A World Well Lost

AKENFIELD by Ronald Blythe. 286 pages. Pantheon. $6.95.

For generations, most Americans have regarded tradition as something to be abandoned without much regret--like a too heavy saddlebag on the Donner Pass or a jammed rifle at Shiloh. That a man should live and die in the house where he was born, that he should take up his father's trade as a matter of course--these things have signified stagnation. Change has been our commonplace, our comfort and our proof of progress.

Just lately a shift in feeling has set in. As times grow more difficult, the new looks less promising; the settled old ways take on new luster. Anyone too inclined to idealize the countrified past, however, or dote on the imagined joys of continuity, might do well to study, as a cautionary text, this extraordinary portrait of an English village. Akenfield is a pseudonym for a real agricultural village of 300 souls about 90 miles and--until recently--several cultural centuries removed from London. "On the face of it," remarks Ronald Blythe, "it is the kind of place in which an Englishman has always felt it his right and duty to live . . . patently the real country, untouched and genuine." Under this impression himself, Blythe, author of a novel and a number of television plays, moved nearby 14 years ago. Unlike other outsiders, he found much more than birds and quiet. Akenfield is the absorbing result. It is remarkable both as literature--a kind of Suffolk Spoon River--and as a sociological report on a par with Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, a journalistic study of poverty in 19th century Britain.

Blythe lets the people of the village speak for themselves. The 50 presented (verbatim, we are assured, although their extraordinary eloquence sometimes suggests the author possesses a magic tape recorder) range from an 82-year-old illiterate recluse to a pair of teen-age buddies, one a forge apprentice, the other a farm worker. All are brilliantly individualized. Not a mute inglorious Milton or a Cold Comfort Farm codger in the lot.

In Akenfield, plodding, unsentimen-talized detail accumulates, suddenly evoking the devotion of a lifetime's hard work. A shepherd loses himself in telling exactly how he trains a sheep dog ("Once you have taught him stillness, you're getting somewhere"). An orchard foreman navigates his way through the niceties of pruning apple trees. A wheelwright remembers how he used to build wagons ("For making the hubs we always chose wych-elm") and paint them ("The blue rode well in the corn"). The village veterinarian, a sensitive man, contemplates the tortuous ethics of "factory farms," where pigs and chickens are raised assembly style. Wrinkling his brow over incipient inbred cannibalism, he observes darkly: "Tail biting among pigs is becoming a quite incredibly large problem."

What really sets Akenfield apart is a sot-in-its-ways, living connection with the rural English past. With vision unblurred by the nostalgia that so often distorts literary renderings of bucolic yesterday, the inhabitants of Akenfield look back to a way of life only just starting to disappear and find it a world well lost. Leonard Thompson, for instance, is 71, a farm laborer from an old family of farm laborers. "Village people in Suffolk in my day," he says, "were worked to death. It literally happened. It is not a figure of speech." The "old ones," he adds, responded to the harshness of their life by taking an almost insane pride in their work. "A straight furrow was all a man was left with." Thompson is typical of his generation. He starved during a childhood spent gleaning beans and wheat and picking up road-mending stones from the fields--at 50-c- for 24 bushels. He witnessed bloody horror as a machine gunner in World War I. Afterward, he was one of a few who helped organize a farm workers' union when the bad times came. Despite the union, the economic gap between landowner and laborer today in Akenfield is about what it was in Victorian times. With land prices above -L-300 an acre, a man on wages has no hope of ever saving enough to buy a place of his own. The simple result is a drift away from the land to the factories, a drift, (unlike its U.S. counterpart) particularly poignant because, despite everything, nobody really wants it.

For nobody, it appears, is so entirely free from nostalgia that he cannot recall a past moment of particular delight. Fred Mitchell, 85, for instance, is now an invalid living with his unmarried middle-aged son. He remembers that the old days were full of raw fear--of landlords, of weather, of hunger. "But I have forgotten one thing," he adds. "The singing. There was such a lot of singing ... So I lie. I have had pleasure. I have had singing."

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