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Who Was Alan Alexander
Milne?
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A.A. Milne was much more than a children's author. The American
Heritage Dictionary (1971 edition) describes him thus: "Milne...A(lan) A(lexander), 1882-1956. English author
of children's books, novels, plays and poems." Yet even this statement hardly summarizes the man or even the
writer, for A.A. Milne won considerable fame and fortune long before he started writing the first of the "Pooh
Books", the book of poems called When We Were Very Young.
Alan Alexander Milne (b. January 18, 1882) was the son of John Vine (J. V.) Milne, a dedicated and talented schoolmaster,
and Maria Milne, herself a highly competent and talented woman and dedicated Victorian mother. Alan had two brothers,
David Barrett (the oldest, generally called Barry) and Kenneth John (Ken). Alan was the youngest (and most precocious)
of the three. As he said of himself years later, "In Papa's house it was natural to be interested; it was
easy to be clever." Later, Alan would attend classes in the school administered by his father, and be taught
there by none other than H. G. Wells (who later wrote The War of the Worlds, among many other works).
Alan's childhood was a happy one, and he was particularly close to his father and his brother Ken. (Much of Alan's
childhood -- not only his own son Christopher's -- is reflected in his books of children's poetry, When We Were Very Young
and Now We Are Six.) He excelled at
mathematics and cricket, loved butterflies, hated killing animals, loved going on walks and adventures by himself
or with Ken, and was an enthusiastic student of almost everything presented to him (except French). He also showed
an early talent for writing, as did Ken, and the two collaborated at times on articles (and later, on poems).
A.A. Milne's biographer, Ann Thwaite, put it this way:
"Alan's father had taught him many things. He had taught him that manners are
nothing to do with etiquette or how to behave at an evening party, but something much more fundamental. 'The essence
of good manners is unselfishness and a desire to give pleasure.' (...) [Alan's] early years had been full of affection,
of freedom, independence and individuality. Much later these would be the wellsprings of his own books for children"
(A.A. Milne: The Man Behind Winnie-the-Pooh,
Random House, 1990, p. 46).
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N.B.: A.A. Milne was most probably an
INTP (as compared to the
ENFP
personality type of the
Webmaster). |
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In 1893 Alan took the examinations for Westminster College (he was then about eleven).
He did poorly in Greek, but excelled in mathematics. He became a Queen's Scholar (one of 35 out of 225 boys at
Westminster), and one of the youngest ever to be elected so. Westminster, however, like Winchester and Eton (these
being the three "best" boys' schools), was rather lacking in its educational standards at the time. In
other respects as well, Westminster was much unlike J. V. Milne's own Henley House. If the plumbing was rather
bad, the food was worse. "In all my years at Westminster," Alan wrote later, "I never ceased to
be hungry."
The food, the hunger, were not the worst things at Westminster. The worst thing was
the fear -- the fear of being tanned [hit four times with a thick cane, wielded at full force]. Corporal punishment
was an everyday occurrence. It was particularly hard for Alan and Ken, coming from the atmosphere of Henley House,
where their father found hitting a boy 'so utterly distasteful' 'that nothing but the conviction that the boy was
being lost could compel him to resort to it'. At Westminster it was another matter. (...) It was not only the actual
pain but the perpetual fear of it, and the random injustice of it, which seemed to Alan later 'such an unnecessary
hardship'. There were so many things you could get tanned for; there were so many bizarre demands. (...) Masters
did not tan. It was boys who wielded the cane and seemed to enjoy the wielding" (Thwaite, p. 55).
Nevertheless, Alan and Ken enjoyed their first summer term at
Westminster. They
found much else to enjoy in the following years. Both boys were keen cricketers. Alan's academic scores were excellent,
and Ken's were not much inferior. (Again, both boys were very keen on mathematics.) The problem was that Ken was
sixteen months older than Alan. Yet Ken, with a generosity that he showed to Alan all his life, never openly resented
his younger brother's playing the upstart (or at least not until Alan beat Ken into the field of professional writing).
All the same, Westminster "ruined Alan as a mathematician" (in Thwaite's words, p. 64) despite Alan's
excellent grades, and it did little to prepare him directly to be a writer. It was Henley House, not Westminster,
that laid the foundations of Alan's writing career, for his father emphatically stressed the importance of writing
to his pupils. But Alan could read,
and at Westminster he read voraciously. Forty years later, when he dramatized Jane Austen's Pride
and Prejudice, he remembered reading it first at Westminster. It remained
one of his favorite books.
Alan could also write light verse, as could Ken (who discovered his own talent first). Alan
collaborated with Ken
on this untitled offering (Thwaite, pp. 70-72):
You ask for a poem, my ownest own editor --
Don't be alarmed at the epithet, pray:
It occurs in Lord Tennyson's Maud --
have you read it? -- a
Poem of merit authorities say.
Shall I write you a parody, smart and satirical,
After the manner of Punch and the rest
--
Or something in dialect, pretty and lyrical,
Safe to remind you of Burns at his best?
Perhaps you would fancy an 'Ode to an Eider-duck'
Telling his praises with never a pause:
How he was born a duck, lived -- yes, and died a duck,
Hampered by Nature's inscrutable laws.
Or a rapturous ode on the worth of some Lycidas --
Blenkinsopp Brown he was called when alive,
And reckoned as likely as not an explicit ass:
Trivial facts not allowed to survive. (...)
(Alan and Ken argued over the last two lines of the third stanza for hours. I personally
would've put "immutable" for "inscrutable", but either is better than Alan's first suggestion,
"miraculous". As Ken pointed out, the one thing Nature could not be was miraculous; it was a contradiction
in terms.)
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Westminster had, despite itself, made it more likely that Alan would become a writer.
When Alan went to Cambridge, he did so with the aim of editing Granta, the university's undergraduate magazine, in mind. While he only got a Third Class [BA (Hons.)
Cantab.] when he graduated in 1903, he did
edit and write for Granta as an undergraduate.
One humorous serial in particular, "Jeremy, I and the Jelly-fish", caught the attention of
R. C. Lehmann
of Punch, and that eventually led Alan
to contribute to Punch himself.
As editor of and contributor to Granta,
Alan honed his natural talent at humorous prose and poetry. Light verse was a particular specialty of his, one
he took very seriously as an art form. Nevertheless his early efforts were lighthearted, and foreshadowed in a
sense what came later (Thwaite, p. 97):
When I was the usual innocent babe
I played on the nursery floor
(For the sake of the rhyme) with an astrolabe;
When I was a babe - with an astrolabe,
As, I think, I have said before.
"Love Among the Bricks" was written in a similar vein (p. 97):
Oh, do not make light of the past, love,
Nor say that my wishes are vain.
I never supposed it would last, love,
Yet why not begin it again?
Oh, think, can you think of the past, love,
When I was a beggar for bricks?
No, I never supposed it would last, love,
But, why did you ever turn six?
And then there was this droll contribution (p. 98):
Brown was a tutor, who loved and lost
An affectionate cannibal queen.
He swore he would win her whatever the cost -
She asked him to dine (as a matter of 'course').
He was with a highly original sauce!
And Brown is the fellow who's been.
Looking back on his Cambridge experience when he was thirty, Alan wrote a poem called
"Golden Memories", in which he praised one thing above all: salmon
mayonnaise. Here is the last stanza (p. 100):
'Did Beauty,' some may ask severely,
'Visit him in no other guise?
It cannot be that salmon merely
Should bring the mist before his eyes?
What of the river there where Byron's Pool lay,
The warm blue morning shimmering in the haze?'
Not this (I say)…Yet something else…Crème Brûlée!
Ye gods! To think of that and Salmon
Mayonnaise!
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After graduation, Alan decided to try his hand at journalism and freelance writing.
For that, he needed to move to London. It was far from smooth sailing for Alan at first. Nevertheless, his first
poem for Punch appeared in May 18, 1904,
and by July 10 he had written for seven other publications as well (at least 17 articles and other contributions,
including "odd jobs"). Later that year he was working on his first book, Lovers
in London. But the financial situation was not good. It was saved by the
publication of Lovers in London in March
1095, and more importantly by Punch,
which in 1905 began to accept Alan's work (prose and poetry) regularly. (In time, though, Milne bought back the
copyright to Lovers in London for five
pounds to prevent a reprint; he thought it was that bad, and he was not alone.)
By early 1906 Alan was wondering what to do next. Even in 1904 there were hints of his eventual direction as a
playwright. But how to get a play produced? Scattered, often anonymous freelance articles would hardly make a name
for himself. It seemed only a proper, strong novel would do it, and Alan wrote to Owen Seaman at Punch (where Alan had appeared thirty times by then)
announcing his intent to take a country retreat to try to write one. As it happened, Seaman was just then becoming
the editor of Punch, and immediately
offered Alan a post as assistant editor. (Alan's own contributions, of course, would be paid at double rates.)
It was an offer Alan could hardly refuse (he had long had a desire to edit Punch one day), and he started work as assistant editor on February 13, 1906. |
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Working at Punch
proved to be especially challenging, even given Alan's talent for "making something out of nothing".
One day, Alan figured, he'd envy the miners or bricklayers who worked with their hands and "knew nothing of
what work really meant." His Liberal politics kept him off the famous Punch Table until 1910, and at length they kept him from having any hope of becoming editor of
Punch.
While Alan was at Punch, however, he
made a name for himself through both his light verse and his humorous sketches. He also reviewed books and plays.
The characteristic mixture of fact and fancy in his work (as many have noted) was and remains something one either
finds funny or one doesn't -- and many people found it funny in those days.
Chief among the stars of Alan's humorous sketches were the Rabbits (who were humans, not toys or furry little creatures).
They appeared no less than forty-six times between June 1909 and April 1914. For the rest of Alan's life, people
remembered these middle-class family members and their conversational somersaults. Remarkably for those times,
the dialectical tennis match between the men and women of the family kept the score about even between the two
sides. (Interestingly, Alan invented Myra Rabbit well before he met his future wife, Dorothy de Selincourt. Myra
and Dorothy had much in common, in particular a similar sense of humor.)
In 1910, after reading Norman Angell's book The Great Illusion, Alan committed himself to pacifism, a cause that he served the rest of his life. His personality
already had inclinations in this direction, however. His abhorrence of violence and
aggression was a fundamental
trait of his character; if affected all his writing, including the Pooh Books. Another trait that affected his
writing was a strong Puritanism, partly natural, partly imposed by his Victorian upbringing (though he considered
himself an Edwardian as an adult).
It was during these years that Alan married Dorothy (on June 4, 1913), wrote for and helped to edit Punch, contributed to the Sphere, and realized the trap he was in as a writer. Trying to be funny twice a week for what could
easily be the next twenty years (when Seaman would likely retire) was beginning to take its toll already. So were
the interminable dinners at the Table. Did he really want to be editor of Punch after all? Collections of Alan's Punch pieces were being published in book form all the time; but Alan's orbit was beginning to
take him into playwriting. Still, after writing for Punch he had little time (or more importantly, brain) left to devote to writing plays. How was
he to escape the dilemma? |
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As it happened, World War I took care of that problem. Paradoxically, though Alan thought
war stupid and cruel, now that England was in it (and hoping it would be "the war to end all wars", in
H. G. Wells' phrase), Alan wanted to do his part in it. His part began by drilling soldiers and instructing them
in laying telephone lines and using other forms of communication. He was later to use that experience himself on
the front lines.
During that time, Alan authored a play (in 1915) for Dorothy and five children to perform for the troops. In time
it was published as Once On a Time (1917);
it was actually Alan's first children's book. It has been all but forgotten, but there are certainly elements that
point forward to what appears later in the Pooh Books. In 1916, Alan finally wrote that three-act play that
J. M.
Barrie and Granville Barker had urged him to try; it was called Wurzel-Flummery. Just after he'd submitted it to Barrie, Alan was called to active service in France.
Alan's four years in the Army, and especially his time in France, was a nightmare he wished desperately to forget.
Besides the senseless slaughter, there was the sheer physical, mental and moral
degradation of it all. Yet Alan
was luckier than countless others. Laid low by trench fever, Alan eventually returned to England in November 1916.
Nothing by him appeared in Punch during
his time in France.
On his thirty-fifth birthday, however, Alan learned that Wurzel-Flummery would be produced (if it could be cut to two acts) in a program sandwiched between two one-act
plays by Barrie. Alan's play debuted on April 7, 1917, the day after the United States entered the war; many troops
on leave attended its opening. From then on, in every spare moment the Army left him, Alan was writing plays. Yet
he had never fully recovered from the effects of his trench fever, and had to be hospitalized for a time. He was
assigned to "sedentary work" -- which in his case meant the writing of propaganda.
It was during his time of growing exhaustion that Alan wrote these immortal lines (Thwaite, p. 183):
When the War is over and the Kaiser's out of print,
I'm going to buy some tortoises and watch the beggars sprint;
When the War is over and the sword at last we sheathe,
I'm going to keep a jelly-fish and listen to it breathe.
When the War is over and we've done the Belgians proud,
I'm going to keep a chrysalis and read to it aloud;
When the War is over and we've finished up the show,
I'm going to plant a lemon-pip and listen to it grow.
Alan's play Belinda
opened on April 8, 1918. It managed to survive London's worst air raid of the war and was taken off after nine
weeks. Alan was still contributing intermittently to Punch, and another children's play, Make-Believe, appeared on Christmas Eve in 1918. In February 1919, however, Alan retired from Punch. Seaman's refusal to take him back as assistant
editor made this necessary (as did Seaman's clarification that Alan's politics ensured he would never be editor).
That same month, Alan was finally discharged from the Army. Now he faced the hard task of "making it"
as a playwright.
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Those who know A.A. Milne only as the author of the Pooh Books may be surprised to learn
just how successful he became as a playwright. If he had had remarkable influence in his days at Punch (he had many imitators, but few rivals), his plays
had just the right kind of light-hearted, fanciful escapism audiences were looking for after the war. It is the
same lightness of touch that marks the Pooh Books, especially Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner.
Alan's plays, novels and other writings have been criticized for a number of reasons, but lack of
clever dialogue
has rarely been one of them. Yet ironically, the one play of his that is still regularly performed is Toad of Toad Hall, an adaptation of Kenneth Grahame's
The Wind in the Willows.
Mr. Pim Passes By was Alan's first real
success as a playwright (in 1920). This was published along with Make-Believe, The Camberley Triangle,
The Romantic Age, and The Stepmother in 1921. The
Dover Road, The Truth About Blayds, and The Great Broxopp
(which oddly foreshadowed Christopher Robin Milne's fate as being overshadowed by his literary namesake) were published
in 1923. Success was published in 1923,
and republished with To Have the Honour,
Ariadne, and Portrait
of a Gentlemen in Slippers in 1926. Other plays (new ones and republications
of old ones) followed in the 1920's and 1930's, notably Michael and Mary in 1930. (Alan also wrote a detective novel, The Red
House Mystery, which was published in 1922; it was his most successful book,
aside from the Pooh Books.)
Alan's style as a playwright in his early days -- light, airy, "whimsical", like thistledown, yet often
with an underlying serious theme -- was compared favorably even with that of George Bernard Shaw. When Mr. Pim Passes By opened in Chicago, the Tribune called it "a play that is, without endangering
Shaw's general reputation, at least five hundred times better than Heartbreak
House" (Thwaite, p. 197). One critic actually suggested that Henry James
would have given his little finger to write the first act of a later, more serious play, The
Truth About Blayds (pp. 232-233).
Alan's strength as a playwright, alas, was also his Achilles' heel. On the one hand, he had an extraordinarily
strong moral sense combined with a whimsical sense of humor, which allowed him to poke deftly (as with a needle)
at the human condition rather than stab or club it violently. On the other hand, his inability to "give the
Devil his due" and to "suffer fools gladly" often betrayed his deeper dramatic sense. When the turn
of the critical wheel finally started going against him (ironically enough, with Success, on which he had set so much hope), his difficulty in accepting criticism made the reactions
of critics all the more painful for him.
It was Alan's very strength as a writer, however -- morality combined with whimsy -- that made him a superb children's
author in due time. Another factor that did so was Alan's unsentimental yet keenly observant attitude toward children,
their thoughts and behavior; still another was his keen memory of his own childhood. It helped greatly as well
that he had a living example in his own house on which to draw. |
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After the critical and commercial "failure" of Success (which was nevertheless highly praised by other dramatists, actors and actresses), Alan's
new literary direction started taking shape. (There would be other plays, but no doubt Alan felt it was time for
a change.) In 1923, the famous poem "Vespers" was first published. It was not a children's poem, nor
was it meant to be sentimental; in fact, it was meant to be ironic, showing how little interest little children
actually have in prayer. It was here, though, that Christopher Robin -- the literary alter
ego of Christopher Robin Milne, Alan's son -- made his first appearance.
In 1923, Rose Fyleman approached Alan with the idea that he write poems specifically for children. Initially he
refused; but that summer, stuck as he was in a Welsh summerhouse surrounded by pouring rain, he may have begun
to wonder if children's poetry were not in his line after all. A few years earlier, he had written this, on just
such another wet summer day (Thwaite, p. 247):
Is it raining? Never - mind -
Think how much the birdies love it!
See them in their dozens drawn,
Dancing, to the croquet lawn -
Could our little friends have dined
If there'd been no worms above it?
Is it murky? What of that,
If the owls are fairly perky?
Just imagine you were one -
Wouldn't you detest the sun?
And so was born one of the best of Alan's poems for children, "The Dormouse
and the Doctor", which appears in When We Were Very Young. That poem begins:
There once was a Dormouse who lived in a bed
Of delphiniums (blue) and geraniums (red),
And all the day long he'd a wonderful view
Of geraniums (red) and delphiniums (blue).
Other poems soon followed, and the complete volume was published in November 1924.
Winnie-the-Pooh (a.k.a. Edward Bear) was purchased for Christopher's first birthday (which explains why Pooh, at the
end of The House at Pooh Corner, is
one year younger than Christopher Robin). Pooh was the child's absolute favorite, his constant companion. Several
other animals soon followed: Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga, Roo and Tigger, partly to please Christopher and partly to
give new material to Alan's stories. (Owl and Rabbit were completely invented by Alan.) Winnie-the-Pooh was written and published after When We Were Very Young (in 1926); then, Now We Are Six
(another book of poems, 1927); and finally, The House at Pooh Corner, the last book of stories (1928). In these books, of course, we find the remarkable partnership
between Alan and illustrator
E.H. Shepard, who were very different as persons but whose arts seemed to go together
like those of Gilbert and Sullivan. (A Gallery of Children, a much-inferior book of verse by Alan, was published between When
We Were Very Young and Winnie-the-Pooh, in 1925.)
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Until 1924 (the year When We Were Very Young was published), the Milnes had been living in London. That very year they found and purchased
the country cottage they had been looking for: Cotchford Farm, near Hartfield in Sussex, not far from Ashdown Forest
and the Five Hundred Acre Wood. Over the years, the Milnes divided their time between their house on Mallord Street
and their cottage at Cotchford. While the streets of London and the Sussex countryside would both inspire Alan's
poetry for children, the stories set in "the Forest" and "the Hundred Acre Wood" would draw
their inspiration from the area near Cotchford -- and also from Alan's own childhood memories and (as E.H. Shepard
intimated) his personal appreciation of The Wind in the Willows.
To imagine the astonishing reception the four "Pooh Books" or "Children's Books" received in
their day, one need only recall the reception given to the Harry Potter books in our own. Relatively speaking, the Pooh Books
seem to have had just about as much impact on the
publishing world and on the reading public. (Winnie ille Pu, the Latin translation of Winnie-the-Pooh, was the first Latin book ever to hit the New York Times' bestseller list.) Some elements do mark some of the poems as products of Alan's own time
and social class. Nevertheless, the Pooh Books have stood the test of time because they portray the attitudes and
concerns of children realistically, in terms a child can understand and an adult can appreciate.
There are other levels of appeal as well. Alison Lurie suggests that in the stories, Alan successfully fused the
qualities of "the Golden Age of history and legend, and the lost paradise of childhood -- two eras which,
according to psychologists, are often one in the unconscious mind" (Thwaite, p. 303). There is Alan's almost
mathematical sense of humor, which consists in pursuing an idea to its logical absurdity (ibid.) -- a technique still used in the modern Pooh films and TV shows by Disney. There are the
various characters, each with a distinctive personality that plays off all of the others, yet is archetypical enough
to be readily understood and identifiable.
And then there is Christopher Robin himself -- who (in both the original books and the Disney derivatives) does
not always take a large part in the action, but who often initiates or acts as a pivot for the action. There is
something to be said for the theory that the animals in the Forest represent different aspects of Christopher Robin's
developing personality, or at least show by comparison what Christopher Robin (and therefore Alan) values in a
"good" person.
Some have criticized Christopher Robin as being too good to be true. Yet as Thwaite perceptively points out, this
critique is completely beside the point. If Christopher Robin is parent-like, even godlike to his charges, it is
because he stands in loco parentis.
He allows the child to stand with him in the parents' place, with the animals looking up to him as children do
to their parents. Moreover, if he is a god, "he is certainly a god of love" -- and not without definite
human vulnerabilities (Thwaite, pp. 300-303). Finally, though Christopher Robin is but Christopher Milne idealized
(the latter falling out of trees as the former never does), in real life Christopher Milne was very much like Christopher Robin: highly intelligent, caring, imaginative, sensitive, a lover
of nature, a lover of the outdoors, and a surprisingly plucky explorer. |
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Alan's reputation had been assured by the Pooh Books -- and it was not the reputation
he had wanted. For all his deftness of touch in whatever he wrote, for all the appreciation others had of his comic
gifts, it seems he wanted above all to be taken seriously. Under the grown-up schoolboy exterior, as it were, was
a man passionately involved with the deeper concerns of the world. In particular, women had always done well in
his comedic sketches and plays; it is they who had the best parts in the dialogues, who always came out at least
equal with the men in verbal skirmishes. This was still rather unusual for the time, though a literary and cultural
revolution was well under way.
Life goes on with its inevitable losses, and Alan had his. Ken died of tuberculosis in 1929;
J. V. Milne, himself
a widower by then, died in 1932. Barry the solicitor had manipulated his father's will to his own ends, and Alan
was determined to have nothing more to do with him. Even Alan's and Dorothy's marriage was becoming more distant
during the 1930's. The one consolation was that Alan and Christopher were drawing ever closer -- yet that closeness
too would be disrupted, after Christopher returned home from military service in World War II.
Only one book Alan wrote during the 1930's would make any difference to his reputation: Peace
With Honour (1934). It was "a passionate plea for peace, for the renunciation
of war" (Thwaite, p. 381). This was the time of the League of Nations, of hopes that man might finally put
aside war even as the hurricane of belligerence was gathering strength in the world. It was that very year that
Hitler took Germany out of the League; by then, Italy and Japan were also openly militarist.
Alan had always been a ferocious polemicist, writing letters constantly to various newspapers. He hated giving
lectures, however, even on such a subject as this. He did receive hundreds of letters from readers, many of whom
agreed with him -- including one from Queen Marie of Romania. Professional critics had a more mixed reaction, but
unquestionably Alan was at last being taken seriously. (Peace With Honour was one of only three books recommended by the Peace Pledge Union in Britain as part of preparation
for courteous debate.) Nevertheless, Alan's view that Britain's real greatness did not lie in her Empire but in
her cultural achievements was a deeply unpopular view at the time.
Alan's most formidable opponent on this subject was a fellow man of letters,
T. S. Eliot. While most felt that Eliot's
specific rebuke of Milne was unjustified, on the larger issues -- that there are indeed worse things than war,
that there are some things worth fighting for -- Eliot in time proved to be right and Milne wrong. In time, Alan
himself came to realize this (Hitler's example could hardly have led him to see otherwise), and he wrote War With Honour (pamphlet, 1941) and War Aims Unlimited (pamphlet, 1941). Many pacifists
thought Alan had betrayed the very ideals for which he had claimed to stand. Alan maintained that a pacifist's
aim is to prevent war or, failing that, to end it as quickly and as honorably as possible.
During the war years, Alan contributed to Punch
again as a freelancer. Behind the Lines,
a collection of verse, was published in 1940. |
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In 1939, Alan had written his autobiography, It's
Too Late Now. Its basic thesis is that one's makeup is largely determined
by childhood influences and heredity, and so it was "too late now" for Alan to be a different kind of
person than what he was. Some people, it seems, had long been wishing he were different, and their numbers were increasing; the world was changing around him, and not
just because of the war. Alan's humor, however seriously motivated, had always been "nice". The sense
of humor of the world around him was growing darker, less "nice".
In the 1940's, Alan wrote one last novel, Chloe Marr
(1946), short stories, a few plays, and a long philosophical poem, The Norman
Church (1948). This last work expresses Alan's long-held cynicism toward
organized religion, even if expressed (as was so typical of him) in a lighthearted vein (Thwaite, p. 477):
The choir-boys shuffle in their seats;
A housewife mentally completes
Tomorrow's washing list; her lord
Adds up the hymns upon the board.
The Squire, as far as one can see,
Is interested in a bee;
A widow, reverently prim,
Is wondering how best to slim -
And all the maidens listen rapt, and 'think of him'.
But as his son Christopher noted in his own autobiography, Alan's audience had largely
deserted him (save, of course, the part that read and bought the Pooh Books). Alan had always been lucky: what
he had wanted to write was what his readers had wanted to read. But now that luck had largely passed away. If The Norman Church confirmed the opinion of the Milnes'
neighbors in Hartsfield village that the Milnes were atheists and sinners, the poem made little impact on the world
at large (Thwaite, p. 477).
Yet not all Alan's luck had gone. While
he and Christopher were now distant, he and Dorothy had renewed their closeness. His last book was a collection
of essays, Year In, Year Out (1952):
a sort of second autobiography, giving Alan's views on a veritable smorgasbord of topics. It was well reviewed
in both Britain and America. By then, happily for Alan, his ironic resentment of the Pooh Books' success had mellowed,
and he could write this verse commentary for the New York Herald Tribune (Thwaite, p. 479):
(...) If a writer, why not write
On whatever comes in sight?
So - the Children's Books: a short
Intermezzo of a sort;
When I wrote them, little thinking
All my years of pen-and-inking
Would be almost lost among
These four trifles for the young.
Though a writer must confess his
Works aren't all of them successes,
Though his sermons fail to please,
Though his humour no one sees,
Yet he cannot help delighting
In the pleasure of the writing
In a farmhouse old by centuries
This so happy an adventure is
Coming (so I must suppose,
Now I'm 70) to a close.
Take it all, year in, year out,
I've enjoyed it, not a doubt.
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Tragically, Alan's "luck" ran out just a few days later. A stroke in October
1952 left him invalid; an operation in December actually left him worse off than before and partly paralyzed. He
was to live another three years and three months, but with a marked change of personality. An ill-timed interview
with Christopher Milne (which, if reflecting poor memory on Christopher's part, seems less rash than Christopher
himself later considered it to be) caused Alan to change his will. Christopher's inheritance remained substantial,
but the separation between Alan and Christopher deepened. (This personal distance was compounded by geographical
distance, as Christopher and his wife Lesley had moved to Devonshire to set up a bookstore.) As a patient, Alan
also lacked patience and tact; he criticized everything and everybody, it seems -- except Dorothy. Yet to the end,
he also seems to have kept aware of his own shortcomings.
"The last eighteen months were dreary and empty," Thwaite writes. "There is nothing to record"
(p. 484). Soon after 1956 began, Alan slipped into unconsciousness; and on January 31, 1956, Alan's death was announced
on the eight-o'clock news by the B.B.C.
Though A.A. Milne did not believe in any personal immortality after death, he did believe that an artist gains immortality through his work -- if only that of the British
Museum's hardcover editions. His reputation as a writer for adults survives almost entirely in that form. It is
his children's books, as well as the stream of countless products derived from them by Dutton and Disney,
that have assured his artistic immortality. Perhaps this proves in the end Alan's own axiom: the man of talent
will find his own place (even if it is not the place he desires or expects). |
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Updated December 27, 2011
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