Wind in the Willows in the TLS!
July 8th, 2009 Posted in News | No Comments »
“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
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.”
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.