Pan Pipes by the Thames

KENNETH GRAHAME (400 pp.)--Peter Green--World ($6).

Probably the most unlikely moneyman ever appointed to the high post of secretary of the Bank of England was a tall, genial, walrus-mustached Scot who much preferred to spend his time on the bank of the Thames. The Old Lady of Thread-needle Street, with a comfortable -L-40 million worth of bullion in her vaults toward the end of the last century, could well afford an officer who set records for short hours and long absences (due to illness), occupied himself with punting, sculling and solitary walks. It was another activity that made his fellow Citymen uncomfortable: Kenneth Grahame was a literary sort, who wrote essays about paganism and short stories about children.

He resigned from the bank in 1908, when he was 49. Four months later he published a tale about a mole, a water rat and a scapegrace toad, called The Wind in the Willows. The London Times wrote stiffly that "as a contribution to natural history, the work is negligible." But Grahame's fable caught on with such varied readers as Theodore Roosevelt and Kaiser Wilhelm, came to be one of those rare books recognized by both children and adults as a children's classic. It still sells about 80,000 copies a year.

Passion for Nature. In Biographer Green's view, Grahame was a strange and troubled man, who never really left his own childhood. Young Kenneth's mother died when he was five, and his alcoholic father shipped him and three other Grahame children from Inveraray to the home of a grandmother in Cookham Dene. The grandmother and the other relatives who raised the children were far from monsters--at worst, reports Green, they were irritable and unimaginative. But to Kenneth they were, in his caustic description, "Olympians," given to religious hypocrisy, sticky sentiment, willful stupidity and dullness. Most damning of all, they allowed children to have no honor or dignity of their own.

Kenneth Grahame's vendetta against the Olympians of Victorian society, and their view that children should only be lectured or else sentimentalized, was the great battle of his life. His fictional children indulge in gleeful fantasies in which Olympians are skinned alive, shot or made to walk the plank. The Olympians struck back; a reviewer called one Grahame short-story collection "a dishonour done to the sacred cause of childhood."

Kenneth Grahame's other passion was for Nature, that igth century deity to be met while strolling through a meadow or boating in a backwater of the Thames. The obverse of this love was a hatred for the factories and railroads that upset rural life, and an aristocratic distaste for the corruption of what seemed clean and good by exploiters who seemed coarse and common. (Banker^Author Grahame felt this way despite the fact that his own Bank of England grew rich as the spark-spouting railroads snorted across the ruined meadows.) Ruskin and Robert Louis Stevenson were Grahame's heroes when he was a young man, and there were many lesser writers who did a prodigious amount of pre-Raphaelite sentimentalizing over the delights of ruralism and the glories of the goat-footed Pan. The worst of them, as Biographer Green puts it, were not above describing "a young man in full shooting rig, Norfolk jacket and all, chasing a naked classical nymph over a Scottish grouse-moor."

Weight of Symbolism. No nympholeptic, Graham was 38 when he met a bustling, 36-year-old spinster named Elspeth Thomson, courted her with a saccharine series of love letters ("Darlin Minkie Ope youre makin steddy progress & beginnin ter think of oppin outer your nest"). But Grahame's notions of sex still seemed those of childhood, and he could not adjust to marriage. He sired one son, a sickly, half-blind boy who died under circumstances that suggest suicide. It was for this boy that he wrote The Wind in the Willows, a book he described as "clean of the clash of sex."

Grahame insisted that there were no hidden meanings in his animal story. Biographer Green makes a good case for the opposite view, but if there is a serious objection to his intelligently written book, it is that he makes a gentle children's story carry too heavy a weight of symbolism, e.g., "The tunnel ... is the outlet of creative force; and the Mole--another symbol for the subterranean, upthrusting, blind imagination--is, of course, an aspect of Grahame himself." Apart from such overanalysis, the biography is a pleasure to read--and for weekend writers, it contains a fine justification of dilettantism. An editor who tried to persuade Grahame to become a fulltime author got a severe reply--for, reports Biographer Green, Grahame "held himself to be a spring, not a pump."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.