The Price Of Pooh
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers & Writitig THE PRICE OF POOH BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Certajn fictional characters become more real than their creators in the public mind, and then weigh like an albatross around the...
...Dorothy Parker chimed in with the parody "Tonstant Weader fwowed up...
...Milne's problem was that he was beginning to chafe at the label "juvenile author...
...Writers & Writitig THE PRICE OF POOH BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Certajn fictional characters become more real than their creators in the public mind, and then weigh like an albatross around the neck of the unfortunate author...
...With his brains and wit, he could have comfortably rubbed shoulders with the Bloomsbury group...
...And I sense from this account that given his ambition to succeed, A.A...
...Milne strongly desired immortality as a writer, and, against all odds, he won it...
...Wodehouse retaliated by pillorying Pooh in his next Jeeves novel...
...the plot is resolved by the discovery that it has all been a farcical misunderstanding, and anguish dissolves happily in new curtains for the morning room...
...Longing to prove himself a "serious" writer, he became earnest...
...today, a few summer stock companies and high schools still produce The Admirable Crichton ox Dear Brutus, but every child knows who Peter Pan is...
...Thwaite has discovered that Kanga also was originally to have been masculine...
...No character since Lewis Carroll's Alice had so captured people's imaginations...
...The only dynamic figure is Pooh, waving a stuffed paw at the camera...
...A sad story...
...Graham Greene snarled that Milne represented every superficial quality of British writing...
...Just before the War broke out, Milne had married a vivacious socialite, Dorothy de Selincourt, who soon rechristened herself Daphne...
...My father's heart remained buttoned-up all through his life," Christopher Robin wrote in his own memoir, The Enchanted Places...
...Initially, the invasion of Christopher Robin's nursery by reporters was stimulating for the whole family...
...He lingered on, his once happy nature now completely soured, until 1956...
...Yes, but a lucky one as well...
...Milne subsequently attempted an attack on Christianity in a long Betjemanesque poem, just when literary tastes were embracing Eliot's "Four Quartets...
...Benson and his brother Arthur, Angela Thirkell and Margery Sharp turned out sparkling comic novels or bittersweet love stories...
...Others thought so, as well...
...Now they seem inhibited—Barrie without emotion, Wilde without frivolity...
...He went so far as to blast poor P. G. Wodehouse when the latter, in German custody, inadvertently participated in a Nazi propaganda effort...
...Notables from royalty to Supreme Court justices to Fred Ast aire wrote fan mail to him...
...His own parents had been "Victorian sweethearts," sharing a double bed all their lives...
...Milne evidently believed that, like seahorses, male kangaroos nurtured the joeys...
...At Cambridge, Milne had lived on the fringes of a circle that included Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell and Leonard Woolf...
...His sketches gave birth to "The Rabbits," a group of Bright Young Things...
...Earlier he had developed a bad stammer...
...The wonderfully ludicrous dialogue that gives life to the stories is the acme of Milne's "Rabbits" technique...
...When you know, you won't be so gay...
...Milne: The Man Behind Winnie-the-Pooh (Random House, 554 pp., $29.95), Ann Thwaite tells the story of how a Bear of Very Little Brain took over the career of a sophisticated entertainer...
...Critics acclaimed them masterpieces, mentioning Milne in the same breath with Barrie and Oscar Wilde...
...Still, one wonders how ardent Milne was...
...Thwaite blames the woman...
...Winnie-the-Pooh (1926), and its even stronger sequel, The House at Pooh Corner(1928), contain a depth of feeling absent in any of his writings for adults...
...He published his pacifist manifesto Peace with Honor on the eve of World War II, then quickly reversed himself and defended Britain's entrance into battle, lest he seem unpatriotic...
...Alan and Daphne always spoke of the importance of comradeship in marriage —talking together, laughing at the same jokes...
...Toward the end of his life Milne also was estranged from Christopher, who resented the high price the family paid for Pooh's success...
...Her own son cut off all contact with her during the last 15 years of her life...
...Inevitably the accolades provoked counterreactions...
...As the world of Pooh developed in Milne's imagination, it clearly took shape from Grahame's carefree, female-less Riverbank...
...At 24 he was an assistant editor at Punch, where he wrote "sketches," inventing an insouciant form of dialogue between Smart Set characters that became his lifelong trademark...
...Upon leaving Cambridge University, where he had edited the literary magazine, he told his schoolmaster father that he planned to make his living by writing...
...Alan Alexander Milne belonged to a breed of writers once immensely popular but now virtually extinct...
...In A.A...
...Barrie watched with dismay as his children's pantomime eclipsed his plays for adults...
...she paints an unattractive portrait of an extravagant social butterfly, glad to get her only child packed off to boarding school and eventually unfaithful to her patient, loving husband...
...The author's unfamiliar face looks enigmatic, half shadowed by the familiar bobbed hair and childish features of Christopher Robin, who lolls against his shoulder...
...Milne worked Pooh into several poems in his first bestseller, When We Were Very Young (1924), a showcase for his skill with light verse...
...The gaiety and irresponsibility of your work are rarer gifts than you wot of now...
...But a prudish streak kept him away from the salacious talk that was becoming a staple in serious literary coteries...
...Not that adults didn't love Pooh...
...Ironically, the most successful and lasting dramatic achievement of Milne's life was an adaptation of Grahame's masterpiece for pantomime, Toad of Toad Hall...
...Though the externals of Christopher Robin's fictional character derived from the real boy, Milne probably saw himself in the role—the wise, loving god of Pooh's world...
...In 1952 the poet suffered a disabling stroke...
...Prior to World War I light verse was all the rage, and Milne excelled at this too, tossing off poems in The style that, week by blessed week, Mixed Calverley and J. K. Stephen With much that was (I hold) unique...
...Milne, who never took criticism well, was especially incensed at this and responded acidly, "No writer of children's books says gaily to his publisher, 'Don'tbother about thechildren, Mrs...
...Even the military service in the Great War hardly dampened Milne's sunny temperament (though he returned from the Somme a convinced pacifist...
...Milne's gifts perfectly suited this milieu...
...It surely did not help that Christopher showed no talent for becoming the ace cricket player his father had decided he would grow up to be the day he was born...
...Randall Jarrell pronounced the verses "the perfect book for a soldier...
...When he sat down to write "A Study in Scarlet," Arthur Conan Doyle never dreamed his own name would only be remembered because of Sherlock Holmes...
...The pessimistic donkey Eeyore parodied Owen Seaman, Punch's formidable edit or, with whom Milne had fallen out...
...Editors and critics compared whatever he wrote with Pooh...
...Barrie told him, "I see no one among the young people with so light and gay and happy a touch as you show...
...The book's jacket displays a revealing photograph that shows Milne holding his son and the famous teddy bear on his lap...
...The children of Milne's brother Ken, who were interviewed by the author, disliked their aunt...
...They basked in the announcement in Parents' Magazine that the boy was one of the world's most famous children...
...Their silly conversations entranced readers and provoked comparisons with Lewis Carroll...
...PimPassesBy, concerns unwitting bigamy—rather titillating to audiences of the 1920s...
...Parker will love it...
...Ann Thwaite does not make the point in her ? verlong biography, y et many writers simply don't possess personalities capable of competing with their inspirations...
...Perhaps in imitation of his literary hero, Milne began to tell the little Christopher Robin stories about his stuffed animals...
...Born in 1882, he came of age in an era when Punch was the popular magazine, the stage specialized in drawing room comedies like What Every Woman Knows, and Edwardian novelists such as E.F...
...The only Milne play that occasionally attracts amateur theatrical groups at present, Mr...
...Many years passed before Milne fully understood that ominous compliment...
...Milne would risk all again for the sort of triumph he achieved...
...In the 1920s he wrote plays that became hits on both sides of the Atlantic...
...But once Christopher was in prep school he hated being asked if he still went hoppity hop...
...Milne's Favorite book was Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows—written for his only son...
...His timing, however, was fatal...
...Nevertheless, Milne was no Ibsen...
...True, he will always be upstaged by Pooh...
...Meanwhile, he continued to shine as a humorist...
...Everyone quoted lines from it...
...The carefree spirit of When We Were Very Young had been irrevocably broken...
...Later the father claimed he was inspired by the boy speaking in Pooh's voice and turning the toy into a kind of alter ego (although Christopher insists in his poignant memoir that it was his mother who first animated the bear, Piglet and the others in nursery games...
...For once, his heart came unbuttoned...
...After his brother's death, Alan remembered him as kinder and more lovable than himself—possibly because he had bested Ken in school and in his career...
...But in a day when people were shying away from anything overly sentimental, they provided a bridge between Quality Street and Private Lives...
...This idealization probably contributed to the formation of Pooh...
...Feeling thoroughly disillusioned, he commented, I doubt if we have ever had A world so sad and mad and bad, And, being part of it, I see That part of it is due to me...
...Yet passion seems to have been lacking...
...Until middle age his one intimate friend remained Ken, his elder by only 16 months and raised almost as atwin...
Vol. 74 • January 1991 • No. 2
