by Ann Thwaite
These poems for people towards the top with children beneath the age of literary consent have the qualities of rhythm, shape, economy, and games with words – good qualities, after all. Would it be too ponderous to say as well that they were poems for a class of middle to top people who had lost their intellectual and cultural nerve, who expected of right things which they had not earned, and who had scarcely looked a fact in the eye for fifty years? It might be too ponderous. But it would be true.
There is some common ground between the two poet critics, writing exactly fifty years apart. They dislike the same poems; they admire Milne’s deftness, his technical skill. The difference is mainly that Drinkwater was writing at a time which took the class background completely for granted, and indeed when the word ‘whimsical’ could be used without pejorative undertones. Grigson, though born into such a world, was unable to enjoy the verse for the sociology. He is nauseated, in fact, as many have been, not by the rhymes themselves, but by the whole paraphernalia of nannies and afternoon walks and clean hands for nursery tea. ‘It’s that bloody nanny,’ Roald Dahl said to me, admiring Milne enormously and regretting how his books have dated. In fact, the nanny (or ‘Nurse’) appears in only five of the forty-five poems in When We Were Very Young and in another four in the second collection Now We Are Six – and, of course, not at all in the Pooh books.
Compton Mackenzie, writing in 1933, also saw the first book, above all, as a social document:
When We Were Very Young marks an epoch as positively as any children’s book has ever marked one. It is not extravagant to surmise that a distant posterity may find in that volume of children’s verse a key with which to unlock the present more easily than with any contemporary novel, poem or play.
Yet if one reads the poems objectively, ignoring the charming period illustrations (many of which, surprisingly, have not dated all that much – look at the boy putting on his raincoat) the main impression is of a number of entirely natural children, egotistical, highly imaginative, slightly rebellious, as children still are. Certainly, as we saw at the beginning of this book, Milne’s own memories of childhood, which play such an important part in the poems, have little to do with nannies and nurseries, and a great deal to do with adventuring, without adults, with freedom and growing independence. The children in the poems are always wanting to break free from the constraints that are constantly being imposed on all children, from whatever social background. (‘Don’t do that!’ ‘Come here.’) Milne’s children want to get ‘up the hills to roll and play’, to watch the rabbits on the common, to ignore the boring injunctions to ‘Take care, dear’ and ‘Hold my hand’. They want to go down to the wood where the bluebells grow or to travel to South America or to sail through Eastern seas.
It is not a bland world. The menaces and uncertainties of real life are there all right, but perfectly adjusted to a small child’s understanding. There are the bears waiting to eat the sillies who tread on the lines of the street. There are the Brownies hovering behind the curtain. There is the constant worry of pet mice, and mothers going missing – a fear, common in children, that the beloved animal may escape, that the person who goes out of the door may never come back. Bruno Bettelheim considers that the listening child can only enjoy the warning and has to repress the great anxiety that he will be permanently deserted. But the child in the poems is protected by his own egotism, is perfectly in control. Life goes on. (‘If people go down to the end of the town, well, what can anyone do?’) He would never be such an idiot as to tread on the lines; the bears are certainly not going to get him. There is a pleasurable thrill of danger, but ultimately a reinforced security.
The child answers politely all the endless grown-up questions (seething quietly inside) and thinks if only he were King of France he would not brush his hair for aunts. Indeed, if he were King of Greece, he would go so far as to push things off the mantelpiece. This seems to be a reasonable indication of three-year-old rebellion. The poems, in fact (and this is why they have lasted so long), are a true expression of the child psyche, as recognised by the child himself and as observed by his elders. They work both for children and for adults who can see through the class trappings to what is actually there. It helps too when one knows, as Grigson did not, that Milne did not come from a moneyed, smug background, or expect things which he had never earned. In fact, he was constantly worried by the established social order and the priorities of many of his readers, who were indeed very often just the sort of people both he and Grigson disliked and who took Milne’s verses to their hearts. ‘It is all most odd,’ Milne reported to Ken. ‘Yellow-faced Anglo-Indian colonels, with no livers and a general feeling that somebody ought to be shot down dammit sir, tell me with tears in their eyes how important it is to avoid the lines of the street and thus escape bears. And they light a long cheroot and tell anybody who is interested that they have knickers and a pair of braces.’ And ‘Pinero, of all people, patted me on the shoulder yesterday and told me what a wonderful book I had given the world. I don’t suppose he has seen or read a play of mine in his life.’
It was all most odd. At Methuen there was a packers’ strike and someone from the production department later remembered how he and every available person had volunteered to try to keep up with the demand as booksellers’ orders for thousands of copies poured into the office every day. In America, the bookshops were taken totally by surprise by the demand. The initial advance orders taken had been for 385 copies. The critics were not particularly enthusiastic, but there are times, John Macrae of Dutton’s would say, when ‘the American public makes up its own mind’. By 1927, when Now We Are Six came out, they had sold 260,000 copies of When We Were Very Young. The demand owed a lot in the initial stages to the extraordinary enthusiasm of Macrae’s son, who was then sales manager and sent copies of the book to anyone he thought would talk about it.
The letters of appreciation came pouring in – the first ones as a result of all the sales manager’s free copies – from thirty-eight state governors, six members of the Cabinet, three Justices of the Supreme Court, eleven Rear Admirals, twelve Major Generals and everyone from Hendrik van Loon to Fred Astaire. One letter, headed F. Ziegfield, New Amsterdam Theatre, New York, was from Lupino Lane and read like this:
I have to do an extra tumble tonight in the ‘Follies’, slide down a flight of steps or jump through an extra trapdoor. Why, you ask? Oh, simply to express my exuberance over the fun I got in reading A. A. Milne’s When We Were Very Young.
Even President Coolidge was delighted, or so his secretary said.
Kermit and Theodore Roosevelt (sons of the former President) called in on Milne in London on their way to shoot tigers in Indo-Turkestan, ‘a curious and delightful couple’, Milne told Ken, ‘all agog to have their copies of When We Were Very Young signed. Kermit has got a first edition (English) and Theodore was almost in tears because he only had an American first edition.’ They were very proud (not realising how little it would impress Milne) that a newspaper had published a verse about their projected hunting trip:
Kermit, Theodore
Roosevelt, Roosevelt,
Said to themselves, said they,
There isn’t a beast
In Turkestan
That we aren’t prepared to slay.
Everyone was quoting the poems and parodying them. A university wife in Kansas wrote to say ‘No dinner with guests is complete without “Sir Brian Botany” or “James, James” or “Mr Teddy Bear”. (You’d be surprised at the number of faculty people trying to reduce.)’ Children at table no longer asked for butter but for ‘some butter for the Royal slice of bread’. If anything was big, it was always ‘enormouse’. And whenever something was lost, the cry would go up, ‘Has anyone seen my mouse?’
A woman in Nashville, Tennessee, was typical of many who said that the poems appealed to all ages – her four-year-old ‘found and recognised himself in almost every poem’, but her eleven-year-old also loved ‘The King’s Breakfast’, �
�Bad Sir Brian Botany’ and ‘Three Foxes’. The most bizarre report was from the Hon. Edwin Samuel, who said he had read some Milne verses at a Jaffa Chamber of Commerce lunch. ‘All those busy Arab merchants took the afternoon off for endless repeats of “Christopher Robin goes hoppity, hoppity, hop”.’ Everyone was hopping. A New York woman reported, ‘We all had to hop. We kept it up until I was overcome by exhaustion and avoirdupois. Then just the children hopped.’ They wanted to know about Christopher Robin. Does he really hop all the time?
An uncomfortable spotlight was already beginning to shine on the small boy himself. ‘Grown-up readers as well as his contemporaries will thank him for helping to inspire the gay verses,’ said someone on the Sunday Herald Post. The accompanying photograph of Milne showing a book to his curly-haired child, with a rather cool Daphne looking on, is captioned ‘A. A. Milne, his wife and little daughter’.
The book was the subject of a leader in the New York Herald Tribune, in March, which quoted Coventry Patmore’s ‘The Toys’ and said that ‘pathos digs perhaps the most treacherous of pitfalls’ when one is writing about children. ‘Our own emotions get between us and the child’s. It takes genius to identify itself with a child’s blithe inconsequence . . . Lewis Carroll had the gift. Stevenson had it . . . Kipling when he wrote the Just So Stories. There are unmistakable signs of it in Mr A. A. Milne, the English playwright.’ The paper suggested that anyone who didn’t appreciate the book was a ‘biffalo-buffalo-bison, who deserves to find treacle in his sockses’.
Milne wrote to E. V. Lucas on 3 April, saying ‘It’s in its 23rd edition in America! But of course not such big editions as you have been printing.’ Sales escalated throughout the year, reaching a tremendous high with the run-up to Christmas 1925. ‘Everybody’s Talking about this Book’, above a photo of Christopher Robin, was a headline in the New York Telegraph for November 1925, and in the following January the Retail Bookseller said that the sales record of When We Were Very Young ‘is practically without parallel for any book in the last ten years’. It was generally agreed to be a book to put alongside Stevenson’s Child’s Garden, and A. A. Milne himself to be as ‘quotable, contagious and personal an institution as Lewis Carroll’.
Milne pondered on the whole, extraordinary business. Before he had heard the mounting chorus of adulation, he had been a little irritated by Drinkwater’s review which had ‘a delightful air about it of how dare this fellow try to write poetry without a proper licence?’ But could he now call himself a poet? If he found being a dramatist so horrible, what sort of writer did he want to be? A time would come when Auden would make a slightly ambiguous reference in his ‘Letter to Lord Byron’:
Light verse, poor girl, is under a sad weather;
Except by Milne and persons of that kind
She’s treated as démodé altogether.
It’s strange and very unjust to my mind . . .
Kingsley Amis, in the introduction to his New Oxford Book of Light Verse, noted Auden’s ‘good word’ for A. A. Milne and quoted at length, and with tremendous approval, Milne’s account of light verse in the course of an essay on C. S. Calverley, his old hero. Part of it echoes neatly Milne’s account, in his autobiography, of writing for children:
[It] is not the relaxation of a major poet in the intervals of writing an epic; it is not the kindly contribution of a minor poet to a little girl’s album; it is not Cowper amusing (and how easily) Lady Austin, nor Southey splashing about, to his own great content, in the waters of Lodore. It is a precise art . . . Light verse is not the output of poets at play, but of light-verse writers . . . at the hardest and most severely technical work known to authorship . . .
From time to time anthologies of light verse are produced. The trouble with most of the anthologists is that, even if they have an understanding of their subject, secretly they are still a little ashamed of it.
The same can be said of many writers for children. When the two come together, light verse written for children, there are some complex feelings going on, even as the writer looks at his extremely satisfactory bank balance.
Milne had done so much for Methuen’s bank balance that in April 1925 they published a small collection of his adult light verse, For the Luncheon Interval, in card covers at one shilling and sixpence. It went into a second edition within the year, but no one regarded it as anything but a poor relation of the children’s poems. Neither Auden nor Amis, when they came to make their light-verse anthologies, could find a single specimen of Milne to earn a place, though, curiously enough, Grigson did include ‘Lines Written by a Bear of Very Little Brain’ in his Faber Book of Nonsense Verse. Stephen Potter, in his exploration of the British sense of humour in 1954, suggested that there had been a revulsion against Milne by his generation, almost because he seemed then, in the early 1920s, ‘so deliciously funny’, with the funniness ‘toppling over into sweetness and niceness’. The second half of the twentieth century prefers its humour blacker, less nice.
Milne would go on speaking out for comedy to be taken as seriously as tragedy, for light verse to be taken as seriously as serious verse. After all, ‘in modern light verse the author does all the hard work, and in modern serious verse he leaves it all to the reader . . .’ But he would gradually have to accept that it was only as a writer for children that anyone would take him seriously. In a poem in For the Luncheon Interval addressed to his nephew Jock, Barry’s elder boy, and written long ago, in 1909, Milne had brooded on
we, who bear your name;
Content (well, almost) with the good old game
Of moderate Fortune unrelieved by Fame.
He had now won, in no small measure, both Fame and Fortune. Whether they would make him content was another matter.
Drinkwater sent him his review copy to be autographed and Milne amused himself by parodying ‘Happiness’ in the front of it:
John has a
Great Big
Actor-proof
Play on,
John has a
Great Big
Mayfair flat . . . etc. etc.
He gave him a bit of ‘The Christening’ too:
I sometimes call him Terrible John
’Cos his plays go on –
And on . . .
And on.
It served him right for being so rude about ‘Twinkletoes’.
Four days after the Drinkwater review, another book was published: Fourteen Songs – verses from When We Were Very Young, set to music by Harold Fraser-Simson, Milne’s neighbour in Chelsea. When the poems were coming out in Punch, Milne had been approached by all sorts of composers wanting to set them to music. At one stage it seemed as if Frederic Austin, who had been on the wet Welsh holiday, would do them, and Walford Davies was also keen. But Milne decided on Fraser-Simson, then immensely well known for his record-breaking musical The Maid of the Mountains. (A selection from that had been played at the New Theatre before the first act of Mr Pim Passes By, back in 1920.) One reason, apparently, was that Billy was extremely fond of the Fraser-Simson’s liver-and-white spaniel, Henry Woggins; they often met on their daily walks. It was the beginning of a long collaboration – in the end there were sixty-seven songs. ‘The music is exactly right,’ Milne wrote to Curtis Brown. Not that he knew much about music.
Milne’s story behind the dedication of Fourteen Songs is worth telling:
It was dedicated (by the composer of course)
By special permission of
H.R.H. Princess Mary
Viscountess Lascelles
to
Hon. George Lascelles
Hon. Gerald Lascelles
This was really Methuen’s idea (E. V. Lucas being thick with Royalty just now), but there is a limit to the number of Lascelles possible in a dedication, and I suggested – if they had to be dragged in –
By permission of H.R.H. . . .
to
The Autocrats of her Nursery
– which has been allowed. But I really don’t know why we
drag in Princess Mary at all. A much more popular dedication would be:
By permission of
‘Mr A’
to his illegitimate children
in every clime
This was in a letter to Milne’s brother Ken. ‘Mr A’ was a source of constant interest and speculation at the time. He was, in fact, Sir Hari Singh, whose financial dealings and involvement with a Mrs Robinson were making headlines in the papers. A few days later Milne wrote: ‘The bother is that it’s no good telling you now who “Mr A” is, but of course I knew weeks ago . . . God how I see life . . . Mrs Robinson has refused an offer to appear on the films, but will merely write her life for the papers instead. I want to stand on tip-toe and scream.’ The Lascelles dedication of the extremely successful book of songs – and a further dedication in the second book of songs to the Princess Elizabeth (the present Queen) – added to the feeling that Milne was somehow the Top Children’s poet, and added to the hostile reaction that was beginning to be felt in some quarters. (Stephen Spender, for instance, whose parents had apparently been keen on keeping him from children who were rough, would later speak of the ‘pure horror’ of Christopher Robin.) Most people probably thought the dedication wholly appropriate and Milne kept his own feelings about royalty to himself most of the time. But on one occasion he could not help speaking out. He was dining at a private house and one of the other guests was Princess Marie Louise, granddaughter of Queen Victoria. It was she who had organised the Queen’s Dolls’ House not long before and she was graciously interested in A. A. Milne, whose tiny leather-bound ‘Vespers’ was in that exclusive library. ‘I talked to her for about an hour after dinner, said “Ma’am” as little as possible, put my foot in it once or twice probably, withdrew it with a loud sucking noise and continued cheerfully.’ The princess was foolish enough to lament to him ‘the objection to work shown by the lower classes’. Milne swallowed and murmured that, indeed, ‘every one of my friends would rather win £50,000 in a sweepstake than by working for it’. It was the best he could do on the spur of the moment. Her Royal Highness could perhaps hardly believe that the man she was talking to, whom, of course, she had supposed to be a gentleman, was identifying himself and his friends with ‘the lower classes’. Milne reported to Ken, ‘She didn’t say anything, but a faint twinge of pain seemed to pass across her face, as if the first violinist were playing out of tune. Very sad.’
