Posted by John Wilson on January 16, 2007 at 00:08:27 from 202.154.140.47 user hugo.
In Reply to: Re: The Untold Stories posted by Alan Hakim on January 14, 2007 at 18:50:52:
There is also “The River Comes First”, of which he wrote eight chapters. Those he finished are included in CN: “The River Comes First” (“The Latin School” chapter, and chapters on Canon John William’s fishing) and “The Cloudburst” (which he would have had to turn from first-person narrative to third-person). His first thought was to write the book in the first person as Tom Staunton’s autobiography, and he had a list of 31 chapters, headed “Gamekeeper”, the original title? Tom Staunton was “imaginative, but not bookish. Compared with Ransome’s middle-class children he is almost stolidly prosaic” and “articulate .. but not introspective”.
Hugh Brogan in the introduction to CN says AR had a prolonged artistic crisis after PM, which Genia (only initially?) hated. So he started work on a book about “an old school-master and a fisherman and a boy and a river”. He drew a map for it and his publisher was keen (and suggesting the bird-artist C.A. Tunicliffe to illustrate it). But he despaired and stopped. Genia had never liked the idea and he tended to think poorly of work in hand, needing encouragement (provided for PM by his mother).
He abandoned “The River” in the summer of 43, and next wrote GN which he finished on on 14 December 1946. But GN came out 1947 (not 1946 as Hugh Brogan says). So it was not a Christmas book! And (from the article) there were also earlier notes on GN from May 1943 after PM had been published.
In the winter of 1948 he started writing CN (CITN), but then abandoned it. So we have the beginning, a synopsis, notes, and “a couple of stray chapters”. Hugh Brogan quotes AR’s note on the foot of the last page of the synopsis for CN: “Thus: Beginning - End - but no Middle or backbone”.