The first swallow of summer
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Posted by Tim on July 10, 1998 at 16:42:37:
In Reply to: Re: Titty posted by John Williams on July 06, 1998 at 11:13:45:
Martin Wainwright's obituary from the Guardian:
The first swallow of summer
Mavis "Titty" Guzelian, who has died aged 78, was the highly original young girl who caught the imagination of a crabby Manchester Guardian journalist tormented by stomach ulcers and the alienation of his own, only daughter. As a result she received the mixed blessing of becoming the "real" version of of a famous children's book character - Titty, the least predictable of Arthur Ransome's young sailors in the Swallows and Amazons adventures.
She led her own successful life in art, medical administration and raising a family, but was always aware of her non-existent but far more celebrated counterpart. The complications were increased by the genuine emotion which Ransome put into his creation, whose model was more than passingly the daughter he never had.
Mavis's mother, Dora Collingwood, had turned down a proposal from Ransome when the writer - a student of her father W G Collingwood, John Ruskin's biographer - was an ambitious young man on the make. Ransome then contracted a disastrous marriage. Its break-up lay behind the alienation of his daughter Tabitha. Meanwhile, Dora enjoyed a long and happy marriage to an Armenian doctor, Ernest Altounyan.
Old ties were reforged when the Altounyans and their children - Susie, Taqui, Titty, Roger and Brigit - met up in the summer of 1928 for a long, sunny holiday in the Lake District. Irritated with the Manchester Guardian - he described its venerable editorial corridor as "hutches for rabbits, some with diseased livers and swollen spleen" - Ransome was looking for a spur to write fiction full-time. The Altounyans' children gave it to him.
He acknowledged their influence in Swallows and Amazons' original dedication; his young crews were based on the Altounyans; the dinghies, the Swallow and the Amazon, were copies from the real boats, the Swallow and the Mavis, which he and Ernest Altounyan clubbed otgether to buy.
In the case of his characters Roger and Titty Ransome did not even trouble to change the names. Mavis was better-known throughout her life as Titty, a nickname taken from a favourite nursery rhyme.
She discovered later in life that Ransome and his second wife, Evgenia Shelepina, had asked to adopt her at the age of eight, and that the writer had always kept a portrait of her which her mother had given him instead. To her he remained "Uncle Arthur", although she confessed that fictional Titty "was so good and clever that she made me feel very inferior."
Mavis Guzelian was born in Aleppo in Syria and spent her early years dodging to and fro beteen the Levant and the Lake District. She was educted at Annisgarth school, Windermere, and the Perse School, Cambridge, and seemed destined for a career in art after studying under Henry Moore in the late 1930's at Chelsea School of Art.
The war intervened, however, and she was dispatched to Jerusalem to write news bulletins. When victory came, she took over from Brigit as administrator of an Aleppo hospital. Titty's most fulfilling period folwed her 1954 marriage to Melkon Guzelian, an Armenian refugee in Egypt. She followed him from Peterborough and then back to the Lake District, where he maintained lorries and buses while Mavis painted and brought up two daughters and a son at a house on Coniston (the background to Swallows and Amazons).
The family re-encountered the Ransomes and might have inspired further books but the author's grumpiness increased with age, to the extent that he replaced his original dedication on the misguided grounds that the Altounyan children were claiming too great a part in the series' success.
The Guzelians moved finally to Bradford, to be close to their daughter Rahel and son Azadour, who had become a sought-after photographer. Titty produced more paintings and was engaged in translating her husband's memoirs from Armenian when she fell ill.
She was described by her sister Brigit Sanders, president of the Arthur Ransome Society, as having "a special relationship with Arthur Ransome because she was so imaginative." Some of that shows in solemnly quizzical photographs of her from the idyllic summer of 1928; and in her paintings, which are expected to form a posthumous exhibition. She leaves her husband and two children. Her other daughter predeceased her.
The photograph shows Mavis Guzelian (left, on the lap of a nanny) on Coniston water as a child, with her sisters.
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