Kenneth’s version of the Streatley weekend in ‘The Romance of the Road’ suggests that he endured the weekday world by cultivating forgetfulness. It points to the persistence of other aspirations, too. ‘After unnumbered chops with country ale, the hard facts of life begin to swim in a golden mist. You are isled from accustomed cares and worries… old failures seem partial successes… Tomorrow you shall begin life again: shall write your book, make your fortune, do anything; meanwhile you sit.’10 Although this is unlikely to represent the whole truth, the inference is clear: oblivion induced by physical exertion and over-indulgence offered respite from regretfulness, made the Bank of England tolerable. Kenneth’s contentment appears less than that of Mole and Rat, whose lives are entirely leisured. As a guarantee of happiness, his childhood habit of oscillating between actual and imaginary worlds yielded variable success in the face of the bank’s solid realities. To himself, Kenneth admitted that he was not one of the ‘stout-hearted ones’ who have ‘the rare courage, at the realizing point, to kick the board over and declare against further play’.11 This much had been clear as early as 1879 and his arrival at the bank in line with John Grahame’s contriving. His rebellion was always submerged; his desire to ‘kick the board over’ was at best intermittent.
‘The Romance of the Road’ appeared in the National Observer in February 1891. That autumn, Henley published a story by Kenneth written in the first person, apparently from a child’s point of view. ‘The Olympians’ is about adults and children and the gulf between them, the imbalance of power in adults’ favour, their unthinking social conformity. The narrative voice belongs at once to the child and his grown-up self. The influence of Stevenson hovers, in this case an essay called ‘Child’s Play’ in which, through a child’s eyes, adults appear ‘bearded or petticoated giants… who move upon a cloudy Olympus’.12 After an interval of eighteen months, Kenneth wrote five more stories, using the same unidentified child narrator. Only Harold appears alongside him in ‘The Olympians’. In ‘A Whitewashed Uncle’, ‘The Finding of the Princess’, ‘Young Adam Cupid’, ‘The Burglars’ and ‘Snowbound’, completed between February and September 1893, the reader is introduced to Edward, Selina and Charlotte, as well as Aunt Eliza, sundry uncles and Miss Smedley the governess. The condition of the five parentless children, ‘whose nearest were aunts and uncles’, mirrors that of the Grahame children. The three boys reflect aspects of Kenneth himself: Edward his talent for bluff conformity, Harold his giddy imagination, the narrator’s preference for his own company. They live at The Mount, sketchily outlined save for the lingering details of garden and surrounding country.
The genesis of these stories is unclear. On 19 January 1893, Kenneth wrote to John Lane of the publishing house The Bodley Head. To date, Henley had published twenty contributions by Kenneth in the National Observer, including three poems and ‘The Olympians’. At Henley’s prompting, he offered Lane a selection of pieces for compilation in book form, in the manner of Virginibus Puerisque. With a mixture of diffidence and defiance, he wrote, ‘Mr Henley suggested to me once, that a “blend” of these short articles with verse would perhaps make a “feature” that might take. But that is a detail I have no particular feeling about, one way or the other.’13 He added, ‘They are, I think, just sufficiently individual and original to stand it.’
In individuality, ‘The Olympians’ clearly outstripped Kenneth’s ‘Stevensonettes’. Its charming, funny, bittersweet presentation of childish percipience was little less than radical to a late-Victorian readership conditioned to objectify children sentimentally. Whether it was Kenneth himself who acknowledged this or Lane or Henley or all three is unclear. At least one contemporary accorded the laurels to Henley. ‘It may be that when the history of the Scots and National Observer is written… we shall then know whether… it was [Mr Grahame’s] own idea to continue the diverting narrative of the childhood of Harold and Edward, Charlotte and Selina,’ ran an unsigned article in the Academy in December 1897. ‘As the cause of wit in others Mr Henley holds a very high position.’14 Whichever way, for a writer who would always work slowly, the result was the equivalent of creative frenzy. John Lane included all six stories – and no poems – in his selection.
The agreement Kenneth negotiated with Lane was impressive. ‘I don’t call this a grasping proposal – especially from a Scotchman,’ he wrote, presumably disingenuously.15 Lane – notoriously slippery about money – almost certainly disagreed. Heredity, fourteen years at the bank or even Uncle John Grahame may have stiffened Kenneth’s hand. On a short publishing run of 450 copies, he stipulated royalties of 10 per cent on the first 200 sold, rising to 20 per cent thereafter. Surprisingly Lane acquiesced. He published the collection in October 1893 under the title Pagan Papers, with a voguish black-and-white illustration by Aubrey Beardsley on the title page. For the first time Kenneth enjoyed the sight of his name attached to work that had first appeared anonymously.
Reviews were mixed. Correctly, critics identified the book’s derivative qualities; the more conservative press jibbed at the idea of paganism. Paganism was a buzzword of the moment, an umbrella term, shorthand for a strand of anti-authoritarianism. It targeted key Victorian orthodoxies of religion, culture and morality; it was invariably nostalgic. The figure of Pan – half-man, half-god – became a key symbol: vigorous, untrammelled in his natural urges, protesting, piliferous, priapic.
Measured against these generalizations, Pagan Papers is ‘pagan’ only in its dislike of modernity and an intense engagement with nature. Kenneth claimed that the part of his brain he used in early childhood had never altered. His perceptions, he was convinced, were those of a child, and it was children, he believed, who preserved links with the natural world that adults routinely severed. In his weekend persona, combing the hills and fields, he insisted on his own physical and emotional connectedness to the landscape. His view of nature was egalitarian: he assumed equality between himself and the creatures of field and hedge and wood. (Later, in an essay called ‘The Inner Ear’, he would go a step further and claim that, while man needed nature, the dependency was not mutual: ‘it is evident that we are entirely superfluous’.) His ‘paganism’ was pastoralism, a cult of the country, a facet of his social and political conservatism; he banished the glum Scots Protestantism of Mrs Inglis and Uncle John Grahame in favour of a mysticism centred on nature. Kenneth’s Pan is a nature spirit, a symbol of the older, vanishing, pre-industrialized landscape to which Kenneth was so fiercely attached: like Kenneth, he is wary of the jangling vulgarities of the age, its materialism, the helter-skelter pursuit of novelty. In ‘The Rural Pan’, Pan ‘loveth the more unpretentious humankind, especially them that are… addicted to the kindly soil, and to the working thereof: perfect in no way, only simple, cheery sinners’.16 With no interest in acknowledging sexual urges of his own, Kenneth also stripped his Pan of lechery. The result is a poster boy for his own rural nostalgia – as he understood, a minority viewpoint. Kenneth’s Pan endorses all the author’s hobbyhorses, as will Rat, Mole and Badger in The Wind in the Willows: his paganism is imaginative escapism.17 It was shaped by the games he had played in the garden at The Mount, and children’s books read in boyhood and since. It was decorative, even whimsical. ‘A step into the woodland was a step over the margin… and then, good-bye to the modern world,’ he wrote in ‘Deus Terminus’, included in Pagan Papers. ‘Little hands were stretched to trip you, fairy gibe and mockery pelted you from every rabbit-hole.’ In its emphasis on long walks and country pubs, his paganism was hearty, too. He lamented his contemporaries’ resistance to ‘jigs and fantasies’.18
*
Kenneth had good reason for his lasting gratitude to Henley. Enthusiastically, Henley had welcomed him into his stable of contributors. He had encouraged him to pursue publication of his ‘Stevensonettes’ in book form. His recommendation had gone some way to persuading John Lane of an uncertain venture. In bringing about Kenneth’s association with Lane, Henley placed his protégé
in the way of another key introduction – to an erratic, excitable, shrilly spoken, short-sighted, long-haired ex-pat American novelist and short story writer, ‘an incalculable creature of moods, at one moment sneering and unjust and the next serious and appreciative’: Henry Harland.19
Although accounts conflict, Harland appears to have conceived the idea of a new kind of periodical, in which artwork and literary contributions were independent of one another but accorded equal status, in the summer of 1893. He would edit it himself, with Aubrey Beardsley as art editor; it would have ‘the courage of its modernity and not tremble at the frown of Mrs Grundy’. His coup was to secure John Lane as his publisher. Lane agreed to issue the periodical quarterly, bound in yellow wrappers, like illicit French novels of the period. Max Beerbohm offered a fictionalized account of key decisions in a sketch set in the autumn of 1893, in which Beardsley tells him, ‘Most exciting! John Lane wants to bring out a Quarterly – Writings and Drawings – Henry Harland to be Literary Editor – Me to be Art Editor. Great fun… Not just a paper thing. A bound thing: a real book, bound in good thick boards. Yellow ones. Bright yellow, and it’s going to be called The Yellow Book.’20 The plan was unveiled at an evening of heavy drinking at London’s Devonshire Club in February 1894, two months ahead of the first issue.
Publication of Pagan Papers went some way to establishing a literary reputation for Kenneth. In its aftermath, Henley printed six more ‘Olympians’ stories as well as three new ‘Stevensonettes’ over the course of ten months. For the National Observer, however, time was running out. The paper had consistently lost money. In the late summer of 1894 it closed. Kenneth’s final contribution was the witty, risqué ‘Sawdust and Sin’, in which Charlotte tells a version of Alice in Wonderland to two of her dolls, Rosa and Jerry, and the dolls’ inability to sit up without slumping against one another is presented as an attempted seduction of blonde Rosa by black-haired Jerry. The loss of Henley’s paper inevitably jeopardized the prospects of any new Olympians stories.
The Yellow Book came to Kenneth’s rescue. Harland first approached him, at John Lane’s prompting, in the spring of 1894. By then Kenneth not only understood the parlousness of affairs at the National Observer, but his yardstick for literary success had altered dramatically. In April, his cousin Anthony Hope Hawkins gave up his practice at the Bar. Four years earlier he had paid for publication of a novel, A Man of Mark, that failed to attract attention. With The Prisoner of Zenda, written under the pseudonym Anthony Hope, he found himself an overnight sensation and retired to write full time. Such conspicuous success when Kenneth’s own literary future was tottering unsettled his more cautious cousin.
The same month, a storm of protest greeted the first Yellow Book. It was not the fault of blameless contributions by Frederic Leighton, Walter Crane and Edmund Gosse (afterwards librarian to the House of Lords). Outrage targeted an essay by Max Beerbohm in praise of cosmetics, including ‘sun tan’ makeup for men, and Arthur Symons’s poem, ‘Stella Maris’, about an encounter with a prostitute (‘The chance romances of the streets,/… One night we loved each other well’), in which Symons praised his ‘Juliet of a night’ in terms more often associated with the Virgin Mary. Moral opprobrium, once earned, proved lasting. Throughout its three-year lifespan, The Yellow Book was synonymous with subversion: effete, libertine, decadent.
It seems a surprising forum for Kenneth’s poignantly humorous stories about children, and for a writer of his stamp. Kenneth’s satire against ‘the Olympians’ targeted their lack of imagination. He protested against unthinking convention, not conformity, like the Dragon in ‘The Reluctant Dragon’ who complains about fighting St George: ‘the whole thing’s nonsense and conventionality and popular thick-headedness’.21 Amiable and upright, Kenneth had no interest in shocking, as he had demonstrated in his retreat to Tuscany amid the brouhaha following Furnivall’s production of The Cenci; he had little in common with Yellow Book contributors like the troubled poet Lionel Johnson – a repressed homosexual alcoholic Catholic convert – or Johnson’s fellow poet, the foppish Richard Le Gallienne. His outlook was closer to Lane’s. Both identified in Harland’s venture sound commercial opportunities and, in Kenneth’s case, a continuing readership. The Yellow Book’s ambitions were lofty. Critically acclaimed and advanced in their presentation of children, Kenneth’s stories satisfied its remit of courageous modernity. His first contribution, published in July, was ‘The Roman Road’, among the very best of his Olympians stories.
His participation in the social world gathered around Harland and his wife Aline was less comfortable than his membership of Henley’s ‘regatta’. He regularly attended the Harlands’ Saturday evenings in the Cromwell Road; he ‘always seem[ed] to want to get into a corner and evade notice if possible’.22 With Henry, Aline and Evelyn Sharp – then a writer of fairy tales for The Yellow Book – he spent Christmas 1895 in Brussels and, the following winter, travelled to Boulogne. Otherwise he had little in common with Harland’s troubled young men, as women in the group were quick to discern. One noted Kenneth’s ‘complete freedom from the affectations which so puzzled me in the other men of the set’: ‘He answered my idea of a man and I suppose half-consciously… I was comparing him with the more or less effeminate young men I met there.’23 He reminded Evelyn Sharp ‘of the nicest kind of schoolboy except that he had a fine taste in literature instead of a passion for sport. He had a charming sense of humour and was a great tease.’24 For Sharp, he was ‘very kind and courteous [with] not an ounce of humbug in him’. Tellingly, short story writer Netta Syrett concluded that ‘he was sane and normal’. All three women contrasted Kenneth positively with the run of Yellow Book men.
In the event, Kenneth was not so ‘sane and normal’ as to guard against an occurrence that could have been lifted from one of his ‘Stevensonettes’ about fugitive City men. After a heavy evening with the Harlands, he staggered as far as Piccadilly, where he saw a vegetable cart heading towards Covent Garden. Kenneth gave chase and climbed aboard. On his bed of cabbages, ‘overcome by an “exposition of sleep”’, he promptly passed out.25 The costermonger looked kindly on his drunken passenger dressed in evening clothes. When Kenneth woke up in the early hours, he was retracing his steps to Piccadilly, still in the cart, which was now empty of vegetables. Later, he was sorry, he told a friend, ‘that he never knew what happened in the interval’.
Like Henley before him, Harland nurtured Kenneth’s writing. The immediate result was completion of ‘The Headswoman’, his historical fantasy begun in 1890, before ‘The Olympians’ changed the direction of his fiction writing. Published in The Yellow Book in October, it is a story influenced by aspects of Kenneth’s working life, and the bulk of its satire is directed against officialdom. In spirit, seventeenth-century Jeanne is a New Woman of the 1890s: her protest is a plea for women’s rights. The pleasure of decapitation by so attractive and engaging an executioner provides the story’s central joke – literally, gallows humour. Evelyn Sharp, who would become a prominent suffragist, clearly preferred Kenneth’s Olympians stories, also the verdict of subsequent readers. ‘The appearance of one of his sketches in the YB would be hailed as an event and discussed at length the next Saturday evening,’ she remembered. She does not mention ‘The Headswoman’, which John Lane nevertheless issued in stand-alone form the following year.26
Only two more Olympians stories were published in The Yellow Book. Instead Kenneth offered new stories to Henley, who was back on his feet as editor of the New Review: published monthly, the New Review offered more opportunities than Harland’s quarterly. Additional stories were also published in American journals The Chapbook and Scribner’s Magazine. Kenneth and John Lane were equally enthusiastic about a second compilation on the lines of Pagan Papers. In The Golden Age, published in February 1895, were twelve new Olympians stories and no ‘Stevensonettes’; Lane also included the six stories already published in Pagan Papers. The result was an instant success, crowned by an effusive review by po
et Algernon Swinburne, who described the book as ‘well nigh too praiseworthy for praise’, royalty payments, invitations from society hostesses, inclusion as one of only two English-language books on the bookshelf of Kaiser Wilhelm’s cabin in his royal yacht, the Hohenzollern, alongside the Bible. In vain dissenting voices challenged Kenneth’s destruction of the myth of the innocent, ignorant Beautiful Child: Lane’s first reprint appeared in March. Within a year Kenneth had matched the achievement of his cousin Anthony Hope Hawkins. Unlike Hope Hawkins, he did not resign his day job.
*
By the spring of 1895, Kenneth had succeeded in the career Uncle John Grahame had forced upon him; he had also succeeded in his own ambition to become a writer. From childhood he had lived two lives. During the 1890s, he rationalized those two lives as a series of polarities: ‘toiler’ and idler; senior administrator and loafer; Grahame probity versus artistic fulfilment; active and passive. This conflict was self-generated and self-serving; it inspired him creatively.
In ‘The Reluctant Dragon’, written in 1898, he created a trio of fictional self-portraits: a bookish young boy, St George and a dragon. Both dragon and saint unwillingly undertake the parts allotted to them by traditional narratives. Neither has any appetite for their preordained roles or their inevitable showdown. Chivvied by the boy, they agree to a public contest; as in the storybooks, St George emerges apparently victorious. The sonnet-writing Dragon comes closest to Kenneth’s personal mythmaking: ‘so engaging and so trustful, and as simple as a child’.27 ‘All the other fellows were so active and earnest and all that sort of thing,’ he tells the Boy, describing other dragons, ‘always rampaging, and skirmishing, and scouring the desert sands, and pacing the margin of the sea, and chasing knights all over the place, and devouring damsels, and going on generally – whereas I liked to get my meals regular and then to prop my back against a bit of rock and snooze a bit, and wake up and think of things going on and how they kept going on just the same’.28
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