Kenneth Grahame

Start Free Trial

All the Comforts of Home

Download PDF PDF Page Citation Cite Share Link Share

SOURCE: "All the Comforts of Home," in The Antioch Review, Vol. 41, No. 4, Fall, 1983, pp. 409-20.

[In the following essay, Lippman considers the notion of "comfort" as it applies to The Wind in the Willows.]

There are times in life when innocence seems very far away, like something once dreamed and long forgotten. Almost forgotten. That residue in us that reminds us of another time, another state, never really vanishes, but lives to prick and disturb. The disturbance takes the form of a yearning for the simpler, the gentler, the aimless day, the cricket-loud back porch, the meadow more green and more yellow than nature herself planned. Idealized memories long since rigidified as picture postcards.

And there is nothing strange about this. Hazy reveries, half-remembered visions, do not a civilization make. We are better equipped for a life of toil without such encumbrances. If we are intelligent and opt for contentment, we do our best to brush off the small gnawings of these impossible pleasures. If, however, we are unable to relinquish them, the suffering can be exquisite.

The cure? Insanity, permanent infantilism, living through one's children, through other people's children, writing for one's children. Aha! Writing for one's children! You mean, of course, writing for oneself? You wince. I've hit a nerve. You blush, and it's all there in your face. Don't shut the notebook, hiding it under the Times Literary Supplement. You're not alone. The world is full of aging children in business suits, models of seriousness, studies crammed with adult toys.

"Not all people who think they are writing for children are really doing so," says Jean Karl in From Childhood to Childhood. Whatever his intentions, Kenneth Grahame wrote The Wind in the Willows for his son. That we know. And we feel certain his son enjoyed it, as multitudes after him have done. But we feel certain, too, that Kenneth Grahame enjoyed the writing of it more than anyone else did the reading of it. Why? Because The Wind in the Willows is one of the most perfect wish-fulfillment books of all times. An extravagant claim? Perhaps. But an extravagant book. A book, curiously, about animals. And very curious animals. Curiously like people. Kenneth Grahame writes about animals because it is more gratifying to write about animals. They don't have to go to work and stay out of reform school. Their lives are rich and wonderfully private.

But a glimpse wouldn't be out of order. One of the joys of an animal life is described very satisfactorily by the Water Rat, known to his friends as "Rat." Rat is speaking to Mole about his life on the boats (this perfectly in keeping with the aquatic animal Rat is), and certain obvious inferences may be drawn from his words:

In or out of 'em [boats], it doesn't matter. Nothing seems really to matter, that's the charm of it. Whether you get away, or whether you don't; whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else, or whether you never get anywhere at all, you're always busy, and you never do anything in particular; and when you've done it there's always something else to do, and you can do it if you like, but you'd much better not.

Such are the words of wisdom Rat offers us, words that thud rather dully on the dulled eardrums of the homme d' affaires. Words that speak rather directly to aimless, time-rich childhood. But of course Rat is only talking about boats.

And then there's Mr. Toad, who doesn't appear until the narrative is fairly well advanced. When he does appear, it is with great éclat and tumult, and with total disregard for conventions. He is, in fact, the most egregious of the characters, committing larger-than-normal crimes, not stooping to half-measures. He does, for example, steal a motor car under the eyes of its owner:

As if in a dream he found himself, somehow, seated in the driver's seat; as if in a dream, he pulled the lever and swung the car round the yard and out through the archway; and, as if in a dream, all sense of right and wrong, all fear of obvious consequences, seemed temporarily suspended.

"Temporarily suspended," or never apprehended? The distinction, at this point, is hardly material; Toad has lost his mind, and acts with a sense of tragicomic vainglory:

… as the car devoured the street and leapt forth on the high road through the open country, he was only conscious that he was Toad once more, Toad at his best and highest, Toad the terror, the traffic-queller, the Lord of the lone trail, before whom all must give way or be smitten into nothingness and everlasting night.

The sense of a self-mythologizing figure is very strong here, a pathetic being whose self-appraisal is based on the uncertain marriage of epic and cheap adventure story. One can hardly help but feel something parallel in many of today's drivers, whose vehicles lift them out of the tiny sphere of their actual power and exalt them to some demiurgical area of consequence.

Kenneth Grahame certainly feels free to use the children's story form for his own purposes. Mr. Toad is of course apprehended (how could it be otherwise, considering the flagrancy of his crime?) and condemned to prison. We are not spared the details of his internment, the description of which ends: "The rusty key creaked in the lock, the great door clanged behind them; and Toad was a helpless prisoner in the remotest dungeon of the best-guarded keep of the stoutest castle in all the length and breadth of Merry England." Even the casual reader will be struck by the chantlike quality of this description. The gradual and explicit encasement of Mr. Toad in various layers of impenetrability makes for a vivid image of isolation and misery. The final, Dickensian irony of "Merry England" augments the sense of despair and at the same time points to the actual presence of a world outside, a world apart, from which Toad has just been separated.

What about the Toad-in-prison chant here? What does it mean; what purpose does it serve? It has some of the purposes we mentioned above, emphasizing Toad's isolation and the impregnability of his cell. But the chant has at the same time an effect nearly opposite to that of emphasis. The chant makes more acceptable the reality, which it encases in rhythmic formula. Our faculties for warding off painful information are lulled as we watch the chant unwind itself to its sinister conclusion. As Toad is a literal prisoner of the British penal system, so we have become helpless prisoners of our mimetic abilities. We can't let the chant go, and similarly, it won't let us go. However much we sympathize with Toad, however much we can't bear to think of his coming to grief, we must follow the inexorable chant, which leads us out and away from Toad, into the free world that is Merry England.

Such is the power of chants, a power strong enough that it should not be entrusted to children. Yet that is precisely at whom most chants are directed, at hapless children whose critical abilities have not developed to the point where they know they are being manipulated. Reciting a chant, one pays the dues of slavery.

The Wind in the Willows is not, however, a sinister book. Written for children in an age when it was still considered possible to "mold" them, it carries with it a feeling of moral responsibility, of not wanting children to suffer on its account. For this reason, its chants, though horrible, are not that horrible; they do not push much past the bounds of other children's literature, in which beloved characters are regularly threatened and always rescued. The chant, therefore, is in itself a parody of other situations, in which the hero is wrongfully imprisoned under dire circumstances, in the rustiest and dustiest of dungeons. The more secure the dungeon, after all, the more credit for escaping from it. Childhood fantasy does not warm as readily to characters' walking out the unlocked doors of minimum-security prisons.

This chant differs from others in that the prisoner in question is a toad, one who speaks, wears clothes, drives motor cars. But a toad nonetheless. That fact is what makes the parody so exquisitely amusing. All the old machinery is being trundled out, the whole literary arsenal reinvoked, all for the sake of a toad, self-important though he may be. That sort of illogical juxtaposition, while not too outré for childhood fantasy work, is also a source of pleasure for adults, and certainly for Kenneth Grahame. There is something supremely irreverent about taking the classic forms and inserting into them an unclassic form—that of a toad. Such variation on a theme, ready-made for children's literature, becomes in this way a mechanism of freedom—the subversion of forms through their deliberate and sedulous use.

Leaving Toad to sweat it out in his language-bound cell, we return to the cozier homes of the animals without criminal records. But alas, even the most comfortable of nests—animal or human—begins to feel a little too snug on occasion. "The larger stressful world of outside Nature" does after all furnish us with a good deal of interest and information. In some way the book (and life itself) is a struggle between precisely these two poles—cloistered comfort, and the hunger for the new, the strange, the adventurous. "How do we know when we are having an adventure?" asks Sartre. A surprisingly difficult question to answer. How much easier to know when we are not having an adventure, when we are curled up in the same old corner, nose on our paws, thoughts on nothingness. For the animals in the book, this level of consciousness is pleasant enough, and is, in fact, their usual state. But at moments the innocent paradise is invaded by alien desires, which often carry with them tragic consequences, as in the case of Toad. Rat, being more sensible, suffers less from the problem. But even he is not immune:

Restlessly the Rat wandered off once more, climbed the slope that rose gently from the north bank of the river, and lay looking out towards the great ring of Downs that barred his vision further southwards—his simple horizon hitherto, his Mountains of the Moon, his limit behind which lay nothing he had cared to see or to know. Today, to him gazing south with newborn need stirring in his heart, the clear sky over their long low outline seemed to pulsate with promise; to-day, the unseen was everything, the unknown the only real fact of life. On this side of the hills was now the real blank, on the other lay the crowded and coloured panorama that his inner eye was seeing so clearly.

This then, is the other movement in the book, the swing back, the reaction. The seemingly hermetic sphere of home and comfort contains within it, as part of its basic equipment, the seeds of restlessness and discontent. Such discordances are what give comfort whatever meaning it may have, formless and ill-defined concept that it is. One might be tempted to view the book in terms of an alternation between comfort and the discontent that leads to adventure.

In this passage the question of whether or not to accept the world as given is put to us in a series of balanced, antithetical statements. Again, Grahame is using the concrete expository style of the children's story to reflect on more abstract issues. What Rat sees when he looks around is a "great ring of Downs" that blocks his vision and defines his horizon, "his Mountains of the Moon, his limit behind which lay nothing he had cared to see or to know." It is this very tangible limitation of vision that is responsible for the upwelling of dissatisfied consciousness—consciousness of being in a world that has literally shrunk before one's eyes—those same eyes that now see it very differently. It is not that Rat hadn't known about the world beyond; rather, until today he hadn't cared. The world for Rat was more than literally bounded by that "great ring of Downs"; the psychological void beyond it was unimaginable because undesired, unsummoned.

The Day of the Birth of Desire is heralded by a magic dissolution of boundaries. A world hitherto crowded with sensuous information has turned into a "real blank," a devastated, shell-shocked area from which the mind has been withdrawn, from which one turns in weariness and loathing as the last object disappears from mental sight. At this nadir, a movement toward conservation is generally initiated, an impulse toward holding onto what we have, an expression of the paralysing fear of the void. We resist death because it will take from us what we have, with hardly a promise of replacement. As an alternative, the "great ring of Downs," the "simple horizon," the "Mountains of the Moon," or even the jail cell, seem greatly preferable.

Rat has taken a step (mental, for the moment) that tends toward the breaking up of his world, the destruction of the little realm of comfort and acceptance that was heretofore all he could have imagined. Actually, imagination had not played any real part among the forces and energies that had maintained the world in place up to now. Instead, a dull sort of nonexamination of the given had kept everything going, had left Rat in the center of a universe that did not feel unduly small (or perhaps Rat did not feel unduly large).

The birth of imagination is not without pain. One looks at the present furnishings of the world and sees only how different they could be. "On this side of the hills was now the real blank, on the other lay the crowded and coloured panorama that his inner eye was seeing so clearly." As our perspicacious narrator reminds us, imagination can take a spatial form. It is the thing that is there, not here, that is on the other side of the hills, just out of sight. Imagination functions as the making present of an absence. Were the desired or imagined object in fact present, imagination would at that instant cease to serve a purpose. It is shed, in fact, as readily as innocence.

But the two are not synonymous, far from it. Clearest for our present purposes is to view imagination as one of the qualities opposite to innocence. Imagination is the ability to visualize and perhaps desire what is not present to the senses. It is a source of discontent. By its very nature, it shows us possibilities without putting them into our hands; we look at those hands, empty as they are, and wish to fill them with the dazzling colors and seductive shapes that are just out of reach. We now know those hands to have a purpose, long unsuspected, a purpose for the present denied them. Desire grows with the realization of futility; the glimpse of another world blinds us to any source of satisfaction in this one. Is not imagination therefore at cross-purposes with innocence? Does it not obliterate the happy state of occupying a whole world uncritically and fully?

The alternative—in Grahame's book—to restless imagination is a much-emphasized comfort and delight in one's surroundings. Such comfort can overtake us at any moment, and often in the most unlikely places. Witness what happened to Toad, for example, in his jail cell:

When the girl returned, some hours later, she carried a tray, with a cup of fragrant tea steaming on it; and a plate piled up with very hot buttered toast, cut thick, very brown on both sides, with the butter running through the holes in it in great golden drops, like honey from the honeycomb. The smell of that buttered toast simply talked to Toad, and with no uncertain voice; talked of warm kitchens, of breakfasts on bright frosty mornings, of cosy parlour firesides on winter evenings, when one's ramble was over and slippered feet were propped on the fender; of the purring of contented cats, and the twitter of sleepy canaries.

The sensuous nature of this passage is irresistible. The narrator permits himself a lavish expenditure of adjectives to describe two rather simple items—hot tea and hot toast. These are basic constituents of an ordinary British diet, but rarely before have they seemed such an exquisite luxury. It is not simply hot tea, or steaming tea, but "fragrant tea steaming on it." The verb lends a certain unexpected but nonetheless welcome emphasis. Tea that is actively steaming is in little danger of cooling, at least in the space of a few paragraphs. But there is little time to worry about the temperature of the tea; hot toast immediately rears its lovely head, and is, without doubt, the piece de resistance. All the possible virtues of toast are presented to us in loving detail. Unlike the one or two cold, begrudged slices one is usually offered for breakfast. Toad's plate is "piled up with very hot buttered toast, cut thick." A lot of it, and thick. Largesse, nothing less. And to moisten the bargain, butter. But not just butter. Butter that is aggressively butter, "running through the holes in it in great golden drops, like honey from the honeycomb." Butter flowing effortlessly, liquid ore, butter sweet as honey.

As important as the immediate appeal to the senses is the process of association the toast triggers in Toad's mind. As he sniffs the repast, he thinks of an array of situations in which comfort and contentment are featured. "Warm kitchens," "cozy firesides on winter evenings," "slippered feet propped on the fender," "purring cats," all epitomize in varying ways a high level of British Gemütlichkeit. This comfort is imbibed through the dual pleasures of food and warmth—every grown embryo's dream.

Somewhat more eclectic, and less an appeal to basic human comfort, is the passage describing the picnic lunch the Water Rat gave the Sea Rat (more about him later). The following is decidedly not for the faint-hearted:

There he [Water Rat] got out the luncheon-basket and packed a simple meal, in which, remembering the stranger's origin and preferences, he took care to include a yard of long French bread, a sausage out of which the garlic sang, some cheese which lay down and cried, and a long-necked straw-covered flask containing bottled sunshine shed and garnered on far Southern slopes.

The details of this passage are exquisite, perhaps even more so than those of the preceding one. There, we had a high degree of descriptive and connotative excellence; here, we have something close to poetry. "A sausage out of which the garlic sang" surely surpasses our narrative expectations for a novel, let alone a children's story. So too does the wine's introduction, pure metaphor, pointing as it does to distant lands of unstinted warmth and sunlight. The "simple meal" that the Water Rat packs is not in the least carelessly assembled. His concern to provide something in accord with "the stranger's origin and preferences," is more than echoed in the control exercised by the narrator as he prepares an expository plate for us. The unexamined life is not worth living and the unexamined meal equally unpalatable. At least as far as a self-indulgent narrator is concerned. One who eats his words. And with great pleasure.

We are now almost at the heart of the comfort question in this book. Earlier we advanced the theory that comfort is somehow to be equated with innocence. Comfort was satisfaction with "things as they are," leading to the lack of desire to look further, a kind of blissful unexamination. To this we had opposed imagination, with all its perils of restlessness and unquelled desire. But we knew there was something facile about this dichotomy. Rigorous examination would find flaws in it. And indeed, less than rigorous examination has to lead to the conclusion that there is more than one side to comfort. Perhaps what finally grinds us down is the total impression purveyed by an accretion of passages such as the two cited above. A toad tempted by salaciously dripping toast is in itself just a freak, a momentary lapse in propriety. And the "simple picnic" that turns rapidly into an elaborate feast of language is also a forgivable small aberration. But the two of them, taken together and in combination with numerous other examples of frank hedonism, are much too rich a diet. They lead rather directly to linguistic gout, unless carefully monitored. They also lead to a reexamination of the comfort question. If comfort is simple innocence, then what about this glut of sensuously comfortable situations? Is it comfort or self-indulgence to dream of (and write about) foods that do more than satisfy hunger? Isn't there a big difference between contentment with one's cell and crust of bread, and the other sort of comfort that comes from oversatisfaction and hyperstimulation of the senses? Where is the virtue of contentment with one's lot, if there is no possibility of discontent?

So we can evaluate the comfort question in the following terms: It is indeed a luxury, and a self-indulgence, to write a children's book and cram it full of such wish-fulfillment items as sumptuous foods and cozy kitchen fires. But this sort of pleasure, vicarious in the highest degree, it among the most harmless in the world, not excepting the Peeping Toms and the Sneaking Sues. As we read The Wind in the Willows, a particular mind's thought process is revealed to us with unaccustomed frankness. With each new passage on the related subjects of food, comfort, and home we find an additional piece for study. The aggregate reveals a personality that we might call obsessive, but that has found a way to deal with its obsessions—by flaunting them in the pages of a children's book. The fact of having animals eating and dreaming about food is a slight decoy; we cannot help but be struck by the absurdity of a water rat envisioning garlic sausage, or a toad sating its hunger with buttered toast and tea (and make it hot). But such is the thin stratagem (or obvious projection) used here. There is no real hope or attempt to deceive, but an almost pure expression of innocent pleasure.

Earlier, we spoke of comfort as the antithesis of imagination. In proceeding, we seem to have changed the status of comfort, demolished it as a real object, and instead subsumed it in the concept of imagination. The comfort conveyed by imagining buttered toast is a purely imaginary comfort, highly satisfying though it may be.

There is an imagination that leads inward, another that points outward. Both kinds are the work of the same faculty, but the products of each, the objects envisioned, are quite different. Both kinds of imagination are represented in Grahame's book, and the counterbalance is quite delicate. As one might assume, home and its benefits require one type of imagination. One thinks back to what one knows, what one has experienced. In the process, horizons shrink somewhat, as the focus of desire is increasingly narrowed until it includes a finite number of objects or situations. The magnification of these few objects, their overcareful description, is the sort of imaginative work that is carried on in the book. Objects and situations are actually recreated in this fashion, given a new emphasis, as is the case in a still life, for example. And that is, in a sense, what Grahame's descriptions are—virtual still lifes. Buttered toast frozen forever with the butter dripping lustily from it, with an eternally available store of associations that go with it, such marvels are the work of imagination, defier of time and space. This sort of imagination abolishes the barriers between memory and future time, between the already-perceived and the yet-to-be-apprehended. It keeps intact the family mansion that has long ago crumbled.

The other kind of imagination, the outward-pushing, is also present in this remarkable children's story. One might say it needn't be, that there is enough internal texture to keep animals, children, and adults enthralled for millenia. But Kenneth Grahame heroically battles against the pleasantly otiose, the overstuffed chair and the warm hearth, in order to poke a cold but questing nose outside the window. In this posture, our second kind of imagination comes into play, bringing with it the dreams of a place that is not home. Such a specific role is left to a rather specific character—the Sea Rat. What better sort of character than a sailor—animal or human—to do the work of emissary from another world? A sailor on a ship who knows no real home, only ports, homes for the night, easily abandoned in the next day's sailing. Such a character introduces himself to our Rat, Water Rat, whose home is the river, but one very specific spot on that river.

The two meet, as we said, and dine together on the finest continental cuisine, replete with garlic and sparkling wine. Then, as a sort of quid pro quo, the Sea Rat speaks a little about his life on the water, speaks to a spell-bound Water Rat who has never known about another, the other, existence, but who is gratifyingly open and accepting:

The quiet world outside … receded far away and ceased to be. And the talk, the wonderful talk flowed on—or was it speech entirely, or did it pass at times into song—chanty of the sailors weighing the dripping anchor, sonorous hum of the shrouds in a tearing North-Easter, ballad of the fisherman hauling his nets at sundown against an apricot sky, chords of guitar and mandoline from gondola or caique? … Back into speech again it passed, and with beating heart he was following the adventures of a dozen seaports, the fights, the escapes, the rallies, the comradeships, the gallant undertakings; or he searched islands for treasure, fished in still lagoons and dozed day-long on warm white sand.…

Calling this passage an encapsulated sea epic would not be overstating the impression it makes on the reader, through the Water Rat, who has surrendered himself body and soul to this teller of tales. For the child reader, this fact is enough to fascinate; for the literary critic (or other cynic), this is a "story-within-a-story," testimony to unsuspected levels of complexity.

Above all else, this passage is an exercise in imagination. Sea Rat tells, but Water Rat "sees." Word pictures are painted and are envisioned, admired, re-created. Sea Rat and Water Rat are alike effaced in the telling, and wholly unconscious of self. Only the verbal pictures remain, floating in the air, dominating with suggestive power. For Water Rat, all these images are very new and very strange. Obvious though it may be, there is a good deal of difference between traveling and remaining at home. Home connotes, among thousands of other things, a stable collection of objects with which to fill and define a life. And we've certainly had enough glimpses of animal home life—British style. Here, though, we have a different arena for thought, an arena virtually without limits because it has no fixed points. A ship docking at different ports—classic symbol of restlessness and, to a certain extent, irresponsibility—is the life the Sea Rat offers the Water Rat. It is a life without any guarantees of a table with buttered toast or a hearth fire sempiternally burning. It is, in short, a life of risks and, possibly, of rewards. It is also the sort of life an Englishman sitting in front of a comfortably modulated fire, munching buttered toast, would like to contemplate. In this setting, our Englishman would be using the outward-pointing imagination we mentioned above, the one that thinks toward objects and contexts never before seen, decidedly "not Home," alien.

It is this imagination we worry about in terms of innocence. Rat hears the Sea Rat's stories and immediately vows to go off to sea, all his former friends and associations forgotten. The sort of contentment on which innocence is built and that is necessary for its complete flowering is impossible in a mind in which restlessness and curiosity have been awakened. Imagining oneself in another state, one inevitably knows the limitations of this one and of oneself. From placid unconsciousness of self, one reaches the stage of self-contemplation and self-criticism. And once infected, it is no easy achievement to travel the road back to the uncritical being who fills his skin with no wrinkles, born to the role.

But Grahame's is a book whose very excesses lead back to the placid fount of consciousness. A few brave gestures, a few baby steps in some new direction, and then a somewhat hurried, if dignified, retreat. Here with the Sea Rat, where imagination is perhaps at its most rampant, even here we can't avoid the homeward motion. His subversive account ends, "… the merry home-coming, the headland rounded, the harbour lights opened out; the groups seen dimly on the quay, the cheery hail, the splash of the hawser; the trudge up the steep little street towards the comforting glow of red-curtained windows." Home again, home again, home again. The "weary traveler" is welcomed with open arms, back to the womb that he never really left. His voyages around the world were just a displacement, a temporary break in the living continuum. Imagination, rebellious for a time, could not help but come back to itself, back to the home, origin of contentment and peace, nest of innocence.

And as we come home to The Wind in the Willows, we see that it never pretends to be more than a children's story. Yet its underpinnings have all the subtlety of a well-made novel. Little flashes of excitement, large doses of innocent comfort—the mixture gives us a first-rate mental beverage, beneficial to both heart and brain. Were the concoction prepared by the Devil himself, it could hardly be more seductive.

Get Ahead with eNotes

Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.

Get 48 Hours Free Access
Previous

Kenneth Grahame (1920)

Next

Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows: A Companionable Vitality

Loading...