Haining Got Haininged!

Peter Haining (1940-2007) was a hugely prolific editor of single-author collections and multi-author anthologies, many of which appeared to dig up lost or forgotten stories by famous authors.  Alas such items were usually frauds--Haining would, for example, take some forgotten story by one unfamiliar author, and attribute it to a more well-known author, complete with falsified bibliographical statements. It is a shameful methodology.

Recently I have been studying the rare materials in Haining's Paths to the River Back: The Origins of 'The Wind in the Willows' from the Writings of Kenneth Grahame (1983). A lot of the stories appear to be mined directly from Patrick R. Chalmers's Kenneth Grahame: Life, Letters and Unpublished Work (1933). I am still in the initial stages of studying these books, but I have already found one fraud at the very beginning of Haining's book, and it has an interesting story. 

The fraud is the poem which Haining prints at the beginning  of his book, "Running Water," which Haining notes as "A poem by Kenneth Grahame written at Blewbury in 1915."

 page 9, Paths to the River Back

 

Haining lifted the poem from pp. 252-253 of Chalmers's book, which is curiously ambiguous about the authorship.

 Click on the pages to make them larger

 

Note that Chalmers writes "in the post-war years Kenneth Grahame" and "he could truly say 'Water first of Singers'; or . . " Then comes the poem. The keyword there is or. The poem expresses the sympathies of Grahame, but it is not by Grahame. In fact, it is by Grahame's biographer, Patrick R. Chalmers, and it had appeared in whole in Punch for 13 March 1929 (Chalmers was a regular contributor to Punch). 

What Chalmers used of his own poem is the final 7 lines, headed by the first four lines (which were repeated but slightly altered immediately before the final seven lines). 

Why did Chalmers do this? He was certainly having difficulties with the book, for Grahame's widow Elspeth used the book to right past wrongs and to erase facts from Grahame's life, leaving it a kind of hagiography, for which Elspeth claimed half the royalties for her meddling, according to Matthew Dennison's Eternal Boy: The Life of Kenneth Grahame (2018). Elspeth would go on in 1944 to publish First Whisper of Wind in the Willows, in which "she published misleading, saccharine 'memories' of her life as wife and mother . . . delusions had made Elspeth's marriage bearable" (Dennison, p. 243). 

Chalmer's implying a false source should not have been done. Nor should Haining's explicit extension of the first false source. Both are bad scholarship, and here, for once, Haining took someone else's fraud and made it new as his own: Haining himself got Haininged.  
 

 

 

A Mystery amongst Bibliomysteries

In 2014, Otto Penzler published Bibliomysteries: An Annotated Bibliography of First Editions of Mystery Fiction Set in the World of Books, 1849-2000. It's a useful book when one is hungry to read a  bibliomystery, for the entries often give a sentence or two about the relevant book or story to whet one's appetite. Thus, recently, I found this entry:

Frederick Irving Anderson's short story "The Jorgenson Plates" sounded intriguing.  The idea of "a publishing story with much about the technical aspects of publishing in England and America" is odd enough to attract my interest. Anderson's book, The Notorious Sophie Lang (1925), is particularly rare, so I looked for the reprint of the story that Penzler cites in Ellery Queen's anthology, The Female of the Species (1943).  And I read it. And it has nothing whatsoever to do with publishing in either England or America. Instead it is a convoluted tale of coincidences and revelations about Sophie Lang, the female jewel thief.  It was really a waste of time.  

But where, then, might I find the story that I wanted to read?  It doesn't appear to be in Anderson's collection, The Notorious Sophie Lang, and if it's a stray annotation by Penzler inserted into the wrong entry, it could go almost anywhere. Any suggestions?

 

G.K. Chesterton on Fairy Tales and Modern Novels

"Can you not see that fairy tales in their essence are quite solid and straightforward; but that this everlasting fiction about modern life is in its nature essentially incredible? Folk-lore means that the soul is sane, but that the universe is wild and full of marvels. Realism means that the world is dull and full of routine, but that the soul is sick and screaming. The problem of the fairy tale is--what will a healthy man do with a fantastic world? The problem with the modern novel is--what will a madman do with a dull world? In the fairy tales the cosmos goes mad; but the hero does not go mad. In the modern novels the hero is mad before the book begins, and suffers from the harsh steadiness and cruel sanity of the cosmos."

 G.K. Chesterton, "The Dragon's Grandmother," The Daily News, collected in Tremendous Trifles (1909)