On the first day of May 1914 a stout brown-paper parcel was dispatched by post from G. H. Harris, First-Class Boot and Legging Maker, The Strand, London W.C., ‘under Savoy Hotel’, to A. Ransome, Esq: at Manor Farm, Hatch, Tisbury, Wiltshire. The thirty-year-old Arthur Ransome was living at Hatch with his first wife Ivy and their three-year-old daughter Tabitha. He was eagerly awaiting the arrival of the parcel. Writing to his mother, he had longingly described the ‘Brands essence, A1 pair of brown walking boots, smart ones, that I have long coveted’. They would need to be tough and serviceable, since he was about to spend several summer months in Russia. It would be his second visit there; he was going to write a book about St Petersburg. Mr Harris’s first-class boots would be just the thing.
Very soon after the arrival of the parcel, the stout brown paper of which it had been made was turned inside out and trimmed in order to wrap another, somewhat smaller, parcel. This time it was full of handwritten pages. It was elaborately fastened with string, and the knots sealed with sealing-wax of two colours, red and black. Ivy Ransome addressed the parcel in her firm and florid hand to ‘The Manager, Parr’s Bank, Regent Street, London, W.’, adding ‘to be delivered on demand to – Arthur Ransome, Esq: or Mrs. Arthur Ransome.’ The contents were succinctly identified on the outside of the wrapping-paper, again by Ivy, as ‘M.S.S.’; the date ‘May 4. 1914’ was written in the same hand, but in much larger characters. Arthur Ransome’s own handwriting appeared nowhere on the parcel. There is no evidence that the parcel was ever delivered as addressed.
On 5 May Arthur set out from London to Paris and then St Petersburg. The parcel was never reclaimed, and the papers which it contained were never to be reunited with their author. For seventy-six years it remained unopened, unrecorded, and probably forgotten. In 1990 it was opened, and its contents form the greater part of this book.
Ivy had addressed the parcel to the branch of Parr’s Bank where she kept an account. She seems to have used this as a ‘default’ address through which she could always be reached; Arthur passed it on to his mother before leaving for Russia. There is no evidence that this branch was ever used by Arthur. Whether the parcel was ever deposited there is impossible to say, since Parr’s records have not survived. Arthur also banked with Parr’s, chiefly (as later documents show) at the Charing Cross branch, although somewhat mysteriously he had the following year an account also at the Liverpool branch. (He is known to have visited Liverpool only once, in the company of the Russian expert and diplomat Bernard Pares.) A few bank statements from 1914 onwards are among the miscellaneous papers in the Ransome archive at the Brotherton Library in Leeds. One of these, headed simply ‘Parr’s Bank’ (with no branch named) and ‘Ransome’, discloses regular monthly disbursements of £8 6s 8d to ‘Mrs Ransome’ during her husband’s absence in wartime Russia, with associated charges on account of posting cheques. Since no other transactions are recorded on the statement, it seems likely that this account was set up for that one purpose only. He is assumed to have had another, separate account at the Charing Cross branch for normal use. (Parr’s was amalgamated in 1918 into what was ultimately to become the National Westminster Bank and Arthur remained faithful to them through all these changes.) Ransome’s complicated banking arrangements may indicate a desire to keep his personal financial affairs secret from his wife.
It is very unlikely that the manuscript would have been deposited at Parr’s Bank, Regent Street, at Ransome’s own request. Since he was already determined to seek a legal separation from his highly strung and volatile wife, it might well have seemed prudent to him to protect his work in progress from damage or destruction by removing it from his study at Hatch while he was abroad. But in that case he would assuredly have made up the parcel himself, and deposited it at his own branch of the bank until he had returned from Russia and was ready to resume work on the papers it contained. His diaries (always laconic) are silent on the subject. The page for 4 May 1914, on which he probably travelled up to London, is completely blank, and on the following day Ransome records only ‘London-Paris’; and, as we have seen, it was Ivy who inscribed and dated the parcel. This suggests that she was taking the initiative. The contents were, of course, Arthur’s sole property, and she was probably aware that she had no right to sequester them – hence her instruction to the bank to surrender the package to Arthur or herself. It seems likely that she went alone into Arthur’s study, perhaps on the evening of his departure; that she impetuously gathered together a large quantity of papers, probably without his knowledge; and that she bundled them up in the brown paper in which his new boots had arrived. Her motive was not necessarily malicious; she may have seen this as a strategic move, a way of strengthening her bargaining position in the still unresolved dispute about the future of their marriage. She may even have hoped that the parcel might be a source of income, should Arthur not return from Russia: she had after all assisted him with his recent anthologies, The Book of Love and The Book of Friendship, and may have thought herself quite capable of sifting these papers and preparing something for publication. At all events, they were one of Arthur’s assets. She had taken control of them, and would give them back when he was in a more congenial frame of mind.
How and when the parcel of manuscript material made its journey from Parr’s Bank (if indeed it ever was there) to the solicitors’ office of Linklater & Paines in London where it was finally discovered and opened, is also unknown. Many of Linklaters’ records were destroyed in 1941, when one of their offices suffered a direct hit in the London Blitz, but the firm is known to have had dealings with Ivy: they provided her, for example, with a character reference in 1935 and acted in 1941 as the executors of her mother Sophia’s will. In 1990 they informed Tabitha Ransome that they had acted for ‘The Ransome Trust’, an arrangement perhaps set up at the time of Arthur’s divorce from Ivy in 1923–4 by her solicitor father George Walker, so it is probable that it was Ivy who transferred the parcel from the bank (or wherever it had been kept) to the solicitors some time before her death in 1939. Linklater & Paines are not among the firms of solicitors known to have been employed by Arthur Ransome.
According to an endorsement written on the wrapper, the parcel was placed in Linklater & Paines’ strong-room in London on 27 May 1947; when and by whom it had been delivered to them was not recorded. It may have been stored elsewhere in their offices before that date. It then remained undisturbed until Linklaters found it in the course of inspecting the contents of their strong-room in 1990. The words ‘Arthur Ransome’ and ‘M.S.S.’ suggested that the contents were probably of considerable importance; they therefore opened the package under conditions of some security. No covering letter was found within, and, unusually, their records contained no relevant correspondence. Having established that Ransome and his wife were both dead, Linklaters reported their discovery to the executors of Ransome’s literary estate, John Bell and Sir Rupert Hart-Davis. They in turn contacted the University of Leeds, which had already received a large part of Ransome’s private papers as a benefaction by his second wife Evgenia. Finally, after consulting Tabitha, now aged seventy-nine, it was decided to deposit the parcel at the Brotherton Library of the University of Leeds on indefinite loan.
On 16 September 1993 Ann Farr, a Special Collections librarian at Leeds, accordingly went to London to receive the parcel on behalf of the University. She was presented with a large pile of loose manuscript sheets, uncounted and unnumbered, contained in a large plastic shopping-bag. With great presence of mind, she asked what had become of the original packaging. Within a few days, the stout brown paper, with its string and seals and inscriptions, was retrieved and was reunited with its contents in Leeds.
The name of Arthur Ransome (1884–1967) is now best known for the complex and engaging series of twelve interconnected novels, the Swallows and Amazons series, written between 1928 and 1948. These books are profoundly innovative in narrative style, genre, and content; they are studies in the nature of childhood imagination and social realism which can be read with pleasure by readers from six to sixty – as their author had hoped that they would be. They are the crown of a long literary career that had followed many different courses and practised in many genres – so many and so different as to lead some readers to assume that there must have been several authors of the same name.
The young Arthur was indeed a very miscellaneous writer: reviewer, essayist, bellettrist, literary critic, travel writer, short-story writer, and reteller of folk-tales. He had arrived in London in 1902 from Leeds, unqualified for any profession, but anxious to get on in the literary world, to which his family had connections: both Cyril and Edith, his parents, were published authors, the poet Laurence Binyon and the playwright ‘Christopher St John’ were cousins, and the Macmillan family of publishers were close family friends. But he preferred to make his own way. Grant Richards, the publisher of many bright young authors, took him on as an officeboy. His enthusiasm for life and literature and his eager and entertaining conversation quickly won him many friends. Among them was Edward Thomas (to whom the young Ransome, sparking with ideas, was ‘the Electrician’) and older men such as John Masefield, Lascelles Abercrombie (who addressed Arthur as ‘Beloved Man, and Admirable Prophet’), and Gordon Bottomley. He was ardent and heroic in friendship, once walking fifty miles to introduce Abercrombie to Martin Secker for a book on Hardy and then cycling with Abercrombie to Hardy’s cottage near Dorchester, where, alas, Hardy was ‘not at home’. His chief mentor however was W. G. Collingwood, once Ruskin’s secretary, the ‘Skald of Coniston’, who adopted Arthur as a kind of honorary nephew. He rapidly grew in confidence, developing cocksure opinions about books and people; he was fluent, enthusiastic, headstrong; meticulous, hard-working; full of words, and brimming over with ideas. He came to affect a more elderly manner in his desire to seem older than his years; much-moustachioed, he was wryly proud of losing a hair or two on top. Although his impetuosity could be exasperating, his contemporaries liked him very much on the whole.
His literary life was very much bound up with his love-life. He fell in love often, mostly with young women slightly older than himself from the literary and artistic world of London. Among these enticing creatures were Stefana Stevens, novelist, Arabic scholar, archaeologist and later (as Lady Drower) the wife of a prominent diplomat; Sylvia Dryhurst, who married the essayist Robert Lynd; and Jessie Gavin, whose drawings decorated his History of Story-Telling. She, with Eileen Gray and Kathleen Bruce (later the wife of the explorer Robert Falcon Scott), was one of ‘les trois jolies anglaises’ who lived in Montparnasse (the address carefully noted in Ransome’s diary), young artists from the Slade School who were studying at the École Colarossi in Paris where Ransome’s sister Cecily was to follow. Like countless other young writers, Ransome fell in love with Paris and used every excuse and opportunity to visit as often as possible. However, the women who were always to remain most important to him after his mother and sisters were the elder daughters of the Collingwood family, whose home in the Lake District he visited often for rest and congenial companionship. He proposed marriage first to Barbara, a sculptor, and then to the older Dora, an accomplished artist (and ‘Beetle’ to his ‘Toad’); neither would take him seriously. It was a great disappointment to him – and, less predictably, to their parents.
Ransome’s career as an author started modestly in 1904 with a number of hack-works which he later wished to forget, such as The A.B.C. of Physical Culture. He was prouder of his second book, The Souls of the Streets, a typical ’slender volume’ of the time, of which the elegant but very small edition was sponsored by an ephemeral provincial publisher. (It was dismissed, accurately enough, as ‘seven short essays of a rather precocious type’ in the Times Literary Supplement’s review.) From 1906 a group of like-minded writers, including Ransome, successfully colonised a number of periodicals. Temple Bar that year included essays and stories by Ransome, a poem by his cousin Laurence Binyon, and, by way of adding gravitas, a tribute to his master and mentor Ruskin by W. G. Collingwood. Edward Thomas was there, writing on Richard Jefferies (another of Ransome’s heroes), and John Masefield on the sea-songs which were later to be used thematically in Ransome’s novels.
From the outset of his career (and for many years afterwards) Ransome’s literary agents were Curtis Brown, for whom his adored Stefana Stevens was then working. He tells us that he was having tea with Cecil Chesterton one day late in 1906, when Stefana came across to their table and said ‘There’s a book that ought to be written, and you are the one who ought to write it, a book on Bohemia in London, an essayistical sort of book.’ The next morning, Ransome took her an outline. Bohemia in London was published in the following September by Chapman & Hall; it was successful on both sides of the Atlantic, and a second edition was later to appear from another publisher. Stefana’s novel ‘– and what happened’: being an account of some romantic meals [sic] (Mills & Boon, 1916) gently satirises the young Ransome as the enthusiastic pipe-smoking Matravers:
he is a person who writes small books in large and beautiful print in which the t’s trail downwards towards the next letter [i.e. the ligatures of ‘artistic’ type-faces] … he contributes essays to quarterlies, and reviews novels in a literary paper without ever having written one. He is, in print, the most fastidious and meticulous creature. In person he is bombastic, Gargantuan, thunderous, explosive, brutal, and bouncing.
It is fair to say that she and Arthur had not met for several years when this portrait was published.
Ransome was prodigiously energetic in producing books and articles over the following few years. A History of Story-Telling: Studies in the Development of Narrative was published by T. C. and E. C. Jack in 1909. It was a substantial and ground-breaking study, although it incorporated matter from the introductions he had written for eleven volumes of selections from ‘The World’s Story-Tellers’. (This series was heavily weighted towards French literature, from the Roman de la Rose to de Maupassant; the translations appear to be Ransome’s own.) Jacks also published two substantial anthologies which he had compiled with help from Ivy, whom he married in 1909, The Book of Friendship (1909) and The Book of Love (1910). His plans for future work were now on an increasingly grand scale, as a letter from Chapman & Hall suggests:
I do not see how we could possibly hope to cover expenses upon a volume of twelve disconnected critical essays of about 5000 words each. The prospect of twelve such books I should reckon as a prospect of a loss of at least £400, probably more … in the meantime I think your scheme is quite a Napoleonic one from an author’s point of view.
No more was heard of this heroic scheme, although Ransome was still keen to publish collections of his critical essays.
The young Ransome was naturally based in Bohemian London, but he and Ivy moved into a farmhouse at Hatch, near Tisbury in Wiltshire, the year after their marriage in 1909. Here he was a near neighbour of Edward Thomas, and the two men enjoyed many long conversational walks together. Thomas was passionately attached to the English language, poetry, song, and the open air, subjects on which Ransome became increasingly fervent. He joined the cult of the Open Road. A new periodical, committed to expressing these ideals, appeared monthly during 1910 and 1911. The Tramp celebrated no ordinary vagabonds, but amiable, pipe-smoking lovers of the countryside dressed in Norfolk jackets and plus-fours – such as Thomas and Ransome, who were regular contributors. A typical cover of this shortlived magazine shows a well-clad gentleman-tramp pausing on a stile, appreciatively gazing out upon the landscape over which he is walking, somewhat in the proprietorial manner of a Renaissance duke. Nevertheless, the contributions of Ransome and Thomas stand out sharply from a good deal of romantic nonsense and weak nostalgia. Their clear, loving gaze had a purpose: they sought in the beloved landscape an essence which could be captured and transmitted by the writer’s art; and they wanted to understand the meaning and method of that art.
Ransome was also at work in 1910 on his first ‘critical study’, Edgar Allan Poe. He corrected the proofs in bucolic, temporarily renewed bachelordom on Peel Island in Coniston Water, where he and Robin Collingwood, whose brilliant career at Oxford had recently begun, camped out and discussed philosophy and literary theory. Ursula, the youngest of the Collingwood sisters (the one to whom Ransome did not propose marriage) brought him the proofs when they arrived from the printer, swimming across to the island with a parcel fastened to her head. The book appeared that autumn.
Ransome’s Poe was one of the first two books published by Martin Secker, a forceful young man exactly his contemporary. He had been particularly impressed by the section on Poe in Ransome’s History of Story-Telling, and commissioned a full-length study as the first in a new series of ‘Modern Monographs’ on recent and contemporary writers. Ransome had originally proposed three such monographs, to be called ‘critical studies’, on Poe, Hazlitt, and Stevenson, writers whom he knew well, greatly admired, and revered as inspirers of his own work. He had had positive discussions about a book to be called ‘Hazlitt and his circle’ with Methuen in 1909, although his fatherly advisor Collingwood had been less than enthusiastic about the project. Secker doubted whether a book on Hazlitt would sell, so out of fashion had he then become. Stevenson seemed a much more promising subject, and it was agreed that Secker would publish Ransome’s study of him as soon as it could be completed. In the meantime, Secker brought out The Hoofmarks of the Faun (1911), a compilation of previously published stories by Ransome, most dedicated to a young woman (including the Collingwood sisters and his wife Ivy). An autobiographical note was prefixed, a sign of the author’s self-confidence. Ransome and Secker looked forward to a fruitful and enduring partnership.
Although Ransome believed he had originated the concept of a ‘critical study’, the term, at least, had been used before: George Gissing’s Charles Dickens: A Critical Study, for example, had appeared in 1898, and Ransome could scarcely have been unaware of that. However, his interpretation of the phrase was highly individual and new, and Secker believed in it. A biographical summary would make perhaps a quarter of the book; the remainder would be a close study of the subject’s techniques, methods and objectives. At twenty-six, Ransome was ready to do this. His History of Story-Telling and Poe had been widely admired; he was ‘astonished by the reviews’ and particularly by the admiration of the American professor G. E. Woodberry. His output of reviews, articles, and essays in The Tramp, T.P.’s Weekly, The Bookman, The Fortnightly Review, and other literary journals was prolific and influential. His reputation as a critic and a literary man was in the ascendant; but unfortunately his publisher’s profits did not keep pace. In May 1911 Ransome proposed a new edition, or second volume, of his Story-Telling to Secker, confidently predicting a good reception. He received the following reply:
About Story-telling, I’m afraid I can’t do anything. I am very depressed and pessimistic about the outlook everywhere, and after losing £50 on Poe and £25 on the Hoofmarks, I do not think it is worthwhile adding to my list any more books for which there is apparently so little demand. What is to be done? It seems as though the only way for you to add critical volumes to your bibliography, is to serialise the articles in the reviews and magazines, and publish on a pure royalty basis … I am sorry if this letter is so divorced from optimism, but I do not think the outlook is particularly hopeful for anyone.
I am glad Wilde is going well. He shall have every chance when the time for parturition comes …
As the last sentence of this letter shows, Secker had already changed his mind about what the next in the series of Modern Monographs should be. In his published autobiography Ransome smoothes over some aspects of the strained relationship between author and publisher at this time. Manuscript pages of his draft in the Brotherton Library collection are more revealing than the account given in his Autobiography:
Secker asked me to follow the study of Poe with another. I had called my book ‘Edgar Allan Poe: a critical study’, and he annoyed me by using my formula for a whole series of such books [by other writers], ‘Thomas Hardy a critical study’, T. L. Peacock ditto’ etc etc. He asked me to choose a subject. Now Poe had interested me, first because of his conscious methods of construction, instead of invention. At that moment ‘native woodnotes wild’ did not interest me whereas the ‘P. & K.’ theory [a critical theory about kinetic and potential speech, which he had published in 1911] did, and I chose to write a book on Robert Louis Stevenson. I should …
There the fragment ends. Was he going to say, ‘I should have stuck to it’?
He didn’t do so. In the autumn of 1910 he had arranged to occupy Lane-head, the Collingwoods’ house at Coniston, while they were away on their travels. He had planned to begin reading for his Stevenson there, among other pleasant rural themes and diversions, but his happiness was soon interrupted: his wife and their infant daughter and a Jamaican nursemaid arrived on 7 October, the very day the Collingwoods left, intent on having the baby’s overdue baptism arranged as soon as possible, with the father present. Within a few days of Ivy’s arrival, on 11 October, Arthur notes in his diary: ‘Book on Wilde. Telegram from an excited Secker’. Secker urgently wanted a book on Wilde ‘as an esprit’, Ransome later wrote – a word which he described as being entirely without an English equivalent. This crucial week requires careful scrutiny. It is clear that Secker’s proposal was deliberated on for four days: and that the decision was not easy. On 15 October Arthur noted in his diary first ‘Woe and sunshine after’ – a typical sequence in his stormy relationship with his wife – and then the reply telegram sent that day: ‘Secker wins Wilde book’. The characteristically terse wording of the message does not disguise a tussle of interests; the decision to accept Secker’s proposal may not have been arrived at from personal inclination. Immediately on receipt of Ransome’s telegram Secker posted a contract; the agreement was signed on 17 October. Reading for Wilde began at once.
In another fragment of draft autobiography, Ransome says ruefully,
I … began work on Wilde without the smallest suspicion of the trouble that book would bring me. I had finished my book on Poe, mainly concerned with his alert, self-conscious technique, and with a chapter on his influence in France, where Baudelaire’s translation had made him almost a French writer. Stevenson was to have …
Once more, the following page is tantalisingly missing, but it is clear that Ransome meant a book on Stevenson to follow. He had detected thematic and stylistic links between Poe and Stevenson, whom the French had similarly taken to their hearts, and was keen to explore them further.
In his published autobiography, Ransome says that if Secker’s telegram had arrived before the Collingwoods had left Lanehead, he would have been persuaded not to write on Wilde. Collingwood had met Oscar ‘as one of the undergraduate navvies under Ruskin’s leadership on the Hinksey road’ and had not received a favourable impression. But as it turned out, his mentor was already far away, his plans for an agreeable autumn had been wrecked, and his mental agitation can be guessed from the fact that halfpages of his diary for the days on which Ivy arrived and Secker’s telegram was received have both been torn out – the only pages in any of his diaries to have been so treated. It is unlikely that the christening at Coniston church, itself postponed by bad weather, put him in a better frame of mind. His position in respect of work, marriage, and religion, were all matters of great agitation.
Still, he set to work with a will, and was for several months immersed in Wilde. Soon a new problem emerged. Despite Secker’s enthusiasm for the forthcoming book, he was shocked to discover how extensively Ransome wanted to quote from Wilde’s writings. There had been no such problem with Poe, although Ransome’s quotations had been just as lavish. But the copyrights of Oscar Wilde’s works were the property of the respected publisher Algernon Methuen, who despite his friendly relationship with Ransome would allow substantial quotations only in return for a substantial fee. Secker’s view was that Ransome would have to make do with much less, refusing to pay more than the barest minimum. Ransome refused to change his methods: if critical study meant the close analysis of significant passages, the reader must have those passages before him. He then made matters worse by trying to conduct negotiations directly with Wilde’s literary executor, Robert Ross; on 28 August 1911 he wrote:
Dear Ross,
I have not heard from Methuen. But, this morning there came this letter from Secker: Dear Ransome, Methuens say they will consider my application to use the extracts, on receipt of complete proofs and that it will be conditional (possibly) upon paying a fee for each extract. Yours, etc’
Shall I let him know that I have sent you a copy of the list? … it is horribly difficult to work when nothing is settled.
I do hope that the making of the list and the sending it to Secker have not been undiplomatic.
My moustache has turned gray.
I have begun to squint and am quite unable to look my daughter in the face.
To this Ross generously and humorously replied:
You can tell Methuen you have sent me the list. But don’t write any more letters to Secker than you can help. I fear it was your interview with Secker that was undiplomatic. However your attitude must now be one of ‘helplessness’, leaving it to Methuen and Secker to fight it out. Methuen would in any case have cut up rough about the quotations: so that he’s writing to do with the pious wish that they should eventually publish. You have only to go on with the work as if nothing happened. When Secker writes reply that ‘you are really in his hands and cannot say or do anything more, but think the quotations are essential to your book.’ If the book is held up a little it does not affect either its value or your position. You must adopt the psychology of the young lady of Sweden who went back to Weedon if you remember.
Ransome took Ross’s advice despite his misquotation of Lear’s limerick (the young lady, having arrived at Weedon, thought it prudent to return to Sweden). He consoled himself while these negotiations proceeded with the breeding of blue mice, a delicate matter on which he had become something of an expert. In 1912 he wrote a splendidly entertaining review of an animal book, peevishly complaining that it had got several aspects of the development of infant mice quite wrong. A room in his farmhouse at Hatch was given over to mouse breeding and selection; Ransome’s successes were attested to by the prize certificates that adorned the walls. He had gone so far as to propose a book on mice to the long-suffering Methuen, who was quite charmed by the idea; but it remained unwritten.
Oscar Wilde: A Critical Study was finished in December 1911, and published early in 1912. Fifteen hundred copies were printed, as against seven hundred of Poe; it seems that Secker was confident of recouping his losses this time. As soon as it appeared, members of Wilde’s family made objections; Ransome apologised for the matter complained of, and agreed to change his text in future editions. Then, in March 1912, Lord Alfred Douglas, vengeful and litigious in his post-Bosie days, brought an action for libel against Ransome, Ransome’s publisher, the printers of the book, and The Times Book Club which had agreed to circulate it. Although Ransome never mentioned Douglas by name, he had asserted that Douglas had ‘lured Wilde to his ruin and abandoned him afterwards’, as Brogan puts it, and those were the grounds for Douglas’s case. The printers quickly settled out of court, and Secker succeeded in buying himself out of the action in a secret agreement with Douglas, whose publisher he had recently become.
Ransome understood very well the likely financial advantages of the publicity surrounding his book. Writing to the literary agent Curtis Brown with a book proposal (never carried out) on ‘the modern spirit’, he had been quick to point out that ‘the success of the Wilde book, which will, of course, be enormously stimulated when my case … comes into court, should ensure a very wide notice for it both here and in America’. He was certain that he had written his Wilde accurately, truthfully, and without an axe to grind: Douglas’ action called his integrity into question. But as his co-defendants backed away, he felt increasingly apprehensive. Secker’s deal with Douglas he regarded as craven disloyalty. Matters were made worse by the delays of the law: the case was not heard until April 1913. Ransome found the suspense hard to bear, and, out of his depth, began to dread an adverse judgment.
His fears were unfounded. The jury did not take long to conclude that he had no case to answer, and that the words complained of were ‘libellous, but true’. Judgment was given accordingly, and costs were awarded against Douglas. His old friend Daniel Macmillan, who was at his side during the hearing, had generously offered to pay Arthur’s costs at once if necessary; happily, it did not come to that. A martyr to Arthur’s cause, Macmillan had taken pains to have lunch with the Ransomes every day of the hearing, so that, as Hugh Brogan beautifully observed, ‘Ivy was obliged, by mere good manners, not to go on quarrelling.’ A second edition of Wilde rapidly appeared (published not by Secker, with whom Ransome had by now irrevocably broken off relations, but by Methuen); ten thousand copies were printed. Five further editions followed: the book was a best-seller, Ransome’s first. Ironically, it was a book which, in the end, he would rather not have written.
Long before the action came to court, Ransome’s patience with Secker was exhausted. In March 1912 he bought back by mutual agreement all the remaining stocks of his Secker books, as well as the rights to his still unwritten book on Stevenson, and other work which he had less formally proposed. While the court hearing was pending, copies of Wilde were sold by post from Ransome’s home in Wiltshire. In the meantime, he had found a new publisher. He had been persuaded into the fold of a clever, charismatic, and persuasive character, a poet as well as an editor and publisher, called Charles Granville (a nom de guerre, as Ransome later said).
Granville had begun publishing under the name of Stephen Swift in 1911, a few doors along from Secker’s office in John Street. He had had some successes already: he brought out Katherine Mansfield’s first book, and in 1911 launched three influential magazines: Rhythm (edited by Middleton Murry), The Eye-Witness (edited by Cecil Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc), and The Oxford and Cambridge Review. The Review allowed Ransome his head in exploring his literary theories; to The Eye-Witness and its successor The New Witness he was such a frequent contributor that he could appear under several guises in any one issue. Best of all, Granville offered very generous terms to his authors. He had a keen and perceptive eye for talent, and recognised Ransome’s capacity for hard work and consistent productivity. He encouraged him to bring together enough of his essays to make a slightly less than Napoleonic three volumes, and in the short term commissioned a translation of Remy de Gourmont’s A Night in the Luxembourg, which was published in 1912 within a month of Oscar Wilde. It is easy to see why Ransome was so completely won over by this charming but unscrupulous adventurer. But Granville was too good to be true. In danger of prosecution for bigamy, he fled to the Continent with his lady, abandoning his friends and his business. Ransome’s comfortable hopes of wealth and fame were no more than a pipe-dream. At first he camped out in Granville’s office, determined to keep physical hold of the stock of his books; before long it became clear that very little could be saved from the wreckage. At least one volume of his collected essays appeared; Macmillans generously published it in 1913 as Portraits and Speculations. Ransome’s other books were finally taken over from Granville by the avuncular Methuen. He was delighted to discover that Ransome was intending to write a book on Stevenson, for he was himself a great admirer, and had relished reading Treasure Island to the boys of the preparatory school which he had established. He would be most happy, therefore, to publish Ransome’s study as soon as it was ready.
A well-known newspaper photograph of Mr and Mrs Arthur Ransome shows them standing together on a snowy pavement outside the law-courts in London, shortly after judgment in the Wilde case had been given. In front, in topper and spats, is Arthur’s gallant friend Daniel Macmillan, of the publishing family. Ivy is on tiptoe with elation, delighted to be at the centre of the picture; indeed, she seems to have enjoyed the publicity and excitement of the case from the beginning, although her determined presence in the public gallery had caused Ransome some embarrassment. Her arm is occupied by a folded cloak, and is not linked with her husband’s. Arthur smiles nervously; he looks bewildered rather than happy or relieved, and considerably older than his twenty-nine years. Only his choice of a very distinctive ‘squashy hat’ defiantly proclaims his membership of the artistic avant-garde; he had long since broken with the trammels of respectability (and dismayed his mother) by putting the bowler hat in which he had arrived in London on the fire. The unwelcome notoriety into which the lawsuit had plunged him had plainly had a profound effect on his self-confidence. But in the body-language of husband and wife there are perhaps the signs of another, underlying, misery. Unlike the libel suit, it would not end happily.
As we have seen, Ransome had nurtured hopes of marrying one of the talented daughters of W. G. Collingwood. After his second rejection, the disconsolate young man rebounded with tremendous force into the arms of the bewitching, lively, dramatic, and volatile Ivy Constance Graves Walker from Bournemouth. Her parents were both extremely wealthy, and had little affection for each other. Unlike Ransome, she was an only child. There was an element of romance in her origins: she had a grandmother from Jamaica, a great-grandmother from Portugal, and distant connections with English nobility. When Ransome met her, she was already engaged to a rather dull cousin. Although she was keen to escape from him, her parents thought otherwise: her wedding-dress was nearly ready for its final fitting. She was older than Ransome, and understood that his family had none of the social or financial advantages of hers; but she was very ready to marry him, if only to disoblige her family. A connection with a ‘Common Writer’ must have seemed to them the worst of all possible disasters.
Mr Walker was a non-practising solicitor. He was evidently fond of mischief. (In his will he left a substantial annuity to his long-serving female chauffeur, a constant humiliation to his wife, who spent more and more time at Ivy’s house.) Confronted with his daughter’s determination to break off her engagement in favour of a struggling author, he perceived an opportunity for being intensely disagreeable to a large part of his family. Over a gentlemanly cigar, he encouraged Arthur to strike while the iron was hot, and to whisk Ivy away to Gretna Green – or, failing that, to the nearest register office. Arthur’s euphoria was such that he began to write a poem in celebration of the ‘respectable’ Mr Walker’s suggestion; but having referred to his bride as a ‘corker’ he could not think of any more plausible rhymes for ‘Walker’, and the ode remained unfinished. When the news leaked out, Ivy’s paternal grandmother sent her a long, great-aunt-ish expostulation, exhorting her to do the Right Thing, not to let the family down, and above all to leave Arthur alone. Her mother sank into despair. But Ivy was delighted by the prospect. She was a charming, elegant, intriguing young lady in need of a husband; Arthur was penniless but dashing, a witty, excitingly passionate and ambitious young man. On Saturday 13 March 1909 Ransome wrote ‘Got married’ in his diary, in ink, adding ‘Went to Paris’ in pencil. The ceremony took place in a register office in Fulham – abutting bohemian Chelsea, but neither then nor now the most fashionable quarter of London.
Disenchantment, as far as Arthur was concerned, was not far away. He soon came to realise what a ‘nightmarish family background of mutual hate’ he had married into, and how powerless he was to detach Ivy from it. Their daughter was later (drawing presumably on her mother’s account of married life) to describe Ransome as ‘Wild and Bohemian’, living an adventurous life in Paris with her mother on the proceeds of his first few stories. Perhaps their first few weeks of marriage were rootlessly exuberant, as they enjoyed a freedom which neither had experienced before; but Ivy’s difficulties in separating reality from fantasy, her wildly romantic fabulations about herself, and her increasingly erratic behaviour, soon gave Arthur serious anxiety. He did not know how to trust her. If she was crossed, she would give way to extravagant and potentially dangerous actions, smashing things and setting them on fire. The Ransomes moved seven times in their first five months together, on one occasion being asked to leave because they had damaged the wallpaper by throwing buckets of water at each other.
This impulsive marriage was to blight Ransome’s life for many years. When in 1942 his publisher Jonathan Cape urged him to write an autobiography, Ransome noted in a personal memorandum that he would be able to do so only by ‘omitting the misery of 1909 to 1913, and from 1913 to 1917, so far as my affairs in England are concerned’. His gloom was lifted by the birth of his daughter Tabitha in May 1910; although he seems to have been somewhat preoccupied, since his diary entry reading ‘Tabitha 10.45–50 am’ was subsequently corrected by Ivy to ‘Born at about 2.40 pm’. (She seems to have read his diaries without compunction, which is perhaps why Ransome confided little except factual matters to them.) As the child grew, Ransome took enormous pleasure in watching her development, encouraging her, telling her stories, and teaching her the things which he thought a child should know. He was always happy with her, and unhappy with her mother; whenever he left home he was torn between relief at being separated from his wife, and distress at being separated from his daughter. Hatch remained his family home and his base: but as time went on, he sought more and more excuses for being away. He expressed to Ivy his fear that their marriage was a failure; she coldly informed him that under no circumstances would she consider a divorce. Once the Wilde case was settled, Ransome felt that he could stay permanently with her no longer. He had taken up the study of Russian folklore and found in it ‘an undramatic way out of my personal troubles’. He would go to Russia – the first of what turned out to be many trips – to learn Russian, gather material, work on his translations, and so peacefully begin to recuperate from the stresses of recent years. He obtained a passport without saying a word to Ivy or to any of his family, informing her when he was ready to leave that his destination was Stockholm, a place far enough away from England to avoid the continuing attentions of the press, but in a country for which no passport was then required. It was not until he had reached Russian territory via Stockholm that Ivy realised that, lacking a passport, she would be unable to follow him. She did not accept the separation easily.
Upon arrival in Russia, Ransome travelled at once into Finland, to stay in a dacha belonging to a family to whom a friend in Paris had given him an introduction. There he wrote a long and distressing letter to his mother. Although probably aware that the marriage was not a happy one, she would have known only a few of the reasons why. The letter reveals so much of Ransome’s tormented state of mind at the time when he was trying to continue uninterrupted work on Stevenson that it deserves to be quoted in full.
Datcha [sic] Gellibrand
Terijoki [sic]
Finland
Jun 30. 1913
My dearest mother,
I had just settled down to hard work here on my book on Stevenson, the Gellibrands having made everything awfully nice for me, when Ivy sent a wild and furious letter telling me to leave at once. I sent the letter to Sir George Lewis [the lawyer who acted for him in the Wilde case] with a letter from me to her refusing to change my obviously suitable arrangements. She telegraphs and writes with great violence, and I have written asking her to go and talk things out with Lewis.
I do not think I told you that 3 days before I left, in one of her terrific scenes (in this case because of a mistake I made in the name of a servant, a mistake I instantly admitted) she took up the two lighted lamps from the dinner table and broke them to pieces, narrowly escaping setting the house on fire.
I told this to Lewis before I left, and he agreed that it was more than unwise to remain in the house, as in another such scene she might without meaning it, go a little further. He is going to try to arrange a peaceable separation, at least for some months so that I can have a chance of getting some work done.
In the month before I left, I paid over to Ivy about £50, to settle our debts* so that she is all right financially. (*mostly due to her insistence on coming to London for the Case.)
Well: I did not want to worry you with all this; but, remembering what you told me about her absolutely untrue letters and telegrams on a former occasion, and her hatred of you, it seems to me that she may try to get at you in some way now: so that it is better for you to know all about it beforehand.
If she does ask you to do anything, or if she sends you violent letters, send them on to Sir George Lewis, Bart., 10 Ely Place, Holborn, E.C., with a letter saying that you are my mother, and do not want to do anything without his knowledge. He will tell you what to do or what to write in reply.
In any case, do nothing to help her to come out here in pursuit of me.
Do not hesitate to write to Lewis if anything happens in which you need advice. If only Ivy would give me a little peace I should be able to work here like anything. As it is, I live in constant terror of the post. Tabitha has been poorly, and Ivy has refused to have any nurse, even her own cousin.
Fortunately, however, Tabitha is better again. How I wish that infant were not going to be brought up in an atmosphere of lies, and dark stuffy rooms.
My dear Mother when I think of Ivy’s deliberate efforts to separate me from my own family, the censorship of my letters, and all the rest, I am surprised that I am still fairly sane. Living in this calm Russian household, where there are no rows, no violent scenes, is such a relief that I feel in a different world. If only Lewis can arrange a peaceable separation, I do hope that in a calmer life you and I will be able to be the friends we used to be before that unfortunate marriage. I am so glad that we had that talk in Leeds before I left England.
One piece of very good news I have for you. Douglas has withdrawn his appeal. So the whole of that trouble is at an end. Lewis has done extraordinarily well.
Perhaps it would be a good thing if you sent this letter on to Geoffrey [his brother]. I should like him to know exactly how things stand. And in case you are at all worried it will be a satisfaction to you to know that he also knows. I told him when I was in Edinburgh how things were: but the lamp-smashing episode occurred only just before I came away, at the end of a day in which, as Ivy admitted I had given up all work and devoted myself entirely to the task of keeping her happy.
This is a beautiful place, and when my worry and anxiety allow it, I lay the foundations for Stevenson at a wooden table under tall pine trees, close to the Gulf of Finland, now and then hearing the guns from the fortress of Kronstadt far away. It is a great relief to be able to write to you without all the fear that Ivy will condemn the letter.
Your affectionate son,
Arthur.
The presence of the friendly, cheerful children of his hosts at the Gellibrand dacha was a welcome stimulus to his work on Stevenson. Ransome returned in due course to Wiltshire, drawn by his deep love for his daughter to try again, but was in low spirits there. His concentration was failing. He worked doggedly on the Stevenson, but it did not go well. A cage of comforting blue mice on his desk failed to cheer him up; he felt increasingly that he was a martyr to Ivy’s jealousy and possessiveness. During this time he composed a strange philosophical allegory called The Blue Treacle, which he hoped his daughter might one day read and understand. Written while living at Hatch with her, it reflects his anguish at the imminent loss of her company. The story was about escape. Ransome called it ‘an allegory of mental processes,’ and ‘merely the story of an escape from this unconscious living – a realization of a moment of experience’. The heroine, Tabitha, represents ‘the poet in us, [who] reaches an imaginative height which [she] cannot explain to herself’, while the blue treacle stands for ‘the general stream of unrealized experience’. Ransome admitted ‘I am not at all certain what all of it means myself.’ It failed to find a publisher. His other projects were going badly, too. He was frantic to get away, back to Russia and safety again, as a letter from Hatch to his mother dated Saturday 14 March 1914 reveals:
Things are very bad with me. The Caucasian Folk Tales have been rejected by the most likely of all the publishers. And I’d counted on them for getting to Russia with. All my hopes of new gorgeous books are blasted, and I’ll have to take a commission for another Wilde, Poe, Stevenson type of book.
Blue Treacle still homeless and likely to remain so.
I’ve written a queer little story, short, one of the best I’ve done [probably ‘Ankou’] which comforts me a little. But I can’t help being bluer than the bluest treacle. … I am here working on Stevenson till Monday. Then just a chance of my getting a French job in Russia, and I may go to Paris 3rd class return to try for it but I don’t know.
The style is uncharacteristically bleak. He did leave for ten days in Paris on the following Monday, but returned without the ‘French job’. Then, at last, he was invited to write a history and guide to St Petersburg by the minor publisher Max Goschen. He jumped at the offer, and made his escape to the Continent in his good new boots on 5 May. He arrived in the city on 13 May, and, working at white-hot speed and giving time to little else, finished the seventy thousand words of the new book on 9 July. There had been a disagreeable price to pay for this remarkable achievement: most of his days had been completely taken up with a ‘famished, fiendish frenzy’ of fact-finding. He complained frequently about having insufficient funds, until Goschen eventually sent an advance of £50; he recorded the windfall in his diary as the ‘result of my anger. Jolly good dinner.’ However, political events were about to render his work obsolete. The city he had explored and described was renamed Petrograd on 31 August 1914, and before long would become a very different place. His publisher could see no commercial future for the book, withdrew from publishing it, and returned the manuscript. Ransome was to say later, ‘I do not think that the book had any merit’, and claimed to have destroyed the manuscript; but his recollections are not always quite reliable. Although no trace of the St Petersburg book has come to light, he was not accustomed to destroy any manuscript voluntarily. (For instance, in his autobiography he says firmly that he destroyed about a dozen stories based on proverbs which he had written at Coniston in the autumn of 1910. In fact he didn’t; they survive among his papers at the Brotherton Library.) So it is at least possible that the St Petersburg manuscript survived, until a disastrous house-fire in Riga in 1923 consumed many of his personal letters, working papers and cherished possessions, and other papers relating to the years which he spent in Russia and the Baltic. Ironically, the fire happened only two months after Ivy had at last agreed to a divorce.
Such books and papers as Ransome left in England had a more complex fate. The working library (including his notebooks) which he had left behind in his study at Hatch was still, he assumed, as he had left it. As part of a difficult separation agreement, all his books remained in the farmhouse at Hatch where Ivy still lived, as her property. When she moved elsewhere in the 1920s, the books went with her; she then had a room purpose-built to receive them, always referred to as ‘the Library’. Ivy seems to have treated not only the books as her own, but also (without Arthur’s consent) his working papers. It was the loss of these things, rather than the one-third of his earnings which she also received, that caused Ransome the greatest pain. He had sacrificed food or fuel to buy some of the books; many were presentation copies from their authors, prized for the association. In 1929 he wrote frequently to Ivy, asking for the return of his notebooks and papers, which could not in any sense be her property. We do not know if he ever specifically asked her for his Stevenson material. Only a few notebooks were grudgingly released. It is clear that she never accepted the reality of their divorce, feeling the disgrace and social disadvantage strongly. When she died in 1939 she was, somewhat pathetically, described on her death certificate as ‘wife of A. Ransome, writer’.
For Arthur, there was worse to come. He records in his autobiography the painful discovery that, after Ivy’s death, Tabitha did not ask him whether he would like to have his books and papers back but had decided to sell them to a bookseller. Wounded by what he felt to be a second generation of cruelty and betrayal, he could not bring himself to accept her suggestion that he might like to make an offer for those he most wanted before the sale went through. He then suffered the additional anguish of seeing the dealer’s catalogue which described them ‘in painful detail, even mentioning the inscriptions in them from my friends. I bought from the bookseller some of my own manuscript notebooks, which, of course, she [Tabitha] had not had ever the right to sell.’ We do not know if he had been hoping to find his Stevenson manuscript material there, or whether the ‘Stevenson exercise book’ (soon to be described) came to him from that source or was with him all through the intervening years.
However, the working papers of Stevenson which Ivy had sequestered in 1914 were not part of the collection that Tabitha sold. It is clear that they had never been restored to their former place with Arthur’s other books and papers, and so presumably did not pass to Tabitha at her mother’s death. Although long estranged from her father, she appreciated his fame as a successful writer, and would almost certainly have opened the parcel if it had been available to her. Instead, she was completely surprised by the news of its discovery in 1990.
When the parcel was opened, it was found to contain an unbound holograph manuscript comprising the text and working papers of the first draft critical study of Robert Louis Stevenson. It was written on three hundred and eighty-seven sheets of small quarto (17.5 cm × 20.5 cm) paper whose watermarks indicate that it was produced between 1909 and 1916 by the Company of Riga Papermaking Factories, in what today is Latvia. Large sheets had been cut to the size he wanted.
The initial, biographical, quarter of the book is present in an almost complete fair copy, a state from which it could have been typed up and sent to the publisher. The remainder includes almost all the sections Ransome listed (both on a page within the manuscript and on a leaf of the exercise-book contemporary with that) as necessary for a complete ‘critical study’ of Stevenson’s works, some of them still awaiting substantial revision before being ready for typing up. Inserted among the sheets of the second part are several pages of quotations from Stevenson, some in an appropriate position for incorporation into the text, others less obviously so. Other working papers in the parcel include an incomplete reading-list, a preliminary list of chapters or sections, and notes of how many pages had been written each day during July and August of 1913. Sections on Stevenson’s childhood and Weir of Hermiston, although listed in Ransome’s scheme and anticipated and foreshadowed within the existing text, are not present. Had he been able to revise his work for publication, Ransome might well have reconsidered the order of his sections. The order in which they were numbered at Leeds (as received from the solicitors) more or less follows that of his scheme. The concluding pages of the manuscript as received deal with Stevenson and morality; Ransome’s diary shows that he was writing these pages, the section planned to be last in the book, towards the end of April 1914. This seems to be the point at which continuous work ceased; and, as we have seen, Ivy dated the parcelled draft with ‘May 4 1914’, the last possible day on which Arthur could have been at home with it: the day before he crossed to the continent en route for Tsarist Russia for the second time, on 5 May.
That Ransome had projected, deferred, and in 1913 returned to work on this book had been known for a long time. His diaries (also now in the Brotherton Library) confirm that he was working steadily on the book during that year; he records the number of pages written on any one day, or (as on 11 September 1913) a running sub-total: ‘Stevenson approx. 90pp. roughly’. He had a good deal of other work on hand, but it is clear that he was working fairly continuously on this book throughout 1913 and the first third of 1914. That he had come very close to completing it was quite unexpected when the parcel was opened; his autobiography tells us only that he ‘worked now and then at a book on Stevenson which Methuen’s were to publish (they subsequently released me from that)’. From this rather disingenuous summary, it was generally believed that the book had not gone beyond preliminary sketching. This assumption was strengthened when one of Ransome’s notebooks became available after his death, an exercise-book now in the Ransome archive at the Brotherton Library. (His books, typescripts, manuscripts, and personal papers were divided between Abbot Hall in Kendal (the Museum of Lakeland Life and Industry) and the Brotherton Library of the University of Leeds by his second wife’s direction.) Ransome had bought the exercise-book in Paris from ‘F. Bernard, Papeterie-Imprimerie des Etudiants et de l’Odéon’. (It was in the Galerie de l’Odéon that he had seen the French translation of his Oscar Wilde on sale on 18 February.) While in Russia, he lettered this exercise-book on the spine in black ink ‘STEVENSON. стивEнсонъ’ (transliterating Stevenson’s name correctly into Cyrillic script and ending with the ‘hard’ sign which in pre-revolutionary Russian spelling was required for a word ending in a consonant) (see appendix A.1). It contains no more than a chronology of Stevenson’s life and works, headings for the sections of his own book, and extensive quotations from some of Stevenson’s. On the fly-leaf is written ‘Arthur Ransome. Datcha Gellibrand. Terijoki. Finland’ – then part of Tsarist Russia. This address was his chief base during 1913 until his return to London in late September, and he returned to it at times in 1914 and later.
The history of this blue exercise-book is completely different from that of the parcel. Possibly it was returned to Ransome with other papers and notebooks after prolonged and bitter negotiations with Ivy in 1929 (the year in which he determined to give up the full-time journalism that had occupied him for the previous fourteen years and devote himself to a new kind of narrative, Swallows and Amazons). Alternatively, it may have been one of the notebooks he was obliged to buy back from the second-hand bookseller. Inserted into the ‘Stevenson exercise-book’ are three loose sheets of the extremely distinctive paper on which Ransome wrote his first draft of the book. One, headed ‘Conclusion’, contains only one paragraph, partially crossed out, that was evidently once intended for Stevenson. (With typical economy, Ransome used the other two sheets many years later for notes towards his autobiography.)
How and why the two sources for the book became separated is unknown. Why Ransome copied some of the quotations from Stevenson twice, on sheets within the parcel and also on pages of the exercise-book, is also somewhat puzzling. However, the exercise-book almost certainly came first. The chronology of Stevenson’s life and works which it contains is evidently derived from Graham Balfour’s memoir of his cousin, a new edition of which had been the subject of a review article by Ransome in 1911: ‘I wrote that year on Kant, Peacock, Paracelsus and Stevenson, mostly short notes and articles hitched to new books.’ (This review, signed with a pseudonym as were many of Ransome’s occasional pieces, is reprinted here as appendix B.3.) It may be that the exercise-book was shelved in Ransome’s study separately from the bulk of his Stevenson papers so that Ivy did not include it in the parcel; or that Ransome on that fated 4 May had already put it with the papers he meant to take to Russia. The latter is more likely.
When he made his escape from England, home, and Ivy on 5 May 1914, Ransome probably took with him (of his Stevenson work) only the exercise book and a few sheets of loose ‘Stevenson’ paper within it. Having already composed a fairly complete (if discontinuous) first draft, he would not have needed to take more than this. At some later point, presumably in Russia or on the way there (the ink is similar to one of the inks used in the main manuscript) he drafted a conclusion to the work on one of those blank leaves. It is unlikely that any more work on Stevenson was done in Russia after that; he was fully occupied in preparing the book he had gone to St Petersburg to write, and in any case would have wanted to reread and revise the whole manuscript again before attempting to write a more satisfactory conclusion. His Stevenson, then, was still very much ‘work in progress’ at the time the parcel was made. Yet he never did return to the manuscript. The reasons for this are complex, though the turmoil of his private life and the all-absorbing new direction that the outbreak of the First World War gave to his professional life, clearly have a bearing on it. Although it was a book which he had been extremely keen to write, and had been absorbed in writing, it was never completed, and (stranger still) Ransome appears never to have mentioned it again, except for the somewhat dismissive reference in his autobiography.
1884 was the year in which Stevenson announced to his friends that he was engaged on a collection of poetry for children. ‘Penny Whistles for Small Whistlers’, his working title for the book, was to be published as A Child’s Garden of Verses. ‘Just about the same time it happened that I was born’, says Ransome. ‘It further happened that the book had just had time to percolate the provinces, and induce in provincial parents a readiness to read it aloud instead of Bunyan, when I, in the course of nature, was ready to listen to it.’ He was fortunate to have parents who delighted in the company of their children, and were themselves voracious readers. His father, professor of history and literature at what was to become the University of Leeds, was the author of various academic and scholarly works; his mother was an able artist and writer, and came from an accomplished and well-travelled family. Arthur’s imagination was informed from his earliest years by the books – A Child’s Garden of Verses among them – that were read to him, and those which he very soon learnt to read for himself. There can be few other children who have received on their fourth birthday a present of their own copy of Robinson Crusoe ‘in reward for being able to read it’.
Both Stevenson and Ransome began their education at home, and their lively imaginations found creative expression very early. At the age of eight, the boy Lewis Stevenson (always called by his given second name; the spelling became ‘Louis’ later) had written ‘“The Book of Joseph”. By R.L.B.S. The author of “A History of Moses.”’ (The earlier story he had dictated to his mother.) ‘Jacob of old married two wives; one of his wives was called Rachael [sic] and the other Leah. Rachael’s eldest [sic] son was Joseph which I intend to found my story on. Well, Joseph was his father’s favourite …’ Thirty-four years later, also at the age of eight, Arthur wrote his own first story, ‘The Desert Island’. But for a Stevenson-inspired pirate accident he might never have written it. At home in Leeds, not merely the nursery and ‘back-bedroom chairs’ which the only child Stevenson had commandeered for his ‘lonely Crusoes building boats’ and other imaginative play, were available; the whole house, even the dining-room table, became the stage for the Ransome children’s games of adventure. Huckleberry Finn, Masterman Ready, Jim of Treasure Island, Davie Balfour of Kidnapped, Ballantyne’s Jack, Ralph and Peterkin of The Coral Island, were their inspiration. It was in consequence of Arthur’s enthusiastic participation that he became a writer, as he explains:
We were playing at ships under and on a big dining-room table which had underneath it, in the middle, a heavy iron screw pointing downwards. It was my ‘watch’ below. My brother or sister was on the bridge, on top of the table, and suddenly raised a shout for “All hands on deck!” I started up, and that big screw under the middle of the table made a most horrible dent in the top of my skull, altered its shape and so, in one moment, changed my character for life. I crawled out, much shaken; and that very afternoon wrote my first book, about a desert island, in a little notebook with a blue cover. I have been writing ever since.
That little notebook still exists; the full text of Ransome’s ‘first book’ is printed here as appendix B.1. The completeness and detail of the story, and Arthur’s careful shaping of the book within such a physically small compass, are both remarkable. The notebook in which he wrote, carefully and in red ink, is no taller than an adult’s thumb.
The Desert Island. By Arthur M. Ransome.
There was once a boy called Jack. His father had gone to Liverpool and had never been heard of since; everybody thought that he had been seized by a press-gang, and taken away to the South Seas. So Jack made up his mind to go and find him. When he was fourteen he went to Portsmouth and went on board a ship called the White Bird.…
They rowed back to the ship the next day and took a lot of planks, guns, pistols and swords back with them.
They built a house and a stockade round it to keep it safe from wild beasts or savages if any should come. Tom shot a wild duck and a sort of pigeon which lasted for breakfast and dinner and they found some bananas and coconuts for tea. There was a little stream running through the stockade so they should never run short of water.
The pace is kept up successfully until the dénouement:
… Jack suddenly saw his father who was captain of the ship. Jack’s father said that it was he who had written the note and built the hut, and that he had been wrecked on that very island and had been found by an English ship and been taken on board. He had afterwards got to be captain and was on his way back to England. Jack and Tom went with him and arrived safely. The End.
Here, plainly, is a homage to Arthur’s favourite adventure story, Treasure Island. (It also owes something to Robinson Crusoe, and to R. M. Ballan-tyne’s The Coral Island, and has the germ of thematic material familiar to readers of Ransome’s We Didn’t Mean To Go To Sea.) Both Stevenson and Ransome were powerfully influenced by Ballantyne’s gripping adventure stories for boys, and both had the rare good fortune to meet him. The normally irrepressible Lewis Stevenson was so awestruck that he was speechless, despite Ballantyne’s affability; and a generation later, the young Arthur Ransome was taken to tea in a garden by his grandmother ‘where, silently worshipping, I shook hands with Ballantyne in the summer before he went to Italy to die.’ He too was overwhelmed by his brief encounter with the aged author. But Defoe, Ballantyne and Stevenson were not young Arthur’s only favourites. Before he was nine he had also read books by Catherine Sinclair, Thackeray, Lewis Carroll, Kingsley, Charlotte Mary Yonge, Mrs Ewing, Andrew Lang, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Andersen, W. G. Collingwood, and R. D. Blackmore; soon after, he began on Scott and Dickens. Some of these were perhaps the choices of his grandmother or some of his favourite aunts who, as he recalled in 1935, ‘sent occasional Ballantynes. I do not think I ever had a Henty. I had “Huckleberry Finn” but not “Tom Sawyer”. I had …Stevenson’s “Treasure Island” and “Kidnapped”. I borrowed “The Black Arrow”.’ In his later autobiography he recalled: ‘Treasure Island we knew and loved, but I remember my father’s shocked astonishment when I did not realise that The Black Arrow was in comparison a poor machine-made thing.’
Stevenson was born thirty-four years before Ransome, and circumstances of time and geography prevented them from meeting. Ransome nevertheless always felt a great affinity with the older writer, and (apart from their significant meetings with Ballantyne) there are many significant parallels between their careers and the things that influenced them. Lewis Stevenson in Edinburgh, and Arthur Ransome in Leeds were both born into comfortable, well-to-do middle-class households, where they inherited strong habits of work and were encouraged in reading, writing, story-telling, music and painting. Lewis remained an only child, whose playmates were his nurse and a number of congenial cousins; Arthur was the eldest of four children who liked playing together. Temperamentally they were both restless, impulsive romantics, and they early showed great energy and creativity. One could almost construct an alphabet of the interests that shaped them as adults: adventure, artists, boats, the Bohemian life, children and childhood, donkeys, escape, exile, friendship, France, the gypsy life, ‘home’ (be it Edinburgh or Vailima, Lanehead or Leeds), maps, morality, music, older women, parents, penny-whistles, poetry, politics, reading, realism, religion, restlessness, romance, the sea, stories, travel, truth, – and wives. Neither had good health: Lewis was a frail child, was thought to be consumptive, and spent many hours being nursed through fevers and nightmares. He grew up to be an extraordinarily thin young man, full of nervous energy, and often on the verge of physical collapse. Arthur was a robust child who relished outdoor pursuits, although he was never able to participate fully in sports on account of his short-sightedness. The extreme stress of his life as a young man had a powerful adverse effect on his health, and he suffered from acute digestive problems for the rest of his life. Nevertheless, both men had a tremendous capacity for hard work as writers. Both were keen to transcend the boundaries of their birth and culture, and Arthur knew from his earliest years those dreams of travel which Lewis had so enticingly expressed:
I should like to rise and go
Where the golden apples grow; –
Where below another sky
Parrot islands anchored lie,
And, watched by cockatoos and goats,
Lonely Crusoes building boats …
At the age of eighteen, Stevenson loved theatricals, and was known as ‘velvet jacket’ to his friends because of the Bohemian clothes which he affected. He was a student in Edinburgh, briefly of engineering, and then of a slightly more congenial subject, law. Unknown to his parents, he rejected their religion, became an atheist, and joined the iconoclastic Speculative Society. He contributed a good deal to the Edinburgh University Magazine, and gratified his father, whom he had accompanied on lighthouse-inspecting travels, by publishing an article on ‘A New Form of Intermittent Light for Lighthouses.’ But the university did not detain Stevenson long. He abandoned his studies and moved to Paris, where he quickly became as intimately acquainted with the artists’ colonies of Fontainebleau and Mont Lozère as he had been with the wynds of Edinburgh’s Old Town and the ‘advanced’ student coteries of its university.
Similarly, Ransome had begun a degree course at Yorkshire College in chemistry, the subject to which his father had thought he would be best suited; but before the age of twenty he had abandoned his barren studies in favour of the profession of literature. He moved to London, rapidly finding his way into the Bohemian circles about which he was later to write affectionately; very soon, he made the first of many visits to Paris. Of this period he later said ‘I lived with great content through what I have come to think was the happiest time of my life.’ Perhaps in imitation of Stevenson, Arthur (who played the piano a little) now became an adept player of the penny whistle. His American artist friends Alphaeus and Peggotty Cole, with whom he lodged as a young man in Chelsea, called him ‘The Piper’; his ‘flageolet’ made a domestic quartet with the violin, piano and cello played by his fellow-lodgers. In a discarded ‘Conclusion’ to the first part of his book on Stevenson (see appendix A.1.i), Ransome was to write: ‘The instrument is unjustly despised, even laughed at, but it is capable of great things … it is symbolical of [Stevenson’s] career. A grown man playing the instrument of youth … playing a penny whistle in the orchestra of English literature.’
By his late twenties, Lewis Stevenson had become Robert Louis Stevenson, the well-known author. He had published An Inland Voyage and Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, and contributed many articles to literary journals – on walking, rivers, Scottish songs, the Arabian Nights, and French writers such as Victor Hugo and Jules Verne. He had enthusiastically reviewed the collected works of Edgar Allan Poe, who – perhaps not entirely coincidentally – was to be the subject of Ransome’s first full-length critical study. And he was about to be married. Although in miserably poor health after a cheap ‘emigrant’ crossing of the Atlantic and interminable railway journeys by third class across the United States, he pursued and finally won Fanny Osbourne, a divorced woman with two children. He had till now been estranged from his father, who was mortified by his confession of atheism: ‘You have rendered my whole life a failure!’ he grimly informed his son. But now they were reconciled, and the Stevensons offered their newly married son much-needed financial support. The company of his young stepson Lloyd was a continuing stimulus to his imagination, and he shared the planning of Treasure Island with him, and with his own father – boy adventurers all at heart. Then Stevenson set off on a voyage of his own, seeking relief from his ailments in the tropical waters of the Pacific. He met (and was befriended by) the ‘merry monarch of Hawaii’, King David Kalakaua, but settled permanently in Samoa. There he dived at once into local politics, publishing vigorously on the issues of the day, often taking the part of the underdog.
By his late twenties, Ransome also had established himself as a promising writer and a perceptive critic, with fourteen published books to his name. He wanted to write a book about Stevenson, a publisher had accepted it, and he had begun to gather material. He too had married, and now had a beloved daughter; but (as we have seen) his marriage was not a source of happiness. His visits to Russia drew him into politics, but on a much broader scale than Stevenson. Initially he found pleasure in the company of Karl Radek and other cheerfully idealistic, pipe-smoking, chess-playing revolutionaries. During the Great War he found a congenial role and a sufficient income as a press correspondent, reporting eye-witness accounts of the increasingly vigorous political unrest, and the effects of war. He was also secretly retained by the British Government as a well-placed observer of developments in Russia. During this time he sent story-letters to his daughter at home in Wiltshire, little realising how long he would be away from her: he remained in Russia for the duration of the war, and was then based in Riga until 1923. He had met a Russian woman whom he was sure he wanted to marry, and felt obliged to remain in exile until such time as Ivy would consent to a divorce.
While Ivy was very unlike her husband in temperament, Evgenia Schelepina, who was to be his second wife, was a woman of integrity, who shared Arthur’s solid values of honesty and openness (except when absolutely necessary to save sanity or skin) and intelligent idealism. She had a deep appreciation of literature, and a liking for rural and aquatic pursuits. She would be with him for the rest of his life; they were married in 1924. She was then thirty to his forty, tall, well built, and blessed with robust health. She was unflappable and genial, except when she took it on herself to protect Arthur from inquisitive journalists, intrusive admirers, and aluminium cooking-pots. She was his strongest ally in all the occupations closest to his heart – sailing, fishing, and writing. In later years he came to rely utterly on her judgement of the literary value of his own work, although her critical opinions were often at odds with his, and probably with ours. But in the main she successfully deflected danger and distress, jollied him out of his mental anguish, and kept him in as good health as could be managed. It had not been easy to woo her away from her Bolshevik colleagues, and the risks which Arthur took to smuggle her out of Russia could have cost him his life; but he was convinced that she was thoroughly worth it.
There were also ten years between Stevenson and his wife, but she was the senior. Although a willing and appreciative audience for his tales and a frequent amanuensis to his flow of genius, she caused him unexpected anxiety as nervous illness and depression took hold of her. Rather like Ivy Ransome, she became a wife to be endured rather than enjoyed. John Singer Sargent painted the Stevensons in 1885, revealingly placing her in the corner of his picture, seated on a sofa and shrouded in an Indian shawl; her shadowy presence can easily be overlooked. Meanwhile, her husband paces the floor restlessly in the throes of inspiration, ‘becoming’ one of his own characters as narrative and dialogue well up spontaneously from within him.
As mature writers, Stevenson and Ransome both flourished when they had the support of a congenial family, domestic security, and especially the company of children. Stevenson took great pleasure in his step-family. In one of a series of photographs of his household taken in Samoa, we see him aged forty-two, two years before he died, on the palm-fringed veranda at Vailima, the tropical island home which had been built to his design. He is in the centre, arms folded, a paterfamilias. The extended family, hierarchically positioned and very much at home in their exotic setting, included his widowed mother Margaret, who came out to the South Seas in 1890; his stepdaughter Belle Strong with her son Austin in one of his mother’s hats; her husband Joe Strong, in long socks and a lava-lava, with Cocky the parrot on his shoulder; his wife Fanny, and his step-son Lloyd. Despite his wife’s frailty and the emerging collapse of his stepdaughter’s marriage, Stevenson was looked after very well. His mother was the very efficient head of the household; all were devoted to him, not least because his writing supported them all.
Ransome, who missed his daughter acutely and scarcely saw her again after she was seven, may have looked forward to having further children with his capable new wife; but there were none. Other people’s children became a kind of surrogate family, in particular the children of Dora Collingwood, a woman to whom Arthur had earlier seriously proposed marriage. In 1915 she had married Ernest Altounyan, the doctor in charge of a hospital in Aleppo. Their children provided the catalyst for the writing of his greatest novels. In 1932 he and Evgenia set out for Syria with a sailing-dinghy which they intended as a present for the Altounyan family. Photographs show them beaming with happiness, surrounded by excited children, Ransome looking, if anything, younger than he had in the 1913 photo with Ivy. While in Aleppo, he began writing Peter Duck, reading the family each chapter as it was written, and welcoming good ideas for the development of the plot from the children. ‘Ukartha’ and Aunt Genia envied the family life which they were allowed to share in Syria – a location as exotic as Stevenson’s Samoa. Ransome had written the first of his great novels to please these children, and they were pleased. He was rejuvenated by their company, as Stevenson had been by Lloyd Osbourne.
Arthur was an ebullient and even mischievous young child, but his prep-school days were miserable. He was, he says, a duffer at sport, and for that reason could make no friends there; but nobody at home or at school had yet realised that he was very short-sighted. While at Rugby, the problem was recognised. There his sense of style and love of literature was sharpened and encouraged by W. H. D. Rouse and Robert Whitelaw, under whose influence he first appeared in print in the local press. He was immersed in books, and enjoyed writing; but his father did not foresee a literary career for him. Rather, he had interpreted Arthur’s interest in natural history and the physical world as a bent towards science. Presumably to fulfil his wishes, the widowed Mrs Ransome encouraged her son to study chemistry. Seeking relief in the library of Yorkshire College, he became engrossed in Mackail’s Life of William Morris. It was a moment of epiphany. He was seduced not only by the desirability of such a life as Morris’s, but by the beauty – physical as well as stylistic – of the book which had been made of it. Ransome was never to write biography of this kind, but Mackail’s perceptive recreation of a writer and thinker whom he greatly admired may perhaps be seen as a remote ancestor of this book.
Writing a study of Stevenson would have been as congenial a project as Ransome could imagine, and for many reasons. And among them, he intended it to strike out in a number of new directions: to challenge received ideas, and to put into practice his recently conceived critical theories.
By 1912 Ransome had begun to make a reputation for perceptive and innovative literary analysis. He was probably best known for a theory of literary expression which was first elaborated in an article entitled ‘Kinetic and Potential Speech’, published in the October 1911 edition of The Oxford and Cambridge Review. The key terms of this theory were perhaps suggested by his earlier scientific studies; Ransome certainly believed that something of a scientific method was needed properly to investigate and evaluate the structures, materials, and effects of literature. He opens with a definition: literature in general is ‘a combination of kinetic with potential speech’. Purely kinetic speech is ‘prose without atmosphere … it says things.’ Purely potential speech is like music. In a ballad the words may be purely kinetic, but a sea-shanty receives an extra dimension of meaning from the tune to which it is sung: a quality of potential speech. The value of potential speech in literature is that it secures profound effects entirely by means of suggestion; to illustrate his point Ransome analyses examples from Spenser, Hazlitt, Blake, Shelley, Lamb, Wordsworth and, being remarkably up to date, Mallarmé. Wordsworth, for example, when he tells us that his sonnet was composed ‘on Westminster Bridge’, is ‘trying to ensure that we shall approach it as he did, and hear as well as the kinetic, the potential speech that he values no less’. Ransome concludes his article by claiming that his theory will provide a valuable new tool for critics, and help them to assess the changing fashions of literature.
Perhaps as a result of immersing himself in Wilde’s critical writings and his doctrine of ‘Art for Art’s sake’ in preparation for Oscar Wilde, Ransome began to read more widely about the development of literary theory from Sidney onwards. He was especially impressed by the essays on the subject exchanged by Henry James and Stevenson. In a long, elaborate, and highly theoretical essay published in The English Review, he proposed another new theory, ‘Art for Life’s sake’. Writing to W. H. D. Rouse, his former master at Rugby, now Head of the Perse School in Cambridge, Ransome describes his thesis as ‘an identification of the act of artistic creation with knowing … this is the central idea of a book which I am now writing on the nature of technique.’ The essays on ‘kinetic and potential speech’ and on Art were included in Portraits and Speculations (1913), which Ransome dedicated, perhaps surprisingly, to his wife. Despite their domestic difficulties, she seems at this time to have borne her husband’s literary enthusiasms in much the same spirit of admiring martyrdom as Fanny Stevenson does in Sargent’s portrait. It is unlikely, however, that she found this dense and extremely serious tract on Art, which would have taken two hours to read, or Arthur’s equally demanding ‘Friedrich Nietzsche: an Essay in Comprehension’, very enjoyable or even comprehensible.
Fortunately, Ransome seems to have got his theories of literature clear in his mind and off his chest in these essays before embarking on his Stevenson. They are perhaps deliberately knotty, but his fresh, clear, proto-modernist eye can also be appreciated in them. He asserts, for example, that ‘a work of art is a collaboration between two artists, whom I … call the speaker and the listener … the process of the speaker in the first creation of a work of art is a process of finding out.’ Thus he is preparing to approach his task of writing about Stevenson in the spirit of an ideal collaborator. He uses the open and benevolent manner of one artist-craftsman observing another, shunning the detached and sometimes esoteric terminology of purely academic assessment; and his insights sometimes seem to be far in advance of his time.
A novel, like any other work of art, is an act of becoming conscious performed by its author. But an illusion is produced that the author has left his own life aside, and is merely chronicling the lives of others. We are faced with the difficulty of reconciling this apparent contradiction.
Ransome seems to be adumbrating the position of Lascelles Abercrombie (with whom he had often debated literary theory) in a British Academy lecture, ‘A Plea for the Liberty of Interpreting’ (1930), of the ‘New Critics’, and even of Roland Barthes and his notion of ‘the death of the author’.
As a writer struggling to find his true voice as a storyteller, Ransome was very much aware of Stevenson standing to him in loco parentis. Writing about Stevenson almost became a way of writing autobiography, so much a part of his psyche had Stevenson’s writings been from his earliest childhood. A reader now may feel grateful to Ransome’s self-indulgent generosity in allowing his first draft to carry so much of his own direct personal response to text. We can, for example, reread Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses through the imagination of the child Arthur together with the adult Arthur, and so experience a double consciousness of poetry so long known and deeply loved that the experiences the words contain cannot be distinguished from those of his own ‘real’ life. Less than twenty years later, in 1928, Ransome the writer would himself master the skill to achieve that effect in prose. Generations of young readers have likewise read Arthur Ransome’s books and savoured the experiences they contain as if they were their own; the books have lived with them to become part of their own real lives. Only the very greatest literature can achieve this.
In writing about Stevenson’s poetry for children, Ransome adopts a different, more relaxed and more personal attitude and approach from the more formal and adult one in which he discusses Stevenson’s essays, stories, letters and novels. He uses an engaging and authentic tone of personal reminiscence, as he approaches the moment in Stevenson’s career when he himself entered the world. Writing unusually in green ink, he has a fine, distinctive, assured voice in sympathy with his subject.
About this time thirty years ago, a Mr Stevenson, sorely stricken in mind and limb, severely troubled with the ridiculous details of drains and smells in a house he had taken in the hope of being well in it, was busied in composition of a kind almost entirely new to him …
But the heart of Ransome’s study is his fascination with the great variety of style that can be found in Stevenson’s work, a variety which he thinks is only partly related to genre. He says:
Style is so far a man’s personal rhythm, that it is as difficult to analyse as a personality. Its characteristics, its differences from other styles, are like a man’s differences from other men. Yet something we can seize, in his choice of words, is the tone in which he uses them: and a vocabulary does not make so utterly flexible a vehicle of thought that a writer is not to be known by the repetition of particular effects varied only in detail, and as it were midway between perfect expression and a private convention of his own.
That is a very knotty sentence, not very stylish, and one which Ransome would no doubt have recast had he returned to his draft. To disentangle his double negative: he says that a writer may be known by his idiosyncratic vocabulary and by a repetition of particular effects, and may finally possess ‘a private convention of his own’. That is certainly true of some kinds of Stevenson’s writing. It is true of all of Ransome’s.
As has already been shown, Ransome was often ahead of his time as a literary critic. These words show how acutely aware he was of the importance of personality and mind-set to a writer’s style, and how a writer exhibits quirks of vocabulary and sentence-structure which can be identified as unique to his habits of mind and thought. Literary criticism has long since passed beyond subjective enjoyment, and it is possible to apply scientific method and specific programmes to determine the authorship of a piece of writing not so much from vocabulary (which we might have expected, and which Ransome naturally assumes is a clear mark of a man’s mind) as from sentence-structures, the ‘which’s and ‘and’s, the rhythms and the ‘repetition of particular effects’, as Ransome puts it. And of course a sensitive reader may still intuitively feel an indefinable ‘something’ in the turning of a sentence that marks it out as that author’s, and his alone.
From earliest childhood Ransome enjoyed felicities of rhythm and words in English prose. In an autobiographical draft he remembered:
a book [by Stella Austin] much loved and often read aloud in my childhood and remembered now for one continually quoted sentence: ‘The way to Stumpie’s heart is paved with strawberry jam.’ ‘Paved’ was the relished word. It gives me pleasure to repeat that sentence even now.
The reader of Ransome’s Stevenson will find many such pleasures in the book, from his telling placing of adverbs, to a complex intertextuality derived from direct address to the reader: ‘You, I hope, who read’ (although there would be no reader for almost a hundred years). And of course he discusses such matters in the work of his subject. He considers whether Stevenson’s ‘familiarity’ is really with his reader or with his subject, and discusses Stevenson’s notions of ‘charm’ and his preoccupation with ‘the small glamour’ of authorship perceptively and with good-humoured disagreement. And he tells us clearly where and why Stevenson does not succeed (in his ‘Aesopic fables’, for instance). But he is fully appreciative of Stevenson’s self-aware artistry and technical skills, and by careful comparison successfully places him in his context and tradition of French, American and English literature.
There is pleasure in Ransome’s conversational engagement with the technical aspects of Stevenson’s text, drawing analogies from enthusiasms past and present. This is the writing of a clever young critic, engaging us with mischievous but challenging convolutions of thought and imagination. Ransome betrays his personal pleasures, as when he sums up The Wrecker by saying, ‘It is as if we are asked to solve a chess problem in the progress of the various courses of an eccentrically designed but excellent meal.’ In assessing Stevenson’s prose he allows an embedded memory of his own pleasure in beetle-collecting as a child: ‘It included always a rhythmical, musical purpose, sound for its own sake, sonorous, reading well, an amber (if I may change to such a metaphor) very nearly if not quite as valuable in his eyes as the carefully collected coleoptera he intended to embed in it.’ In defining Stevenson’s accuracy of touch and tone he turns to billiards for an image: ‘When he started “The Sea Cook” as an amusement only, of the most light hearted kind, he could not but write with skill and certainty, in the same way as the accomplished billiard player will frame with style even on a bagatelle board.’ The metaphor suggests how important deliberation, shape and style are to the plan of a story however miniature. In reading Ransome’s book we are often aware that he is on his own journey of self-discovery as an artist, as when he underlines Stevenson’s observation that taking a liberty with fact is ‘against the laws of the game’.
Perhaps because the book exists only in a first draft, there is often a flavour of autobiography and an attractive immediacy of tone, as when Ransome explains that ‘I am writing in a little Russian town where there are no English books …,’ or mentions ‘a backhand deduction as to the childhood of my aunts’, or describes himself with premature exaggeration as ‘a bald-headed person’, or tells an elaborate anecdote about some performing bears he once met in France, or mentions (no doubt with a thought of his own Bohemia in London) ‘the many miraculous Londons that have been discovered in these latter years’, or lets on casually that he ‘cannot abide’ the character of Stevenson’s Davie Balfour. There are marked tonal shifts of style from third to first person, most noticeably where he is writing about A Child’s Garden of Verses – a considerable part of which had been published almost verbatim in a periodical during Ransome’s lifetime (reprinted here as appendix A.3). Although much would probably have been changed in redrafting, the immediacy of his writing adds greatly to the reader’s enjoyment, as do his creative word-coinages: abracadabraical, impressional, exhilaritic, peacocking, commentatory, sur-iced … It is the voice of the young, exuberant, talkative Ransome.
One especially attractive aspect of Ransome’s writing on Stevenson is the way it so easily becomes conversational that the reader has all the pleasure of a privileged participant. We become sensitive to his tone of voice: at times querulous, questioning, dogmatic, appreciative, always assured, always alert to the chameleonic nature of his subject. His judgements, almost always carefully supported by perceptive argument, are often expressed with pithy irony, as when moving in to conclusion: ‘And now, let us consider not piecemeal but in a lump, the essentials of his preaching’; or in assessing Stevenson, ‘the efficient man, who can build his house, cook his food, clothe himself, sail a boat, ride a horse, and read, a civilized Crusoe, the novels of Mr Henry James’; or in describing the quality of ‘Tod Lapraik’: ‘The dialect seems to knit the words together so that there are no interstices to allow reality to slip out’; or in his personally felt response to ‘Providence and the Guitar’ – ‘one of the most loveable stories in the world’. We can also enjoy his affectionate irony: ‘Stevenson discovered a new romance: Silent upon the peak of Hyde Park Corner …’ He admired Stevenson for his creative productivity, which in some ways resembled his own turbulent cauldron of book projects. ‘He never complained that a man cannot do two things at once. He had seldom fewer than half a dozen on the stocks at once.’
Despite all his veneration for Stevenson, and his powerful sense of affinity with his ‘romantic’ temperament, Ransome is no idolater. His purpose is to place him as accurately as possible among his peers, not to make extravagant claims. ‘He will not … except by a few enthusiasts of special temper, be counted among the greater writers’; and this may be because so often ‘the part is greater than the whole’. He aims to discover and explore Stevenson’s ‘idea of art’. This especially affects his assessment of his technique:
In art he was preoccupied with technique so largely that all he did seems now to have been by way of experiment during a prolonged adventure in the discovery of technical perfection … He was not a constructive thinker: he perceived, he felt, but was better at illustration than at argument.
He is acute in his assessment of Stevenson’s oft-admired qualities of ‘charm’ and ‘familiarity’, clearly distinguishing familiarity with the reader from familiarity with the subject, and questions Stevenson’s ‘too sure an understanding of the moral difficulties of his subjects’ (in the Familiar Studies of Men and Books). Why, he asks, is Stevenson’s In the South Seas ’so curiously underestimated’ in comparison with his other works? Because ‘persons … conversant with Stevenson’s other works, expect a different book’:
The great travel books are written by Europeans, and enable other Europeans to follow the adventures of people not unlike themselves to strange surroundings. Stevenson’s object was far less easy to attain. He eliminated, or almost eliminated, the common ground of race … Most of those who know of In the South Seas, ask themselves some such question as ‘Am I the keeper of my fifteen cousins twenty times removed,’ and buy Treasure Island instead.
Ransome’s attitudes often chime with Stevenson’s in relation to personal morality. He sees Stevenson’s moral nature as being like that of a naïve Christian child playing at being a leader of cavalry, who in death gallantly surrendered his soul ‘to a greater leader than he’. He disapproves of his whimsical false naïveté in leaving coins by the wayside on his travels with a donkey to ‘pay God’. He sees in Stevenson’s preaching an attitude that contains both acceptance and revolt in relation to received religion: this seems to chime with his own position. Those familiar with the novels of Ransome’s maturity will know that there is no religion and no church-going in them – it is of course irrelevant to the society depicted – and may have wondered about Ransome’s personal position, which is never mentioned in his Autobiography. The present book, alone in Ransome’s work, gives us clues about his thinking – at least as it was in 1914. It is significant perhaps that the section on Stevenson’s morality was written in the weeks leading up to what Ransome hoped would be a complete break with his wife. He writes with understanding and sympathy about Stevenson’s ‘position’, which perhaps matches his own undogmatic, liberal and humanistic reduction of Christianity. He maps Stevenson’s ‘private intellectual position’ and says ‘I find that position extremely interesting.’ As we can see also from the fervent conclusion he gives to Part I of his book, he shares with Stevenson a sense of a divine master who belongs to no particular church, or, at least in the case of Stevenson’s stoic minimal theism, to no particular religion either.
He looks for a tradition in which to place Stevenson, and finds (as F. R. Leavis was to do for a future generation) that Stevenson does not easily fit in. But even so he is able to identify where Stevenson belongs as a writer: he does not give us ‘the filled views, for example, of Dostoevsky or Turgenev’; his characterisation pales before Balzac’s:
His is not the tradition of Richardson, Bronte, Hardy and Meredith, though just as Meredith in the beginning of his life wrote The Shaving of Shagpat so Stevenson, at the end of his, wrote Weir of Hermiston which, more than any other of his books, belongs to the other side of the gulf between the poet and the troubadours.
A course of Balzac which, as Wilde said, ‘reduces our living friends to shadows, and our acquaintances to the shadows of shades’ turns Stevenson’s creations into the most transparent veils, and a course of Dostoevsky makes them altogether non-existent. But only the crudest criticism would undervalue them on that account, just as only the dullest critics measure a work by comparison with another, and only he who has no right to be a critic at all measures it by comparison with another work in an altogether different kind.
Adventure was what Stevenson cared for in life; adventure was what brought him to his twentieth reading of Vicomte de Bragelonne; adventure is what delighted him in his own books; and it is after a course of Dumas that the Scotch novels of Stevenson appear in their true colours, something new, something different, accomplished, graceful sacrifices on the altar of a tradition that will last as long as men are young enough to have the hearts of boys.
No man can put more virtue in his words than he practices in his life, according to Hugh Kingsmill; and this is plainly true of Stevenson and Ransome, both virtuous men whose consciences were severely tested in matters of faith, love, and artistic integrity. Ransome finds echoes and illuminations of his own torments in his subject’s life and work. Later readers may be startled to find in his observations of Stevenson foreshad-owings of his own struggles to come. He remarks that Stevenson’s speed in composing ‘The Sea Cook’ ‘was only made possible by the years of slow, meticulous labour that preceded it’ – labour such as he himself is presently engaged in; or he mentions the need of the writer ‘to re-collect himself, to refresh his personality until it could indeed translate those old adventures in to the general rhythm of his experience’ – which reminds us that it was only when Ransome had returned from his Baltic exile to the Lake District with Evgenia as his wife that he was able to compose the novels of his fame. He sympathetically observes Stevenson’s struggles with ‘this bluidy Ebb Tide’ with its narrative style ‘pitched about “four notes higher” than it should have been’ (an extraordinarily difficult reconciliation which few but Jane Austen have managed), prefiguring Ransome’s later determined struggle and success with narrative point of view, style, and a large cast of characters in the Swallows and Amazons series.
Ransome was fortunate to have been writing in the innocent days of immediate personal response to books, when (apart from the primary works of his author) little but biographical information had to be taken into account by the writer of a critical study. He was able to communicate the joy of his inner conversation with Stevenson straight from the heart. It is refreshing for us to hear Ransome’s clear, personal voice in his book, encouraging us and enlightening us in our own response.
What did Ransome learn from Stevenson? Much about the importance of maintaining a point of view – both negative and positive examples are carefully analysed in his book; about the difficulties of a first-person narrator; about how to leave the reader breathless at the end of a chapter; about narrative shape. Perhaps, like Graham Greene (a cousin of Stevenson’s) he learnt from him something of the ‘method of describing action without adjectives and adverbs.’ He learnt how to engage the whole being of the reader: ‘there are delicious, perilous moments, up the mast, with Hands climbing from below, and jerking his dagger murderously through the air to pin me – or was it Jim Hawkins? – to the mast.’ He learnt ‘the laws of the game’ of realism. He learnt how much more difficult a task it is to have a cast of six or eight, into whose minds and thoughts we can see (or partially see), than to maintain a narrative identity of one. In all this, Stevenson’s struggles for perfection are mirrored by Ransome’s own torments and ultimate success.
Ransome also learnt from Stevenson the power of maps to lead young readers into adventure. He learnt the power and enticement of islands, in art as in life. He learnt how to empower imagination, and to create reality through the use of deeply embedded metaphor. Most of all, he learnt about the importance of quest and romance. But he was his own man in demonstrating in his major fiction that the greatest treasure is to be found in human relationships, not in gold moidores. He certainly achieved in his mature work what he had sought for in Stevenson, ‘the perfectiony … which disguises from us the separateness of the planes on which he is working’. As we have seen, his was a mentality conditioned by Stevenson’s imagination from childhood; indeed, he had come to know much of his work by heart. That imagination supported and coloured his narrative methods throughout his writing of the ‘twelve books’ of his maturity. Finally, the great slaty slabs of Stevenson’s unfinished epic Weir may have influenced Ransome’s own epically conceived and similarly unfinished ‘The River Comes First’.
Clearly there are many affinities of style and imagination between Stevenson and his critic: but Ransome is never the ’sedulous ape’, and the two are by nature stylistically distinct. We may intuitively appreciate that Ransome’s style is marked out altogether from everyone else’s by well-placed adverbs, and by the distinctive rhythms of his relative clauses, the remarkableness of which is evident in his writing from the early years of his career. In this book, we find his typical voice and turn of phrase and quality of perception more evident than in the completed studies of Poe and Wilde that had preceded it. It is a pleasure to discover that Ransome in this early book is discernibly our Ransome.
Lovers of Ransome’s narrative voice will find much to appreciate and savour in this book. There is the pleasure of his sentences, always constructed with idiosyncratic rhythm, point, structure and flavour. There is his individual cast of mind, his love of the countryside and walking, of quiet inns, of firesides, and of pipes of tobacco enjoyed in congenial company beside them; of folk-song and poetry, of books and their writers. Above all, we hear his unmistakeable voice, both in enthusiastic but friendly disputation and in quiet companionable talk. It is a deeply personal book, and one with which he must have been pleased. And yet, only this first draft is extant. Why was it abandoned so near to completion and publication?
Despite the breach with Ransome, Martin Secker had decided to continue publishing the series of ‘modern monographs’ that Ransome claimed to have originated. Aware that Ransome might yet complete his own book on Stevenson, Secker had no compunction in engaging another of his bright young authors to contribute the ‘critical study of Stevenson’ to the series. This was Frank Swinnerton, whose George Gissing: A Critical Study he had published in 1912, hard on the heels of Ransome’s Oscar Wilde. The story of the literary rivalry between Swinnerton and Ransome has not been told before: its details are fascinating.
Swinnerton, Ransome’s exact contemporary by birth, was to outlive him by twenty-five years. He too had started work in London as an officeboy, though in a newspaper office; and he too was determined to become a writer. For most of his long life he produced at least a book a year, although only his chronicles of the Georgian literary scene are now remembered. Like Ransome, he had energetically elbowed his way past the university-educated hopefuls in order to be accepted into the fiercely competitive literary world of London. He became associated with a coterie which included H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett, quite different from the circles in which Ransome preferred to move. If only for this reason, his published memories of Ransome are rather sparse and not always reliable; and it is plain that they were not on friendly terms.
He may have suspected Ransome’s hand in an entertainingly derisory unsigned review of his third novel The Casement in The Eye-Witness, 3 August 1911. Although the title of the article, ‘The Plate-Glass Window’, prepares us for wry mockery, the review begins blandly enough.
The technique of those writers, gradually increasing in number, who usually style themselves ‘creative artists’ is now reasonably familiar to the majority of readers. Mr Swinnerton is a promising recruit to the band. In his third novel he proves his ability to write a novel, a stage of artistic development which many more popular writers will never attain. … He is something of a symbolist in that he prefers suggestion to explanation.
This faint praise, with Ransome’s style and preoccupations very evident, is rapidly followed by enjoyable sledge-hammer blows of damnation.
The fact remains that he has wasted that ability in writing “The Casement”. The book was not worth writing. It is a mass of platitudes decked in the guise of subtleties. It is an attempt to make a Kemp [sic] window out of plate-glass. Mr Swinnerton is selling soiled goods in gilded wrappers, and the name of Swinnerton is on every packet. Mr Swinnerton calls his book ‘A Diversion’. To him it may be; to us it is not. It is rather the pitiable spectacle of an artistic ability wasted by lack of courage to attack material worthy the craft. If he will throw aside his timidity and grasp at things he can only as yet apprehend he may become a novelist of distinction.
Even if Ransome was responsible for this onslaught (and it seems very likely on stylistic grounds), Swinnerton recalled him in later years as one of ‘the liveliest juniors of the day’, favourably mentioning his book on Wilde and his innovative theorising about kinetic and potential speech, ‘the search for words and phrases that should have just so much value and meaning’. However, he did not mince his words when, as publisher’s reader for Chatto & Windus, he damned Ransome’s first novel The Elixir of Life (1915), dismissing it (not altogether unfairly) as ‘pseudo-Stevensonian romance, and very juvenile.’ His report perceptively sums up the more derivative aspects of the story:
In the house is the exquisite heroine of such books, who whispers and pales and endures. And Killigrew is a man who has kept himself alive for 200 years by means of an elixir compounded of the blood of murdered humans. So he’s not a very nice man.
He concludes:
The idea is quite old, and Mr Ransome has not the imagination to work it out thoroughly. There is no illusion; but only a succession of scenes. Also, Mr Ransome writes a very clumsy, heavy style, in imitation of Stevenson, and does not at all shape like a winner.
This novel had been written by Ransome at white-hot speed – sixty thousand words in one month. He was very pleased with it; he ‘had never written with so much enjoyment’; his friends said that they liked it. He had even taken the trouble to go to Moscow by sledge to buy special paper for typing up his manuscript. He told his brother Geoffrey that his ‘beautiful heroine’ was modelled on ‘Margaret Lodge and Barbara Collingwood and Miss Gavin’. Feeling ‘surprise and ecstasy’ at having finished his first full-length novel, he celebrated by downing quantities of Russian Imperial Stout. Chatto & Windus acted on their reader’s recommendation, and declined to take the book on, but the loyally appreciative Methuen published it within the year. Hugh Brogan’s judgement is that ‘it was an odd book, about which it would be too easy to be wantonly unkind.’ Christina Hardyment identifies its provenance as ‘by Stevenson out of Poe’. It has one redeeming feature, a vividly realised episode of a horse-race with the Devil unique in Ransome, but it belongs indeed to the genre of sub-Stevensonian romance, and shows that Ransome still had much to learn about the craft of fiction.
Unlike Ransome, who was encumbered by Oscar Wilde and its consequences, Swinnerton had no other pressing claims on his energy. His Robert Louis Stevenson: A Critical Study was in Secker’s hands even before Ransome returned from his second visit to Russia in 1914, and it was published in October that year. This must have been a severe blow to Ransome, who had hoped to finish his own Stevenson for Methuen that same year. Being forestalled by a rival writer can only have added to his depression.
Swinnerton’s study was also, in its own way, a new approach to Stevenson. The book is physically identical to Ransome’s Wilde and Poe, although it is shorter than them. There the similarity ends. If Ransome’s attitude to Stevenson is that of an enthusiastic apprentice craftsman, Swinnerton’s is that of a demolition man. His book is based on a relatively superficial acquaintance with Stevenson’s output: preliminary reading, writing, and publication were all accomplished in less than nine months. Ransome had of course begun his reading much earlier, and had included everything then available by and about his subject. His book would rely on specific readings of Stevenson, and would give cogently argued reasons for admiring him as a writer and a stylist. As he had written in a different context in 1910, ‘Some biographers collect their author’s toothpicks or old boots; some follow his prowess on the cricket field or in the swimming-bath; a very few push things so far as to look into his books.’ He was determined to be one of those few.
But Swinnerton had wanted to make a splash, and succeeded in doing so. As a publisher’s reader, he had learnt to be shrewd and perceptive in assessing the work of others, and many of his criticisms are well founded. And if he took pleasure in the prospect of bursting the inflated bubble of Stevenson’s reputation, he was certainly not the first who wished to dethrone the idol. (He dedicated his work to a friend who greatly admired Stevenson, ‘to Douglas Gray, in malice’.) His barbs can be cruelly effective. ‘It is surely better to look straighter with clear eyes than to dress life up in a bundle of tropes and go singing up the pasteboard mountain’, he says of Travels with a Donkey. In assessing In the South Seas, he considers that Stevenson was ‘not equal intellectually to the task’, although he at least showed ‘great sincerity’. Stevenson’s essays show ‘literary affectation’; in writing of childhood, ‘only a single child provides the picture’, and he tends to ‘make all children delicate little Scots boys’. In Lay Morals he offers only ‘the wagged head of sententious dogma’, the ‘prosaic teaching’ of a lay preacher. He finds that Stevenson could never grasp a character unless it was idiosyncratic or larger than life: hence he dismisses the benign Fleeming Jenkin as perfunctory. Stevenson’s style ‘lacks vehemence’ although it has ‘figures and tropes in plenty’. His plays are false, lack ‘real dramatic effect’ and ‘visual sense’. The short stories however show ‘variety’ and some even ‘brilliance’, especially ‘The Bottle Imp’ and ‘Thrawn Janet’, which he thinks perfect in form and manner. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is merely an ‘efficient piece of craftsmanship’, though he concedes that the craftsmanship of ‘The Treasure of Franchard’ is first-class. All of Stevenson’s romances fail for Swinnerton, because they ‘offend our sense of form’, and lack powerful inevitability. He complains of Stevenson’s ‘curious and unsatisfactory method, involving so much falseness, of the first person singular, with those man-traps, the things the narrator can never have known, supplied by leaves from other narratives’ – a reference to Treasure Island – but he supposes ‘the use of the “I” probably made the tale better fun for himself.’ He feels that for Stevenson writing was ‘an end in itself’, and disparagingly notes that his ‘attitude to style and the art generally’ is ‘essentially technical’. Finally, he observes that for most readers Stevenson ‘produces a vague uncritical doting’. ‘Our worship of Stevenson is founded, let us say, upon the applause of his friends, who sought in his work the fascination they found in his person.’ Of the longer works he can approve only of The Wrecker, The Ebb Tide, and the unfinished Weir of Hermiston. He gets quickly over the subject of Stevenson’s life, and ignores altogether his published letters, because his purpose is ‘entirely critical’ – but it is so only in an adverse sense, and it relies much more on swashbuckling assertion than on careful demonstration or argument.
Unsurprisingly, Swinnerton’s book was received with outrage by the guardians of Stevenson’s reputation. Later, he would congratulate himself on having set the cat among the pigeons: ‘Reviewers … became as excited as the greater urgencies of a European War would allow them to be. They denounced me. They said I was horrible. They headed their reviews with such agreeable insults as “Travels with a Critic”.’ He admitted that his opinions were ‘purposely outspoken’, and modified a few especially vigorous passages in a second edition – defending himself by claiming that they had been long overdue. There is no doubt that he succeeded in initiating a sharp decline in Stevenson’s reputation which continued for successive decades. Much as the renaming of St Petersburg scuppered Ransome’s travel book, so Swinnerton’s job of demolition seems to have put the brakes on his Stevenson project.
Meanwhile, Ransome’s personal life had deflected him into quagmires of ‘blue treacle’. Escape to St Petersburg had temporarily relieved his intolerable domestic pressures, but matters seemed worse than ever once he had returned. The guide-book which he had been commissioned to write would probably have been financially profitable, but the publisher had reneged. Meanwhile he had been prevented from completing and publishing his own study of Stevenson. He had stayed at Hatch for part of the summer and autumn, intent on fishing his way to recuperation after his mammoth effort with the St Petersburg book, and determined to test the water once more to see if peaceful family life might be possible. (It was not.) While still in St Petersburg he had been alarmed by Germany’s sabre-rattling, and by the fierce hatred of Germans which this had provoked among ordinary Russians. Late in July 1914 he sent a telegram to his literary agents Curtis Brown ‘asking to fix up job as war correspondent’. A Mr Massie replied, ‘What war?’ Ransome immediately returned to England, arriving on 2 August; two days later, England declared war on Germany.
Ransome would have been rejected for military service because of his poor eyesight and other health problems, but he was determined to do his best for his country. On 2 September he offered his services as a King’s Messenger for the duration, writing to the Collingwoods at Coniston and to his mother about his longing for the ‘glimmering glorious chance of the Messengership. That is too good to hope for, but …’ – hope he did. To his mother he admitted, ‘The knowledge that I have a chance of it, real useful work, somehow sets my mind free so that I go ahead twiddling things out on my typewriter.’ Although he was later to be retained by the British Government as an informant, his initial application was not successful. When he returned to Russia, he became a war correspondent for the Daily News.
In another letter to his mother, undated but most probably written from Lanehead in autumn 1914, he says that he was ‘still struggling heavy-heartedly with Stevenson’. But what exactly he was working on is tanta-lisingly unspecified. He could not have had with him the parcel of manuscript which Ivy had sealed. Most likely he was writing the few remaining sections of his book, intending to add them in due course to the existing manuscript before revising the complete work. After Ransome had finally left Lanehead for Russia in December 1914, he wrote to Collingwood asking him to forward ‘my notebook’ which he had left behind. This can hardly have been the ‘Stevenson exercise-book’, which contains only one paragraph of composed text. It seems possible that this unidentified notebook contained his latest work on Stevenson. Alas, it does not survive.
Ransome had several reasons for being ‘heavy-hearted’ in the autumn of 1914. The war-work he hoped for had so far eluded him; his latest attempt to be reconciled with Ivy for Tabitha’s sake had failed. His work on Stevenson was not far from completion, but the publication of Swinnerton’s book that October spoiled the market. What was the point of going on? It might be years before any other critical study of Stevenson, however original, could be a success. His self-esteem was at a very low ebb; he needed a complete break from everything.
Thereafter, Ransome appears to have done no further work on his Stevenson. He became increasingly caught up in the currents of revolution and war in Russia; exigent daily deadlines meant that he had little time for sustained literary work, except for the feverishly composed and ill-fated Elixir of Life. His health deteriorated: he suffered appallingly from intestinal ulcers, and was lucky to survive an ineffective operation. (The anaesthetic failed.) He continued to include Stevenson in a list of work in progress entered in his diary until 1917, but it is unlikely that he had either opportunity or inclination to take it further. He tells us that Methuen finally released him from his contract. Thereafter, we can safely assume that he regarded his book as ‘work abandoned’.
Every biographer or critic who had written about Stevenson, however superficially, found him a fascinating subject. The life he lived was unusually romantic, his personality overwhelmingly charismatic, his imagination unrivalled in creativity: these things gave him a personal charm that was powerfully sensed even by those who had never met him. But charm can have dangerous consequences, and it influenced the reception of his books both positively and negatively. Even before the end of his life, admiration of his story-telling and of his own life-story had reached the point of adulation. Between 1894 and 1924 there were eight collected editions of his works, a number achieved by no other contemporary author. Admirers who had the means had gone on pilgrimage to Samoa to meet the great man and listen to his table-talk. After his death his friends and his public felt genuinely profound and prolonged grief, feelings that were sharpened and prolonged by the posthumous publication of the master’s unfinished works – not to mention a flood of hyperbolic tributes. ‘High on the Patmos of the Southern Seas our Northern dreamer sleeps … He is gone, our Virgil of prose’, laments Richard Le Gallienne in his elegy; and ‘He is gone, our Prince of storytellers’, sighed The Illustrated London News. In the first years after his death appeared his Songs of Travel, other unpublished poems, autobiographical work such as The Amateur Emigrant, Vailima Letters … and In The South Seas, part essay, part autobiography, in a category of its own and considered by Ransome as an unrecognised masterpiece. More novels and stories followed: St Ives, and then his last work, so good that it had ‘frightened’ him, the unfinished Weir of Hermiston. The story of Stevenson’s death in the middle of writing a sentence of this story gave an especially agreeable frisson to many of his readers, provoking awed speculation about its significance. Stevenson’s widow, stepson, and extended family, who had been financially dependent on him in life, were amply provided for after his death through stimulating the flow of Stevensoniana. They were however perhaps surprised to discover that he was rapidly becoming a kind of secular saint, and his life a source of moral inspiration.
Many of Stevenson’s contemporary writers admitted to falling under the spell of his charm, although for more discriminating reasons. For Oscar Wilde, whose style and ideas on art had so engaged the young Ransome, Stevenson was ‘that delightful master of delicate and fanciful prose’. G. K. Chesterton, in Twelve Types (which had been the young Ransome’s constant pocket-companion and inspiration in early days in London) admired Stevenson for qualities most others had ignored: his principles of art and ethics, ‘things that Stevenson nearly killed himself to express’ – a theme expanded by Ransome in his book. He was admired by writers as disparate as Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, and John Masefield – (whose tribute ‘A Ballad of John Silver’ speaks for generations of boys: ‘a big black Jolly Roger flapping grimly at the fore, We sailed the Spanish water in the happy days of yore’). By 1910 several of Stevenson’s books were established as classics, and even studied at school. His gripping narratives of adventure were universal favourites.
In the year Ransome may first have published on Stevenson, 1911 (see appendix B.3), interest in the man and writer had received fresh stimulus from several sources. There was the publication of the first four volumes of the twenty-five volume Swanston edition of his works; the newly enlarged edition of Stevenson’s letters in the ‘four red volumes’ edited by Sidney Colvin; and the augmented sixth edition of the ’standard’ biography of Stevenson by Balfour, which had prompted Ransome’s review essay. But in embarking on a critical response to Stevenson as a writer when he returned to this subject late in 1912, Ransome was venturing into much more hazardous territory than might be supposed. In 1887 Stevenson wrote ‘My biographer, if I ever have one’, perhaps unaware that various friends, not least his young cousin Graham, were already storing up their materials. He could scarcely have guessed what a deluge of memorial writing would be let loose after his death. Ransome’s aim was to give a fair and just account of the man and his work, to elucidate his personal moral code and his ‘principles of art’, and to achieve ‘gradually clearing perspectives’ of the artist. He was no doubt aware of the many toes that might be trodden on in the process, not least those of Fanny Stevenson, Lloyd Osbourne, and the adulatory Graham Balfour. ‘All biography would be autobiography if it could’, Balfour had said in the preface to his biography. Ransome might well have taken those words as his motto when beginning his study of Stevenson.
Most of the Stevensoniana which Ransome had read concentrated on Stevenson’s personality, and it included a good deal of sentimental nonsense. Neil Munro, a fellow Scot, in a contribution to The Bookman’s special collection of essays on Stevenson (1913), finds ‘only in his language sometimes he minces; his nature steps breast-high like a stag, regardless of the weather … his style, in fine, is an incarnation of his thought and character’. An anonymous poet in 1905 had characterised him as ‘an elfin wight’, a ‘genius bringing delight and joy’; one Alice Browne (1893) confessed that ‘it is difficult to regard his critical work studiously, save with a wandering eye, drawn momentarily away from the canvas to the artist himself’.
This cult of Stevenson the man had already begun to create ripples of dissent, expressed notably as early as 1901 in an outburst by his once great friend and collaborator W. E. Henley (an inspirer of the character of Long John Silver), who seems to have resented his flight to the South Seas as a kind of desertion. His attack on the ‘overstrained stylist’ struck many orthodox admirers of Stevenson as disloyal and near-blasphemous, and provoked a flurry of fervent counterblasts. Many who had learned to love and admire Stevenson the writer were embarrassed by this pamphlet war; but they were in the minority. Later, and not least in the wake of Swinnerton’s book, some of these admirers were to revise their opinions. G. K. Chesterton remained fascinated by Stevenson, and wrote on him again in 1913, this time somewhat perversely interpreting him as an inadvertent apologist for imperialism, and finally in 1927, returning to the subject he had hinted at in 1902:
I mean to attempt the conjectural description of certain states of mind, with the books that were the ‘external expression’ of them. If for the artist his art is a fizzle, his life is often far more of a fizzle: it is even far more of a fiction. It is the one of his works in which he tells least of the truth. Stevenson’s was more real than most, because more romantic than most. But I prefer the romances, which were still more real. I mean that I think the wanderings of Balfour more Stevensonian than the wanderings of Stevenson: that the duel of Jekyll and Hyde is more illuminating than the quarrel of Stevenson and Henley: and that the true private life is to be sought not in Samoa but in Treasure Island; for where the treasure is, there is the heart also. In short, I propose to review his books with illustrations from his life; rather than to write his life with illustrations from his books. And I do it deliberately, not because his life was not as interesting as any book; but because the habit of talking too much about his life has already actually led to thinking far too little of his literature. His ideas are being underrated, precisely because they are not being studied separately and seriously as ideas. His art is being underrated, precisely because he is not accorded even the fair advantages of Art for Art’s Sake.
We can only speculate on the effect of Ransome’s Stevenson on so acute a reader as Chesterton, had it been possible for him to read it.
Stevenson’s best-loved books never fell out of print, and collected editions continued to sell. Nevertheless, critical enthusiasm for his writing cooled. Stevenson gradually fell out of the academic canon of English literature: partly because of the great variety of genres in which he wrote; partly because of the perceived superficiality of his ‘boys’ books’ when contrasted with, say, the depths of Conrad’s novels; partly through suspicion of his ‘charm’; and partly through sheer change of taste, under the influence of academic critics such as F. R. Leavis, who dismissed him in a footnote to the ‘great tradition’. But now the tide has well and truly turned. In the last twenty years Stevenson studies are pursued increasingly in universities, and the interested reader risks being engulfed by an avalanche of articles and books on every aspect of his life and work. In the last decade alone, academic industry has brought forth more than four hundred books and articles with every imaginable theory and approach applied: aesthetical, anthropological, biographical, cross-cultural, colonial, comedic, commercial, comparative, conceptual, cultural, dramaturgical, epic, folkloric, gender, generic, geographical, historical, narratological, national, pathological, pedagogic, pictorial, political, populist, psychological, receptionist, representational, rhetorical, Scottish, semiotic, sexual, sociological, structural, stylistic, symbolical, textual, transformational. Stevenson continues to excite the imagination in a world in which he finds ever more readers. The narrative power of Treasure Island and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde also seems to grip an ever-growing mass audience, albeit in every kind of abridged, pictorial, film, and television versions.
Jorge Luis Borges once described Stevenson as ‘a form of happiness’. Ransome would have agreed. And the transformative influence of Stevenson’s imagination seems to remain as strong as ever amongst writers of many cultures. Jeanette Winterson’s wry nod towards him in Lighthouse-keeping, with a heroine called Silver, is perhaps the most recent and unexpected of many tributes to a great master of English fiction.
Ransome’s study of Robert Louis Stevenson, commissioned in 1910 and written mostly in 1913 and 1914, now meets its readers for the first time. ‘None but an idiot or an enemy would wish to possess any book written by me before 1914’, wrote an elderly and irascible Ransome to someone who had enquired about his early work. This book shows that we need not agree with him.
In 1994 Ransome’s literary executors had the manuscript photocopied in order to help them decide what could or should be done with it. They, and publishers they showed it to, felt that the material was excellent, and still merited publication. But there were serious problems to overcome. Ransome’s handwriting, clear enough when he is writing relaxedly once the reader has got used to it, quickly deteriorates into a scrawl when he is ill or tired (which he often was), or writing at speed (which he often did). Some sections seemed to defy decipherment altogether. The range of Ransome’s references was also an obstacle. He was extremely widely read in English and European medieval and renaissance literature, French and Russian literature (the Russian he met in French translation, only beginning his study of the language in 1913), as well as in more recent British and American literature and literary theory. Some of the authors and stories that he and his intended readership would have been familiar with have vanished from the ken of the modern reading public. Proper names posed their own difficulties: many of them were not English, and because of their density and range it was often not immediately clear whether Ransome was referring to a fictional character or a real-life person.
The order of pages when the executors read the manuscript was also puzzling. They were evidently not all in a coherent sequence, and were not numbered consecutively. Some sections of continuous fluent text clearly related to one topic, such as a specific book by Stevenson: pages headed (for example) ‘Fleeming Jenkin’, were numbered consecutively 1–5. However, the pagination for each separate topic was the start of a separate sequence, and there are very many topics, some (for example a page headed ‘Style’) amounting to only a page or less. It was also hard to establish what the intended sequence of sections might be. The status of a few sheets was problematic: some bore quotations which Ransome had copied out for future use, many of which he had drawn into completed sections of the text; others had quotations which had not been used. Had Ransome discarded them, or had he intended to include them somewhere? He always preferred to be lavish in his use of quotation.
From the outset of his career, Ransome does not seem to have worked steadily through any piece of work, in the sense of starting at the beginning and going on until he had come to the end of it. His preferred method of composition, having read round his subject and made his notes, was to map out a working structure of chapters and narrative order, and then to begin composing any section which happened to be clear in his mind. The present manuscript includes one leaf which sketches a possible chapter-structure (see appendix A.1.iv); but even that scheme is hedged about with arrows and question-marks, and may be far from what would have been Ransome’s final construction. There is a similar page in the ‘Stevenson exercise-book’, with a different outline order of chapters for the projected book. Which came first, and which should take precedence?
Neither can we tell in what order the various sections of the manuscript were composed, although there are occasional clues from physical evidence such as a change of ink, from internal linguistic evidence, and from Ransome’s correspondence, notebooks and diaries. As we have seen, a few sections are missing, and nothing has been found to show that they were ever written. Nor is every section of the same quality. Some are written in the fluent authoritative manner that would have satisfied Ransome in print without further revision: indeed, as we have seen, a few pages did appear as an article in 1914 (see appendix A.3). At other times we have what seems little more than Ransome’s Stevenson commonplace book, quotation following quotation with little or no linking thread of argument.
It was not at all certain to those who first looked through the contents of the parcel in 1994 that it contained anything like a complete book, or indeed that all the sheets related to the one piece of work. Many pages consisted of fragmentary one-line jottings, whose relevance to Stevenson was not obvious, or simply a heading such as ‘Schwob’. The parcel’s contents were, after all, clearly identified on the wrapper as ‘M.S.S.’, not as ‘Stevenson MS’. As a result of all this, the literary executors could not decide how best to proceed. Sir Rupert Hart-Davis had, with great dedication, pieced together (from a rather chaotic assemblage of typescript and manuscript) Ransome’s autobiography, and written a conclusion to it. But that had been twenty years earlier, and both he and his fellow-executor John Bell were now aged and lacking the energy required for the task of editing. Their successors, Christina Hardyment and David Sewart, were also determined to bring Ransome’s long-lost book to public attention. David, with his wife Elizabeth, offered to produce a complete transcript. This labour was undertaken in intervals from their daily work and occupied ten years. There were understandable lacunae in their transcription, and not all their guesses at the hopelessly indecipherable seemed correct to other readers, but the text presented here would have taken much longer to prepare without their work. They are to be thanked most sincerely for providing an extremely valuable starting-point for this edition, which is based on a careful scrutiny of the manuscript afresh.
The present book contains not only the first publication of a major Ransome manuscript, but includes in its appendices all Ransome’s other extant work on Stevenson. Here can be found the Stevenson-inspired story which he wrote as a child, available to the general public for the first time; a first reprinting of his published articles on Stevenson contemporary with the manuscript; and a transcription of all his working-notes from the separate ‘Stevenson exercise-book’. Thus, in conjunction with the main text, we present here the fullest evidence known of Ransome’s methods of composition. If only for this reason, all his own footnotes, source-citations, and memoranda have been retained; as an essential part of the text as we have it.
Ransome copied out many passages of Stevenson for commentary or quotation; those few that have found no place in the main text of this edition can be found in appendix A.2.iv. Some longer passages copied out in full by Ransome, such as Stevenson’s character-study of ‘Spring-Heeled Jack’, which may have been intended for selective quotation in the next draft, have been retained uncut in the main text, as found. Ransome clearly felt that only by a liberal use of quotations could the effect of the writer’s style be fully demonstrated; as we have seen, it was a policy which caused him great trouble in relation to his Oscar Wilde, but which had the support of Robert Ross. It has not been possible to ascertain which of the many editions or reprints of Stevenson’s works were used by Ransome; references to these are therefore generally by title only (and chapter, where relevant). (Between Stevensonians and lovers of Ransome the editor has tried to be as even-handed as possible, but in this matter has chosen to favour Ransome: the letters can in any case readily be found in the current standard edition by B. L. Booth and Ernest Mehew.) Most of Ransome’s quotations from Stevenson’s letters are from ‘the four red volumes’, The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson ed. Sidney Colvin, 4 vols. (London, 1911), abbreviated to ‘Letters’, with volume and page number following, and from Vailima Letters, being correspondence addressed by Robert Louis Stevenson to Sidney Colvin, November 1890–October 1894 (London, 1895), ‘Vailima Letters.’ Letters not in these works are identified by date. Ransome’s own footnotes are given within double quotation marks, e.g. “Across the Plains, p. 143”. All Ransome’s own footnotes are reproduced verbatim. Where Ransome does not identify the source of a letter quoted, reference is given to books he is known to have used.
As for other matters of editorial detail: punctuation has been modernised – for instance, full-stops after book-titles in Ransome’s notes become commas, as in the example above; full-stops after the titles ‘Mr’ and ‘Mrs’ are omitted; the colon with dash [:–] becomes a colon; italics instead of quotation-marks are used to identify book-titles. But Ransome’s Edwardian habits of nomenclature, which are so much part of the flavour of his text, have been retained. People living at the time of writing are referred to him by title, ‘Sir J. M. Barrie’, ‘Mr W. B. Yeats’, ‘Mrs Stevenson’, whereas those have died are not: ‘W. E. Henley’, or ‘Henley’ – although there are exceptions, such as (the deceased) ‘Dr Baildon’. His sectional running headings (which were effectively his aides-memoires) are generally omitted, although some have been editorially incorporated in order to ease continuity. Thus ‘Stevenson. Criticism. Victor Hugo. He distinguishes …’ becomes ‘Writing on Victor Hugo, he distinguishes …’ Such expansions are few, and all are identified in footnotes. The few misspellings in the manuscript have been silently amended, for example ‘Ferguson’ to ‘Fergusson’, ‘Ori a Ori’ to ‘Oria-Ori’, and ‘Dostoieffsky’ is given the more modern form ‘Dostoevsky’. Occasional inconsistencies with verb-agreement have been corrected. Numerals within the text such as ‘at 33’ are spelt out in full, and dates such as ‘89’ expanded to ‘1889’. Ransome’s handwriting has very occasionally nonplussed the editor and her advisors. She has done her best to decide on contextual grounds whether the intended word is (for example) ‘fever’ or ‘power’ – on the grounds that an informed guess is potentially of more value than an admission of defeat. Hardly any editorial linking passages have seemed necessary, and these are printed in italics.