Ivy is bitterly condemned in his autobiography for her financial and emotional extravagance, and her unbalanced passion for melodrama. Her taste for the lurid limelight was gratified when Ransome wrote a biography of Oscar Wilde and was sued by Lord Alfred Douglas. The strains of the case speeded the collapse of the marriage.
In 1913, Ransome deserted his wife and small daughter, and fled to Russia, hoping to write a guide-book and translate fairy-tales. When Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914, Ransome reacted by taking a holiday — boating, fishing, sunbathing and playing tennis at a summer dacha: a lack of prescience that set a pattern for the future.
He became a reporter for the Daily News in 1915. The February Revolution of 1917 found him passionately on the side of the revolutionaries. In recognition of his support, Ransome was awarded a pass to the meetings of the Soviet: "It was the first proletariat parliament in the world," he boasted. "And by Jove it was tremendous. They said very nice things when they asked me to come. It was because of the stuff I got through on their behalf before the revolution."
It may be that he was so easily flattered because his self-esteem was low. Again, however, it set a pattern. Ransome continually preened himself on his unique access to inner circles, sure that he was the only Westerner who knew the "truth".
It is not that there were no clues about the nature of the regime he adulated. When Felix Dzerzhinsky founded the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police, he declared, "We represent terror — this must be stated openly — a terror that is absolutely essential in the revolutionary period we are passing through." Ransome swallowed this "tyrant's plea" wholesale, arguing for the necessity of state censorship, the suppression of democracy, and the ruthless annihilation of counter-insurgents, without trial.
Typically, Ransome missed the October Revolution of 1917 — he spent the Ten Days That Shook the World on holiday, fishing. He was back for the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, but managed not to witness the slaughter of peaceful pro-Assembly demonstrators, mown down by Bolshevik snipers. He had gone to lunch — in Trotsky's office.
