The Haunted Wood, page 27
It was a colossal hit right away. Two months after publication, there were more than 40,000 copies in print, and more than a quarter of a million copies were sold in the three years that followed. Even Rudyard Kipling – still a towering figure in children’s writing – wrote Milne a fan letter; to which Milne responded: “If you can remember what you once said to Tennyson, you will know what your letter makes me want to say to you. I am proud that you like the verses.” (Kipling had told Tennyson that “When a private is praised by his General he does not presume to thank him, but fights the better afterwards.”)
Writing in the 1950s, the critic Geoffrey Grigson, who deplored its niceness and what he saw as its cosy middle-class milieu, nevertheless touched on an aspect of its appeal to the people who bought it to read to their children:
Children, in my experience, of every generation since and including the Twenties, have found the poems nauseating, and fascinating. In fact, they were poems by a parent for other parents, and for vice-parental nannies – for parents with a war to forget, a social (and literary) revolution to ignore, a childhood to recover.*
This misses, I think, the observed truth of the children in the poems: they chafe at constraint, they are wilful and whimsical, and they live in the moment. When in “vespers” Christopher Robin is saying his prayers, he’s always getting distracted and getting it wrong. The speaker of “Politeness” dutifully parrots the formulae of good manners but admits how wearisome he finds them. Undoubtedly, though, “a war to forget” and “a childhood to recover” will have been powerful selling-points to the book’s first readers-aloud.
Any peril in these poems – the bears waiting to pounce on children who step on pavement-cracks, for instance – is of the mild variety. And the childhood it idealizes is a space held apart from materialism. In “Puppy And I,” the speaker of the poem meets a series of characters on errands to the village to pick up food and is invited to accompany them. He turns them all down until he meets a puppy headed for the hills on no greater errand than “to roll and play.” In “Market Square,” the speaker finds his pockets filling with money as the stanzas go by, but none of the stalls is selling a rabbit, which is what he actually wants to buy. When finally, pockets empty, he strolls onto the “old-gold common,” he sees rabbits in abundance.
Even if some of the more whimsical poems do cross the line into cutesy, it’s a work of extraordinary technical command. “James, James, Morrison, Morrison, Weatherby George Dupree” survives in part because of the comic way that it inverts the child–adult relationship: the child sternly scolding his mother for going down to the end of the town unaccompanied, the archetypal childish fear of abandonment turned reassuringly on its head. But what really makes it work is its metrical virtuosity. The humbling of Sir Brian Botany – which, pace Grigson, was very much in keeping with Milne’s egalitarian politics – is another extraordinary feat of metrical precision.
Milne himself made no bones about this. A well-established comic writer and assistant editor of Punch even before the war, he was a sophisticated and urbane figure whose acquaintances included H.G. Wells and J.M. Barrie, and who locked horns with T.S. Eliot and Graham Greene. When We Were Very Young, he wrote, “is not the work of a poet becoming playful, nor of a lover of children expressing his love, nor of a prose-writer knocking together a few jingles for the little ones, it is the work of a light-verse writer taking his job seriously, even though he is taking it into the nursery.” Nevertheless, he was to come to regret the way in which the success of his children’s writing overshadowed his other work.
Overshadow it, though, it did. Edward Bear and Christopher Robin make their first appearances in When We Were Very Young, but they were to reach their most perfect expression in the two books of stories that followed. The world of Winnie-the-Pooh and its sequel is even more remote from our own than that of When We Were Very Young, which at least contains houses and streets and people with jobs. It’s a perfectly sealed-off universe. Only Christopher Robin can ever leave it, and the poignancy is that, in the end, he must.
What actually happens in the stories is the least of them. A bear and a piglet go in search of a woozle and don’t find it. A bear falls into his own heffalump trap. A depressed donkey gets an empty pot and a burst balloon for his birthday. A baby kangaroo falls in the water and is fished out. A donkey falls in the water and is fished out. A wooden lean-to moves from one side of a field to another. A bouncy creature discovers that it likes extract of malt. Pooh, apparently discovering the concept of object-permanence, invents a new game. Tone of voice, dialogue, and the surface play of language are all.
Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner are the most obvious descendants of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, and arguably the only direct ones, in the canon. Like Alice, there are layers to the fiction: the telling of the story is inscribed in the story itself. The opening pages of Winnie-the-Pooh introduce Edward Bear, also known as Winnie-the-Pooh (“He’s Winnie-ther-Pooh. Don’t you know what “ther’ means?”), and who inexplicably lives “under the name of Sanders,” coming down the stairs “bump. bump, bump” behind Christopher Robin.
The narrator, at Christopher Robin’s request, starts to tell Pooh a story about himself. A few sentences in, Pooh himself (or, perhaps, Christopher Robin speaking in “a growly voice”), interrupts the narrator. The narrator goes on, embarking on the story of Pooh’s abortive attempt to steal honey from bees by ascending under a balloon disguised as a small cloud.
He crawled out of the gorse-bush, brushed the prickles from his nose, and began to think again. And the first person he thought of was Christopher Robin.
(‘Was that me?’ said Christopher Robin in an awed voice, hardly daring to believe it.
‘That was you.’ Christopher Robin said nothing, but his eyes got larger and larger, and his face got pinker and pinker.)
So Winnie-the-Pooh went round to his friend Christopher Robin, who lived behind a green door in another part of the forest.
‘Good morning, Christopher Robin,’ he said.
‘Good morning, Winnie-the-Pooh,’ said you.
And we’re off, plunged into an enclosed world that is the figure for an idealized childhood – one in which Pooh and his friends have absolute freedom of action and nothing important to do. Like the world of Wodehouse’s fiction, Milne’s forest is a place of complete safety, shadowed only dimly by the awareness that there’s a larger world outside it. It’s so funny, and so inventive, and so selfcontained, that earnestly applying the tools of literary criticism to it risks, as was said of P.G. Wodehouse, taking a spade to a soufflé.
Inasmuch as it records a response rather than an analysis, then, Dorothy Parker’s famous verdict on The House at Pooh Corner – “Tonstant Weader fwowed up” – avoids this hazard. It’s also a little unfair. The stories are sentimental, but they are not quite saccharine. Eeyore’s sulfurously passive-aggressive outlook, and the characters’ small vanities and self-deceptions, shade the whole thing with irony. The different animals are psychological types (we all know an Eeyore or a Tigger), but they also manage to be winningly and memorably particular.*
The connection to Alice – a spikier and wilder text, but a kindred spirit – can be seen especially in the absurdist wordplay. There’s a lot of thinking that goes on in the Pooh books, but almost none of it results in anything that resembles a thought; and there’s a lot of talking, but almost nothing meaningful is ever said. Words are unmoored from things. Meanings are turned on their heads. Sentences deconstruct themselves on the go: “Everybody said ‘Howdo-you-do’ to Eeyore, and Eeyore said that he didn’t, not to notice, and then they sat down.” “Tigger kept disappearing, and then when you thought he wasn’t there, there he was again, saying, ‘I say, come on,’ and before you could say anything, there he wasn’t.”; “The more he looked inside, the more Piglet wasn’t there.”
In the Snark and Jabberwock tradition, searches are undertaken for non-existent creatures: “It is either Two Woozles and one, as it might be, Wizzle, or Two, as it might be, Wizzles and one, if so it is, Woozle.” Traps are laid for Heffalumps and Backsons are at large:
‘Have you seen a Backson anywhere about in the Forest lately?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Rabbit. ‘That’s what I came to ask you. What are they like?’
‘Well,’ said Owl, ‘the Spotted or Herbaceous Backson is just a –’
‘At least,’ he said, ‘it’s really more of a–’
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘it depends on the–’
‘Well,’ said Owl, ‘the fact is,’ he said, ‘I don’t know what they’re like,’ said Owl frankly.
‘Thank you,’ said Rabbit.
It’s easy enough to see why philosophers of a whimsical cast have found material in the apparently simple adventures of Christopher Robin and his brigade of stuffed animals – most notoriously in Benjamin Hoff’s 1982 The Tao of Pooh. The great divide between doing and being is a constant presence in the books, and Pooh, like a little bodhisattva, has a head blissfully empty of self-consciousness.
When they are perfectly in tune, Christopher Robin shares Pooh’s ability to empty the world of conscious meaning. As the book closes, he’s in an in-between space where he can still access the world of the forest and feel “all sunny and careless, and just as if twice nineteen didn’t matter a bit, as it didn’t on such a happy afternoon.” The sort of “knowledge” that doesn’t require you to know anything is available to him: “he thought that if he stood on the bottom rail of the bridge, and leant over, and watched the river slipping slowly away beneath him, then he would suddenly know everything that there was to be known, and he would be able to tell Pooh, who wasn’t quite sure about some of it.”
The world of the forest is that world in which, in its purest form, it’s possible to live without thinking: to exist as yourself is total knowledge. But, of course, Christopher Robin grows up and stuffed toys don’t. He’s going to school, where twice nineteen will matter, and going nowhere and doing nothing will dwindle into memory.
There’s an echo of Carroll’s envoi – the White Knight’s melancholy farewell to Alice in Through the Looking-Glass – in the closing pages of The House at Pooh Corner. Christopher Robin knights Pooh:
Then he began to think of all the things Christopher Robin would want to tell him when he came back from wherever he was going to, and how muddling it would be for a Bear of very Little Brain to try and get them right in his mind. ‘So, perhaps,’ he said sadly to himself, ‘Christopher Robin won’t tell me any more,’ and he wondered if being a Faithful Knight meant that you just went on being faithful without being told things.
The notoriously tear-jerking pay-off – “So they went off together. But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.” – repeats Carroll’s fantasy of capturing childhood, with its irrecoverable set of loving relationships, in a frozen bubble of time. That’s the “golden afternoon,” the space in which Alice will always be “moving under skies / Never seen by waking eyes.” Here, though, the patient abandoned knight is not the adult helplessly watching a child un-selve as she grows up; it’s the child, or inner child, losing a parent who is also a friend and a peer.
Like the beautiful garden Alice glimpses, Hundred Acre Wood is a metaphor; but, unlike that garden, it’s also a real place. You can stand there. In fact, a commemorative plaque does stand in Ashdown Forest, which inspired the landscape of the Pooh stories; Milne first visited the forest as a child, and he lived and wrote the Pooh books at Cotchford Farm nearby. As he was later to say, it was “Gill’s Lap that inspired Galleon’s Lap, the group of pine trees on the other side of the main road that became the Six Pine Trees, the bridge over the river at Posingford that became Pooh-sticks Bridge.” The bachelor inhabitants of the forest, with the exception of Owl and Rabbit, were based on Christopher’s stuffed animals – Pooh, Eeyore and Piglet were all toys he owned, and Roo, Kanga, and Tigger, as in the books, were latecomers.
With his own happy childhood, Milne was not, unlike so many children’s writers, writing from a wound; but he did, like so many children’s writers, create one. Even though Christopher Robin isn’t the central figure in the Pooh stories – he most often swoops in at the end of an adventure to sort things out with an exclamation of “How I love you, Pooh!” or “Silly old bear!” – Milne’s only child Christopher became a celebrity “original” no less than vivian Burnett. In 1934 an American magazine named him in a list of the most famous children in the world, alongside Yehudi Menuhin, Crown Prince Michael of Romania, and Princess Elizabeth. As Christopher was to recall, he “was beginning to be what he was later to become, a sore place that looked as if it would never heal up.” The fame of his father’s books caused him to be badly bullied at school, and he described the “toe-curling, fist-clenching, lip-biting embarrassment” that “vespers” – “Hush! Hush! Whisper who dares! / Christopher Robin is saying his prayers.” – caused him.
“It seemed to me,” he wrote in his autobiography, “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.”* It was not just his accidental celebrity that shaped his reaction. Christopher speculated later, looking back on a family holiday after the early death of Alan’s closest brother, Kenneth, that his father, “I now suspect, saw me as a sort of twin brother, perhaps a sort of reincarnation of Ken… He needed me to escape from being fifty.”
Estranged from both his parents as a young adult, Christopher Milne was only able to make peace with his legacy by taking control of his own story in his 1974 memoir The Enchanted Places, which served “to lift me from under the shadow of my father and of Christopher Robin, and to my surprise and pleasure I found myself standing beside them in the sunshine able to look them both in the eye.”* Even in the most effervescently innocent of children’s stories, then, there’s something at stake. An adult, writing toward childhood, is always in some sense serving an adult need, and that can come at a psychic cost. As the literary historian Peter Hunt puts it, the “collision between adult writer and child reader [is] the central conundrum of children’s literature.”†
* Or to give it its full, whimsically eighteenth-century subtitle, The Story of Doctor Dolittle: Being the History of His Peculiar Life at Home and Astonishing Adventures in Foreign Parts Never Before Printed.
* A.A. Milne, It’s Too Late Now, [p].
* Quoted in Thwaite, A.A. Milne: His Life, [p].
* The creatures of the forest are a bit of a Rorschach blot. One (anachronistic) theory sees the toys as representing different mental health conditions – Eeyore as a depressive, Piglet as suffering anxiety, Tigger as having ADHD and so on. The writer Nicola Shulman identifies them with Romantic poets.
* Christopher Milne, The Enchanted Places, [p].
* Christopher Milne, The Path Through the Trees (McLellan and Stuart, 1979), [p].
† Hunt, op. cit., [p].
Opening a Franchise
W.E. JOHNS · CAROLYN KEENE · FRANKLIN W. DIXON · RICHMAL CROMPTON · ARTHUR RANSOME
The Camels Are Coming; Biggles Defies the Swastika;
Biggles of the Special Air Police; Biggles Does Some
Homework; The Secret of the Old Clock; The Tower
Treasure; Just William; More William; William Again;
Still William; William the Outlaw; Just William’s
Luck; William the Dictator; William and Air Raid
Precautions; William and the Evacuees; William and
the Moon Rocket; Swallows and Amazons; We Didn’t
Mean to Go to Sea; The Picts and the Martyrs
THERE WAS ONE NOTABLE EXCEPTION TO THE TENDENCY of writers of the interwar period to turn away from the horrors of the First World War: Biggles. The ground war, as Lofting saw, was too horrific, too grinding, too static, and boring to make its way into children’s stories directly. But the romance of early aviation could, perhaps, be something around which a mythology of sorts could be built.
Nevertheless, the flyer we first meet in “The White Fokker” (a short story published in Popular Flying in 1932 and later collected that same year in the first Biggles book The Camels Are Coming) is not the carefree character he later became. He is described waiting on the ground at an airfield, in unspoken anxiety, awaiting the return of a patrol:
His deep-set hazel eyes were never still and held a glint of yellow fire that somehow seemed out of place in a pale face upon which the strain of war, and sight of sudden death, had already graven little lines. His hands, small and delicate as a girl’s, fidgeted continually with the tunic fastening at his throat. He had killed a man not six hours before. He had killed six men during the past month – or was it a year? – he had forgotten.
The story follows Biggles’s attempt to take out a white Fokker that has been ambushing British patrols as they limp home, and death, the fear of it and the feeling of responsibility for it, are strong presences in the story. When his first attempt to down the enemy plane fails, it costs lives and Biggles’s shot nerves send him close to the edge of reason.
‘I’ve lost Swayne and Maddison,’ he said grimly, as the others joined him. ‘I’ve lost Swayne and Maddison,’ he repeated. ‘I’ve lost Swayne and Maddison, can’t you hear me?’ he said yet again. ‘What the hell are you looking at me like that for?’
Aerial warfare was exceptionally dangerous, and the author W.E. Johns (1893–1968) – who served as an infantryman in Gallipoli and Macedonia before transferring to the Royal Flying Corps in the last year of the war – had personal experience of it, though he didn’t spend more than a few months in the air. Johns didn’t enjoy his hero’s virtuosity or luck. He is reported to have lost three planes in as many days to technical malfunctions and went on to lose two more by shooting off his own propellor. During a bombing mission over Germany in September 1918 he was shot down and taken prisoner.
