Wild at Heart

A sentence in an article I cited in the previous post just jogged my memory:

An attempt to recreate the river trip immortalised in Jerome K Jerome's classic book with two girl friends turns into a strange hybrid of Wind in the Willows and Apocalypse Now, writes Joanne O'Connor
- How three women in a boat took a trip back in time, The Observer, Sunday 2 July 2006

As it so happens ... I wrote this short story a few years ago. It's failed to get placed in a number of competitions, notably the Kenneth Grahame Society's 2008 competition (despite its invitation for creative angles on The Wind in the Willows). So, rather than have it languishing on file forever (furthermore, a file that I very nearly lost through computer crashes), I thought I'd post it here. I don't recall having read the Observer article back then, but it could conceivably have been the inspiration. Enjoy.

Update: I've moved the post here - Wild at Heart.

- Ray

Kenneth Grahame's lesser-known works: part 1

On Wednesday a customer was asking about the early works - prior to Wind in the Willows - of Kenneth Grahame. I was aware of these, but have never seen copies in book form. As it happens, they're all old enough to be out-of-copyright, and are on the Internet Archive. They are:

Pagan Papers (1893, Internet Archive ID paganpapers04grahgoog)
The Golden Age (1895, Internet Archive ID goldenage01grahgoog)
Dream Days (1898, Internet Archive ID dreamdays01grahgoog)
The Headswoman (1898, Internet Archive ID headswoman01grahgoog)

These were all written when Grahame was pursuing a very successful career as a banker, were what made his critical reputation. In contrast, the critics disliked The Wind in the Willows. In the long term, however, it came to largely eclipse the early works.

Pagan Papers is a compilation of Grahame's essays written from 1888 onward in publications including The Yellow Book, St James's Gazette and the National Observer.  A quick summary of the topics:

• The romance of the road: on the exhilharating experience of walking the Ridgeway of the north Berkshire downs.
• The romance of rail: on the imaginative delights of planning rail journeys.
• Non libri sed liberi: on the habit of buying books, even getting them custom-bound, and never reading them.
• Loafing: on the merits of aimless passive enjoyment of an upper Thames village.
• Cheap knowledge: on the pros and cons of free libraries.
• The rural Pan: in praise of countryfolk, personified as Pan, in contrast to the Apollo and Mercury city denizens.
• Marginalia: on the practice of annotating books.
• The eternal whither: in praise of people who know what they want from life, via the example of clerks who took criminal holidays.
• Deus Terminus: on the Roman god Terminus, god of boundary markers, and mourning the days when no such demarcations of land existed.
• Of smoking: in praise of pipe and cigar smoking.
• An Autumn encounter: an extended description of passing a scarecrow.
• The white poppy: on the benefits of forgetting.
• A Bohemian in exile: an account of "Fothergill", who opted out of society to roam the country roads with a donkey cart.
• Justifiable homicide: on dealing with annoying relatives.
• The fairy wicket: on moments that offer brief glimpses of the magical.
• Aboard the galley: an extended exploration of the metaphor of officer workers as galley slaves.
• The lost centaur: a lament at humanity's divide from animals, and failure to acknowledge kinship.
• Orion: the constellation is explored as a symbol of the hunter that remains in us all.

The general tone is wry and whimsical. While they're not at all bad reading, I found them variable in quality: some come across as throwing an excess of erudition and style at extremely slight topics. But others express the powerful emotion, a very deep and very English yearning, evoked by the countryside. The repeated themes - pastoral escape, urban encroachment on the countryside, the urge to transgress against the system either by idleness or crime or primitivity, the recognition of our animal nature, the appearance of Pan - are highly recognisable as similar to those of The Wind in the Willows. They could be read as the unsurprising fantasies of a man reacting to the confines of his highly formal job, but a number of biographies note that Grahame (like a number of late-Victorian writers) was actively interested in neopaganism ...

Neither his visions of escape from modern society nor the anti-authoritarian philosophy of his essays was particularly original to Grahame; they were shared by many of his contemporaries, as was a variety of neopaganism that the title of his first gathering of essays, Pagan Papers, reflects.
- Writers for children: critical studies of major authors since the seventeenth century, Jane Bingham, 1988

... and the essay "A Bohemian in exile" contains a fairly explicit statement of this.

When old Pan was dead and Apollo's bow broken, there were many faithful pagans who would worship at no new shrines, but went out to the hills and caves, truer to the old gods in their discrowned desolation than in their pomp and power. Even so were we left behind, a remnant of the faithful.

Contemporary reviews were mixed. A standard critical comment was to view them as derivative of Robert Louis Stevenson's essays such as the 1876 Virginibus Puerisque. Patrick Reginald Chalmers, in his 1933 Kenneth Grahame: life, letters and unpublished work, mentions one reviewer who said that Grahame was "only one in a whole generation who turns out a "Stevensonette" as easily and lightly as he rolls a cigarette", and another who evidently felt the writing to be precious, proving the author to be "one of Mr. Henley's very clever young men". However, plenty of other reviews took a less complicated view, and were unstinting in their praise of the book. For instance:

The sense of virility, of wholeness, which one gets from this book is not its least claim upon the regard of all who care for literature. In these essays Mr. Grahame shows himself a lover of boats, of the fresh free life of the . fields and the downs, of old books, of the poets; he gossips cheerily of them all, adding to the clearness of his observation and his extreme sanity a sense of the value of word and of phrase, which makes each short paper excellent reading.
- The Review of Reviews, Volume 9, 1894

- Ray

Willows competitions update

From Academi (and elsewhere), Toad's Brave New World, a competition by The River & Rowing Museum

"to re-frame Kenneth Grahame’s famous book for the 21st Century by creating a short story (under 4,000 words) in a contemporary riverside setting which reflects a drastically changing world"

Ideas given include online dating, the credit crunch, environmental change, and so on. It's stressed that

"Entries don’t have to be about the River Thames, they can be about World Rivers and even mythical and fictional rivers. The brief is wide open for interpretation!"

Again, this looks interesting, though with a minor limitation that - looking at the small print in the entry form (PDF) - the readership for the story is age 5-16.

Meanwhile, the winner has been announced of the The Wind in the Willows Cover Competition, which asked young artists to illustrate the cover of the Vintage Classics centenary edition. The entry by Harry Jones was deservedly the winner, but all of the top four have very sophisticated composition (see the Times slideshow). Winners have also been announced for the Kenneth Grahame Society's competition to write a sequel, prequel or countertext to Wind in the Willows. The anthology will be published around March 8th 2009 (the 150th anniversary of Kenneth Grahame’s birth).

See the previous posts Wild at heart and Something wild for background.

- Ray

Addendum: you might be amused by my attempt, inspired by examples found for the Lurid classics post, at a pulp-style WITW cover.

The promised anthology from the Kenneth Grahame Society Competition came out a few months later than expected. The Society has also removed the discussion forum from its website.

The Kenneth Grahame Society Forum finally closed. It existed for about two years, and it had some interesting discussions and information. However, it was only used by a very small minority of the membership, and it often remained dormant for months at a time. At the 2009 AGM in Oxford it was agreed that the Forum, in such a dormant state, was no great credit to the name of Kenneth Grahame, and the decision to close it was approved. We would like to thank everyone who contributed postings to it over the years. All the information on it has been saved, and some of that will be repackaged and placed on the main website during forthcoming updates to the website.

Clare and I will admit to feeling a trifle miffed at not getting anywhere in this competition; mine (a countertext that retold Heart of Darkness as a post-apocalyptic river journey with Kim Newman style intertextuality) was trying a bit too hard to be clever, but Clare is regularly placed in writing competitions, and I thought her story (which used the WITW setting for a parable about xenophobia and global warming) could be faulted: it was heartwarming and stylistically impeccable. Honestly, it's not just sour grapes - the Society's handling of the anthology seemed a bit peculiar. The delay in publication, they explained on the now-defunct forum, was because some of the entries they'd chosen to anthologise weren't up to anthology standard, and needed work in collaboration with the Society to revise them. Seems to me that they shouldn't have been chosen, then ...

Addendum: I decided, rather than let my story languish on my computer, to post it here. See the update Wild at Heart.

- Ray

Something wild

A while back I posted the entry Wild at heart that focused on Peter Green's Beyond the Wild Wood: The World of Kenneth Grahame. I forgot to mention the Kenneth Grahame Society, whose site has a deal of biographical and bibliographic material, as well as a discussion forum. If you're of a creative turn of mind, the Society is running a Short Story Competition: free entry, circa 5000 words, the story to be a "sequel, prequel or countertext to The Wind in the Willows". Of the competition, which marks the centenary of the book's publication in 1908, the organisers say:

This is a unique opportunity for creative writers everywhere to write a short story in the same style as The Wind in the Willows and have it published. It is, similarly, a unique opportunity for academic writers to use creative writing as an alternative approach for presenting some new insights into the book. And it is an opportunity for all to pay homage to their favourite book and add to The Wind in the Willows canon.

Looks an interesting brief.

-Ray

Wild at heart

I was just reading Peter Green's Beyond the Wild Wood: The World of Kenneth Grahame, a biography of Kenneth Grahame with a particular focus on the relation between his life and his work.
There's no reason to doubt the basics of the standard origin story: that The Wind in the Willows was conceived as bedtime stories for Grahame's young son (as told in Elspeth Grahame's 1944 chapbook of letters, First Whisper of "The Wind in the Willows"). But Green explores a deeper psychological background. He views Grahame's animal world partly as a vision of idealised domesticity, an escape from his highly incompatible marriage (he described his mythos as "clean of the clash of sex"); and also as a reflection of a widespread upper-crust distaste at social changes at the close of the 19th century.

Grahame was a pastoralist, and a standard interpretation of TWITW is as metaphor for a very English nostalgia at the decline of a largely mythical Merry England: an unspoilt world of simple rustics and minor gentry, being invaded by trains, motor-cars and the proletariat, in the form of the vulgar weasels who temporarily take over Toad Hall. (In a BBC adaptation shown early in 2007, such rural landscapes were achieved by filming in countryside outside Bucharest).

TWITW enabled Grahame, already in ill-health - to retire from his job as a high-ranking bank official (he'd been fairly traumatised by a visitor to the bank - George Robinson, called "a Socialist Lunatic" in newspaper accounts, shooting at him). He wrote very little afterward, the end of his life further blighted by his son's suicide, officially reported as an accident despite unambiguous evidence of his deliberately lying on a railway line.

However, a number of authors, to varying degrees of acclaim, have revisited the Grahame mythos: Wiliam Horwood's The Willows in Winter, Toad Triumphant and The Willows and Beyond; Dixon Scott's A Fresh Wind in the Willows; and Jan Needle's Wild Wood. Most attempt to recreate the atmosphere of Grahame's books, but the last instead tells the events of TWITW from the left-wing perspective of the inhabitants of Wild Wood, whose lifestyle is poverty-stricken in comparison to that of Toad and his friends. The 1998 Counselling for Toads - a Psychological Adventure (Robert De Board, Routledge, ISBN:0415174295), although it looks a trifle didactic, is another interesting take in which Toad goes for counselling, using transactional analysis, to deal with the scripts he follows that cause his episodes of impulsive and obsessive behaviour.
Along with TWITW, a number of Grahame's earlier works are available from Project Gutenberg. There are several other biographies: check out Patrick R Chalmers, Eleanor Grahame, Peter Hunt and Alison Prince.

Addendum: the Telegraph feature Kenneth Grahame: Lost in the wild wood (John Preston, 08 Feb 2008) is a very good potted biography.

See also Something wild.

- Ray