Today marks 100 years since that perennial children's favourite, Winnie the Pooh, was published.
It wasn't the writer's first work for children: in addition to When We Were Very Young, in which an as-yet-unnamed Pooh made his first appearance, A.A. Milne had already written a play called Make-Believe and a novel-length fairytale entitled Once on a Time (though the latter was half-intended for adults).The Pooh books - "These four trifles for the young", as he dismissively called them in a late poem - have long overshadowed his other work but during his lifetime Milne made several reputations for himself as a writer. In the early 1900s, as Assistant Editor of Punch, his articles and light verse were very popular indeed with readers; writing Milne's obituary in that magazine fifty years later, H.F. Ellis (of A.J. Wentworth fame) described the "genuine stylistic innovation" which his writing represented.
After the Great War he turned to playwriting and had considerable success, in addition to writing a highly-regarded detective novel amongst other things. Unlike his contemporary P.G. Wodehouse, he kept giving himself new challenges, which is why there were only four Pooh books in total - and given that there is such a clear, and poignant, leave-taking at the end of The House at Pooh Corner, I can't imagine he would have taken kindly to a recent attempt to write a sequel (source of the Shepard-style illustration below).
There are a number of posts about Milne's work scattered through this blog; links are provided in the discussion below and a monograph will, I hope, soon be added to their number. The latter, entitled Wisdom Lingers, is a relic of an earlier incarnation as an art student, not that my writing has noticeably matured in the interim.
Reading and thinking about A.A. Milne has occupied quite a lot of my time over the years. Although I enjoyed Winnie the Pooh as a child I would date this interest to the discovery, in 1977, of some cheap secondhand copies of his Punch collections and newspaper essays, my first indication that he wasn't simply a children's author.
It's hard to say precisely why I responded to his wider work with such enthusiasm: easier to read it than describe its appeal. One critic referred to his "bland but agile prose", which might seem like damning with faint praise, but I think this is a reference to the sophistication he was able to convey within the limits of a vocabulary within reach of young readers. Pooh contains plentiful evidence of the dry wit honed by Milne during his prewar years at Punch and, as he emphasised in his autobiography, he was applying his craft as seriously as in any work intended for an adult audience. He retained a real distaste for the lazy option generally: his notes for a collection of poems written during World War 2 include a dig at the harmless comic song Me and My Dog because of its use of an obvious rhyme. His poetic idol was C.S. Calverley, whom he considered the master of light verse (a post about Calverley is linked to a little later).
In the mid-nineties my admiration for Milne took the ill-advised form of a play. Its premise seemed so obvious to me that I simply couldn't understand why nobody had attempted it before: why not yoke Milne together with the deposed Rolling Stone Brian Jones, who had bought the writer's former home, Cotchford Farm in Sussex, in the late sixties? Well, I eventually found the answer to that. This doomed project was to occupy me for quite a while, as discussed during the following review of the Jones biopic Stoned - click on the title below, should you be minded to share my pain:
Talking of biopics, there is a creditable one of Milne entitled Goodbye Christopher Robin (not to be confused with a later, more schmaltzy, Disney film). I was initially hesitant about watching someone else's take on Milne's life; it felt like a final admission that I would never revisit my own script and find the winning formula which had eluded me for so long. Eventually, however, my curiosity about what other writers (two are credited) might have fashioned out of the material overcame that. One ruthless but perhaps necessary choice made, I believe, by Frank Cottrell-Boyce, is the total omission of Milne's brother Ken, who features prominently in his autobiography, ensuring the film's focus remains firmly on the sundering of the father-son relationship. I recall publicity about the film a long time before its release and I think, though I am not certain, that Cottrell-Boyce was brought in to rework an existing screenplay; if so, it would be interesting to see whether Ken played a role in earlier drafts.
I wrote about Goodbye Christopher Robin over two posts, the first mostly about Anne Thwaite's excellent biography of Milne (she was an advisor on the film), the second a review:
There have been other dramatisations of aspects of Milne's story. Brian Sibley wrote a radio celebration of Milne's work entitled Not That It Matters (echoing the title of one of those collections of his newspaper pieces) as well as It's Too Late Now, a radio play imagining a series of conversations between Milne in his later years, recovering from a stroke, and his physiotherapist. You can still listen to Not That It Matters via Mr Sibley's website (link in post) though the play, which borrows its title from Milne's autobiography, no longer seems to be available. My thoughts about both can be found here:
Christopher William Hill wrote a radio play set after Milne's death in which the grown-up Christopher Milne and the elderly E.H. Shepard and tentatively share their feelings about the man with whom both were so intimately connected. It's a neat idea, convincingly worked out - the playwright doesn't overstate his case but quietly convinces, as I suggest in this review:
Hush! Hush! Whisper Who Dares!
My art school dissertation on Milne was well received - rather more so, in fact, than the rest of my efforts at that establishment. Please to imagine, at this poin,t a copy of The St James's Gazette (or other long-vanished London evening newspaper of your choice) whirling around to denote the passing of time; the next scene finds me deposited at a more suitable place of learning where, my interest in Milne and all his works still not sated, I have opted to write about his plays for adults, once very popular with West End audiences as well as on Broadway.
I spent quite a lot of time on this project until my tutor gently put it to me that such a topic wasn't exactly a stretch and might not be the best choice for demonstrating my abilities to the full. I had already spent a fair amount of time writing up notes on just about all his plays but switched, without too much regret at the time, to the works of Tennessee Williams (how's that for a leap?). I still have the folder stuffed with all those unused notes; I haven't looked through them for a long time, partly because I fear that they might reveal themselves to be more in the way of detailed plot summaries than the sort of insightful analyses which might yet delight a waiting world.
Back then, there seemed to be no opportunities to see his plays staged; it wasn't until last year, in fact, some forty years on, that I finally got to see a revival of a Milne play, at London's Finborough Theatre. This was one of his most famous works, The Truth About Blayds, about an elderly poet exposed after death as a fraud. In the first of three pieces linked to below I wondered how modern audiences might react to what Frank Swinnerton once called Milne's "punitive zeal" as a playwright; the second concerns the life and work of C.S. Calverley, the poet greatly admired by Milne whose name - but not his character - had been appropriated for the play; the third is a review of the Finborough production.
The Truth About Blayds to be revived
The Sharpest Blades: Calverley and Milne
The Truth About Blayds: review
The Truth About Blayds clearly meant a lot to Milne: he devoted several pages of his autobiography to defending it, feeling that critics hadn't given it its due. It certainly didn't meet with much unqualified praise either in England or America although there were few outright condemnations. The central problem for audiences and commentators was Milne's killing off the poet after the first act but Milne's interest was in how those around him would behave once they learnt of his deception. Milne's neighbour and friend, William Darlington, drama critic for the Daily Telegraph, once said that the playwright was peculiarly thin-skinned about such matters and whenever he, Darlington, felt obliged to do his professional duty when some work didn't come up to scratch it usually took the combined efforts of their respective wives to nudge the two men back towards their former friendly relations.
One work which Milne wasn't inclined to defend in his autobiography, however, was his very first book, a collection of newspaper pieces plus a bit of new material entitled Lovers in London, which he was glad to note in 1939 was now "very rare". This predates his work for Punch, and the wit is more obviously laboured. (When he was Assistant Editor of Punch he was once complimented that one of his pieces seemed to be "funny without trying"; he admitted that that was what it was trying to be.)
Lovers in London is about the jaunts of a young couple, the man English, the woman American, around the capital; I didn't get a chance to read it until very recently, and wrote about it below. (Rereading this piece, I see that I have described the book in rather general terms and it could do with more quotations by way of illustration; I may attend to that later.)
One of the few Milne plays I didn't get a chance to read at university was Sarah Simple; I knew nothing of it other than the name, and although there have been many public domain editions of many of Milne's plays this one only seemed to surface in facsimile form recently. I was once told by a Katherine Hepburn-obsessed student that the actress had played the title role in summer stock, which would make sense, but overall the play seems a less than wholly successful attempt to revive past glories, as I argue below:
Which diminuendo seems a good point at which to stop for now.
*
For those seeking a biography of Milne, Anne Thwaite's book cannot be bettered; two recent books, a joint biography of Shepard and Milne by James Campbell, and a biography of Milne by Gyles Brandreth, both rely heavily on it.
That said, Campbell's book is very attractively laid out, with much interesting material, new to me, about the artist, and Brandreth's is an agreeable enough read, even if, despite his friendship with Christopher Milne, the book is not exactly teeming with revelations.
Christopher Milne's own memoir, The Enchanted Places can, however, be unreservedly recommended. Incidentally, Christopher Milne was still alive when Anne Thwaite was working on her book, and he gave her what seems to me a wonderful piece of advice: to write as though he was never going to read it.
There have already been several radio programmes celebrating the centenary of Winnie the Pooh but I hope the BBC might find the time to repeat an older documentary, hosted by Barry Norman, in which Christopher Milne took part. At the end - and possibly it was just a comment made when the tape happened to be running rather than part of a formal interview - Norman said that of all the people in the room - presumably referring to the technicians involved - Christopher's was likely to be the only name remembered throughout the world in a hundred years' time, and what did he think of that?
He replied, after a pause: "I view it with dread."
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