The Wind in the Willows (2 page)

INTRODUCTION

Kenneth Grahame’s life was marked by duality, personal disappointment, and loss, all of which, through temperament and imagination, he transformed in his work, the best known being the children’s classic The Wind in the Willows. The charming, memorable characters of Rat, Mole, and Toad find their origin in the author’s own experience; the book’s themes—the lure of travel, the affection for home, the virtues of friendship, the benevolence of nature—all spring from Grahame’s deepest human and artistic preoccupations.

Sometimes readers assume that a children’s book must owe its existence to a particular child the author knows, as in the instance of Lewis Carroll writing Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for Alice Liddell or J. M. Barrie finding his inspiration for Peter Pan through his friendship with the Davies boys. While it is now probably more the exception than the rule, in Grahame’s case the assumption holds true; the first adventures of Toad grew from stories he told his son, Alastair, affectionately known as “Mouse.” The small, ordinary event of his son’s request for a bedtime story tapped deeply into Grahame’s psychic and imaginative life, enabling him to explore his deepest conflicts and longings in the extraordinary book he produced. It is perhaps because of this marriage of outer pressure with inner need that The Wind in the Willows, published in 1908, has survived. Its honesty and truth resonate with children and adults alike. Its sensual, poetic prose, so pleasurable to read, is informed by Grahame’s grasp and love of past literature, which is felt even when it is not visible.

Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on March 8, 1859. Grahame was five when his mother, Bessie Grahame, died of scarlet fever, leaving her husband to care for their four children. James Cunningham Grahame, who suffered from depression and alcoholism, was ill-equipped for this role. He promptly sent Kenneth and his siblings, Helen, William, and Roland, to live with their maternal grandmother, an emotionally aloof but capable woman. Her home, called the Mount at Cookham Dene, was situated in Berkshire on the Thames River. There, as only a child thrown back on his resources can do, Grahame found compensatory joy in the countryside (as an adult he likewise would find joy in the recuperative power of words). Nature became his companion; it offset his feelings of dislocation and abandonment, and fueled a rich, imaginative inner world. In Berkshire, he experienced, like Mole in the book’s opening chapter, “the joy of living and the delight of spring” (p. 7) and came face to face with the river, the book’s central symbol of earthly paradise and, arguably, something even greater, the imagination:

It all seemed too good to be true. Hither and thither through the meadows he rambled busily, along the hedgerows, across the copses, finding everywhere birds building, flowers budding, leaves thrusting—everything happy, and progressive, and occupied.... He thought his happiness was complete when, as he meandered aimlessly along, suddenly he stood by the edge of a full-fed river. Never in his life had he seen a river before.... All was a-shake and a-shiver—glints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble. The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the river he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spellbound by exciting stories (p. 8).

Unfortunately, Grahame’s stay at the Mount lasted only two years, for his grandmother moved to a new house in 1866, and soon after, his father summoned them home. That arrangement lasted less than a year; his father left them permanently and moved to France, where he died twenty years later, penniless in a boarding house. Grahame never saw his father again except to reclaim his body and plan his funeral.

In 1868, at the age of nine, Grahame and his older brother, William, entered St. Edward’s School at Oxford. After adjusting to the rigors of English public school life, Grahame distinguished himself as a scholar and athlete. He did this despite the emotional blow of William’s death from a respiratory ailment in 1875. Grahame had every expectation of continuing his studies at Oxford after St. Edward’s, but his grandmother and uncle had different ideas. His uncle arranged for him to work in London in his own firm of parliamentary agents in Westminster and later, in January 1879, as a gentleman clerk at the Bank of England.

Grahame made the best of a situation he did not choose or desire—he used his spare time afforded by banker’s hours to explore London and become part of a coterie of writers surrounding the scholar Frederick James Furnivall. Furnivall founded the Early English Text Society and the New Shakespeare Society, both of which Grahame joined; in 1880 he became the honorary secretary of the New Shakespeare Society and began writing poems and prose, ostensibly in a long-lost bank ledger. Furnivall, one of Grahame’s first critics, was as encouraging about his prose as he was discouraging about his verse.

Grahame now had access to an intellectual milieu he had craved and an outlet for his creativity, even as he dutifully reported to the bank, rising in its ranks over the next two decades to the impressive position of secretary of the Bank of England. By the time he received this appointment in 1898, he had buried his father, who died in 1887, traveled extensively in Europe, and published the three volumes that established his reputation, first as an essayist in Pagan Papers (1893), and then as an authority on childhood in The Golden Age (1895) and its sequel, Dream Days (1898).

The duality of Grahame’s life as a banker and writer and the degree to which these two worlds were separate is arresting, although duality was a condition he’d been familiar with as a Scot living in England and as a young outsider in his grandmother’s home. (It is said that when The Golden Age appeared, the governor of the bank thought Grahame was writing about bullion rather than the irretrievable days of childhood.) However much Grahame initially deplored working at the bank, he came to embrace it; it gave him a secure paycheck and freed him from any pressure of having to become a professional writer, which Grahame acknowledged would have been “torture.” When it came to writing, he was, by his own admission, “a spring not a pump” (Green, Kenneth Grahame [1859-1932], p. 113; see “For Further Reading”). Writing for neither money nor fame (he was an intensely private man), Grahame’s work grew out of personal need, which lent his enterprise a purity of motivation.

Pagan Papers, which is hardly known today, is a collection of essays that originally appeared anonymously in the National Observer, home to significant writers of the time such as Yeats, Conrad, James, and Shaw. Poet and playwright William Ernest Henley, perhaps best remembered for his poem “Invictus,” was the editor. At Henley’s suggestion, Grahame submitted a collection of his essays to John Lane at the Bodley Head Press, and it was published with a frontispiece by Aubrey Beardsley depicting the nature god Pan. The book received mixed reviews, some of which compared Grahame, mostly unfavorably, to Robert Louis Stevenson. The essays contained some of Grahame’s lifelong concerns, which would also be expressed in The Wind in the Willows: the romance of the road, the glory of nature, and the virtue of loafing. One of the essays, “The Rural Pan,” even captures the spirit of the nature god Pan as he later appears in the book’s seventh chapter, “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” : “In the hushed recesses of Hurley back water, where the canoe may be paddled almost under the tumbling comb of the weir, he is to be looked for; there the god pipes with freest abandonment.” Here, for comparison, is the dramatic moment in The Wind in the Willows when Rat and Mole approach Pan:

In silence Mole rowed steadily, and soon they came to a point where the river divided, a long backwater branching off to one side. With a slight movement of his head Rat, who had long dropped the rudder-lines, directed the rower to take the backwater.... Breathless and transfixed the Mole stopped rowing as the liquid run of that glad piping broke on him like a wave, caught him up, and possessed him utterly (pp. 85-86).

The Wind in the Willows proved to be the outgrowth and culmination of much of Grahame’s prior thought and work.

Grahame’s second book, The Golden Age, which Swinburne described as “too praiseworthy for praise” (Kuznets, Kenneth Grahame, p. 59) and Dream Days, which soon followed, marked a shift in technique and subject from those of Pagan Papers. Eschewing the essay form, Grahame adopted short, fictional stories to address a single topic: childhood. The stories concern a Victorian family of five children, one of whom is the unnamed narrator reflecting on his youth. They highlight the disparity between the sensitive child in touch with the natural world and the dull, materialistic, adult Olympian, estranged from nature and youth’s innocent pleasures. The Golden Age and Dream Days are landmarks in the development of children’s literature for changing the status of the child. Where earlier the child was represented as being an ignorant, though trainable proto-adult, in Grahame’s books the child was a unique, indeed superior being, with ideas and needs distinct from those of grown-ups. Though not written for children, The Golden Age and Dream Days portrayed childhood in a new way, and influenced the manner in which subsequent writers for children depicted them in fiction.

As an immediate literary descendant of the British Romantic poets, with their emphasis on childhood, subjective feeling, nature, and the imagination, Grahame was especially sympathetic to the poems of Wordsworth, whose Prelude recounts the poet’s growth from childhood to maturity and privileges childhood as the site of supreme sensibilities and union with the natural world. In her memoir, Elspeth Grahame claims that all of Grahame’s work is founded on the first stanza of Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” (First Whispers of “The Wind in the Willows,” p. 26), wherein the poet laments his loss of the child’s glorious view of the earth. Wordsworth’s sentiments would have struck a chord in Grahame, who concludes “The Olympians,” an essay in The Golden Age, with the narrator’s Wordsworthian observation: “I certainly did once inhabit Arcady. Can it be that I too have become an Olympian?” Grahame’s response to this inevitable dilemma was to create his own Arcadia, which he later did brilliantly in The Wind in the Willows.

Besides the stories of the five children (Harold, Edward, Charlotte, Selina, and the narrator), Dream Days contains as the last entry a story within a story, now known in its own right as the children’s book The Reluctant Dragon. Grahame’s first biographer, Patrick Chalmers, calls it “the top note of all Kenneth Grahame’s articles and short stories” (Kenneth Grahame, p. 91). Published separately in 1938 after Grahame’s death and still in print today, the book depicts a resourceful, fearless child who reconciles Saint George with a peace-loving dragon by enlisting them in a mock battle, thus allaying the townspeople’s fears of the beast. The dragon, a “happy Bohemian,” who likes to laze in front of his cave, enjoying sunsets and polishing his poems, stands as a tantalizing portent of the riverbank characters in The Wind in the Willows.

Grahame’s evolution as a writer was steady, clear, and, in 1898, nearly complete, the arc of his development taking him from personal essays to short fiction about childhood to an actual children’s story in “The Reluctant Dragon.” Peter Green describes it as a rising and falling curve, the falling curve being that of self-conscious explicitness, “the openly stated theme, the deliberate literary quotation or allusion, the carefully ornate style” and the rising curve that of “unconscious, implicit symbolism and allegory which is practically non-existent in the early essays” (p. 265) but which becomes apparent in The Wind in the Willows. After Dream Days, the stage was set for Grahame’s major work; his life’s events, namely his marriage and the birth of his son, squared with his temperament to propel him.