Vol. 31 No. 18 · 24 September 2009
pages 16-17 | 3493 words
With What Joy We Write of the New Russian Government
Ferdinand Mount
- BuyThe Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome by Roland Chambers
Faber, 390 pp, £20.00, August 2009, ISBN 978 0 571 22261 2
‘Ransome, when he turned up, proved to be an amiable and attractive man, with a luxuriant blond soup-strainer moustache, a rubicund complexion, a large mouth from which more often than not a pipe protruded, and a hearty disposition.’ Malcolm Muggeridge immediately took to Arthur Ransome when he first met him in Cairo in 1929. Most people did. The philosopher R.G. Collingwood, a close friend from their shared childhood in the Lake District, gave Ransome his entire life savings to pay his legal costs when he was sued by the incurably litigious Lord Alfred Douglas. Edward Thomas was devoted to him. John Masefield drank claret with him at teatime as they sang sea shanties together in Ransome’s mother’s kitchen.
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Letters
Vol. 31 No. 19 · 8 October 2009
From Harry Stopes
Ferdinand Mount dismisses the ‘unspeakable goodness’ of Arthur Ransome’s characters and seems to be irritated with the fact that they are portrayed as enjoying themselves (LRB, 24 September). He also seeks to highlight what he sees as the novels’ twee predictability by declaring that ‘no boat [ever] capsizes.’ Is he dismissing the wrecking of the Swallow (the defining event of Swallowdale), because crashing into a rock isn’t technically the same as capsizing?
Harry Stopes
London N16
Vol. 31 No. 20 · 22 October 2009
From Roland Chambers
I was surprised by Ferdinand Mount’s suggestion that there was little in my biography of Arthur Ransome that had not been covered before (LRB, 24 September). Mount may have read Ransome’s posthumously published autobiography and Hugh Brogan’s biography, which appeared in 1984 to mark Ransome’s centenary. But if so he must have noticed the absence from either of any mention of Ransome’s spying for the British, his collaboration with the Bolshevik secret police, or the background and political careers of Ransome’s in-laws in Russia – the family of his second wife, Trotsky’s private secretary, Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina. As for Ransome’s autobiography, it was scarcely likely to address any of this candidly, while Brogan was much too fond of his childhood hero to ask awkward questions. In any case the material wasn’t available. Brogan wrote a fine book, but he did not have access to the Russian state archives, opened to Western researchers in 1991, or to previously classified documents released to the British National Archives in 2005.
It’s quite true, as Mount indicates, that Ransome headed David Caute’s list of ‘useful idiots’ in The Fellow Travellers (1973), but Caute’s view of Ransome’s character and motivation, based entirely on his journalism, offers little of value to a biographer. Ransome, keen to keep a foot in every door, revealed only the most acceptable portion of his affairs in his published writing. He cannot be understood by leafing through his articles, or by expanding on the eyewash he passed off as a memoir.
Roland Chambers
London E8
