Kenneth Grahame: The Gentleman of Idyllic Friendship

Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932) in all his lifetime craved for an arcadian past, a warm home surrounded by peaceful nature. It is not only because that he was born in the mid-Victorian era, the most stable period of the Empire, in a rich Edinburgh

family, but due to his tragic childhood. His mother died at childbirth when he was five.

After three years his father flew overseas and later died in France, while sending the children to live with his grandmother. These two tragedies intensified Grahame’s longing for home and sadness for the loss of home, which then became the theme of The Wind in the Willows. Yet Grahame did have compensation. The house of his grandmother at Cookham, Berkshire, was surrounded by idyllic gardens, orchards and the Thames. Roaming along the river since childhood comforted him in his years at St.

66

Edward’s school (the public school) at Oxford, for the pastoral landscape and the primeval Thames brought him sense of home and of nature (Green 43).

His dream of maintaining this arcadian retreat through entering Oxford University, however, was shattered when his uncle refused to provide him financial support. Grahame instead worked at the Bank of England, one of the most

conservative, stable institutions. This vocation then haunted him for twenty-nine years, yet it was also his “haven which ensured financial security and superficial

conformity” (Wullschläger 168). Without it a bourgeois man like him would be deprived of social respects, like the penniless gentleman Toad.⁸² This emphasis of the bourgeois financial security also makes the nostalgic world of animals in The Wind in the Willows constructed by not rural farmers but bourgeois gentlemen, particularly the down-to-earth Mole (Moore 59). Nevertheless, Grahame’s free soul needed to escape, escaping from this conservative vocation. As Mole takes a holiday and meets Rat by the River, so did Grahame seek leisure in holidays and stimulate creativity through homosociality. He not only travelled to Italy, having had a great passion to the southern Europe ever since (Hunt xii), but also developed many genuine friendships in the intellectual and artistic societies. It was a real pleasure for him to spend time rowing and chatting with his male friends, particularly Arthur Quiller-Couch.

Yet nothing can fully express his idyllic nostalgia except writing. In his first book Pagan Papers (1893) Grahame described Pan as a desexed, solitary wanderer by the Thames, who talks with animals and nature, as well as lures busy urban men to the mythical countryside by piping. This image of Pan not only echoes the thriving

Neo-paganism since the fin-de-siècle⁸³ but reveals what Grahame longed for.

82 The links between sense of security, social status and money on Toad will be discussed in the second part of this chapter.

83 Neo-paganism, according to W. F. Barry’s criticism for the Quarterly Review in 1891, is a widely spread movement which has something to do with the late-Victorian decadence and the decline of the Empire. The literary and social descents led to the public reminiscence of the Greek paganism, which

67

Likewise, in his The Golden Age (1895) he recreated his idealized, Thames-side village life at Cookham by using metaphors of Greek mythology to portray the lives of some orphans in a country house of their relatives. In its sequel Dream Days (1898) Grahame kept romanticizing his childhood and disclosing his desire of non-growing up, as later Barrie did in Peter Pan.

His successful publication brought him an unexpected consequence: Elspeth Thomson, one of the fans of The Golden Age, fell in love with him. Through their love letters in baby-talk tone Grahame revealed his uncertainty for heterosexuality and husbandly duties, probably due to his twenty-year London bachelorhood (Green 227). They got married in 1899; however, during their honeymoon at St. Ives, the fishing village of Fowey, Cornwall, since none of his bachelor friends liked his bride, Grahame left her ashore and went rowing with them. From then on, he preferred male companionship to the married life, and Elspeth’s love to social life at Kensington drives this unfortunate couple more apart in life style (Wullschläger 157, 162). Even after the Grahames moved to the countryside, they continued “lived in separate parts of the house . . . with this nocturnal separation of the sexes” (Green 304). They both pinned all the hopes on their only son Alastair, whose right eye was blind and the left one squint. Nevertheless, Grahame neglected Alastair’s handicap and kept training his son to fulfill his own dream—attending Oxford, until this doomed child committed suicide on the railway track as an undergraduate of Oxford in 1920.

Dull married life had hindered Grahame’s publication for eight years, yet it did not hinder his imagination. The Wind in the Willows came from a bedtime story for Alastair during 1904-5 as both a father-son link and Grahame’s reminiscence of his own childhood. Encouraged by Alastair and Constance Smedley,⁸⁴ Grahame reflamed

was opponent to the modern Christianity (Hallet 163-4).

84 Smedley was a journalist of the American magazine Everybody’s who visited Grahame at Cookham

68

his creativity and published The Wind in the Willows (1908). This work shows Grahame’s nostalgia for the romanticized, ordered, idyllic Victorian past and his fear of the modern, riotous, technophilic Edwardian present (Lerer 265): the cautious Mole, the poetic Rat and the patriarchal Badger belong to the former, while the theatrical Toad represents the latter. Moreover, Grahame also wished for an escape from marriage to have a faraway adventure, just like the globe-travelling of Sea Rat (especially to Italy) in The Wind in the Willows. For Grahame, only through story-writing, -telling and -reading could he reconcile his nostalgia and his wish.

Aside from his love to Alastair, his unhappy married life, and his longing for gentlemanly leisure and overseas adventures, Grahame writes The Wind in the

Willows under the influence of Alfred Lord Tennyson, the most notable Victorian poet laureate. Like Grahame, Tennyson is “essentially a poet of the countryside”

(Greenblatt 1112), conducting poetry of rural serenity and of reminiscing friendship.

Like Grahame, Tennyson reveals “his emphasis on the corrosiveness of female sexuality” (Gilbert 864) in the four idylls published in 1859: “Vivien,” “Guinevere,”

“Enid,” and “Elaine.”

Above all, the Arthurian chivalric codes of loyalty, friendship and honor intensely influenced both Tennyson and Grahame in the Victorian bourgeois context of domesticity. Hence, they both developed strong homoerotic friendships in real life and wrote about male intimacy in their works (Machann 207,213). In his long poem In Memoriam A. H. H.(1849) Tennyson compares himself to a heartbroken widower, viewing Arthur Hallam, his deceased best friend, as “[d]ear as the mother to the son,/

More than my brothers are to me” (Greenblatt 1145). Moreover, in his poem

“Ulysses” (1842) Tennyson transforms the ending of heterosexual family in Homer’s Odyssey into the homosocial, masculine adventures under sail and, above all, shows

(Grahame moved his family back to Cookham in 1906), trying to persuade him to resume writing.

69

his death wish to reunite with Hallam in Elysium, as Odysseus reunites with Achilles in Hades (Rosenberg 313).⁸⁵ Likewise, in Chapter 12 “The Return of Ulysses” in The Wind in the Willows Grahame makes an allusion to the restoration of order and

homecoming of Odysseus. Nevertheless, his focus is no longer the heterosexual relationship (as that between Odysseus, Penelope and the suitors) or the father-son relationship (as that between Odysseus and Telemachus) but the heart-stirring gentlemen’s friendship between the four major characters.

Like Peter Pan, The Wind in the Willows is ambiguous in its readership. Most Edwardian critics like H. L. Nevinson and Arthur Ransome think of this book as meant for adults, since the animal characters are more like nostalgic young men than real animals. Recent critics, however, have different notions. Mary Haynes and Bonnie Gaarden use the domestic structure to prove that this book is meant for the child. Peter Hunt considers that this work “epitomizes the adult’s ideas of the

children’s book” (12) and attempts to discuss the importance of social hierarchy in its animal world. Tess Cosslett believes that its animal characters can be “identified as members of a leisured, masculine elite. But their protected, irresponsible, sexless existence also corresponds to a version of childhood” (174).

In my opinion, The Wind in the Willows partly aims for children because it originates from the bedtime stories to Alastair, describing the childish, adventurous Toad as the original hero.⁸⁶ This book is not merely for children, however, since the vital figure is not Toad, though he remains the most popular character among child

85 For homoerotic friendship between Tennyson and Hallam, John D. Rosenberg evidences it by doubting why all the letters between them two were destroyed by Hallam’s father and Tennyson’s son after they died. Aside from this, no hints of homosexuality is found in the Memoir (1897) of Tennyson, edited by Tennyson’s son, because this work was published after Wilde’s 1895 trials in the homophobic British society (305).

86 The adventures of Toad is also the part first created (on his story letters to his son in 1907 when Alastair was sent to have a holiday with a governess) before Grahame began to design the whole plot of The Wind in the Willows. In addition, Wullschläger pins down the similarities between Toad and Alastair. Toad is a naughty boy with passing fancy and hot temper, while Alastair, when he walked with his governess in Kensington Gardens, tended to kick and slap other children (158).

70

readers. For Grahame, the core of The Wind in the Willows is friendship, symbolized by the River. John David Moore broaches that “Grahame's ideal animal is the urban bachelor, the man of leisure, the old boy, the tourist in the country who has decided to stay, bringing the misogynous values of the men's club into the rural cottage”(52). Rat, the gentleman of homosociality, male domesticity, and nature (especially the

River)-loving, is the real vital figure among the four major characters, for he represents the ideal masculine image Grahame has been desiring to own.

Apart from this, friendship between Mole and Rat is the most genuine, most intimate among many friendships in The Wind in the Willows. Mole, as Neil Philip broaches, is “a fantasy image of Grahame” (99), due to his bourgeois life of financial security and his pursuit of homosociality in the Riverbank society. Compared with Mole, Rat is both the idealized Grahame and his best friend, leading him into the world of carefree male friendship, which is, as Neil Philip and Jackie Wullschläger both agree, what Grahame values most in his lifetime (103; 155). The archetype of Rat is Arthur Quiller-Couch, a rowing-lover who “often had the author [Grahame] to stay at his house” at Fowey (Flood, n. pag.). It was also at Fowey, Grahame rowed with Quiller-Couch and other Cornwall friends, abandoning his newly-wedded Elspeth ashore. Above all, it was also the daughter of Quiller-Couch whom Grahame dedicated to the first edition of The Wind in the Willows. These pieces of evidence make Quiller-Couch more likely the archetype of Rat, and also make Rat and Mole, the friendly duo, rather than the self-conceited Toad, the center of this novel. In other words, male domesticity and homoerotic intimacy in the Rat-Mole cohabited life marks The Wind in the Willows, as that in the Hallam-Tennyson friendship marks In Memoriam and “Ulysses.” They also make The Wind in the Willows, like Peter Pan, not just a text intended for children or adults but as one of the classics of crossover fiction among Edwardian children’s literature.

71