Ronald Blythe was the kind of writer who had friends who wrote letters that made him think, making him a better writer. One sent him one of the Rev. Laurence Sterne’s sermons.
Sterne is better known for The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman than for his sermons. The one Blythe read was awful.
The great comic novelist was being dead serious, which wasn’t his style at all.
People do different things with words. I can’t picture Montaigne as a novelist, but the world would be a poorer place without his essays.
• Sources: Ronald Blythe, Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside; London: John Murray, 2022, p. 15.
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