Arthur Ransome neglected or obscure? Hardly. Even in this hyperkinetic age of throwaway pop culture his Swallows and Amazons series remains in print, and the books are regarded as classics of their kind. Ransome is even remembered for his journalism: he covered the Russian Revolution for the press. But even famous authors have written books that deserve to be better known. Ransome's Bohemia in London is one such example: a semi-fictional memoir of his early years in the capital, first published in 1907 when he was 23. The Oxford University Press issued a paperback in 1984 (now out of print), with an Introduction by Rupert Hart-Davis. Not all of Fred Taylor's evocative illustrations were included in the OUP version, so for the dedicated collector a first edition is desirable.
The young Ransome published two collections of essays, which he desperately tried to suppress in later years, and some slim children's books, but Bohemia in London was his first substantial work. In his opening chapter Ransome states:
I wanted to write a book that would make real on paper the strange, tense, joyful and despairing, hopeful and sordid life that is lived in London by young artists and writers. I wanted to present life in London as it touches the people who come here, like Whittingtons, to seek the gold of fame on London pavements.
The book stands as an Edwardian precursor of Julian Maclaren-Ross's Memoirs of the Forties - see our feature on Ross- though it presents a rose-tinted and respectable picture of bohemianism, as befits the halcyon days before the carnage of the First World War put an end to innocence. (Coincidentally, the publisher Rupert Hart-Davis was a friend to both Ransome and Maclaren-Ross. As an adjutant in the Coldstream Guards, Hart-Davis saved Lance Corporal Ross from a court martial after Ross went absent without leave in wartime.) Ransome intersperses modern day scenes of artistic and literary life with anecdotes involving the ghosts of Grub Street: writers such as William Hazlitt, Carlyle, Pierce Egan, Thomas De Quincey, Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, Dr Johnson and Richard Savage haunt his pages. He records the happy-go-lucky life of the metropolitan bohemian through a series of kaleidoscopic sketches and vignettes, moving freely from artists' studios in Chelsea to Fleet Street taverns and editorial offices, Soho restaurants and coffee-houses, Charing Cross Road bookshops and Hampstead salons. David Garnett was asked to produce a reader's report in 1950, when Rupert Hart-Davis was considering reprinting the book, and wrote:
It is an odd book - full of genuine feeling and understanding which lapses frequently into rather trashy journalism - no doubt as the author tried to spin it out to the required length. It is a mixture of sensibility and commonsense crossed with immature romanticism. The mixture gives it an odd charm which is all the greater for the "period" absurdities, such as: "Even the maddest cigarette-smoking art student is tamed by marriage"...
It is not a book which will add lustre to Ransome's name - it is a young, immature and absurd book. But youth and immaturity have decided charm, and the evocation of the city of my childhood is delightful.
In 1904 the Yorkshire-born Ransome was living with relations in Balham - "the ugliest and most abominable of London's unpleasing suburbs" - when, "mad to be a Villon", he decided to make the move across the Albert Bridge into one of the artistic quarters of the city. He found a room in Chelsea above a greengrocer's shop, not far from the Fulham Road, and ordered a grocer's van for his removal:
The van drew up before the door. I announced its meaning, packed all my books into it, a railway rug, a bundle of clothes and my one large chair, said good-bye to my relations, and then, after lighting my clay pipe, and seating myself complacently on the tailboard, gave the order to start. I was as Columbus setting forth to a New World, a gypsy striking his tent for unknown woods; I felt as if I had been a wanderer in a caravan from my childhood as I loosened my coat, opened one or two buttons in the flannel shirt that I wore open at the neck, and saw the red brick houses slipping slowly away behind me... I have never known another afternoon like that.
The chapter entitled "A Novelist" is, for various reasons, the highlight of the book. This describes Ransome's visit to " a well-known writer", whom he is surprised to find living in one room, with a wife and baby, in a dingy Bloomsbury lodging-house.
I knocked, and went into the most dishevelled room it is possible to imagine. There was a big bed in it, unmade, the bed-clothes tumbled anyhow, several broken chairs, and a washing-stand with a basin out of which some one had taken a bite. The novelist, in a dressing-gown open at the neck, and showing plainly that there was nothing but skin beneath it, was writing at a desk, throwing off his sheets as fast as he covered them. A very pretty little Irish girl, of about nineteen or twenty, picked them up as they fell, and sorted them, at the same time doing her best to quiet the baby who sprawled all over her, as she sat on the floor.
The novelist tells his wife to take the baby out and orders a bottle of burgundy from his landlady. "Then he talked of literature," writes Ransome, "and so well that the untidy bed, the unclean room, the wife and the baby were as if they never had been. In spite of his unwashen hands, in spite of the dressing-gown, he won his way back to greatness."
Some years later, after the writer's wife has left him and he has become prosperous through the success of a book in America, Ransome dines with him in a decently furnished flat in Bloomsbury. What isn't revealed, though the posthumous Autobiography of Arthur Ransome (1976) provides the key, is that the writer portrayed here was Matthew Phipps Shiel. The dreary lodging-house was possibly 2 Keppel Street, off Russell Square (now demolished); Shiel lived there in 1902. The "Irish" wife in Bohemia in London was a Parisian Spaniard, Carolina Garcia Gomez, who, disliking London, left Shiel after a few years of marriage to return to the continent. In his autobiography Ransome explains how he dedicated Bohemia in London to Shiel in case he offended him with his overly frank portrayal of the writer's poverty-stricken existence. "Dedicate the book to me and libel me as much as you please" was Shiel's gracious response.
The autobiography gives a slightly different account of the first meeting with Shiel. Ransome explains that he was on an errand for the publisher Grant Richards, for whom he began working as an office boy, aged 17, in 1902. Ransome called to collect some manuscript pages, presumably for The Weird o'It, Shiel's vast novel, published by Grant Richards in December 1902. In the autobiography Shiel merely hands the manuscript bundle to Ransome, saying, "No time to talk now (I had not said a word), but you can come and see me again." In Bohemia in London Ransome says he is invited to visit after he mentioned Shiel in "a paragraph in one of my diminutive essays". Ransome may well have written something on Shiel for the Week's Survey, to which he was a contributor. Ransome's purpose in the book is not to give an account of the precise circumstances surrounding his encounter with Shiel, but to paint a generic portrait of a writer struggling in uncongenial circumstances.
In The Fitzrovians: A Portrait of Bohemian Society, 1900-55 (1988) - an essential guide for anyone interested in the subject - Hugh David is dismissive of what he argues is the well-bred Ransome's assumed bohemianism. He claims that Ransome, the son of a Leeds University professor, was never a bohemian in the manner of one of Henri Mürger's characters from Scènes de la Vie de Bohème (1851). He cites Ransome's squeamishness over Shiel's disordered room - and his noticing that Carolina goes out hatless - as telling indications of the author's middle-class values lurking beneath his veneer of carefree living. "However 'Bohemian' they might have been," writes David, "unmade beds, domestic squalor and the very idea of working before one was dressed were plainly notions undreamt of in his philosophy." Yet to emphasize his point to his presumably bourgeois and comfortably-off readers, Ransome's camera eye inevitably has to be offended by Shiel's domestic chaos. (The fact that it is Shiel portrayed here - he is briefly mentioned in a later chapter of The Fitzrovians - escapes the author's attention.) Curiously, Hugh David states that at this period there were no genuine bohemians in London - one had to travel to Mürger's Paris to find them. This is an odd assertion in view of some of the tales Ransome relates. What mustn't be forgotten is that he was writing in 1907. Bohemia in London exhibits a childlike wonder about its milieu - it is indeed "young, immature and absurd" as Garnett characterized it. Ransome is presenting an idealized picture of artistic life. He doubtless witnessed many sordid and disreputable incidents he had no wish to record; there is nothing in the book concerning prostitution, for example, and even the little episode involving Casanova in Soho is suitable for a maiden aunt to read. Mürger's verdict on Bohemia was that it "is the preface to the Academy, the Hospital, or the Morgue". To Ransome, however, at least in the framework of his book, it appears as a romantic youthful kingdom.
Several other once celebrated writers and artists crop up in the memoir. Ransome alludes to "One of the best books of verse published in recent years was dated from a dosshouse in the Marshalsea". This refers to W.H. Davies, author of The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908). Edward Thomas, the critic, nature writer and author of "Adlestrop", who was killed in action in 1917, appears unnamed in the chapter "Ways and Means". In 1904 he shared lodgings with Ransome at 1 Gunther Grove, Chelsea. Ransome explains that the two had subsisted for a week on a diet of apples and cheese when a cheque for £25 arrived from Thomas's agent. They celebrated with a sumptuous dinner in their favourite Soho restaurant - and, on leaving, went across the street to another restaurant to dine again. The American artist Pamela Colman Smith, the designer of A.E. Waite's Tarot card pack and a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, features as "Gypsy" in the chapter "A Chelsea Evening".
The poet and essayist Richard Middleton, author of "The Ghost-Ship", is described in the chapter "Coffee-Houses About Soho". Ransome says he encounters him in the Provence, a drinking hall in Leicester Square: a scene depicted by Fred Taylor on the cover of the OUP edition. Middleton has
A huge felt hat banged freely down over a wealth of thick black hair, bright blue eyes, an enormous black beard, a magnificent manner (now and again he would rise and bow profoundly, with his hat upon his heart, to some girls on the other side of the room)... He seemed to be delighting his friends with impromptu poetry. I did a mean but justifiable thing, and carried my pot of beer to a table just beside him, where I could see him better, and also hear his conversation. It was twaddle, but such downright, spirited, splendid twaddle, flung out from the heart of him in a grand, careless way that made me think of largesse royally scattered on a mob.
When he leaves, Ransome follows Middleton outside and asks him: "Are you prose or verse?"
"I write verse, but I dabble in the other thing."
Ransome invites him to visit for "Tobacco. Beer. Talk."
"I love beer. I adore tobacco. Talking is my life. I will come."
"He came, and it turned out that he worked in a bank from ten to four every day [Middleton was a clerk for the Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation from 1901 to 1907], and played the wild Bohemian every night. His beard was a disguise." This last statement was perhaps a disguise on Ransome's part, in case readers recognized Middleton. "Ransome lies about the colour of my eyes, damn him" was Middleton's comment upon the portrait.
Sadly, four years after the book appeared, Middleton, penniless, despairing and neuralgic, took his life with chloroform in Brussels. He would not have known it but this "dreamer, sensualist and poet" as he described himself, influenced the young Raymond Chandler, then contributing essays, like Middleton, to the Academy. Chandler, who met him in the Academy office, commented years later: "This incident [Middleton's suicide] made a great impression on me, because Middleton struck me as having far more talent than I was ever likely to possess; and if he couldn't make a go of it, it wasn't very likely that I could." Emigrating to America, Chandler gave up writing until his mid-forties. Middleton's tragedy may have played a part in his decision to stop writing as a young man.
In the chapter "Old and New Fleet Street" Ransome amusingly describes a meeting of the New Bohemians tavern society, of which Middleton was a valued member:
There was a long table down the middle of the room, and round it, on benches, were seated about a dozen men, some young, some very young, few over thirty, with beer mugs and spirit glasses before them, and pipes in their mouths. The room already reeked of the good, dirty, homely smell of tobacco smoke, although they had but just assembled. There was a big cigar box at one end of the table, into which each member dropped a coin representing the amount of liquor he expected to drink during the evening and the amount he thought fitting for any guest he happened to bring. A huge snuff box was passed around at intervals. All the members took pinches, and sneezed immediately afterwards, with apparent enjoyment. One of the members had just published a book, and the others were attacking him as healthy wolves worry a lame one.
Some of the elder statesmen among the New Bohemians, such as Arthur Machen and Edgar Jepson, had established reputations in the 1890s. It is interesting to note Ransome's aside on the Nineties, in the chapter "The Book-Shops of Bohemia", to "the forgotten immortals of the nineties, essays published by Mr. John Lane, and poets with fantastic frontispieces". By 1907 this unique period in literary history belonged to antiquity (see our Nineties compendium in the "In-and-Out-of-Print" section).
In his concluding chapter Ransome himself prepares to bid an inevitable farewell to his hand-to-mouth existence: "Bohemia is only a stage in a man's life, except in the case of fools and a very few others." "...the door into the registrar's office is the door out of Bohemia," he writes wistfully. Ransome married in 1909, though the union was not a success. He ends his bohemian idyll in Dowsonesque fashion:
But now, in youth, it is the best life there is, the most joyously, honestly youthful. It will be something to remember, when I am become a respectable British citizen, paying income tax and sitting on the Local Government Board, that once upon a time in my motley "I have flung roses, roses, riotously with the throng."
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