Some stories are born in an instant; others take time to fruition. For haiku poet and novelist Alan Spence, his latest book spent nearly a lifetime gestating. The subject of “Mister Timeless Blyth” is R.H. Blyth — an English scholar, conscientious objector during World War I, tutor to the young emperor-to-be Akihito and the man who helped introduce Japanese haiku to the West.
“I first encountered Blyth back in the 1960s,” Spence, 76, says. “I think I can pin it down to 1968. A friend loaned me a copy of Blyth’s ‘Zen in English Literature’ and it blew me away, the fact that he was drawing on a Western tradition and that Zen wasn’t just something exotic and esoteric. The way Blyth portrayed it was very accessible, something I recognized and felt completely at home with.”
For Spence — who was awarded the prestigious Order of the Rising Sun in 2018 — Zen, haiku and the meeting of East and West have long been at the heart of his literary output, from his 1981 poetry collection “Glasgow Zen” to his 2013 novel “Night Boat” about 18th-century Zen master Hakuin Ekaku. The fascination gripped him early in life.
“I knew there was a bookshop in London called Compendium that had a lot of Eastern books, especially on Zen,” he says. “I got a friend to check, and they had all four volumes of Blyth’s haiku translations. They were expensive at the time: Each volume cost about £2.50 (approximately ¥2,160) — my father earned £10 (¥8,640) a week at that time! So I really had to save up. I’d hitchhike down from Glasgow and get one of those books. ... Over a year I picked up all four. I still have them.”
Given this affinity with Blyth, it’s somewhat surprising that it has taken so long for Spence to write about him. “Mister Timeless Blyth” is his third biographical novel set in Japan, after “Night Boat” and “The Pure Land,” which centered on fellow Scot Thomas Glover.
“It’s just the way things unfolded. I was rereading the books of haiku, which I do frequently, and there was something in one of the introductions that made me think about what an incredible life this guy led. As a young man, he was in jail at 18 for objecting to WWI. It took courage in that society at that time to stand up and declare your opposition to all that jingoism.”
After his spell in prison, Blyth moved from England to Japanese-occupied Korea in 1925 to teach English. Although his first wife, Annie, didn’t take to life there, Blyth fell in love with East Asia. From Korea, he relocated to Japan, where he continued his study of the region’s cultures, languages and literature. Though Blyth would go on to be interned in Japan during World War II as an enemy alien, after the war, he taught at Gakushuin University, which today houses an archive of his works. Between his arrival in Japan in 1936 and his death in 1964, Blyth’s path crossed with many of the most important figures of the day, including the young crown prince.
Blyth wrote extensively about Zen during his lifetime, but his four-volume translations of haiku, published first in 1949, are considered his main legacy. Through these collections, each themed around a season, many important poets in the West such as Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder encountered the Japanese poetic form for the first time. It’s impossible to overstate how profound an influence this had on 20th-century English-language poetry.
While the details of Blyth’s life are in the “you couldn’t make it up” category, plot alone doesn’t make a novel. Spence inhabits Blyth’s voice in a quite stunning act of ventriloquism.
“It’s imagination,” he says, “but there’s also that complete identification. Blyth reminded me of good friends I’d had over the years who had that same kind of intellectual curiosity, humor and photographic memory. One friend would come out with a poem he’d read 50 years before and quote it word for word. I’ve known a couple of people who had that extended frame of reference, drawing on all sorts of different cultural influences. It was partly based on them, but I think I was projecting myself in there as well.”
Still, despite long familiarity and identification with Blyth, the novel was almost 10 years in the making. “I actually wrote the first section in 2014. I came to Japan and sought out Ikuyo Yoshimura, who had written a biography of Blyth in Japanese. She was so kind and generous, and showed me all the material she had, so that got me started. Blyth scholar Norman Waddell in Kyoto was also a great help. But I realized after a couple of years that I just didn’t know enough about Blyth’s life. He didn’t talk about himself very much in the books, so the voice was there but not the detail. There was only so much I could do.”
The acknowledgments at the end of Spence’s novel highlight the fact that despite the romantic image of the solitary writer, these projects are often team efforts. “Saeko Yazaki at Glasgow University told me about the archive at Gakushuin, so I got in touch with the archivists, Motoko Ohkawa and Yuri Tomita," Spence says. "They were so kind and showed me stuff that hadn’t even been cataloged yet — boxes of papers, manuscripts of the books I read in the ’60s in Blyth’s beautiful handwriting — and I thought, ‘Yeah, this is all meant to be. I’m supposed to be here, doing this, telling his story.’”
Spence had further help with research from his friend Daisuke Matsunaga and Blyth student Kuniyoshi Munakata. The accumulated material led Spence to consider presenting the book as an autobiographical novel.
“It was something technical that I had to solve. If I start in the first person and the guy’s going to die at the end, how do I deal with this?” he says. “It’s the old message in a bottle thing: ‘You mean, Blyth actually left a manuscript that was lying in a cardboard box at Gakushuin gathering dust? Wow! And Alan Spence found it, dusted it off and knocked it into shape.’”
The ending itself is a thing of sadness and beauty, as the ailing Blyth looks back on a life less ordinary from his literal deathbed. The prose becomes poetic, rhythmic and hypnotic as Blyth looks over the moments that have made up his life, the final pages a collage of haiku-esque snapshots.
“You open yourself up when you’re writing stuff like that and it’s like writing a poem, in a way,” Spence says. “It comes through you and it takes its own shape and you just nudge it.”
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