Final tack
Christopher Hawtree
The Life of Arthur Ransome Hugh Brogan (Jonathan Cape £10.95)
Perhaps the most unlikely of literary 1 debuts was The ABC of Physical Culture by the persistently unhealthy Arthur Ransome. He had compiled various items of anonymous hack-work before, but for some reason chose to put his name to this one. It was a book to which he never alluded later; his posthumously-published Autobiography passes over the feelings it aroused in him in 1904, and he would no doubt be glad to hear that the British Museum has celebrated his centenary, which fell in the middle of the week, by not finding a replacement for the copy which the Luftwaffe destroyed. The outline of his life has long been known, not only from the Autobiography but also from the diverse books published in his lifetime, but with this excellent 450-page biography Hugh Brogan incorporates previously obscure material, ranging from his early books to his strange marriages, and presents a por- trait of the man that is as objective as it is affectionate.
'Now, I want to know just what your politics are,' he was gruffly asked by the head of the Special Branch when he return- ed from Russia in 1919. 'Fishing' he replied. 'Just what do you mean by that?' Far from being insolent, Ransome was be- ing truthful — he would have much prefer- red to have been enjoying the sport to which he had been re-introduced by his postman some ten years earlier. This classic exchange emphasises the impression of an essentially simple man whose love of books had led him into a life for which picaresque might be too conservative a description. Few people, wearied by a petulant libel suit from Lord Alfred Douglas and eager to escape a nagging wife, would set off for Russia to compile a children's book of folk tales and finish by chronicling the events and personages of a revolution hideous in its consequences.
Arthur Ransome emerged from his childhood and schooldays, which form one of the most vivid sections of his memoirs, and began life as a writer in those balmy days at the beginning of the of the century, when London was pleasant and a man could earn a living by working for a small publisher and writing articles for newspapers. These years, too, are engross- ingly related in the Autobiography, the city being 'marked for me by bookshops as the sea is marked by buoys'. They are roman- tically evoked in Bohemia in London, now reissued for the first time in nearly 80 years as part of Oxford's enterprising paperback series and with an introduction by his ex- ecutor, Rupert Hart-Davis. The ghost of his favourite Hazlitt, among many others, hangs over this account of literary London; sometimes rather gauche, it is none the less a light, pleasant read which the author rightly regarded as his first 'real' book. 'The only excuse for those early books is that they were written ...at a time when I should, have been a university student and saved from myself by the laughter of my fellows'. While these books are grindingly whimsical, he was also reading more than his contemporaries did and he came to find a voice of his own with the essays in Por- traits and Speculations and studies of Poe and Wilde.
The good fortune of being helped with the latter by Robert Ross had the concomi- tant drawback of arousing Douglas's litigious rage. 'That winter of 1912-1913 was one of continual nightmare'. The full extent of this is shown here against the history of his first marriage, to Ivy Walker. Quite why they married — he, retiring and bookish, she, voluptuous and domineering — remains puzzling; what is certain is that her antics can only have added to the strain of his existence. Nobody, let alone a writer struggling to meet deadlines, needs a wife who summons him to the bedroom to watch her tip poached eggs over her head. Life was further complicated by the birth of a daughter and by his poor health. Piles agonised him for years. 'This painful and humiliating disease', comments Mr Brogan, 'responds best, short of surgery, to a carefully gentle regime and a quiet life. It got neither from Arthur.' Indeed, the even- tual surgery in 1915 almost killed him.
Equally agonising for a writer must have been the battle of the books that he had to wage against Ivy for over 20 years; his ef- forts to retrieve his library with the ending of the marriage and the Amazon's persis-
tent refusal to give it up met a hideously ironic end.
That the woman, Evgenia, who became his second wife should have been Trotsky's personal secretary is yet another of the unlikely twists to his life. There Is something of the William Boot about the author of Pond and Stream and Things 01 Season becoming one of the most informed reporters of the years before the Russian Revolution, The plan to write its history did not come to anything, largely owing to the Communists' destruction of his papers. While the Autobiography vividly describes some of the characters involved, its political accounts are not always easy to follow. One of this biography's many qualities is the ef- fortless summary of the complex events leading to the Revolution and, any ideals inevitably evaporated, the in-fighting, burgeoning bureaucracy and murder which followed. If Ransome was sometimes op- timistic about the outcome of these events and could even be complacent about some of the Cheka's activities, he was certainly far more aware of the importance with which they should be treated than men In Whitehall were willing to allow. His involvement in all this tumult would remain a subject of speculation among historians had he not begun his series of children's books in the Thirties. 'But it's the essays we want,' Jonathan Cape told him when agreeing to take on Swallows and Amazons. Cape looks foolish now, but at the time it must have seemed a sensible thing to say to a journalist who had turned down £1,000 a year from the Manchester Guardian and was well known for his sail' ing exploits. Towards the end of his life he remarked 'a good book is not merely a thing that keeps a child...amused while reading. It is an experience he shares, something that he himself lives. It calls upon faculties that grow with use and atrophy without it... For this no picture papers, no cinema films, that depend not on things imagined but on things actuallY demonstrated to the eye, are anY substitute'. This is, as Mr Brogan says, a noble apologia. Not all children, as I recall, are enthusiastic about his children's books and to an adult they are less enjoyable than Old Peter's Russian Tales, but with their clear, supple prose they will outlast any television adaptations, not to mention in- stalments of Star Wars and all those bleeP- ing video games. Although he was far luckier with his second wife, he had none the less to contend with her literary views, the 'local veto' as he called it. This was finally to prevent him completing what, to judge from extracts printed here, might have been his finest book. He should have trusted to his own judgement, for he was a man who revered P.G. Wodehouse and was appalled to find himself being given an honorary MA at Durham University while Edith Sitwell received yet another doc- torate. Hugh Brogan's biography, elegantlY produced if too generous with photographs, is ample compensation for such humiliation.
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