Finding out that there was an annotated “Wind in the Willows,” I just had to put it on my Christmas wish list. I had been assuming that even though other annotated classics have turned out to be disappointments, there was no way anyone could ruin “Wind in the Willows.” Right?

Wrong. But the book did give me two insights and one rant-y screed. Being me, I’ll start with the screed.

(BTW, I don’t think any of the following will make sense if you haven’t read the “Wind in the Willows.” But if you haven’t, stop reading this right now and go read that. Only, y’know … without annotations.)

1. We’re all a lot smarter than we thought we were. Or else, scholars and intellectuals are a lot dumber. Take your pick. But I’m pretty sure I’m right about that, because no smart person could’ve misjudged the audience and character of a beloved classic so outrageously. Any one of the millions of readers who have enjoyed this whimsical, poetic and utterly charming book would know that if you are going to add footnotes, they need to be in the same vein — playful, breezy, fun. And innocent, right? If you’re talking about a book with the harmless escapades of a couple of proper little English gentlemen who happen to be a mole, a rat, a toad and a badger, you don’t need to get into pointy-headed claptrap about sex and politics, right? And yet, here’s one I picked at random:

[when Mole is in high spirits out boating in Chapter 1 and “he was even able to give some straight back-talk to a couple of moorhens who were sniggering …”, we get about 125 words on what a moorhen is and then:] A hen is also defined as a ‘fussy, middle-aged woman.’ Grahame’s use of a hen to make Mole feel out of place suggests that he himself felt at odds with women who gravitated to the boating and yacht clubs he frequented. … [The annotation quotes a letter where Grahame says that he doesn’t know the wife of a yachting friend, which they apparently feel really makes their argument, and then conclude:] To the riverbankers, Mole included, the female character is to be tolerated, at best. Real contentment on the river involves homo-social company.

Say what? The author of the annotations is a woman, and might feel keenly that the book could be improved by some female leading characters. But using that opinion to claim that Grahame was channeling misogyny through his animal friends who were craving, ahem, ‘homo-social company’ is just weird.

But things get weirder than that. It’s one thing to read between the printed lines; it’s another thing to read between the unprinted ones and take big meaning out of what the author excised. In the chapter where Mole and Rat meet the god Pan (which is, admittedly, an odd chapter — more on that in a minute), Grahame apparently had written that they saw Pan’s shaggy flanks and limbs, and then changed his mind and crossed out “flanks and.” Does that sound fraught with repression to you? If not, apparently, you’re just not paying attention:

By crossing out ‘flanks,’ Grahame makes the setting a little bit less potent. Grahame’s Pan has a touch of the homo-erotic, something that Grahame shied away from elsewhere in the manuscript. … With the trials of [Oscar] Wilde fresh in the public memory in 1900, Grahame was discreet about supporting homo-erotic literature.

And by ‘discreet,’ she means, as near as I can tell, that he never put anything in writing to suggest that he did support it. A-HA! So not only does he cross out ‘flanks’ and NOT openly espouse overt homosexuality in his book of talking animals, but he goes on throughout the rest of his life to not endorse it any time. Well! Talk about a dead giveaway!
It goes on this way all through. Thank goodness that we have giant-brained scholars to show us how Toad and Ratty are classists, sexists and are masking their true feelings for each other.

2. The times and the river. Kenneth Grahame was born in 1859 and wrote “Wind in the Willows (WiW for the sake of my tired fingers)” from about 1906-1908. He had seen the changes that industrialization had already made on the English villages, towns and cities. This is the same background that Tolkien had in writing The Lord of the Rings series (though he came a generation later). Both of them could see simple country folk and sweeping English countryside being disposed of for the sake of factories and plants that seemed to do away with centuries-old forests and timeworn traditions and give back only a meager paycheck. Tolkien’s answer to a world that only seemed to be getting darker and colder — on the eve of WWII, no less — was to remind everyone that “even the smallest person can change the course of the future.” Grahame’s was to show how the little people didn’t need to even do that. They could keep the world as it was just by being what they were. In the early 1900’s, England hadn’t gone through the shock to the system that came with WWI and all of its attendant despair. But life had already changed in a way that couldn’t be undone.

The author of the annotations, Annie Gauger, notes that the attachment to the earth, to home, to simple pleasures like homespun poetry and homecooked meals form major themes in WiW. I agree with that. You can hardly read a chapter without one or the other of those things making an impact (often so forcefully that still, after all these years, I’m liable to get watery eyes). On the other hand, Gauger is frequently at odds with Grahame’s decision to make his main characters be animals, but I think that he did it because even by the early 1900’s, you couldn’t reasonably say that people would be so contented, innocent and in touch with nature without seeming ridiculous. I couldn’t help feeling that WiW was a product of the times in that way, even if the evidence of it is how little it resembled the times. I think it was a wistful work for Grahame, a way to catalogue a world that was already being swept down-river.

3. About Kenneth Grahame. When you really love a certain book, there’s a risk in looking deeper into the life of the author. It’s always foolish to feel a kinship with someone based on their creative output, but we do it all the same. I would have loved to find out that Grahame was a real kindred spirit on all the things I think are most important, but in a few particulars at least, it turns out not to be so. For one thing, he was an ardent fan of the neo-pagan movement that was going on, which is why the chapter where Mole and Rat meet the god Pan smacks of such unalloyed religious ecstasy. I can’t help feeling that the English needed then and need now to return to Orthodoxy. It sounds like he would’ve preferred for everyone to move in another direction. Doesn’t ruin WiW for me, but it does kind of take the glow off it a little.

And then there’s the oddness of it being written for (and with the suggestions of) his son, Alastair. Grahame and his wife went away on summer trips, much to his son’s consternation, and left him with nannies, as the English were wont to do in those days. Alastair was handicapped with eye problems, and that may have contributed to his “difficult” behavior. He bit children and attacked them, took things he wanted, had tantrums — so he was either a sensitive genius or a spoiled brat, depending on whose account you read. Even given a strict Victorian view of things, there are some disturbing aspects to Alastair’s personality, like insisting that his parents call him Robinson, the name of a lunatic who had tried to shoot his father. Alastair lived into early adulthood, just barely, and then seems to have committed suicide. (It’s a little inconclusive, since he didn’t leave a note, but he died after having laid on train tracks, and since he wasn’t drunk or high at the time, it’s kind of hard to imagine how it wouldn‘t have been suicide.)

I couldn’t help thinking of Alastair as I made my way through the exploits of outrageous Toad, the rich, conscience-challenged, unbelievably conceited adventurer, and suddenly, I have to admit, Toad’s funny ways didn’t seem so funny. Toad steals cars and crashes them, steals horses and sells them, takes charity from a bargewoman and runs her barge aground. And he brags and whines and fumes and is heedless of any feelings except his own. In short, he sounds a lot like a self-centered child that refused to grow up. At the end of it all, Toad is somehow Reformed and is a different Toad. But there’s no real intimation of what would have made him change, and that detail seems to have been thrown in out of a sense of duty.

I wondered about all that. Does it ruin WiW for me? No … but I think it changes my admiration for it. Both in the times he lived and in what his life held, Grahame wasn’t just breezing through an easy existence. He had a complicated life, and yet he managed to spin a simple yarn for us. He reached into his own private reserve of the goodness of life to bring us this book. He wasn’t enjoying the benefits of Ratty’s life or Mole’s, and he didn’t live in a world where someone could rob and break out of jail and never have to pay the consequences for it. He was describing a landscape that only existed in his imagination.

Is it just me? That gives me a wistful sense of what it probably took to get all this out in print. He was describing one world that was disappearing fast, and another one that had never been there in the first place.