Goodbye Christopher Robin

by Ann Thwaite

  My husband has found the MS of The Ivory Door and suggests that I ask 1,000 dollars for it. He doesn’t suppose that it is worth this or any other particular sum, but if it hasn’t got any considerable value for anybody else, he would sooner keep it – partly from sentiment, because it is his favourite play, and partly because manuscripts sometimes get more valuable later on. Of course he will quite understand if you don’t want to pay this for it – in fact he says that in your place he certainly wouldn’t.

  But Pforzheimer was not to be put off. He asked for a ‘special foreword’ for his wife and, when that arrived, dispatched $1,000.

  Milne was extremely famous, but there were still some people who had never heard of him. One night the telephone rang and Daphne said to the stranger at the other end of the line that Mr Milne was out:

  STRANGER (After apologies) What I wanted to ask Mr Milne was, Has he any relations living in Weybridge?

  DAFF: I don’t think so. I’ve never heard of any.

  S: Oh! (With an apologetic laugh) You see, we’re having a Treasure Hunt in Weybridge, and one of the clues was something to do with A. A. Milne, so I looked him up in the Telephone Book to see his Weybridge address, and found that he lived in Chelsea, so I wondered if any of his family—

  D: But surely it referred to one of his books?

  S: His what?

  D: Books!

  S: I’m sorry—

  D: Books!

  S: (bewildered) Oh!

  D: You knew he was the well-known author—

  S: The what?

  D: AUTHOR!

  S: Oh! . . . Oh, well, you see, I’m afraid that’s not much in my line, all that sort of thing. Thanks so much. Sorry to have troubled you for nothing.

  Good-bye. (Exit to resume hunt – but I doubt if he was successful.)

  The Milne phone number was obviously not ex-directory and there would sometimes be calls from strangers with hard-luck stories. There would also be begging letters, among the piles of praise and requests for articles, appearances, autographs. It was now that Milne began to develop the habit Christopher Milne described of doing nothing about some things – which, as Owl said wisely, was sometimes the best thing. But Milne had plenty of charitable impulses: he gave generously both to the Royal Literary Fund for indigent writers and the Society of Authors Pension Fund. He would often write something for good causes. In a sense, it was guilt money. He would say how easy it was to give money, how difficult to do anything for those worse off than ourselves. At least writing fundraising letters was more worthwhile than just writing cheques. He raised funds for the Children’s Country Holiday Fund, writing regular annual letters about the scheme in The Times. In one he said, ‘Ladies may regret their last hat, and a man the new brassie which has not added twenty yards to his drive. The only money which we are never sorry to have spent is the money which we have given away.’

  Milne supported Toc H. In one appeal he wrote for Tubby Clayton, he expressed again his feeling that no one should congratulate themselves as having earned their good fortune, no one can claim to be a self-made man. ‘Idiots we are, if we can look at ourselves, however high our achievements, however great our success, with anything but humility and thankfulness. Our achievements, our possessions, are not of our own making; they were given to us. There is only one honest answer to that hackneyed question of the interviewer: “To what do you attribute your success?” And the answer is “Luck!”’ He appealed to people to say thank you for their good fortune by helping others who had been less lucky.

  On another occasion, he wrote an extremely successful appeal letter on behalf of a hospital, signing thousands of letters and writing hundreds of thank-yous. It began like this:

  I expect you know the story of the man who took his friend to the bar, and said, with a large and generous air, ‘Now then, what would you like?’ – to which the friend replied that he thought he would like a pint of champagne. ‘Oh!’ said his host, ‘Well, try thinking of something nearer threepence.’

  What the Hampstead General Hospital would like is £10,000, and it would be a simplification of its finances if you were charming enough to send them a cheque for that amount in the enclosed envelope; but if you would prefer to think of something nearer threepence I shall understand. Not near enough to give you the bother of buying stamps or postal orders; something in guineas, I suggest, which will give you no more trouble than the opening of your cheque-book. But just as you like, so long as you help us.

  Milne drew the line at appearing at the Savoy luncheon or the Mayfair Hotel dinner in connection with the appeal. He rarely appeared in public. ‘I may be unique in not wanting to say anything aloud at any time,’ he once said, and on another occasion: ‘I dislike public appearances, always avoid them, and am, in fact, not very good at them.’ ‘“Some can and some can’t, that’s how it is”, as Christopher Robin’s friend, Pooh, used to say,’ Milne quoted, at a time when he was still quoting Pooh. (There would be times when the very name would make him shudder.)

  With the extraordinary success of the children’s books, Milne altered his life in no way at all. He had completed the purchase of Cotchford Farm almost at the very moment that When We Were Very Young was published. He had no wish for any larger or grander home either in London or the country. Both houses were comfortably equipped and furnished and staffed. He ran a good enough car (later there would be another, which stayed permanently at Cotchford) and employed a chauffeur. Milne said he had inherited from his father a love not of money but of not having to worry about it, of being extravagant in a thoroughly sensible way. ‘We set our standards within our income and then enjoyed them carelessly . . . I shouldn’t be happy if I couldn’t be reckless about golf-balls, taxis, the best seats at cricket grounds and theatres, shirts and pullovers, tips, subscriptions, books and wine-lists.’ He liked buying expensive lingerie for Daphne at Christmas, going to Harvey Nichols, consulting the assistants and choosing with enormous care – ‘soft, pretty crêpe-de-chiney, lacey things. What fun!’ He enjoyed these minor extravagances. (Daphne would enjoy more major extravagances of her own.) He made sure he was always salting enough away not only for the future of his own family, but for Ken’s as well.

  Milne never gambled, but he would put up money for something he thought worth doing. For instance, in the summer of 1928 his friend P. G. Wodehouse was looking for an extra backer for Ian Hay’s dramatisation of his novel A Damsel in Distress. Wodehouse wrote: ‘The management, Ian and I are each putting up £500. We needed another £500 to make up the necessary £2,000 and A. A. Milne gallantly stepped forward and said he would like to come in. I don’t think we shall lose our money as Ian has done an awfully good job.’ It indeed proved a safe investment.

  Milne had taken on the responsibility for Ken’s family with a real joy that he was able to do it. ‘CVSD’ (ça va sans dire) he would say to Ken, over and over again, when some question of education or medical expenses came up. They were such a rewarding family. ‘I love you all,’ he ended one letter to Ken and obviously meant it. At the end of another letter he wrote, ‘You must be very proud of your family. So am I – I mean of yours, but also of mine. He is a darling. Much too good for me. So is Daff.’ (Viola Tree had just described him in the Woman’s Pictorial as ‘a natural bachelor’. ‘For a natural bachelor I have done well,’ he wrote. Certainly, a great deal better than Kenneth Grahame, that other ‘natural bachelor’.)

  It was fortunate for both families that he had done so well financially. But he never let his riches go to his head. He remained sensible about money. Christopher Milne would say, ‘There was something not quite nice about being rich.’ A. A. Milne could hardly believe that he was or that, if he really was, that he would remain so. He always had the feeling at the back of his mind that in some mysterious way it would suddenly stop, that no one would buy his books or produce his plays and he would have to live on his savings. One of Ken’s children remembered that he always read bills carefully before paying them and
was often appalled by high prices (a relic surely of the time when he first came to London). He would be amazed at the cost of Christopher’s school clothes or of a particular restaurant (‘Gosh, this costs more than the Mirabelle!’) and his niece once caught him out in an extraordinary small economy, ‘re-using last year’s diary, altering the days’. Perhaps it was really just that he had kept forgetting to buy a new one until the point when there were none left in the shops. He sometimes failed to realise just how short of money Ken’s daughters were when they were first working in London. He would ask them to dinner at Mallord Street before the theatre, forgetting how the cost of the taxi, which they would need to take because of their theatre-going clothes and the time factor, meant that they would have to cut down on their lunches for a week.

  J. V. Milne took a particular pleasure in his son’s new kind of success. It was as if he had been waiting all the time for the children’s books. He relished every sales figure, every sign of their widespread fame (Pooh prints being given away with Home Chat, ‘Vespers’ being sung on the wireless). Alan wrote to Ken: ‘Father seems so terribly happy and excited that he makes me feel ashamed of not having made him happy before.’

  Christopher Robin had other things on his mind besides Pooh, now that he was six and a half. His world was expanding. Someone had given him a map of Africa, which hung on the wall of his bedroom and fed his imagination. One day he would travel far further than A. A. Milne ever had. Books fed his mind too. ‘Moon is devoted to the Children’s Encyclopaedia, which I gave him at Christmas, and brings a volume down to breakfast whenever he comes. Flags, beetles and the inside of engines seem to be his favourite reading.’ Years before, Milne had surprised a nursery of Ken’s children similarly absorbed. He had gone up expecting to have to impersonate a bear but had found there was no demand for bears. ‘Each child lay on its front, engrossed in a volume of the Children’s Encyclopaedia. Nobody looked up as I came in. Greatly relieved, I also took a volume of the great work and lay down on my front.’ He considered many of the answers were aimed more at him than at the children.

  Take a question like ‘Why does a stone sink?’ No child wants to know why a stone sinks; it knows the answer already – ‘What else could it do?’ Even Sir Isaac Newton was grown up before he asked why an apple fell, and there had been men in the world fifty thousand years before that, none of whom bothered his head about gravity.

  Christopher was particularly concerned about his wildlife, and not just beetles. He went off to stay with the Darlingtons on one occasion, taking the volume containing CATERPILLARS with him, much to his father’s dismay when he wanted to check on a curious caterpillar he had found in Christopher’s absence. Was it a Death’s Head Hawk Moth? It was certainly bigger than a Poplar Hawk. He wrote to Ken that it ‘Looked exactly like a small snake in marking and colouring . . . and the Enc. Britt. isn’t very forthcoming on the subject.’

  Now We Are Six was slowly taking shape. Milne wrote to Shepard after a day at Methuen, ‘Muller and I got to work on the book today, and I saw the new drawings. At present we have pasted up 14, taking 42 pages.’ Milne told Shepard how much space he was reckoning ‘for some of the poems which you have still to do’. He planned, for instance, that ‘Forgiven’, the one about Alexander Beetle, should take up three pages, giving Shepard the chance to draw the disappearing beetle over and over again as he runs away and disappears off the page. But it didn’t work out quite right. It should have been a right-hand page. As it is, poor Alexander Beetle looks as if he has been cut in two.

  Milne was slightly worried about the length of the new book. In the end, it turned out to be a couple of pages longer than When We Were Very Young, though there were nine poems fewer. Shepard was already working on the second collection of Pooh stories. Milne had bought another new character and looked forward to seeing him for the first time: ‘I’m longing to see the “Tigger” illustrations,’ he wrote. Shepard had introduced the toys into the illustrations for Now We Are Six far more than Milne had into the poems themselves. Pooh goes nearly everywhere that Christopher Robin goes, of course, as Milne suggests in ‘Us Two’:

  Wherever I am, there’s always Pooh,

  There’s always Pooh and Me.

  Whatever I do, he wants to do,

  ‘Where are you going today?’ says Pooh:

  ‘Well, that’s very odd ’cos I was too.

  ‘Let’s go together,’ says Pooh, says he.

  ‘Let’s go together,’ says Pooh.

  He goes along, just as he always did, with Anne and Christopher on their morning walk. But Eeyore and Piglet and Kanga and Roo are there from time to time too. They wait on the platform in ‘The Engineer’. They had become such public figures they could hardly be left out entirely. Methuen’s advance publicity would say the new book was ‘better’ than When We Were Very Young. ‘This is doubtful,’ Milne said – but he thought it ‘pretty much as good as’. Certainly, it contained a number of poems – ‘King John’s Christmas’, ‘Sneezles’, ‘The Old Sailor’ and ‘In the Dark’, for instance – as memorable as anything in the earlier book.

  With four of the House at Pooh Corner stories under his belt, Milne was spending August at Cotchford working on a play – ‘a Detective Play which is fun to do’. Plays were always fun to do. The awful part came afterwards. Negotiations for The Ivory Door were still going on. That was the ‘Shakespearean’ one – the costume play with masses of characters. There was the possibility it might be done that autumn in both New York and London. In the event it opened in New York in October – but it was not until April 1929, after the detective play, that it came on in London. ‘I have given up bothering about it,’ Milne told Ken, but it was still very close to his heart. A headline in a Canadian paper the year before (of a review of his Chatto volume Four Plays) read:

  A. A. MILNE’S STAR IS NOW IN ASCENDANT AS PLAYWRIGHT

  It was hardly a snappy headline and he knew, in any case, it was not true. Already too many people were thinking of him primarily as a children’s writer. A review of the same book in Granta began:

  I think Mr Milne, at some time in his career, must have whispered to himself, ever so gently, ‘One day, I shall write a great play’; and I’m also certain that after completing this volume, he whispered, even more gently, ‘I shall never write a great play.’

  The volume included Success, one of the plays for which Milne had had such particularly high hopes. The Granta reviewer liked it too. ‘In parts there is a vigour and a strength, which in spite of all the doubts, leave a hope; and I have hoped for and enjoyed Mr Milne for so long that I can’t give up the habit. Perhaps, after all, he hasn’t whispered that second sentence.’ I think, in fact, that he had. There is no way, really, that a ‘detective play’ can be a ‘great play’. He would write half a dozen more plays. He would never write a great play.

  The Fourth Wall, which would be produced in New York as The Perfect Alibi, was certainly an ingenious play – ‘an exceedingly interesting one from a technical point of view. In the first act it shows us a murder. We see the crime committed and who has done it. In the second and third acts we watch the other characters trying to unravel the mystery. Such a scheme is, of course, the very opposite of what generally happens in “detective plays” . . . Courage and originality of treatment are things to be thankful for, and for their sakes I rank The Fourth Wall as far above any other “detective play” I have seen,’ one reviewer would say. The bus-boards would read ‘the best murder in London’ in a season when nearly every first act contained a corpse.

  But in the summer of 1927 Milne was really not worrying about anything as he sat in a deck chair on the lawn at Cotchford, writing to Ken:

  We are terribly happy here. I could go on and on doing nothing but watch Daff weed, and she could go on and on weeding. Really the garden is lovely now, and I wish you and Maud could see it. We have just been ordering our next year’s improvements. I shall leave something beautiful behind anyway. Moon had a tent, two ba
ntams and a rope-ladder among his birthday presents. The lady bantam laid her first egg yesterday, and he has just eaten it. He knows the name of every flower in the garden; and when the expert horticulturist points to a small green, as yet unflowering, bush, and says ‘What’s that? I don’t think I know that?’Moon pipes up, ‘Zauschneria – or Californian fuchsia’. And he not only knows but can spell Eschscholtzia, which nobody else can do.

  Now We Are Six was published on 13 October in both Britain and America. Christopher Robin’s copy was inscribed:

  For my Moon

  From his Blue

  Now I am 45

  Milne wrote to tell Ken in November: ‘The reviews have been poor in England but much better in America. If I were a critic I should loathe A. A. Milne. How could one help wanting to say that he was falling off, or taking success too easily or whatnot? However this is the end of the verses; and then, after one more Pooh book, I must think of something else. In fact, it’s time I tried a novel.’ The reviews were mixed, with plenty of critics in both countries enjoying the new book. In Britain, the Spectator said: ‘The severest criticism that can possibly be made . . . is that it does not quite reach the extraordinarily high standard he has set himself.’ In America, the New York Times said that it might not be ‘as fresh as When We Were Very Young but it comes close’.

  In fact, it did not matter very much what the reviews said. On both sides of the Atlantic, the new book sold immediately and enormously on the strength of the earlier book of poems. At Christmas, J. V. Milne was able to write to his friend, Miss Pinnington: ‘The success of Alan’s books is remarkable.’ He set out these British sales figures: