Kenneth, of course, was both kinds of dragon. His weekends on the Downs involved scouring and pacing aplenty to satisfy his active side: his requirement for ‘meals regular’ and things ‘going on just the same’ were assumptions of the banker secure in his purse and content with the status quo. Absent from Threadneedle Street, Kenneth propped his back against a bit of rock and daydreamed and reimagined his daydreams as fiction: the dragon who, in place of action, exasperates the boy with ‘views and theories of life and personal tendencies, and all that sort of thing’.29
Like the dragon, celebrated, successful, lionized Kenneth would meet his own St George. She appeared in surprising guise and at a moment of defencelessness to lure him unexpectedly to his defeat.
• 8 •
‘Woman as but a drab thing’
‘HITHERTO WE HAD known the outward woman as but a drab thing, hour-glass shaped, nearly legless, bunched here, constricted there; slow of movement,’ Kenneth wrote in 1896.1 The statement belongs to the adult writer, at the age of thirty-seven, as much as to the childish narrator to whom he attributes it. It follows an ecstatic description of a circus performer called Coralie. She is dressed in ‘pink and spangles’. Her white arms are bare; her legs are visible. She is golden-haired and her beauty strikes Kenneth’s narrator as ‘more than mortal’. Fleetingly, he is in love.
Love had scarcely touched Kenneth himself. Bessie Grahame brimmed over with maternal love, but died much too soon to draw her children’s emotional horizons or even leave behind her any residue of unconditional affection; their father’s preoccupations were directed inwards. Neither Mrs Inglis nor Uncle John Grahame had rated emotional wellbeing uppermost in their duty of care to Cunningham’s orphans. The standard brutalities of nineteenth-century boarding school, added to the shock of Willie’s death, further dammed any overflow of feelings in Kenneth and Roland. Helen’s brusqueness masked strong sibling affection. John Grahame had insisted that Kenneth participate in the adult, masculine world of work, away from Cranbourne and brother and sister, within months of his sixteenth birthday. Unsurprisingly, Kenneth’s childhood daydreaming had hardened into a preference, amounting to a requirement, for solitude: only solitude, he believed, let the mind shake off its harness, thoughts be liberated, creativity stimulated, ‘for, be he who may, if there is another fellow present, your mind has to trot between shafts’.2 In their first years at the Bank of England, with reservations on Kenneth’s part, he and Roland had lived together briefly in Bloomsbury Street. In 1882 Kenneth made the break, choosing to live alone.
He gave up the Chelsea flat after a dozen years to set up house at 5 Kensington Crescent with Tom Greg, an amiable barrister ‘of rugged vitality and ever-present sympathy’, whom he had met at Toynbee Hall. Kenneth’s reasons for this change are unclear, but as acting secretary of the bank he may have been required to entertain at home on a larger, more formal scale; Annie Grahame believed he had tired of looking after himself and craved the services of a live-in cook-housekeeper who could not be accommodated in a flat. Tom Greg shared Kenneth’s sideline in journalism, a series of essays on wine published in the Pall Mall Gazette and the National Observer; he contributed to the Art Journal, the Manchester Guardian, the Birmingham Daily Post. Of a wealthy mill-owning family from Cheshire, he collected early English and continental pottery, later loaning ceramics described as ‘pre-Wedgwood’ to a museum in Manchester; his tastes influenced Kenneth’s. His library included a two-volume first edition of Grimm’s fairy tales in handsome Morocco bindings. Epicureanism supplied a further link. In The Wind in the Willows, Rat defines his world as ‘brother and sister… and aunts, and company, and food and drink, and (naturally) washing’.3 Kenneth could have said something similar, with food and drink not least on the list – like Rat’s breathless picnic menu of ‘coldtonguecoldhamcoldbeefpickledgherkinssaladfrenchrollscresssandwichespottedmeatgingerbeerlemonadesodawater’ or the picture of his own pantry Kenneth drew in a story called ‘Bertie’s Escapade’: ‘cold chicken, tongue, pressed beef, jellies, trifle and champagne’, ‘apples, oranges, chocolates, ginger and crackers’.4
The men employed a housekeeper, Sarah Bath: an outspoken woman of black-and-white convictions, low church bias and decided outlook, from Somerset. Jointly they oversaw a generous table and a full cellar. ‘With port we lose the senses, with claret we exchange them,’ Greg wrote; he considered port the prince of wines, and, ‘across the dinner table, in smoking-room armchairs’, Kenneth’s evenings at home were full of like-minded conviviality.5 Anecdotal evidence paints Sarah Bath as a battleaxe. She told Kenneth that she mistrusted writers, whom she considered ‘loose fish’. She preferred bankers – as Kenneth pointed out to her, by the same analogy, ‘goldfish’. She prided herself on a job well done and provided for her bachelor charges high levels of comfort. Kenneth affixed to the outside of the house the Cantagalli plaque of the Madonna and Child he had bought with Annie Grahame in Florence. A visiting cousin noted his irritation at Greg’s particular taste in pictures and manner of hanging them. For the most part the arrangement was a happy one.
It lasted a year. In 1895 Tom Greg became engaged to Mary Hope, leaving Kenneth in Kensington Crescent, in Sarah Bath’s capable care, with a new housemate, Gregory Smith. Kenneth’s reaction to this unexpectedly sudden departure has not survived: in itself it was not enough to point his thoughts inevitably towards marriage. 1895 found him particularly busy. Outside the bank he was occupied by the success of The Golden Age and engaged on a series of new stories that would make up its sequel; Henley published two new pieces in the New Review in March and a third in October. Like every Yellow Book contributor, he was concerned by the trial of Oscar Wilde. At the point of arrest on 5 April, Wilde was carrying a French novel: with its bright covers, journalists mistook it for The Yellow Book. Reaction to Wilde’s ‘crimes’ was virulent. It did not spare The Yellow Book and the journal’s offices at The Bodley Head were stoned. ‘Uncleanliness is next to Bodliness,’ Punch quipped, to Kenneth’s horror. A decade ago, he had removed himself physically from the backlash that followed performance of The Cenci. On this occasion, troubled by Punch’s insinuation, he suggested that Lane sue, and further detached himself from ‘Wildean’ elements of Harland’s journal. ‘I do not care for notoriety: in fact it is distasteful to me,’ he commented later.6 Save the story to which he was already committed, ‘Dies Irae’, Kenneth published only one new piece in The Yellow Book after Wilde’s arrest. ‘To Rollo, Untimely Taken’ was a poem on the death of a puppy. While it did little to enhance Kenneth’s literary reputation, its simple sentiment and clumsy classical name-checks were comfortably remote from the ‘decadent’ aestheticism vilified by the journal’s detractors.
Kenneth’s avoidance of marriage hitherto was just one outcome of his determination to preserve a childlike outlook that, on the cusp of middle age, held firm. A guest at a lunch party in 1896, admiring The Golden Age, admitted her anxiety that the author would grow up and be prevented from writing new stories. Kenneth had recently completed ‘The Magic Ring’, about a visit to a circus, in which the narrator’s pulse is quickened by white-limbed Coralie and a dusky equestrienne called Zephyrine. To his fellow guest his reassurance was quick: ‘No – I don’t think I shall – I’ve just been writing about a circus and I found I didn’t feel a bit grown up,’ he told her.7 Descriptions of both circus women tell a different story. Zephyrine, ‘the Bride of the Desert’, is a ‘magnificent, full-figured Cleopatra’. Her exoticism is tangibly erotic. The grown-up longings uncovered belong to Kenneth rather than his childish narrator.
Fear as much as anything shaped his stubbornness about growing up. Death, abandonment and upheaval had effectively destroyed his childhood. Stunned and uncomprehending, as a young child he had created for himself a substitute world in his imagination. In the short years at The Mount, he invented and enjoyed a private golden age. Afterwards he retained an overwhelming attachment to it. The loose sequence of stories that was not yet complete p
reserved key memories of the feverish joy he had contrived after the loss of both his parents and in defiance of Mrs Inglis and Uncle John Grahame. Despite outward success in his thirties, these fantasies of early childhood remained the clearest instance of autonomy in Kenneth’s life. They represented something more, too. The period of intense, selective memory from the ages of five to seven was the only interval in his life when imagination at its most powerful combined with a child’s limited emotional understanding to overcome every faculty of reason and successfully smother misery: he simply imagined so hard that nothing else felt real. For Kenneth the act of writing his fact-and-fiction Olympians stories resuscitated former happiness, with its astonishing anaesthetizing of despair. In resisting growing up, Kenneth showed himself unwilling to discard childish escapism and confront unhappiness that, as a child, he had sidelined.
He was also poorly equipped for loving relationships. Since his departure from Cranbourne for St Edward’s, his world had been as strenuously male as ‘the succession of books on sport, in which the illustrator seemed to have forgotten that there were such things as women in the world’ against which Selina protests in a story called ‘Its Walls were as of Jasper’.8 Although women were admitted to the clerical staff of the Bank of England in 1890 and The Yellow Book had its share of female contributors, Kenneth mostly worked among men; men made up his fellow volunteers in the London Scottish, at Toynbee Hall and on the committee of the New Shakspere Society. Kenneth’s life was well ordered: it suited him. A development as fundamental as marriage would require wholesale readjustment. ‘For myself, I rather liked a fair amount of blood-letting, red-hot shot, and flying splinters, but when you have girls about the place, they have got to be considered to a certain extent,’ explains the narrator of one of the last Olympians stories.9
In his writing, there are signs that Kenneth’s thoughts were edging inconclusively towards marriage some time before he committed himself. Both his writing and his correspondence indicate that this shift was accompanied by persistent misgivings. In her autobiography, Evelyn Sharp, who twice accompanied Kenneth and the Harlands abroad for Christmas, recorded that Henry Harland was eager to promote an attachment between them. Her memories of Kenneth after his death indicate that she may not have been averse to this; acerbic novelist Baron Corvo remembered her ‘huge black eyes [that] yearned for the secretary of a bank’.10 They saw one another regularly at Yellow Book gatherings in Cromwell Road and shared the same enjoyment of fairy tales that had previously linked Kenneth to Annie Grahame. Evelyn wrote to him frequently, usually with invitations. As often, he declined. References to books and stories pepper their notes. One letter suggests his impatience; he appears frightened of an escalating involvement. He accused Evelyn of rushing him in a manner he labelled ‘hysterical’. He told her she reminded him ‘of a Spanish bull-fight somehow – a flash of white horns, hot muzzles, a streak of red, a jump, a shout, – & all under a glittering Southern sun – or a St Moritz toboggin[sic] run’, and held her firmly at arm’s length.11 Devastatingly for Evelyn, a markedly naïve, sensitive young woman of willowy appearance, he likened her to a Bandersnatch, a ferocious long-necked adversary in Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky and The Hunting of the Snark, a comparison from which she could wring no dreg of affection. In this instance it is Kenneth, not Evelyn, who appears hysterical. His letter recalls the fear and loathing of a ‘Stevensonette’ called ‘The Fairy Wicket’, published in 1892, in which female attractiveness is presented as a trap and ‘the depth of one sole pair of eyes’ does not admit the loving swain to fairyland, but lures him through the gate of ‘a cheap suburban villa, banging behind the wrathful rate-collector or hurled open to speed the pallid householder to the Registrar’s Office’.12 No wonder Evelyn remembered a look about Kenneth ‘as if he thought you might be going to bite if he wasn’t very careful’.13
Young boys’ interest in the opposite sex permeates The Golden Age. In the last stories Kenneth wrote, published in book form as Dream Days in December 1898, this curiosity is intensified, as if the writer’s own preoccupation had sharpened. The narrator reveals a secret to a girl who has caught his eye in church, in ‘Mutabile Semper’. Rapidly he regrets the revelation. Such is his thraldom that, setting doubt aside, he agrees to meet her again. He keeps the date, but she spurns him for the ferret-owning son of a local clergyman. In ‘Its Walls were as of Jasper’, absorbed in a picture book, the narrator is curious about the truth of adult relationships: ‘they were going to live happily ever after; and that was the part I wanted to get to. Story-books were so stupid, always stopping at the point where they became really nice.’14 The book that he has counted on to supply this knowledge is briskly snatched from him. In both instances the narrator is disappointed. Significantly his regret is brief. Having been thrown over by the girl, he becomes ‘aware of a certain solace and consolation in my newly recovered independence of action’.15 Without the book, he reveals that what really interested him were not details of the couple’s future but a picture of an island that has gripped his imagination. He longs to be transported to it and reassures himself that ‘somehow, at some time, sooner or later, I was destined to arrive’.16 He carries seeds of his preferred form of happiness within himself, ‘self-poised’, as an admirer referred to Kenneth.17 Both stories toy with the idea of emotion; both revert to escapist fantasies. Neither can have made encouraging reading for any young woman who had set the stories’ author in her sights.
*
Frank Dicksee’s portrait of the nineteen-year-old Elspeth Thomson, painted in 1881, depicts her as a fashionable heroine. Hers is not mainstream fashion. The self-possessed young woman with the long, oval face and enormous doe eyes of challenging fixedness wears an amethyst brocade dress and a gold necklace of coloured stones: opals, garnets, tiny green cabochons. Hers is ‘artistic’ dress, her tastes advanced – and the painting was exhibited the year after at the Grosvenor Gallery, spiritual home of the pre-Raphaelites. Her clothes align her with the fashionable intelligentsia; her portrait is as much manifesto as likeness. The artistic pretensions it trumpets accurately reflect her aspirations, as does an expression of steely, unflinching determination that belies initial sweetness. This whimsical gazelle of a girl, pictured against a sludgy, ‘greenery-yallery’ backdrop of dim foliage and flowers, was a force to be reckoned with.
In 1897, when she first met the celebrated writer Kenneth Grahame, Elspeth Thomson was midway between thirty and forty, an unnerving age for a woman in a society that validated marriage as her only purpose; her appearance was still girlish. Her surface sophistication matched his urbanitas. His practised courtesy and charming witticisms found an echo in her easy knowledge of the worlds of art, letters and politics. As a child she had charmed Mark Twain, Alfred Tennyson, illustrator of the Alice books John Tenniel, who continued to send her Valentine’s Day verses; like Kenneth, she had no intention of relinquishing her childhood self. Both Kenneth Grahame and Elspeth Thomson were adults in thrall to their childhoods: in Kenneth’s case because childish escape consistently made him happy; in Elspeth’s because growing up had brought her disappointments – her girlish charm insufficient to win her a husband, her friendship with literary giants not enough to make her a literary talent. Both were also children masquerading as adults: desperately naïve and emotionally unfulfilled; sexual novices. On the subject of sexual inexperience Kenneth described himself as hindered by ‘much natral “gaucherie” wot as never been strove gainst’; he referred to ‘my beastly virtue [that] has been my enemy through life’.18 It was true of both of them. They recognized shared qualities in one another. Biographers accuse Elspeth Thomson of pouncing on Kenneth as her last chance of marriage.
The year that they met, Kenneth had been forced to re-evaluation. Roland Grahame married a young widow with two sons, Joan Fieling. Kenneth knew Joan, too: her son Tony wrote the original ‘death letter’ that he incorporated in ‘Mutabile Semper’ as Harold’s riposte to Selina. Roland’s marriage came as a jolt; Ke
nneth joined his brother and new sister-in-law for their first Christmas together. It was the first time a fully physical relationship between a man and woman had intruded upon the Grahames’ immediate family circle.
Whatever the direction of his thoughts, Kenneth’s meeting with Elspeth was an accident, probably a result of a visit to her stepfather, John Fletcher Moulton, on bank business at home in Onslow Square. In Fletcher Moulton’s absence, Kenneth was entertained by Elspeth. Since her mother’s death in 1888, she had kept house for the barrister and former MP; she was his hostess and occasional, unofficial secretary. Early on she and Kenneth identified similarities in upbringing: both born in Edinburgh (Elspeth’s father Robert Thomson, who died in 1873, was the gifted entrepreneurial inventor of pneumatic tyres and a floating dock); both of privileged background, although Fletcher Moulton kept her desperately short of money; both, by 1897, locked in solitariness. Elspeth aspired to write. In 1888, she had published a novel of working-class life, of which she knew virtually nothing, called Amelia Jane’s Ambition. In her large, looping handwriting, she wrote facile verse, routinely rejected by editors and publishers. By the time she met Kenneth Grahame, Elspeth Thomson was treading water, in need of stimulus, distraction, a focus. Kenneth too. Inspiration for the stories in which he rekindled his childhood had virtually run dry. By the end of the year, he had all but completed the pieces that make up Dream Days. Only ‘A Saga of the Seas’, in which the narrator briefly professes interest in the trajectory of married life, and the valedictory ‘A Departure’, were written in 1898.19 For the better part of a decade, the process of fictionalizing memory in print had enabled him to return to an edited, imaginative remembering of former happiness. Its loss – the discarding of a lifeline – posed significant challenges.
Eternal Boy Page 9