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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Kenneth Grahame, author of the magical pastoral Wind in the Willows, died 77 years ago today.  Among his great fans were Theodore Roosevelt, my dad (who read it to me twenty five years ago) and Honoria St. Cyr, who reviewed Seth Lerer’s new annotation edition

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in our July 2009 issue. She delights in the way Lerer’s explications and digressions refresh the oft-read text. Although,

it’s also an irresistible game of ‘bet you didn’t know,’ as when we’re helpfully informed that comfrey is “a flowering plant of streams and ditches, recorded in English from Anglo-Saxon times; Symphytum offincale,” or that a mullion is “a vertical bar dividing the panes in a leaded window,” or that “cloop” is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the sound made by drawing a cork from a bottle.” If this is your sort of thing (it very much is mine), you’ll find a nearly endless amount of it in this edition of The Wind in the Willows. And if it isn’t your sort of thing, you can at least turn the page – imagine with deep pity the poor dinner guest who draws the seat next to Lerer and innocently lets fall the word “selvedge.”

Other July 6th milestones? Well, today is the day 52 years ago when John Lennon and Paul McCartney met one another for the first time. Lennon’s band, the The Quarrymen, had just performed. There was a big to-do at St. Peter’s church in Liverpool. Then, twenty years later, as Adam Golaski explains on our blog, they made a “Carnival of Light.”

Nancey Reagan was born on the 6th, too (Steve Donoghue essayed her husband’s diaries in April 2009). George Bush the younger was hatched today, in 1946, and our political Editor Greg Waldmann has been doggedly chronicling his crimes both on our blog and in accomplished and morally compelling monthly essays.

Also on June 6th, in 1997, the Mars Pathfinder deposited the Sojourner scout to begin exploring the mysterious and surprisingly boring surface o the red planet. In November 2008, Astrid Van Sarisgaard described some of the ancient geographies little Sojourner dispelled:

In 1610 … Galileo turned his primitive telescope upon that bright light in the sky and saw the dim outline of a world bathed by sunlight. Not a star, nor a comet, but a planet more or less like Earth, which was a revolutionary break with received knowledge (the Bible makes no mention of other planets). Fifty years later, Dutch astronomer Christian Huygens studied Mars clearly enough to detect rough scratches on its surface. In 1877 Giovanni Schiaparelli studied the planet for months and drew his famous canali on his map of its surface, and those ‘canals’ gave rise to half a century of frenzied speculation about life on the red planet. In the scientific community of the time, that frenzy reached its peak with Percival Lowell, who turned his telescope on Mars and reported not only an extensive network of canals but the reason for them: Mars was obviously a dying world inhabited by a race desperate to tap ice caps for the planet’s only remaining water supply. Most serious scientists wanted nothing to do with Lowell’s ideas, and scientific journals wouldn’t publish him – but when he wove his tales of noble race on a doomed, distant world, you could have heard a pin drop on the floor of Boston’s Horticultural Hall. It was the perfect interplanetary myth.

Happy Exploring and Happy July. Oh, and one more anniversary … bestselling noveler Norah Roberts was married to an accepting and patient man, many many years ago today.

– John Cotter