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‘It’s much more sensible to pretend the world is fairy-land than an uninteresting dust heap’

LIKE BEATRIX POTTER’S The Tale of Peter Rabbit, which Kenneth read aloud to Mouse, The Wind in the Willows, begun orally, took shape in a series of letters. As with Potter’s story, a governess preserved the letters; encouragement by a third party nudged him towards a full-length book. In the case of The Wind in the Willows, Mouse was the child, Naomi Stott his governess, appointed in 1905, Constance Smedley the winning American who cajoled Kenneth back to his desk.

A separation provided first impetus. In the late spring of 1907, Elspeth persuaded Kenneth to go away with her on his own, leaving Mouse with Miss Stott. She chose Cornwall; she may have intended a second honeymoon after years of illness. Claiming poor health one more time, Kenneth again abandoned his bank duties. Mouse and Miss Stott set off for seven weeks of sea air at Littlehampton. Afterwards Kenneth returned to London and Durham Villas and the bank. Missing Mouse, he wrote to him from Falmouth, Fowey and Kensington, lengthy letters that begin with ‘Toad’s Adventures since he was dragged off to prison by the bobby & the constable’ and end with a banquet at Toad Hall and, ‘to his great satisfaction’, Toad ‘an object of absorbing interest to everyone’.¹ Eventually the fifteen letters amounted to first drafts of chapters VIII, X, XI and XII of The Wind in the Willows.²

Constance Smedley’s decision to approach Kenneth in mid-August, when, as she remembered rosily, ‘the mists of early autumn were invading hedge and lane’, included its measure of serendipity.³ In Fowey, Kenneth had befriended a visiting American businessman, Austin Purves. By letter, Purves introduced him to President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt’s admiration for Kenneth’s writing was unqualified: in June the president told him how much he wished he would visit the States as his guest at the White House; he requested signed copies of The Golden Age and Dream Days. By the time of Constance Smedley’s arrival, uninvited, on the Grahames’ doorstep, having driven over from neighbouring Bray, not only had Kenneth plotted much of Toad’s story in his letters to Mouse and maintained for some time his bedside narrative of Mole, Rat and Badger, but his predisposition in favour of appreciative American readers was roundly positive. Constance Smedley was a writer herself, a feminist, attached to the well-funded Philadelphia-based Everybody’s Magazine. The magazine’s editor, John O’Hara Cosgrave, rated The Golden Age and Dream Days as his ‘ideal of literary charm’. At Cosgrave’s request, Miss Smedley’s mission was to persuade Kenneth to produce more of the same for publication in Everybody’s. She was not the first person tasked with such an undertaking since the appearance of Dream Days, and she would certainly have failed had it not been for the existence of the Toad letters to Mouse.

Luck and astuteness were on her side. She introduced herself to Kenneth as a relation of the governess in The Golden Age, whose name she shared; she avoided any mention of her feminism. Together they discussed her novel An April Princess, which Kenneth and Elspeth had both read. Kenneth doubtless approved its heroine’s statement, in response to a criticism that she is behaving like a child, that ‘it’s much more sensible to pretend the world is fairy-land than an uninteresting dust heap’.⁴ It was his own philosophy to the letter. Although Kenneth seemed to her ‘as remote and shadowy as the countryside’ and ‘encased in the defensiveness which dreads coercion’, her visit stretched to several hours, long enough to overrun Mouse’s bedtime.⁵ Eavesdropping on Kenneth and Mouse, she overheard ‘an unending story, dealing with the adventures of the little animals whom they met in their river journeys’.⁶ She suggested the stories form the basis of a new book. Kenneth demurred; she did not contradict him. ‘He hated writing; it was physical torture. Why should he undergo it?’⁷ Later he expanded: ‘There is always a pleasure in the exercise, but, also, there is always an agony in the endeavour. If we make a formula of those two motives, I think we may define the process. It is, at best, a pleasurable agony.’⁸ Miss Smedley pointed out that the book was virtually written already. Her visit was the first of several. She took the opportunity to outline her plan to an enthusiastic Mouse. It was to Constance Smedley that Kenneth explained about the sharpness of his recall from the ages of four to seven, an indication that this determined, intelligent but romantic young woman had succeeded in winning his confidence. ‘Coming back here wakens every recollection,’ he told her.⁹ To his own surprise, Kenneth found himself agreeing to her scheme.

He wrote much of The Wind in the Willows in London that autumn of 1907, adding new episodes about Mole, Rat and Badger. He wrote last the chapters that were most personal, ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ and ‘Wayfarers All’. The first sums up in iridescent prose the rural pantheism he had begun exploring in print two decades earlier. Kenneth’s benign, half-smiling Pan figure, ‘the Friend and Helper’, appears to Rat and Mole in an awe-inducing vision of glowing sunlight, aspens and roses, and returns to them the lost otter cub Portly. In ‘Wayfarers All’, Rat battles the siren call of the South, symbol of adventure and escape. His is a vision of another sort: a hallucination, momentary madness. ‘Two or three chapters were new to me and come as charming surprises,’ Graham Robertson wrote to Kenneth.¹⁰ The men had discussed the book during writing, including Kenneth’s concern over an appropriate title. ‘It may come – as you say – while shaving,’ Robertson attempted to reassure him; his own suggestions included ‘The Lapping of the Stream’, ‘The Whispering Reeds’ and ‘River Folk’.¹¹ A surviving manuscript is headed ‘The Mole and The Water Rat’. Significantly Kenneth did not discuss his extra chapters with Robertson, although there are affinities between the visionary quality of ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ and drawings by Blake. Such was his certainty that he had no need to.

But there were surprises in store for Kenneth, too. Despite Constance Smedley’s enthusiastic admiration, Everyman’s Magazine turned down the novel. At The Bodley Head, John Lane also rejected it. Kenneth’s literary agent, Curtis Brown, attempted to place individual chapters with magazines, like the earlier Olympians stories: he failed as well. It was not an animal fantasy that publishers wanted from Kenneth, but a third volume of stories of Edward, Selina, Charlotte and Harold. Eventually, and with reservations, Methuen & Company accepted the manuscript. In place of an advance, Curtis Brown negotiated ‘excellent rising royalties’, for which Kenneth would have reason to be grateful.¹² Methuen advertised the book as The Wind in the Reeds, the same name as a collection of verse by Yeats, and commissioned a single illustration by Graham Robertson. How, or by whom, the final change of title was made went unrecorded.

It proved a depressing year. That summer, Kenneth resigned from the Bank of England. ‘The responsibility was a great strain & was telling on his health,’ Elspeth wrote to Austin Purves’s wife, Betsey, in a careful piece of whitewash.¹³ Kenneth’s modest pension award of £400 per annum, formalized in a letter of 2 July, gives credence to rumours at the time that his decision was forced upon him: he may have fallen foul of the bank’s new governor, William Campbell Middleton, or a bullish director called Walter Cunliffe. His colleagues’ expressions of regret emphasized his personal qualities in place of any particular prowess. His departure followed swiftly. By the end of July Elspeth was able to tell Betsey Purves, ‘we’ve disposed of the lease of the London house’.¹⁴ She described Mouse, but not Kenneth, as ‘quite charmed’ with Cookham Dean; he had learned to play chess; Kenneth had given him a pair of rabbits, called Peter and Benjie after the stories by Beatrix Potter.

Publication of The Wind in the Willows in October was as much a damp squib as the conclusion of his thirty years at the bank. Reviews were overwhelmingly negative. ‘As a contribution to natural history the work is negligible,’ claimed the Times Literary Supplement; it criticized the absence of an ‘animating spirit’.¹⁵ Kenneth’s venture into new territory provided chief grounds for reviewers’ carping and sales were initially poor. With Elspeth, Kenneth retreated to Devon, where he caught flu. By the middle of December, he told Austin Purves, ‘the after weakness and general grogginess still continues, and I can only walk a mile or two, and then an armchair and slumber till dinner-time, which is a nuisance’. He described himself as ‘“in a moment of depression”’, the inverted commas perhaps a sign of his embarrassment; it was true, nevertheless.¹⁶ The next month, still unnerved by what he interpreted as his double failure as banker and writer, Kenneth referred to ‘a moment of some stress and pressure in my private affairs’.¹⁷ ‘I have given up the City of London altogether,’ he wrote. ‘I am still somewhat unsettled.’¹⁸ A letter from Roosevelt brought momentary cheer, as did their meeting later in the year, in Oxford. ‘At first I could not reconcile myself to the change from the ever-delightful Harold and his associates,’ the President told him. ‘Now I have read it and re-read it, and have come to accept the characters as old friends; and I am almost more fond of it than your previous books.’¹⁹ In February, with Elspeth, Kenneth escaped gladly for three months to Switzerland and ‘the northern part of Italy, for colour and anemones and Chianti and so on’.²⁰ Feelingly he had written to Purves, ‘I want to go on my travels with a light heart.’²¹

The Wind in the Willows tells a story about animals living in, on or around a riverbank. Kenneth’s reprise of Three Men in a Boat, it is also a novel about fellowship and companions, and Kenneth might have appended to it the old Water-rat’s assertion in Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Devoted Friend’, of 1888, that ‘love is all very well in its way, but friendship is much higher’. It is concerned with rootedness and concepts of home. It celebrates an idealized rural society and ideal bachelor leisure, glimpsed in Toad’s inventory of ‘everything you can possibly want’: ‘biscuits, potted lobster, sardines… soda water… baccy… letter-paper, bacon, jam, cards and dominoes’.²² It is about stability, indeed a manifesto for maintaining a certain status quo that is presented as an idyll.

It is an aggressively conservative book and its targets include socialism and any form of faddishness or craving for novelty, Toad’s weakness. Loyalty to caste and suppression of the masses are at the heart of its patrician creed. It is triumphantly an exercise in denial, written within a decade of the First World War at a moment when death duties, agricultural slump and left-wing political philosophies had begun an onslaught on inherited privilege that sure-footedly gained in momentum as the century progressed. Its charms include lyrical descriptive writing and nostalgia: even on first publication, The Wind in the Willows was nostalgic. It is a book for readers of all ages, and it appeals to the instinctive conservatism of small children who hanker to preserve their particular worlds intact.

It is also, despite Kenneth’s stringent denials, pre-eminently an autobiographical book. It emerged from the disaster of his marriage to Elspeth and in the aftermath of an attack on the Bank of England in November 1903, in which a lunatic assailant called Robinson turned a revolver on Kenneth and fired three times, missing on each occasion. (‘Mr Kenneth Grahame is wondering what is the meaning of the expression, “As safe as the Bank of England”,’ Punch commented; Kenneth was not amused.) This incident formed the coagulant for all Kenneth’s fears of social unrest: he recycled it in Toad’s encounter with a ferret sentry at Toad Hall, who ‘said never a word, but he brought his gun up to his shoulder’.²³ The book reflects his joy in fatherhood and the intensity of his affinity with the natural world around him. It is a heartfelt repudiation of sex. Elspeth’s later claim that she was the book’s inspiration and catalyst was truer than she knew, though not for the reasons she reckoned.

Kenneth’s description of the novel as ‘free of the clash of sex’ doubtless baffled his publishers who, in Edwardian England, would have expected nothing else of a book aimed even partly at a child readership and written by the author of The Golden Age and Dream Days. It is equally free of the clash of marriage and all but denies the existence of women. For Kenneth this absence of sex was intrinsic to the perfection of the Riverbankers’ lives and to his own pleasure in writing. In discussing The Wind in the Willows he returned to it repeatedly. ‘It was pleasant to write & especially – what people don’t see – by simply using the animal, to get away at once from weary sex problems & other problems, & just do jolly things without being suspected of preaching or teaching.’²⁴ To President Theodore Roosevelt, an admirer of his Olympians stories, he explained the book’s ‘qualities, if any, [as] mostly negative – i.e. – no problems, no sex, no second meaning – it is only an expression of the very simplest joys of life as lived by the simplest beings of a class that you are specially familiar with and will not misunderstand.’²⁵ At best these are disingenuous interpretations, but Kenneth clung to them fixedly.

The Wind in the Willows rejects outright male–female relationships. That it does so deliberately is clear from Kenneth’s comments, which seem to indicate how far ‘weary sex problems’ lay at the root of his own malaise. The main literary source for the story is Homer’s epic account of Odysseus’s ten-year return to Ithaca after the Trojan War, the Odyssey. The Wind in the Willows is the Odyssey rewritten in Kenneth’s study full of toys, the one room completely free of Elspeth and the taint of Onslow Square. Toad is Kenneth’s Odysseus, whom the Romans called Ulysses: the connection is made explicit in the book’s final chapter, ‘The Return of Ulysses’. Toad’s adventures parody Odysseus’s. Although he possesses echoes of Odysseus’s cunning and his talent for disguises and deceit, Toad is heroic only to himself; Kenneth’s is a mock epic with elements of satire. Odysseus is assisted by Athene and a bevy of obliging goddesses; Toad is rescued by ‘a pleasant wench and good-hearted’, a lowly gaoler’s daughter. The home that Odysseus left behind is exposed to the depredations of a band of suitors, arrogant and unscrupulous men determined to win the hand of his wife Penelope. Uninvited, they consume all that Odysseus’s estate provides, much as the inhabitants of the Wild Wood plunder Toad Hall and the contents of Toad’s cellar. Odysseus’s son Telemachus aspires to be like his father and share in Odysseus’s renown; in Kenneth’s story, the otter cub Portly is brought round to this point of view. Meanwhile, Rat is tempted by the seafarer, a version of Odysseus’s encounters with Lotus-eaters and Sirens.

A single central element is missing from Kenneth’s rewriting: Penelope. A longing to be reunited with his paragon of a wife draws Odysseus across the ‘wine-dark’ seas, defying mortal dangers. There is no Penelope figure in The Wind in the Willows and, far from being voluntary, Toad’s homecoming is forced upon him by Badger and his friends in order to restore the hierarchical order of their tiny social microcosm, a pyramidal structure with Toad at the apex. Shattered by his marriage to Elspeth, Kenneth was unable to incorporate within his story any approximation to selfless, life-enhancing love between men and women. Odysseus weeps for Penelope; Toad weeps for himself. As an omission it is deeply unfair. Elspeth’s lifelong mourning of the love she thought that she and Kenneth shared reveals deep affinities with Penelope. Like Penelope, she lacked power to bring about a reunion; she too could only wait for her husband to come back to her. Instead, Kenneth resorts to coercion to return Toad to Toad Hall. As a member of the landed elite, Toad must recapture his ancestral acres to oust the creatures of the Wild Wood, members of the proletariat in the thinnest of disguises.

As with the boys in his Olympians stories, all four principal characters in The Wind in the Willows borrow features of his own; their makeup includes reminders of Furnivall, Henley, Q, Atky and, in Toad’s case, Mouse. On the brink of his fiftieth birthday Kenneth completed a novel in which Toad’s itch for adventure is defeated by Badger’s respect for convention and common sense; strong forces of conformity thwart his hankering for escape. For Toad there can be no going it alone or evading the role society has allotted him: status imposes duties and responsibilities, a part to be played and a manner in which to play it. Rat’s sudden wanderlust dimly echoes Cunningham Grahame’s abandonment and perhaps Kenneth’s own fantasy of leaving Elspeth; it is quashed by the sensible Mole. Like Kenneth, Toad and Rat are hostages to fortune, both trapped by the people who claim to love them best. Viewed from this angle, Kenneth’s conclusion is bleak indeed.