by A. A. Milne
And the sea went down, and the stars came out in the wake of the setting sun,
And ever the gallant fight went on ’twixt the Fifty-three and the One.
When the pages came up on Friday, Owen was more slow, more thoughtful over them than he had ever been. At last he said, in his most cold voice: ‘Have you seen Rudie’s verses?’ Naturally I said that, though I hadn’t seen them, I knew what they were about as I had given him the idea. ‘Then,’ said the cold voice, ‘you have done Punch and your country a great disservice.’ Possibly; but in those days I resented the assumption that Englishmen could only be accepted as lovers of England if they discussed Germany in terms either of adulation or of terror. Unfortunately, the war, which made the world safe for democracy, and England fit for heroes to live in, did not succeed in changing permanently the stigmata of patriotism. Once again the true-blue Englishman feels this profound admiration for Germany: an admiration too profound for anything but the very deepest bomb-proof cellar.
I am too old now to resent it, but I do find it funny.
2
Being now a man of means (or so it seemed to me) I moved from Wellington Square to a flat which had the high-sounding address ‘St James’ Park Chambers, Queen Anne’s Gate,’ but which was more easily identifiable by cabmen as ‘31 Broadway, Westminster.’ It had its in conveniences. In order to get to the long living-room in front, it was necessary to pass through either of the two rooms at the back; which gave visitors an immediate acquaintance with one’s bedroom or one’s bathroom, as preferred. In these days this might be supposed to strike the right note of intimacy at the start, but in those days one kept something in reserve. I decided, therefore, to sleep in the bathroom, or, as I chose to put it, to have the luxury of a completely fitted bath in my bedroom. The other room thus became the ante-room or library. Through this visitors were shown, little knowing that for their sakes I was sleeping with the geyser. Luckily I had got used to the smell of gas in Chelsea.
Ken was married and living on two hundred pounds a year in Ealing. Always once and often two or three times a week I went down to dinner with them. While Maud stayed home and boiled the potatoes, Ken and I would go out and buy all the things at the grocer’s which we would have bought so gladly at Westminster: sardines, tongues, tinned fruit, soft drinks and, more adultly, cherry brandy. Then while Maud washed up, we men sat in front of the fire, replete, and smoked and chattered. So it was often, but not always. There were days when Maud was not well enough for domesticity, and then it was for the men to take over her responsibilities. Many a time we have gone to the butcher’s and moved on equal terms with him from one undressed and much-slapped piece of beef to another, and haggled for four pounds of rolled ribs, and taken our booty back, and cooked it, Mrs. Beeton watching from the top of the oven, roast with two veg, and served it up triumphantly, no better beef on any table in England. Did ‘I lead,’ as I did on the Napes Needle, or is it just my infuriating habit to assume that I did? I can’t remember; perhaps Ken was the better cook of the two. But I remember that I made an article out of some such dinner a few days before I got on to Punch, which I sent (I suppose by request, though it seems strange) to the Manchester Sunday Chronicle. Unfortunately in Manchester, or in this part of Manchester, it is customary to demand an account from the contributor, detailing the number of words or lines for which payment is requested.
I read my article at the National Liberal (how right Wells was to say that I should find it useful) and then went out to buy a copy for the making of the account. A second contribution was sent up, and was published (as I suppose, since it was never returned to me) on a Sunday when I was out of London. Thus I never saw it in print, was unable to make out an account, and in fact, did not get paid for it. With an income of £500 a year I was not bothering then about a trifle like that; but if The Sunday Chronicle cares now to send the money, with thirty-two years’ interest, to the Children’s Country Holiday Fund, it has my permission.
The weekly article in Punch left me with a certain amount of time but very little inspiration for other work. Owen used to suggest that I should spend the time in writing serious articles for the reviews; so did Father. As schoolmasters they felt that I was not taking full advantage of my education. Owen made it perfectly clear in his verses that he was a classical scholar, but there was nothing in any of my cricket sketches to indicate that I could even work out a bowling analysis. Consider the literary members of the Table. Lehmann was in Parliament, Lucas had written a life of Lamb, Graves was assistant-editor of The Spectator. Could I not also show that beneath the mask of levity there dwelt a serious purpose, or a knowledge of quaternions, or something?
The answer was that the levity was no mask put on for the occasion. The world was not then the damnable world which it is to-day; it was a world in which imaginative youth could be happy without feeling ashamed of its happiness. I was very young, very light-hearted, confident of myself, confident of the future. I loved my work; I loved not working; I loved the long week-ends with the delightful people of other people’s delightful houses. I loved being in love, and being out of love and free again to fall in love. I loved feeling rich again, and having no responsibilities but only the privileges of a benevolent uncle. I loved hearing suddenly that some Great Man, full of serious purpose, had loved my last article. And if anybody says that all this is a misuse of the much misused word ‘love,’ well, it is, but I like misusing it for it conveys my simple happiness. Those (as I said when I collected under one title four books of Punch contributions; and as Wordsworth had said earlier; and as Osbert Sitwell was to say later), Those Were The Days.
In short I was gay, and the gaiety could not be kept in. If to please my elders I had exposed the inner life of the quaternion in The Quarterly Review, it would have been a gay exposure, shocking to the academic mind. It is assumed too readily, I feel, that a writer who makes his readers laugh would really prefer to make them cry, and that he is only making them laugh because, as a ‘professional humorist,’ he is paid to do so. When, many years later, critics took to calling me ‘whimsical,’ they assumed, easily and naturally, that ‘whimsy’ was something which I had heard from Barrie was profitable, and which I stuck on my writing here and there, as one sticks stamps on a postal order to give it a higher value. I doubt if this mode of writing is practised so freely as is supposed. It is too difficult. A writer’s job is to express himself in prose or verse, and this is what most of us are doing. We are not laboriously expressing somebody else’s personality in order to please a publisher or annoy a critic.
3
In 1910 I was allowed downstairs. Graves presented me with a knife with which to leave my mark on the Table, and I achieved a modest and monogrammatic A. A. M. which is already, I dare say, a hieroglyphic to him who sits in my place. Who was this, he wonders and nobody now can tell him. Yes, Bernard Partridge is still there, the only survivor of my time, he sat just opposite, he may remember. Milne, wasn’t it? And in a little while somebody will be saying: ‘What were his initials?’
In those days the initials were better known. Indeed, I could claim that they were the most popular which ever appeared in Punch, inasmuch as they were divided, when I retired, among two other contributors, Anthony Armstrong and Archibald Marshall, for whose work I have received a good deal of credit. An article by ‘A. A.’ on a Dutch cheese he had once met brought me an unexpected gift from Holland which I accepted thankfully, knowing how impossible it was to forward anything so ill-shaped for forwarding as a Dutch cheese. It was always a regret to me that Marshall didn’t write more about champagne or golf balls. For Punch readers are delightfully responsive. At a crisis in the war I wrote some pathetic verses called ‘The Last Pot,’ and never lacked for marmalade again. When I had exhausted the benevolence or the larders of English women, the nearer colonies and the more distant Dominions took up the torch, so that the Empire became for me a place in which marmalade is always setting.
Whether through kindnesses like these, or from letters, or just from an awareness hard to justify or explain, the regular Punch writer did feel peculiarly at home with his readers, sure of their instant response. Just as a theatre company can play better to a warm house than a cold house, so does the ‘professional humorist’ expand in the warmth of the reception which he knows is awaiting him. As a writer I expanded happily.
As a member of the Table I provided my own warmth. The dinner was a long one and a good one; we drank champagne who liked it; we smoked cigars or pipes; we talked and could have gone on talking. But from the other end of the Table Owen said, ‘well, gentlemen,’ and we turned reluctantly to the business of the evening. The cartoons. The very political cartoons. And in those days politics made me extremely warm.
With its large circulation in the Shires, the Vicarages and the Messes of England Punch was almost compelled to be True Blue. To-day the distinction between Blue and Red is not so marked; ultra-red is indistinguishable from ultra-blue, and everything complementary is some shade of purple. But those were the days when Lord Willoughby de Broke swore that blood would flow beneath Westminster Bridge (I think I am right about that, but it may have been Waterloo Bridge) before the Parliament Bill became law; and an Ulsterman called O’Neill threw a book at Winston Churchill (this being one of Mr Churchill’s Liberal periods) across the sacred floor of the House of Commons; and Lord Winterton bobbed up continually, calling out, ‘Manners, there, manners;’ and Duchesses bound themselves by a terrible oath never to lick stamps for a little Welsh attorney; and ‘well-known Harley Street physicians’ solemnly exhibited in the more Conservative press the seeds of poisoning which lurked in the gum of Insurance stamps if Duchesses licked them, but not apparently in the gum of postage stamps such as are continually licked by common people. It all seems ridiculous now; it seemed to me ridiculous and indecent then; and being young and impatient and sure of myself (or, as I said, young), I found it difficult not to get over-heated at those interminable discussions which followed the over-heating Punch Dinner.
4
When Owen went off to the Riviera or Scotland, E. V. Lucas came into the office as acting-editor. He had as many concerns outside Punch as Owen had few, and consequently was as quick as Owen was slow. After the paper was put to bed on Friday night, Owen had nowhere to go but home, and a lonely home at that. E. V. had a hundred mysterious activities waiting for him. Only once as we walked down the Strand together did he vary his usual, ‘Well, I’m going this way. Good-night,’ in preface to one of those disappearances to which I was now used, and which had all the air, even if they took him no further than the Garrick Club, of a prelude to adventure. On this occasion he suggested that I should come with him, and for the first time in my life I passed through the stage door of a theatre. What theatre I cannot remember, save that it was a theatre of varieties. We found ourselves in the dressing-room of one of the great comics of the day, I have forgotten which. He and E. V., it seemed, were dear old pals. I was introduced. My presence there was so surprising to myself that I supposed he had wished to meet me, but my name meant as little to him as would that of Keats or any other dear old pal. We got on splendidly together. I didn’t say anything because I had nothing to say; I didn’t drink anything because I had nothing to drink, except whisky, which I have never liked.
But his flow of professional high spirits swept me up equally with Lucas, the dresser, and a couple of other men whom he seemed to think I had brought with me; his eyes appealed with no less confidence to mine than to theirs for appreciation and support; and when I left it was with the knowledge that there was always a drink waiting for me (old boy) whenever I liked to drop in. I never saw him again.
When Lucas died, I wrote this of him in The Times:
He could not be called ‘the writers’ writer,’ as—was it Spenser? E. V. would know: why can’t I ask him?—as Spenser was called the poets’ poet, but he was the writer most loved as a man by other writers; in part because he was free from the unlovable vanities and jealousies which other writers indulge. Nobody was so instantly appreciative of the work of his fellow-craftsmen, nobody was so little cumbered about his own. Listening to him among his contemporaries, the conversation all of books, a stranger on the outskirts of his company would still wonder why the wittiest and the best-informed of them all did not himself try authorship. In fact, his writing, though so necessary to him, was in no way an expression of himself. No essayist of his quality has had so little to say of the world within him, so much to say of the world around him. To pass from a knowledge of his books to a knowledge of the man was to find oneself neither on familiar ground nor on treacherous ground; it was to explore a new country, as exhilarating and as firm of outline as his own beloved Downs. To be a writer and to have him for a friend was to feel that whatever one wrote was written in a special sense for him; so that the thought ‘E. V. will like that’ gave one a new conceit of the last paragraph, a new confidence for the next. With the same assurance one would save for him the little gleanings of the week: ridiculous things, odd things, fine things, damnable things: heard, read, discovered: thinking, ‘I must tell E. V. that,’ knowing that his comment would give just that extra flavour to one’s own emotion. He had the dry sparkle of his favourite wine, and brought to his companion the same sense of ease and well-being, the same satisfaction with oneself, the same stimulation to be wiser and wittier than one really was. Now E. V. is dead; now it is the morning after. The world is not so good a place as we had thought it. We are not such fine fellows.
Through the thirty years of my friendship with him, beginning from the days when he first came into the Punch office as Acting Editor, I was encouraged by him to think that I was a good writer. Anybody who likes may differ from him, including myself at times, but I know that I am a better writer for his appreciation than I should have been without it. Owen was as guarded in his praise as a preparatory schoolmaster, who fears always the retort: ‘If my son was as clever as you said, why didn’t he get a scholarship?’ When I had written half-a-dozen articles, he would say, ‘Isn’t it about time you wrote some verse again?’ which in a way (let us look on the bright side) was a compliment to my verse; and after three sets of verses he would say, ‘It’s about time you did another series, isn’t it?’ which could be taken (thank you, Owen) as a compliment to my prose. If those were compliments, they were all that I extracted from him. But E. V. knew that you can’t be light and gay and off-hand and casual and charming in print unless you are continually reassured that you are being some of these things. If I had any value to Punch it was because sometimes I was some of these things, and E. V.’s praise helped me to give the air of doing it all easily–which is the only air to give writing of that sort.
At this time he was contributing, over the initials V. V. V., a weekly commentary to The Sphere called ‘A Few Days Ago.’ When he wandered off to Florence, he asked me, with the editor’s acquiescence, to take his place. So, for the six weeks of his absence, I commented on the world (religion and politics barred) over the initials ‘O. O. O.,’ and at the end of them was given the freedom of The Sphere for a weekly essay over my own name. I wrote those essays for two years at three guineas a time, and then retired, feeling at a temporary loss for subjects, politics and religon being barred. After a year’s rest I asked if I might come back, being then engaged to be married and more aware of the importance of money. Clement Shorter expressed his delight in the nicest way; but after six months the Proprietors of Punch offered to pay me what The Sphere was paying me if I stopped writing for it. This doesn’t sound like a tribute, but I suppose in a way it was. Shorter again was nice about it, and let me go. After the war, when I had left Punch and had to earn a living somehow, I suggested to Shorter that I should make another return to The Sphere, but this time for six guineas. Once again he agreed, with the politeness of one whose only object was to serve me. I have always thought of him as the best editor for whom I have worked. We
never met; he never wrote to me, save when I retired from or returned to the paper; but in some way he always gave the impression of having the completest confidence in his contributors.
5
It was in 1910 that I published what I think of now as my first book: The Day’s Play, a collection of Punch articles. E. V. suggested that, since I had parodied the title, I should send a copy to the author of The Day’s Work. When I said that I didn’t know Kipling, and couldn’t imagine the author of the famous and recently-published line ‘The flannelled fool at the wicket, the muddied oaf in the goal’ being interested in a book full of cricket and lesser games, E. V. assured me that Kipling was ‘not like that,’ and that he would write me a charming and appreciative letter back. I should have loved a charming and appreciative letter from Kipling, but had to wait twenty years for it; for in those days I couldn’t regard it as possible that young writers should introduce themselves in this way to older writers whom they didn’t know. The school tie wouldn’t hear of it; it was ‘bad form.’ However, each Wednesday when we met at the dinner, E. V. would say, ‘Have you sent your book to Kipling yet?’ until at last I had to promise him that this next week I really would. So I sat down to write the accompanying letter: ‘Sir,’ I began. . . . It was, it had to be, one of those letters in which the case for the importance of the addressee and the unimportance of the addressor is slightly overstated. Kipling himself once answered Tennyson’s praise with the words: ‘When a private is praised by his General he does not presume to thank him, but fights the better afterwards,’ although the parallel of a corporal not thanking his colonel but fighting the better afterwards would have done justice to the situation. My letter beginning ‘Sir’ and enclosing my own modest volume expressed not only an unrestrained admiration for the great man’s own work, but the assurance that it was from him alone that I had drawn my first enthusiasm for literature and that it was to the peak whereon he sat that I was lifting my eyes, content if I could master only so much as the few first gentle slopes. (Or whatever. I don’t keep copies.) When I had written this, I read it through, and decided that it was so utterly false that I simply could not let it go. I admired much of Kipling, but not like that. The only writer whom I did admire at all like that in those days was Barrie. So, not wishing to waste the letter, I sent it and the book to Barrie. He wrote a ‘charming and appreciative’ letter back. He elected me the ‘last member’ of his cricket team, the Allahakbarries. He asked me to lunch. That was how I got to know him. Even after twenty-five years I wished that I had not forced myself on him, but had been introduced in the ordinary way.