He goes along, just as he always did, with Anne and Christopher on their morning walk. But Eeyore and Piglet and Kanga and Roo are there from time to time too. They wait on the platform in ‘The Engineer’. They had become such public figures they could hardly be left out entirely. Methuen’s advance publicity would say the new book was ‘better’ than When We Were Very Young. ‘This is doubtful,’ Milne said – but he thought it ‘pretty much as good as’. Certainly, it contained a number of poems – ‘King John’s Christmas’, ‘Sneezles’, ‘The Old Sailor’ and ‘In the Dark’, for instance – as memorable as anything in the earlier book.
With four of the House at Pooh Corner stories under his belt, Milne was spending August at Cotchford working on a play – ‘a Detective Play which is fun to do’. Plays were always fun to do. The awful part came afterwards. Negotiations for The Ivory Door were still going on. That was the ‘Shakespearean’ one – the costume play with masses of characters. There was the possibility it might be done that autumn in both New York and London. In the event it opened in New York in October – but it was not until April 1929, after the detective play, that it came on in London. ‘I have given up bothering about it,’ Milne told Ken, but it was still very close to his heart. A headline in a Canadian paper the year before (of a review of his Chatto volume Four Plays) read:
A. A. MILNE’S STAR IS NOW IN ASCENDANT AS PLAYWRIGHT
It was hardly a snappy headline and he knew, in any case, it was not true. Already too many people were thinking of him primarily as a children’s writer. A review of the same book in Granta began:
I think Mr Milne, at some time in his career, must have whispered to himself, ever so gently, ‘One day, I shall write a great play’; and I’m also certain that after completing this volume, he whispered, even more gently, ‘I shall never write a great play.’
The volume included Success, one of the plays for which Milne had had such particularly high hopes. The Granta reviewer liked it too. ‘In parts there is a vigour and a strength, which in spite of all the doubts, leave a hope; and I have hoped for and enjoyed Mr Milne for so long that I can’t give up the habit. Perhaps, after all, he hasn’t whispered that second sentence.’ I think, in fact, that he had. There is no way, really, that a ‘detective play’ can be a ‘great play’. He would write half a dozen more plays. He would never write a great play.
The Fourth Wall, which would be produced in New York as The Perfect Alibi, was certainly an ingenious play – ‘an exceedingly interesting one from a technical point of view. In the first act it shows us a murder. We see the crime committed and who has done it. In the second and third acts we watch the other characters trying to unravel the mystery. Such a scheme is, of course, the very opposite of what generally happens in “detective plays” . . . Courage and originality of treatment are things to be thankful for, and for their sakes I rank The Fourth Wall as far above any other “detective play” I have seen,’ one reviewer would say. The bus-boards would read ‘the best murder in London’ in a season when nearly every first act contained a corpse.
But in the summer of 1927 Milne was really not worrying about anything as he sat in a deck chair on the lawn at Cotchford, writing to Ken:
We are terribly happy here. I could go on and on doing nothing but watch Daff weed, and she could go on and on weeding. Really the garden is lovely now, and I wish you and Maud could see it. We have just been ordering our next year’s improvements. I shall leave something beautiful behind anyway. Moon had a tent, two bantams and a rope-ladder among his birthday presents. The lady bantam laid her first egg yesterday, and he has just eaten it. He knows the name of every flower in the garden; and when the expert horticulturist points to a small green, as yet unflowering, bush, and says ‘What’s that? I don’t think I know that?’Moon pipes up, ‘Zauschneria – or Californian fuchsia’. And he not only knows but can spell Eschscholtzia, which nobody else can do.
Now We Are Six was published on 13 October in both Britain and America. Christopher Robin’s copy was inscribed:
For my Moon
From his Blue
Now I am 45
Milne wrote to tell Ken in November: ‘The reviews have been poor in England but much better in America. If I were a critic I should loathe A. A. Milne. How could one help wanting to say that he was falling off, or taking success too easily or whatnot? However this is the end of the verses; and then, after one more Pooh book, I must think of something else. In fact, it’s time I tried a novel.’ The reviews were mixed, with plenty of critics in both countries enjoying the new book. In Britain, the Spectator said: ‘The severest criticism that can possibly be made . . . is that it does not quite reach the extraordinarily high standard he has set himself.’ In America, the New York Times said that it might not be ‘as fresh as When We Were Very Young but it comes close’.
In fact, it did not matter very much what the reviews said. On both sides of the Atlantic, the new book sold immediately and enormously on the strength of the earlier book of poems. At Christmas, J. V. Milne was able to write to his friend, Miss Pinnington: ‘The success of Alan’s books is remarkable.’ He set out these British sales figures:
Now We Are Six
94,000
Winnie-the-Pooh
80,000
When We Were Very Young
169,000
So the new book, not much more than two months after publication, had already overtaken the bestselling Winnie-the-Pooh, published a year earlier.
At Christmas, Milne looked back on the year. Things were good. ‘The Ivory Door goes on well in New York, playing to bigger houses each week, and should be in for a good run. But it had to fight its way against the seas of Sex and Crime which pour down Broadway at the moment, and nearly got swamped. Talking of Crime, the Haymarket has just taken my detective play.’ It would open on 29 February 1928 – the day after a revival of Mr Pim Passes By at the St Martin’s, with Marie Tempest in Irene Vanbrugh’s old part. ‘Having had no play in London for three years’, Milne rather wished The Ivory Door was coming on first, but The Fourth Wall would be far more successful than The Ivory Door.
Life was a little overshadowed in December 1927 because ‘our beloved Moon has chicken-pox’ – not too badly, but ‘he was to have sung various solos and duets at his school breaking-up and now he won’t. We were looking forward to it more eagerly than to any first night of mine. He sings jolly well.’
He did indeed, well enough only a little later to make a recording of four of the poems Fraser-Simson had set to music.
When the idea first came up, the following argument took place, or so Milne would lead Ken to believe:
ME: (when it was first suggested) Bah!