A. A. Milne was a haunted man.
To all appearances he was the acme of success. After achieving the coveted goal of a regular column in Punch at a surprisingly young age, he realised one day that all that lay ahead of him now was the Sisyphean task of having to come up with something mildly amusing (but not too racy) every week until the end of time.
As Ann Thwaite's excellent biography tells us, the outbreak of the First World War came almost as a relief to him: a chance to escape from this depressing drudgery.
Unfortunately things didn't quite work out like that. Milne was invalided home after a couple of months at the front with the common diagnosis of trench fever, or PUO [Pyrexia Unknown Origin] - in other words, feeling sick for no discernible reason.
The same thing happened to C. S. Lewis - and to J. R. R. Tolkien. Trench fever in both cases. Hence, I suppose, the fact that we have the "Narnia" books and The Lord of the Rings rather than another couple of names on the grandiose Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme.
Milne, like his younger contemporaries Lewis and Tolkien, never went back, instead managing to wangle himself a safe billet as a signals instructor. But, unlike the other two, he was abnormally sensitive for the rest of his life to any references to his perfectly respectable - albeit a little less than resplendent - war record.
When Milne watched the first performance of R. C. Sherriff's classic war play Journey's End in 1928, for instance, it was difficult to persuade him that Captain Stanhope's reference to Hibbert as "another little worm trying to wriggle home" was not a direct dig at him:
How long's he been out here? Three months, I suppose. Now he's decided he's done his bit. He's decided to go home and spend the rest of the war in comfortable nerve hospitals - He thinks he's going to wriggle home before the attack ... [quoted in Thwaite, 180]In any case, freed from the inferno of Punch as well as the Western Front, he started a new career as a West End dramatist, and produced a series of pretty successful plays - as well as screenplays for the burgeoning British film industry - throughout the 1920s and 30s.
But then came Christopher Robin.
The birth of his young son in 1920 inspired him to start writing a series of part-comic, part-sentimental poems, which seemed to hit a nerve with the reading public. Was it just that they were eager for whimsy after the horrors of the war? That was probably as much his motive for writing them as theirs for reading them - reading all that he could churn out and still demanding more.
The rest is history. I certainly couldn't escape endless readings of these poems and stories in my childhood, and neither - I suspect - could most of you. I can still recite a fair number of them from memory. And characters such as Eeyore, Tigger, and Piglet are ingrained in my soul.
Even at the time there were a few dissenters - such as the queen of sarcastic put-downs, Dorothy Parker. Here's an extract from her "Constant Reader" column in the New Yorker for October 12, 1928:
“The more itThe above lyric is culled from the fifth page of Mr. A. A. Milne’s new book, The House at Pooh Corner, for, although the work is in prose, there are frequent droppings into more cadenced whimsy. This one is designated as a “Hum,” that pops into the head of Winnie-the-Pooh as he is standing outside Piglet’s house in the snow, jumping up and down to keep warm. 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. I could bite my tongue out.
SNOWS-tiddely-pom,
The more it
GOES-tiddely-pom
The more it
GOES-tiddely-pom
On
Snowing.
“And nobody
KNOWS-tiddely-pom,
How cold my
TOES-tiddely-pom
How cold my
TOES-tiddely-pom
Are
Growing.”
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 — 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.
Har-de-ha-ha. It must have got a bit wearing for Milne at times, though, listening to all the other chaps laughing at him behind his back and mocking the sheer obscene extent of his success with all this baby-talk.
The atmosphere of the times, and the grotesque lengths which the Milnes, husband and wife, were prepared to go to in pimping out their little boy to the public are portrayed in grim detail in both Ann Thwaite's coffee-table book The Brilliant Career of Winnie-the-Pooh (1992) and Simon Curtis's more recent movie Goodbye Christopher Robin (2017).
There are some particularly memorable scenes in the latter of Christopher himself being brutally bullied at school by gleeful oafs who kick him down the stairs as they intone: "Hush! Hush! Whisper who dares! / Christopher Robin is saying his prayers," and other artless verses.
Milne was a vociferous pacifist throughout the 1930s: eagerly backing Chamberlain and the other architects of appeasement, and trying to convince everyone he met of the necessity of disarmament. Mind you, the same was true of many other prominent authors at the time, and - in the abstract - who can dispute the desirability of an end to war?
It appears to have frustrated him somewhat that his friend and fellow humorist P. G. Wodehouse refused to go along with him in this. Wodehouse was famously apolitical, and took up no positions whatever on current affairs, except for indulging in a persistent vein of mockery of dictators such as Mussolini and Hitler in the pages of his Jeeves novels.
In particular, there's a recurring gag about an aspiring British fascist leader called Roderick Spode (presumably based on Oswald Mosley) who leads a group of violent thugs called the "Black Shorts":
"By the way, when you say ‘shorts’ you mean ‘shirts’ of course."
"No. By the time Spode formed his association, there were no shirts left. He and his adherents wear black shorts."
"Footer bags, you mean?"
"Yes."
"How perfectly foul."
"Yes."
"Bare knees?"
"Bare knees."
"Golly!"
"Yes."
- P. G. Wodehouse: The Mating Season (1938)
When war finally came in September 1939, Milne had to shift gears pretty quickly to re-establish his bona fides with the Great British Reading Public. Four months later, on January 1st, he issued a revised dispatch on his ideological position entitled War with Honour. The essential thing he needed to point out was that he still stood by his earlier pacifist views concerning everyone except Hitler. As one reviewer explained:
... the quickest way back to peace is to defeat Hitler, because the option of "peace" with Hitler in charge would be worse than war.Is it wrong of me to be reminded by Milne's swift volte-face of the political commentator in Monty Python's "Election Night Special" who points out that the election had gone "largely as I predicted, except that the Silly Party won"?
I think one should point out that in this constituency since the last election a lot of very silly people have moved into new housing estates with the result that a lot of sensible voters have moved further down the road the other side of number, er, 29.It's not that one can't see Milne's point. The advent of Hitler was a game-changer. There's certainly no shame in revising your opinions from time to time according to circumstances - just as there was no real reason to feel sensitive about having been invalided home from the Somme. But the trouble was that he always had to be right. If he ever seemed to be wrong, it must be because someone else had misunderstood him: there could be no other possible explanation.
So, from being one of the nation's foremost pacifists, Milne went to be one of its most fire-breathing patriots. Hence his behaviour during the notorious Wodehouse affair.
I've already written a little about this in another post about P. G. Wodehouse and his biographers. After being captured by the Germans at his home in France in 1940, Wodehouse and his wife were sent to an interment camp in Lille, and thence to further (separate) camps in Belgium and Germany.
It was German policy to release civilian detainees on their sixtieth birthday. For Wodehouse, the date would have come around in October 1941. A few months before that, however, he was transferred to Berlin and asked if he'd like to stay in touch with his "American readers" by broadcasting to them on German radio. Foolishly, he agreed.
It should be emphasised that numerous other prison camp inmates detained by the Germans had already done the same thing. None of them ever received the opprobrium Wodehouse did - or were even criticised for it. Nor was America at war with Germany at the time.
The complete innocence of what he broadcast - humorous details of camp life - did not affect the fact that he was immediately decried as a traitor in both the UK and America. Ever since there's been a powerful lobby who continue to lump him in with antisemites and collaborators such as Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Lord Haw-Haw, or Ezra Pound.In her excellent article on the subject, "Bertie Wooster v. Christopher Robin" (2021), Josie Holford points out that Wodehouse's broadcasts were denounced in Parliament before anyone - including Duff Cooper, the Minister for Information - had even had a chance to hear them.
Duff Cooper's speech, ghost-written by demagogue William Connor, better known for his "Cassandra" column in the Daily Mirror, included statements such as "It is a sombre story of honour pawned to the Nazis for the price of a warm bed," and "Wodehouse was throwing a cocktail party when the storm-troopers clumped in on his shallow life." It concluded as follows:
And Dr. Goebbels taking him into a high mountain, showed unto him all the Kingdoms of the world, and said unto him: "All this power I will give thee if thou wilt worship the Führer."Among the very first to jump on the bandwagon of denunciation was A. A. Milne, who unleashed "a vicious and highly personal tirade" against his former friend in the Daily Telegraph on July 3rd 1941:
Pelham Wodehouse fell on his knees.
The news that P. G. Wodehouse had been released from his concentration camp delighted his friends; the news that he had settled down comfortably at the Adlon [Hotel in Berlin] made them anxious; the news that he was to give weekly broadcasts (but not about politics, because he had 'never taken any interest in politics') left them in no doubt as to what had happened to him. He had escaped again.As Josie Holford points out:
I remember that he told me once he wished he had a son and he he added characteristically (and quite sincerely) 'but he would have to be born at the age of 15, whe he was just getting into his house eleven." You see that advantage of that. Bringing up a son throws considerable responsibility on a man, but by the time the boy is 15 one has shifted the responsibility onto the housemaster, without forfeiting any reflected glory that may be about.
This, I felt, had always been Wodehouse's attitude to life. He has encouraged in himself a natural lack of interest in 'politics' - 'politics' being all the things grown-ups talk about at dinner when one is hiding under the table. Things, for instance, like the last war, which found and kept him in America; and postwar taxes, which chased him backwards and forwards across the Atlantic until he finally found sanctuary in France.
An ill-chosen sanctuary it must have seemed last June, when politics came surging across the Somme.
Irresponsibility in what the papers call 'a licensed humorist' can be carried too far; naïveté can be carried too far. Wodehouse has been given a good deal of licence in the past, but I fancy that now his licence will be withdrawn.
Before this happens I beg him to surrender it of his own free will; to realise that though a genius may grant himself an enviable position above the battle where civic and social responsibilities are concerned, there are times when a man has to come down into the arena, pledge himself to the cause in which he believes, and suffer for it.
The anecdote about parenting that Milne alleges Wodehouse said to him in person is actually a quote from a novel Wodehouse wrote in 1908 ... It’s a family supper scene in Clapham, and Mike Jackson is seated next to the householder’s insufferable son:Mike got on with small girls reasonably well. He preferred them at a distance, but, if cornered by them, could put up a fairly good show. Small boys, however, filled him with a sort of frozen horror. It was his view that a boy should not be exhibited publicly until he reached an age when he might be in the running for some sort of colours at a public school.- Psmith in the City, Chapter 17
Actually, that's just the first of many inaccuracies and half-truths in Milne's article. Once you start to look at it in detail, the fact-checking needed begins to look like those long screeds appended to each new speech by Donald Trump.
First, all that elaborate mockery of Wodehouse's "lack of interest in 'politics'":
'politics' being all the things grown-ups talk about at dinner when one is hiding under the table.This is surely a bit rich coming from one of the principal proponents of both pacifism and appeasement? One can't help feeling that some of those weighty dinner-time discussions of 'politics" with the likes of Lord Halifax and Neville Chamberlain might actually have been spent more profitably playing bridge instead.
Then there's that little sneer about "the last war, which found and kept him in America." Yes. And? Is that any less "honourable" than being invalided home to pursue one's career as a playwright in London? People who live in glass houses ...
Weirdest of all, though, is that statement of Milne's about how "Bringing up a son throws considerable responsibility on a man." This doesn't quite square with Christopher Robin's own statement: "It seemed to me almost that my father had got to where he was by climbing upon my infant shoulders, that he had filched from me my good name and had left me with the empty fame of being his son." Ouch!
As it happens, Wodehouse was (by all accounts) an excellent father. He adopted Leonora, his wife Ethel's daughter from a previous marriage, and it seems from their letters that:
Wodehouse adored being a stepfather ... Family, for Wodehouse, was forged through love, not genetics. Leonora – or "Snorky" – as she soon became, was far more precious to Wodehouse than any of his biological relations.She eventually became his "confidential secretary and adviser", and her death from a botched operation in 1944 was a tragedy neither of the Wodehouses ever recovered from. It far outweighed, for them, all the fallout from the witchhunt surrounding them at the end of the war.
Whisky Galore author Compton Mackenzie hit the nail on the nail when he wrote, in response to Milne's article:
There is a curious infelicity in Mr A. A. Milne’s sneer at Mr P. G. Wodehouse for shirking the responsibility of fatherhood. Such a rebuke would have been more decorously from a father who has abstained from the profitable exhibitionism in which the creator of Christopher Robin has indulged. I gather that Mr. Wodehouse is in disgrace for telling the American public over the radio about his comfortable existence at the Hotel Adlon. Not being convinced that I am morally entitled to throw stones at a fellow author, and retaining as I do an old-fashioned prejudice against condemning a man unheard, I do not propose to inflict my opinion upon the public, beyond affirming that at the moment I feel more disgusted by Mr. Milne’s morality than by Mr. Wodehouse’s irresponsibility.Needless to say, the Daily Telegraph saw no need to print his letter.
At risk of belabouring the point, the notion that Wodehouse had somehow been irresponsible in remaining at his house in France is also misguided. Le Touquet is a seaside resort down the coast from Calais. Calling it an "ill-chosen sanctuary" obscures the fact that none of the military pundits in 1940 (with the possible exception of the Führer himself) foresaw the incredibly rapid collapse of the French army in the face of the German blitzkrieg.
Nor was there any way to predict that the fall of France would leave so little time for foreign nationals to evacuate.
It's hard, in retrospect, for us to comprehend fully the hysterical atmosphere of wartime Britain. This was, after all, before America's (enforced) entry into the conflict, and something of a siege mentality was probably inevitable.
Milne never apologised for his misleading, venomous words - but then, neither did the British government. Although they investigated Wodehouse thoroughly in 1945, and concluded that any attempt at prosecution would be futile, they never informed him of the fact directly, instead continuing to imply that he risked arrest for treason if he ever set foot on British soil again.
Even when he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1975, the ceremony had to be performed in absentia.
Milne's is a sad story, really. It must have been a bitter pill to swallow when Wodehouse's post-war popularity went from strength to strength, whereas nothing he himself did or wrote afterwards could alter his status as the whimsical creator of Winnie-the-Pooh. There are still some fans of his early detective stories to be found here and there, but everything else has sunk into oblivion.
His son never really forgave him, but he did agree to visit him a couple of times before his death. Christopher Milne became an author in his own right, as you can see from the bibliography at the foot of this post. He refused to accept any of the royalties from the children's books about him, and allowed the toys that inspired them to be donated to the New York Public Library.
A. A. Milne seems, in fact, to have been a pretty clear case of Canadian SF writer A. E. Van Vogt's "Right Man": the man who must always be right, and cannot acknowledge error under any circumstances:
It is obvious that the Right Man syndrome is a compensatory mechanism for profound self-doubt, and that its essence lies in convincing others of something he feels to be untrueMilne was not a violent man - except on paper - but he was certainly unable to accept responsibility for mistakes. And he did have a strange compulsion to denounce in others the failings he must have known were so evident in his own life: estrangement from his son, questionable war service, bewildering reversals of opinion - in short, all the irresponsibility associated with "what the papers call 'a licensed humorist'".
Wodehouse was both more honest and more direct in his own verdict:
We were supposed to be quite good friends, but, you know, in a sort of way I think he was a pretty jealous chap. I think he was probably jealous of all other writers. But I loved his stuff.
-
Novels:
- Lovers in London (1905)
- Once on a Time (1917)
- Once On a Time. 1917. Illustrations by Susan Perl. London: Edmund Ward (Publishers) Limited, 1962.
- Mr. Pim [novelisation of his 1919 play "Mr. Pim Passes By"] (1921)
- The Red House Mystery (1922)
- Two People (1931)
- Four Days' Wonder (1933)
- Chloe Marr (1946)
- Peace With Honour (1934)
- It's Too Late Now: The Autobiography of a Writer (1939)
- War With Honour (1940)
- War Aims Unlimited (1941)
- Year In, Year Out. Illustrated by E. H. Shepard (1952)
- The Day's Play (1910)
- Included in: Those Were the Days. 1910, 1912, 1914, 1921. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1929.
- The Holiday Round (1912)
- Included in: Those Were the Days. 1910, 1912, 1914, 1921. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1929.
- Once a Week (1914)
- Included in: Those Were the Days. 1910, 1912, 1914, 1921. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1929.
- Not That It Matters (1919)
- If I May (1920)
- The Sunny Side (1921)
- Included in: Those Were the Days. 1910, 1912, 1914, 1921. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1929.
- By Way of Introduction (1929)
- Those Were the Days (1929)
- Those Were the Days: Being "The Day's Play," "The Holiday Round," "Once a Week," and "The Sunny Side" in One Volume. 1910, 1912, 1914, 1921. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1929.
- A Gallery of Children (1925)
- A Gallery of Children. 1925. Illustrated by Henriette Willebeek Le Mair. Frederick Warne. London: The Penguin Group, 2000.
- Winnie-the-Pooh. Illustrated by E. H. Shepard (1926)
- Included in: The World of Pooh: Containing Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner. Illustrated by E. H. Shepard. 1926, 1928, 1958. London: Methuen Children’s Books, 1956.
- Included in: Winnie the Pooh: The Complete Collection of Stories and Poems. Illustrated by E. H. Shepard. 1924, 1926, 1927, 1928. London: Methuen Children’s Books, 1994.
- The House at Pooh Corner. Illustrated by E. H. Shepard (1928)
- Included in: The World of Pooh: Containing Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner. Illustrated by E. H. Shepard. 1926, 1928, 1958. London: Methuen Children’s Books, 1956.
- Included in: Winnie the Pooh: The Complete Collection of Stories and Poems. Illustrated by E. H. Shepard. 1924, 1926, 1927, 1928. London: Methuen Children’s Books, 1994.
- The Secret and other Stories (1929)
- The Birthday Party (1948)
- A Table Near the Band (1950)
- The Complete Short Stories (2023)
- When We Were Very Young. Illustrated by E. H. Shepard (1924)
- Included in: The World of Christopher Robin: Containing When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six. Illustrated by E. H. Shepard. 1924, 1927, 1959. London: Methuen Children’s Books, 1972.
- Included in: Winnie the Pooh: The Complete Collection of Stories and Poems. Illustrated by E. H. Shepard. 1924, 1926, 1927, 1928. London: Methuen Children’s Books, 1994.
- For the Luncheon Interval (1925)
- Now We Are Six. Illustrated by E. H. Shepard (1927)
- Included in: The World of Christopher Robin: Containing When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six. Illustrated by E. H. Shepard. 1924, 1927, 1959. London: Methuen Children’s Books, 1972.
- Included in: Winnie the Pooh: The Complete Collection of Stories and Poems. Illustrated by E. H. Shepard. 1924, 1926, 1927, 1928. London: Methuen Children’s Books, 1994.
- Behind the Lines (1940)
- The Norman Church (1948)
- Wurzel-Flummery (1917)
- Belinda (1918)
- The Boy Comes Home (1918)
- Make-Believe (1918)
- The Camberley Triangle (1919)
- Mr. Pim Passes By (1919)
- The Red Feathers (1920)
- The Romantic Age (1920)
- The Stepmother (1920)
- The Truth About Blayds (1920)
- The Bump (Minerva Films, 1920)
- Twice Two (Minerva Films, 1920)
- Five Pound Reward (Minerva Films, 1920)
- Bookworms (Minerva Films, 1920)
- The Great Broxopp (1921)
- The Dover Road (1921)
- The Lucky One (1922)
- The Artist: A Duologue (1923)
- Success [aka "Give Me Yesterday"] (1923)
- Ariadne (1924)
- The Man in the Bowler Hat: A Terribly Exciting Affair (1924)
- To Have the Honour (1924)
- Portrait of a Gentleman in Slippers (1926)
- Miss Marlow at Play (1927)
- Winnie the Pooh (1928)
- The Fourth Wall, or The Perfect Alibi [adapted for the film Birds of Prey (1930)] (1928)
- The Ivory Door (1929)
- Toad of Toad Hall [adaptation of The Wind in the Willows] (1929)
- Michael and Mary (1930)
- Other People's Lives (aka "They Don't Mean Any Harm") (1933)
- Miss Elizabeth Bennet (1936)
- Sarah Simple (1937)
- Gentleman Unknown (1938)
- The General Takes Off His Helmet [from The Queen's Book of the Red Cross] (1939)
- The Ugly Duckling (1941)
- Before the Flood (1951)
- Shepard, Ernest H. Drawn from Memory. 1957. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.
- Crews, Frederick C. The Pooh Perplex: A Freshman Casebook. 1963. A Dutton Paperback. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1965.
- Thwaite, Ann. A. A. Milne: His Life. 1990. London: Faber, 1991.
- Thwaite, Ann. The Brilliant Career of Winnie-the-Pooh: The Story of A. A. Milne and His Writing for Children. Methuen London. London: Reed Consumer Books Limited, 1992.
- Thwaite, Ann. Goodbye Christopher Robin: A. A. Milne and the Making of Winnie-the-Pooh. Preface by Frank Cottrell-Boyce. Pan Books. London: Pan Macmillan, 2017.
Non-fiction:
Collections of Articles:
Collections of Stories:
Poetry:
Plays & screenplays:
Secondary:
- The Enchanted Places (1974)
- The Enchanted Places. 1974. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.
- The Enchanted Places. 1974. London: Methuen, 1983.
- The Path Through the Trees (1979)
- The Path Through the Trees. 1979. London: Methuen, 1983.
- The Hollow on the Hill (1982)
- The Hollow on the Hill: The Search for a Personal Philosophy. Photographs by James Ravilious. 1982. London: Methuen, 1983.
- The Windfall (1985)
- The Windfall: A Fable. Engravings by Kenneth Lindley. London: Methuen, 1985.
- The Open Garden (1988)
