Posted by Jock on August 03, 2005 at 09:36:38 from 217.172.246.144 user Jock.
In Reply to: Childers and Ransome posted by Paul on August 02, 2005 at 22:02:13:
Ransome apolitical?
Well it's a view that could be argued both ways. He certainly doesn't fit under any neat political label and his writings first infuriated the British 'right' and then were spurned for many years by the 'left'. So a case can be made that he was just trying to be as objective as he could be in the perculiar circumstances of the time and lacked any kind of political commitment.
For a counter view may I refer you to Paul Foot's excellent introduction to In Revolutionary Russia. Foot argues that Ransome is at first uncommitted: So Ransome went to Russia entirely without political enthusiasms or commitment. He had not joined the newly formed Labour Party or shown the slightest interest in any of the great issues which racked pre-war Britain: women's suffrage, Irish independence or the great strikes of 1911 and 1912 which effectively destroyed the Liberal Party and shook the Tories to their foundations.
Foot goes on to argue that what Ransome saw in Russia led to a radical change: What he saw excited him so much that he became for the first and last time in his life politically committed. He describes the genesis of the pamphlet The Truth About Russia and quotes Ransome: I do not think I shall ever be so happy in my life as I was during those first days when I saw working men and peasant soldiers sending representatives of their class and not of mine. I remembered Shelley's:
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you.
Ye are many - they are few’.
So what happened next? Does Ransome suddenly loose his ideals as a result of the excesses of the revolution? Or do his experiences in Russia strengthen his views. A political perspective gained from an early enthusiasm for William Morris and honed by his friendship with Collingwood is suddenly snubbed out overnight? I think not.
Of course, many of Ransome's ideals are alive and well and are eloquently expressed in the S&A books. One has only to compare the hothouse atmosphere inhabited by the young protagonists in L.P. Hartley's novel The Go-between to the environment enjoyed by Ransome's characters to realise how fresh and modern the S&A books must have seemed to their young readers. But while we are left in no doubt about Ransome's position on the environment, the role of women, gunboat diplomacy and the bungling police force, what happened to Ransome's views on more 'political matters' such as worker's democracy?
Do they change? Or does he find himself unable to express them? There is a lot of material on the Russian revolution that Rupert Hart-Davies left out when he was editing The Autobiography. Maybe one day this too could be published?
I wonder if the Literary Executors would permit a new book - The Politics of Arthur Ransome ? (!)