by Ann Thwaite
There is a new paper (for ‘Mothers’) coming out next month with a special feature, ‘Nurseries of the Highly Nourished’ or some such title – anyway, Billy leads the way in the first number. He and his nursery were photographed all ways up, and Daff was interviewed, and explained how important it was to combine firmness with kindness, and I said nothing, and – well, get it. I wish I could remember the title for you.
Milne could not get away from his fame – and he did not really want to – even when that month he had to do four days’ jury service. (‘I ’ate the Law’ was his only comment on the case.) The day before he had signed five hundred copies of A Gallery of Children – a limited edition in England. He was glad to have the hundred guineas for the signing, not because he needed it, but because it was certainly rankling that he had been so stupid in accepting the lump-sum payment from the American publisher. The day after the case he had to sign a hundred copies of a special edition of The King’s Breakfast, and when the jury retired to consider its verdict a fellow jurywoman produced Not That It Matters – a collection of his essays that had just gone into a ‘new popular edition’ – and she asked him to sign that.
A few days later Christopher – still Billy – and Daphne were involved in a theatrical occasion. Milne wrote to Ken on 11 December:
Billy is being a Holy Innocent (with 20 other children and Gladys Cooper) at a matinée on Tuesday. At a sort of committee meeting, attended by parents of Innocents (Holy) to consider costumes, Daff said ‘Oh, no!’ in a loud voice from the back of the room when somebody suggested dark-grey flannelette (or whatever it was) – whereupon she was immediately elected Managing Director or Wardrobe Mistress of the whole scene. The result is that every ten minutes the telephone bell rings, and some anxious if aristocratic mother is heard imploring Mrs Milne to let her little darling wear blue. Two of them have already been here – ‘any time Mrs Milne would see me,’ they say humbly to me – and throw themselves at Daff’s feet. Even a father – the Colonel of the Grenadier Guards, no less – took up an insignificant position in the drawing-room, while Daff issued orders. What snobs parents are about their children!
As all the preparations for the matinée went ahead, Milne was racking his brains to think of a children’s story for the Christmas number of the Evening News. Daphne, preoccupied with the Holy Innocents, assured him it was easy and that all he had to do was to write down ‘any one of those bedtime stories’. Milne assured her it was not easy and that they weren’t really stories at all – all that stuff about ‘dragons and giants and magic rings’.
‘Wasn’t even one of them any good?’ she pleaded. And then Milne remembered ‘that there was just one which was a real story, about his bear’. He sat down and started writing:
This is Big Bear, coming downstairs now, bump-bump on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it. And then he feels that perhaps there isn’t. Anyhow, here he is at the bottom, and ready to be introduced to you. Winnie-the-pooh.
That was the first time he had written the words Winnie-the-pooh. (The ‘p’ is definitely small in the manuscript.) He went on writing until he got to the point where Christopher Robin asks, ‘Is that the end of the story?’
‘That’s the end of the story.’
Christopher Robin gave a deep sigh, picked his bear up by the leg and walked off to the door, trailing Winnie-the-pooh behind him. At the door he turned and said,
‘Coming to see me have my bath?’
‘I might,’ I said.
‘I didn’t hurt him when I shot him, did I?’
‘Not a bit.’
He nodded and went out . . . and in a moment I heard Winnie-the-pooh – bump, bump, bump – going up the stairs behind him.
It was indeed a real story, with a beginning, a middle and an end. In the book, after Christopher asks, ‘Is that the end of the story?’ Milne says, ‘That’s the end of that one. There are others.’ In December 1925 there weren’t, but the first story ‘became Chap I. The rest inevitably followed.’
Explaining all this he would say that he never wrote anything ‘without thought of publication’. After all, he was a professional writer. He would also say that he was lazy, and needed ‘somebody or something to set me off’. If Milne had not had such a keen sense of what would make a publishable story, it is easy to imagine (so great was his fame the Evening News would have printed anything) that the next children’s book after When We Were Very Young might have been about yet more knights and ‘dragons and giants and magic rings’, rather than the entirely original adventures of one boy’s bear.
On Thursday 24 December 1925 the main news headline in the Evening News, stretching right across the front page of the paper, read A CHILDREN’S STORY BY A. A. MILNE and under, in only slightly smaller letters, the two words CHRISTOPHER ROBIN. And then:
Page 7 To-night – To-morrow Night’s Broadcast.
A new story for children, ‘Winnie-the-Pooh’, about Christopher Robin and his Teddy Bear, written by Mr. A. A. Milne specially for ‘The Evening News’, appears to-night on Page Seven. It will be broadcast from all stations by Mr. Donald Calthrop, as part of the Christmas Day wireless programme, at 7.45 p.m. tomorrow.
The headline was above and in far larger print than GREAT STORM SWEEPS OVER DERBYSHIRE (WHITE CHRISTMAS OVER TWO THIRDS OF BRITAIN), LORD COBHAM’S MANSION ON FIRE and WHITES’ DANGER IN TIENTSIN. On page seven there was another enormous banner headline right across the page, simply
WINNIE-THE-POOH.
The illustrations were not by Shepard, who had presumably been too busy. He had managed to do a rather splendid version of Milne’s poem ‘Binker’, with a girl in the main role, which appeared the same month in Pears’ Annual. The Evening News illustrations for the story were by J. H. Dowd. Winnie-the-Pooh, not yet looking quite himself, had started his public life. He was on his way to becoming ‘the most famous and loved bear in literature’.
5
WINNIE-THE-POOH
In January 1926, Milne wrote to Ken with a long list of ‘things which ought to be done’. They included:
1) A book of verses (about 15 done to date) to appear in 1927 or 1928, but they have to be done fairly soon, so as to be illustrated and then serialised (horrid word) in America. [This would be Now We Are Six.]
2) A book – at Daff’s and Billy’s special request – of Winnie-the-pooh. 2 done. The Evening News one, and one for Eve in February.
3) A book of short stories I want to get out some time. There are about 6 available and I want to do some others – am, in fact, in the middle of one now – grown-up ones, of course. [This would be The Secret and other stories, but it contained only four stories and appeared in 1929, in a limited edition only.]
4) Playfair thinks I’m doing a pantomime for the Lyric, Hammersmith next Christmas, but I think I’m not.
5) I am doing an introduction for a collected edition of Saki [The Chronicles of Clovis, 1928].
6) Proofs of Four Plays to correct.
It was not actually a very substantial or demanding list, at least not for someone with Milne’s fluent pen. The manuscript of Winnie-the-Pooh does not really show how few changes he made because it was his practice to make a pencil draft, which was thrown away, before the surviving ink manuscript, but there is no doubt that he did write quickly and fluently, that the stories came easily. Eeyore, Piglet and, of course, Pooh, the toys already in the nursery, were at the heart of the book. He had invented Owl and Rabbit, and then he and Daphne had returned to the toy department at Harrods on a deliberate mission to acquire a new character or two. Kanga and Roo had looked the most promising candidates and duly inspired the seventh story. By March Winnie-the-Pooh was largely written.
None of the stories in The Secret were written after the date of the list. The proofs of Four Plays were swiftly returned, in time for Chat
to and Windus to publish on 15 April. There was no hurry about the Saki introduction or the further children’s poems, and he remained reluctant to write a pantomime for Playfair.
So it is no wonder that he had plenty of time to involve himself in the whole business of the illustration, design, layout, production and the finances of Winnie-the-Pooh. ‘Milne’s instructions were detailed, far more so than any Kipper had received from other authors,’ said Rawle Knox. ‘Kipper’ was Shepard’s nickname, but Milne never used it. They were still not at all close. ‘I always had to start again at the beginning with Milne every time I met him, I think he retired into himself – very often and for long periods,’ Shepard said much later, but the letters suggest Milne was not at all withdrawn at this point. He often pressed Shepard for meetings.
Shepard had always worked from models – ‘The idea of working without models never occurred to him.’ Milne knew this and was anxious, in March 1926, that the artist should come to Mallord Street and meet the toys. ‘I think you must come here on Thursday, if only to get Pooh’s and Piglet’s likeness.’ But he wanted Piglet small ‘as you will see when you read the sixth story’ – that is the one where Piglet is too small to reach the knocker. In the original sketch, in the Royal Magazine, Piglet is shown in mid-air, jumping up and down. For the book, Shepard provided a convenient flowerpot. In fact, it was even more important that Piglet should be small for the seventh story – the rather disquieting story where Kanga and Roo are not welcomed to the Forest, and Piglet impersonates the kidnapped joey and jumps into Kanga’s pocket in his place. ‘It is hard to be brave when you’re only a Very Small Animal,’ says Piglet, and Rabbit responds, ‘It is because you are a very small animal that you will be Useful in the adventure before us.’
From the beginning the appearance of the toys had shaped their characters. Milne himself had said that you could see at once that Eeyore was gloomy and Piglet squeaky. ‘As for Pooh’, Milne wrote (sending four of the stories ‘so that you can get an idea of them at once’): ‘I want you to see Billy’s Bear. He has such a nice expression.’ But Shepard had been drawing teddy bears for years, based on his son Graham’s Growler, that magnificent bear, and he was really not inclined to change now. Growler was there already, anyway, in When We Were Very Young, not only as himself in ‘Teddy Bear’, but clearly identified as Christopher Robin’s own bear, on his bed in the last picture in the book.
Shepard would even go so far as to say (after Milne’s death and, indeed, after the death of his own son) that he used Graham as the model for the child: ‘Christopher Robin’s legs were too skinny. So I decided to draw my own son, Graham, who was a sturdy little boy. Otherwise I was a stickler for accuracy. All the illustrations of Christopher Robin and Pooh and Piglet and the other animals were drawn exactly where Milne had visualised them – usually in Ashdown Forest.’ It was a natural enough claim for Shepard to make in his extreme old age. But Graham was eighteen at the time of Winnie-the-Pooh, and indeed anyone who has seen the juxtaposition in Christopher Milne’s own memoirs of the ‘butterfly photo’ and one of Shepard’s drawings would find it difficult to give much credence to Shepard’s claim. Christopher’s real legs look quite as sturdy as in the drawings, and Christopher himself would say, ‘It is true that he used his imagination when he drew the animals but me he drew from life. I did indeed look just like that.’ The clothes, the hairstyle – that was just how they were, his mother’s ideas carried out by Nanny, who made the smocks and shorts and cut (rather rarely) his hair.
John Macrae of Dutton’s, Milne’s American publisher, claimed to have been in the room, presumably in March 1926, when the partnership was in action.
During the process of bringing Winnie-the-Pooh into existence, I happened to be present at one of the meetings of Milne and Shepard – Milne sitting on the sofa reading the story, Christopher Robin sitting on the floor playing with the characters, which are now famous in Winnie-the-Pooh, and, by his side, on the floor, sat E. H. Shepard making sketches for the illustrations which finally went into the book . . . Christopher Robin, the true inspiration of these four books to both the author and the artist, was entirely unconscious of his part in the drama.
This sounds a little too neat, a little too good to be true, but it is accurate enough to what we know (Shepard did sketch the animals in pencil from what Milne called ‘the living model’) and was written only nine years after the event.
Milne’s own view of his American publisher was rather more astringent. ‘He is an old man with a beard, and he calls me “Sir” all the time. Not “Yes, sir” à la Americaine, but “Yessir”, like a Boy Scout. Very trying. He is always bowing to me, and telling me how I go straight to the hearts of the people.’ After all, there had never been anything quite like When We Were Very Young. ‘I also go straight to the heart of his banker, I should imagine,’ Milne wrote to Ken.
In the spring of 1926 Shepard was having to work against the clock, as the Royal Magazine had taken six of the stories, needed to go to press, according to Milne, ‘months in advance’ and was naturally anxious all the stories would appear before the book was published in October. At one stage, Miss Pearn, in the magazine department at Curtis Brown, wrote to Milne, ‘Will you be so kind as to pass this S.O.S. on to Mr Shepard’, and three days later wrote to Shepard to say, ‘Mr Milne has asked us to communicate direct with you in future in connection with the Winnie-the-Pooh drawings.’ In April, Shepard was in Rapallo and the Royal Magazine was getting a bit nervous about timing. ‘I am relieved to hear that you are now at work,’ Miss Pearn wrote.
Milne seemed to be acting as a financial middleman, as well as being closely concerned in the content of the illustrations. ‘They were going to pay you £12.10 a story’ (that was for one large and four to six small drawings). ‘I have told C.B. to try and raise them, as I didn’t think you would be satisfied with this; but in a way it is all extra, and I hope we shall get much more from America. The trouble is there is so little time.’
Dutton’s were very anxious to get the original two – Bees and Rabbit – out as soon as possible for their salesmen to take round to the bookshops. Frederick Muller at Methuen agreed to get those two stories (which had already appeared in the Evening News and Eve) ‘set up in galley proof . . . then we had all three better meet and try to arrange the make-up of it’ – that is Muller, Milne, Shepard. At the Royal Magazine they were making up the pages for their first story, actually the fourth in the book, called at that stage: ‘Winnie-the-Pooh finds a Tail’. In the magazine it was squashed into only four and a half pages, with Shepard providing thirteen pictures altogether, including nine of Eeyore in various odd positions – rather than the six or seven Milne had suggested would be called for. In the book itself, ‘In which Eeyore loses a tail and Pooh finds one’ takes up twelve pages. On 24 March, Daphne was able to write to Shepard (as A. A. Milne pp D. M. – having abandoned a fictitious ‘Celia Brice’, at least as far as Shepard was concerned) to tell him that ‘the Royal has gone up to 15 guineas’.
It was Milne’s idea that Shepard should have a share of his royalties this time, recognising his permanent share in the books. It was extremely unusual for an illustrator at this period. The agreed proportion seems to have been Milne’s own suggestion. The contracts remained primarily between Milne and the publishers, with subsidiary agreements made between Milne and Shepard. The contract for Winnie-the-Pooh, signed on 15 March 1926, said ‘that the publishers agree to publish the said work with illustrations by E. H. Shepard, to be provided by the author without cost to the publishers’. The contract for When We Were Very Young (10 April 1924) had said the publishers agreed the book should be ‘suitably illustrated at their own expense’. The two further children’s books would follow the pattern for Pooh – and when the rights to reproduce Shepard’s drawings as toys, wallpaper and so on were granted in both England and America, again it was ‘by agreement with the author’. The characters, both Christopher Robin and the toys themselves, adapted by Sh
epard from the reality, and Owl and Rabbit imagined by Shepard from Milne’s invention, were never, in any sense, Shepard’s property. Milne wrote to Shepard:
Brown has drawn up the agreements with Dutton and Methuen for Winnie-the-Pooh. In them you get £200 on account from M. and £100 from D. (less commission) – i.e. you get £270 anyway, if not a single copy is sold. Which is better than When We Were Very Young, for, I should imagine, fewer drawings. As regards royalties Dutton and Methuen were prepared to pay 20% and 25% (i.e. 4% and 5% for you) but protested that it wouldn’t leave them much margin for advertisement. So now D. pays 15% to 5,000, and then 20%, and Methuen pays 20% to 10,000, 22½% to 15,000 and then 25%. If it is the success we hope and expect it to be, we ought to do at least 50,000 in England and 100,000 in America – in fact there is really no limit to what we might do, and the sales will go on for a long time.
A little later, when presumably the advance had been increased, Milne wrote to Ken:
Shepard and I are having a joint agreement, dividing in the proportion of 80 to 20. Actually he did all the WWWVY illustrations for £200, and as on this book we are getting £1,000 in advance from England and £1,000 from America, he gets £400 straight off. And, of course, should eventually get much more. But when I told Daff of the suggested division, 80% to me, 20% to him, she said, ‘I am sure you make it sound all right to him, but it will want a lot of explaining to Mrs Shepard.’
The two women had met when the whole Shepard family went down to Cotchford for the day to give the artist a chance to sketch and explore the actual setting of the book, ‘all the spots where the things happened’. If Milne seemed reticent and rather stiff in Mallord Street, it was not so in Sussex that spring. ‘He was a different man,’ Shepard remembered many years later. ‘He was quite different, going over the ground and showing me the places.’ Milne had, in fact, had only just a year to get to know Ashdown Forest, but he already loved it, and as he wrote the stories, though the landscape is hardly mentioned, they are set firmly in a real place under a real sky.
