Posted by Peter Ceresole on March 27, 2009 at 12:43:57 user PeterC.
In Reply to: Re: Tyson-common Cumbrian (farmer) name? posted by Owen Roberts on March 27, 2009 at 09:33:13:
However if the books were surrogates, perhaps if he had children there would have been no books.
I think it more likely that the books were a refuge (sanctuary, anyone?) in childhood. He's had a difficult life with his first marriage failing, a noisy time with the Bolshevik revolution and relations with the Red leadership (those kinds of times and experiences are absolutely exhausting even when they're exhilarating). Even when he'd got Evgenya out of Russia, and spent the time with her on the Baltic (and written it up successfully in RFC) I reckon he must have been aching for some peace, which he hadn't known since childhood holidays on the Lakes.
And then of course he needed to make some money. We should never lose sight of the fact that, whatever the private significance of the books, the very strong public fact was that they made him money; after a remarkably short time, for books, lots of it. So I guess there would have been books; most journos want to write books, AR more than most, so he wouldn't have been satisfied with continuing with the Manchester Guardian. They might have been different in detail, but he is said to have always wanted to write for children and as a target readership his own would have done fine... And writers tend to write about things they know, at least to an extent. The things he knew about and had already written about extensively were fishing, sailing and the lakes...