Goodbye Christopher Robin

by Ann Thwaite

  When We Were Very Young

  179th thousand

  Winnie-the-Pooh

  96th thousand

  Now We Are Six

  109th thousand

  In America they were correspondingly larger. The reviews in both countries were almost unanimously enthusiastic. Everyone had been told it was the last book and again and again reviewers lamented the fact. Punch said: ‘The last book is as good as the first. It is too bad that Christopher Robin has to grow up.’ The Saturday Review: ‘The stories have lost none of their charm. It is a shame to see them end.’ Even the Times Literary Supplement, although it congratulated Milne on deciding to avoid ‘the temptation to repeat his successful formula mechanically’, said: ‘It is sad to see the stories end.’ Only Dorothy Parker, the Constant Reader, returning to her attack of the previous year, poured scorn on Pooh’s hum, the one about ‘The more it snows, tiddely-pom’. It was an easy target:

  It ‘seemed to him a Good Hum, such as is Hummed Hopefully to Others.’ In fact, so Good a Hum did it seem that he and Piglet started right out through the snow to Hum It Hopefully to Eeyore. Oh, darn – there I’ve gone and given away the plot. Oh, I could bite my tongue out.

  As they are trotting along against the flakes, Piglet begins to weaken a bit.

  ‘“Pooh,” he said at last and a little timidly, because he didn’t want Pooh to think he was Giving In, “I was just wondering. How would it be if we went home now and practised your song, and then sang it to Eeyore tomorrow – or – the next day, when we happen to see him.”

  ‘“That’s a very good idea, Piglet,” said Pooh. “We’ll practise it now as we go along. But it’s no good going home to practise it, because it’s a special Outdoor Song which Has To Be Sung In The Snow.”

  ‘“Are you sure?” asked Piglet anxiously.

  ‘“Well, you’ll see, Piglet, when you listen. Because this is how it begins. The more it snows, tiddely-pom–”

  ‘“Tiddely what?” said Piglet.’ (He took, as you might say, the very words out of your correspondent’s mouth.)

  ‘“Pom,” said Pooh. “I put that in to make it more hummy.”’

  And it is that word ‘hummy’, my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up.

  Milne hated it, of course. He had resisted the temptation to reply the year before and now he would wait more than ten years. In his autobiography he wrote:

  The books were written for children. When, for instance, Dorothy Parker, as ‘Constant Reader’ in The New Yorker, delights the sophisticated by announcing that at page 5 of The House of Pooh Corner ‘Tonstant Weader fwowed up’ (sic, if I may), she leaves the book, oddly enough, much where it was. However greatly indebted to Mrs Parker, no Alderney, at the approach of the milkmaid, thinks ‘I hope this lot will turn out to be gin’, no writer of children’s books says gaily to his publisher, ‘Don’t bother about the children, Mrs Parker will love it.’

  Milne had made the decision to stop long before Mrs Parker. She simply added to his satisfaction in his own decision, so clearly included in the book itself. At the end of The House at Pooh Corner, shades of the prison house are beginning to close around Christopher Robin; it is all coming to an end. School and growing up are claiming the boy as they claim every child. Things would never be the same again.

  That Christmas, Christopher had his first pair of football boots and wore them in the house, ‘so as to get used to them’. In January 1929, just three months after the book was published, he started at prep school, at Gibbs’ in Sloane Square, in a bright red blazer, with a bright red cap on his newly trimmed hair. Nanny took him in the number 11 bus along the King’s Road. Milne wrote to Ken:

  Moon is in the thick of school life. Daff thinks he’s aged ten years. I don’t think it’s quite as bad as this, and anyway, if he’s 12 one moment, he’s 2 the next. Also instead of saying ‘No, Blosh’ (corruption of ‘Blue’) when I tell him to do anything, he now says ‘Yes, sir’ and does it. But somehow I fancy that the novelty of this will wear off. He is very happy, and began Latin and French on the same day, and is now grappling (a little prematurely, I think) with the domestic life of the four Georges.

  It was time to leave the Forest. As Christopher Robin said to Pooh:

  ‘I’m not going to do Nothing any more.’

  ‘Never again?’

  ‘Well, not so much. They don’t let you.’

  This is not sentimental. It is an occasion for real feeling and, if we cannot accept it, it is our fault, not Milne’s. It is only in the memory that ‘a little boy and his Bear will always be playing’, as the final often-quoted words of the last children’s book have it.

  To stop while the going was good, that was the point; and, if possible, to protect his son from any further glare of publicity. In 1929 Milne wrote at length, and cogently, about the reasons behind his decision. He had been amazed at the way readers, back in 1924, had singled out the child:

  You can imagine my amazement and disgust, then, when I discovered that in a night, so to speak, I had been pushed into a back place, and that the hero of When We Were Very Young was not, as I had modestly expected, the author, but a curiously named child of whom, at this time, I had scarcely heard. It was this Christopher Robin who kept mice, walked on the lines and not in the squares, and wondered what to do on a spring morning; it was this Christopher Robin, not I, whom Americans were clamouring to see; and in fact (to make due acknowledgement at last), it was this Christopher Robin, not I, not the publishers, who was selling the book in such large and ridiculous quantities.

  Now who was this Christopher Robin – the hero now, since it was so accepted, of When We Were Very Young; soon to be the hero of Winnie-the-Pooh and two other books? To me he was, and remained, the child of my imagination. When I thought of him, I thought of him in the Forest, living in his tree as no child really lives; not in the nursery, where a differently named child (so far as we in this house are concerned) was playing with his animals. For this reason I have not felt self-conscious when writing about him, nor apologetic at the thought of exposing my own family to the public gaze. The ‘animals’, Pooh and Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga, and the rest, are in a different case. I have not ‘created’ them. He and his mother gave them life, and I have just ‘put them into a book’. You can see them now in the nursery, as Ernest Shepard saw them before he drew them. Between us, it may be, we have given them shape, but you have only to look at them to see, as I saw at once, that Pooh is a Bear of Very Little Brain, Tigger Bouncy, Eeyore Melancholy and so on. I have exploited them for my own profit, as I feel I have not exploited the legal Christopher Robin. All I have got from Christopher Robin is a name which he never uses, an introduction to his friends . . . and a gleam which I have tried to follow.

  However, the distinction, if clear to me, is not so clear to others; and to them, anyhow, perhaps to me also, the dividing line between the imaginary and the legal Christopher Robin becomes fainter with each book. This, then, brings me (at last) to one of the reasons why these verses and stories have come to an end. I feel that the legal Christopher Robin has already had more publicity than I want for him. Moreover, since he is growing up, he will soon feel that he has had more publicity than he wants for himself. We all, young and old, hope to make some sort of a name, but we want to make it in our own chosen way, and, if possible, by our own exertions. To be the hero of the ‘3 not out’ in that heroic finish between Oxford and Cambridge (Under Ten), to be undisputed Fluff Weight Champion (four stone six) of the Lower School, even to be the only boy of his age who can do Long Division: any of these is worth much more than all your vicarious literary reputations. Lawrence hid himself in the Air Force under the name of Shaw to avoid being introduced for the rest of his life as ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. I do not want C. R. Milne ever to wish that his names were Charles Robert.

  The comparison between Lawrence of Arabia and Christopher Robin, which at first seems rather ridiculous, has re
al reverberations. Robert Graves once wrote of Lawrence, ‘He both despised and loved the legend that surrounded him’, and this was also true of Christopher Milne at different stages of his life. The great difference, of course, was that Lawrence’s legend was based on his own achievements, Christopher Robin’s on nothing he had done himself – and his mixed feelings would eventually transfer from the legend to his father, the author of it.

  Milne had another reason to stop writing for children. A writer has to believe that his latest book is his best:

  Can I go on writing these books, and persuade myself that each is better than the one before? I don’t see how it is possible. Darwin, or somebody, compared the world of knowledge to a circle of light. The bigger the circumference of light, the bigger the surrounding border of darkness waiting to be lit up. A child’s world of the imagination is not like that. As children we have explored it from end to end, and the map of it lies buried somewhere in our hearts, drawn in symbols whose meaning we have forgotten. A gleam from outside may light it up for us, so that for a moment it becomes clear again, and in that precious moment we can make a copy of it for others. But when the light has gone, to go on making fair copies of that copy – is it worth it?

  For writing, let us confess it unashamed, is fun. There are those who will tell you that it is an inspiration, they sing but as the linnet sings; there are others, in revolt against such priggishness, who will tell you that it is simply a business like any other. Others, again, will assure you (heroically) that it is an agony, and they would sooner break stones – as well they might. But though there is something of inspiration in it, something of business, something, at times, of agony, yet, in the main, writing is just thrill; the thrill of exploring. The more difficult the country, the more untraversed by the writer, the greater (to me, anyhow) the thrill.

  Well, I have had my thrill out of children’s books, and know that I shall never recapture it. At least, not until I am a grandfather.

  A. A. Milne never did know himself to be a grandfather. His only grandchild, Clare, was born, severely disabled, a few months after his death.

  Milne called that essay ‘The End of a Chapter’, as he came to the end of the five years or so in which he had been involved in writing the four children’s books for which he will always be remembered. There was another much longer chapter – indeed one should rather call it a book – that was also coming to an end. Just after The House at Pooh Corner was published his brother Ken became seriously ill. He had been ill with tuberculosis for years, but he had learned to live with it, to move around, to live a quiet but almost normal life. Now he had to take to his bed.

  At first his brother was not really alarmed. Ken had been in bed before. There was no reason to suppose he would not recover from this setback. Ken was having the best medical advice and treatment his brother could procure for him. ‘Don’t be afraid of having another specialist if you want one,’ Milne wrote. In his next letter he told Ken he had seen Christopher as Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night: ‘It’s a rotten part. For pages at a time he says nothing but “Ay, ’tis so” and, after an enormous wait, “And me too.” But he did make an effort to keep the thing going, and other people say he was very good. I suppose my standards of acting are too high.’ It was the first time, but it would not be the last, that Christopher disappointed his father. He went on:

  The Fourth Wall is a great go in New York. But I get terrible set-backs to make up. A Scarborough school-master wrote to ask if they could do a scene from Pooh without paying a fee. Daff wrote back certainly as long as it was a private performance etc, etc. Now he writes: ‘I wrote to you last Sunday, and received a reply from ‘Celia Brice’. I was not asking her but you. As you write (if you have written it) in this discourteous way, the dramatisation of that, or of any other scene in any of your works can go to blazes, and you with it. Yours faithfully.’ So I have nothing to hope from Scarborough.

  Life was not always plain sailing, even for the rich and healthy. ‘The Fiat broke down next to the Nurse Cavell statue and had to be towed home. I haven’t heard yet when if ever I shall see it again.’ Milne ended his letter. ‘Get well, please. Ever your very very affectionate, Alan.’ In the months to come, he would say that over and over again: ‘Get well, please.’

  Even at this difficult time, Ken’s wife Maud organised a special pencil with his name on it for Christopher’s Christmas present. Alan sent them not a cheque but a large bank note, hoping that would make it more likely that they would spend it on something nice but ‘entirely unnecessary’. ‘A happy Christmas to you with your family,’ Alan wrote to Ken, not allowing himself to realise it would be the last time he could send such a greeting. ‘I hope that you will all have a happier New Year.’

  Daphne and Alan Milne went to Grindelwald for skiing in February 1929; Ken and Alan had been there together in 1907, soon after Alan had joined Punch. Ken was much in his mind. He recalled an enormous walk they had done together. He showed it to everyone on the map and ‘nobody believes it’. His last visit to Switzerland had been in 1913 – when he and Daphne had become engaged. He thought of that time too:

  Sixteen years ago, I just went down moderate slopes, falling at the bottom and Daff didn’t go down, collapsing at the top. But there appears to be a lot more in it than that. Everybody here is terribly keen and many of them terribly good. Some of the things they do are beautiful to watch, and I feel, as I feel about anything I can’t do, that I would sooner do this one thing than everything which I can do. (Which isn’t much.)

  He told Ken about a Boy’s Own Paper lunch he had been to just before going to Switzerland:

  The Editor in replying to Baldwin’s toast told us of some of the questions boys ask him; and said that one boy – about 10 by his writing – asked for the price of an expedition to the North or South Pole, ‘for one man and his dog’. I gave one great ‘O-oh!’ when I heard this, and unaccountably found a tear trickling down my nose.

  He knew Ken would understand why he was so moved. He was weeping for the boys that he and Ken had been. He was weeping for lost childhood and for all the expeditions and adventures that they had had together, the two boys and their dog, a long-ago mongrel called Brownie. He was also weeping, perhaps, for the fact that life, rewarding and comfortable as it was, had not given him the challenges that he had imagined as a child, that the only snow he knew was the snow of safe comfortable Switzerland, not of the North Pole.

  Above all, Milne was weeping for the brother he was losing. Ken died on 21 May 1929, aged forty-nine. His most vivid link with his childhood had gone. Memory, that wellspring of his best writing for children, was now painful.

  AFTERWORD

  Alan Milne lived another twenty-eight years after the death of his brother Ken, and after his decision to stop writing about Christopher Robin. But neither he nor the boy himself could avoid the particular kind of fame the children’s books had brought them. When Milne went to America in 1931, ostensibly to publicise his new adult novel, Two People, and to discuss plans for a new play, he found nearly all the questions in bookshops and at parties were about Christopher Robin and Winnie-the-Pooh. Two years later the American Parents magazine named Christopher Robin as one of the five most famous children in the world.

  The thirties were a time when Alan and Daphne were increasingly leading separate lives. Daphne’s enthusiasm for the Pooh books and all the celebrity associated with them was itself a cause of friction between husband and wife at a time when Milne sometimes wished he had never written them. Daphne was finding the quiet life Milne liked (golf, watching cricket, and crossword puzzles, when he wasn’t writing) was not enough to satisfy her. There is plenty of evidence that both of them found some happiness with other people. Alan Milne would say: ‘Don’t miss any happiness that is going or you will find it gone.’ He felt only children can experience unalloyed happiness. When we are adult, ‘happiness is always tainted with the knowledge that one will have to pay for it.’ There were important rel
ationships, but the marriage survived.

  Alan Milne’s father died in 1932. All the links with his childhood were now severed. He had spent a great deal of his adult life looking forward to the next thing he was about to write, the next piece for Punch, the next play, the next book, full of optimism. It had always seemed that he was making his reputation. But now he had to accept that he had made it and it was not the one that he had wanted.

  We do not need, in this version of Milne’s story, to read much about the strains and stresses of the thirties, even the politics, the rise of fascism, with which Milne told an interviewer his mind was ‘intolerably preoccupied’. There was the singular success of just one of his books, Peace with Honour, in 1934, his tract against war. At that point Milne was temporarily famous for something other than being the father of Christopher Robin, but the odds were stacked against his pacifist views. They came to be seen as ‘appeasement’ and Milne himself would admit that there were some things that had to be fought. Six years later, he would publish War with Honour. For the most part, there were sluggish sales of his adult books and bad reviews of his plays.

  Just one play, Toad of Toad Hall (an adaptation of his favourite book) was enthusiastically received. It had been first suggested by Curtis Brown in 1921, but was not finally produced until 1929. It continued to be a Christmas treat for children for many years, until in the twenty-first century it was supplanted by Alan Bennett’s The Wind in the Willows.

  Milne came to hate the word ‘whimsical’ in his reviews and the constant references to the Pooh books. Even if he wrote something as straightforward as ‘the cat sat on the mat’, he said, he would be accused of being whimsical about cats, ‘not a real cat, but just a little make-believe pussy, such as the author of Winnie-the-Pooh invents so charmingly for our delectation’.