The Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome [Hardcover]

This is a remarkable book about the remarkable life of a fairly unremarkable man. It's not that Arthur Ransome wasn't interesting in his own right - he certainly was! It's rather that he just happened to be born at a time when astonishing things were happening all around him. It was a case, pure and simple, of being in the right place at the right time. His family background and education gave him the contacts and the opportunities to be caught up in the midst of a number of sensational events as the 19th century gave way to the 20th.

Roland Chambers' account of the so-called double life of this quintessential Englishman is so well-written that you feel you know the subject personally even before the life-changing mid-section where he ends up as a journalist in Russia at the time of the Revolution and prior to the outbreak of The Great War. Ransome comes across as just an ordinary fellow such as one might have met in one's own school days or in the office at work. Indeed, I got the increasingly palpable sense that, there but for fortune, this could have been me.

Ransome was no heroic figure or adventurer as such. This is no `Lawrence of Arabia' or `Clive of India' boys' own-type of story despite the bravura nature of his later children's fiction. Instead, we read of a man who remained rather innocent and childlike in many ways, always drawn back to his beloved England and the Lakes in particular. His main gift was for observation and then, through his impressive skill with words, of being able to re-interpret and convey his impressions so articulately to others. He was a wordsmith.

Chambers is also a gifted raconteur and his book bristles with lively description and anecdote. The details come from Ransome's own diaries and published writings together with heaps of comment from those around him. He had an impressive circle of friends and associates, and seems to have been a very likeable man. I think I would have been pleased to know him.

Much of the account may already be a matter of public record but the author fashions it into a cohesive narrative that is a joy to read. I admit to having been a bit bogged down by all the Bolshevik politics in the middle part of the book when, to be fair, everything was changing at an alarming daily rate. As in real life, the bigger picture is still overshadowed by the personal dimension, so that for example it is of far greater significance that Ransome was not just able to know Leon Trotsky personally and interview him on several occasions but rather that he fell head-over-heels in love with Evgenia Shelepina, Trotsky's secretary.

Ransome's position in regard to his political masters is, of course, what gives the book its main dynamic, giving rise to this misinterpretation of his leading a double life, but it is the human details, such as his lifelong battle with his haemorrhoids (!), that really adds colour and texture to the account.

Is the book worth reading? Well, people will often say of a good book that "I couldn't put it down" or "it's a real page-turner". All I will say is that while reading it I couldn't deal with anything else, and, when I was obliged to put it aside to deal with other things, I was constantly thinking about it and rushing to get back to the next chapter. It also has some wonderful photos of the `dramatis personae' including a joyous picture of Ransome dancing down a country lane with his young daughter Tabitha. I think that one image sums up all that was best about, and most important to, this man as he himself was to acknowledge later when he reflected on all that he ultimately sacrificed.

Arthur Ransome - Swallows and Amazons. Go together like a horse and carriage don't they? Job done, well not quite: This book suggests that "celebrated children's author" was only the latter persona of many that Ransome adopted through his life.

If the author is to be believed, Ransome spent most of his life trying to please a long succession of heroes (many of whom were left-wing inclined creatives such as writers and artists). In each effort to please his latest hero he more or less reinvented himself and very often took steps to erase the paper trail of his previous incarnations. This erasure was mostly carried out, not because there was something to hide, but to make the reinvention more convincing and complete. Throughout this book you can sense Roland Chambers' frustration at how fragmentary the trail sometimes becomes. This perhaps increases the perception that Chambers really didn't like his subject very much?

I came away from the book wanting more evidence that Ransom had lived his life in this fashion, but of course the very mode of such a life must mean that direct evidence of how it was lived (diaries and so on) is thin on the ground. So it's no discredit to Mr Chambers that I came away with such a feeling, in fact I'm pretty sure he shares it. The fairly extensive use of Ransome's own autobiography is - throughout this book - heavily hedged around with scepticism that is often, but not always, justified by citing conflicting evidence.

I finished the book without a clear of idea of a consistent Arthur Ransome. The kindly old author who turned out Swallows and Amazons and its many sequels and spin offs is clear enough, but it is suggested that this was merely a front for a much less graspable character underneath - The "Swallows and Amazons" phase Ransome was, it is suggested, just a shell that some other creature wore.

As for Ransome's earlier life: We're told that an abandoned academic career seems to have been caused, in part, by his non-engagement with his teachers (except for just one). Then, the premature death of his father meant he had to and seek alternative role models and abandon school to find work.

He initially found work as a gopher in a string of London publishing firms. This work gave him contact with Eastern European émigrés living in London. These, in their turn, gave him the ability to go to live in Russia around the outbreak of WWI and on into the time of the revolution. During this turbulent period he seems to have been able to remain as everybody's friend and to have remained a neutral in all senses - again this is according to his own somewhat unreliable testimony. There are other versions.

Perhaps due to his self-reinvention habit, Ransome seems to have been able to stay in good stead with both sides of the revolution and the war. He seems to have kept this up as things settled down during the early 1920s and the communist state needed to be spied upon by the Western powers. But, again, a lot of this is surmise, hearsay and gossip - apparently Ransome's not telling!

By the 1940s the British state was deeply suspicious of him when he returned home, yet they never charged him with anything. There followed a short interval during which he again shed his skin, reinventing himself as a children's author.

He wisely did what all authors do best, he wrote about what he knew and what he valued. He combined the English lake lands with thinly disguised versions of members of his extended circle of family and friends (much to the fury of some of them) into "Swallows and Amazons". When the book was a huge hit, he kept on repeating the recipe for many years with enduring success.

And yet, and yet, Ransome was not only the children's author he appeared to be, he was also other people. This book shows quite convincingly that it was hard or perhaps impossible to know who he really was - even for him. The book doesn't make the case in a neutral way, that's for sure, but nevertheless it makes a convincing case.

I came away from this book thinking that Ransome was rather like Peter Sellers - who was also intentionally impossible to know. They both seem to have been quite savage to anyone who got too close. This suggests that they either did not know themselves and were afraid to reveal that fact, or maybe they knew, but didn't like, their "real" self and wanted to keep it completely hidden?

As the book suggests, it may be best that we put these strangenesses to one side, and just revel in our enjoyment of Ransome's work. Sometimes that is a better alternative than trying to get behind the mask of the author.

In the final chapter of this book, Roland Chambers says that he set out to "know if Ransome had been a double agent... And there is a great deal of circumstantial evidence to support this view"; and that "Ransome...had so narrowly avoided prosecution under the Defence of the Realm Act". The circumstantial evidence contained in the book is in fact flimsy and the assertion about avoiding prosecution is purely the author's alone.
The author cannot have been aware of the publication in 2010 of the official History of the Secret Intelligence Service by Professor Keith Jeffery which throws a different light on Ransome's activities (pp 173-175). He was indeed an agent of the SIS (known as "S.76") and despite reservations as to his socialist political sympathies Admiral Cumming, the head of SIS, described the information Ransome provided as satisfactory. He is also described by others as "absolutely honest" and as operating in Russia openly under his own name.
Ransome was undoubtedly a whole hearted supporter of the Bolshevik revolution and was regarded as an important channel of information to the British public by the revolutionary leaders. It was this that Cumming realised made his information to the SIS accurate and valuable. It is also this support that has made him a target of Roland Chambers' prejudices. But it has to be remembered that in 1917 many influential people in England (on the left wing of the political spectrum) agreed with him.
Unfortunately these prejudices mean that Chambers treats his subject in a patronising and dismissive way. which gives a thoroughly distorted picture of most interesting man.