Eternal Boy: The Life of Kenneth Grahame
Matthew Dennison
Head of Zeus, £18.99
Review by Nick Major
“A boy’s will is the wind’s will, / And the thoughts of youth are
long, long thoughts.” So goes the refrain of Henry Wandsworth
Longfellow’s poem My Lost Youth. When Kenneth Grahame was still a
sapling of a boy, his father recited these lines on walks along the
banks of Loch Fyne. Grahame’s thoughts of youth remained long for the
rest of his life. The writer of The Wind in the Willows was forever
being drawn back to what Robert Louis Stevenson called “cloudland,”
that colourful panorama of imaginative clarity and inner-absorption
that entrances children’s minds. As Matthew Dennison points out in his
fine new biography, Grahame “dismissed as inanities, delusions and
‘pale phantasms’ adult preoccupations like politics and society…”
Rather, he thought the magic and hallucinatory majesty of life could
be found in the world of boyhood stories and nature.
It is strange that Grahame was so enchanted with visions of youth. His
own childhood was no idyll. Although he was born to a wealthy
Edinburgh family, his mother died when he was five years old. His
father, an inveterate alcoholic, was unable to look after his
children, and remained estranged from them for most of his life.
Kenneth and his siblings were sent from Inveraray to live in Berkshire
with his grandmother on his mother’s side, a traditional Scottish
Calvinist who wouldn’t seem out of place in a Willa Muir novel. When
Kenneth left school, his uncle secured him a job as a clerk at the
Bank of England.
The research here draws on a wealth of Grahame’s writings; enough
space is given to Grahame’s own words that even someone unfamiliar with
his work will get a good sense of his style. Dennison also writes with
atmospheric detail about the late Victorian and Edwardian bohemian
sets that Grahame tentatively embraced when he wasn’t desk-bound. Like
many classic children’s books, The Wind in the Willows – published in
1908 to almost wholly negative reviews – started as a bedtime story
for a child. Grahame crafted it for his son Alastair, known as Mouse.
After Mouse was sent away with a nanny or to school, Grahame carried
on writing the tale in letters to his son.
Dennison’s prose can be clumsy, but this shouldn’t hamper readers. I
flew through this book, eager to read more of Dennison’s insights that
connect Grahame’s lonely bookish life with his artistic vision, one
rooted in boyhood innocence and a kind of pantheistic conservatism. He
does seem too harsh on Grahame’s wife, Elspeth, who he thinks was
partly responsible for Grahame’s unhappiness. What seems closer to the
truth is that, as Dennison implies, Grahame was more comfortable in
nature and with books than with people. That Mouse died at 20 years of
age from a suspected suicide only compounds the sadness of Grahame’s
life; it is one of history’s ironies that his tale of the animals who
live on the lively riverbank and in The Wild Wood has brought so much
joy to children down the years.
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