Eternal Boy

by Dennison, Matthew;

  Kenneth’s description of the novel as ‘free of the clash of sex’ doubtless baffled his publishers who, in Edwardian England, would have expected nothing else of a book aimed even partly at a child readership and written by the author of The Golden Age and Dream Days. It is equally free of the clash of marriage and all but denies the existence of women. For Kenneth this absence of sex was intrinsic to the perfection of the Riverbankers’ lives and to his own pleasure in writing. In discussing The Wind in the Willows he returned to it repeatedly. ‘It was pleasant to write & especially – what people don’t see – by simply using the animal, to get away at once from weary sex problems & other problems, & just do jolly things without being suspected of preaching or teaching.’24 To President Theodore Roosevelt, an admirer of his Olympians stories, he explained the book’s ‘qualities, if any, [as] mostly negative – i.e. – no problems, no sex, no second meaning – it is only an expression of the very simplest joys of life as lived by the simplest beings of a class that you are specially familiar with and will not misunderstand.’25 At best these are disingenuous interpretations, but Kenneth clung to them fixedly.

  The Wind in the Willows rejects outright male–female relationships. That it does so deliberately is clear from Kenneth’s comments, which seem to indicate how far ‘weary sex problems’ lay at the root of his own malaise. The main literary source for the story is Homer’s epic account of Odysseus’s ten-year return to Ithaca after the Trojan War, the Odyssey. The Wind in the Willows is the Odyssey rewritten in Kenneth’s study full of toys, the one room completely free of Elspeth and the taint of Onslow Square. Toad is Kenneth’s Odysseus, whom the Romans called Ulysses: the connection is made explicit in the book’s final chapter, ‘The Return of Ulysses’. Toad’s adventures parody Odysseus’s. Although he possesses echoes of Odysseus’s cunning and his talent for disguises and deceit, Toad is heroic only to himself; Kenneth’s is a mock epic with elements of satire. Odysseus is assisted by Athene and a bevy of obliging goddesses; Toad is rescued by ‘a pleasant wench and good-hearted’, a lowly gaoler’s daughter. The home that Odysseus left behind is exposed to the depredations of a band of suitors, arrogant and unscrupulous men determined to win the hand of his wife Penelope. Uninvited, they consume all that Odysseus’s estate provides, much as the inhabitants of the Wild Wood plunder Toad Hall and the contents of Toad’s cellar. Odysseus’s son Telemachus aspires to be like his father and share in Odysseus’s renown; in Kenneth’s story, the otter cub Portly is brought round to this point of view. Meanwhile, Rat is tempted by the seafarer, a version of Odysseus’s encounters with Lotus-eaters and Sirens.

  A single central element is missing from Kenneth’s rewriting: Penelope. A longing to be reunited with his paragon of a wife draws Odysseus across the ‘wine-dark’ seas, defying mortal dangers. There is no Penelope figure in The Wind in the Willows and, far from being voluntary, Toad’s homecoming is forced upon him by Badger and his friends in order to restore the hierarchical order of their tiny social microcosm, a pyramidal structure with Toad at the apex. Shattered by his marriage to Elspeth, Kenneth was unable to incorporate within his story any approximation to selfless, life-enhancing love between men and women. Odysseus weeps for Penelope; Toad weeps for himself. As an omission it is deeply unfair. Elspeth’s lifelong mourning of the love she thought that she and Kenneth shared reveals deep affinities with Penelope. Like Penelope, she lacked power to bring about a reunion; she too could only wait for her husband to come back to her. Instead, Kenneth resorts to coercion to return Toad to Toad Hall. As a member of the landed elite, Toad must recapture his ancestral acres to oust the creatures of the Wild Wood, members of the proletariat in the thinnest of disguises.

  As with the boys in his Olympians stories, all four principal characters in The Wind in the Willows borrow features of his own; their makeup includes reminders of Furnivall, Henley, Q, Atky and, in Toad’s case, Mouse. On the brink of his fiftieth birthday Kenneth completed a novel in which Toad’s itch for adventure is defeated by Badger’s respect for convention and common sense; strong forces of conformity thwart his hankering for escape. For Toad there can be no going it alone or evading the role society has allotted him: status imposes duties and responsibilities, a part to be played and a manner in which to play it. Rat’s sudden wanderlust dimly echoes Cunningham Grahame’s abandonment and perhaps Kenneth’s own fantasy of leaving Elspeth; it is quashed by the sensible Mole. Like Kenneth, Toad and Rat are hostages to fortune, both trapped by the people who claim to love them best. Viewed from this angle, Kenneth’s conclusion is bleak indeed.

  • 13 •

  ‘The somewhat inadequate things that really come off’

  AT FIFTY, DRESSED in his own version of the countryman’s garb of tweed breeches and shapeless jacket, Kenneth remained physically imposing. ‘He was very tall and broad, a massive figure, but with no spare flesh,’ wrote American academic Clayton Hamilton. ‘His hair was white, but his face was almost beatifically young, and he had the clear and roseate complexion of a healthy child.’1

  He no longer felt either young or healthy, his winters invariably plagued by bronchitis or influenza, but it was not the move from Durham Villas to the country that disappointed him. Each morning he fed a tame robin with a currant, crumbs or a paring of cheese – ‘It seems to me that the family is not complete without a tame robin,’ Mouse wrote after its departure – and he awoke to ‘a carolling of larks and a tinkling from distant flocks… the wind-hover hang[ing] motionless, a black dot on the blue’; over Quarry Wood he heard ‘the sound of Marlow bells’.2 For hours he walked. Often he was alone in the silence of his own thoughts, tracing sheep tracks ‘or the foot-path through copse and spinney not without pleasant fellowship with feather and fur’, up ghostly chalk paths to the summit of the Downs and the views he loved: ‘the vale, with its clustered homesteads, its threads of white roads running through orchards and well-tilled acreage, and, far away, a hint of grey old cities on the horizon’; at home he ate heartily and smoked.3 Instead a bigger disillusionment took hold of him in the immediate aftermath of leaving the bank and completing what would be his final book. Stubbornly it lingered. Cookham, like Inveraray, had fallen short of the picture he had padlocked in his memory. New houses of red brick marred its fringes. It was crowded and busier than he remembered. New developments had shattered ‘its natural life of somnolency’, and Kenneth, until recently a weekender from London, found himself a spectator, not a participant, in this authentic local world he prized so highly.4 The lease on the Grahames’ house, Mayfield, would shortly expire and the effort of house-hunting again so soon pressed on him. And yet his days were overwhelmingly empty. Casting about for an explanation, he described himself simply as ‘somewhat stale and rusty’.5 His marriage to Elspeth was no happier. ‘Company too often means compromise, discretion, the choice of the sweetly reasonable,’ he wrote later, a first-hand assessment of awful bitterness.6 For lengthy periods he heard nothing of Atky or Q, who nevertheless dedicated his novel The Mayor of Troy Town ‘to my friend Kenneth Grahame and the rest of the crew of the Richard and Emily’; Graham Robertson remained in London; for the moment Kenneth’s relationship with his brother Roland was amicable rather than sustaining, and was dealt a blow by the death that winter of Roland’s wife, Joan. As always, thoughts of escape into solitary make-believe taunted him, compounding gnawing regret. In The Wind in the Willows he had divided experience into ‘the best and the raciest adventures’, which occupied ‘the category of what-might-have-happened-had-I-only-thought-of-it-in-time-instead-of-ten-minutes-afterwards’, and ‘the somewhat inadequate things that really come off’.7 ‘Everyone’s experience will remind him that the best adventures of his life were pursued and achieved, or came suddenly to him unsought, when he was alone,’ was his mature conclusion.8 It was a dispiriting reflection for a man who was both husband and father.

  In his introduction to A Hundred Fables of Aesop, written in 1899, Kenneth had joked that ‘parents of the human sp
ecies have an altogether singular and unaccountable method of rearing their young’.9 So it had been in his own case: abandoned by Cunningham, treated with briskness by Mrs Inglis. Kenneth and Elspeth’s approach to parenting had its unaccountable qualities too. They continued to spend lengthy periods apart from Mouse. In the summer of 1909, only months after their own return from Switzerland, the Grahames dispatched Mouse once more, with Miss Stott, to ‘his favourite seaside resort – Littlehampton, a rather horrid little place, which he adores’. To Purves, Kenneth explained ‘I wish our tastes in places were similar, so that we could be together.’10 It ought to have been an unnecessary regret on the part of a devoted father of comfortable means, able to provide for his family whatever holiday they wished. On this occasion, Kenneth blamed an eye problem of Elspeth’s, which forced her to avoid bright sunlight, though the summer had been notably overcast. There are signs that both parents found Mouse exacting company. His diet of inflated praise, Elspeth’s encouragement of flamboyant precocity and Kenneth’s laissez-faire attitude to self-discipline had wrought predictable results. In his last years at home before preparatory school, Mouse struggled, with limited understanding, to live up to the towering expectations of his parents. He became bombastic and showy, this chubby boy who battled poor vision and crippling shyness; Kenneth called him a ‘social animal’, likening him to Elspeth rather than himself.11 Towards Kenneth, Mouse was both loving and dismissive. He requested that his father address him as ‘Michael Robinson’, the name inspired by the gunman who had attempted to shoot Kenneth in the Bank of England. He divided adults into ‘Goods’ and ‘No Goods’, and shuffled his father between both categories. On happier days they explored the lanes and woods together; they visited a sheep fair; in the apple-loft belonging to a neighbouring farmer they sampled ‘every sort of apple and filled our pockets – and then we sat in the parlour and discussed circuses, and… agreed that they were the only thing worth living for’, this father who idealized boyhood and his son, like the fictional Edward, on the brink of departure for school.12 One walk brought them in the path of the hunt: Mouse was blooded by the huntsman and presented with the fox’s brush. For hours each day he was alone with Elspeth, who continued to spend much of her time on a sofa sipping hot water and listening to the gramophone, so thin that she refused to be photographed and had given up the effort of anything resembling respectable dress. With terrible consequences for Mouse, she embedded herself in a world of sentimental fantasy – despite, or because of, the collapse of her relationship with Kenneth.

  In the late spring of 1910, neither of his parents involved Mouse in their choice of a new house. ‘It seems funny to call Boham’s home,’ he wrote from another of his parentless holidays, ‘so when chaps ask me where my home is I tell them Berks because I have not seen Boham’s.’13 The house in question was a modest thatched red-brick Tudor farmhouse named after its first owners, a family by then extinct and ‘[a]sleep in a row in the churchyard’.14 It stood in the village of Blewbury, a ‘little grey old-world Berkshire village, in King Alfred’s country, probably much as it was 1,000 years ago’.15 Farmhouse and village enchanted Kenneth. Rapturously he described ‘a plain Berkshire farmer’s house, “unfaked” and unaltered, with no special architectural features, with its orchard on one side and its farm buildings on the other’.16 Close by wound a trout stream. In a pig trough Kenneth discovered a handsomely carved William and Mary chimneypiece; indoors, workmen stripping away layers of paint revealed linenfold-panelled oak doors 300 years old. Kenneth converted a barn into a study, though his writing days were all but over; he installed electric light and a bathroom. It took months to settle in properly, he in one part of the house, Elspeth quite separate in another, with an ex-soldier and his wife to look after them. Kenneth hung pictures; with hammer and tacks he fitted carpets; he arranged his large collection of Sailor’s Farewells. Once the barn had bookcases and a stove, he surrounded himself with ‘beautiful old Italian china, [De] Morgan tiles, Hispano-Moorish platters, old Capo di Monte figures, and what not of rare and lovely specimens of the ceramic arts’.17 ‘Peasant toys from all countries’ intrigued Constance Smedley when she visited.18 Kenneth admitted they had ‘too much stuff for so small a space’, but went on collecting, including Staffordshire animal figures, miniature tea services for dolls and eighty-five pieces of ‘old glass most delicately and minutely engraved in sporting subjects, hounds, stags, birds’.19 He soon became ‘perfectly well aware that every time Mr Lay [a neighbouring farmer] thrashes out a rick, some non-paying guests… seek admission to the house’, and he acquired a cat.20 Kenneth applied himself to village life to the extent of Sunday church attendance, though he accepted few of the Anglican orthodoxies. He had written out his belief in a rural pagan god in nature in ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’.

  In London, in his first years at the bank, he had escaped at weekends, fleeing the capital’s ‘ignominy of rubble and brick-work’, delighting in the big open spaces of the Downs and a conviction of his own place in nature’s jigsaw. Then his walks had inspired his writing, ‘for Nature’s particular gift to the walker, through the semi-mechanical act of walking… is to set the mind jogging, to make it garrulous, exalted… certainly creative and suprasensitive.’21 Now he no longer craved inspiration. In The Golden Age and Dream Days, he had relived a version of best aspects of his childhood; The Wind in the Willows, a dialogue with himself, contained a personal creed that solidified with the act of writing. Although a pall hung over him, his joy in nature endured. Away from Cookham’s new red brick, the expansive country thrilled him with its ancient unchanged pastoral rhythms. It is his own delight that he attributes to Mole in ‘the harvest… being gathered in, the towering wagons and their straining teams, the growing ricks, and the large moon rising over base acres dotted with sheaves’.22 To a visiting American he eulogized ‘this “antick” corner of Berkshire, so near everything by train and yet so very remote in historic time’; he told Austin Purves ‘it is only about 54 miles from London, but 5,400 years remote from it in every way’.23 In his walks, he sought out shepherds and their stories of husbandry; he found ‘intoxicating’ a local sheep-fair, ‘the noise of dogs and sheep and dealers, the procession of sheep and men, the droves of flockmasters and dealers in the most fascinating clothes you can conceive’.24 His imagination responded to animals and plants in as lively a fashion as four decades earlier, drawing crocodiles in the margins of a book. ‘I like most of my friends among the animals more than I like most of my friends among mankind,’ he admitted to one friend.25 And his solitary progresses were meditative. Answering a request from Curtis Brown, he promised ‘to go forth once more on the Downs and give it prayerful consideration among my friends the hares and plovers’.26

  He wrote to Graham Robertson to persuade him to take a cottage nearby.27 His instincts were mostly reclusive, as if he recoiled from a world by which he felt thrown over. His visits to London, usually for a matinée, were fleeting. With the exception of his letters to Austin Purves, he scarcely wrote to friends. ‘I fancy that professional writers nearly all hate letter writing,’ he offered by way of excuse.28 Even to Purves, he wrote only a fraction of the letters he intended. ‘I do write you any quantity of truly magnificent letters,’ he protested. ‘In my armchair of evenings, with closed eyes, or strolling in the woods of afternoons – or with head on pillow very late on a thoroughly wet and disagreeable morning. I see my pen covering page after page.’29 Most of the letters went unwritten. Kenneth was battling debilitating inertia from which he never recovered. With no pleasure in their marriage, husband and wife let slip domestic standards too. Constance Smedley described Kenneth’s careful dressing of a salad, ‘the occasion a lovely intimate ceremony’, and sloe gin decanted into antique glasses, but on the pantry shelves mice nested unchecked.30 The Grahames gave up dressing for dinner, and Elspeth firmly set aside her smart London wardrobe. In her hand-knitted stockings and shabby cardigans, she had become an ill-kempt wraith, this woman who for
merly played hostess to writers and politicians – Tennyson and Tenniel, the Asquiths and Campbell-Bannermans. Behind her back, villagers sniggered at her eccentricities. She had become domineering; her conversation was strident and hectoring. In small ways she bullied Kenneth. For reasons that have not survived, she forced him to wear special underwear that was changed only once a year.31 She had developed a streak of meanness, despite her settlement from Fletcher Moulton, Kenneth’s pension from the bank and healthy royalty payments from The Golden Age, Dream Days and, after an unpromising beginning, The Wind in the Willows. From her sofa she continued to write verse, including the poems she asked Constance Smedley to deliver to Thomas Hardy in the autumn of 1907, which Hardy judged ‘charming’.

  Kenneth’s appetite for writing had not deserted him completely. At the end of July, he received a proposal from publishers A&C Black. It was an invitation to rural escapism and fitted exactly his instincts of the moment, a book of ‘anecdotes, folk-lore, philosophy, political economy, botany, ornithology, and references to anything and everything that rambles in beautiful English country are likely to bring to mind’.32 Remembering the successful progress to book form of his Olympians stories published in the National Observer and The Yellow Book, Kenneth requested that Highways and Hedges appear chapter by chapter in instalments, like a serial. Editor Gordon Home agreed. He offered Kenneth a single payment of £50, with no royalties. And so the scheme foundered – and with it the last book that Kenneth might have written.

  • 14 •

  ‘Noble ideals, steadfast purposes’