I closed Matthew Dennison's biography of Kenneth Grahame with such a strong feeling of 'if only' and 'what might have been', for its subject's life was so sad, so limited in many ways - partly by circumstance, partly by misdirected choice.
Born here in Edinburgh in 1859 (delivered by Simpson, coincidentally), Kenneth lost his mother to scarlet fever when he was only five. His father proved unable to cope and eventually fled abroad leaving his children in the care of their grandmother in England. The surroundings of his later childhood in Berkshire may have seemed idyllic to Kenneth, but the emotional landscape was austere. A lack of funds "excluded him from the Oxford of his youthful fantasies"; instead of reading for a degree in the city he loved, he joined the Bank of England as a clerk and spent his entire career there, rising to Secretary. He made a disastrous marriage and lost his only child to suicide. His rich inner life was fully realised only in his writing.
Those bare bones are given flesh in spare fashion in the book which shows a man forever an escapist, an inhabitant of "imaginary relationships and imaginary worlds", someone capable of achieving an "intense engagement with place", sustained by "a mysticism centred in nature."
Would Grahame's masterpiece have existed at all or as is had his life been otherwise? Impossible to know, but in The Wind in the Willows his ideas of fellowship, his concepts of home* - and his 'twinning' of escape and homecoming - his conservative ideals of ruralism, all cast in a nostalgic light, were worked out on the page, shaped perhaps but also uncircumscribed by the failings of others and the disappointments of 'real' life.
*See also.
I know very little about his life - this sounds like it would be tough to read, but eye-opening.
Posted by: Simon T (StuckinaBook) | 30 December 2018 at 04:20 PM
Somehow KG just got on with things, but there is a strong sense of sublimation about his life. Matthew Dennison doesn't labour his points - it is as I say quite a spare account - but the reader can't help but wish KG had had more happiness.
Posted by: Cornflower | 30 December 2018 at 05:22 PM
How very sad; I doubt, then, that I shall attempt it.
Posted by: Toffeeapple | 31 December 2018 at 06:41 PM
Better perhaps just to enjoy The Wind in the Willows.
Posted by: Cornflower | 31 December 2018 at 07:55 PM
This sounds a good read, despite the sadness of KG:s life. Certainly interesting to speculate what may have been if he had had a different life. Poignant too that the Wind in the Willows has remained an iconic book loved by so many generations, yet born out of much suffering.
Posted by: Fran H-B | 01 January 2019 at 06:10 AM