Goodbye Christopher Robin

by Ann Thwaite

  ‘If I’d had a train (and I didn’t have a train) any brake that I’d wanted to make for it – any simple thing like a brake – WOULD HAVE WORKED.’

  There were numerous interviews in these years. There were numerous descriptions of the house in Mallord Street (‘a rhapsody in azure and primrose’ – carpets ‘a heavenly blue’, walls yellow) and of Milne’s book-lined study – ‘a neat and cosy room’, looking out on ‘a tiny townish garden’. Christopher would remember the smells of fuchsia and geraniums in Chelsea. There were numerous questions about how Milne liked being famous (‘Well, if I am famous, then, yes, I do like it’), numerous tributes to his good looks (‘his fine spare features, tanned and healthy-looking’), to his laughter, his diffidence and modesty, to his own charm, his charming wife and even more charming child.

  The child was not asked at the time but he would say, much later, that ‘I also quite liked being Christopher Robin and being famous. There were indeed times . . . when it was exciting and made me feel grand and important.’ It was only later that he grew out of his part and came to resent the books so fiercely, to resent the fact that it seemed, almost, as if the father had got to where he was by climbing upon the child’s own puny shoulders.

  The child’s grandfather said that winter: ‘Alan’s boy (6½), Christopher Robin, or, as he calls himself, Billy Moon, is quite unspoilt. He complains that his school is “easier than ever”, but Alan thinks he learns quite enough. He makes up for it by learning chess and whist at home!’ His cousin, Tony, just twelve, had been telling his grandfather that he was sure he could get a Westminster scholarship ‘and is not going to be behind his father or his uncle or his brother’. When Tony’s brother, Tim, had got the top scholarship to Westminster in 1925, Milne wrote to Ken: ‘I only hope Billy will be as clever, but I doubt it,’ and a little later added, ‘I suspect him of striking out an entirely new line of his own, like Archery and Spanish. But as long as I love him as I do now, I don’t mind.’

  There were a lot of hard acts for Billy Moon, alias Christopher Robin, to follow, but so far he seemed to be bearing up well. He was showing little sign of strain though he was already famous, even before Winnie-the-Pooh brought him further into prominence. A piece in an American magazine, Town and Country, in May 1926, itself raving about Milne’s ‘adorable nonsense’ and coining the word ‘Milnenomaniacs’ for his fans, carried the following caption under his photograph:

  A. A. Milne. English playwright. Children’s poet laureate by divine right of whimsy. His plays have been successfully produced in New York. And he is the father of Christopher Robin.

  Milne seemed to see no need to protect the child from all the publicity. Daphne positively encouraged the press. There is no evidence for Christopher’s adult suggestion: ‘I imagine that the door was guarded with extra vigilance.’ Milne would say later that all the talk about Christopher Robin seemed to have nothing to do with the real child, Billy Moon. But the photographs were, of course, of the real child, whatever he was called. Milne was always allowing photographs to be taken of the two of them together. There is the famous image by Howard Coster, now in the National Portrait Gallery – Christopher Milne would say of that photograph that his father never held him like that. There are lots of other studies in less or more awkward poses. And plenty of the boy alone. Milne seemed totally confident, at least on the surface, that Christopher Robin would be able to cope when he got to prep school:

  Years ago, school was a world of blips and buffetings, and a boy might have had a hard time, perhaps, if he had been a nursery celebrity, but conditions today are vastly different . . . I am not uneasy. A delicate or lonely boy used to have a terrible time, but those days are gone, thank goodness!

  How could he have felt so sure?

  In New York that spring there had been a ripple of sensation when Milton, Balch and Company published a rather clever parody of Milne and Shepard entitled When We Were Rather Older, focusing attention on a generation of ‘modern’ young things with cocktails and Charlestons and fast cars. There was some talk of a libel suit, but in fact the book (which went into a second edition immediately) did nothing but good to the original. Milne’s verse was so obviously much more skilled than that of Fairfax Downey. But the book is now a collector’s item itself with its own sociological interest and period charm:

  James James

  Morrison’s Mother’s

  Had her hair shingled off.

  She’s late

  Home for her dinner

  Being out shooting golf.

  Jim says

  Somebody told her

  That was the modern view,

  And since it’s the rage not to be your age,

  Well, what can any son do?

  Milne wrote to Ken in 1926 not only of Christopher and all the interest as the Pooh stories began to appear regularly month by month in both England and America, but also of politics, of cricket and golf and of servant problems. It was the year of the General Strike, but nothing survives to tell us what Milne thought about that. The ‘politics’ at one point related to personalities. Apparently, Milne had sneered at Lord Bridgeman, First Lord of the Admiralty, and Ken had admonished him. In his reply to the admonition, Milne referred to an Academy painter, another old Etonian, John Collier, whose portraiture was described as achieving ‘a sober veracity slightly reminiscent of Frank Holl’, now hardly himself a name to conjure with. The passage seems worth quoting at length because it shows so clearly Milne’s attitude to the Establishment, his inability to suffer fools gladly, which was always so characteristic of him. It also suggests Milne had a rather less conventional attitude to the avant-garde in art than some might suppose:

  Talking of Bridgeman:

  Suppose Roger Fry (say) were to be talking of the more advanced continental painters, and were to end up: ‘Meanwhile for England the shining genius of a Collier is enough’ – and suppose you were to say ‘Why sneer at Collier? His artistic genius is his own affair. It may not be great, but it is adequate for the work he does, work done competently and honourably’ – what could Fry answer? I suppose something like this.

  ‘I am not “sneering” at Collier particularly; or, if I am, only in as much as he pretends to be something he isn’t – that is, in as much as he gives himself the airs of a great painter. What I am really “sneering” at is the artistic perception which looks for nothing higher than a Collier, which is satisfied with a representative Academy full of Colliers, which tolerates the bestowal of rewards on the Colliers and the Colliers only.’

  Bridgeman (from his looks, and from all I have heard of him from those who know him) is an utterly uninspired, unimaginative, rather bewildered mediocre little man, such as you could find in thousands all over England. If you say that such a man is entirely competent to fill the post of First Lord, I have no doubt you are right. But one is allowed to ask oneself: ‘In that case: (1) Ought such a man to get the £5,000 a year and the honours and glory that, for some obscure reason, we have been in the habit of giving our First Lords? – and (2) Ought we to be satisfied with our methods of government, if government means nothing more than a Bridgeman rather red in the face saying “Yes. Yes” and signing something?’

  Hence these sneers. The truth is that since the war I have been utterly sick of, and utterly uninterested in, politics. Perhaps the fact that I played round Ashdown Forest behind Joynson-Hicks at Easter has intensified my contempt for statesmen. My God, the profound mediocrities that emerge.

  Joynson-Hicks was the Conservative Home Secretary at the time of the General Strike.

  Milne went to see the MCC play the Australians and was pleased when the England team for the first test match turned out to be almost exactly the one he had predicted to Ken (‘Larwood for Allen is the only difference.’ He had wanted Larwood ‘and he may go in yet’.) The brothers were jubilant in August when in the last match of the series a tremendous partnership between Hobbs and Sutcliffe meant the Ashes would return to England after fou
rteen years. ‘It was a triumph for the selectors,’ the papers wrote, and Milne almost felt he had been one of them.

  When the family returned to London at the end of August they found that their new cook (‘our Penn has left us’, he had told Ken a little earlier) had been entertaining a young gentleman from Jermyn Street:

  They had been living happily, honeymooning so to speak, at 13 Mallord Street, kindly borrowed from Mr and Mrs A. A. Milne. We knew nothing of this until Monday morning when we came down to breakfast and found that the cook (who had welcomed us home beamingly the afternoon before) had vanished in the night. Thereafter we heard all and more than all we wanted to. The charwoman, who comes once a week, told Daff that our house had been turned into a ‘bad-ouse’; in fact from all we heard Daff and I might have been arrested for keeping one.

  They returned hastily to Cotchford. Christopher did not go back to school until halfway through September. After some initial problems, they were now being very well looked after at Cotchford by a reliable couple. The handsome gardener, George Tasker (someone said he looked like a Spanish sea captain), would stay with them for the rest of his life and put up, apparently quite willingly, with Daphne’s imperious ways. She was immensely pleased with the prizes they won at local horticultural shows and would introduce Tasker to visitors as her ‘head gardener’. (He had a nephew who helped.) Though the Taskers lived in a cottage at the top of the drive, Tasker’s daughter Brenda would remember that the only time Mrs Milne ever came there was just after the gardener’s death. She came with a friend for support and Brenda could not decide ‘if she was a very shy person or a complete snob, who was quite unaware of any other person around’. She had certainly been irritated many years earlier when she had to find a new cook at Cotchford because Mrs Tasker was expecting her second child, Peter.

  Winnie-the-Pooh was published on 14 October 1926 in London and on the 21st in New York. There was one annoying misprint. Somehow Milne had left ‘his’ instead of ‘her’ for Kanga at the end of Chapter VII, having started off interestingly thinking the kangaroo a father, in spite of the pouch. (He originally wrote, ‘An animal who carries his child about with him in his pocket . . .’ The male pronouns are crossed out heavily in the manuscript; somehow the final ‘his’ in the chapter slipped through and survives in the first edition.) And some officious copy-editor had corrected Piglet’s spoonerism ‘spleak painly’ in the same chapter: it was years before that was noticed and put right. But, in general, Milne was extremely pleased. The balance between type and illustrations was so much more satisfactory than it had been in the cluttered pages of newspapers and magazines, where the stories had made their first appearances.

  The reactions to those first appearances, and the initial orders for the book, had prepared Milne for the fact that he was about to repeat the success of When We Were Very Young – but the reviewers could hardly believe it. The New York Herald Tribune said, ‘As you read the conviction grows on you that Mr Milne has done it again. There are not so very many books that, sitting reading all alone, you find yourself laughing aloud over. This is one of them. Here is nonsense in the best tradition . . . with the high seriousness about it that children and other wise people love.’

  Vogue thought it was ‘not quite as nice as When We Were Very Young, but still it has tremendous charm and is great fun to read aloud’; a St Louis paper also couldn’t convince itself that the new book was quite as clever as the first one. But the great majority of the reviewers raved about it. ‘Almost never has there been so much funniness in a book.’ ‘Mr Milne has repeated the rare coup. Once more he has written the perfect book for children.’ ‘It is even better than When We Were Very Young, which is saying much,’ said the Saturday Review, and a week later May Lamberton Becker wrote in the same place: ‘When the real Christopher Robin is a little old man, children will find him waiting for them. It is the child’s book of the season that seems certain to stay.’

  And, like the first book, it was apparently not only the child’s book but the adult’s book as well. It seemed Milne’s books always had the double ability to open up the future for the child looking forward (filling in obscure pieces of the puzzling jigsaw that is life), and the lost past for the adult looking back. My own copy of the first edition of Winnie-the-Pooh was given by my father to my mother long before they had any children. ‘Adults loved him first,’ Elliott Graham of Dutton’s told me, extravagantly. ‘Every intellectual knew the books by heart. It was easily a year and a half before any children saw the books.’ Earlier in the year, the Churchman had congratulated adults on the way they had taken the poems to their hearts. ‘This book appeared in childless New York apartments, in Pullman smokers and in doctors’ offices – an innocent bestseller. Mr Milne’s success seems to indicate that Americans are as yet neither completely commercialised nor completely sophisticated.’

  The phenomenal success of both When We Were Very Young and Winnie-the-Pooh was seen as a tribute to the mental health of thousands of Americans. One hundred and fifty thousand copies of Winnie-the-Pooh were sold in the United States before the end of the year. Three weeks later, Milne would say: ‘In America, by the way, they seem at least twice as keen as they were on WWWVY’ – so it seemed, though sales of the poems would keep slightly ahead of Pooh for many years. That was also true in Britain, where the reviews were similarly enthusiastic. ‘Another book full of delight for all children under seventy,’ the Nation said, rather strangely. (Why exclude all those over seventy?) In spite of the fact ‘that it has not the advantage of demanding that it be learned by heart’, it is likely ‘to gain quite as many firm and unshakable admirers’. Milne would soon report that Christopher Robin himself ‘knows Winnie-the-Pooh absolutely by heart’, and there would be many like him.

  Methuen had had such confidence that the first British printing was seven times the size of that of When We Were Very Young. In the shops on the day of publication were 32,000 copies bound in dark green cloth. Another 3,000 were bound in red, blue or green leather and there were other limited editions, specifically aimed at book collectors. For Now We Are Six, the following year, the first printing would be 50,000 and for The House at Pooh Corner, 75,000. Within a remarkably short time the worldwide sales of Milne’s four children’s books, in a multitude of languages, would be counted in millions.

  6

  THE END OF A CHAPTER

  Not long after Winnie-the-Pooh was published, the Milnes were at Cotchford for the weekend and had one of Piglet’s floods on the Saturday night. They were not entirely surrounded by water (Cotchford Farm is built on the side of the valley) but the water came up to the wall at the edge of the terrace ‘and from there was one large sheet of water as far as you could see in the moonlight. Unfortunately Billy was asleep, which was very unfair.’ Milne resisted the temptation, writing to Ken, to quote himself: ‘It wasn’t much good having anything exciting like floods, if you couldn’t share them with somebody.’ But Daphne was there, gazing out at the water too; and if she was not quite as excited as the boy would have been, that was only to be expected.

  He went on:

  Moon tells me that Pooh is ‘what I call a good sort of book’, which has encouraged me greatly. He is terribly sweet just now – and so is Daff – and so am I – and I have just finished with the dentist for another 9 months or so, and am feeling rather bucked.

  There was none of that terrible uncertainty about what he was going to do next. Half of the poems for Now We Are Six were already written and the ending of Winnie-the-Pooh deliberately paved the way for a sequel:

  ‘And what did happen?’ asked Christopher Robin . . .

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Could you think, and tell me and Pooh some time?’

  ‘If you wanted it very much.’

  ‘Pooh does,’ said Christopher Robin.

  Indeed, the Evening News Christmas edition again carried a new Pooh story, just as it had the year before. Milne had every reason to feel pleased with himself,
but he could hardly believe his luck would last. He was finding the financial side of things difficult to manage. ‘I feel I must save quickly, and I never know how much. It’s so easy for a writer to drop out and be forgotten. I have just been helping Edwin Pugh,’ he told Ken, ‘who is starving and has had one article accepted in the last 18 months.’ The lack of security never interfered with his generosity.

  One indication of Milne’s unusual reputation at this period was that he was invited to join the Athenaeum ‘under the provisions of Rule II’. Most men put their names on a waiting list and waited, hoping to get there in the end. To be invited was a considerable honour and a rare one; certainly not one to be refused. Rule II required that the Members elected should be ‘persons of distinguished eminence in Science, Literature, or the Arts or for Public Services’ and that at the relevant meeting ‘nine at least of the Committee be actually present, and the whole of those present unanimous in their Election’. Milne was rather pleased about it. He thought when he first lunched there that the denizens were more human than he expected. The Chicago Daily Tribune, giving the story of Milne’s election, called it ‘one of the most awesome and one of the most legendary places on earth’.

  Writing to Swinnerton on 9 March 1928 he said: ‘I feel poetical for some reason. Possibly the result of joining the Athenaeum. But I’m afraid I must chat to Sticko – I mean stick to Chatto.’ Swinnerton had left the firm, after eighteen years reading for them, and was trying to persuade Milne to take his plays away. But Milne would not be persuaded. Harold Raymond, at Chatto, if not as entertaining an editor as Swinnerton, seemed keen and conscientious. Profits and sales were tiny compared with the children’s books, but at least the plays were kept in print in attractive editions, which was the most important thing.

  One source of income – from his manuscripts – Milne was not at all keen to exploit. When Carl Pforzheimer approached him for the manuscript of The Ivory Door, Daphne wrote: