Sometimes, you need one critic to formalize for you what you dislike in another. I knew that something about Michael Dirda’s ubiquitous book-ramblings had always bothered me, but it wasn’t until I read the rough handling Slipstream move he received from Open Letters Fiction Editor Sam Sacks that I saw just how annoying Dirda could be.

I still read Dirda’s book-essays, naturally, but now my antennae are extra-sensitive to his irritating qualities … many of which are on display in a piece he wrote recently for the New York Review of Books. His subject was the pair of new annotated versions of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, one by Annie Gauger from Norton, the other by Seth Lerer from Harvard University Press, and this was of obvious interest to me since Open Letters’ own Honoria St. Cyr reviewed Lerer’s book in our July 2009 issue.

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I knew that grand old lady was fond of Lerer’s efforts, so I was briefly dismayed to read Dirda:

Certainly anybody who wants to own just one annotated Wind in the Willows should choose Gauger’s. She simply offers more for the money.

As I recalled, St. Cyr didn’t think enough of Gauger’s edition even to mention it by name in her review of Lerer’s, so I wondered if our old girl was wrong. Searching Dirda’s essay for his reasoning (it’s often difficult to find, as Sacks implies), I grew confused. True, he tells us Gauger’s edition is the one to buy – but then he spends the bulk of his essay listing and tsk-tsking its (apparently) many and (apparently) egregious flaws. Her bibliographical research? Less exhaustive than Lerer’s. Her literary interpretations? Less accurate than Lerer’s. Even the quality of her edition’s picture reproduction? Less faithful than Lerer’s.

All this makes it fair to wonder why Dirda didn’t favor Lerer’s edition the way St. Cyr did – what does he have against Lerer? Well, that Lerer is tedious, for one (although Gauger’s sheer prolixity makes her sound deadlier than the male), and for another that he overreaches in his source-finding, as when he digs up the obscure Victorian poet Wathen Mark Wilks Call to elucidate a line from The Wind in the Willows Gods and Generals . Dirda complains:

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What’s the point of this tenuous association? Will we actually find anything that illuminates The Wind in the Willows in this piece of forgotten sentimental verse?

Such shots across the bow called for summary action, so I emailed Dirda’s essay to Honoria St. Cyr, who took time off from tending her quiet little garden to provide the following answer:

My word, is this what passes for literary criticism over there in the States? This man at four points all but calls the Gauger edition boring, but he somehow ranks it superior to Lerer’s? And how is one to explain his confusion over Lerer’s Wilks Call reference? Quite obviously, the point of such an association (hardly tenuous, since we know Grahame read the poet) – its illumination, albeit of low candle-power – is that although it is a “piece of forgotten sentimental verse,” it went into the great creative mix that produced The Wind in the Willows, which certainly brings it within the purview of someone annotating that book. One would think a professional book-critic would realize that without assistance from an amateur such as myself. Perhaps this Dirda person is out of his depth when it comes to children’s literature?

And that, as they say, is that. We stand by our gal.

–Steve Donoghue

“I adore annotated editions,” admits Honoria St. Cyr in her long, loving look at a new annotated edition of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, found in the current Open Letters. And you will find that her adoration is perhaps trumped only by her deep affection for Grahame’s classic itself. As St. Cyr finds, when you are as devoted to a book as she and many millions of others are to The Wind in the Willows, you can’t get enough of the trivia that surrounds it.

Such trivia is at the forefront of Peter Parker’s review

in the TLS

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of no less than two annotated Wind in the Willows, one by Seth Lerer for Belknap Press and the second by Annie Gauger for Norton. Though Parker has plenty of nits to pick with each editor (the debating over trivia being just as fun as the trivia itself), ultimately he can’t resist the pull of simply recounting some of the grand speculation that the classic has inspired. For instance, the is the idea that

Toad is an unholy amalgam of Oscar Wilde, Horatio Bottomley and Grahame’s purblind, tantrum-prone son Alastair, for whom the book was written…. Toads by their very nature give the impression of being puffed up, and the carriage of their heads unwittingly suggests snootiness. Strutting down the steps of his country manor, stuffed into his preposterous driving togs; supplied with funds to buy the latest shiny toy, or take up and as quickly discard every passing fad; writing his appalling invitations on stationery “with ‘Toad Hall’ at the top in gold and blue”: Toad is the embodiment of nouveau riche vulgarity and bumptiousness. Ludicrously vain, utterly shameless and horribly self-pitying, he nevertheless remains endearing.

Parker goes on to agree that there is much in Toad that reminds you of Oscar Wilde, “from his aphorisms and his imprisonment to his middle-parted hair.” And he additionally suggests that the scene in which Toad is heckled as he’s transferred from the courthouse to the prison is “strongly reminiscent of the notorious occasion when Wilde was transferred by rail from Wandsworth Prison to Reading Gaol and was obliged to stand on a platform at Clapham Junction, handcuffed and in convict dress, surrounded by a jeering mob.”

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More trivia abounds in both St. Cyr’s and Parker’s pieces, and of course in the new annotated books themselves—enough even to sate the most obsessive fans of Wind in the Willows. Dig in.

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