by Ann Thwaite
Another good writer, Barbara Willard, who lived on the edge of the Forest and had used the place in her own books, said to me that the Pooh books, ‘could just as well have been set on Hampstead Heath’, but the stories have a much more rural feeling than that suggests and the illustrations are still recognisably of the Sussex background Milne showed to Shepard more than ninety years ago. The October 1987 hurricane did terrible damage in the Forest and devastated the wood the Milnes planted in the field along the lane from their house – but Gills Lap is still recognisable as ‘the enchanted place on the very top of the Forest’. New pines have grown to replace those that fell and there is now some undergrowth and not quite so much of the ‘close-set grass, quiet and smooth and green’, where you can sit down carelessly like Pooh.
Milne and Shepard walked up to Gills Lap across open country that is more heathland than forest, over dry golden grass, between bent dead bracken (with no sign yet of the new season’s growth), tangled gorse and heather. They saw, as Pooh and Christopher Robin did, ‘the whole world spread out until it reached the sky’. Now, in a secluded spot, a ‘warm and sunny spot’, if it’s that sort of day, you can find, if you look hard enough, a memorial to the two men, writer and artist.
On that spring day they walked down the hill to the river in the valley and saw under the trees in Posingford Wood clumps of yellow primroses, sheets of white anemones (‘like driven snow against the trees’), patches of bluebells and the buds of marsh marigolds just beginning to show a little gold. They crossed the wooden bridge and returned along the lane in time for tea. Mary, Shepard’s daughter, would remember Christopher Robin’s delight when her big brother, Graham (soon to go up to Oxford), played with the child in the stream, ‘with an old log floating there that became a battleship, an alligator.’ She thought Christopher Robin reacted as one who had never known ‘anyone older than himself actually playing games with him’. In fact, the only child spent a good deal of time playing what he called ‘dog games’ with his father – running after balls, hitting balls, catching balls – but there were also messier, less structured games: scooping mud and scum and weed from the stream, looking for lost golf balls, and landing instead grass snakes and nobbly newts. He had a number of companions nearer his own age too – Anne Darlington, when she was visiting, as she did very often; Brenda Tasker, the gardener’s daughter, who would remember building huts out of bracken, playing cricket and riding Jessica, the donkey; and Hannah, who lived only half a mile away, and was good at climbing trees. It was in the apple orchard up the lane – full of excellent trees for climbing – that Roo was lost and never found again. Olive Brockwell remembered the heartache of that search all her life.
Part of the strength and charm of the stories comes from the juxtaposition of toy animal and forest. Milne writes something simple, such as Pooh was ‘walking through the forest one day, humming proudly to himself’, and Shepard shows a jaunty toy bear walking through real Ashdown Forest over real rough grass with real trees in the background; or Milne writes: ‘One fine winter’s day when Piglet was brushing away the snow in front of his house’, and Shepard shows a diminutive toy piglet making a tiny path with a tiny broom away from the trunk of a fine beech tree. Trees dominate the books. Rabbit lives in a burrow, which has some relationship to Badger’s house in the middle of the Wild Wood (but there are no stoats and weasels, no cudgels or pistols in Milne’s forest); nearly everyone else lives in trees, including Christopher Robin himself.
It had all started in a tree in the garden at Cotchford – an ancient walnut tree (now long gone). ‘The tree was hollow inside and a great gash in its trunk had opened up to make a door.’ It was the perfect tree-house for a five-year-old. ‘There was plenty of room for a boy and his bear.’ They could sit on the soft crumbly floor and see, high above them, ‘a green and blue ceiling of leaves and sky’. And even if Nanny could hear him if he called, it was a sort of independence and he was getting more adventurous every day. Christopher would recall: ‘So if anyone wonders why in the stories so much time seems to be spent in trees or up trees, the answer is that this, in real life, was how it was.’ Milne wrote in 1927, just after Christopher’s seventh birthday: ‘At the moment he is mad on tree-climbing, which he really does rather well and pluckily, even after doing the last eight feet (downwards) on his head the other day.’ This is the sort of boy behind the stories, not the long-ago kneeling child with the little gold head.
There have been critics who have found Christopher Robin, even in the Pooh books, a stumbling block to their full enjoyment. ‘Was there ever a more insufferable child than Christopher Robin?’ wrote the critic Chris Powling on the sixtieth birthday of the book. Like Geoffrey Grigson on the poems, again he seems to let sociology and class-consciousness get in the way:
Every inch of him exudes smugness – from the top of that curious, bobbed haircut to the tip of those tiny-tot sandals (and the smock and shorts in between are just as irritating). Okay, so we shouldn’t take him at face value. Maybe there is deep irony in this twentieth-century version of the Victorian Beautiful Child. In Christopher Robin’s case, however, we must certainly heed the wise advice of Oscar Wilde that it’s only a superficial person who does not judge by appearances. With Milne’s prose [his ‘sheer literary craftsmanship’] reinforced by E. H. Shepard’s superb line-drawings, Christopher Robin must surely be what he seems. And what he seems is a serious affront to anyone who believes children are simply people who haven’t lived very long.
Powling, in fact, comes round to knowing that the stories can survive even the ‘insufferable’ too-perfect child:
The permanence of the Pooh books has nothing whatever to do with their psychological depth or the sharpness of their social comment or their status as morality. These don’t matter a jot. What’s important, through and through, is their success as storytelling. And this is a triumph. It survives shifts in fashion. It survives Christopher Robin. It even survives that odd tone-of-voice which, for all Milne’s simple language, never quite settles for a child audience. The world Pooh creates is completely unique and utterly self-sustaining. Yes, it is a world that’s very like ours . . . but much, much more like itself.
That phrase ‘the world Pooh creates’ seems at first like a slip. Didn’t he really mean to say ‘the world Milne creates’ or ‘the world of Pooh . . .’? In fact, it gives us the clue why Christopher Robin is the way he is – too perfect, flawless, not falling out of trees. It is because he is seen in relation to Pooh and the other animals. Pooh and Piglet are the children and the boy himself takes on the role of the adult. The listening or reading child identifies with the superior strength and power he sometimes resents in the adults around him, however much he loves his parents. Christopher Robin is always resourceful and competent; he is the child as hero. In ‘the world Pooh creates’ it is Christopher Robin who reads sustaining books at moments of crisis, who comes to the rescue, who will make sure that no harm comes to the kidnapped Roo (whatever befell him in real life) and protects the animals from the teeth of fierce things. (‘If Christopher Robin is coming, I don’t mind anything.’) He dries Eeyore’s tail after its immersion in the river (having nailed it on on a previous occasion) and does all the comforting and useful things that parents do. The boy is brave and godlike to the toys, just as the loving parent is to a small child. It is absolutely beside the point to criticise him for being too good to be true.
Just occasionally, as any adult does too, Christopher Robin reveals his frailty, his feet of clay, and this surely adds to his appeal. He has forgotten what the North Pole looks like. (‘I did know once . . .’) It is Pooh who is childlike, egotistical, hungry, alternately boastful and self-deprecating, occasionally managing to be brave and unselfish, accepting things without really understanding them, as children so often have to accept un-understandable explanations. The listening or reading child recognises himself in Pooh and recognises himself as he longs to be, as he thinks he will be, in Christopher Robin. He recognises
and enjoys the wit and tenderness of the books.
But after The Pooh Perplex, Frederick Crews’ 1963 parody of a student casebook, one cannot attempt the most rudimentary criticism without seeming to be joking. After ‘The Hierarchy of Heroism in Winnie-the-Pooh’ and ‘A la recherche du Pooh perdu’ (Weltschmerz, alienation and the rest) one’s pen freezes in one’s hand. Perhaps, with all that chasing after honey, the books explore the universality of the sexual urge or the bestiality of the free market? Perhaps the great Heffalump expedition really is a paradigm of colonialism? Eeyore is certainly the archetypal outsider, if not the spokesman for the disillusioned postwar generation of the 1920s. ‘There is something a little frightening about The Pooh Perplex’, as Benedict Nightingale wrote in a review. You begin to wonder if those invented critics may not have something after all, underneath their ludicrous jargon.
As Alison Lurie put it, Crews managed ‘to stifle almost all critical comment on Winnie-the-Pooh for a decade’. She felt she was, in 1972, merely following up one of the suggestions made by ‘Smedley Force’, a prominent member of the Modern Language Association of America, who was struck by ‘the paucity of biographical connections between Winnie-the-Pooh and the lives of A. A. Milne, “Christopher Robin”, and the historical personages who probably lie behind the fictional portraits of “Pooh”, “Piglet”, “Kanga” et alia.’ Lurie makes the suggestion that Pooh’s relation to Piglet is much like that of Milne’s older brother, Ken, to Milne himself. She sees something of J. V. Milne in Owl and something of Milne’s mother Maria in, not Kanga, but Rabbit. She points out, as many others have done, that we all know people like Tigger, like Eeyore, like Kanga. Humphrey Carpenter suggests, ‘Don’t we, indeed, recognise them in ourselves?’ He saw that Milne makes it possible for a child ‘to carry into adult life a perception of human character acquired from his readings’ of the Pooh books. If Milne sets out to depict only a very small fraction of human behaviour, ‘he manages to do so completely within a child’s understanding; the Pooh books can be taken in fully by all but the smallest children.’ And yet the adult reading aloud is not bored. It is an extraordinary achievement.
Richard Adams has suggested that Eeyore is ‘the first portrait in English literature of a type of neurotic we all know only too well’ – though he may owe a little to Dickens’s poor Mrs Gummidge in David Copperfield, ‘the lone lorn creetur’, who did not appear to be able to cheer up, drowned in self-pity as she was. ‘My trouble has made me contrary,’ she said, and Eeyore’s troubles make him contrary too, but Milne makes self-pity far funnier and more lovable. Eeyore has moments of happiness which save him from being a caricature – for instance, when his tail is restored and when he puts his burst birthday balloon into his useful pot. Adams says it was from the Pooh books that he learnt for Watership Down (one of the few comparable bestsellers, at least in the initial years) ‘the vital importance, as protagonists, of a group of clearly portrayed, contrasting but reciprocal characters’, though he does not claim that his rabbits come anywhere near Pooh and his friends.
There have been many different reasons given for the enduring appeal of the books. It has been suggested it is because they are stories of ‘universal perplexity’, that we are all bears of very little brain trying as Pooh does to bluff our way through life. ‘Hardly anybody knows if those are these or these are those.’ And as Pooh can be a brave and clever bear, we feel we could be too, if only life would give us the chance. If the critic John Rowe Townsend, realising ‘how very good they are’, considers the stories ‘as totally without hidden significance as anything ever written’, another critic, Peter Hunt, responds by saying that they are ‘still the complex work of a complex man, and they include a fascinating series of subtexts that can tell us a lot about the relationships of child, adult, story and book.’ It is ‘sophisticated writing, the pace, the timing, and the narrative stance all contributing to the comic effect’.
Alison Lurie suggests it is because Milne ‘created out of a few acres of Sussex countryside, a world that has the qualities both of the Golden Age of history and legend, and the lost paradise of childhood – two eras which, according to psychologists, are often one in the unconscious mind’. The small adventures are concerned entirely with the things children are most interested in – friends, food, birthdays, tree-houses and expeditions, jokes and songs. They are concerned, as children are, with courage that comes and goes. There is no economic necessity or competition. The dangers are all natural ones – bees, heffalumps (possibly), bad weather – and what is celebrated is community, the spirit of co-operation and kindness, most clearly seen in Winnie-the-Pooh when Christopher Robin and Pooh rescue Piglet when he is entirely surrounded by water.
Humphrey Carpenter has pointed out that Milne’s humour is that of a mathematician. ‘Each humorous situation in the Pooh books is reached by the logical pursuit of an idea to the point of absurdity.’ Milne’s pleasure is in playing with words. Carpenter suggests he ‘handles words in the kind of detached manner in which a mathematician deals with figures’ but, in fact, there is plenty of emotion in the Forest. If Christopher Robin is godlike, he is certainly the god of love. The feminist critic, Carol Stanger, sees that the stories appeal because ‘they respect what is traditionally given low status in patriarchal society, nurturing and emotion’. They reflect a pre-sexual, pre-literate world that is kinder and more attractive than the world as it is; and even critics who say – like Roger Sale and Margery Fisher – that they can no longer enjoy the stories as much as they did as children, or as much as college students often do today, none the less find themselves still moved by the thought of their own vanished Pooh-reading childhoods.
In July, three months before the book was published, someone was already after the manuscript. Milne wrote to E. V. Lucas: ‘If I give a price now, I say £350. If the book is a complete failure, this may be reduced to 2/9; on the other hand, it may go up to £500 . . . I wouldn’t give £350 for anybody’s manuscript . . . But I don’t want to make the mistake I made with the verse.’ In fact, he never did sell the manuscripts of Winnie-the-Pooh or its sequel, and in his will instructed his trustees, after the death of his wife, to offer the two manuscripts to the library of his old college, Trinity, Cambridge, as a gift. And that is where they are now.
Winnie-the-Pooh was dedicated to Daphne in one of those almost embarrassingly open gestures which seem so strange from a man whose son would say, ‘My father’s heart remained buttoned up all through his life’.
TO HER
HAND IN HAND WE COME
CHRISTOPHER ROBIN AND I
TO LAY THIS BOOK IN YOUR LAP.
SAY YOU’RE SURPRISED?
SAY YOU LIKE IT?
SAY IT’S JUST WHAT YOU WANTED?
BECAUSE IT’S YOURS—
BECAUSE WE LOVE YOU.
Here it seems that Alan Milne is wearing his heart on his sleeve – a necessary gesture, perhaps, when the child’s mother has been so totally excluded from both the books for children. Nanny was in the first, When We Were Very Young, over and over again, and so was Milne himself – Shepard actually drew him (with cap and pipe) in ‘Sand-between-the-toes’. All Daphne got was ‘God bless Mummy’ and a possible (undesirable) association with the disappearing mother of James James Morrison Morrison. Long afterwards, Ronald Bryden in the Spectator looked at the poems and decided that whether the mother’s absences ‘betoken drink, drugs, insanity or infidelity, the child has obviously been driven by some emotional deprivation into a life of lonely fantasy, inventing a series of imaginary playmates’: Binker, mice, beetles, even raindrops – quite apart from the toys themselves. The mother has surely failed in her role. Now in Pooh the conversations between the boy and his father make the framework of the book, and there is no room at all for the mother.
Ernest Shepard’s copy of the book would later carry Milne’s inscription:
When I am gone,
Let Shepard decorate my tomb,
And put (if there is room
)
Two pictures on the stone:
Piglet, from page a hundred and eleven
And Pooh and Piglet walking (157) . . .
And Peter, thinking that they are my own,
Will welcome me to heaven.
That is Piglet ‘blowing happily at a dandelion and wondering whether it would be this year, next year, some time or never’, whatever ‘it’ was; and Pooh and Piglet (Pooh clasping his special pencil case, so like Christopher Robin’s real one) walking thoughtfully home together in the golden evening, at the very end of the book. This gives us moving evidence of how much Alan Milne admired Ernest Shepard’s contribution to the books.
In the spring of 1926 the Evening News had carried an article by Milne, lamenting the attitude to writers of the British Broadcasting Company, formed three and a half years before. Milne wrote to Ken, sending him his play The Ivory Door to read:
I also send the Evening News: sorry you don’t read it, nor live in London where the whole metropolis is placarded on these occasions with my name, practically life-size. On second thoughts, I think perhaps you’re lucky . . . I called it ‘Authors and the B.B.C. by an author’ and asked for 10 guineas, to which they said promptly ‘15, if you sign it’. Did I hesitate? Not for a moment.
It seems worth giving most of the article here for, if the BBC has, in over ninety years, improved its attitude and payments, the general feeling about writers seems to have stayed much the same. Not long ago, for example, Philip Pullman initiated a campaign in Oxford pressing literary festivals not to expect writers to take part without proper payment.
