Regular visitors
to The Jade Sphinx know of our love
for children’s literature. Few figures
of the field loom larger than Kenneth
Grahame (1859-1932), author of Wind
in the Willows (1908), one of the great classics of the field.
Readers familiar
with Wind know that it chronicles the adventures of Rat, Mole, Badger and Toad
along the banks of the river. Rat and
Mole are often contentedly picnicking along the riverbank, simply “messing around
in boats.” Badger’s spacious underground
abode provides comfort, books and plentiful food. It is a perfectly sexless idealization of
ease and creature comforts.
So it
should come as no surprise that one of the recurring themes in Grahame’s oeuvre
is that of escape. Like many of the great children’s authors,
Grahame had an ambivalent attitude towards adulthood and its concomitant responsibilities.
Poor
Grahame had a tumultuous life. He was
born in Edinburgh, Scotland. His mother
died when he was five, and his alcoholic father gave young Kenneth and his
brothers and sister to the children’s grandmother, in Cookham in Berkshire. Grahame loved the countryside there, and it
was there that he was introduced to the pleasures of boating. These years in Cookham would be remembered as
the happiest of his life.
Following
his years at St. Edward’s School in Oxford, Grahame wanted to attend Oxford
University. He could not do so, his
guardians claiming that it was too expensive.
Instead, this sensitive and introverted boy was sent to work at the Bank
of England in 1879, where he rose through the ranks until retiring as its
Secretary in 1908. The reason for his retirement
was that an anarchist broke into the bank and shot at Grahame three times,
missing each shot. The incident forever
shattered his nerves; he would move back to the country in an effort to find
peace.
Grahame published
his first book, The Pagan Papers, in
1893. He would follow this with his
first two great novels about children, The
Golden Age (1895) and Dream Days
(1898). He would not write again until
after marrying Elspeth Thomson in
1899. They had one child, a son named
Alastair (nicknamed Mouse), born blind in one eye and plagued by various mental
problems. Grahame would tell Mouse
stories about the woodland denizens around them. These stories would eventually morph into
Wind in the Willows.
Sadly,
the stories provided only a limited amount of succor to Alastair, who would
commit suicide by lying on a railway track two days before his 20th
birthday.
The
Pagan Papers is a collection of essays on the general theme of escape. It has little (or nothing) to do with
paganism as is understood today; actually, it was a long mediation on the
invasive and horrifying transformations brought about by the machine age, and
extolls the virtues of long country walks, rivers, the countryside, and
welcoming pubs.
While
the tone varies wildly from piece to piece, what is unmistakable is that the book
is suffused with a powerful emotion, a particularly English yearning produced
by the countryside. Again and again
Grahame urges pastoral escape, transgression against an increasingly urban
system, and recognition of the genius of remote places, often represented in
pagan figures like Pan. That these
essays were written by a man in the stranglehold of a formal job, distant from
his beloved countryside, should come as no surprise.
This
reader found many of the passages moving.
This is from his essay in favor of loafing and idleness:
When the golden Summer has rounded
languidly to his close, when Autumn has been carried forth in russet
winding-sheet, then all good fellows who look upon holidays as a chief end of
life return from moor and stream and begin to take stock of gains and losses.
And the wisest, realising that the time of action is over while that of
reminiscence has begun, realise too that the one is pregnant with greater
pleasures than the other — that action, indeed, is only the means to an end of
reflection and appreciation. Wisest of all, the Loafer stands apart supreme.
For he, of one mind with the philosopher as to the end, goes straight to it at
once; and his happy summer has accordingly been spent in those subjective pleasures
of the mind whereof the others, the men of muscle and peeled faces, are only
just beginning to taste.
Here is
another, in a more puckish vein: In
these tame and tedious days of the policeman rampant, our melancholy selves are
debarred from many a sport, joyous and debonair, whereof our happier fathers
were free … 'Tis a sad but sober fact, that the most of men lead flat and
virtuous lives, departing annually with their family to some flat and virtuous
place, there to disport themselves in a manner that is decent, orderly, wholly
uninteresting, vacant of every buxom stimulus. To such as these a suggestion,
in all friendliness: why not try crime? We shall not attempt to specify the
particular branch — for every one must himself seek out and find the path his
nature best fits him to follow; but the general charm of the prospect must be
evident to all. The freshness and novelty of secrecy, the artistic satisfaction
in doing the act of self-expression as well as it can possibly be done; the
experience of being not the hunter, but the hunted, not the sportsman, but the
game; the delight of comparing and discussing crimes with your mates over a
quiet pipe on your return to town; these new pleasures — these and their like —
would furnish just that gentle stimulant, that peaceful sense of change so
necessary to the tired worker.
My
favorite passage, though, has to do with his friendship with a wandering
painter – it is a view of freedom that resonates strongly with anyone in a
restrictive job: This allowed him to take along with him a few canvases and other
artists' materials; soda-water, whisky, and such like necessaries; and even to
ask a friend from town for a day or two, if he wanted to.
He was in this state of comparative
luxury when at last, by the merest accident, I foregathered with him once more.
I had pulled up to Streatley one afternoon, and, leaving my boat, had gone for
a long ramble on the glorious North Berkshire Downs to stretch my legs before
dinner. Somewhere over on Cuckhamsley Hill, by the side of the Ridgeway, remote
from the habitable world, I found him, smoking his vesper pipe on the shaft of
his cart, the mare cropping the short grass beside him. He greeted me without
surprise or effusion, as if we had only parted yesterday, and without a hint of
an allusion to past times, but drifted quietly into rambling talk of his last
three years, and, without ever telling his story right out, left a strange
picturesque impression of a nomadic life which struck one as separated by fifty
years from modern conventional existence. The old road-life still lingered on
in places, it seemed, once one got well away from the railway: there were two
Englands existing together, the one fringing the great iron highways wherever
they might go — the England under the eyes of most of us. The other, unguessed
at by many, in whatever places were still vacant of shriek and rattle, drowsed
on as of old: the England of heath and common and windy sheep down, of by-lanes
and village-greens — the England of Parson Adams and Lavengro. The spell of the
free untrammelled life came over me as I listened, till I was fain to accept of
his hospitality and a horse-blanket for the night, oblivious of civilised
comforts down at the Bull. On the downs where Alfred fought we lay and smoked,
gazing up at the quiet stars that had shone on many a Dane lying stark and
still a thousand years ago; and in the silence of the lone tract that enfolded
us we seemed nearer to those old times than to these I had left that afternoon,
in the now hushed and sleeping valley of the Thames.
This is
a wise and wonderfully wistful book. It
is available at the indispensable Manybooks.net, and comes highly recommended.
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