Eternal Boy

by Dennison, Matthew;

  Shortly afterwards, Kenneth made a second visit to Italy, this time to Rome. In imagination he had often found himself in the city – this classically educated young man who had doodled in the margins of Macaulay’s Lays, and later, to Helen’s derision, declaimed their stately measure in the woods at Cranbourne. He found the reality a disappointment, and eventually would argue that, for a city of legend, it could not be otherwise. In Kenneth’s essays Rome remains the ‘Eternal City’, the ‘Golden City’. Many years later, under sadly altered circumstances, he returned. In 1890 his enjoyment of Venice – in his mind less hedged about by its own myths and storybook expectations – was more straightforward. He called it ‘a fine city, wherein… the air is full of music and the sky full of stars, and the lights flash and shimmer on the polished steel prows of the swaying gondolas’.13

  *

  In the bank ledger he showed to Furnivall, Kenneth attempted to answer a question: ‘Of the friends that make so great a part of our life, relentless Time makes two bodies – the living and the dead – which are the dearer?’14 Kenneth chose the dead. ‘Their sympathies are sure,’ he wrote.

  It was not the case in his own life, as he knew, though sweet Bessie Grahame was certainly an exception. At the end of February 1887, Cunningham Grahame died. He appears to have made no attempt to contact Kenneth – or Helen, Willie or Roland – in the twenty years following his departure for Normandy. The news arrived in the form of two telegrams sent by Uncle John Grahame’s partner Mr Currie from the Le Havre office of Grahame, Spens and Currie. The first notified Kenneth of his father’s stroke; the second, soon after, of his death, described as instantaneous.

  Kenneth travelled to France overnight from Southampton. In his father’s room, in a house belonging to an elderly Frenchwoman called Madame Bazille, Cunningham’s tolerant and affectionate landlady for the last eighteen years, little remained to see bar the body: Currie had already cleared away any books and papers to the office. Kenneth’s farewell was brief; the coffin was shortly closed. The burial took place the same afternoon. The resident Methodist minister, Mr Whelpton, conducted the service according to Anglican rites in the affordable cemetery at Sainte-Adresse to the north, ‘on the heights overlooking the sea, near the lighthouses’. Kenneth’s diary suggests a smallish knot of mourners: Madame Bazille, her son and daughter-in-law, Kenneth, Currie and clerks from Grahame, Spens and Currie. Afterwards, with Currie’s approval, Kenneth gave Madame Bazille £5 – a sum rather greater then than now – and, still later, the fifteen francs he found in his father’s pockets. To her son he gave his father’s clothes. He declined Madame Bazille’s offer in return of ‘a small photo of [Cunningham] which he had given her, and which she wished me to take if I had not got one’.15 Carefully he looked through the few possessions remaining in the rented room. From the office he selected books, including dictionaries: poor record of a life. He visited the docks, accompanied by a member of Currie’s staff.

  The following day, after consigning events to his diary in precise, unemotional prose, he returned to London. He never again referred directly to his father with any nearer approach to emotion. Kenneth’s essay writing and subsequent fiction mostly bypass the question of parents; in his own life he pursued neither father nor mother substitutes, though Furnivall and his first editor W. E. Henley both fulfilled a quasi-paternal role as literary mentors. Instead, imprinted on virtually everything Kenneth wrote is the legacy of The Mount, that stretch of green English riverbank unknown to Cunningham Grahame, or the image of the Downs, where mostly Kenneth chose to walk alone.

  *

  In the second half of 1887, Frederick Greenwood, editor of the St James’s Gazette, accepted Kenneth’s essay ‘By a Northern Furrow’. It was written in the shadow of Cunningham’s death, a wintry meditation on the endless cycle of nature’s renewal and, against this, the transitoriness of human life. On the subject of death, Kenneth quoted Tennyson and Walt Whitman; ‘emblems of mortality’ permeate his discussion of landscape and painting. His ‘somewhat sad account of the past year’s words and deeds’ almost certainly had a private resonance.

  He did not return to the theme. Greenwood accepted a second, quite different contribution, though he did not publish it until the autumn of 1890. In ‘A Bohemian in Exile’, Kenneth crafted the first of his tales of London men who flee the capital. Beyond the idea of abandonment, there are no obvious links to Cunningham. ‘He doubtless chose wisely to enjoy life his own way, and to gather from the fleeting days what bliss they had to give, nor spend them in toiling for a harvest to be reaped when he was dust,’ Kenneth concluded.16 More than a verdict on his father’s flight, it was a warning of time’s evanescence aimed at city workers, himself among them. Even so cursory an inspection of Madame Bazille’s spartan lodgings had revealed to him their stark absence of ‘bliss’.

  In the meantime Kenneth cast his net widely in pursuit of alternative outlets for his writing. To a handful of editors he despatched neat, hand-written essays, sometimes transcribed on Bank of England paper – his practice, as Reginald Inglis had seen, since at least 1882. On 18 September 1888, in response to one such, now lost, he received a letter from the editor of the Cornhill Magazine, a distinguished and widely read journal that had previously serialized novels by Eliot, Trollope and Hardy. ‘Your little paper is too short and slight for the Cornhill,’ James Payn wrote, ‘but the humour it exhibits has struck me as being exceptional and leads me to hope that I may again hear from you.’17 At a time when ‘five out of six of my little meteorites came back to me’, Kenneth remembered, Payn’s response was sufficiently encouraging to merit keeping, although there is no evidence that he took up its invitation. His only surviving overtly humorous writing, ‘Conversation between a Balcony and a Waterspout’, a satire on the relationship of Irish Home Rule politician Charles Parnell and his mistress Katharine O’Shea, was published anonymously in November 1890 in the St James’s Gazette.

  Kenneth’s determination remained dogged. He had not forgotten – and never would – John Grahame’s refusal to fund a university education. ‘The heroes of all history had always been noted for their unswerving constancy,’ announces the child narrator of ‘A Saga of the Seas’.18 In Kenneth’s own case, constancy was rewarded by a series of serendipitous literary encounters, beginning with Furnivall.

  However, it was William Ernest Henley, in the decade after Kenneth met Furnivall, whose enthusiasm for Kenneth’s writing transformed aspiration into reality. Ten years Kenneth’s senior, belligerent but zealous, Henley had only one foot. (The other had been amputated as a result of tubercular arthritis in 1875.) A friend of Robert Louis Stevenson, he was the model for Long John Silver in Treasure Island, a novel that he had helped steer towards publication. Physical lameness did not diminish his pugilist’s spirit. Opinionated, argumentative and energetic, he was a vociferous opponent of socialism, Puritanism and religious orthodoxies: art and empire made up his credo. In January 1889 Henley was appointed editor of the Edinburgh weekly newspaper, the Scots Observer. The following year, in a bid to increase circulation, he rebranded the paper the National Observer and, in 1892, transferred operations from Scotland to London.

  Henley accepted Kenneth’s first offering, ‘Of Smoking’, while he himself was completing a monograph about Scottish portraitist Henry Raeburn; he published the essay in the Scots Observer in October 1890. Over the next four years, he printed twenty more of Kenneth’s essays. He ‘was the first Editor who gave me a full and a free and a frank show, who took all I had and asked me for more,’ Kenneth remembered.19 If Kenneth had not yet discovered for himself Stevenson’s Virginibus Puerisque, a collection of essays published in 1881 and reissued in 1887, Henley certainly directed his attention towards it. Virginibus Puerisque is dedicated to Henley; an essay called ‘Some Portraits by Raeburn’ anticipates his own lengthier study. Kenneth’s early essays for Henley closely retraced Stevenson’s footprints. ‘Loafing’ echoes ‘An Apology for Idlers’, ‘The Rural Pan’ St
evenson’s ‘Pan’s Pipes’. Stevenson had already articulated Kenneth’s consistent underlying lament for the losses caused by the century’s ‘progress’: ‘Science writes of the world as if with the cold finger of a starfish; it is all true; but what is it when compared to the reality of which it discourses? where hearts beat high in April, and death strikes, and hills totter in the earthquake, and there is a glamour over all the objects of sight, and a thrill in all noises for the ear, and Romance herself has made a dwelling among men?’20 Unsurprisingly, a critic labelled Kenneth’s essays ‘Stevensonettes’.

  Henley’s championing placed Kenneth within a stable of distinguished National Observer writers: W. B. Yeats, J. M. Barrie, Kipling, H. G. Wells. Henley also invested the business of writing with that camaraderie Kenneth shared with the more sympathetic of his Bank of England colleagues, including Sidney Ward, who accompanied him on walking weekends on the Downs, or the young men he worked alongside at Toynbee Hall and Whitechapel Art Gallery, among them the barrister with whom he later shared a house, Tom Greg. Caustic and vituperative on slender provocation, Henley was remarkable for his avuncular approach to nurturing talent. Yeats remembered him ‘[making] us feel always our importance, and no man among us could do good work, or show the promise of it, and lack his praise’; Stevenson referred to shared sympathy, ‘founded on the love of our art, and nourished by mutual assistance’.21 For favoured contributors, Henley hosted a weekly Friday-night supper at Solferino’s in Rupert Street and Sunday ‘at homes’ in his house in Chiswick, ‘in two rooms, with folding doors between, and hung… with photographs from Dutch masters, and in one room there was always… a table with cold meat’. Max Beerbohm’s description of Henley’s table at Solferino’s as ‘the Henley regatta’ suggests a recognized group identity. Superficial or not, it gave Kenneth a sense of belonging. It legitimized his activities outside the bank.

  At the outset, Kenneth benefited twice over from Henley’s belief in him and Stevenson’s absence. Henley’s continuing admiration for the Stevenson-style essay, which Stevenson himself was unable to supply following his departure for America in 1887, left a void filled by Kenneth. In the first years of their association, Virginibus Puerisque provided Kenneth with a workable template for his contributions to Henley’s paper. Like many young writers, Kenneth may have struggled to find material to sustain his eagerness to write. Henley’s attachment to the ‘Stevensonette’ and its recognizably fin-de-siècle preoccupations – the thirst for oblivion, suspicion of modernity, personal bohemianism and nature mysticism – supplied Kenneth with a sympathetic agenda and saved him the problem of identifying appropriate subject matter. Kenneth’s treatment of his subjects was his own: his love of landscape is frequently the dominant note. Avoiding overt didacticism, his touch is lighter than Stevenson’s.

  ‘Mr Henley supplied not only a haven for young writers, but also an impulse and momentum,’ an anonymous critic claimed in 1897.22 The price Henley exacted was an assertive, intrusive approach to his task of editing. Fond of classical allusions and archaic verbal flourishes, he embellished the work of all his contributors with his own bulky stylistic mannerisms. He was obdurate in the face of resistance: annotated proofs of an unpublished essay, ‘A Funeral’, reveal Henley’s ‘improvements’ and Kenneth’s protests. Only with publication of ‘The Olympians’, the first of Kenneth’s non-Stevensonette stories about Edward, Selina, Charlotte and Harold, did his intervention lessen. Tactfully Kenneth would choose to remember his particular quality as vividness.

  *

  To at least one observer, Kenneth appeared at a gathering of ‘the Henley regatta’ in September 1891 ‘a tall, well-knit… man, who moved slowly and with dignity, and who preserved, amid the violent discussions and altercations that enlivened the meetings of the group, a calm, comprehending demeanour accompanied by a ready smile that women would call “sweet”. And yet this… temperate, kindly-looking man had also a startled air, as a fawn might show who suddenly found himself on Boston Common… unable to escape wholly from the memory of the glades and wood whence he had come. He seemed to be a man who had not yet become quite accustomed to the discovery that he was no longer a child… Every one of us has his adjective. His adjective was – startled.’23

  Kenneth never would escape the memory of the glades and wood – the country round The Mount – and deliberately so. On these memories he built past, present and future happiness. To be ‘as a fawn’ – childlike – was both inadvertent and an aspiration, his protest against Olympians’ barbarism and silliness. He praised the child’s sense of wonder, ‘the most priceless possession of the human race’, and queried ‘the use of living in a world devoid of wonderment’; in The Wind in the Willows, he eventually offered his riposte to an ‘unwondering’ world.24 His Olympians stories are Wordsworthian, shaped by the poet’s vision of the childish connection to the divine in the world around us, which Kenneth interpreted both as wonder and insight:

  There was a time when meadow, grove and stream,

  The earth, and every common sight,

  To me did seem apparelled in celestial light,

  The glory and the freshness of a dream.

  ‘“There was a time”,’ Kenneth explained to an American academic, quoting Wordsworth. ‘It is that time which I have attempted to recapture and commemorate,’ and not only in a handful of stories but in his conduct of his life.25 Daily encounters did indeed startle him: his introduction to Frederick Fryer as a new boy at St Edward’s, first exposure to his fellow clerks in the Bank of England – proof that his ‘fourth dimension’ offered only qualified protection. The habit of withdrawal within himself persisted. He lived his life in compartments. ‘It is possible that he was somebody quite different in his official capacity at the Bank of England,’ concluded Evelyn Sharp, who came across Kenneth at literary parties. He was childlike but not childish: stubbornly, he preserved his own version of the child’s view.

  Showcased in a series of essay-length stories in the 1890s, this distinctive outlook earned him the unqualified admiration of his contemporaries.

  • 7 •

  ‘I liked to get my meals regular and then to prop my back against a bit of rock and snooze a bit, and wake up and think of things going on’

  IN THE PAGES of the Scots Observer Kenneth described himself as one of the ‘labourers in the vineyard, toilers and swinkers, [for whom] the morning pipe is smoked in hurry and fear and a sense of alarums and excursions and fleeting trains’.1

  There were shards of truth in his affable narrative posturing. By 1890, Kenneth had been at the Bank of England for more than a decade. Soon Henley would begin pressing him to resign, to concentrate instead on writing full time, but Kenneth either did not intend, or was insufficiently brave, to leave yet. A transfer to the chief cashier’s office in 1888 had been followed a year later by a second move, to the secretary’s office; in the directors’ library he catalogued books, ‘mainly on dry-as-dust subjects’.2 Bank of England routine was less exacting than that of many workplaces, its toil less toilsome: it imposed constraints nonetheless. In Chelsea Gardens, where work could be set aside, Kenneth forced himself to the ‘pleasurable agony of attempting stately sentences of English prose’.3 The ‘toil [of] making sentences’, he reflected, meant ‘sitt[ing] indoors for many hours, cramped above a desk’, while across the river in Battersea Park lay the distracting possibility that the wind was ‘singing in the willows’.4

  In the secretary’s office, Kenneth worked alongside Sidney Ward, also a co-worker at Toynbee Hall. The men became friends, Sidney nearer to Kenneth in character than clerks of the spitting, dog-fighting, sheep-butchering, drunken variety: he recognized Kenneth’s self-containment. Kenneth, he knew, ‘liked a solitary life as a bachelor, with his books and writing, so that, friends as we were, I never saw a great deal of him outside our office life’. Correctly he estimated that ‘he was probably the better pleased to see me because I didn’t dig him out too often’.5

  At Kennet
h’s invitation Sidney shared walking weekends in the Berkshire Downs and Chilterns. Sidney’s account of one of these weekends suggests the bachelor chumminess of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, published in the same year. One cold, sunny spring weekend, a friend lent Kenneth a fourteenth-century cottage on the tree-studded main street of Streatley, ‘and we had a grand twenty-mile walk along the Ridgeway… If we either of us said clever things that day they are forgotten, but we came home happy and tired, bought some chops and fetched a huge jug of beer from the pub. We cooked our dinner over the open wood fire, and how good the chops were! Then great chunks of cheese, new bread, great swills of beer, pipes, bed, and heavenly sleep!’6 Kenneth matched Sidney’s enjoyment: nearly twenty years later, he revisited their weekends in the peaceable male companionship of The Wind in the Willows. ‘Mole and Rat kicked the fire up, drew their chairs in, brewed themselves a last nightcap of mulled ale, and discussed the events of the long day. At last the Rat, with a tremendous yawn… clambered into his bunk and rolled himself well up in the blankets, and slumber gathered him forthwith, as a swath of barley is folded into the arms of the reaping-machine.’7

  In the second half of 1894, Kenneth was appointed acting secretary of the Bank of England. Four years later, at the young age of thirty-nine, this appointment was confirmed. As secretary he occupied one of the bank’s three senior positions; among more congenial tasks was the presidency of the bank’s Library and Literary Association.8 There is no reason to assume that promotion altered his view of City life, or the bank’s activities in particular. A family friend criticized an attitude on Kenneth’s part, decried as half-heartedness; as late as 1895, Kenneth revealed the extent of his ambivalence in a description of a nightmarish vision of a City clerk stalked on the Underground by the ‘old – oh, so very old’ figure of Death.9 In ‘The Headswoman’, the youthful executioner, Jeanne, summarizes her role as ‘an occupation demanding punctuality, concentration, judgement, – all the qualities, in fine, that go to make a good business man’, a statement that tells us something of Kenneth’s thoughts concerning commerce and finance. For good measure, she dismisses the law, that other refuge of Grahame men, as ‘a minor and less exacting walk of life’ than her own line in corporal punishment.