Abridged too far

On second thought, maybe it's a wonderful thing that this passage was simply left out of the adaptation. I would hate to read a Hostess Ho-Ho version of this poignant moment in the Mole and Rat friendship.

Don't get me wrong. Grahame's writing is demanding enough that I'll freely concede it might be fun to have a version geared to young readers, to tide them over until they can manage the original on their own. It could issue a disclaimer in bold letters on the very first page, just like the Dalmatian Press Children's Classic editions do: "This is not the original version (which you really must read when you're ready for every detail)." And "The Wind in the Willows" could absolutely be made more young-reader-friendly without rewriting it. Since I have been unable to find such an edition, let's take another children's classic, Chapter 2 of Milne's "Winnie-the-Pooh," "In Which Pooh Goes Visiting and Gets Into a Tight Place."

I compared this to "Pooh Goes Visiting," a Puffin Book in the Easy to Read series, geared to readers ages 5 to 8. In this story, Pooh eats too much honey at Rabbit's house and gets stuck in the door. Like Grahame, Milne lives in the language. When Pooh realizes he must spend the week stuck in that hole, fasting until he slims down enough to be yanked out, he makes a tearful request of Christopher Robin: "Then would you read a Sustaining Book that would help comfort a Wedged Bear in Great Tightness?"

So say both books. Indeed, only by doing a line-by-line comparison was I able to find the words and phrases that were missing, and I was pleased to see that no new words had been added. In this case the adapter, Stephen Krensky, has his name in large print right on the cover. No one would assume this is identical to the original. It's an honest abridgment that honors the beauty of the writing, and that would be Sustaining for anyone Wedged in Great Tightness or otherwise needing a Good Read.

Furthermore, it's clear that the cartoonification of both the text and illustrations of "The Wind in the Willows" is no accident, no amateur mistake. Taken as a whole, it appears the Great Illustrated Classics has a mission, that being to make all the classics as accessible, and ultimately as vacant, as a third-rate comic book. There must be good marketing in that, since commerce and busy parents don't always have time for art.

It's painfully ironic that today's children -- whose alarmingly low reading rates are the subject of endless educational debates -- are nonetheless willy-nilly expected to read the classics to themselves earlier than children of any previous generation. The publishers of Great Illustrated Classics have created a self-perpetuating marketing niche. The more parents buy their series, the less reading aloud will go on, so the more children will fail to gain the sophisticated literacy it would take to read the original for themselves, so the more they will need watered-down versions. Even if these watered-down versions go unread, there will be well-meaning parents who will buy them anyway, hoping.

There's another force to be reckoned with in this process, and that is the Walt Disney Co.

If the Great Illustrated Classic of "The Wind in the Willows" is actually faithful to anything, that would be the many animated versions that have spun off from Grahame's book over the years. When Disney ate Milne's treasure, the evidence was everywhere. There are the trademark cartoon figures; there is the text that retells the popular cartoon more than Milne's stories. Fittingly, the Disney versions are to be found under "D" in our library's children's section. Under "M" you may, if you are lucky, find "The Complete Tales and Poems of Winnie-the-Pooh," by Milne himself, intact and full of their original wit.

But the Disneyfication of "The Wind in the Willows" is more insidious. Because, as Evil Clones are wont to do, Disney's Toad has gone back to wipe out the original, replace it with himself and cover his tracks. Only those who know to poke around will discern the plunder, and by that time the real treasure may be long gone. When our library's vintage copies of "The Wind in the Willows" finally wear out, the Great Illustrated Classic, with its sturdy library binding will be all that's left. And the only hint of the desecration will be the ambiguous but friendly "adapted by" bit on the title page. We'll find Mole sick of cleaning. Toad flinging horrid little wagons. Mole sitting in his chair with a bubble of Badger over his head. Cleansed of "divine discontent and longing," bereft of "poetry of motion," with Mole never taking time out to smell Home, Little Portly neither lost nor found, and no Pan pipes to be forgotten by Rat or reader. Greatly diluted and poorly illustrated "classics" will be the literary legacy left to our children.

Oddly, A.A. Milne himself may have set the hatchet of progress in motion. When "The Wind in the Willows" first came out in 1908 it didn't exactly receive a standing ovation. Shepard's illustrations helped. But not until 1929, when Milne adapted it for the stage, did "Wind in the Willows" become launched as a popular children's work. To blow up the action and streamline it for his audience, Milne stripped it down to the Toad story and called it "Toad of Toad Hall." In 1949, Disney put Toad on the big screen. Again, we can thank Milne for encouraging Grahame in this direction. In a letter to Grahame he wrote: "I expect that you have heard that Disney is interested in it? It's just the thing for him, of course, and he would do it beautifully."

Well, is it beautiful? And if it is mere parody, what is wrong with that? For one, how do you think our daughter gets to hear an hour of reading and discussion of literature with both parents every night? When it's real literature, we show up and celebrate it with her. If it's going to be dumbed down, we might as well pop in the DVD.

But if my child is going to dive into a world of someone's creation, let it be an artist's, not a corporation's. Great children's literature is written by an artist answering an urgent personal call, and the artist's magic can touch the reader in places that a cheap imitation can never reach with its sugar-sticky fingers.

While idly surfing the Internet with Kenneth Grahame in mind I discovered that "The Wind in the Willows" came from stories Grahame had told his only child, a boy named Alistair, and whom he called Mouse. When at 7 years of age Mouse refused to go on vacation for fear of missing the stories, Grahame promised to write installments to him by post; published much later, in 1989, as "My Dearest Mouse: The Wind in the Willows Letters," these missives to his son became the basis for his classic novel. These were no idle bedtime stories, though. One Web site hints that Alistair had passions not unlike Mr. Toad, and his worried father sought to temper his son's excesses. While an undergraduate at Oxford, Alistair killed himself, somehow using a train, two days before his 20th birthday.

Suddenly it clicked. I called my mother.

"Toad was bipolar," I told my mother. We knew bipolar. My brother had been bipolar and suffered from manias not unlike Toad's, although after his manias for such toys as motorcycles he eventually gave in to a passion for prescription drugs. Like Toad, his grandiose self-image goaded him into terrible mischief, and he could contrive magnificent deceptions without the slightest hint of conscience. Like Toad, he could be heartbreakingly contrite when confronted, only to get that grandiose glint back in his eye and go on to outdo himself.

Even after being imprisoned for stealing motorcars, even after having escaped prison, and even after having spent a bitterly cold night in a hollow tree, incorrigible Toad is capable of the most delicious grandiosity. Now, the adapted version simply says, "Shaking the dry leaves out of his hair, [Toad] crept out of the hollow and marched off, confident and hopeful, though a little hungry."

Grahame, on the other hand, treats us to Toad's view of his situation:

"He was warm from end to end as he thought of the jolly world outside, waiting eagerly for him to make his triumphal entrance, ready to serve him and play up to him, anxious to help him and to keep him company, as it always had been in the days of old before misfortune fell upon him ... the green fields that succeeded the trees were his own to do as he liked with; the road itself, when he reached it ... seemed, like a stray dog, to be looking anxiously for company."

I read this passage to my mother and we laughed as we reviewed the Toad Dynamic in light of our own bizarre, but now strangely archetypal, experiences with my brother. It was so easy to laugh about Toad, while we heard unspoken echoes of my brother's narrative. The most painful things yield the most laughter when played by an artist. My brother thought he could drive to northern Virginia on tranquilizers. Then he thought the arresting cop had failed to realize it was a prescription drug, a prescription. Having his license taken away just meant that he had to drive without a license -- what else was he supposed to do? And the number of pills he would take, well, he had a much higher tolerance than other people, much higher. We didn't understand how high his limits were, he assured us.

"Grahame wrote 'Wind in the Willows' to appeal to his son," I told my mother. "I think he was hoping to save him from himself." Ratty and Mole's friendship is so carefully and urgently rendered, and stands in such stark contrast to Toad's rather frail grasp of relationship. Indeed, as my daughter would ask after Toad had betrayed his friends yet again, "Why do Ratty and Mole keep wanting to be friends with Toad?" Then I remembered that Badger was originally friends with Toad's late father. Toad was a surrogate son to Badger, and Badger needed to save him, just like Grahame needed to save Alistair, and my mother lived to save my brother.

At the end of "The Wind in the Willows," Badger has triumphantly gotten through to Toad at last. Grahame in his authorial omnipotence provides Toad further protection by forgetting about the police soon after Toad's jailbreak, an unlikely plot device that even my 5-year-old kept decrying. ("But why don't the police think to look for him at Toad Hall?" We said we didn't know and to stop asking us.) But despite his desire to provide us with a redeemed and safe Toad, Grahame undercuts this notion, offering ample hints that he knows darn well Toad is doomed to go back to his Toady ways, just like he surely had ample reason to suspect that Alistair was destined to live a short life, and we suspected that my brother was destined to down one too many pills.

"Oh," my mother sighed. "He wrote it to save his son, his only son." A pause. "But he couldn't."

The next day my mother called to say that she found it oddly consoling to know that Grahame had had Toad for a son, just like her, and had been no more able to save him than she had been. "It makes it less personal, in a way," she said. "An archetype. Not a personal failure."

I don't think she would have gotten that from the Great Illustrated Classic.

Childhood is a sweet time, and an innocent one. But my child knows pain, sorrow, desires and their restraint, friendships tested and found true, people who let you down again and again and you love them anyway. Kenneth Grahame spoke from his heart, bestowing a gift that my daughter can open more and more fully each year. My daughter deserves nothing less than the gifts of artists. What I want for her is precisely what the Great Illustrated Classics wants to leave out. The unfathomable mystery of intimacy and glimpses of its inner workings. A taste of the dangers of the world. The jaw-dropping beauty of language. The heartbeat of the artist.

Beware the white binding with the red and black letters.

Editor's note: This story has been corrected since its original publication.

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