KennethGrahame
Gillian Avery
The Golden Age and Dream Days Kenneth Grahame Illustrated by Maxfield Parrish with an introduction by Marion Lochhead (Paul Harris Publishing £8.95 each) Paths to the River Bank From the writings of Kenneth Grahame Introduced by Peter Haing Illustrations by Carolyn Beresford (Souvenir Press 0.95) Uew professional writers have built their 1' reputation on so slender an output as Kenneth Grahame. There are only the two volumes of essays about childhood, col- lected together under the titles of The Golden Age and Dream Days, and The Wind in the Willows. Having in these purg- ed himself of the longings and aspirations, the regrets and the resentments that he had harboured for some 30 or 40 years he had no more to say. The Wind in the Willows was published in 1908, four months before he retired from the Bank of England at the early age of 49. After that he retreated into an indolence and apathy that made it dif- ficult for him even to keep up cor- respondence with old friends. He wrote a couple of prefaces, a brief article in his old school magazine, some reminiscences of his schooldays (published posthumously in Country Life) and gave two lectures in the remaining 24 years of his life. He took up no new interests, and though in `Wayfarers All' he might dream about wanderings in mediterranean lands, he did not in his new leisure attempt them. `The long-dreamed-of release,' as Peter Green said in his biography, `proved a mirage.'
He was famous from the moment The Golden Age was published in 1895. Dream Days, three years later, was received rap- turously and was instantly a best-seller. So closely was he identified with what was held to be a startlingly original view of childhood that his admirers were at first deeply disap- pointed by The Wind in the Willows. His agent had difficulty in placing the manuscript; the reviewers, Arthur Ransome among them, were cool. 'For ourselves,' said The Times, 'we lay The Wind in the Willows aside and again, for the hundredth time, take up The Golden Age.'
Posterity has long since reversed the judgment, and it is now perhaps difficult to see why contemporary enthusiasm for the books about childhood should have so far outrun that for The Wind in the Willows. To modern taste they seem mannered and contrived, and the constant shifting of the viewpoint is disconcerting. The narrator, who always remains unnamed, sometimes looks through the child's end of the telescope, sometimes through the adult's. He can certainly evoke the savageness, the rapacity, the total self-absorption of children, aspects of them that had never before been presented as part of their charm. He can capture the moodswings, the ecstacy of being released from lessons and being free to run and shout: 'I dug glad heels into the squelching soil; I splashed diamond showers from puddles with a stick; I hurled clods at random, and presently I somehow found myself singing. The words were mere nonsense, the tune was an improvisation ... and yet it seemed to me a genuine utterance, and just at that moment the one thing fitting and right and perfect.' And then the irrational despair when the sun goes in and the savour goes out of life. He remembers what a nine year old boy feels about girls — ('They don't know anything; they can't do anything,') how the sight of a troop of soldiers can brighten a whole day, and the gift of half-a- crown can transform one's life and one's attitude to the donor.
But then the next moment he changes in- to the middle-aged litterateur, viewing childhood from the depths of a leather arm- chair in the Athenaeum. The narrator who
could say contemptuously of the sight of a pair of lovers gazing into each other's eyes over a stile 'well, it was a thing to hurry past, shamed of face, and think on no more' is allowed to be seduced by 'a vision of a tip-tilted nose, of a small head poised scornfully .... and the charms of the baker's wife slipped from my memory like snow-wreaths in thaw.' The same small boy with adult eyes perceives in a tea-party which his sister is giving for her dolls an elaborate flirtation (if not attempted seduc- tion) involving Japanese Jerry and curly- headed Rosa.
The Golden Age and Dream Days have been acclaimed as a literary tour de force, a stereoscopic picture of childhood, with the child's eye view given depth by adult vision. Swinburne called them 'well-nigh too praiseworthy for praise.' To most readers now the recollection of childhood seems rather blurred by the literary conventions of the time. The vision is there, but we have to be prepared to discard a fair amount of fine writing to reach it. The books have always been kept in print, one of the best recent editions being the 1979 one published by Bodley Head with the Ernest Shepard il- lustrations and an introduction by Naomi Lewis. This most recent one has the Max- field Parrish illustrations from 1902 and an introduction by Marion Lochhead.
Naomi Lewis pointed out that 'almost everything that is most characteristic in the history of Rat and Mole is foreshadowed in The Golden Age and Dream Days, the
camaraderie, the feasts, the secret haunts, the expeditions, the obsession with ships and water, the long days of summer, the woods under winter snow.' But Peter Haing in Paths to the River Bank, a study of the origins of The Wind in the Willows, has gone back beyond these, to Kenneth Graham's occasional writings. These have presumably never been reproduced since they appeared in the National Observer, the St James' Gazette, and the Yellow Book, and it has to be admitted they make rather dreary reading. (One good thing about the literary conventions of today, there is no longer room for wordy musings about the countryside.) Much the most interesting of the articles reproduced is the only autobiographical fragment that Grahame left, 'Oxford through a Boy's Eyes.' Curiously this collection does not mention Bertie's Escapade, that delightful story of a pig which, more than any of the articles in- cluded, foreshadows The Wind in the
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