The children’s books of AA Milne are lived as much as read. Like the boy in the poem “Lines and Squares” from When We Were Very Young, I’ve measured my steps on pavements to avoid the cracks, mindful of some ill-defined threat to the order of things. I’ve followed the progress of drips down panes of glass on rainy days, as in “Waiting at the Window” from Now We Are Six.
Winnie-the-Pooh, Milne’s most famous creation, summons a memory almost too distant to pin down of a lazy afternoon beside a river in Staffordshire, tossing twigs off a bridge and waiting for the current to take them under and out the other side; and then much later, and much more clearly, of the less idyllic Lewisham stream where I introduced the game to my children as my parents had to me. Exactly how these rituals came to be established was a question on which the author’s son Christopher would muse in later life: “Did I do something and did my father write a story around it? Or was it the other way about, and did the story come first?” Whichever it was, the imaginative world they shared is now the property of all.
When readers were introduced to Poohsticks halfway through the last of Milne’s four great children’s books, 1928’s The House at Pooh Corner, the denizens of the Hundred Acre Wood had already established themselves as cultural fixtures on both sides of the Atlantic. Full of subtle wordplay and logical sleight-of-hand, the stories were popular with adults from the start. But their appeal was grounded first of all in the gentle ensemble comedy generated by a cast that embodied the wonder and confusion of early childhood: Pooh, “the bear of little brain” whose natural modesty is unaffected by his ability to knock out Edward Lear-standard nonsense poetry at will; Piglet, the anxious Very Small Animal who just occasionally lifts himself to feats of great bravery; sergeant-major-ish Rabbit; pompous but ignorant Owl; bouncy, irrepressible Tigger; devoted Kanga and impetuous Roo; and, of course, the old donkey Eeyore, perpetual pessimist, proto-Remainer and mouthpiece for many of Milne’s best lines (“Good Morning, Pooh . . . If it is a good morning. Which I doubt”).
By the time Pooh and Piglet arrive at the bridge, the writing is taking on a more elegiac tone. Below, the stream has broadened out to the point where “it was almost a river, and, being grown up, it did not run and jump and sparkle along as it used to do when it was younger, but moved more slowly”. Christopher Robin, the small boy who plays the role of adult throughout the stories, dispensing advice and leading “expotitions”, has already begun to withdraw from the action, leaving the toys to their own devices until he emerges from his studies in the afternoon. Here was a vision of childhood at its most perfect, captured at the moment when it would soon have to be set aside.
For Christopher Milne, the transition would prove a difficult one to make. Exposed to the glare of publicity from the publication of When We Were Very Young in 1924, he never managed to shake off the angelic images that fuelled the bullying he endured at boarding school. Eventually he came to feel his childhood had been exploited, even to resent the books’ success — as would the author himself, exasperated at how these 70,000 words spread over a few slim volumes in the 1920s had defined him as a writer and overshadowed the plays, novels and political works that he regarded as his true calling.
One boy’s childhood was coming to an end — and a whole era’s conception of childhood was receding as well. That, at least, is one explanation for the trouble I’ve had injecting a few early 20th-century classics into my kids’ literary diet over the past few years. Sometimes, as when snagged on the serpentine sentences of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, it can feel like simply a matter of linguistic change, that process through which, generation by generation, works that were once part of the living childhood canon slip into the territory of literary history. Just occasionally you will feel an icy blast of stern morality: I, at least, felt a little alarmed on reaching the concluding pages of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck, when the fox is seen off by hounds and a chastened Jemima is marched back to her safe but unfulfilling life on the farm. Know your place, the story seems to say — not much of a message for the modern child.
Yet Potter is really an outlier, harking back to another time. Across the landmarks of late Victorian and early 20th-century literature — in J M Barrie’s Peter Pan, Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, Milne and many others — the dominant strain is not moral uplift but rather a view of childhood as something to be treasured, a state of grace from which even adults might learn a thing or two.
This, in one sense, was a big improvement on what came before, and it is no accident that classics of the period continue to loom over us, endlessly reimagined in film. Still, when I think of the stories that my kids enjoy most, I’m struck by one big difference: they seem to take place in a world that children and adults share. Fantasy has not disappeared, but it has been domesticated: the witches are good at heart, the monsters misunderstood, and magical academies run much along the lines of ordinary schools. Childhood, once something enchanted and separate, has been reintegrated into the rest of life.
Milne was 41 when he began work on When We Were Very Young; a successful playwright and a humorist who had made his name with the magazine Punch. As a model for the idealised childhood, his own was hard to better. Growing up above the north London school run by his father, a headmaster with progressive views on education, he and his two brothers had been encouraged to roam as they pleased from an early age and follow their intellectual passions where they led. This propelled Alan, the youngest and most precocious, first to Westminster School on a scholarship and then to Cambridge, where his editorship of the university journal Granta gave him a platform to pursue a career in journalism.
Milne’s contradictions were becoming apparent in this period. Specialising as a satirist in vignettes of middle-class life, he moved freely in clubland and made a fashionable marriage in 1913 to Daphne de Sélincourt, goddaughter of the then Punch editor Owen Seaman. In his will he split the rights to Pooh between his family, the Royal Literary Fund, Westminster and the Garrick Club.
Yet he was always uncomfortable with privilege. “In my day,” he wrote in his autobiography in 1939, “there was something called Society, into which (unless you were born there) it was almost impossible to enter; and if you were outside it, as I was, you read about it in the Society papers with awe or indulgence or an amused contempt.”
Liberal convictions also marked him out in the Punch offices, where his relationship with the staunchly Tory Seaman — proposed by some as the inspiration for Eeyore — was not quite as straightforward as the introduction to Daphne would suggest. Indeed, it was partly Milne’s realisation that his politics stood in the way of his ever assuming the editorship himself that stiffened his resolve to strike out as a playwright. A pacifist who had been invalided out from the Somme, he would write in his 1934 polemic Peace with Honour: “I think war is the ultimate expression of man’s wickedness and man’s silliness . . . I think war wrong as I think cruelty to children wrong: as I think slavery and the burning of heretics wrong: as I think the exploitation of the poor wrong, and the corruption of the innocent.”
This complex hinterland, coupled with Pooh’s predilection for gnomic utterance, may explain the cottage industry in exegesis that has grown up around the books in more recent decades. The tendency was held in check for a while by Frederick Crews’ 1963 spoof of academic literary criticism, The Pooh Perplex, which introduced a collection of invented Owl-like professors pontificating on subjects such as “The Hierarchy of Heroism in Winnie-the-Pooh”. As the biographer Ann Thwaite put it in her fine life of Milne, “one’s pen freezes in one’s hand”. Yet plenty more have been undeterred. Benjamin Hoff’s guide to Chinese philosophy, The Tao of Pooh, comes to mind; so too the recent efforts by Conservative politicians to bring Milne into the debate over Britain’s relationship with the European Union, from Boris Johnson’s observation that the FT’s Brexit coverage managed “to make Eeyore look positively exuberant” to the speech this autumn in which MEP Daniel Hannan extolled the virtues of Tigger to Canadian parliamentarians.
The satirist in Milne would have enjoyed some of this — though as the creator of what must be the most conflict-free fantasy world in English literature, where dangers invariably turn out to be imagined (the Heffalump, for example) or the product of misunderstandings (Pooh and Piglet’s pursuit of their own footsteps in the Woozle story), he is unlikely to have approved entirely. It occurs to me that the only vaguely discomforting episode over the course of the entire two storybooks comes when the animals briefly gang up on the migrants Kanga and Roo, before realising the error of their ways. And then there is Tigger’s habit of conflating his own personal tastes with the preferences of all Tiggers . . . but I will stop there with this liberal-pacifist reading of Pooh, not least for fear that the still-combative Crews may return to the fray.
As for my own kids, I’m going to persist with Milne — and perhaps next year’s Disney biopic of Christopher Robin will help make my case. “I just think bears are a bit silly,” my six-year-old daughter said the last time I tried. But that was a very long time ago now, about last Friday: since then we have been to see Paddington 2.
Lorien Kite is the FT’s books editor
‘Winnie-the-Pooh: Exploring a Classic’ runs at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, from December 9 to April 8 2018; vam.ac.uk
Follow @FTMag on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first. Subscribe to FT Life on YouTube for the latest FT Weekend videos
Photographs: Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Shepard Trust; Matt Flynn
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2017
2017 The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved. Please do not copy and paste FT articles and redistribute by email or post to the web.
