The Wind in the Willows
Milne, an unqualified admirer of Grahame’s work, called The Wind in the Willows a “Household Book ... a book which everybody in the household loves.” C. S. Lewis wrote in an essay first published in the October 1963 Horn Book Magazine that it was the brilliant kind of story that expressed things without explaining them; Lewis pointed to the description of Badger: “that extraordinary amalgam of high rank, coarse manners, gruffness, shyness, and goodness. The child who has once met Mr. Badger has ever afterwards, in his bones, a knowledge of humanity and of English social history which he could not get in any other way.” When asked to write his reminiscences, Grahame characteristically replied: “Reminiscences? I have none.” But, of course, they were already written down and transformed in his best-known book. Kenneth Grahame died on July 6, 1932; he fell asleep by his much-loved river, reading Sir Walter Scott’s The Talisman. This is a closure with symmetry, since the house he was born in at 32 Castle Street in 1859 was directly across from one Scott had inhabited two decades before. The proximity of his birthplace to Scott’s could not have escaped Grahame’s attention. Perhaps even in his youth the man who later claimed he wanted only to “build a noble sentence” knew he would become a writer. Early on, Kenneth Grahame found what he wanted to say, and, in The Wind in the Willows, he found the best way of saying it.
Gardner McFall is the author of two children’s books and a collection of poetry. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Wheaton College in Massachusetts, a master’s degree from the Writing Seminars at the Johns Hopkins University, and a doctorate in English from New York University. McFall is the editor of Made with Words (1998), a prose miscellany by May Swenson. She teaches children’s literature at Hunter College in New York City.