Alison Prince. Kenneth Grahame: An Innocent in the Wild Wood (1994)

     Alison Prince. Kenneth Grahame: An Innocent in the Wild Wood (1994) Prince treats Grahame as a child that never grew up, but learned to act like an adult when needed. He had a wretched childhood, lightened by his joy in nature, which stayed with him all his life long, and moved him towards a Pagan pantheism (most clearly expressed in the “Pipes of Pan” chapter of Wind in the Willows). He made a reputation for himself with magazine pieces, stories and essays about children in nature that were essentially autobiographical, and which attracted those who felt unease at the industrialisation of England. He became secretary of the Bank of England, and discharged his duties conscientiously, though perhaps without real engagement, which eventually led to his early retirement from that post.
     When he was forty, Grahame made a disastrous marriage to Elspeth Thomson, a woman with romanticised notions of her own importance and creativity, who did not share Kenneth’s attitude to nature (though she was good at faking it). They had one child, Alastair, born with defective sight, and cosseted and indulged to the point where he was incapable of living in the real world, and committed suicide at Oxford. The parents had little direct contact with the boy, but in his early years, Kenneth made up stories for him, and later wrote him letters continuing the saga of Toad, Mole, Rat and the others. These eventually became Wind in the Willows. Kenneth died at the age of 73, and Elspeth set about sanctifying his memory, as she had that of their son.
     Kenneth Graham was one of those writers whose public persona, private life, and writer’s voice were all different. As a public person, he was courteous, but avoided contact with strangers as much as possible. To his closest friends he was dear and charming. To his wife he was an enigma, as she was to him. These two people were incapable of being truly themselves in each other’s company. Their marriage was founded on a fantasy of a shared interest in “fairyland”, and their married life was in some ways an attempt to avoid admitting they had made a serious mistake. Towards the end of their lives, after Alastair’s death, they travelled much, and perhaps achieved an accommodation with each other, if not a sharing of interests and enthusiasms. Prince regrets their unhappiness, and the profound loneliness of these two people, but also believes that the dysfunction of the family was necessary to the writing of Wind in the Willows.
     An interesting book. Prince rarely speculates, with gives it a certain dryness. ** (2005)