Oh my, oh my!

I wonder if you recognise this extract?

“The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and a pail of whitewash; till he had dust in his throat and eyes, and splashes of whitewash all over his black fur, and an aching back and weary arms. Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing.  It was small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said ‘Bother!’ and ‘O blow!’ and also ‘Hang spring-cleaning!’ and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat.  Something up above was calling him imperiously, and he made for the steep little tunnel which answered in his case to the graveled carriage-drive owned by animals whose residences are nearer to the sun and air. So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged and then he scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, ‘Up we go! Up we go!’ till at last, pop! his snout came out into the sunlight, and he found himself rolling in the warm grass of a great meadow …”

These are the opening lines of Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame.[i]  The book was based on a series of bedtime stories, and much of the power of the language coming from its oral roots,  a book to be read out loud as well as savoured in private reading, a book I reread time and again.  Who is this Mole?  Mole is clearly the child listening to the story, and the substitute (the avatar?) giving the child a place in the story:  Graham makes that clear a page further on as Mole wanders beside a ‘full-fed’ river. “The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the river he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spell-bound by exciting stories”.  This is a child who would scrabble and scrooge out of bed, quickly throw on some clothes and go outside to play on one of those rare but special, sunny English days.  The river? It was “this sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal, chasing and chuckling, gripping things with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh, to fling itself on fresh playmates that shook themselves free, and were caught and held again. All was a-shake and a-shiver–glints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble … a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea.”  It was the prospect and possibility of life, of adventures away from home.  The promise of the river  was “so very beautiful that the Mole could only hold up both forepaws and gasp, ‘O my! O my! O my!’” I could keep quoting extracts, as the book is packed with poetic prose.  In Dulce Domum, still for me one of the most moving chapters in the book, Mole is on his way back to Rat’s home:“It was one of these mysterious fairy calls from out the void that suddenly reached Mole in the darkness, making him tingle through and through with its very familiar appeal, even while yet he could not clearly remember what it was. He stopped dead in his tracks, his nose searching hither and thither in its efforts to recapture the fine filament, the telegraphic current, that had so strongly moved him. A moment, and he had caught it again; and with it this time came recollection in fullest flood.  Home! That was what they meant, those caressing appeals, those soft touches wafted through the air, those invisible little hands pulling and tugging, all one way! Why, it must be quite close by him at that moment, his old home that he had hurriedly forsaken and never sought again, that day when he first found the river! And now it was sending out its scouts and its messengers to capture him and bring him in.”

Evocative, entrancing and sometimes thrilling, I loved Mole and his friends as a child, and I still do.  But is this still read today?  Last year, Common Sense Media advised “Parents need to know that the beautifully written, richly inventive adventures chronicled in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows are best for children with patience. Kids may be more familiar with TV and film versions based on the original book.,” adding “A timeless classic for generations, [it] may be difficult for today’s kids in terms of its language and pacing. But parents can help in a read-aloud setting.” [ii]  That made me sad.  There are adventures, but it’s the imagery, the words that matter, not the adventure story, the scaffold around which Grahame’s descriptions are placed. [iii]

I know the problems. The book evokes a distant, English middle class, affluent past, comfortable and easygoing.  Rat and Toad are Mole’s friends, exemplars of the chaps you would meet at your private school.  Rat is one of those boys who excel in every kind of sport and physical tasks, and in doing so often making a Mole a little anxious and envious; Toad is a lazy, rich and spoilt fellow, loveable but prone to sudden fads and equally prone to foolish behaviour.  Another character, Badger, is more like a schoolmaster, a principal perhaps, wise, old, a little slow but capable of dramatic action when required (just as my elderly history teacher could whirl round and instantly throw and hit the noisy boy with a wooden duster if he heard a sound behind him!).

In this world, do fathers and mothers exist?  The story-teller might be dad, but mum is obviously busy elsewhere.  Do women exist?  Just two I recall:  a bribeable washerwoman and a barge-woman, both helping Toad escape from jail!  The language is challenging, with words seldom used today, and there’s cussing and violence, as some parents noted in feedback.  Cussing?  Mole’s ‘bother’ or ‘o blow’?  At least he didn’t say fuck or shit.  Violence?  Yes, blows were struck retaking Toad Hall, but no-one died, just stoats and weasels with bruises and sore heads.

Kenneth Grahame was middle class to the core.  He had worked in the Bank of England for nearly 30 years, supposedly retiring with ill health.  His only child, a son, was born in 1900.  Stories told to his son became the book, but, despite its success, he never wrote a sequel, perhaps because his son committed suicide just before his 20th birthday.  For me, he sits alongside A A Milne as a gentle, amusing yet insightful author.  As an added bonus, among various editions both authors’ books were illustrated by E H Shepherd, whose spare drawings are so much more compelling than the beautiful colour work of Arthur Rackham: Shepherd’s mole is Mole!

If it is a “timeless classic for generations”, is Wind in the Willows still popular today?  I couldn’t get book sales for recent years.  Back in 1959, one text suggested that it was selling at a rate of 80,000 copies a year. [iv]  I doubt it still sells at that level.  Looking on Amazon’s page for the Shepard illustrated edition, I saw on the ‘Best Sellers Rank’ it was at #185,370 in Books, #3179 in Literature, #1812 in Children’s Classics, and #5946 in Classic Literature and Fiction.  Not good for a timeless classic!  At least the Disney version is only at #2,943,902 in Books!

I started down this track because I was interested in what becomes lost.  Critics have written about the decline or rejection of the ‘Western Tradition’, now seen as an embarrassment or worse by many academics. [v]  We seek a more diverse literature as our heritage, an excellent and wholly appropriate change.  I have inserted Chinese and Indian classics, and even some Islamic treatises into my seminars on ‘Great Thinkers’.  However, the desire for diversity goes well beyond my tiny additions.  Some teachers have decided comic books, and other ephemera, even blogs (!) should be considered worthy as items for study, challenging what we think of as ‘literature’.

When we turn to books for children, what does that mean for past classics?  Wind in the Willows is an excellent example, deeply embedded in a sexist, class-ridden era, a world that lingers on in the UK.  I recall, all too clearly, visiting England several years ago with my wife, in part to catch up with my parents. We were having afternoon tea, and my wife was horrified: my mother didn’t talk to or acknowledge our waiter other than curtly ordering scones and a pot of Orange Pekoe tea.  An Australian, my wife didn’t understand English class boundaries.  My mother was comfortably middle-class, our waiter was way below her level.  That was the way things were.

Does the world it inhabits mean we have to put Grahame’s book on one side?  Or rewrite it?  Or rely on the ghastly distortions perpetrated by Disney?  This is a puzzle for some of us today.  I could add Lewis Carroll’s Alice books as another example, as some consider Carroll unsuitable today.  His language is sophisticated, his images complex, but it’s not only that, there’s his unacceptable interest in young Alice Liddell.  Where to stop?  Are other novels to be set aside, too?  Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, because it is built around lies, or Katherine Patterson’s The Bridge to Terabithia, because there’s atheism and swearing? Oh my! [vi]

As always, I know it is easy to be misunderstood.  New classics for children keep appearing, from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings of years ago, to a stunning range of fantasy books for children over recent decades.  Where to begin?  The Dark is Rising; The Earthsea Trilogy; Garth Nix’s Abhorsen series; Tamora Pierce’s series set in Tortall; the Harry Potter books, Lev Grossman’ Magicians trilogy; Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart Trilogy. There are great new authors every year: Leigh Bardugo, S A Chakraborty, Sabaa Tahir.  Please add your own to the list.

However, there’s something of a paradox here.  Concerns about old classics don’t seem to extend to new books in this golden age of fantasy.  There’s violence, colourful language, challenging dialects and words.  Some writers thrive on the exploits of criminals, and horrific violence by both good and bad characters.  Surely, I should be happy with so much exciting stuff!  I am, and it seems my only problem is keeping up with the flood of new, engaging and insightful stories.  I read every day, but my list of books to read next is running away from me.

Just what is my concern?  Am I just another grumpy man, hanging on to the memory of a long gone childhood, unable to accept what always been the case, that many books do slip away after decades, replaced by newer, more contemporary alternatives?  In part, it is about language, of course.  Books can disappear from library holdings because they are difficult to read, the language complex, the words less used today.  A stick-in-the-mud, I still love Shakespeare in the full, largely uncut versions of the plays.  I continue to read old English classics authored by authors like the Brontës, Trollope, Fielding and Austen, as well as reaching back to a much earlier era with Sophocles, Thucydides and Catullus, even though I find the language can be exacting, violence is commonplace, and some expressions are more than a little unseemly!

Most of these earlier authors are bowdlerised for mass consumption, safely smoothed out in cartoons, and some reduced to easy-going romantic films.  Every one of these ‘alternative’ presentations reduces what was in the original to a pale and impoverished version, a colourless, safe and easily digested fare.  Only Jane Austen appears to escape some of these concerns, the subtleties and nuances of her fiction largely unchanged, though when her books are bought, in many cases I suspect they remain unread, sitting dutifully on a shelf.  Even a relatively harmless account of river adventures may be lost, in part, because the wonders of its startling and original descriptions are in language considered too difficult for modern readers.  Oh my, indeed.

Authors can offend.  Reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will mean confronting racist attitudes in the old South, together with family drunkenness and violence.  Rather than shying away, surely it is an opportunity to learn and explore.  A teacher might encourage students to discuss why there are some aspects of a story that are uncomfortable or out of touch with many current sensibilities.  That isn’t a reason to ignore them.  Reading Huckleberry Finn can reveal a great deal about the racist attitudes which persist in the South, and the violence and intimidation shown by drunken parents.  Yes, but is that all there is to Huckleberry Finn, a lesson in morality?  That is important, but this is an adventure book too, finely written about life on the Mississippi, as engaging as many modern fantasies (and perhaps just as exotically foreign to many readers).

The lives of artists are often suspect.  I have already mentioned Lewis Carroll.  Here we confront what I might call the Caravaggio problem.  Caravaggio was an astonishing artist, whose works from around the end of the 16th Century are revered as masterpieces.  Through the dramatic use of chiaroscuro, vivid contrasts between light and dark created powerful paintings of everyday scenes, and later of religious themes, while, controversially, using live models who were far from the idealised images of other artists.  For many, they are one of the highlights of a visit to Rome.  However, Caravaggio was a gambler, a bully, constantly in brawls, a murderer, his last years living on the run.  Forever enjoying arguments and fights, even his patrons gave up attempts to excuse his behaviour.  Do we stop admiring his work because he was a nasty criminal?  Burn the canvases?  Do we stop reading Dickens because Charles was an unrepentant misogynist creep, or Roald Dahl because he was a racist and an anti-Semite?  These are two examples from a long list of writers with unsavoury backgrounds.  Burn the books?

Scrutinising the morals of writers is tricky.  I usually avoid doing so, but you can fairly object it’s because I am a white, Anglo-Saxon middle class male.  I fear my choices confirm my biased and ignorant views, but, unrepentant, I still read books by authors others ban. Today I’m seduced by Wind in the Willows once more.  Rat is visiting Mole’s home, the carol singers have come in for a warm drink: “They act plays too, these fellows” the Mole explained to the Rat. “They gave us a capital one last year, about a field-mouse who was captured at sea by a Barbary corsair, and made to row in a galley”.  Ah, yes … as Mole would say, forepaws held up, ‘O my, O my’!

[i] First published in 1908 by Methuen, the 1931 edition with illustrations by the incomparable E H Shepard

[ii] https://www.commonsensemedia.org/book-reviews/the-wind-in-the-willows

[iii] Incidentally, I can’t get over Laurie Anderson’s comment: “It’s amazing that little children are still drawn to stories about small bachelor animals in bathrobes and slippers.”  By the Book, New York Times, 2 February 2020

[iv] https://childliterature.net/childlit/animal/willows.html

[v] See https://thepointmag.com/letter/on-the-hatred-of-literature/

[vi] Grahame writes it as ‘O my’, but I prefer ‘Oh my’.  Oops, that’s me rewriting!!

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