Roland Chambers, author of The Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome, discusses the two volumes of Ransome’s Russian journalism brought back into print by Faber Finds.

Arthur Ransome is usually remembered as the author of Swallows and Amazons and eleven further novels which earned him a reputation as one of the safest pair of hands in the British children’s canon. Few writers have identified themselves so effectively, or so exclusively, with nostalgia for the British Empire in its heyday, or the confidence and moral clarity with which British pioneers explored new territories.

Six Weeks in Russia and The Crisis in Russia belong to an earlier and entirely different episode in Ransome’s career: an episode which he was glad to forget until his children’s books had established him as a household name. Long before the Walkers first set sail for Wild Cat Island, he was one of the most influential and controversial journalists of his generation. Escaping from a disastrous first marriage, he had fled to Russia to study fairy tales, and was still in Russia when the First World War exploded in 1914. Over the next ten years, before returning to England with Trotsky’s former private secretary, he worked as Russian correspondent for the radical Daily News, then for the Manchester Guardian. Following the Bolshevik coup d’état in November 1917, he became one of a tiny number of Western journalists permitted regular access to the Bolshevik leaders and achieved a notoriety that at one point brought him within a hair’s breadth of prosecution for treason.

In addition to newspaper journalism, Ransome wrote three political pamphlets in defence of the Bolshevik government, the first and most aggressive completed in May 1918, as Allied troops prepared a military intervention. Six Weeks in Russia is his second pamphlet, written in early 1919 to describe conditions in St Petersburg and Moscow in the aftermath the World War. It includes several meetings with Lenin, a conversation with the deputy head of the Bolshevik secret police, Jacob Peters, and a description of the inauguration of the Third International, Lenin’s vehicle for spreading revolution abroad. Ransome maintained an essentially sympathetic view of the Communist experiment in Russia, but Six Weeks (the title suggests a visit) is also a self-conscious effort at distancing its author from the politics of the Revolution. Since his first pamphlet the Bolsheviks had unleashed the Red Terror, the Allies were supporting the Whites in the Civil War, and Ransome had been recruited to MI6 as a British spy. Six Weeks is therefore both a rare eye witness account and a careful high wire act: an effort at pleasing both the Bolshevik administration, British intelligence, and the Allied peace conference then sitting in Paris. The book was translated into Russian, and in England was read by Sir Basil Thomson, head of Special Branch, who congratulated Ransome and invited him to tea.

When Ransome wrote Six Weeks in Russia, he was the only British journalist living in Moscow with access to the Kremlin. By contrast, The Crisis in Russia was published in 1921, when the Bolsheviks and the British were negotiating a trade agreement and the Kremlin had opened its arms to all sorts of visitors. Owing to competing books by Bertrand Russell and H G Wells, Ransome’s third and final pamphlet received little attention. But it is essential to anybody interested in how the West came to terms with the Soviet as a sovereign government, and also for those who want to understand Arthur Ransome, whose friends at the time ranged from Karl Radek, the Bolshevik propaganda chief, to Enver Pasha, former Ottoman Minister for War and one of the chief architects of the Armenian genocide. Ransome, who in his first pamphlet had praised Soviet Russia as the freest country in the world, now openly acknowledged Bolshevik tyranny, insisting that it was the essential vehicle of economic recovery. Privately he had long since lost faith in the Revolution and was longing to go home.

Comfortably installed in the Lake District, it is, perhaps, unsurprising that Ransome discouraged searching questions about his time in Russia, while his second wife, Evgenia, admitted only that her father had been ‘a very senior gardener to the Tsar.’ But in Swallows and Amazons, Ransome could not resist at least some reference to a colourful past, casting himself as Captain Flint, a retired pirate struggling to complete his memoirs.

A new, regular slot in which we pick out some of the supporting material around books, to be found in our Faber Finds Archive. Faber Finds is our POD list, which sees a return to print for some great titles. We’ve already put over 600 books back into print, and the number is increasingly steadily.

Fiona MacCarthy

Here former Guardian design correspondent and acclaimed biographer Fiona MacCarthy discusses the ambitious social experiment which formed the basis of her debut book, The Simple Life. She explains the drive to set up an experimental artistic community – an exodus of skilled craftsmen and designers from London’s East End to the idyllic Cotswolds, led by C. R. Ashbee – and analyses its success and legacy.

Why I Wrote ‘The Simple Life’

I remember my own first sight of Chipping Campden back in the 1960s. The long curve of the high street; the mellowed grey stone houses; the church with its tall tower of surprising scale and splendour, reminding one that this had once been an important centre of the wool trade; the fantastically gabled and pillared market hall standing strangely isolated like a bizarre island in the middle of the street. This is still the most beautiful small town in the Cotswolds. Even now, on an early summer evening when the tourists have receded, it retains its ancient magic and you see it much as C. R. Ashbee and his guild of craftsmen would have seen it when they first arrived in Chipping Campden from the East End of London in that hopeful early summer of 1902.

The story of Ashbee’s exodus from London in search of an idyllic way of working in the countryside became the subject of my first book, The Simple Life. I was at that time the Guardian’s design correspondent, already fascinated with creative life and motivation, why exactly works of art and craft turn out the way they do, and I found the romantic impulses behind Ashbee’s flight to the Cotswolds with his skilled craftsmen, their wives and children – in all 150 people – not only intellectually interesting but also very moving. The attempt to create an Edwardian Utopia in a small town in the Cotswolds, putting William Morris’s ideals into actual practice, was brave to the point of recklessness.

The Simple Life

The idea of handmaking was central to the project. I found this sympathetic and familiar. My own husband had trained as a silversmith. The members of Ashbee’s Guild of Handicraft arrived with their tools of specialist trades; jewellery, silvers, enamelling, ironwork, furniture making, fine printing. They set up their workshops in a by then redundant silk mill. At the forefront of Ashbee’s thinking was the concept of social regeneration, of achieving a more balanced, democratic and more natural way of combining work and leisure than was possible in the squalid cramped conditions of London’s East End. There was an attractive element of mysticism. Things made in a beautiful rural setting would be more likely to turn out beautiful themselves.

One of the things I loved about the subject was the element of comedy. The simple collision of the country folk and cockneys who colonized the village. The social manoeuvrings within the workshops with their mixture of artisans and middle class idealists imbued with Ruskinian principles about destructive divisions in society caused by separating the ‘workers’ from the ‘thinkers’. In Ashbee’s Utopia workers and thinkers merged, playing in the village band, acting in the annual Guild plays, taking part in the Guild sing-songs, bathing naked in the bathing lake.

Ashbee was himself homosexual, though married, a disciple of the pioneering gay liberationist Edward Carpenter. One of the most intriguing elements of the story of the Guild in Chipping Campden is the quiet but insistent homoeroticism. This is something I would have made more of had I been writing The Simple Life today.

For me as a biographer many of the themes I first discovered in C. R. Ashbee’s story lingered in my mind. It was a fortunately rich beginning that led me on to books on Eric Gill and William Morris and the biography I am just completing, a life of Edward Burne-Jones. I still find the idea of experimental artistic communities entrancing. Next I plan to write a book on Gropius, the Bauhaus and the hopes of building a modernist new world.

More generally, since the Ashbee book was published, the instincts behind the exodus to Chipping Campden a century ago have recently been reawakened. We are now experiencing a rather similar search for an authentic way of life as people question the costs of the unbridled and unprincipled global expansion of recent years. Some of us have been returning to an ‘elemental’ mode, seeing the value of taking things more slowly, appreciating our own local countryside, retrieving our almost forgotten human skills of craftsmanship. We are even (like Ashbee’s craftsmen) tending our allotments. To a surprising extent the human longing for a simpler life lives on.

– Fiona MacCarthy

You can buy a copy of The Simple Life from the Faber Finds website.

Faber Finds Editor John Seaton writes:

In his biography of Michael Foot Kenneth Morgan wrote, ‘His passing will symbolize a world we have lost.’ That moment has sadly arrived. Michael Foot died yesterday.

The Pen and the Sword

Michael Foot was famous for having heroes about whom he wrote with such eloquence. It is perhaps appropriate therefore (as Faber Finds Editor) that one of my heroes, was Michael himself. Noticing that most of his titles were out of print, I set about acquiring their rights. In that process I had the memorable experience of being invited to Michael’s Hampstead home for a morning coffee. Although frail, he was spellbinding, talking with undiminished verve and knowledge about Heine, Hazlitt, Nye Bevan, H. G. Wells, Swift and many more. He also spoke repeatedly and with moving affection about his late wife, Jill Craigie: it was an unforgettable an uplifting encounter.

In Faber Finds The Pen and the Sword (his book about Jonathan Swift, one of his heroes, and his most scholarly work) and his Aneurin Bevan biography (in the original two volumes) have already been published.

Due to be published are Guilty Men (one of the most effective polemics of the twentieth-century) and the two best collections of his essays, Debts of Honour and Loyalists and Loners. These three books will now be reissued as soon as possible.

Despite its leanings to hagiography the Nye Bevan biography is a great work, about a flawed but great man to whom, as the political architect of the NHS, we are all indebted. There was no one better suited to write this book than Michael Foot.

On Michael Foot, let Kenneth Morgan have the last words:

‘He stands, and feels himself to stand, in the great tradition of dissenting “trouble-makers”, the heir to Fox and Paine, Hazlitt and Cobbett. He played in his life many parts. As icon of the socialist left, he was custodian and communicator of British socialism. He was the greatest pamphleteer perhaps since John Wilkes, a formidable editor, and author of a glittering biography of his idol Nye Bevan. He was a scintillating parliamentarian, an inveterate critic and peacemonger as Bevanite, Tribunite and founder member of the CND, yet also a belligerent patriotand internationalist from Dunkirk to Dubrovnik.’

This could hardly be more removed from the venal political world of duck ponds and moats.

As the 22-strong longlist proves, 1970 was an incredibly rich year for British and Commonwealth fiction. Just scan the list very quickly and big names jump out at you – the likes of Iris Murdoch, Ruth Rendell, Melvyn Bragg and Patrick O’Brian.

The proviso for books to be considered for the award was that they must currently be available to buy, ie in print. Fortunately for two of the authors on the list – Elaine Feinstein and Francis King – their books are available in Faber’s print-on-demand imprint, Faber Finds.

Faber Finds comes with the tagline ‘Bringing Great Writing Back into Print’. Hopefully, with the combination of digital technology and the good old-fashioned media attention that comes with major literary prizes, these two books – The Circle and A Domestic Animal – can gain even more recognition posthumously, and find a new band of appreciative readers.

We managed to get both Elaine Feinstein and Francis King to provide some background to their books.

A Domestic Animal by Francis King

A Domestic Animal

‘Autobiographical in inspiration, its story that of an obsessive love that devoured more than a year of my existence, this was the most painful novel that I have ever had either to live or to write.

With the aftermath of its publication, the anguish merely worsened. A former Labour M.P., Tom Skeffington-Lodge, a Brighton friend and neighbour, concluded, I must admit with justification, that a woman character was based on himself and at once sued for libel. In consequence I had to sell my beautiful house in Brighton to pay the lawyers of everyone concerned and at once fell off the property ladder.

Since the obsessive love was a homosexual one, many of the reviewers found the book at best distasteful and at worst disgusting and when at last a new version was reissued took an all too obvious pleasure in laying into it.

Yet the remarkable thing is that the book has survived, being repeatedly reprinted  and bringing me more fan-letters that any other of my works. Its recent appearance on the ‘Lost’ 1970 Booker list is a proof that it still pulses with life despite all the drubbings so gleefully administered to it over so many years.’

– Francis King, February 2010

The Circle by Elaine Feinstein

The Circle

‘This is a novel written while I was living in a Georgian house in Brighton – which my husband and I could not afford to maintain – and commuting to Colchester where I was an Assistant Lecturer at the University of Essex.

It is a story about a marriage under stress, told in fragments of memory which lodge like shrapnel. Lena has tried to find her own way – as a whole generation of women have not – but the cost has been high. The family home is messy, every post brings bills, and most painful of all, her children suffer from the lack of domestic structure. We see the world she has created sharply through their eyes.

It is a novel about many kinds of betrayal. When Lena discovers her husband is sleeping with the au pair, he assuages his guilt by making her feel inadequate. Most of the women in the novel, one way or another, are dependent on the opinion of their men. They are often ashamed of their own ambitions, or wait for the telephone to ring. These are not yet days of consciousness-raising groups.

Lena cannot want to be like them, yet she finds, when her two boys are lost in a freak snowstorm on their way home from school, it is an “ordinary woman” who has seen their distress and takes them in.

The Circle is my first novel, written after a group of my poems had been published in Faber Introduction 1, and sharing the same intensity.’

– Elaine Feinstein, February 2010

The shortlist for the award will be announced in March, and the winner in May, with voting opened to the public.