As a diarist, Woolf is unputdownable. Yes, she is sometimes horrible. So are most of the diarists and memoirists we continue to read, from Pepys and Saint-Simon to Chips Channon, Harold Nicolson and Alan Clark. As an essayist, she is magnificently plain and thumping, now and then almost Johnsonian – she loved Samuel Johnson and borrowed from him the title for her collections of reviews – ‘I rejoice to concur with the common reader’. Her writings in the women’s cause are the best possible advertisement for feminism: vigorous, good-humoured and irresistible. No writer of non-fiction could be less affected or less bowed down by theory.
What a contrast with her approach to fiction, which she embarks on festooned with slogans and banners. The time had come to abandon ‘this appalling narrative business of the realist’. Future novelists would leave the description of reality more and more out of their stories, taking a knowledge of it for granted. She told Katherine Mansfield, whom she alternately loved and loathed, despised and envied, ‘What I’m at is to change the consciousness and so to break up the awful stodge’ – the materialist, earth-bound fiction of the dreadful Arnold Bennett and the unspeakable H. G. Wells. ‘We believe that we can say more about people’s minds and feelings. Well then, it becomes less necessary to dwell upon their bodies.’
This dematerializing not only represented the future of art for her, it also accorded with her own instinctive preference. Even when young, she had now and then expressed distaste for the flesh, most notoriously only seven weeks after getting married when she wrote to Molly McCarthy, ‘Why do you think people make such a fuss about marriage and copulation? I find the climax immensely exaggerated.’ She was not yet fifty when she remarked that she hated ‘the slow heaviness of physical life and [I] almost dislike people’s bodies, I think, as I grow older.’
What she valued in fiction was the flow. Style, she told Vita, was simply a matter of rhythm and should flow like a wave; ‘as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it’. She was always pleased with herself when she had written a long passage on the run, whatever the nervous cost to her afterwards: ‘I shall never forget the day I wrote “The Mark on the Wall” – all in a flash, as in flying.’ In finishing the second draft of The Waves, she boasted of ‘having reeled across the last ten pages with some moments of such intensity and intoxication that I seemed only to stumble after my own voice’.
But is flow enough? If the flow is making up its own words as it crashes and splashes across the page, may it not come perilously close to gush? In the last ten pages of The Waves, it is not Virginia’s voice but Bernard’s that is supposed to be washing over us. But he speaks/thinks in this weird, attitudinizing, implausible fashion which is like no human being ever born but like someone inventing a character for themselves in an interminable Bloomsbury after-dinner game. The other five characters speak in just the same way, thus hopelessly blurring the intended distinctions between them, Susan the earth mother, Jinny the man-mad and so on. Julia Briggs is by no means blind to this blurring, recognizing that in Mrs Dalloway, for example, the experiences of the neurotic Septimus Warren Smith seem surprisingly similar to those of the other characters who are better adjusted to the world around them. But she does not pause to enquire whether this swimmy, samey quality may not have a deadening effect on the work as a whole. Indeed, for an avowedly literary biography the book is remarkably abstinent in its critical evaluation, which in a way is refreshing but cannot help leaving unproven Woolf’s claims to greatness as a novelist.
Since character and narrative are deliberately broken down and homogenized into a continuous poetic flow, the reader is bound, in the absence of the normal diversions, to become attentive to the uneven quality of that flow, at times sparkling and dancing but at other times, far too frequently, whipping itself into a foamy, scummy sort of texture. The opening page of The Waves – the description of dawn breaking over the sea – contains half-a-dozen extended similes: a wrinkled cloth, the breath of a person sleeping, sediment in an old wine bottle, a woman raising a lamp, flames leaping from a bonfire. By itself, each is rather stale and unprofitable. Together they produce a messy smudge.
There is, I think, a paradox about modernism which Woolf seems unaware of: the more you make soup of the old bones of plot and character, the more materialistic, the more naturalistic even you have to be, not less. Compare the last ten pages of Ulysses with the last ten pages of The Waves, Molly’s soliloquy with Bernard’s. Compare Bloom’s day with Mrs Dalloway’s. Both writers are trying to think themselves into a very different sort of person’s head. But while the tumbling stream of thoughts in Ulysses is so coarse, so abundant, so immediate as to overwhelm disbelief, in Mrs Dalloway you never quite manage to forget that this is Mrs Woolf ventriloquizing a woman she would have run a mile from at a cocktail party.
Woolf initially dismissed Ulysses as ‘an illiterate, underbred book, the book of a self-taught man, and we all know how distressing they are’. She could not understand why Great Tom Eliot thought it on a par with War and Peace. Although she thought of herself as in some sense in competition with Joyce, and noted on his death (just before her own) that he was about a fortnight younger than she was, she always found his ‘indecency’ and ‘sordidity’ too off-putting to learn much from. Ditto with D. H. Lawrence. They were incredibly proud in Bloomsbury of being able to say semen and shit and bugger in mixed company, but when it came to creative writing they retreated into a gentility that would have appeased E. M. Forster’s aunts.
The counterexample of Orlando, so wicked, so light-footed, so ingenious, showed how much she could have done with the novel form, but she was caught in this pseudo-poetic slipstream which at its worst has no more purchase on the imagination than those Omega workshop tables and screens painted in their tremulous whorls and stripes which infest the shrines of lower Bloomsbury. Far from it helping her reputation to detach her novels from her diaries, essays and letters, the closer they stick together, the better their chances of survival. In the same way, I think it is better to stick the whole Virginia back together and remember a woman brimming with wit, malice, common sense, imagination and caprice rather than to worship a plaster saint for a godless age.
ARTHUR RANSOME: LENIN IN THE LAKE DISTRICT
‘Ransome, when he turned up, proved to be an amiable and attractive man, with a luxuriant blond soup-strainer moustache, a rubicund complexion, a large mouth from which more often than not a pipe protruded, and a hearty disposition.’ Malcolm Muggeridge immediately took to Arthur Ransome when he first met him in Cairo in 1929. Most people did. The philosopher R. G. Collingwood, a close friend from their shared childhood in the Lake District, gave Ransome his entire life savings to pay his legal costs when he was sued by the incurably litigious Lord Alfred Douglas. Edward Thomas was devoted to him. John Masefield drank claret with him at teatime as they sang sea shanties together in Ransome’s mother’s kitchen.
And Ransome took to most people; he was not choosy. In fact, he was inclined to instant and lasting hero worship from which nothing could shift him, for he also had a stubborn conviction of his own rightness. His innocent egotism was underpinned by the belief that he was an excellent fellow who could do no wrong. These were dangerous qualities which in combination drew him into a career so bizarre that now, as during his long lifetime (1884– 1967), it takes your breath away.
For years, Ransome’s place as the pipe-sucking deity of children’s literature seemed unassailable. The latest adventures of John, Susan, Titty and Roger could safely be placed in the hands of the most impressionable child, and placed they were by wholesome parents every Christmas holidays between 1930 and 1943: Swallows and Amazons, Coot Club, We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea, every one a bestseller to be avoided with horror and loathing by any young person with the slightest vestige of humour or subversion. It is not just that the Fearsome Foursome live in a world of nannies and apple-cheeked farmers’ wives filling their milk-cans and calling them Miss Susan and Miss Titty (not an appellation whi
ch most farmers’ wives today could manage without corpsing). That, after all, is standard for children’s fiction of the period. It is their unspeakable goodness, their unflagging enthusiasm for outdoor pursuits, their intolerable expertise in handling boats and their never, ever being cross or bored. When Susan has a spare moment, she improves it by scouring the dishes again or by sewing buttons back on her younger brother’s shirt. Her elder brother, John, meanwhile practises tying some of the knots in The Seaman’s Handybook. In Arthur Ransome’s Lake District (and his Norfolk Broads), there are no wasps or midges, it hardly ever rains and no boat capsizes. One longs for them all to be deported to the island in Lord of the Flies, if not actually to share the fate of Simon and Piggy. In fact, of course, they sail home to a scrumptious tea with Mother. It’s hard to imagine that a grown man whose life’s ambition it was to be a great writer could have brought himself to turn out 300 pages of this stuff, let alone 3000.
Yet there was also a very different Arthur Ransome, a ruthless and tireless propagandist for the Bolsheviks and their Revolution, a double agent courted simultaneously by Lenin and Lord Curzon, a man whose total lack of qualm or scruple baffled the spymasters of East and West alike. This other Ransome was, I think, first brought to public attention by David Caute in The Fellow Travellers (1973), then by Hugh Brogan in his 1984 biography, more recently in papers declassified by MI5 in 2005 and now by Roland Chambers in this new biography.
It should be said at once that the bulk of the evidence was never secret, being set out in Ransome’s own articles for the Daily News and the Manchester Guardian (his early stuff was often reprinted in the New York Times as well), and in his pro-Soviet pamphlets, On Behalf of Russia (1918), Six Weeks in Russia (1919) and The Crisis in Russia (1921), and only half covered up in his autobiography, which was in any case published posthumously in 1976. It is Ransome who leads off Caute’s parade of useful idiots on the first page of his first chapter.
Chambers tells essentially the same story as Brogan, though his emphasis is different. The bulk of his pages concentrate on Ransome’s adventures in Russia and the Baltic, with his career as a children’s writer tacked on, rather perfunctorily, at the end. He declares candidly that when, at the age of forty-five, Ransome began writing the books for which he is now remembered, ‘the most interesting episode of his life, from a biographer’s point of view, was already over.’ Brogan presents a more rounded picture, and his touch is surer. Chambers is shaky on the minutiae, getting in a tangle, for example, about the names and titles of Foreign Office staff, lurching between Lord Cecil and Sir Robert Cecil for Lord Robert Cecil, Sir Esmie instead of Esme Howard and Sir Cavendish Bentinck for Victor Cavendish-Bentinck. More seriously, Muggeridge is described as ‘an enthusiastic apologist for Stalin’, when in reality he had not been in Russia three months before he was writing to tell Beatrice Webb, his wife’s aunt, of his ‘overwhelming conviction that the government and all it stands for . . . is evil and a denial of everything I care for in life’. Chambers also has an occasional weakness for the cliché: ‘In 1914, Serbia stood in relation to the great powers of Europe very much like a match next to a barrel packed with gunpowder.’ If the book had source notes and a better index, it would be easier to be clear who said what and when. All the same, Chambers tells the story with verve and a stylish deadpan manner when recounting Ransome’s more amazing excursions and effusions. It is a story not to be missed.
Ransome went to Russia in the first place to get away from his wife, Ivy. He hated Ivy with an unrelenting venom, later describing her as ‘an incarnate devil and nothing else’. Not everyone agreed. Ivy deeply admired her husband and helped him with his work, as well as keeping the household going while he disappeared to go on long walks or visit his friends. Of the two of them, Edward Thomas’s wife, Helen, greatly preferred Ivy and thought that Arthur was turning into an intolerable Superman. Arthur refused to see their only child, Tabitha, throughout her adolescence and never met her children at all, except when Tabitha tricked him into coming to see her in Somerset and introduced him to his granddaughter Hazel, by then aged eighteen. Ransome was enraged by this stratagem and stormed off to Taunton station, refusing Tabitha’s offer of a lift. He did have a substitute family in the shape of the real-life Susan, Titty, etc., the children of Collingwood’s sister Dora, but in old age he turned against them too. There were decided limits to his family affections.
But his political affections were unbounded. He had a front-row seat at the February Revolution, watching the siege of Litovsky Castle from his office desk. He was never short of courage, visited the Eastern Front three times and came under fire while surveying the battlefield from a Russian biplane. Like many other foreign observers, he welcomed the fall of the tsar: ‘It is impossible for people who have not lived here to know with what joy we write of the new Russian Government.’ Kerensky was his first Russian hero: ‘Then, as on a dozen other occasions, Mr Kerensky saved the situation.’
Ransome was at the Finland Station to see Lenin’s return; and soon he had a new hero. Lenin was Russia’s Oliver Cromwell, a modest, simple man; every line on his face was ‘a line of laughter’. Two years later, Ransome reflected in Six Weeks in Russia: ‘Walking home from the Kremlin, I tried to think of any other man of his calibre who had had a similar joyous temperament . . . I think the reason must be that he is the first great leader who utterly discounts the value of his own personality. He is quite without personal ambition.’
During the October Revolution, Ransome was back in England, fishing and making a half-hearted effort to patch things up with Ivy. He returned to Russia in time to see the Bolsheviks dissolve the elected Constituent Assembly, a spectacle which moved him to write: ‘I tell you I walk these abominable, unswept, mountainously dirt-clogged, snow-clogged streets in exultation. It is like walking on Wetherlam or Dew Crags, with the future of mankind spreading before one like the foothills of the Lake Country.’ As soon as Lenin looked like winning, Ransome abandoned Kerensky and parliamentary democracy without a backwards glance.
The suppression of the assembly was not simply a regrettable necessity, it was a glorious moment in history. As he listened to the exposition of his other new hero, Trotsky, ‘I felt I would willingly give the rest of my life if it could be divided into minutes and given to men in England and France so that those of little faith who say that the Russian Revolution is discredited could share for one minute each that wonderful experience.’
When Fanny Kaplan shot Lenin in August 1918, Ransome hurried to compose an obituary, describing how the common peasants worshipped Lenin as a saint. In the event, the obit was not needed.
When Lenin did die in 1924, after suffering his third stroke, Ransome also composed the obit that appeared in the Guardian. Lenin had been ‘like a lighthouse shining through a fog’. It had never occurred to him that the Revolution rested in his hands alone, or that he had for one moment approved unnecessary killing in his name.
Of course, other enthusiasts were to say similar things, then and later (Lincoln Steffens, the Webbs, H. G. Wells, Walter Duranty of the New York Times, Bernard Shaw), but it was Ransome who first coined those glowing phrases that lingered in the Western mind for so long. He was thus a valuable commodity, as his great friend Karl Radek, the presiding genius of the Comintern, was quick to realize. To the mercurial British agent in Moscow, Robert Bruce Lockhart, Ransome might be only an incorrigible sentimentalist, ‘a Don Quixote with a walrus moustache’, but that was just what the Bolsheviks needed: a propagandist who was not one of them but was obviously good-hearted and sincere. Ransome’s pamphlet On Behalf of Russia was written in close collaboration with Radek and was circulated by Russian agents among Allied troops. And when Lenin objected that Six Weeks in Russia failed to follow the party line, Radek pointed out that it was the ‘first thing written that had shown the Bolsheviks as human beings’.
Ransome was beautifully ignorant of the sacred texts of Marxism-Leninism. What he had instead was a narrative g
ift and an eye for local colour. He was one of the pioneers of the celebrity interview. How seductively he describes Trotsky’s simple furniture in his office in the Smolny Institute, marked only by a piece of paper pinned to the door with the words ‘People’s Commissary for Foreign Affairs’. From the great man’s striking head, with its high forehead and lively eyes, Ransome deduces in a flash that this is a man who will do nothing that will not best serve the revolutionary cause that is in his heart.
A statuesque secretary, Evgenia Shelepina, over six feet tall in her high heels, is taking notes at this first of many interviews. Later, Ransome and Evgenia, looking for someone to stamp his telegram, find the censor nodding off over a pot of potatoes on a Primus which is sending up clouds of black smoke. Evgenia and her sister Iroida invite Ransome to stay and drink tea. The whole scene is so delightfully innocent and Russian.
Ransome soon abandons his dark, chilly room at the Elite Hotel and moves into a merchant’s palace, which he shares with the Radeks and the Shelepin girls. He describes with open glee the abject terror of the millionaire who is being evicted. The amusing incident is recorded in his notebook under the title ‘Requisitioning a Flat’. Eventually, Evgenia is smuggled out of Russia to become Ransome’s second wife and spend the rest of her life making tea in the Lake District. Also smuggled out with the happy couple are thirty-five diamonds and three strings of pearls to be sold to fund Comintern activity in the West. Ransome denies knowledge of these items of luggage, but he is an old hand at the game. On an earlier exit, he has smuggled out 3 million roubles in cash for the Swedish Comintern. Iroida stays in Russia. She joins the Cheka and in 1926 is promoted to deputy director of the Moscow region forced labour camp. She continues at this exacting post in a busy part of the Gulag until the early 1930s.
We must not think that Ransome, as a foreign correspondent, was somehow shielded from the grim realities. On the contrary, his matchless contacts gave him access to the worst horrors. Besides, he was an energetic reporter who always wanted to see for himself. He saw, for example, in company with Yakov Peters, No. 2 at the Cheka, the ghastly aftermath of the Cheka’s massacre of the anarchists. Bruce Lockhart went on another tour with Peters’s boss, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, and wrote a horrified account of the blood and squalor. But Ransome (who as a boy in Leeds had been taught ice-skating by the exiled Prince Kropotkin) entirely approved of Dzerzhinsky’s actions: ‘The Soviet has finally shown itself capable of uprooting a movement which all previous governments have not dared to touch.’ Though keen on all the Bolshevik leaders, Ransome had an especially soft spot for Dzerzhinsky: ‘He has been much in prison [under the tsar], where he was remarkable for the urgent desire to take upon himself the unpleasant labour of other criminals, such as cleaning cells and emptying slops.’
English Voices Page 13
