Goodbye Christopher Robin

by Ann Thwaite

  For my dear daughters,

  Emily, Caroline, Lucy and Alice,

  with my love

  CONTENTS

  Preface by Frank Cottrell-Boyce

  Introduction

  Before You Begin

  1 PLAYWRIGHT

  2 THE ARRIVAL OF CHRISTOPHER ROBIN

  3 WHEN WE WERE VERY YOUNG

  4 THE BEGINNINGS OF POOH

  5 WINNIE-THE–POOH

  6 THE END OF A CHAPTER

  Afterword

  Picture Acknowledgements

  List of Illustrations

  PREFACE

  BY FRANK COTTRELL-BOYCE

  Success simplifies.

  Quentin Crisp famously pointed out in a lecture that if he were to bring a distinguished old Yorkshireman onto the stage, the audience might be perplexed. But if he brought a polished abstract sculpture with a hole in the middle, the audience would cry out, ‘Ah! Henry Moore!’ So A. A. Milne’s long career as poet, playwright, polemicist, peace campaigner and novelist is completely eclipsed by four short children’s books which – as he put it in 1952 – he created . . .

  . . . little thinking

  All my years of pen-and-inking

  Would be almost lost among

  Those four trifles for the young.

  The only thing that’s changed since 1952 is that ‘almost’ is no longer needed.

  We are a society obsessed by the pursuit and adulation of success. We want to know The Secret of Your Success. And very very few things have been as successful as Winnie-the-Pooh. Pooh is one of those tiny handful of creations that are so enormously successful that we forget the infelicity of their name – Boots, The Beatles, Star Wars, Winnie-the-Pooh. There are many books that tell us how certain successes were or can be achieved – How I Lost Weight / Became President / Won Gold – and How You Could Too. But very few that tell us what success feels like, what lies in its aftermath. One of the great Secrets of Success is that more often than not it is not quite the kind of success you were hoping for. You want to be Hamlet but you’re hailed as a clown. And now you can never be any kind of Hamlet. You want to move on but your global hit exerts all the gravity of a planet and you are trapped in its orbit. Failure at least has the comfort of hope. Milne’s life story – as told here so compellingly by Ann Thwaite – brilliantly illuminates what it feels like to be tested by huge, unlooked-for success.

  It isn’t easy. Frankenstein was so eclipsed by his own creation that it has robbed him of his name. Milne had a long, successful career in the theatre – a world in which the writer gets used to a certain amount of petting and caressing. He gets to hear the audience call, ‘Author! Author!’ No one did that at Pooh events. They wanted to see the bear and – more troublingly – the boy. Milne isn’t of course the only writer to find himself swallowed up by his own creation. You could say Milne’s friend and hero J. M. Barrie wrote with great commercial success after Peter Pan, but what does ‘after Peter Pan’ mean? Peter Pan was, is and always will be. Barrie’s other works are of their time. The over-arching drama of the Sherlock Holmes stories is the great detective’s struggle, not with Moriarty, but with his own creator’s attempts to kill him off.

  Biography gives us the chance to restore some human complexity to the icon, to see some of the shade and shadow hidden behind the glare of monstrous success. Milne’s career traces a path through the suave, seductive world of London clubs of the twenties, through the green rooms of Shaftesbury Avenue all the way up to the Disney section of the app store on my phone. It’s good to be reminded of just how long and demanding an apprenticeship Milne had served before he discovered Pooh. His peerless dialogue has its roots in his playwriting career. His study of classics and his work on Punch had given him the extraordinary ease and range he shows in the poems. Milne’s are probably the last poems written that really cry out to be memorised and recited. They float like a butterfly and sting like a bee. I can’t think of a poem more easily absorbed and enjoyed than ‘Disobedience’. I also can’t think of one that captures so perfectly one of the true terrors of childhood.

  It’s good to be reminded, too, that Pooh was not universally adored, that writers who had admired Milne’s lightness of touch turned on what they saw as the mawkishness of Pooh. ‘Tonstant Weader’, said Dorothy Parker, ‘twowed up’. ‘Timothy Bobbin’, wrote P. G. Wodehouse, ‘goes hoppity hoppity hoppity hoppity hop’. Cruellest of all is Richmal Crompton’s brilliant skewering of the cult of Christopher Robin in the poem ‘Homework’ – ‘Anthony Martin is doing his sums’.

  The adulation of the public is salt in the wound of the writer who has lost the admiration of his peers.

  One of the unexpected treasures of this book is Ann Thwaite’s moving account of Milne’s relationship with his brother Kenneth. Milne’s letters to Kenneth uncover the well-spring of his creativity with all its childish joys, shadowed by tragedy. They are a real find. I was bewitched by this material when I read the book. Of course, when I was asked to write a film about Milne I left that out.

  If success simplifies, film simplifies the simplification.

  Or put another way, biography looks for what makes the individual different; drama looks for what we have in common. You can sell a million books if you write a good story well but a cultural phenomenon like Pooh needs something else. It needs to touch a raw nerve. That terrible review by Dorothy Parker also covered Christopher Morley’s children’s book I Know a Secret – which really is a pile of mawkish mush. There was a fashion for sentimentalising children on which people like Morley successfully cashed in. Milne on the other hand searched it for its source and found something true and terrible and enduring.

  The House at Pooh Corner stands in a glade between two dark shadows – the aftermath of one war that had just finished and the dread of one coming. No one who fought in the First World War knew it was the First World War. On the contrary, they had been told that they were fighting the war that would end all wars. It must have been with the most bitter irony and failure, then, that that generation – Milne’s generation – watched their children march away to a war that they had been told would never happen. The Milnes received that dreaded telegram telling them their son was missing in action and presumed he was dead. This can happen to anyone. This is feared by everyone. It’s there – something you can build a film around. It’s the shadow that makes the carefree days in the Hundred Acre Wood tremble and shimmer with their own fragility. They are suffused with a sense that happiness is possible and valid even though we know it is short-lived. It’s a feeling that is expressed with peculiar intensity in the political situation of the between-the-war years but which applies to everyone, everywhere, all the time.

  It is there, too, in the child who plays in the woods – in Christopher Robin himself. On the one hand he is Robin Hood revelling in the freedom of the Greenwood but he’s also a babe lost in the wood. What marks Christopher Robin out from other children in literature – from William, say – is that he’s often absent from the adventures. Often his role is to come and put things right. He’s more like a kindly uncle than a child. Through the carefree forest he carries a burden of responsibility.

  The other unusual thing about Christopher Robin of course is that he was – to some extent – a real boy. It also swallowed Christopher Robin. The difference between Winnie-the-Pooh and, say, Sherlock Holmes, is that Pooh did not just swallow Milne. Imagine if Barrie had called Peter Pan Peter Llewelyn Davies. When Czeslaw Milosz said, ‘When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished’, he meant that a writer will betray his parents and siblings. Milne on the other hand – however innocently – betrayed his son. The magic of the Hundred Acre Wood is that it takes something painfully fleet
ing and makes it stay for ever. The tragedy of Milne’s success is that it trapped a real child in that moment like a fly in amber and made it almost impossible for him to become that thing that every child wants to become – a grown-up. Is there a threat more pathetic and painful than Christopher Robin’s cry, ‘We’ll see how father likes it when I write poems about HIM.’

  It’s a complex, nuanced story and it takes this whole book to unpack it. But it’s worth pointing out that what abides of this story – what moves us – is the happiness and beauty that Milne rescued from it. I’ve used the word ‘aftermath’ a couple of times in this preface. Aftermath nowadays is almost always used to refer to damage and ruin but its original meaning is the second harvest that is sometimes possible after the first has been gathered in. For all its shadow, what really abides about this story is the light, the sense that happiness – no matter how fleeting – is real. The fact that we are all moved and enchanted by the Hundred Acre Wood, that it calls to us, is proof that these passing moments are as real and essential as the more solid and enduring things with which we surround ourselves, that we find in them something true and paradoxically enduring, even eternal.

  As R. S. Thomas put it in his poem ‘The Bright Field’:

  It is the turning

  aside like Moses to the miracle

  of the lit bush, to a brightness

  that seemed as transitory as your youth

  once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

  INTRODUCTION

  I have often been asked how I came to write about A. A. Milne and his son, Christopher Robin. After my second biography, Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape, won a prize, I was approached by a number of publishers and A. A. Milne was one of the suggestions. He seemed particularly appropriate for a biographer who had just written about another complex father–son relationship; and before that about Frances Hodgson Burnett, whose son, Vivian, had inspired Little Lord Fauntleroy. In 1974 the Observer called Christopher Robin ‘the most famous of all tiny boys (by comparison Little Lord Fauntleroy was a mere starlet)’.

  It was also relevant that I had myself been brought up on A. A. Milne. My father had given Winnie-the-Pooh to my mother when it first came out in 1926, six years before I was born. I knew many of the poems and stories by heart. My own London childhood had been a slightly downmarket version of Christopher Robin’s. We did not have a country cottage, but we did have a stream, the Dollis Brook, at the bottom of our north London garden. Even my double name (I was always called Ann Barbara as a child) had more to do with Christopher Robin than with Princess Margaret Rose.

  When A. A. Milne came up as a possible subject for me, I felt it likely that Christopher Milne would turn me down, as I knew he had rejected others. He had himself written two memoirs and had actually said in the second one, The Path Through the Trees, that the first one, The Enchanted Places, was written to forestall strangers. But I knew I could only write about this father and son if I had his approval and permission to quote any relevant material.

  I was elated when Christopher said not only that he was prepared to let me write the book, but that I must write it as if he were not going to read it. When, after the long years of research and writing, I gave him his copy of the finished book, he eventually wrote to tell me that ‘if I had any doubts and reluctance at the beginning, they have all been swept away and I am left with nothing but admiration and happiness.’ His reaction was a great relief to both of us.

  A. A. Milne: His Life was published in 1990, on both sides of the Atlantic, and won the Whitbread Prize for the best biography of the year. It went into a number of editions and is now available from Pan Macmillan as an ebook and as a print-on-demand paperback. Goodbye Christopher Robin is not just a cut version of the biography. It is the full story of how A. A. Milne came to write the four great children’s books and how Christopher Robin became one of the most famous children in the world. It is a story of celebrity and of the joys and pains of success.

  Christopher Milne died in 1996 after what he himself called a happy life. I don’t know whether he would have been surprised at the new twenty-first-century surge of interest in Winnie-the-Pooh. Recently the book came top in a BBC poll to find the best children’s book ever. In 2017 there is a grand exhibition devoted to Winnie-the-Pooh at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. And best of all, because it can be seen all over the world, in all the countries where the books have been translated, there will be the remarkable film produced by Damian Jones, directed by Simon Curtis and written by Frank Cottrell-Boyce. This is the story behind that film.

  May, 2017

  BEFORE YOU BEGIN

  Alan Alexander Milne was born on 18 January 1882, the much-loved youngest of the three sons of a schoolmaster called John Vine Milne and his wife, Maria. Both his parents were of what one might call humble origin. They had made their own ways in the world. Alan Milne grew up at Henley House, a small private school in a part of London Milne would call ‘the Kilburn end of Maida Vale’. Five minutes’ walk away, in what he would call St John’s Wood, lived a boy, born just over two years earlier, who would grow up to be Milne’s illustrator, E. H. Shepard. Their names would be permanently linked, but they did not meet until years later in the new century, when they both worked for Punch, described then as the most famous humorous paper in the world.

  Henley House was a good school and Alan flourished as his father’s pupil. He and his next brother, Ken, enjoyed an extraordinary amount of freedom when they were quite small. The wide open spaces of Hampstead Heath were not far away for boys with bicycles. It is no wonder that there are no nannies or nursery rules in the Enchanted Forest. Pooh and his friends are the children who explore a world where only friendship and hunger and the desire for adventure affect the pattern of their days and a boy called Christopher Robin plays the role of the wise and helpful parent with whom the listening or reading child identifies.

  A very clever child, at eleven Alan Milne won a scholarship to Westminster School and joined Ken there. He would, in the far future, remember the school with gratitude, but, after one unjust, crushing report, he said that he ‘turned to the lighter side of life and abandoned work’.

  Certainly he gave up any mathematical ambitions but he still managed to win a minor scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, and, more importantly, had already developed a talent for light verse.

  At Cambridge, Milne edited Granta, the university magazine. He began to hone the skills that, not long after leaving Cambridge, got him a place on the staff of Punch at a point when he said he had only £2 in his bank account. He was appointed assistant editor in 1906, aged twenty-four. He had already by then published one book (a collection of related stories he later disowned), a great deal of journalism and had written several unperformed plays. Now he had a good salary and 100,000 readers every week.

  Even before the success of his plays, A. A. Milne was becoming something of a celebrity. Invitations poured in, often from people he didn’t really know. The Day’s Play, a collection of his Punch pieces, was a bestseller. The Daily Graphic painted a vivid picture of families up and down the land tearing Punch apart in their eagerness to read what Milne had written. He found himself being compared with Lewis Carroll, though children were hardly yet part of the picture.

  In January 1913, he went to Switzerland on a skiing holiday, found Daphne de Sélincourt, god-daughter of his editor, was staying at the same hotel and returned to London engaged to marry her. They married at St Margaret’s, Westminster, on 4 June that same year. It was the day of the Derby when Emily Davis threw herself in front of the King’s horse and died. Daphne was not a suffragette, though she had agreed with Alan that the word ‘obey’ in the marriage service meant only that she would ‘write all my thank-you-very-much letters for me’.

  Christopher Milne would one day explain why his parents married – a marriage that seems to need some explanation, as many marriages do – in a phrase his father had used himself: ‘She laughed at my jokes�
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  Daphne, highly polished and glamorous as she was, came from a very different background – wealthy trade with yachts and fast cars. She had no interest in politics. The way things looked were always of more concern to her. Alan Milne himself was a passionate democrat who canvassed for the Liberals, street by street, in the close-run 1910 elections. He was a pacifist.

  In a letter to his American publisher, he would one day write:

  You have always told me that personally you have always thought more of Winnie-the-Pooh than any book I have ever written. Please let me tell you that I think more of Peace with Honour than any book I have ever written.

  This bestselling pacifist tract was not published until 1934, but Milne had called himself a pacifist since 1910 and the seeds of this serious and important book were inevitably in his mind throughout the war and in the twenties, as he suffered from his ghastly experiences on the Somme.

  The war shattered the world that Milne had written about in Punch, as it shattered so much else, and so many lives. In his autobiography, Milne wrote, ‘It makes me almost physically sick to think of that nightmare of mental and moral degradation, the war.’ It is difficult for us to understand, after the killing of one Archduke had led to the deaths of ‘ten million men who were not archdukes’, just how widely the war was welcomed in 1914. Milne himself briefly felt it might be ‘the war that will end war’, in his friend H. G. Wells’ phrase that would become a sad cliché. He hoped that the war might make people realise the true futility of war, but on the Somme he came to know it as ‘a lunacy which would shame the madhouse’.

  The talk of ‘shirkers’ and white feathers in the Punch office was intolerable. Milne finally volunteered in February 1915. ‘Life in wartime is hell anyway. And only in uniform can one escape thinking about it,’ he said, illogically. In March he was commissioned into the Warwickshire Regiment stationed at Golden Hill Fort on the Isle of Wight. Much later, Milne was able to record that in the entire war he had never fired a shot in anger or even in defence. The reason for this (which soothed his pacifist conscience) was that he had volunteered for a nine-week course at the Southern Command Signalling School at Wyke Regis, near Weymouth. On his return to the Isle of Wight he was registered as ‘Indispensable to the Training of the Battalion’. He was lucky, as so often in life. ‘Had I not been a Signals Officer, I should have gone out in July and the second battalion was wiped out to a man, or rather to an officer, in the advance.’ Daphne joined him on the island and they were able to rent a cottage in Sandown.