Arthur's Little Problem


I promised I'd offer an explanation as to why Arthur Ransome’s characters seem so strangely uninterested in sex. Rash of me, but here goes.

Of course, part of the reason - and perhaps a big part - is that writing a fictional account of life on the Swallow’s “Wildcat” island could not be anything like a diary entry for a day trip to Peel Island, its real world model.  Proper diaries are filled with entries like "did the shopping"; "saw Hilary"; "got my hair cut"; and so on: things inconsequential. Only let the thought creep into your mind that eyes other than your own might see it and the venture is lost. The thing takes on its very own cast of fiction, perhaps only in a small way, but fiction nonetheless. Tiny lies slip in and clot, even as the ink dries.  

If you’re going to be staying long, visits to real islands rapidly focus on suitable places to pee (or worse). We must conclude that part of Arthur’s reason for avoiding certain things, and that may include sex, was simply that he was writing fiction. Fiction is mostly about what to leave out, because readers make a great deal of whatever you chose to include. So don’t run away with thinking you can idly write about the lavatory and expect readers to let that go by, because they won’t - they will conclude that lavatories are of some consequence. We have observed that Arthur’s golden children never got round to any kind of sexual activity. But they also never seemed to go to the lavatory. In part because they did whatever Arthur wanted them to, for fear you would make more of it than was warranted. Do remember those golden children were not real: they didn’t exist. It is a tribute to Ransome’s extraordinary skill that we are even discussing their sex lives. Countless children wrote to him demanding reassurance that they were, in spite of all, real. They were not.  

We may have a passing, even prurient, interest in real diaries, but the diary of a trip to a fictional island is another matter altogether because it will engage the reader's insatiable appetite for connecting things. That’s what readers of fiction do. In fact, skilful readers find far more connections than the author ever imagined; more even, dare I say, than the author intended?  So you, dear skilful reader, quickly come to believe I saw Hilary because I went shopping. I regret to say most readers (not you, of course) will then rush on to conclude we must be having an affair. The sordid sort conducted in supermarkets, albeit this lazy connection has simply been hatched in a world a tiny bit too obsessed with sex. Of course, we might just as well have been lodging bits of microfilm for each other under the cheese counter. You never can tell: we may even have been planning WWIII. How would I know? On the other hand, Hilary’s disapproving look must have been the reason for that haircut, else why would I have mentioned it? You see, it’s not that I really did get my hair cut (who would care about that?) but why I decided to tell you about it - two very different things. Readers connect; that’s what they do, and I am certainly not the first person to suggest this. Try as they might, authors are doomed to discover that the truly inconsequential cannot be written.

Which brings us back to Arthur. It’s not his fault, of course, but he is now inextricably bound up in his own fiction. He wrote an autobiography (although he didn’t finish it), but he needn’t have bothered, because bits of his life poke out of his fiction. How can we resist using them to explicate? For some artists the autobiographical element is only evident well after the fact. Perhaps the greater the artist, the greater the delay. T S Eliot, for example, appeared shocked to discover how much of his relationship with Jean Verdanal had inadvertently leaked into The Waste Land. His lawyers were still trying to supress articles on the topic years after the poem had been published; allowing what was actually an intensely personal and particular poem to became the canonical lament for a disillusioned generation. Arthur, in his own small way, sought in his later years to erase the personal and particular from his fiction. But the truth is plain enough to see. And the promised explanation lies there.

Arthur Ransome married very young. He was 24, but quite immature: an innocent (he was almost certainly a virgin). A romantic, dreamy character quite unfitted for the real world. He was a writer of sorts, but his fiction (mostly translations of fairy stories) was embarrassingly sentimental. He ended up married almost by accident, having proposed to both daughters of his mentor and adopted father figure, W G Collingwood. Both women sensibly turned him down but they remained close, even after Dora’s marriage to Ernest Altounyan, an Armenian doctor. Peter Duck was mostly written in Aleppo on an extended visit and the Swallows were clearly idealised versions of Dora’s children – the family Arthur never had, born of a girl he loved and lost.

 By contrast, the woman he actually married, Ivy Walker, was the daughter of a local solicitor. We need care, because much of what we know of her comes from Ransome himself, but she appears to have been emotionally rather unstable. W G Collingwood was Ruskin’s biographer. His son Roger was a famous academic logician. The Collingwood family concerned itself with art, philosophy, science, poetry and music - for a man like Ransome a mixture more heady than anything sex could offer. Ivy’s world could not have been more different. She was very pretty, quite flirtatious, and with a very pronounced sex-appeal. Going by the accounts of his friends, Arthur was bowled over. For a while, he could not have enough of Ivy. And to his delight, her enthusiasm for that part of married life conducted in bed equalled his own. Quite soon, however, the excitement began to trouble him and he rapidly felt overwhelmed and frightened. Life with Ivy became a hellish merry-go-round of horrible scenes, theatrical makings-up, and a spiral down as both realised their essential incompatibility.  

But they had a child - a daughter named Tabitha. There are numerous quaint stories as to how she came to be called this, but knowing Ransome’s extraordinary sensitivity to names perhaps he was simply content with the Biblical reference. He professed himself enchanted with the girl, but his letters suggest he was also daunted by the reality of a new person in his life. He much preferred fairy tales. Whatever the reason, the inescapable (and unpalatable) truth is that, faced with a wife he couldn’t satisfy and a new child he couldn’t cope with, he simply ran away. He contrived to make a trip to Russia, ostensibly as a journalist, stretch out, bit by bit, into a permanent separation. There is no kind way to put it: Ransome abandoned his wife. And as a miserable consequence of that, he abandoned his daughter.  His only experience of a real child was of Tabitha – not much more than a baby.

There are many accounts of Arthur Ransome’s long Russian years and his intimacy with Lenin and other leaders of the Bolsheviks. His own account is enthusiastic about the revolutionary cause but unpardonably evasive about the bloodshed.  He was witness to many dreadful things but they seem to have left him unmoved. He affected a patronising sympathy for the plight of the common Russian and got on with his fishing. His rather muddled geopolitical speculations found their way into the pages of The Manchester Guardian. We now know he also gave what information he had to the MI6 of his day, but it flatters him to claim (as some have) that he was a kind of double agent. From his letters, including a rather thoughtless one to Tabitha, his main interest was the courtship of Evgenia Shelepina, Trotsky’s secretary. Although it is perhaps worth asking who exactly encouraged the courting. An ingenuous Russian-speaking journalist with access to Lloyd George – a man fired with a naïve enthusiasm for revolution, albeit informed in the main through the medium of children’s fairy stories, must have seemed like a godsend to Trotsky.

 Ransome never called his new wife pretty. If she had sex appeal he never mentioned it.  He mostly described her in terms normally reserved for a best chum at school. In his eyes she was a jolly good chap without a calculating bone in her body. A bitter and drawn-out divorce from Ivy had to be played out before marriage to this sturdy Russian heroine (and possible part-time spy). They lived together for the rest of his life. They had no children; but you wouldn’t would you? Not with your best friend.

When the jigsaw was finished the piece left in the box was, of course, Tabitha. She fitted nowhere and although her father intermittently mourned her loss, the Swallows, his magical sexless fictional family, more than compensated. He was a very good father to these phantoms. He gave them the only name that seemed right – Ivy’s name. They became the Walkers.

Visit  Lasserrade Press http://tinyurl.com/lzuukwf