Creature comforts
A biography of the man who wrote The Wind in the Willows celebrates the power of the imagination.
Kenneth Grahame was appointed Secretary of the Bank of England when he was 39. This lofty position both bored him and made him anxious. He responded by retreating into his imaginary world.
As Matthew Dennison notes in Eternal Boy, his biography of the author of The Wind in the Willows, Grahame often needed his imagination’s solace. His mother died when he was five and his Scottish father fell into an “alcoholic torpor”. The four children were dispatched from Scotland to live with their unloving maternal grandmother in Berkshire.
The siblings were too young to help each other, and a paternal uncle who supported them financially was as unsympathetic as the grandmother. It could have been hell, but his grandmother’s rambling house by the deep green banks of the River Thames provided Grahame with imaginative sustenance to last a lifetime: “there, like Rat in The Wind in the Willows,” Dennison writes, “[Grahame] became, as he would remain, ‘a self-sufficing sort of animal, rooted to the land’.’’
Dennison’s main premise is that Grahame remained childlike as well as self-sufficing. All his life he kept a drawer full of dolls. “Nothing,” Grahame wrote, “is quite so consoling as the honest smell of a painted animal.” He loved rambles with undemanding male companions, his cosy rooms full of precious possessions, solitude, the sea and small animals. He wrote hugely successful stories about childhood to distract himself from hated office work. He found contentment, even happiness.
Aged 40, he decided to get married. Elspeth Thomson was a “whimsical gazelle of a girl,” who, like Grahame, “had no intention of relinquishing her childhood self”. They had one child, nicknamed Mouse, partially blind and emotionally damaged by alternating neglect – both parents were hypochondriacs and left him with his maid for long stretches while they sought cures – and extravagant adoration. The marriage was a mistake. Grahame viewed sex with “distaste, fear, even astonishment”, and poor Elspeth got stranger. “For reasons that have not survived,” Dennison notes, “she forced [Grahame] to wear special underwear that was changed only once a year.”
The Wind in the Willows, badly received initially, grew out of Grahame’s bedtime stories for Mouse. The excerpts included in Eternal Boy remind me how lambent and irresistible the novel is. Is there anything like it? Dennison acknowledges the novel’s ability to enchant, but doesn’t pull his punches: “Loyalty to caste and suppression of the masses are at the heart of its patrician creed. It is triumphantly an exercise in denial [of the growing movement against inherited privilege].”
Tragically, Mouse died at 19 in an apparent suicide on train tracks near Oxford.
His parents remained together, bound in misery.
Most of the plates in Eternal Boy are of Ernest Shepard’s gorgeous illustrations from The Wind in the Willows. More photos, particularly of places that meant so much, would have been welcome. Eternal Boy is beautifully written and often sad. It celebrates the power of the imagination, but cautions that it’s not enough.