From Russia with love

In the last couple of decades or so, a plenitude of biographers have provided us with studies of 20th-century literary celebrities, from Thomas Hardy and George Bernard Shaw to Evelyn Waugh and T. S. Eliot. Roland Chambers now treats the life and works of Arthur Ransome, a lesser mortal than these grandees.

Ransome was born in 1884, the son of a professor at what would become Leeds University. Chambers gives a clear account of Ransome’s driving ambition to be a writer. After leaving Rugby he took a job as an office boy in a publishing house at eight shillings a week. Within a few years he had become a figure in London’s literary Bohemia. Capable of dashing off 40,000 words in a few weeks, he wrote on such diverse subjects as ‘The Things in our Garden’ and a critical work on Edgar Allan Poe.

In 1912 came his study of Oscar Wilde. Written in the flowery prose of the time, it established Wilde as a persecuted genius, doomed and destroyed by his love affair with Lord Alfred Douglas. (By 1938 Douglas was no longer an attractive man. Introduced to Douglas by Simon Asquith, the prime minister’s grandson, I met him alone during my first year at Oxford in the lounge of the Randolph Hotel. After telling a few stories about literary celebrities he started to fondle my neck. As a boy from a mixed secondary day school, where girls with the most ample bosoms were the objects of our gropings, I knew nothing of homosexual affairs — though they were common enough at Eton and Winchester — and, disgusted, fled from the Randolph into Beaumont Street.)

Chambers chronicles Ransome’s disastrous marriage to Ivy Walker, an intelligent, eccentric but essentially self-centred woman, who disturbed his ferocious concentration on his writing.