Eternal Boy
Page 15
Members of the British and American ex-pat community left visiting cards at the Grahames’ hotel. Elspeth told Patrick Chalmers that she and Kenneth were in accord on not returning their calls. There were exceptions. In 1922, the British ambassador Sir Rennell Rodd invited Kenneth to address the Keats/Shelley Association. In a talk entitled ‘Ideals’, afterwards published in the Fortnightly Review, Kenneth returned to ‘the fancy-realm of childhood’. ‘Ideals’ is simultaneously a confession and an apologia. It is not the waving arms of a drowning man, but his rubber ring, proof that Kenneth responded to Mouse’s death as he had reacted to every vicissitude. ‘When we are tempted to speak somewhat contemptuously of the wayward fancies of a boy, let us ask ourselves seriously whether we ever entirely lay aside this habit of mind; whether we do not, all of us, to the last, take refuge at times from the rubs and disappointments of a life where things go eternally askew, in our imaginary world where at any rate we have things for the time exactly as we want them?’5 It was Kenneth’s trusted escape mechanism, more dependable now than his own writing or Marcus Aurelius’s stoic aphorisms. Its solace excluded Elspeth as firmly as the closed doors of his doll-filled study at 16 Durham Villas, or the barn fitted out with stove and bookshelves that he had left behind at Boham’s.
From Rome the Grahames visited the Dolomites, Rapallo, Lake Garda, Capri, Sicily, Florence and Siena. Dressed in an Inverness cape, Kenneth walked alone through the varied landscapes, as he walked the rises of the Downs. With Elspeth he visited picture galleries and churches, admiring triptychs and altarpieces by the Italian Primitives he had first encountered in London. ‘I have walked through hundreds of picture galleries in my day, always with pleasure and interest, often with the keenest delight,’ he remembered, but the only souvenirs he kept lifelong were ‘tiny shells picked up from some Cornish beaches, miniature fishing nets from Brittany… little gewgaws from foreign and English fairs of which he was a lover’, like ‘the Treasure Trove of some darling child’, in Elspeth’s words.6 The tenant of Boham’s, a Mr Davies, left in 1922, but still they did not return to England to order their affairs. Rome drew them back and back. ‘We wintered in Rome, and summered there, and Eastered, and Christmas’d,’ Elspeth said, ‘and knew every one of the 490 old churches.’
*
Eighteen months after Mr Davies left it empty, in the spring of 1924, Boham’s was sold and Kenneth and Elspeth returned to England. They had already dispersed much of the impedimenta of their marriage; they had given away Mouse’s belongings. Elspeth kept boxes of correspondence, including letters sent to her by Kenneth from Cornwall in the summer they were married, and sprightly, courtly Valentine’s Day verses written specially for her by Sir John Tenniel. She kept Mouse’s letters up to his departure from the Old Malthouse and discarded all evidence of his unhappiness afterwards. She kept the letters about The Wind in the Willows that Kenneth received from across the globe, to which she, rather than he, invariably replied. In this carefully edited private archive survived Dino and Minkie’s love match, the myth of Mouse’s charmed life and universal acclaim for the book Elspeth took credit for. Her culling and hoarding were her own equivalent of Kenneth’s imaginative escapism, and equally misleading.
They chose a house close to the river in the large, bustling village of Pangbourne. Southeast of Oxford, with Oxford traffic clearly audible, it did not, like Blewbury, retain the shadows Kenneth once prized of King Alfred’s ancient landscape. But its large garden contained a grassy amphitheatre that reminded him of a circus ring; there was a terrace for reading and The Times crossword; he hired garden help but no domestic staff, and refused to install a telephone. In Pangbourne, Kenneth accepted the role the village bestowed upon him of local littérateur. He gave talks in the Constitutional Hall; he introduced visiting speakers. When Osbert Sitwell lectured to the Pangbourne Art and Crafts Society, Kenneth used his introduction to lament the despoliation of the landscape. ‘For as I pass through this beautiful world, always with an eye – I hope – for the beauty around me, year by year I see things I have admired and loved passing and perishing utterly.’7
It was a statement he might have applied more widely. Not only places but the people Kenneth loved were passing from him. Atky had drowned in a sailing accident in 1911; the Boy, Bevill Quiller-Couch, had tried in vain to save him. The Boy himself was dead, killed by Spanish flu in February 1919 after distinguished war service. Austin Purves, whose assiduous correspondence rallied Kenneth’s morale after publication of The Wind in the Willows, had been dead for a decade. Kenneth had not seen Helen since his marriage to Elspeth, nor Roland following a disagreement in 1913. He felt no curiosity about new friends and his attempts to maintain contact with old friends were as half-hearted as ever. ‘You are an elusive fellow,’ an exasperated Q told him in 1925.8 Once, Kenneth had told Elspeth, ‘You like people. They interest you. But I am interested in places!’9 His interest in Pangbourne was confined to its Thames frontage. His world had shrunk and the places that still engaged his attention were the countries of the mind he commended in ‘The Fellow That Walks Alone’ – above all the mythical river that Rat told Mole he lived by, with, on and in.
He had little appetite for novelty. He accepted a commission from J. M. Dent to write an introduction to the memoirs of a circus impresario who called himself Lord George Sanger; he declined the offer of an authorized biography of Dr Barnardo. ‘It seems to me that the essay is somewhat remote from the book,’ wrote editor Guy Pocock, after reading Kenneth’s first draft of the Sanger introduction. ‘It is also quite remote from the man.’10 Characteristically, Kenneth had mostly overlooked Sanger. His essay revisits his own memories of circuses; it celebrates the romance of the travelling players’ lives, glimpsed through the prism of Kenneth’s conservatism: ‘The show people are a contented folk, chiefly I think because they rarely want to be anything but what they are. They like the life for itself.’11
It was a wistful and double-edged statement, though Kenneth was too polite deliberately to invoke Elspeth’s weaknesses in a manner recognizable to anyone but himself. A Pangbourne acquaintance described her in unlovely terms, ‘a chinny woman of leathery countenance, who wore well-cut tailor-made tweeds and talked stridently and interminably, laying down the law about her preferences in literature and art, and never taking much heed of what anybody else had to say’.12 He dismissed her ‘wearing personality’ and reported what was clearly village gossip: ‘I gathered that Mr Grahame had long since learned that it was a waste of time and energy to attempt to express an opinion in his wife’s company.’ Village gossip also drew attention to the quantities of claret and champagne delivered to Church Cottage, which may have become essential to Kenneth. It contrasted with Elspeth’s cooking, in which she gave free rein to well-honed instincts for parsimony and cutting corners.
As long ago as 1910, Kenneth had told a visitor to Boham’s, ‘Granted that the average man may live for seventy years, it is a fallacy to assume that his life from sixty to seventy is more important than his life from five to fifteen.’13 It is a restatement of the old familiar theme: that with the end of childhood comes death in life. In his own case, his final decade has the quality of a recessional, which he perhaps anticipated. Most winters he and Elspeth returned to the Continent, usually Italy or Cannes. Through walled medieval towns, across broad, sun-soaked boulevards, he walked with a cane now, shoulders stooping, white hair lifted aloft by southern breezes, sometimes short of breath, touched by lumbago, a stiffness in his joints. He ate and drank too much and, in Pangbourne, chaffed Dr Bourdillon, who advocated restraint as an adjunct to treatment for arteriosclerosis. When Elspeth’s back was turned he escaped Church Cottage in pursuit of ice cream.
Much of each day was devoted to reading: Browning, Tennyson, Boswell, Dr Johnson, Henry Fielding, Samuel Butler, Robert Burns, Marvell, Herrick, Shelley and Shakespeare. He disliked the novels of the Brontës, this courteous, undemonstrative mid-Victorian whom Q described as ‘eminently a “man’s man�
��’.14 He was still in thrall to the river, where he spent a part of every day, listening, watching, scenting the air like the small creatures he had immortalized. The Wind in the Willows itself was inescapable and he did not try to escape it. E. H. Shepard visited Church Cottage in 1930, preliminary to beginning work on a new series of illustrations. Kenneth told him, Shepard recorded, that he would like ‘to go with me to show me the river bank that he knew so well, “but now I cannot walk so far and you must find your way alone”’.15 He offered Shepard a single injunction: ‘I love these little people, be kind to them.’ Following first production on 17 December 1929, he attended several performances of A. A. Milne’s stage adaptation, Toad of Toad Hall, writing to Curtis Brown after one such, in January 1931, ‘I arrived in London stiff as an icicle with cold. I returned glowing with warmth, and with the merry tunes of Toad and his friends dancing through my head.’16 In November, ahead of a London exhibition, Ernest Shepard wrote ‘to ask if you will do me the honour of accepting as a gift, one of the original illustrations that I made for The Wind in the Willows’.17 Kenneth chose the caravan drawing from ‘The Open Road’. Dr Bourdillon had told him enough to make it clear that his own junketings by lane and highway were over.
He died in the early hours of the morning of 6 July 1932, of a cerebral haemorrhage. His death surprised Elspeth, following an unruffled day beside the river and, after supper, a stroll, the two of them, and early bed. The noise that alerted her was Kenneth’s book falling from his hand: The Talisman by Walter Scott, adored by his grandmother, admired by Cunningham. Elspeth found the book on the floor, Kenneth’s bedside lamp still burning, her husband in a coma, past communicating, lost to her, as in truth he had been for much of their marriage.
She arranged the funeral quickly, in Pangbourne’s Church of St James the Less, three days after his death; a day of coruscating sunlight that sparkled in dust motes and lit with gold the stands of roses and delphiniums and pale branches of willow gathered that morning from the riverside. Even in so short a time, flowers had arrived from readers across the country, ‘with cards attached in a childish scrawl, saying how much they loved him’.18
Kenneth was temporarily buried in the churchyard – later, he was transferred to a plot beside Mouse – and quantities of sweet peas heaped the lid of his coffin, their scent incense-heavy, like an opiate, in the heat. ‘That nature has her moments of sympathy with man has been noted often enough,’ he had written in 1894, in an Olympians story called ‘The Blue Room’.19 So it was the day he was buried. Nature celebrated the final river crossing of this gentle disciple with the full panoply of summer pomp.
*
Kenneth had excluded Elspeth from The Wind in the Willows. At his death she became Penelope at last, weeping and weaving and fixedly attached to his memory. The web that she wove was her own version of his story. The year after he died, she collaborated with Kenneth’s first biographer, Patrick Chalmers, to create a hagiography in which past wrongs were righted: this was Kenneth Grahame: Life, Letters and Unpublished Work, and she demanded of Chalmers half the book’s royalties for her meddling. In 1944, two years before her own death, under the title First Whisper of ‘The Wind in the Willows’, she published misleading, saccharine ‘memories’ of her life as wife and mother, Mouse’s genius, a version of Kenneth’s working practice and the novel’s sunshine inspiration. Delusions had made Elspeth’s marriage bearable and many of her delusions stemmed from love. But Kenneth had written the stories of his life already, for he lived, as he wrote, in his imagination, this eternal boy acclaimed by Q as ‘at once a child and a king’. In imagination, if not in life, he was frequently alone.
We hope you enjoyed this book.
Plate Section
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Notes
Index
About Matthew Dennison
Also by Matthew Dennison
An Invitation from the Publisher
Plate Section
A riverside picnic in The Wind in the Willows, Ernest Shepard’s vision of Kenneth’s rural idyll. The febrile, escapist happiness of Kenneth’s childhood years at The Mount remained with him lifelong.
Kenneth as a new boy at St Edward’s School, Oxford, c.1868, a ‘sullen, reluctant, very ordinary-looking youth of nine summers’.
(St Edward’s School, Oxford)
Kenneth in the uniform of volunteer infantry regiment the London Scottish, the stiff swagger of his posture belied by a hunted, uncertain expression.
(Frederick Hollyer)
Kenneth c.1895, on the surface a very eligible bachelor of respected position in the City and growing literary renown.
(Getty Images)
Frank Dicksee’s 1881 portrait of Elspeth Thomson shows a young woman of cultured tastes and, behind doe eyes, steely fixity of purpose.
(National Trust / Bridgeman Images)
Kenneth and Elspeth’s only child Alistair, known as Mouse. The angle of his head in this romantic photograph effectively conceals from view a debilitating squint.
(From Patrick Chalmers biography of KG)
Kenneth’s relationships with both Elspeth and Mouse included their measure of tension. On good days, like the creatures of Kenneth’s fiction, father and son walked for miles across the country surrounding Mayfield and Boham’s.
Kenneth in his fifties by John Singer Sargent, retired from the Bank of England, the author of best-selling, much-loved stories.
(Lebrecht Authors / Bridgeman Images)
This photograph by Lady Ottoline Morrell depicts a snowy-haired, elderly Grahame, happier walking alone than at home with Elspeth or in the company of friends.
(© National Portrait Gallery, London)
Arthur Rackham’s illustrations to The Wind in the Willows, like this scene of Badger, Rat and Mole, were the last the artist completed, published in 1940, the year after his death.
(The Stapleton Collection / Bridgeman Images)
‘I love these little people, be kind to them,’ Kenneth told Ernest Shepard in 1930. Shepard’s version of animals and landscape has proved enduring.
Toad, Mole, Badger and Rat: Kenneth’s multiple diffused self-portraits, and a vanished world of pre-war, pre-lapsarian certainties.
Acknowledgements
An award from The Society of Authors assisted the writing of this book. To the Society, and particularly members of the distinguished awards panel, I express my grateful thanks.
I am grateful to the staff of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, and also to the Duchess of Argyll.
As always I express heartfelt thanks to my terrific agent, Georgina Capel, and my wonderfully supportive family: my parents, my son Aeneas and my peerless, inspirational, adored wife, Gráinne.
‘When the girl returned, some hours later, she carried a tray, with a cup of fragrant tea steaming on it; and a plate piled up with very hot buttered toast, cut thick, very brown on both sides, with the butter running through the holes in it in great golden drops, like honey from the honeycomb. The smell of that buttered toast simply talked to Toad, and with no uncertain voice; talked of warm kitchens, of breakfasts on bright frosty mornings, of cosy parlour firesides on winter evenings […] of the purring of contented cats, and the twitter of sleeping canaries’ (Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows).
MATTHEW DENNISON
Montgomeryshire
Feast of Thomas the Apostle, 2018
Bibliography
The largest collection of archive material relating to the life of Kenneth Grahame is housed in the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Patrick Chalmers’s 1933 biography, written with Elspeth Grahame’s active involvement, quotes a number of primary sources that have since been lost.
Published sources
Batchelor, John, The Edwardian Novelists (Duckworth, London, 1982).
Blount, Margaret, Animal Land: Creatures of Children’s Fiction (Hutchinson, London, 1974).
Chalmers, Patrick R., Kenneth Grahame: Life, Letters and Unpublished Work (Methuen, London, 1933).
Gooderson, David, intro, My Dearest Mouse: ‘The Wind in the Willows’ Letters (Pavilion, London, 1988).
Graham, Eleanor, Kenneth Grahame (The Bodley Head, London, 1963).
Grahame, Elspeth, First Whisper of ‘The Wind in the Willows’ (Methuen, London, 1944).