Very heaven
Margaret Drabble
The Autobiography of Arthur Ransome, edited with an epilogue and prologue by Rupert Hart-Davis (Jonathan Cape £5.95) The name of Arthur Ransome summons up an image of a certain kind of Englishman, a certain style of English life: a life of buttered eggs and marmalade, of small boats and fishing, of fair play and gentle erudition. Those of us who were reared on Swallows and Amazons did not need to know what buttered eggs were, and most of us had never been near a small boat. It was the world and its ethos that were important, a world with its own rules of honour, its own games and realities. One re-enters the world each time one opens one of those well-read books. But it is not the real world. It is eternal Loliday, eternal make-belief. An autobiography by Ransome ought to give some clue to the secret whereby its author, a fully grown, much travelled and experienced man, twice married, managed to create so lasting a fantasy, a fantasy which continues to delight both children and adults, of social backgrounds very different from his own. How did he manage to enter so fully into the child's spirit ? Rupert Hart-Davis, who edited this volume, provides an explanation in his prologue; Ransome was, he says, two very different characters—half of him was a dedicated man of letters, the other half 'a perpetual schoolboy, with all the zest, fun, enjoyment and enthusiasm of youth . . Sharing his two great delights, fishing and sailing, was 'like sharing them with a most articulate, knowledgeable and amusing boy.' The autobiography tempts one to go further. He remained, in everything, a boy : he treated the adventures of war and the reversals of politics as a kind of lark, a sport. It was his honourable naiveté that trapped him, against his will, in his disastrous first marriage: he tells us that he married Ivy Walker because of his fear of 'the horrible scenes' she made when he tried to break off the relationship.
He remained an innocent, through the violence of the First World War and the Russian Revolution, which he covered, as reporter, from Russia, for the Daily News and the Observer. This is not to suggest that his attitude was either partial or ignorant : on the contrary, he was one of the first reporters to foresee the Revolution, watched its progress more closely than any, had many close friends amongst the Bolsheviks, and was most eager to persuade the British to abandon their dangerous policy of intervention. His is a first hand account of a major historical event. Yet, throughout, he seems to have been protected by his own boyish high spirits. At one dramatic moment, after the murder of the German Ambassador by the anti-Bolshevik anti-Peace Treaty Social Revolutionaries, he found himself engaged by Radek in a piece of diplomacy: he set off to Vologda in a hurry to meet the American Ambassador, but before going 'I stuck Plato and Sir Thomas Browne (counter-irritants to politics) in my bag, and commandeered a very fine plum cake that was rashly exposed on the table in the Mission ...'
Similarly, his escape with his Russian fiancée, Evgenia, through Estonia and the White Russian troops in 1919, takes on, in the telling, something of the air of an escapade. It cannot have been very amusing, travelling through occupied country, not knowing where the front was, not knowing what troops one might meet next—Russian Whites, Letts, or Estonians. They burned their White papers lest they should be found by the Reds, and their Red papers lest they should be found by the Whites, and bluffed their way through: Ransome would have us believe that their successful escape was due to his loud voice and his long coat, which enabled him to act the part of a man of authority, and also to a chance encounter with an officer whom he had once beaten at chess. The journey, he says, 'was comic opera.' So it may have been, to him, and to his loyal Evgenia, but one can be sure that others would have told the story in different terms. And, no doubt, experienced it in different terms. One feels, in the end, that Ransome must have had some protective spirit with him: maybe those who see no evil and fear no evil travel through life under a true safeguard. He does not shut his eyes to the terrors that overtook others, reporting laconically on assassinations and deaths of old comrades—his friends Vorovsky and Bukharin were shot, Radek disappeared, Rykov, Krestinsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, all were shot. But the worst pain Ransome suffered was from his intestines, and even they, like gentlemen, did not play up in a crisis.
It would be easy, but incorrect, to ascribe this spirit to Ransome's public school upbringing. He hated school, did badly at his first, and badly at Rugby, his second, which he left from the Lower Fifth. He was the kind of boy who lives for the holidays, and his holidays, in the Lakes, were more important to him than lessons or school sports (which he was too blind to play with any success). His interests, in fish and beetles and ammonites and Andrew Lang's fairy stories, were home grown, and the atmosphere of his home was one of high-minded Northern progressive thought, of scholarship and the Manchester Guardian (his father was Professor of History at Leeds University). He describes himself as a man without politics, but such as he had can be judged from the quality of the company he kept, and the papers he wrote for. His early career reminds one, oddly, of Arnold Bennett's first hero in A Man from the North: he started work as a boy for Grant Richards, the publisher, at a salary of eight shillings a week, and started, like Bennett and his hero, to try to write essays and poems for literary magazines. His aspirations were lofty, but he was industrious, and he learned to work as a 'ghost'. writing up the advice of well-known sportsmen. He was advised to write sensational serials, such as those by which Bennett and Eden Phillpotts made their living when young, but preferred ghosting and highbrow essays and a small salary as a working combination. His first 'real book', Bohemia in London, was written when he was twentYthree, and published in 1907, and in it he said 'Bohemia . . . is a tint in the spectacles through which one sees the world in youth. It is not a place but an attitude of mind.' He catches the tint well enough, in his descriptions of celebratory dinners of sardines and cheap wine, of bicycle rides from Balham to the Gray's Inn Road, of games of chess and visits to Clive Bell in Paris. But his spectacles were to remain tinted : he never became a man of the world. Perhaps this is the mark of the boy from the North. Ransome, wellconnected though he was (compared, for instance, with Bennett) and much as he enjoyed his visits to the Garrick in later years, seems never to have acquired the tastes and weariness of the worldly. His code of honour is not that of Rugby, but of some land of the mind where boys remain boys and do not grow up into men who drown (as his friend Ted Scott drowned in Windermere), where Madame Sun Yat Sen and Chinese politics can be transformed into Missee Lee. It is not an entirely golden land, for Ransome writes, of snow and ice even better than he writes o/. the summer, but it is a land of myth, not 01 reality. We enter it willingly for, like the Ancient Mariner he was, he tells a good tale.
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