The Visitors by Ronald Blythe; a Helen and Kurt Wolff book (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: $16.95; 239 pp.)

Ronald Blythe may not quite bestride the world of English letters, but he will be found there generations after several bigger reputations have washed away. He does supremely well something that is supremely his own.

First of all, he has a genius for listening to people who are not used to being heard. The ear deteriorates the voice, which may be why the very well listened-to--anchor-people, political columnists--seem to have less and less to say. Whereas, the East Anglian farmers in Blythe’s “Akenfield,” and the extremely old in his “The View in Winter,” speak as if they were lowering an heirloom from the attic.

Furthermore, along with Bruce Chatwin and virtually no one else, Blythe sustains the ghost in the English countryside; that magical quality made up of history, a talent for the particular and an uneradicated paganism. Finally, he uses language the way a master mason fits blocks of cut stone.

“The Visitors” is a collection of Blythe’s short stories, mostly dating back to the beginning of his writing career. It was the early form he found for a spirit that required something less formal and more concrete; namely, the mixture of commentary and interview he used in his best-known works.

The fascinating thing about the stories in “The Visitors,” nonetheless, is how the author’s talent for finding magic in humble or vulnerable circumstances keeps asserting itself.

Some of the stories are contraptions; graceful ones, but with clear links to the kind of thing Saki used to do. In “Here Be Dragons,” a 900-year-old survivor of the species incinerates an intellectual English woman who comes upon him in Bessarabia and proposes to take him back to London to meet E. M. Forster.

A similar kind of rueful irony comes in “And the Green Grass Grew All Around,” whose 17-year-old narrator imagines himself on the point of being seduced by a sexy older woman, only to find that she is aiming through him at someone else. And in “A Wedding in the Family,” where a childlike spinster, universally regarded as nice but hopeless, suddenly makes a formidable marriage that rattles every teacup in her country village.

Contraptions are not Blythe’s meat. Mysteries are. Saki also found mystery in everyday affairs, ghosts in middle-class closets, but he tended to be arch about them. Here and there we find a whiff of archness in Blythe’s, but they possess a seriousness and intensity of language that lifts the best of them from their amiable spring-trap construction.

Several contain ghosts, or their equivalent, but like the very best ghosts, they are there not for the mystery they contain but the mystery they point to. In “A Bit Simple,” Rose, dim and little more than a girl, lives in the mist-shrouded marshes of Exmoor with her husband, a benevolently despotic junk dealer who took her over from her father.

All but housebound during her husband’s frequent absences, and fearful of everything--Exmoor’s quicksands, the funeral mounds on the hills, their watchdog--she is visited one day by a young man on a bicycle. He wears tennis shorts and a sophisticated air, quotes Blake, and takes her and the dog she fears for a walk through the countryside she fears. All the while, he chats with affectionate irony about the life and surroundings that keep her prisoner. He, it turns out, is a ghost; and she is oddly and convincingly released. It is a ravishing story, close to a poem.

Most of the tales concern people who are on the edges of the mainstream. They are very young, or quite old; they live in the country or in rural villages. A number of them are spinsters or widows, women in middle-age whose struggle against the end of passion produces odd extremities, half real and half spooky. Blythe lets us discover them as eccentrics, and then he leads us to inhabit their centers.

There is a sweetness in his characterization that never grows in the least sentimental or softens the bone structure. The most remarkable story, I think, is about Faulkner, an aging rural squire whose inheritance has left him both property and an endless series of obligations, from maintaining his roofs to being the pillar of his community.

“His life was trivial. It was trivial because it was nothing more than a packet of unexamined gestures. The gesture he made towards heaven was the worst,” he reflects, as he finds himself praying beside the new parish rector whom he detests.

This rector, Mr. Deenman, is a strangely exalted mystic; ungainly, unwashed and quite out of place in the tidy Anglicanism of present-day rural England. He is a figure out of history and the religious wars. Faulkner, trapped by history, finds himself reliving it, seized by irrational hatred and borne back into his own bloody ancestry. “The Shadows of the Living” is partly a ghost story and partly a story of hallucination, but most of all, it is a story about the leaden weight of sustaining life when faith has evaporated.

Scattered among the more elaborate tales are several brief sketches about a boy growing up with his uncle in the Suffolk countryside. The life is heavy here, too--Blythe gives us the exact weight of gray mud on an undertaker’s boot heel--but it has a redeeming power and rhythm.

“The Right Day to Kill a Pike” gives us a moment of that dead time in the country between winter and spring. A restlessness comes over the uncle, as if life’s clock had stopped and it was up to him to restart it. In the chill overcast, he and the boy spend the day on the muddy river, and finally catch a pike. They are filthy and frozen on their return, and the fish goes on the garbage heap. But something in its silvery, fierce struggle has got the seasons going; there is a whiff of spring in the air.

In Blythe’s countryside, time is devouring, inhuman and featureless. The works and days of farmers, their rituals, planting dates and celebrations, serve to color and give it shape. It is like bridling some everlasting stallion that sooner or later will break free again but, meanwhile, will serve to plow, cultivate and, with ribbons tied in its mane, give Sunday rides to courting couples.