Arthur Ransome and Beautiful Untrue Things
I want to reflect on the activity known as lying. I wrote a book about it a few years back (A Time to Tell Lies, 2016, Lasserrade Press), found I couldn’t really escape the topic, so wrote another (The Things that are Lost, 2018, Lasserrade Press). Then, when The Lutterworth Press launched my book on Arthur Ransome,[1] I found myself harking back again to the same old theme. It seems appropriate in these gloomy times to explain this preoccupation.
First, don’t get me wrong, I have barely a censorious bone in my body when it comes to lying: it has its place in the scheme of things, along with – since it is a necessary part of - joking. Indeed, you don’t have to read much physics before you conclude that since decidedly the joke’s on us God must have been content to lie now and then. As for Arthur Ransome’s contribution to the topic - well, there’s a paradox about it. I only hint at it in A Thoroughly Mischievous Person, because it wasn’t really central to the theme of my book, but I have always promised myself I would one day come back and try to resolve it. Well, dear reader, that day has arrived.
I must take you back to 1914, a good many years before Arthur Ransome could lay claim to any reputation at all as a children’s author. Fleeing from a collapsing marriage, he had more or less abandoned wife and infant daughter and fetched up, far from home, in Petrograd (as it then was called). Eking out a rather uncertain life as a newspaper correspondent he watched the fall of the Czar and found himself drawn deeper and deeper into a communist revolution gradually unfolding about him. As Roland Chambers revealed (to understandably shocked Ransome fans) what Arthur got up to at that time gave a new meaning to the term ‘literary agent.’ However, I part company with Chambers in thinking there was all that much deliberation (in the John Le Carré sense) about Ransome’s ‘espionage’. Certainly there were spies a-plenty abroad in Petrograd, but gentlemen amateurs in the main; there was little in the way of systematic organization. The Spymasters of the time saw in Ransome someone typical of most progressive writers of the age – the kind of unthinking lefty the Bolsheviks ate for breakfast. The fact that he ended up a fully fledged fellow traveller – indeed, became a very significant political figure - came about more by luck than judgement. It is invariably a mistake to infer intent when accident will do perfectly well: judgement was never Arthur’s strong suit.[2]
It comes as a shock to those who only know Arthur Ransome as the author of Swallows and Amazons, to find him passing on snippets of secret British political gossip to Vladimir Lenin. Does that not define him as a kind of spy? Perhaps, but recall he also blithely passed to British Intelligence such Bolshevik secrets as came his way. So what does that make him? It is a question many have asked and I confess, having spent two years thinking about it, I still find it impossible to see Arthur as any kind of calculating double agent. The villain of Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands[3] had taught Ransome’s generation that high on the list of things a gentleman simply does not do is face both ways. It was a lesson he hardly needed. Steeped in the virtuous ethos of the English Public School, he emerged as one of those (fortunate) men who seem never quite to grow up. His work as a war correspondent filled countless columns with purple political prose, all too often leaving the reader excited but none the wiser. In the end we accept him at the evaluation he sets on himself: not the double-dealing spy, more the teller of tales; a man happier with fiction than with truth. Indeed, someone whose relationship with truth was never very secure. And there is a reason for this - which brings me to my theme.
In 1918, returning from Stockholm to Petrograd, Ransome’s baggage was searched at the personal command of Vice-Commissar Karl Radek, who demanded to meet the strange person ‘who travelled with a Shakespeare, a folding chessboard and chessmen, and a mixed collection of books on elementary navigation, fishing, chess and folklore.’[4] So began a bizarre association that lasted many years, the two men becoming close friends, sharing accommodation and eventually collaborating in the production (for an English-speaking audience) of thinly disguised works of Bolshevik propaganda.
Now you may not know Lenin’s Vice-Commissar for Foreign Affairs all that well, so let me briefly introduce Karl Radek. Aware that he came to a brutal end (in 1939, beaten to death in his prison cell on Stalin’s orders) some historians have been kind to Karl, presenting him as an almost comic character, waving his outsize revolver and orchestrating revolution with an impish grin. I can’t agree: there is nothing amusing about one of the architects[5] of the ‘Red Terror’ set in train the very year (1918) he met Ransome. Radek defined his purpose in a complex and conflicted life as fomenting revolution, pitting class against class, extracting the last pearl necklace[6] from a tormented and terrified bourgeoisie. In the succeeding years he watched numberless thousands perish of cold and misery, accepting mass starvation as the means to a noble end. What to make of a man who could look on, unmoved, as babies were sold for meat on the streets of Petrograd?
And there’s the paradox. What on earth had Karl Radek in common with the author of whimsies such as The Child's Book of the Seasons, The Things in our Garden or Pond and Stream. How could someone described as ‘the jeering cynic of the revolution’s rationale’[7] find common cause with an unprepossessing author whose only ambition at that time was to bring Russian fairy stories to an audience of English children? Did ever two such different beings work together and share their daily lives? It seems inexplicable.
Let me try to offer a resolution - one which has resonated through the years and continues to resonate to the present day. It concerns lying. Karl Radek was possessed of an almost obsessive interest in the activity. ‘Like many of the most knowing liars, Radek’s rationalisations convinced him that everything important, really important, was based on falsehood. As a result, falsehood became for him a kind of truth.’[8] Now this is more than just a clever turn of phrase, the kind of artful contradiction we find put to good effect by Oscar Wilde. The fact is, people committed to a Utopia (among whom you may certainly count Karl Radek) see present horrors as no more than a temporary misrepresentation of their hopes, an ugly parody of some deeper truth, best ignored. The Bolshevik dream - like hope itself - could be sustained against any number of present miseries, even indefinitely, if the lies which supported it were morally or, as Oscar Wilde put it, artistically, superior to reality (after all, ‘the telling of beautiful untrue things [is] the proper aim of Art’[9]).
It may seem perverse, but Radek would have had little difficulty persuading Arthur Ransome to this position, because Ransome also passionately believed in the cleavage between art and reality, something that came to define his novels for children. Children invent the worlds they inhabit and Ransome’s, possibly unique, gift to literature was his ability to allow his readers to reimagine these as descriptions of reality. In fact, the spell cast by that curious pastoral idyll, Swallows and Amazons, has nothing to do with an account of reality (indeed, little of consequence happens): it stems from our intuition that these magical children are acting their parts in a different, yet morally superior, world.
Ransome strongly endorsed[10] the celebrated essay in which Oscar Wilde lamented the decay of lying: ‘Art takes life as part of her rough material, recreates it, and refashions it in fresh forms, is absolutely indifferent to fact, invents, imagines, dreams, and keeps between herself and reality the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style, of decorative or ideal treatment.’[11] Neither Arthur Ransome nor Karl Radek - in completely different contexts - thought that reality should get the upper hand; both feared that should it do so, something far more significant would be driven into the wilderness.[12]
In 1939, as yet another war approached, a secretive Political Warfare Executive was established in the United Kingdom to orchestrate a programme of national propaganda. Its views on what constituted information, misinformation or disinformation have changed little with the passing years. The overwhelming need to ‘own the narrative’ is eerily familiar: Radek would obviously have endorsed the proposition that a willingness to lie was essential to capture and control the public mood. The definition of effective propaganda offered by the Political Warfare Executive would not have been out of place in the Soviet Union, pointing to similarities with the task novelists and tellers of tales face in constructing believable fictions. A secret army of celebrated authors was recruited at the outbreak of war (it did not include, so far as we know, Arthur Ransome) to prosecute Britain’s propaganda war. ‘The people’ we were told, ‘must feel that they are being told the truth. Distrust breeds fear much more than knowledge of reverses. The all-important thing for publicity to achieve is the conviction that the worst is known… the people should be told that this is a civilians' war, or a People's War, and therefore they are to be taken into the government's confidence as never before…. What is truth? We must adopt a pragmatic definition. It is what it is believed to be the truth. The government would be wise therefore to tell the truth and, if a sufficient emergency arises, to tell one big, thumping lie that will then be believed.’[13]
Notes:
[1] Alan Kennedy, A Thoroughly Mischievous Person: The Other Arthur Ransome, 2021, The Lutterworth Press.
[2] Against those who might claim this harsh, I cite in evidence Giles Udy’s monumental work, Labour and the Gulag, 2017, Biteback Publishing; and the fascinating collection of documents in The Lost Literature of Socialism by George Watson, 2010, The Lutterworth Press. As late as October 1938 Ransome was still ‘clinging to the illusion that some reasonable bargain could be struck with Hitler that would preserve the peace,’ and that Chamberlain was ‘putting right the worst of the errors’ committed in Versailles (Hugh Brogan, Signalling from Mars, The Letters of Arthur Ransome, 1997, Jonathan Cape.) As to the nature of those ‘errors’, in The Crisis in Russia, 1921, Allen & Unwin, 1921, he writes approvingly of Lenin’s belief that ‘Europe is steadily shaking itself to pieces.’
[3] Erskine Childers, The Riddle of the Sands, 1903, Smith, Elder & Co.
[4] Roland Chambers, The Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome, 2009, Faber and Faber, p.184.
[5] Together with fellow-Pole, Felix Dzerzhinsky, Director of the Cheka, the Soviet State Security Service, defining its function as the extermination of enemies of the revolution on the basis of their class affiliation.
[6] In October 1919, as a quid pro quo for free passage from Moscow, Ransome’s second wife, Evgenia Shelepina, agreed to smuggle a packet of ‘confiscated’ pearl necklaces to Stockholm ‘for the use of the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs.’
[7] Stephen Koch, Stalin, Willi Munzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals, 1994, Harper Collins, p.7.
[8] Ibid p.134.
[9] Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying – an Observation, In Intentions, 1891, Methuen & Co. p. 49. The essay takes the form of a short dialogue between two characters.
[10] In his biography of Wilde (Oscar Wilde: A Critical Study, Martin Secker, 1912) Ransome cites this essay no less than nine times, declaring it ‘of the first importance to the student of Wilde’s theory of art’. (p. 107).
[11] Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying, p. 11.
[12] The real-world reality of characters and locations is a persistent theme of Ransome literary criticism.
[13] The Emergency Powers Act, 1939. See www.spartacus-educational.com.
I want to reflect on the activity known as lying. I wrote a book about it a few years back (A Time to Tell Lies, 2016, Lasserrade Press), found I couldn’t really escape the topic, so wrote another (The Things that are Lost, 2018, Lasserrade Press). Then, when The Lutterworth Press launched my book on Arthur Ransome,[1] I found myself harking back again to the same old theme. It seems appropriate in these gloomy times to explain this preoccupation.
First, don’t get me wrong, I have barely a censorious bone in my body when it comes to lying: it has its place in the scheme of things, along with – since it is a necessary part of - joking. Indeed, you don’t have to read much physics before you conclude that since decidedly the joke’s on us God must have been content to lie now and then. As for Arthur Ransome’s contribution to the topic - well, there’s a paradox about it. I only hint at it in A Thoroughly Mischievous Person, because it wasn’t really central to the theme of my book, but I have always promised myself I would one day come back and try to resolve it. Well, dear reader, that day has arrived.
I must take you back to 1914, a good many years before Arthur Ransome could lay claim to any reputation at all as a children’s author. Fleeing from a collapsing marriage, he had more or less abandoned wife and infant daughter and fetched up, far from home, in Petrograd (as it then was called). Eking out a rather uncertain life as a newspaper correspondent he watched the fall of the Czar and found himself drawn deeper and deeper into a communist revolution gradually unfolding about him. As Roland Chambers revealed (to understandably shocked Ransome fans) what Arthur got up to at that time gave a new meaning to the term ‘literary agent.’ However, I part company with Chambers in thinking there was all that much deliberation (in the John Le Carré sense) about Ransome’s ‘espionage’. Certainly there were spies a-plenty abroad in Petrograd, but gentlemen amateurs in the main; there was little in the way of systematic organization. The Spymasters of the time saw in Ransome someone typical of most progressive writers of the age – the kind of unthinking lefty the Bolsheviks ate for breakfast. The fact that he ended up a fully fledged fellow traveller – indeed, became a very significant political figure - came about more by luck than judgement. It is invariably a mistake to infer intent when accident will do perfectly well: judgement was never Arthur’s strong suit.[2]
It comes as a shock to those who only know Arthur Ransome as the author of Swallows and Amazons, to find him passing on snippets of secret British political gossip to Vladimir Lenin. Does that not define him as a kind of spy? Perhaps, but recall he also blithely passed to British Intelligence such Bolshevik secrets as came his way. So what does that make him? It is a question many have asked and I confess, having spent two years thinking about it, I still find it impossible to see Arthur as any kind of calculating double agent. The villain of Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands[3] had taught Ransome’s generation that high on the list of things a gentleman simply does not do is face both ways. It was a lesson he hardly needed. Steeped in the virtuous ethos of the English Public School, he emerged as one of those (fortunate) men who seem never quite to grow up. His work as a war correspondent filled countless columns with purple political prose, all too often leaving the reader excited but none the wiser. In the end we accept him at the evaluation he sets on himself: not the double-dealing spy, more the teller of tales; a man happier with fiction than with truth. Indeed, someone whose relationship with truth was never very secure. And there is a reason for this - which brings me to my theme.
In 1918, returning from Stockholm to Petrograd, Ransome’s baggage was searched at the personal command of Vice-Commissar Karl Radek, who demanded to meet the strange person ‘who travelled with a Shakespeare, a folding chessboard and chessmen, and a mixed collection of books on elementary navigation, fishing, chess and folklore.’[4] So began a bizarre association that lasted many years, the two men becoming close friends, sharing accommodation and eventually collaborating in the production (for an English-speaking audience) of thinly disguised works of Bolshevik propaganda.
Now you may not know Lenin’s Vice-Commissar for Foreign Affairs all that well, so let me briefly introduce Karl Radek. Aware that he came to a brutal end (in 1939, beaten to death in his prison cell on Stalin’s orders) some historians have been kind to Karl, presenting him as an almost comic character, waving his outsize revolver and orchestrating revolution with an impish grin. I can’t agree: there is nothing amusing about one of the architects[5] of the ‘Red Terror’ set in train the very year (1918) he met Ransome. Radek defined his purpose in a complex and conflicted life as fomenting revolution, pitting class against class, extracting the last pearl necklace[6] from a tormented and terrified bourgeoisie. In the succeeding years he watched numberless thousands perish of cold and misery, accepting mass starvation as the means to a noble end. What to make of a man who could look on, unmoved, as babies were sold for meat on the streets of Petrograd?
And there’s the paradox. What on earth had Karl Radek in common with the author of whimsies such as The Child's Book of the Seasons, The Things in our Garden or Pond and Stream. How could someone described as ‘the jeering cynic of the revolution’s rationale’[7] find common cause with an unprepossessing author whose only ambition at that time was to bring Russian fairy stories to an audience of English children? Did ever two such different beings work together and share their daily lives? It seems inexplicable.
Let me try to offer a resolution - one which has resonated through the years and continues to resonate to the present day. It concerns lying. Karl Radek was possessed of an almost obsessive interest in the activity. ‘Like many of the most knowing liars, Radek’s rationalisations convinced him that everything important, really important, was based on falsehood. As a result, falsehood became for him a kind of truth.’[8] Now this is more than just a clever turn of phrase, the kind of artful contradiction we find put to good effect by Oscar Wilde. The fact is, people committed to a Utopia (among whom you may certainly count Karl Radek) see present horrors as no more than a temporary misrepresentation of their hopes, an ugly parody of some deeper truth, best ignored. The Bolshevik dream - like hope itself - could be sustained against any number of present miseries, even indefinitely, if the lies which supported it were morally or, as Oscar Wilde put it, artistically, superior to reality (after all, ‘the telling of beautiful untrue things [is] the proper aim of Art’[9]).
It may seem perverse, but Radek would have had little difficulty persuading Arthur Ransome to this position, because Ransome also passionately believed in the cleavage between art and reality, something that came to define his novels for children. Children invent the worlds they inhabit and Ransome’s, possibly unique, gift to literature was his ability to allow his readers to reimagine these as descriptions of reality. In fact, the spell cast by that curious pastoral idyll, Swallows and Amazons, has nothing to do with an account of reality (indeed, little of consequence happens): it stems from our intuition that these magical children are acting their parts in a different, yet morally superior, world.
Ransome strongly endorsed[10] the celebrated essay in which Oscar Wilde lamented the decay of lying: ‘Art takes life as part of her rough material, recreates it, and refashions it in fresh forms, is absolutely indifferent to fact, invents, imagines, dreams, and keeps between herself and reality the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style, of decorative or ideal treatment.’[11] Neither Arthur Ransome nor Karl Radek - in completely different contexts - thought that reality should get the upper hand; both feared that should it do so, something far more significant would be driven into the wilderness.[12]
In 1939, as yet another war approached, a secretive Political Warfare Executive was established in the United Kingdom to orchestrate a programme of national propaganda. Its views on what constituted information, misinformation or disinformation have changed little with the passing years. The overwhelming need to ‘own the narrative’ is eerily familiar: Radek would obviously have endorsed the proposition that a willingness to lie was essential to capture and control the public mood. The definition of effective propaganda offered by the Political Warfare Executive would not have been out of place in the Soviet Union, pointing to similarities with the task novelists and tellers of tales face in constructing believable fictions. A secret army of celebrated authors was recruited at the outbreak of war (it did not include, so far as we know, Arthur Ransome) to prosecute Britain’s propaganda war. ‘The people’ we were told, ‘must feel that they are being told the truth. Distrust breeds fear much more than knowledge of reverses. The all-important thing for publicity to achieve is the conviction that the worst is known… the people should be told that this is a civilians' war, or a People's War, and therefore they are to be taken into the government's confidence as never before…. What is truth? We must adopt a pragmatic definition. It is what it is believed to be the truth. The government would be wise therefore to tell the truth and, if a sufficient emergency arises, to tell one big, thumping lie that will then be believed.’[13]
Notes:
[1] Alan Kennedy, A Thoroughly Mischievous Person: The Other Arthur Ransome, 2021, The Lutterworth Press.
[2] Against those who might claim this harsh, I cite in evidence Giles Udy’s monumental work, Labour and the Gulag, 2017, Biteback Publishing; and the fascinating collection of documents in The Lost Literature of Socialism by George Watson, 2010, The Lutterworth Press. As late as October 1938 Ransome was still ‘clinging to the illusion that some reasonable bargain could be struck with Hitler that would preserve the peace,’ and that Chamberlain was ‘putting right the worst of the errors’ committed in Versailles (Hugh Brogan, Signalling from Mars, The Letters of Arthur Ransome, 1997, Jonathan Cape.) As to the nature of those ‘errors’, in The Crisis in Russia, 1921, Allen & Unwin, 1921, he writes approvingly of Lenin’s belief that ‘Europe is steadily shaking itself to pieces.’
[3] Erskine Childers, The Riddle of the Sands, 1903, Smith, Elder & Co.
[4] Roland Chambers, The Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome, 2009, Faber and Faber, p.184.
[5] Together with fellow-Pole, Felix Dzerzhinsky, Director of the Cheka, the Soviet State Security Service, defining its function as the extermination of enemies of the revolution on the basis of their class affiliation.
[6] In October 1919, as a quid pro quo for free passage from Moscow, Ransome’s second wife, Evgenia Shelepina, agreed to smuggle a packet of ‘confiscated’ pearl necklaces to Stockholm ‘for the use of the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs.’
[7] Stephen Koch, Stalin, Willi Munzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals, 1994, Harper Collins, p.7.
[8] Ibid p.134.
[9] Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying – an Observation, In Intentions, 1891, Methuen & Co. p. 49. The essay takes the form of a short dialogue between two characters.
[10] In his biography of Wilde (Oscar Wilde: A Critical Study, Martin Secker, 1912) Ransome cites this essay no less than nine times, declaring it ‘of the first importance to the student of Wilde’s theory of art’. (p. 107).
[11] Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying, p. 11.
[12] The real-world reality of characters and locations is a persistent theme of Ransome literary criticism.
[13] The Emergency Powers Act, 1939. See www.spartacus-educational.com.