Arthur Ransome ex Wiki
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Arthur Michell Ransome (18 January 1884 – 3 June 1967) was an English author and journalist. He is best known for writing the Swallows and Amazons series of children's books about the school-holiday adventures of children, mostly in the Lake District and the Norfolk Broads. Many of the books involve sailing; fishing and camping are other common subjects. The books remain popular and "Swallows and Amazons" is the basis for a tourist industry around Windermere and Coniston Water, the two lakes Ransome adapted as his fictional North Country lake.He also wrote about the literary life of London, and about Russia before, during, and after the revolutions of 1917.
Ransome was born in Leeds;[1] the house at 6 Ash Grove, in the Hyde Park area, has a blue plaque over the door commemorating the event.[2] Ransome's father was professor of history at Yorkshire College, Leeds. His father's death in 1897 had a lasting effect on Ransome.
Ransome received his formal education first in Windermere and then at Rugby School (where he lived in Lewis Carroll's study room) but did not entirely enjoy the experience, due to his poor eyesight, lack of athletic skill, and limited academic achievement. He attended Yorkshire College, his father's college, studying chemistry. After a year, he abandoned the college and went to London to become a writer. He took low-paying jobs as an office assistant in a publishing company and as editor of a failing magazine, Temple Bar Magazine, while writing and becoming a member of the literary scene of London.
Early writing, including life in Russia
Some of Ransome's early works were The Nature Books for Children a series of children's books commissioned by publisher Anthony Treherne. Only three of the six planned volumes were published before the publisher went bankrupt. They have recently been made available in PDF format on the All Things Ransome website.[3]In his first important book, Bohemia in London (1907), Ransome introduced the history of London's bohemian literary and artistic communities and some of its current representatives. A curiosity in 1903 about a visiting Japanese poet, Yone Noguchi, led to an ongoing friendship with Japanese painter (and Chelsea neighbour) Yoshio Markino, who in turn introduced him to the bohemian circle of Pamela Colman Smith.
Ransome married Ivy Constance Walker in 1909 and they had one daughter, Tabitha. It was not a happy marriage: Ransome found his wife's demands to spend less time on writing and more with her and their daughter a great strain and, as Ransome's biographer Hugh Brogan notes, "...it was impossible to be a good husband to Ivy". They divorced in 1924.[4]
Ransome began writing books of biography and literary criticism on various authors, one on Edgar Allen Poe was published in 1910. His book on Oscar Wilde, published in 1912, embroiled him in a libel suit with Lord Alfred Douglas His wife Ivy attended the trial, sitting in the public gallery as Ransome would not let her sit beside him. Her apparent enjoyment of the public notoriety the case attracted added to the stress on their marriage. The publisher Daniel Macmillan dined with Arthur and Ivy every day during the trial so that Ivy could not quarrel with Arthur.[5] Ransome won the suit, but suppressed the contentious text from subsequent editions of the Wilde biography. Adding to Ransome's "wretched" thirteen months waiting for the case to come to trial was the action of his publisher, Charles Granville. Wilde had been prepared under the guidance of publisher Martin Secker, but Granville had promised better returns and Secker agreed to release the rights. In exchange for a promise of a guaranteed income Ransome handed Wilde over to Granville. The work was well received and successful, running to eight editions, but Ransome saw little in return; in 1912 Granville was charged with embezzlement and fled the country, leaving Ransome to struggle even to register himself as a creditor of Granville's ruined company. Furthermore, his neglect of his health—he suffered from piles from sitting too long in wet boats, and a stomach ulcer—had been exacerbated by the pressure of defending the legal action.[6]
Ransome had also been working on a similar literary biography of Robert Louis Stevenson but this was abandoned with the manuscript in the first draft and only rediscovered in 1999. It was subsequently edited and finally published almost a century later in 2011 as Arthur Ransome's Long-lost Study of Robert Louis Stevenson.
In 1913 Ransome left his wife and daughter and went to Russia to study Russian folklore. In 1916, Ransome published Old Peter's Russian Tales, a collection of 21 folktales from Russia. After the start of World War I in 1914, he became a foreign correspondent and covered the war on the Eastern Front for a radical newspaper, the Daily News. He also covered the Russian revolutions of 1917, developed some sympathy for the Bolshevik cause and became personally close to a number of its leaders, including Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. He met the woman who would become his second wife, Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina, who at that time worked as Trotsky's personal secretary.[8]
Ransome provided some information to British officials and the British Secret Intelligence Service (then known as MI1c), which gave him the code name S76 in their files.[9] In October 1919 Ransome met Rex Leeper of the Foreign Office's Political Intelligence Department, who threatened to reveal this unless Ransome privately submitted his articles and public speaking engagements for approval. Ransome's response was "indignant".[10] MI5, the British Security Service, kept watch on him because of his opposition to the Allied intervention against the Russian Revolution.[9] On one of his visits to the United Kingdom, the authorities searched and interviewed him and threatened him with arrest.
In October 1919, as Ransome was returning to Moscow on behalf of The Manchester Guardian, the Estonian foreign minister Ants Piip entrusted him to deliver a secret armistice proposal to the Bolsheviks. At that time the Estonians were fighting their War of Independence alongside the White movement of counter-revolutionary forces. After crossing the battle lines on foot, Ransome passed the message, which to preserve secrecy had not been written down and depended for its authority only on the high personal regard in which he was held in both countries, to diplomat Maxim Litvinov in Moscow. To deliver the reply, which accepted Piip's conditions for peace, Ransome had to return by the same risky means, but this time he had Evgenia with him. Estonia withdrew from the conflict and Ransome and Evgenia set up home together in the capital Reval (Tallinn).[11]
After the Allied intervention Ransome remained in the Baltic states and built a cruising yacht, Racundra. He wrote a successful book about his experiences, Racundra's First Cruise. He joined the staff of The Manchester Guardian when he returned to Russia and the Baltic states. Following his divorce, he married Evgenia and brought her to live in England, where he continued writing for The Guardian, often on foreign affairs, and also writing the "Country Diary" column on fishing.
By 1937, MI5 appeared satisfied of Ransome's loyalty to Britain. However, evidence uncovered in the KGB files following the break-up of the Soviet Union seems to indicate that Evgenia Ransome, at least, was involved in smuggling diamonds from the Soviet Union to Paris to help fund the Comintern.[12] The topic is discussed in a 2009 book by Roland Chambers, The Last Englishman: the Double Life of Arthur Ransome.[13]
Swallows and Amazons series
Main article: Swallows and Amazons series
Ransome settled in the Lake District. He decided not to accept a position as a full-time foreign correspondent with the Guardian and instead wrote Swallows and Amazons in 1929—the first of the series that made his reputation as one of the best[14][15] English writers of children's books.Ransome apparently based the Walker children (the "Swallows") in the book in part on the Altounyan family: he had a long-standing friendship with the mother and Collingwood grandparents of the Altounyans. Later he denied the connection, claiming he only gave the Altounyans' names to his own characters; it appears to have upset him that people did not regard the characters as original creations.
Ransome's writing is noted for his detailed descriptions of activities. Although he used many actual features from the Lake District landscape, he invented his own geography, mixing descriptions of different places to create his own juxtapositions. His move to East Anglia brought forth a change of location for four of the books and Ransome started using the real landscape and geography of East Anglia so that it is possible to use the maps printed in the books as a guide to the real area. Ransome's own interest in sailing and need to provide an accurate description caused him to undertake a voyage across the North Sea to Flushing. His book We Didn't Mean To Go To Sea reflects this, and he based the fictional Goblin on his own boat Nancy Blackett (which in turn took its name from a character in the series).
Two or three of the "Swallows and Amazons" books have less realistic plots. The original concept of Peter Duck was a story made up by the children themselves, and Peter Duck had appeared in the preceding volume Swallowdale as a character whom the children created, but Ransome dropped the foreword of explanation from Peter Duck before it was published. Although relatively straightforward, the story, together with its equally unrealistic ostensible sequel Missee Lee,[16] is much more fantastic than the rest of the series. A trip to China as a foreign correspondent provided Ransome with the imaginative springboard for Missee Lee, in which readers find the Swallows and the Amazons sailing around the world in the schooner Wild Cat from Peter Duck. Together with Captain Flint (the Amazons' uncle Jim Turner), they become the captives of Chinese pirates.
More controversy attaches to the final book Ransome completed in the series, Great Northern? (1947). Set in Scotland, the plot and action appear realistic, but the internal chronology does not fit the usual run of school holiday adventures. Myles North, an admirer of Ransome, provided much of the basic plot of the book.
"Swallows and Amazons" was so popular that it inspired a number of other authors to write in a similar vein: most notably two schoolchildren, Pamela Whitlock and Katharine Hull wrote The Far-Distant Oxus, an adventure story set on Exmoor. Whitlock sent the manuscript to Ransome in March 1937; he persuaded his publisher Jonathan Cape to produce it, characterising it as "the best children's book of 1937".[17]
Ransome died 1967 in a Greater Manchester hospital. He and his wife Evgenia lie buried in the churchyard of St Paul's Church, Rusland, Cumbria, in the southern Lake District. The Autobiography of Arthur Ransome, edited by Rupert Hart-Davis, was published posthumously in 1976. It covers his life only to the completion of Peter Duck in 1931.
Awards and appreciation
Ransome won the inaugural Carnegie Medal in Literature from the Library Association, recognising Pigeon Post in the Swallows and Amazons series as the year's best children's book by a British subject.[18] He was appointed CBE in 1953.[19] Durham University made him an honorary Doctor of Letters.Translations of his books have been published in several languages and he became popular in many countries. Thriving Ransome appreciation societies exist in the Czech Republic, and in Japan where the Arthur Ransome Club was founded in 1987. Czech astronomer Antonín Mrkos named an asteroid after the author (6440 Ransome). The Arthur Ransome Society founded in 1990 in the U.K. now has a worldwide membership.
Works
The Child's Book of the Seasons (1906) Pond and Stream (1906) The Things in our Garden (1906) Bohemia in London (1907) The Book of Friendship (1909) Edgar Allan Poe (1910) The Book of Love (1911) Oscar Wilde (1912) Old Peter's Russian Tales (1916) Six Weeks in Russia (1919) The Crisis in Russia (1921) Racundra's First Cruise (1923) Rod and Line (1929) Mainly about Fishing (1959) Arthur Ransome's Long-lost Study of Robert Louis Stevenson (2011) (ed. Kirsty Nichol Findlay)
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He was a real sailing man.