by Ann Thwaite
Complaint was made in the Evening News a few days ago that the programmes of the B.B.C. were of a much lower standard on the literary side than on the musical side. I should like to suggest, from the author’s point of view, some reasons why this is so.
Authors have never been taken very seriously by their fellow-men. ‘A singer is a singer,’ the attitude seems to be, ‘a painter is a painter, and a sculptor sculpts; but, dash it all, a writer only writes, which is a thing we all do every day of our lives, and the only difference between ourselves and Thomas Hardy is that Hardy doesn’t do anything else, whereas we are busy men with a job of real work to do.’ And since writing is, in a sense, the hobby, or at least the spare-time occupation of the whole world, it has become natural for the layman to regard the professional author as also engaged merely upon a hobby . . .
Now the B.B.C. exploits to its highest power this attitude of kindly condescension to the author. To the B.B.C. all authors are the same author. There is a ‘regular fee’ for the author, whoever he is; the fee is what advertisers call ‘nominal’; and with any luck the B.B.C. can avoid paying even this ridiculous amount by an ingenious scheme of its own. It says to the author: ‘If we pay you a fee, we won’t mention your name or your works or your publishers or anything about you, but if you will let us do it for nothing we will announce to our thousand million book-buying listeners where your work is to be bought. And if you don’t like it, you can leave it, because there are plenty of other authors about; and, if it came to the worst, we could write the things ourselves quite easily . . .’
But the B.B.C. is obsessed by the thought of advertisement. Publicity might never have been heard of until the B.B.C. was born. After all, if the B.B.C. says to the author, ‘I shan’t pay you, because I’m helping your books to sell,’ why on earth shouldn’t the publisher also say to the author, ‘And I shan’t pay you, because I’m helping you to get taken up by the B.B.C.’? Why should the Broadcasting Company be the one, and the only one, not to pay?
I suggest, then, that the reason why the literary standard of the B.B.C. is low is simply that the Company has made no effort to attract authors, and is entirely out of touch and sympathy with authors. Let me give an example or two from my own experience.
1) I was offered two guineas to read one act of one of my own plays. Whether this was an attractive proposition for listeners-in is not for me to say, but how could anyone think that it was an attractive proposition for the author? Let anybody consider what, in the way of preparation and performance, the author would have to go through, and ask himself if the offer was likely to be accepted.
2) On a very special ‘Gala Night’ I was asked to read something of my own during the Children’s Hour. I was offered five guineas, and it was explained to me apologetically that the Children’s Hour had to be run cheaply. (As if that was any reason why I should help the B.B.C. to run it cheaply!) I replied that I didn’t want to read my work aloud. An Editor, a Manager, a Publisher, would then automatically have said, ‘Would you do it for ten guineas?’ or ‘What would you do it for?’ – or something of that sort. The B.B.C. voice at the other end of the telephone said in heartrending accents, ‘Not even for the sake of the Little Ones?’
3) I was asked, in common with, I think, every known dramatist from the highest downwards, if I would write an original one act play for the Company. I said that, apart from anything else, it would be impossible for the B.B.C. to pay a fee at all comparable with the royalties one might expect from a stage-play, and that, in this case, such a fee would be necessary, seeing that there were no subsidiary stage-rights to be got from a play specially written for listeners only; I was told proudly in reply that, indeed and on the contrary whatever, they were prepared to pay as much as fifty pounds . . . !
4) And finally a letter from America; for indeed the Broadcasting Manner knows no frontiers. But in this case there is a difference. An author, to the American B.C., is, at any rate, an individual. In a letter to my agent the A.B.C. says lyrical things about me, such as the B.B.C. never felt about any author. Why can’t they broadcast my plays – those lovely, adorable things? What can they do to persuade me? Are tears, prayers, quotations from Ella Wheeler Wilcox, letters of introduction from the President, alike useless? ‘What is the next step we can take? What is there I should do?’ It is a cry from the heart.
And then, suddenly an inspiration occurs to him. Can it be? Absurd! Still – you never know. Just worth trying, perhaps. So he tries,
‘Is it a question of royalty? You have but to say the word if that is what is holding him back?’
Yes, it was. Fancy! An author wanting money, just as if he were a real worker! What on earth does the fellow do for it?
Milne was much in demand. A film producer telephoned to ask if he could come and film the author at work: ‘Entering the Library after Kissing Wife Farewell – Deep in Thought – Interrupted by Prattling Child – Takes Child on Knee and Pats Head of Same – Sudden Inspiration – Throws Child Away and Seizes Pen – Writes – Fade Out.’ Milne said he did not think it was much of an idea, whereupon the producer, almost like the B.B.C., brought up the educational effect, if not on the Little Ones, then certainly on the Lower Classes. The producer then brought out his most compelling argument: ‘In fact, Mr Milne, I assure you that I would sooner – you will hardly credit this but it is true – I would sooner film a really great artistic genius than an Earl.’ To clinch the matter he then added that he had already got Gilbert Frankau. And Milne rang off.
Milne also refused the blandishments of an envoy of Pears’ Soap. They had had a tremendous success years earlier when they had bought Sir John Millais’ Academy painting Bubbles and, inserting a cake of soap into it, had created the most widely known advertisement in the world. Now they wanted Milne to follow his contribution to the previous year’s Christmas Annual with a story actually tailor-made to their product. They had wined and dined him in a private room in the Ritz with the other distinguished contributors to the Annual (E. V. Lucas and Heath Robinson among them). Might not this have softened him up for what they really wanted – a children’s story about soap bubbles? Clara Hawkins, who had edited the Annual, recorded her visit to Mallord Street, which she apparently thought to be a great deal older than it really was:
A. A. Milne lives in Chelsea, and there I went upon appointment. The houses of Chelsea are old and gracious of manner; with the classic red brick and white paint austerity of their Georgian origin relieved by brilliant doors of primary reds or blues or yellows – the happy inspiration of their present day bohemian owners. Mr Milne’s doorway was a brilliant blue. There was a little stoop in front of it where I stood for one moment to catch my breath. I rang. A maid admitted me and led me into a grey, orange-curtained little room that was austere and cold. I was glad I had an appointment. This little room had an atmosphere forbidding to autograph hunters or timid maiden writers seeking comfort.
At last the maid returned and led me down a little hallway to a room at the end, the door of which she opened, at the same time announcing ‘Miss Hawkins’. Inside the room there was a bluish haze of nice-smelling pipe smoke, and inside the smoke there was a lean, pleasant young man. He got up lazily as if he were a little tired after a long tramp on the moors. That was my impression of him – tweeds, dogs, gorse, and a pipe. As a matter of fact I don’t believe he is especially any of these things; I just thought of them as he stood up to shake my hand. [Later he said] ‘Are you interested in houses?’
I answered, ‘I have been envying you this one ever since you have been talking to me.’
He looked pleased and said, ‘It really is a nice one isn’t it? Would you like to see it? It’s rather a hobby of my wife’s and mine.’
I followed him up the stairs, little winding stairs that led a charming way up to the second floor. He opened a door and out came a shower of golden light. We entered the drawing-room. It was a perfect little room, with Georgian panels and original cornices and a fireplace in th
e manner of William Kent. The whole of it had been painted a brilliant glowing yellow, with the mouldings picked out in gold. On the walls, in the centre of each panel, there were pictures that were great blobs of red and yellow and orange done in the modern manner and extraordinarily effective. The room was a burning sun in the middle of grey and sober London! Milne looked at me and I nodded my head.
‘You like it?’ he said. ‘Now come and see my wife’s room.’
Down a narrow passage we went, through a door, and again gold flooded out upon us. Only gold this time with a glowing rose-colour mellowing it. There was a great Italian four-poster, painted Italian chairs. It was a curious combination of modernity and ancient grace, very well done.
‘My wife rather goes in for this sort of thing,’ he said. We returned to his study.
‘You’re an American,’ he said. ‘Of course you must be, else you wouldn’t have been so interested in my house.’ And then abruptly he turned to me:
‘You want me to write about soap bubbles, do you, as an advertisement?’
‘For children, Mr Milne,’ I said pleadingly.
But Milne was not to be persuaded – ‘not even for the sake of the Little Ones’. No money was mentioned, and Miss Hawkins had to be content with the promise of another contribution to Pears’ Annual. She left ‘glowing because he was so nice. I had absolutely forgotten that he hadn’t done a thing I’d asked him to do.’
Milne was also approached by the makers of Wolsey children’s underwear. ‘The story would of course be left entirely to Mr Milne, subject only to there being included in it some, so to speak, fatherly remarks upon the warmth and wisdom of children being under-clothed in wool.’ But Milne was no more inclined to promote underwear than soap.
Christopher Robin had made a fleeting appearance during Miss Hawkins’s visit – sucking his thumb and sitting on the stairs. Miss Hawkins had seen him as the three-year-old she had wanted to see, but in fact he was a schoolboy now. He had started at Miss Walters’ School in Tite Street, in Chelsea. He went with Anne Darlington and the daughters of another neighbour, who had also become a friend – Denis Mackail, grandson of Burne-Jones, brother of Angela Thirkell, whose mother’s first cousins included Stanley Baldwin and Rudyard Kipling. Milne had written to him after Greenery Street – they had met before the war, in J. M. Barrie’s cricket team – and Milne had found him decidedly interesting as a person, with his ‘special fits of depression’, his ‘special brand of nightmares’ and his occasional ‘flickers of sunshine’, as he tried to support with his pen an extravagant household in another Chelsea house. They had a lot of friends in common – not only Barrie (Mackail would write his first biography), but P. G. Wodehouse, Ian Hay, the Darlingtons. The new friendship survived a disastrous first lunch party. Mackail wrote:
It was as near a complete failure as anything could well be. I was desperately shy, but so was my host. Moreover the Milnes had a refectory table in those days, which when four people are seated at it means that two are much too close together, while the other two are much too far apart. Yet though I should like to blame the table entirely, I know that I was dull and tongue-tied and that Alan . . . must bitterly have regretted ever having posted his letter.
Later they would laugh at that first occasion as they dined with each other over and over again. (There was one particularly memorable evening in November 1927 when a taxi went through a wall on the other side of the road and no one heard it because they were all listening to Barrie – ‘There was always considerable anxiety beforehand as to whether he were going to lift the whole party to glorious heights or plunge it into silence and gloom.’) Milnes and Mackails went to theatres together (‘Every outing concluded by our being deposited, in their bright blue car, at our own front door’), visited each other’s country cottages in the summers and each other’s children’s parties at Christmas. Mary was a year older than Christopher Robin and Anne was two years younger than both Christopher and Anne Darlington. The Milne children’s party was always an outing to the theatre, combined with some sort of splendid meal. Milne and Wodehouse together put Mackail up for the Garrick and, though Wodehouse resigned almost immediately afterwards (‘I loathe clubs . . . I hated the Garrick more than any of them’), Mackail would often go in Milne’s car for lunch in Garrick Street.
Milne described the Tite Street school in a letter to Ken in June 1926:
Billy loves his school, though I never quite know what he is doing. He brings home weird works of art from time to time, hand-painted pottery and what not, which has to be disposed of by Daff. They also teach him to catch. (This is really rather a good school.) Yesterday he bounced the ball on the ground and caught it with the right hand 20 times running, thus earning a penny from his gratified papa. He says he’s done 10 times with the left hand, but not visibly.
The boy was also giving some thought to the future. One afternoon when Daphne and Nanny were both out, father and son had some serious talk on their own. ‘Do parents and children understand each other better than they did?’ an interviewer would ask A. A. Milne, who replied: ‘I think they try more and they certainly should . . . But there is still a kind of shyness between the child and the parent.’ On this occasion Milne told his son that when he was about ten he would go to a boarding school. The boy said, a little wistfully, ‘Do I ever come back to you after that?’ They talked about careers too, and after the boy had rejected various suggestions the idea of elephant hunting came up. ‘As long as I wasn’t eaten,’ he said, and then, after a moment’s thought, ‘Or trodden on.’ (‘I can’t bear to think of him being trodden on by an elephant,’ Milne wrote to Ken.) When he was grown up, Christopher said that he had never told anybody that it was an elephant, a real live elephant, that he had most wanted. What he had at Cotchford (on a count in 1927, when he was seven) were ‘two bantams, two rabbits, several kittens, six snails, a lot of caterpillars and a horrible collection of beetles’.
Milne also reported a walk when he was beginning to get irritated because his son was continually lagging behind:
ME: Come on, Moon.
MOON: I’m just looking at something, Blue. [That was what Christopher normally called his father, as did many other people.]
ME: (rather impatiently): Oh, do come on!
MOON: (running up, terribly respectfully): Yes, father. Yes, father. Yes, father!
Which makes all parental sternness simply impossible.
Milne once said that he thought it impossible for anyone with a sense of humour to be a good father. ‘The necessary assumption of authority and wisdom seems so ridiculous.’ ‘It is the old conflict of duty and affection, and correction is still a difficulty . . . Over and over again you hear the threat “If you do that again I’ll punish you . . .” and, if he does it again, how can we help admiring his pluck, seeing how small he is and how big we are.’
Christopher, when adult, would have some interesting things to say about this; he thought that his father ‘had inherited some of his own father’s gifts as a teacher’, but that he could never have been one himself. ‘He could radiate enthusiasm, but he could never impose discipline.’ His ‘relationships were always between equals, however old or young, distinguished or undistinguished the other person’. Christopher remembered how, at about this time, his father had chided him gently for sitting at the lunch table, between mouthfuls, with his hands on the table, knife and fork pointing upwards. ‘You oughtn’t really to sit like that,’ he said. ‘Why not?’ the boy asked, surprised.
‘Well . . .’ He hunted around for a reason he could give. Because it’s considered bad manners. Because you mustn’t? Because . . .
‘Well’, he said, looking in the direction that my fork was pointing, ‘suppose somebody suddenly fell through the ceiling. They might land on your fork and that would be very painful.’
When the young Enid Blyton came to interview Milne for Teacher’s World that October, just before the publication of Pooh, they naturally spoke of teachers and schools. M
ilne talked sympathetically of teachers who ‘spend their days struggling in the poorer districts with terribly large classes’. And he couldn’t resist showing off Christopher Robin’s prowess with problems – exactly the same sort of problems his father had set him nearly forty years before. ‘He likes problems . . . There are 500 cows in a field. They go out of a gate at the rate of two a minute. How many are left after two and a half hours?’ Miss Blyton did not reveal whether the six-year-old answered that one promptly, but she did say: ‘Christopher Robin finds no difficulty with problems of this sort.’ A similar problem would crop up two years later in the ‘Contradiction’ to The House at Pooh Corner.
The young mathematician that day seemed to be not quite sure whether he was a dragon or a knight. He stared at Enid Blyton fiercely and blew tremendously hard. He had paper tied round his legs and she asked why. ‘So’s dragons won’t bite me.’
He carried an enormous Teddy Bear, which he informed me was Pooh. He stood there in his little brown overall, with his great shock of corn-coloured hair, and looked about the room seeking for what he might devour. His bright eyes fell upon his father’s fountain-pen and he immediately took it up and pulled it into as many pieces as possible.
This sounds destructive, but fountain pens did come apart in a rather satisfactory way and undoubtedly Christopher would have been able to put it together again, its flabby rubber tube tucked neatly away, without disgorging any ink. Christopher was already very good with his hands and would be indignant about his father’s poem ‘The Engineer’, in Now We Are Six, which seems to have him saying:
It’s a good sort of brake
But it hasn’t worked yet.
