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.