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 A lot of the stories appear to be mined directly from Patrick R. Chalmers's Kenneth Grahame: Life, Letters and Unpublished Work (1933).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."
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| 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.
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| 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).
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.
