Posted by Jeremy Kriewaldt on August 04, 2005 at 01:24:00 from 202.138.212.58 user JeremyKriewaldt.
In Reply to: Childers and Ransome posted by Paul on August 02, 2005 at 22:02:13:
My latest reading has been of AR's translation of Remy de Gourmont A Night in the Luxembourg. This was done just after AR had written and released his Oscar Wilde. It is little discussed in either the Autobiography or Brogan's Life (mainly for the story in both places that the plaintiff's counsel in the Douglas trial tried to suggest that this was AR's original work not a translation and that AR placed a copy of the French work prominently on the bar table in full sight of Darling J).
However, AR's introduction suggests an attraction to de Gourmont's modernisation of the Epicurean philosophy which is quite interesting and quite un-British. Was Ransome dabbling in this philosophy himself? Does this somehow tie in with the breakdown of his marriage and his flight to Russia (was this the pleasure that he was seeking)? Does it show an intellectual rootlessness in AR that made him likely to be attracted to Bolshevism?