1859 The author of The Wind in the Willows – that archetypally English idyll – was, in biographical fact, a Scot. Kenneth Grahame was born into the Edinburgh professional classes. But the solid family framework around him dissolved almost immediately. His mother died of fever, giving birth to her fourth child, before Kenneth was six. His barrister father fell into alcoholism and died alone in France. He never communicated with his children, who were left to the care of an extended family.
There are no fathers, no mothers, no wives, no siblings in the animal world of The Wind in the Willows. After public school in Oxford (a city he adored) there arrived the great sorrow of Grahame’s life. He did not ‘go up’ to the university. His guardian uncle determined that the boy must do something useful. It was, according to his biographer, ‘the most crushing blow that Grahame suffered, perhaps in his whole life’. It’s a strange notion of catastrophe; but real enough for Grahame. Paradise was now forever lost.
Kenneth was installed, by patronage, into the cogs and wheels of the Bank of England. In this great machine he would work, mechanically, for 30 years. Although Oxford had been denied him, Grahame imbibed the university’s 1890s Paterian-Wildean decadence. Gem-like flames licked, decorously, around his ankles. He bought into Great-God-Pan-worshipping ‘neo-paganism’, a cult that, guardedly, promulgated all those Hellenic practices that Victorian England frowned on – not least after the savage Labouchere amendment of 1885 making ‘gross indecency’ a crime.
By day a dutiful fonctionnaire in the Bank, by night Grahame roamed Soho, a bohemian. Literary introductions furnished him an entry into John Lane’s Yellow Book. His first volume of collected pieces, Pagan Papers (1893), carried a frontispiece by Aubrey Beardsley. A green carnation could not have been more emblematic.
The papers were well received. Grahame (all the while slaving by day at the Bank) followed up two years later with another series, delicately recapturing childhood experiences: The Golden Age.
In the same year, 1895, disaster struck with the Wilde trials. Prudently, Grahame married in 1899. The marriage proved a disaster, although it put to rest any suspicions about his private life. He was 40, his wife, Elspeth, in her late thirties. Sex was discontinued as soon as begun. It produced one son. It was to young Alastair, as bedtime entertainment, that The Wind in the Willows was conceived and eventually published in 1908.
In the book Grahame pictures an ideal ménage: women do not come into it. In their ‘digs’, like Holmes and Watson, Ratty and Moley are two chaps living together: it’s a Darby and Darby situation. No Joans need apply. The story, as the author insisted, was ‘clean of the clash of sex’.
Grahame wrote nothing of significance after The Wind in the Willows and his later life was chronically wretched. It is recorded by his biographer that he changed his underwear once a year. He died in 1932 and left his estate to the Bodleian Library, as homage to the university he had never attended.