The Only Reason to Tell a Story: Kenneth Grahame’s Jasper Walls
by David N. Tobin
“As a little girl I loved writing fairy tales without happy endings,” essayist Leslie Jamison tells us, reflecting on her parents’ divorce (and, years later, her own): “the dragon ended up incinerating everyone, or the princess left her prince standing at the altar and ran away to fly over the sea in a hot air balloon (which maybe was a happy ending, just a different kind).”[1]
Happy endings have been on my mind since reading The Wind in the Willows author Kenneth Grahame’s wonderful story, “Its Walls Were as of Jasper.” Always drawn to Grahame’s nostalgia for the lost verities of childhood, I came across his two collections of reminiscent sketches, both written well before the 1908 chronicle of Mr. Toad and company: The Golden Age (1895) and Dream Days (1898, including “Its Walls Were as of Jasper”).
There must have been something in the Edwardian air, for this was also the time when J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan first appeared on the London stage (1904). Wendy Darling and her brothers have much in common with Grahame’s young narrator and his four siblings. They all share the same rigid hierarchy of roles and privileges; the same baffled dissatisfaction with the mysteries of adult custom and expectation; the same bittersweet need to escape into a free realm of untrammeled imagination.
“Its Walls Were as of Jasper” begins one rainy morning, picture-books spread out on the hearth-rug, with one of the children’s rituals of escape. It is a “process of allotment”:
All the characters in the pictures had to be assigned and dealt out among us, according to seniority, as far as they would go. When once that had been satisfactorily completed, the story was allowed to proceed; and thereafter, in addition to the excitement of the plot, one always possessed a personal interest in some particular member of the cast, whose successes or rebuffs one took as so much private gain or loss.
This is more than a child’s game. It is how empathy is born. It is one of the principal gifts of story — actually, of much literature and art in general: getting to imagine and understand what it would be like to be someone else.
One picture shows a beautiful queen seated between a young armored knight and a fellow with “no armour nor weapons . . . a mere civilian — and with one hand he pointed to a wound in his thigh.” Grahame, with typically keen insight into the minds and hearts of children, describes why the youngest brother, Harold, wants to lay claim to the injured man: “It was the wound he coveted. . . . He wanted to have a big, sore wound of his very own, and go about and show it to people, and excite their envy or win their respect.”
But Grahame’s image of the wounded thigh also calls to mind the Arthurian legend of the Fisher King, whose unhealed wound leads to an incapacitated kingdom and many a quest for the healing power of the Holy Grail.[2] The grown-up world is, alas, a marred world; there, adventure and glory are rarely innocent.
When the oldest brother Edward goes off to school, “a great deal of adjustment and re-allotment took place,” the narrator boasts, “and all the heroes of illustrated literature were at my call, did I choose to possess them.” Strangely enough, though, he does not choose the knight, or the civilian, or any of the smirking child-angels hovering about. Instead, “I had got into the habit of strolling off into the background [of the picture], and amusing myself with what I found there.”
In other words, he has grown from identifying with only one character into a larger domain of possibilities. He can begin to create his own stories now — which he does, with great pleasure. The background in which he loses himself “held a great deal, though so tiny”: towers, belfries, knights riding two by two on a sinuous white road, and a tranquil blue bay where “a very curly ship lay at anchor.” But although “[t]here was plenty to do in this pleasant land,” one key problem persists:
. . . one could never penetrate beyond a certain point. I might wander up that road as often as I liked, [but] I was bound to be brought up at the gateway . . . of the little walled town. Inside, doubtless there were high jinks going on; but the password was denied to me. I could get on board a boat and row up as far as the curly ship, but around the headland I might not go. . . . I must stay down in the meadow, and imagine it all as best I could.
Until, one day — a breakthrough. Accompanied by his tyrannical aunt, the narrator is stuck with the dreary duty of dressing up and paying a social call at a grand manor; “the lady who received us was effusive to Aunt Eliza and hollowly gracious to me.” Fidgeting, he escapes the dull talk and wanders to the library, alone. He discovers a “very fine and large” volume, splendidly illustrated. “Of course I was not going to waste any time in reading. . . . However, the pictures remained; pictures never lied, never shuffled nor evaded; and as for the story, I could invent it myself.”
To his surprise and delight, he sees unfolding before him “my own little city!” Sure enough, it depicts the same kind of portcullis, towers, fair ladies, and sea. “Confident, yet breathless with expectation, I turned the page. Joy!” This time, the gateway is open. Now, finally, he can be part of the bright life and bustle within. A great celebration, a noble church — perhaps a wedding?
Well, no doubt they were now being married, He and She, just as always happened. And then, of course, they were going to live happily ever after; and that was the part I wanted to get to. Storybooks were so stupid, always stopping at the point where they became really nice; but this picture-story was only in its first chapters, and at last I was to have a chance of knowing how people lived happily every after.
When I first read this passage, it stopped me dead in my tracks. Was Kenneth Grahame’s story not just about art, and empathy, and the maturing imagination, but also about the secret to happiness? The heart-clutching naiveté of the boy’s outlook suddenly shifts the tale into deeper waters. Literally. He joins the “merry bridal party” moving down to the harbor and preparing to set sail. “From the deck I should see the little walled town recede and sink and grow dim,” he imagines, “while every plunge of our bows brought us nearer to the happy island — it was an island we were bound for, I knew well!”
It is 1898, remember. In one of the century’s best-known English poems, another stalwart adventurer imagines sailing to “the Happy Isles” (maybe he will even “see the great Achilles, whom we knew”). But Ulysses never makes it. In Dante’s version he and his crew drown in a storm. Finding those isles is, to say the least, perilous.
Our young Ulysses’ reverie is soon dashed to bits by Aunt Eliza: she grabs him by the neck and gets him out of there. He had ventured where he was not supposed to go. “Naught was left to me but to blubber dismally, awakened of a sudden to the harshness of real things and the unnumbered hostilities of the actual world.”
Dreaming up stories is one thing; achieving “happy” is another.
“When I’ve grown up big,” the narrator promises himself at the end of “The Walls Were as of Jasper,” “I will set out early one morning, and never stop till I get to that little walled town. . . . As for the island, which I had never even seen, that was not so easy. Yet I felt confident that somehow, at some time, sooner or later, I was destined to arrive.”
The rhythm of that concluding sentence is perfect. Confidence is an unhesitating, forward-driving quality. Yet the sentence slows to a crawl as it pauses — hesitates — three times in a row. The narrative is told from the perspective of a presumably grown-up man reminiscing about his distant youth. Never mind how confident he “feels” — how strong does his confidence sound?
Sam Sussman, a writer based in New York, has a brief memoir in the May 2021 Harper’s Magazine called “The Silent Type: On (possibly) being Bob Dylan’s son.” It is about growing up with his unconventional, repeatedly single mom, who may or may not have conceived him when she was seeing Bob Dylan in the mid-seventies, “the most harrowing time of her life,” and who went on to build a successful practice in holistic health and live what Sussman calls a “rich and inspired life.”
Before her death, of ovarian cancer, the two got closer. Over dinner, she told her son that (in Sussman’s words) “we are designed to heal. . . . We are here to take the pieces of the universe we have been given, burnish them with love, and return them in better shape than we received them. She told me she had always thought this was the only reason to tell a story, to redeem what is broken in our world, and for what it was worth, I might keep that in mind.”
Now, “when I reach for creative guidance, I think not of Dylan, but of my mother: her belief in the integrity of any story told on its own terms, whether it’s the tales of King Arthur she read to me as a child or the stories I am trying to write today.”
The memoir turns out to be about a storyteller’s growing love and awareness of “the infinite gifts of being my mother’s son.”
Grahame’s epitaph (d. 1932) tells us that he left “childhood and literature . . . the more blest for all time.” He told unforgettable stories that do indeed redeem what is broken in our world: its fraught hopes, its hostilities — “the harshness of real things.” The title “The Walls Were as of Jasper” alludes to one hellacious humdinger of a story: the incendiary Book of Revelation. In chapter 18, the prophet imagines a holy city (“and the building of the wall of it was jasper”), “a new heaven and a new earth [where] there shall no longer be any death; there shall no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain.”
Grahame’s vision is more modest, his Biblical allusion shadowed by wry irony. He just wants to get back to that “little walled town” and finally arrive at his happy island. Somehow. At some time. Sooner or later.
[1] Leslie Jamison, “The Self Unmoored,” The New York Review of Books, 13 May 2021.
[2] The story of the Fisher King underpins much of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.”
