little creatures and the nature of hope

{ or, devastation and those who escape it }

Welcome to a new series of essays on The Wind in the Willows. If you want to read the rest of the series as it comes out, engaging with the book chapter by chapter, you can subscribe here. Paid subscriptions help me to write what I love, but are not required to read this series. This post, like everything else here, is AI-free.

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When I was a kid I read a number of stories focused on the relationship between children and animals (usually dogs), and I hated most of them. I hated them because the animals inevitably died, sometimes in exceedingly cruel ways. Where the Red Fern Grows messed me up. Nadia recently read this horrible book as well, and we commiserated together over how miserable it is.

It seemed to me that for the most part, with a few notable exceptions like Sterling North’s Rascal, it was always the innocent ones – the ones who only ever loved you and never asked for much of anything – that these characters lost so quickly. Within the confines of Where the Red Fern Grows (the first book I remember crying over), I encountered my first taste of a world determined to crush and kill. This and other books by the likes of Gary Paulsen and Jack London were books I never enjoyed rereading. I barely enjoyed reading them once. 

I know that this is almost a genre unto itself, the dog-dying coming-of-age story. These books probably have many good qualities that I missed in reading them, but they also said something specific about the world in which we live: it is unrelenting and brutal and it will eat the innocent and loyal and good among us… and you had better get used to that. Here’s a story to help you accept that reality. Behold: you are closer to being an adult now.

The Wind in the Willows, however, is not one of those stories.

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Published only two years after White Fang, Grahame’s classic was released during the golden age of children’s literature, which saw such classics as Peter Pan, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Pinocchio, etc. Peter Rabbit preceded Toad by six years, and Winnie the Pooh would come along 16 years later. 

Grahame combines fantasy elements like talking animals and the god Pan with the English countryside and icons of the Industrial Revolution to create a richly-imagined, childlike world of his own, where little bad happens and a happy, triumphant ending is all but guaranteed. The world is not going to eat you, though it might scare you a little if you go into the Wild Wood unprepared, or take over your house while you’re in jail. Wind in the Willows insists on innocence, propriety, and beauty. It lives within poetry, and it is never brutal (however Toad might think he was treated).

This all, despite the fact that Kenneth Grahame’s life began, continued, and ended in trauma.

Kenneth’s mother, Bessie, offered him the first and last experience of true parental love that he would encounter in his life. She died of scarlet fever one month before his fifth birthday. His father James, inclined to alcoholism prior to her death, was incapable of giving his children the care they needed in the aftermath, so Kenneth and his siblings were left in the care of a cold and distant grandmother. Kenneth never reconciled with his father, despite James’ clumsy attempts to do so later in life.

Kenneth’s primary happy memories of childhood, then, were of those hours spent in isolated imagination on the grounds of “The Mount,” in the village of Cookham Dene, on the banks of the Thames River. This core childhood memory provided the setting and groundwork for his hilarious tales of romping children in The Golden Age, and ultimately for The Wind in the Willows. 

Kenneth attended St. Edward’s School in Oxford, dreaming of studying literature in university. However, his practical uncle, who managed the family finances, directed him into a career in banking. While he was a banker, he wrote stories from a child’s perspective on the side. This season of bachelorhood, which lasted until he married at the age of 40, provided the secondary hook for Wind in the Willows – walking tours with friends, long hours spent in solitude among the things and people he enjoyed most, and total freedom. 

His marriage to Elspeth Thomson, unfortunately, can only be described as forced, petty, and desperately unhappy for both parties involved. The biographer’s accounts are not pretty, and provide ample evidence that both parties lived in barely-concealed resentment toward one another for the duration of their union.

Kenneth and Elspeth had one son, Alistair, whom they fondly referred to as “Mouse.” He was born prematurely, was nearly blind, and remained sickly all of his life. Kenneth was not an attentive father, spending as much time avoiding his family responsibilities as he could, but he did spin a series of bedtime stories for Alistair about various denizens of the riverbank. The Wind in the Willows was published in 1908. Alistair was eight years old. 

Alistair’s parents set their expectations for him very high. He gradually acquired a superior attitude that Kenneth noticed early on and attempted to curb, perhaps the only way he knew how: through the character of Toad. Alistair was usually left in the care of others while his father traveled and his mother, who had been in a state of depression since her marriage, languished in bed.

Alistair only grew more isolated when he entered school. He was bullied, made no friends, and struggled academically – all of which served only to exacerbate his anxiety and depression. He killed himself on a train track near the banks of the Thames two days before his 19th birthday, his pockets still full of Scripture booklets for an exam he had failed three times. 

Kenneth retreated further into his solitary lifestyle; Alistair’s suicide severed any remaining ties between him and Elspeth. He wrote nothing of significance in the 12 years between the death of his son and his own death at 73.

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Given this knowledge, one might be forgiven for considering the poetic ode to life and youth that is The Wind in the Willows to be the epitome of escapism, complete with exaltation of the privileged classes and (if we are to believe some modern critics) thinly-veiled misogynist and racist undertones. Awareness of his isolation, his limited experience of maternal figures, and his emotionally-stunted marriage, however, offers us some understanding of those issues without excusing them.

Kenneth was perpetually looking back to the all-too-brief happy moments of his life, in avoidance of the current difficult moments. Throughout his work, you see the idyllic English countryside, the animals that served as childhood friends, and the free and easy bachelor life of his 20s and 30s as a successful banker and writer, devoid of any vulnerable relationship, only that of male compatriots who liked the finer things of life. There are no wives in Willows, nor parents, nor jobs, nor troubles beyond the adventuresome type, and those easily handled. The few women and children are usually used as plot devices or set dressing (as in the carolers at Mole’s home, the jailer’s daughter, and the barge woman). 

And yet, the delight in this world he created is palpable. The book stands as an extravagant ode to the childlike wonder and freedom Kenneth turned to in order to survive the sorrows of his life. There is love here, after all of his inability to show it tangibly: for his son, for his friends who accepted him and shared life with him, for the places he associated with happiness and well-being. His fantasies, as “escapist” as they were for him, are still so fully realized that they have delighted readers for over 115 years (at the time of this writing). Why do these places and characters delight us so, as they did Kenneth? Should we even let them delight us? 

To take our minds off of that which creeps in the corners of our vision, we turn aside to many things, not least of which are happy memories, nostalgia-fueled stories, beauty, poetry, and laughter. We want picnics on the river and adventures in canary-colored carts. We want poetry by the hearth and a grand return of heroes to take back their home. We want the freedom of traipsing about the countryside without all of the consequences and complexities of traumatic childhoods and loveless marriages.

To pejoratively call this “escapism” is unfair, as J. R. R. Tolkien argues in “On Fairy Stories:”

“Evidently we are faced by a misuse of words, and also by a confusion of thought. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.”

I look at the devastation of Kenneth’s life and I see a broken man who never escaped the trauma of his childhood, who brought the hurt of it into his adulthood, erecting walls of lavish prose to keep out what might have destroyed him if he let it in. I think he attempted to cast a lifeline to his son by way of Mole, Rat, Badger and Toad. Willows stands as a distillation of what home and friendship can be, how wonder shapes us, and the longing within us all for Divine Love. We can label him a selfish deserter and leave it at that, or we could see him as a fellow prisoner trying, in his own way, to escape into something more beautiful and true.

One of the great mercies of nostalgia is that past things can remain perfect in our minds, always marching through the Wild Wood, forever memorialized in rosy glows. When the life we live here and now shows us otherwise, it hurts all the more. And when it hurts, we are faced with a choice regarding those happinesses: to retreat into them, or to see them as an engine that drives our longings forward (poop-poop).

Sorry. Sometimes the spirit of Toad is strong within me.

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I've often wondered if hope is really all it's cracked up to be. 

My daughter Nadia has lost a few pets already in her young life – her cat Midnight to a garage door, her hamster Honeybun to an overzealous younger sibling. This last winter, her new cat Merrylegs lost an eye after damaging it from a fall. We thought she wasn't going to make it, and I almost didn't dare hope she would. I tried to prepare Nadia (i.e. prepare myself) for the possibility. But she pulled through, coming out of it with a rakish piratey look. 

And isn't that just like hope? It disarms you before it ruins you. When your hopes are realized, you become more willing to believe that good things can happen. When your hopes are deferred once again, the heartsickness takes hold. We held out small hope for Merrylegs, such that when the vet said she would make it we were greatly relieved. We lived in that realized hope for a few days. And then our neighbor found her dead on the road in front of our house, still warm.

It wouldn't have been so hard if Nadia didn't love her cat so much. It wouldn't have been so hard if it hadn't happened three times. It wouldn't have been so hard if we had just assumed that usually pets die quickly (which I'm afraid Nadia is beginning to assume), and expected it to happen any day. Maybe if we’d taken the Paulsen/London tack and assumed brutality, we would have been insulated from the hardness by our own hardness.

But here's the thing: I want it to be hard. 

It is better to have loved and felt the pain of loss, then to withhold love and numb ourselves to the pain. I want all of the beauty and the terror. I want Nadia to know it, even as I would do anything to deflect it from her. Because otherwise it means nothing. The little creatures live and die and we move on, buttressed against the elements by stony souls.

I shouldn’t be this way. The little creatures live, and we live with them, and we love them. They die, and they leave a pet-shaped hole that only they could fill, and if we let ourselves feel it, we will grow a little more tender and a little more loving by the loss of the object of our love. 

We live next to our loved ones day after day, some of us with the thought of death looming a little larger than others, some of us dying little deaths every day. Our lives themselves are brief, maybe not as brief as a cat's or a hamster's life; these little losses remind us that we will experience greater ones. They don't inoculate us from them. But if we let them, they will teach us the one great lesson: how to love things fiercely, in defiance of death, in assurance that life wins out in the end. Thus we practice resurrection in even these things, our little loves. 

And that is why I read Willows over and over again, because it is an insistent lesson in unabashed love for something, devoid of disclaimers.

The memories we carry of dearly-loved ones and places are not dismissable because they are past. The stories we weave to end happily are not lesser because they turn from darkness in favor of light. Just as we cannot responsibly retreat into them, we cannot rightly escape from what they prove: the darkness and pain of the world is not right, nor is it forever. There is a better way. Wholeness and freedom and peace and happiness are available. You've even experienced them. Loving the good in our past helps us to love our present, and prepares us to love the future.

And so the little denizens of Kenneth’s river bank take form once more as creatures I love, not because they go on and on forever, immortalized in the legends of Kenneth for his son, but because I need to cherish things. If it is about escape, it's about escape from despair into new hope. In the wonder of loving these lovingly-drawn characters and listening again to their stories, we are all learning how to love again, like Kenneth, at the very center of our greatest losses. 

Which is, of course, learning how to live.

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Cover art by Ernest Shepard, as captured by Bibliodyssey.