Goodbye Christopher Robin: A. A. Milne and the Making of Winnie-the-Pooh

For every evil under the sun

There is a remedy or there is none.

If there is one, try and find it;

If there isn’t one, never mind it.



‘J. V. Milne was more sprightly, a small man (he got smaller with age) with a neat white beard and a panama hat. He wore pince-nez and showed his Scottishness by pronouncing “grass” with a short “a” . . . He would stroll round the garden (hands behind back) with us, telling us useful and funny things.’ The garden was full of frogs and apples. The house often resounded to ‘Trumpeter, what are you trumpeting now?’ on the gramophone and to Harry Lauder singing ‘I Love a Lassie’.

The elderly Milnes’ great source of pride and pleasure was, of course, A. A. Milne’s rise to fame and fortune. Alan had given his father a subscription to the General Press Cutting Association Ltd, as early as 1910, and J. V. stuck the cuttings neatly into a stout black notebook. Before long there would be productions of Milne plays all over the place in little theatres and community playhouses. In the west of England, two boys who would grow up to be Charles Causley, the poet, and J. C. Trewin, the drama critic, would both remember Mr Pim Passes By as their first happy experience of the theatre.

It ran in London for 246 performances and opened in New York for another successful run on 28 February 1921. For the rest of Milne’s life it would continue to make him money. Milne had had a sort of fame for years as a Punch humorist. Now the morning post increased dramatically. He was much in demand. Photographers wrote wanting to photograph him. ‘Very handsome, long-headed, keen-faced’, as Swinnerton described him, he looks out from dozens of photographs taken in the 1920s.

Milne himself was writing his novel based on the play. ‘I know very little about the writing of novels – or the writing of plays for that matter – but I hope I am learning. And, anyway, it is much more fun trying to do things which you can’t quite do than doing them when you can.’ The novel, Mr Pim, included most of the dialogue from the play, but it was ‘a real book’, Milne said, ‘and not just the dialogue with “he said” or “she said” tacked on.’ The idea had not been Milne’s own, but it worked extremely well.

Milne had already finished another novel, a detective story, The Red House Mystery, though it would not be published until 1922, after Mr Pim. He said, modestly, much later: ‘The result would have passed unnoticed in these days when so many good writers are writing so many good detective stories, but in those days there was not so much competition.’ It was actually written just before the publication of Agatha Christie’s first book The Mysterious Affair at Styles (a book which, thirty years later, he would call ‘the model detective story’) and published a year before Dorothy Sayers’s first novel. In an introduction to a later edition of The Red House Mystery Milne comments on his agents’ lack of enthusiasm for the new project. He was, after all, typecast as a humorist. But it was in Milne’s nature, and demonstrated throughout his career, to refuse to be typecast. It was always more interesting to try something new. ‘It has been my good fortune as a writer that what I have wanted to write has for the most part proved to be saleable. It has been my misfortune as a businessman that, when it has proved to be extremely saleable, then I have not wanted to write it any more.’ This would be true in turn of humorous essays, detective stories and children’s books.

A. A. Milne had an enviable confidence in his own activities. His niece, Angela, remembered Milne telling her ‘that he had a superiority complex; not boasting, or confessing, simply stating a fact. I am sure it was true,’ she said. ‘All Milnes have been brought up to believe that never mind about money . . . it’s BRAINS THAT COUNT.’ It would be poor Pooh’s lack of brain that would cause most of his problems and give Christopher Robin (and the listening child) that delightful feeling of superiority that Milne enjoyed so much of the time, even if, occasionally, it was accompanied by intolerance and impatience. Friends and acquaintances could find this very difficult, though he often managed to cloak it with a becoming, self-mocking modesty. With his strong conviction of his own worth, there went a sad inability to accept criticism. W. A. Darlington put it like this:


Alan and I spent most of our time together on various golf courses, where we had, or soon acquired, a number of mutual friends. It was from these that I learned the disconcerting fact that, devoted to Alan as they were, they all found him on occasion very difficult to deal with. The trouble was, I was told, that he simply could not take any form of adverse criticism. ‘Say the wrong thing to him,’ I was warned, ‘and he freezes stone cold and won’t speak to you for the rest of the day.’

It is not an uncommon trait in the creative artist to desire praise and shrink from censure, but Alan evidently had it to an abnormal degree. The violence of his reaction against even a hint of blame had in it something pathological, as if he were short of a skin.



Was it perhaps that he had never needed in his glowing cherished childhood to grow any form of protective coating? Long ago there was the blow of a first bad Westminster report for the boy who had spent his early years as the headmaster’s beloved youngest son, the child so lapped in love and admiration that he thought he could do anything. Milne had, indeed, as many writers have, an intense need for praise. He once wrote about ‘that sense of inspiration and power that only comes upon me after violent praise’. And, on another occasion, when asked by an interviewer whether Daphne, so often at this period still involved in taking his dictation, ever criticised what he had written at the end of the day, he said, ‘No, she just praises . . . Praise is what an author really wants when he is actually writing.’ It was, in fact, what he always wanted.





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THE ARRIVAL OF CHRISTOPHER ROBIN


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