Kenneth Grahame, 1859-1932 (review)

KENNETH GRAHAME, 1859-1932. By Peter Green. L: John Murray, 1959. 3Qs.; pub. in U. S. as KENNETH GRAHAME: A BIOGRAPHY. NY: World, 1959. $6.00. Portion Ch. Vl in THE CORNHILL MAGAZINE, No. 1018 (Winter, 1958-59), 293304 . Kenneth Grahame's THE WIND IN THE WILL0V/S has sold an estimated 4,160,000 copies since its publication in 1908, an achievement unequalled perhaps by any other novel published during the Edwardian era. But despite this tremendous success, Peter Green is the first to undertake a detailed critical study of its content, structure and sources. The list of secondary material on Grahame is not long, and the only other biography, Patrick Chalmers' KENNETH GRAHAME: LIFE, LETTERS AND UNPUBLISHED WORK (1933), was unduly influenced by Grahame's wife. Accompanying Mr. Green's new biography is a bibliography of Grahame's writing based on the work of Roger Lancelyn Green, which runs to 85 items. In the strictly biographical parts of his book Mr. Green is limited by his subject matter. Aside from his unfortunate marriage to a self-deluded, incompatible woman and the tragic suicide of his son Alastair, Kenneth Grahame led an uneventful, if somewhat eccentric life. Mr. Green's work does correct the picture given by Chalmers and destroys completely the fantasy-myth built up so carefully by Grahame's wife, Elspeth, concerning their son and the composition of THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS. Mrs. Grahame's own slim volume, FIRST WHISPERS OF THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS" (1944), now appears a very pathetic effort by an unrealistic woman to write literary history as she would have liked to have had it happen. An especially interesting portion of this biography is the section describing Grahame's literary relationships—and in Grahame's case they were purely literary!—with the members of the YELLOW BOOK group. A more innocent and innocuous decadent than Kenneth Grahame would be hard to imagine, and Mr. Green's discussion of the difference underlying the concepts of Pan as a symbol of decadence—the difference between the concepts of Beardsley, Machen and Grahame—shows what an incongruous figure Grahame was in the YELLOW BOOK circle; nevertheless, he was highly thought of by the other contributors to that publication. Perhaps more important than his associations with THE YELLOW BOOK were Grahame's long-lasting friendships with F. J, Furnival and Sir Arthur Qui 1ler-Couch. Though Kenneth Grahame was not a major writer, his life reflects many of the elements common to the transitional years between the Victorian period and the present. Grahame especially resented the full tide of industrialization that flooded England in the Eighteen Nineties and which seemed, to many artists and writers, to be engulfing intellectual and aesthetic life. The central thesis of Mr. Green's book is that Grahame preferred an anarchistic life, but subdued his individualism for the security of a position as Secretary of the Bank of England. His outlet for this frustration was his writing, and his stories and essays reflect the struggle within himself, which was also the struggle of his period. Mr. Green is careful to acknowledge ideas that are admittedly "conjecture," but occasional Ly-he goes astray with his psychologizing. For example, there is little basis for assuming that the trial of Oscar V/i 1 de lent specific elements to the persecution complex of Mr. Toad, and it is carrying cause IX. and effect to extremes to claim that an attack on Grahame in the Bank of England by a lunatic named George Robinson provided the material for the scene in which Mr. Toad is nearly shot by a "trigger-happy ferret sentry." Bgt with only one or two such misdirected efforts to trace ultimate sources, Mr. Green's detailed analysis of The Reluctant Dragon" and iHE WIND IN THE WILLOWS is a fascinating piece of research. -- E.S.L. Joseph Jones. THE CRADLE OF EREWHON. Austin: University of Texas P., I960. $4.00. tn The Cradle of Erewhon Professor Jones has collected most of the known facts about the four and a half years Samuel Butler spent in New Zealand; he has effectively examined the articles and letters which Butler wrote for THE...