ETERNAL BOY

THE LIFE OF KENNETH GRAHAME

MATTHEW DENNISON

Head of Zeus, 288pp, £18.99

Kenneth Grahame may have been the creator of a classic of English literature – but his life was blighted with tragedy. As Ysenda Maxtone Graham put it in the Times: ‘To write a story as joyously uplifting as The

Wind in the Willows you need to be pretty miserable.’ Grahame, a solidly respectable banker, lost his mother when he was five, was abandoned by his father and his marriage was miserable. In the Financial Times, Daisy Hay noted that he ‘spent his life looking for refuges. Escape came in the form of weekend jaunts to the country and in writing stories for children in which adults figure as imagination-stunting villains.’ Repressed within, wrote Maxtone Graham, were ‘yearnings for security, snugness, friendship, love, freedom, nature and beauty’.

‘Escape came in the form of weekend jaunts to the country’

Matthew Dennison’s acclaimed biography strikes at the heart. According to Simon Callow in the

Sunday Times ‘what it celebrates, despite adventures and crises, is a quintessentially English dolce far

niente, a refusal of the real, a quiescence that is almost mystical’. Callow was among many struck by the haunting revelation that the figure of Toad was inspired by Grahame’s half-blind only child Alistair who killed himself aged 20. Peter Parker in the Spectator noted that by ‘frequently telling Alastair how marvellous he was they turned him into a monster of conceit’. In what Boyd Tonkin in the Artsdesk called, ‘a compact and incisive portrait, neither hagiography nor hatchet-job’, Dennison ‘examines the archetypal pattern of the wounded spell-binder’.