by A. A. Milne
Title
A. A. Milne
IT’S TOO
LATE NOW
The autobiography of a writer
Contents
Contents
Introduction
CHILD
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
SCHOOLBOY
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
UNDERGRADUATE
Chapter Nine
FREE-LANCE
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
ASSISTANT EDITOR
Chapter Twelve
AMATEUR SOLDIER
Chapter Thirteen
AUTHOR
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
About the Author
Dedication
1880–1929
To the memory of
KENNETH JOHN MILNE
who bore the worst of me
and
made the best of me
Introduction
When I read the biography of a well-known man, I find that it is the first half of it which holds my attention. I watch with fascinated surprise the baby, finger in mouth, grow into the politician, tongue in cheek; but I find nothing either fascinating or surprising in the discovery that the cynicism of the politician has matured into the pomposity of the Cabinet Minister. It was inevitable. So, too, is it inevitable that the composer of one opera should compose other operas, and, if not inevitable, at least not surprising that a reputation founded on the first should grow with its successors. Nor is it surprising (nor particularly interesting) that any man moderately well known should meet other well-known people; for as soon as he has made himself known he will dine with Lady X; it is for Lady X to write her own autobiography and tell us who else were there. What we want to learn from the composer is how he came to compose an opera at all. Tell us why the boy became an apothecary, and how the apothecary found himself writing Endymion, and let us guess for ourselves that the author of Endymion will meet Wordsworth and Shelley, and surprise neither of them with an Ode to a Nightingale.
There is no vanity in supposing that even one’s own early life may have this interest for others. Most of us must have wondered about the making of those we meet. This man who has come to mend the telephone: that man who has come to mend the chair: why not the other way round, this one mending the chair, and that one the telephone? Our lawyer, our doctor: what accident, what environment, what determination placed them where they are? The painter with whom we had supposed ourselves intimate says casually, ‘I remember when I was a school-master at Eastbourne,’ and it is as startling to us as if he had said, ‘I remember when I was prospecting for gold in the Carpathians.’ So that was how he began! How interesting!
Feeling like this about other people I feel like it also about myself. In this book, as in everything which I have written, I have humoured the author. Whatever happens to the public, the author is not going to be bored. I have enjoyed looking back on the past, and if others now find enjoyment in looking over my shoulder, I am as glad as my publishers will be. But let us be quite clear that this is my party, not theirs. There is no index for their entertainment. Even if there were an index, there would be very few names to put in it. I had the honour of meeting a world-famous golfer once. We were introduced, but naturally my name meant nothing to him. Our introducer, wishing to do his best for me, added kindly, ‘The writer, you know.’ The golfer looked uncomfortable and said, ‘Oh, yes.’ I should have been content to leave it there, but my friend was more persistent. ‘You know,’ he said doggedly; ‘the dramatist, Mr Pim Passes By.’ Amazingly the golfer’s face lit up. He beamed at me. ‘Oh,’ he said eagerly, ‘then you know a lot of actresses!’ ‘I do; but this is the autobiography of a writer, not a book about a lot of actresses. It will be a disappointment to the golfing world.
Perhaps some explanation of the title is needed. It does not mean that if I had my life again I should be an engineer or a clergyman or a stockbroker or a better man, and that unfortunately it is too late now to be any of these things. It means that heredity and environment make the child, and the child makes the man, and the man makes the writer; so that it is too late now–it was probably too late forty years ago–for me to be a different writer. I say this neither regretfully nor complacently, I state it as a fact. It is a habit of modern criticism to condemn the author of the book criticized for not being the author of somebody else’s book; for not writing, that is, in a style alien to him. He who is at home among the leisured classes is urged to take a ’bus down the Whitechapel Road and see how the poor live; and he whose heart is in the Whitechapel Road is rebuked for his ‘inability to draw a gentleman.’ The optimist is reproached for not despairing of the world, the pessimist is urged to take a lesson from the optimist. One begins by reading such criticism hoping to profit by it; the criticism should have been made to the child’s parents before they married. One writes in a certain sort of way because one is a certain sort of person; one is a certain sort of person because one has led a certain sort of life.
This is the life.
When I had my first story published in an American magazine, the editor asked my agent for a short account of this unknown author for his monthly article ‘Something about Our New Contributors.’ My agent passed the letter on to me, and I did what I could for him. A few weeks later my first published book in America was due, again some information about the unknown author was required. Again I wrote happily about myself. Back came an indignant letter from the agent: ‘Hi! This Life is the same as the other one!’
You see, it was too late even then.
A.A.M.
CHILD
1882–1893
Chapter One
I
‘Once upon a time there was a man who had three sons’— this was how we began, this was how the fairy stories began. And as our governess read them aloud to their inevitable end, Barry looked at Ken, and the two of them looked at Alan, and I looked as little complacent as I could, knowing that the third son was the good one, yet in a way sorry that his character was so blameless, his destiny so assured. Perhaps, after all, the others would get more fun out of life. In another moment Barry would be turned into a toadstool, and Ken into a two-headed bear; interesting, interesting; but the third son would only kill the same old dragon and come into the same old Kingdom, just as he had done a hundred times before. Oh, to be Barry or Ken for once, to miss this easy good fortune by the simple and attractive method of being rude to a godmother, how exciting that would be!
Rudeness, alas, was for the others only. We could stand in a row and put our tongues out at an unpopular governess, but my tongue would not be noticed. Miserably I would withdraw it, and wait to be held up to the others as a model of propriety. It was true that I had blue eyes and long flaxen hair; true that these were the Little Lord Fauntleroy days, and that on occasion I wore a velvet suit and lace collar; true that my hair curled naturally on my shoulders, after it had spent the night in papers. But this was equally true of all of us. Why, then, was I treated so unfairly?
In the circumstances Barry and Ken behaved well. Barry, secure in his position as the bad boy of the family, regarded me with kindly condescension. He had nothing to regret, being one of those boys who are sent to governesses solely (it seems) for comparison. On the one hand, let us contemplate George Washington, the young Nelson and James Watt; on the other hand, Barry. Which of these exemplars were Ken an
d I following? Later on it was my privilege also to contemplate Ken. Was I going the way Ken was rapidly going? Honestly I tried to, but the fairy stories were against me. I remained the third son of the family, for whom good-fortune waited. . . .‘Once upon a time there was a man who had three sons,’ read our governess.
Governesses came and went. By the third day we had made up our minds about them, as they, no doubt, about us. Only one stayed, and her we loved dearly. There was argument as to which of us should marry her, but though historically she would have fallen to me, Barry claimed her by right of conquest. When Barry was in this mood, it was a case of History against One on the Nose, and History said no more. Fortunately she had two sisters, Trot and Molly. Trot had been an occasional visitor to our house, so that when Ken proposed to her and accepted himself, there was no surprise in the family. This brought Molly and me together. I had seen her photograph; she was the Beloved One’s sister; she was the only one left; it was enough. I would marry Molly.
We all chose houses for ourselves in Priory Road, for it was up this road that we walked every morning on our way to Miss Budd’s kindergarten. I thought at the time, and still think, that Molly’s and mine was the prettiest house. Ken’s was dark and gloomy, but he had found a buff-tip caterpillar just outside the front door, and it had seemed to him that the house, for some reason, might be attractive to buff-tip caterpillars. Barry’s artistic nature was satisfied when he had assured himself that he was settling down as far as possible from Miss Budd’s. But my house had a virginia creeper all over it, and was bright and sunny. Being in the neighbourhood the other day I walked up the Priory Road, and looked for it again. It was still the prettiest house in the road. I never really got to know Molly’s tastes (one can do so little with a photograph), but I think that she would have liked it as it looked that autumn afternoon. Where is she now? Married, I suppose, to somebody else.
2
Molly would be about seventy now, which makes me feel that Miss Budd must be well over a hundred. If so, she will not mind my saying that she looked like the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland. At Miss Budd’s we began morning-school with a hymn. In reward for I know not what good or bad behaviour one or other of us might be called upon to choose this hymn, and my choice on these occasions would fall upon ‘All things bright and beautiful’; possibly because it was the only one I could remember in my sudden embarrassment. But indeed I liked it, in as far as one can like a hymn, for it had a scent of the country which distinguished it from its fellows. ‘The rushes that we gather by the stream-side every day’ opened up a vista of enchantment and adventure to a London child along which he could wander happily through the Arithmetic lesson. ‘A very pleasing choice,’ Miss Budd would say, ‘but we will omit the third verse, for unfortunately it is not quite true of those of us here to-day. We do not make a habit of gathering rushes. Now, Miss Florence, please, omitting the third verse.’ And Miss Florence Budd at the piano would strike the appropriate chord. Unimaginative Miss Budds. I had gathered rushes and fallen into that stream a hundred times.
We lived, as perhaps I should have said before, in Mortimer Road. In those days it was Mortimer Road, Kilburn, and none the worse for that; now it is become more respectable (or Kilburn less) and is known as Mortimer Crescent, St John’s Wood. Priory Road was just across the railway bridge; and day and night, beneath that bridge, trains roared their romantic way to Scotland. I always thought of them as going to the right to Scotland, but I see now that they must have gone to the left, and that every train which I watched so enviously into the heather was in fact burrowing its way ingloriously back to something worse than Kilburn. Possibly I should have been a different man if I had got the truth of this as a child; possibly not. But the Milnes came from Scotland and ought to have known where to look for it.
Every morning then, in charge of Miss Beatrice Edwards, we leave Scotland on the left and make for Miss Budd’s. It is probable that Barry is no longer with us, being already too big, or too bad, for kindergarten. Before he was in double figures his life diverged from Ken’s and mine never to come back to it. ‘We’ through all my memories of childhood is Ken and myself, and was to remain so until he was eighteen. Now I am six, Ken seven. We cross the bridge, the beloved ‘Bee’ in the middle. She holds a hand of each, and repeats to us the twenty-third Psalm. We have half-an-hour yet before school begins; we shall walk all up West End Lane and then slowly back down Priory Road; and by the time we get to Miss Budd’s we shall (it is hoped by Miss Budd) know Psalm 23 by heart.
‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,’ says Ken. ‘That’s easy.’
‘He maketh me to lie down in green pathturth; he leadeth me bethide thtill waterth,’ say I, leaving it uncertain whether it is the Psalmist or I who is lisping. ‘Oh, look, thereth a caterpillar.’
‘I saw it first. I saw it years ago. Yea, though I walk through the valley—’
‘No, darling. He restoreth my soul—’
Time goes on inexorably. We are getting nearer and nearer to Miss Budd’s. Nothing now can keep us from getting there. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, but what’s the good of saying it after Bee, when I don’t really remember it and why didn’t we start learning it sooner?
The sun is shining, goodness and mercy are to follow me (it seems) for ever, but fifty years from now I shall still dream at times that I am walking up Priory Road, an unhappy middle-aged man wrestling with a psalm which no father of fifty-six should be asked to learn. The hymn and the psalm: this is all that is left to me of Miss Budd’s educational system.
3
Ken was sixteen months older than I and fifteen months younger than Barry, so he could be as young as the one or as old as the other, whichever he preferred. Fortunately he chose me for contemporary. We were inseparable; sometimes, when fighting, so mixed up as to be indistinguishable. We never ceased to quarrel with each other, nor to feel the need of each other. Save for the fact that he hated cheese, we shared equally all belief, all knowledge, all ambition, all hope and all fear. Sometimes at inns or in strange houses we shared a bed. I remember once asking an elderly visitor if she didn’t agree with me that sharing a bed with somebody else was the most horrible thing which anybody could be asked to do. Before she could tell me, my mother interrupted. ‘Talking of bed,’ said my mother calmly . . . and I knew as I ‘ran along’ that I had been a fool to mention the subject. I only mention it now, because I wish to put it on record that my love for Ken, as his for me, survived six holiday weeks in the same bed; with a fight every morning, when one of us found that the tide of clothes had receded in the night, leaving him bare and beached.
It was, of course, I who gained most from this friendship. When Ken did a thing I did it too, and this meant that I was always sixteen months ahead of him. In any contemporary estimate of Shakespeare and Marlowe the few months between them would not be held to matter; but as between two boys, every day is a day in which the younger may overtake the older. ‘When I am Ken’s age, how much more I shall know than he knows now.’ So I could think then. But I can make myself no promises to-day as to what I shall know when I am Shaw’s age. Strange, for surely I can learn more quickly now than I could when I was a boy.
All through Ken’s schooldays, then, it was a reproach to him that his younger brother was intellectually his superior. If, by reason of his greater age, he could enter for, and did in fact pass, some examination before I did, nobody had any doubt that I should pass it before the sixteen months were up, and with more distinction. Every triumph had over it the shadow of my impending triumph. When he was only twelve, he surprised the family by getting a Westminster scholarship; congratulations were sincere, but kept within reason. There was (surely?) something better to come. There was. Within six months I had got a similar scholarship . . . and I was still only eleven.
Do you wonder that he was jealous of me?
But he wasn’t. A boy can do
a great deal in sixteen months, but he cannot change his nature, and Ken had one advantage of me which he was to keep throughout his life. He was definitely—nicer. On going into the matter with Dr Murray I find that the word ‘nice’ has fourteen meanings, none of which gives the clue to Ken’s superior quality. Yet I still say that he was nicer than I; kinder, larger-hearted, more lovable, more tolerant, sweeter tempered–all of that or none of that, it doesn’t matter, he was just ‘nicer.’ If you knew us both, you preferred Ken. I might be better at work and games; even better-looking, for he had been dropped on his nose as a baby (or picked up by it, we never could decide which); but ‘poor old Ken’ or ‘dear old Ken’ had his private right of entry into everybody’s heart. Anybody less nice than he would have found me, and left me, insufferable. If, in later years, I have not seemed insufferable to my friends over any success which has looked in on me I owe it to him, in whose company complacence found nothing on which to batten. And if I have taken failure less well than I should have done, it is because I am still sixteen months behind him in humility, and shall never catch up.
But in these days humility and complacence were unknown words to us, and examinations had not come seriously into our lives. The only competition between us was for the larger half of the holiday bed. In bed or out of it, we looked (except for Ken’s nose, and there may be precedent for that) like two angels not yet fledged—or, as one might say, entire cherubim. Any old lady could be trusted to adore us, any normal boy to have the urge to kick us. Both would have been wrong. To some extent we were unkickable anyway, being now at our father’s school; but without its protecting walls we had to take our chance. There was an occasion during a summer holiday at Sevenoaks, Ken being eight and I seven, and both of us too winsome for words, when we were rounded up by a gang of savages in the ruins of a deserted house. What dreadful fate would have befallen us I do not know, but Ken created a diversion while I escaped, and becoming himself a prisoner was inspired to say that he lived in a village three miles off, and if given two hundred yards’ start would never be seen again. The lust of the chase was too much for the hunters; they could beat the quarry up at leisure afterwards. Gleefully they gave him to just short of the cottage down the road, and set off after him with loud halloos. So Ken trotted into our cottage and joined me in the kitchen, to the relief of the cook, who was being hurriedly organized for rescue.