Now we are sixteen-and-a-bit some posts on this blog seem to have disappeared into its depths and the reader is, so I firmly maintain, the poorer as a consequence. So to mark the fact that today is the 100th anniversary of the publication of Winnie the Pooh I've written the following handy guide to the various pieces about A.A. Milne and his work to be found within these virtual pages.
I also hope, very soon, to add another piece: a monograph on Milne written for an art school course almost half a century ago (though my writing style hasn't noticeably matured in the interim).Thinking about A.A. Milne's work has occupied quite a lot of my time. In the mid-nineties I tried to write a play about him - and boy, did I try. It had what seemed to me so obvious and appealing a premise that at first I simply couldn't understand why nobody had attempted it before. I yoked Milne together with the Rolling Stone Brian Jones, who bought Milne's former home, Cotchford Farm in Sussex, in the late sixties. This doomed project occupied me for quite a while, as discussed during this review of the Brian Jones biopic Stoned - click on the title below, should you wish to share my pain:
There has also been a creditable biopic of Milne entitled Goodbye Christopher Robin, not to be confused with a more schmaltzy Disney film. Having attempted myself to tell the story of his life I was initially reluctant to see someone else's version, feeling that to do so would be a final admission that I would never revisit my own script and magically find the formula at last - but I was also keen to see what the writers had made of the available material, especially as they hadn't saddled themselves with the additional difficulty of combining two disparate tales. I wrote about it 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 a collection of his newspaper articles) as well as a play imagining a series conversations between Milne in his later years, recovering from a stroke, and his physiotherapist. You can listen to Not That It Matters on Mr Sibley's website though the play no longer seems to be available there. My thoughts about both can be found here:
Christopher William Hill wrote a radio play in which the shade of Milne looms large: Hill imagines a meeting between Christopher Milne and E.H. Shepard in later years. This idea is beautifully 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. Eventually I ended up at a more suitable place of learning where, my interest in the author not sated, I had thoughts of writing about his plays for adults, which had been very popular in the twenties and thirties, with quite a few West End successes.
I spent quite a lot of time on this project until a 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 even so I switched, without too much regret, to the works of Tennessee Williams, a more recent enthusiasm. I still have a folder with all my unused Milne notes; I haven't looked through them for a long time but suspect that they are more by way of detailed plot summaries than insightful analyses.
At that time I had never seen a revival of a Milne play and when, not too long ago, it was announced that the Finborough Theatre, a respected London fringe venue, was about to stage one of his most famous works, The Truth About Blayds, I was very excited, eventually writing three related pieces: the first anticipating how modern audiences might take to what Frank Swinnerton once called Milne's "punitive zeal"; the second about C.S. Calverley, the poet whose name was appropriated for the play; the third a review of the Finborough production, including notes about the cuts which had been made.
The Truth About Blayds to be revived
The Sharpest Blades: C.S. Calverley and A.A. 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 unanimous praise but there were few outright condemnations: qualified approval was the norm, both in England and America. His neighbour and friend, William Darlington, drama critic for the Daily Telegraph, has said that Milne was peculiarly thin-skinned about such matters and it usually took the combined efforts of their respective wives to nudge the two men back towards friendly relations.
One volume which Milne wasn't inclined to defend in his autobiography, however, was his very first book, a collection of newspaper pieces entitled Lovers in London, which he was glad to note 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 replied that "that's what it tried 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 here:
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 only seemed to surface in facsimile form recently. I've written about it here. 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 argued below:
Which diminuendo seems a good point at which to stop for now. There will be more discussion of a range of Milne's work once I have been able to transcribe or scan the monograph mentioned earlier ...
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