by A. A. Milne
So there I was with an exercise-book and a pencil, and a fixed determination not to leave the heavenly solitude of that summer-house until it stopped raining . . . and there in London were two people telling me what to write . . . and there on the other side of the lawn was a child with whom I had lived for three years . . . and here within me were unforgettable memories of my own childhood . . . what was I writing? A child’s book of verses obviously. Not a whole book, of course; but to write a few would be fun–until I was tired of it. Besides, my pencil had an india-rubber at the back; just the thing for poetry.
I had eleven wet days in that summer-house and wrote eleven sets of verses. Then we went back to London. A little apologetically: feeling that this wasn’t really work: feeling that a man of stronger character would be writing that detective-story and making £٢,٠٠٠ for the family: a little as if I were slipping off to Lord’s in the morning, or lying in a deck-chair at Osborne reading a novel, I went on writing verses. By the end of the year I had written enough for a book.
It was only after the book was in the publishers’ hands that Owen Seaman heard about it. Probably Lucas, then chairman of Methuens, had mentioned it casually. Owen asked if Punch could print some of it, and I told him, reluctantly enough, that he could use what he liked, for I feared that as a ‘reprint from Punch’ it might not get the attention which would be given to a new book. However, the publication of some of the verses had two good results; it confirmed my opinion that Shepard was the right illustrator for the book, and, with the first appearance of The King’s Breakfast, gave the publishers an idea of its ultimate reception. This was enthusiastic beyond all imagining, both in England and America. In the ten years before it went into a cheap edition half a million copies were sold.
It is inevitable that a book which has had very large sales should become an object of derision to critics and columnists. We all write books, we all want money; we who write want money from our books. If we fail to get money, we are not so humble, nor so foolish, as to admit that we have failed in our object. Our object, we maintain, was artistic success. It is easy to convince ourselves that the financial failure of the book is no proof of its success. It must be so: for how else could we be the artists we are and remain in our first editions? If any other artist goes into twenty editions, then he is a traitor to the cause, and we shall hasten to say that he is not one of Us.
All this is commonplace. What has been particularly irritating about the sales of the Christopher Robin books (even though the irritation has produced no more intimidating retort than the writing of the name ‘Kwistopher Wobin’) is that the books were written for children. When, for instance, Dorothy Parker, as ‘Constant Reader’ in The New Yorker, delights the sophisticated by announcing that at page 5 of The House at Pooh Corner ‘Tonstant Weader fwowed up’ (sic, if I may), she leaves the book, oddly enough, much where it was. However greatly indebted to Mrs Parker, no Alderney, at the approach of the milkmaid, thinks ‘I hope this lot will turn out to be gin,’ no writer of children’s books says gaily to his publisher, ‘Don’t bother about the children, Mrs Parker will love it.’ As an artist one might genuinely prefer that one’s novel should be praised by a single critic, whose opinion one valued, rather than be bought by ‘the mob’; but there is no artistic reward for a book written for children other than the knowledge that they enjoy it. For once, and how one hates to think it, vox populi, vox Dei. The position can only be saved by asserting that it isn’t the genuine voice of the people. It is the illiterate mothers who speak. Even so, it might be held that mothers have their own particular qualifications for speaking.
In fact I know that a great many children did, and do, like When we Were Very Young. I think that such merit as attaches to the verses for this (as distinct from the illustrations to which the book is so obviously indebted) was won by taking pains: more pains, perhaps, than is usual. Whatever else they lack, the verses are technically good. The practice of no form of writing demands such a height of technical perfection as the writing of light verse in the Calverley and Punch tradition. When we Were Very Young 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 light-verse writer taking his job seriously even though he is taking it into the nursery. It seems that the nursery, more than any other room in the house, likes to be approached seriously.
Whether I have added to technique that ‘wonderful insight into a child’s mind’ of which publishers’ advertisements talk so airily, I wouldn’t know. I am not inordinately fond of or interested in children; their appeal to me is a physical appeal such as the young of other animals make. I have never felt in the least sentimental about them, or no more sentimental than one becomes for a moment over a puppy or a kitten. In as far as I understand their minds the understanding is based on the observation, casual enough and mostly unconscious, which I give to people generally: on memories of my own childhood: and on the imagination which every writer must bring to memory and observation. Again to avoid paraphrasing myself I shall quote here from a Preface to Parents, which I wrote for a particular edition of the verses.
In real life very young children have an artless beauty, an innocent grace, an unstudied abandon of movement, which, taken together, make an appeal to our emotions similar in kind to that made by any other young and artless creatures: kittens, puppies, lambs: but greater in degree, for the reason that the beauty of childhood seems in some way to transcend the body. Heaven, that is, does really appear to lie about the child in its infancy, as it does not lie about even the most attractive kitten. But with this outstanding physical quality there is a natural lack of moral quality, which expresses itself, as Nature always insists on expressing herself, in an egotism entirely ruthless.
Now it seems to me that the writer who is trying to put a child upon paper must keep these two outstanding facts about children before him, and endeavour to preserve his sense of proportion. A sentimental painter might leave out the wart on Cromwell’s face; but the biographer who, priding himself on his realism, calls attention to the wart every time he mentions the face, is just as falsely sentimental, since any small blemish on the face of one we know soon passes unnoticed. A pen-picture of a child which showed it as loving, grateful and full of thought for others would be false to the truth; but equally false would be a picture which insisted on the brutal egotism of the child, and ignored the physical beauty which softens it. Equally false and equally sentimental, for sentimentality is merely an appeal to emotions not warranted by the facts.
To avoid equally these two sentimentalities is the difficulty in front of the writer. It is easy (at least, I suppose it is easy, if one is a painter) to paint a beautiful child, but it is not easy to describe one. Any attempt to do so will become either conventional or indescriptive. But it is possible to give what one might call ‘an air of charm,’ particularly when writing in verse, to any account of a child’s activities, and it seems to me that this ‘charm,’ if one can convey it, should have as much chance in the printed page as in real life of hiding from the sentimentalist the uncharming part of a child’s nature: the egotism and the heartlessness.
I shall now expose my own egotism by giving one or two examples of how I have tried to do this.
The mother of a little boy of three has disappeared, and is never seen again. The child’s reaction to the total loss of his mother is given in these lines:
James James
Morrison Morrison
(Common/y known as Jim)
Told his
Other relations
Not to go blaming him.
And that is all. It is the truth about a child: children are, indeed, as heartless as that: but only in one sense have I made a song about it.
In Buckingham Palace Christopher Robin is taken by his nurse to see the changing of the guard. She tells him about the soldiers and
the Palace and the King, and at the end of it all he has only one question to ask: ‘Do you think the King knows all about Me?’ Could egotism be more gross? If you were to take an author up to your most admired friend–as it might be Lindbergh–and on the way were to whisper to him of all the wonderful things your hero had done, would you not be disgusted if his only remark were, ‘Do you think Lindbergh knows all about Me?’ But since a child of three can say these things, and be innocent and charming enough to make them sound innocent and charming, so then, in the poem, if a true picture is to be given, the egotism must be there for the unsentimental to find, but there must also be charm enough to give it at least a surface covering.
Finally, let me refer to the poem which has been more sentimentalized over than any other in the book: Vespers. Well, if mothers and aunts and hard-headed reviewers have been sentimental over it, I am glad; for the spectacle in real life of a child of three at its prayers is one over which thousands have been sentimental. It is indeed calculated to bring a lump to the throat. But, even so, one must tell the truth about the matter. Not ‘God bless mummy, because I love her so,’ but ‘God bless Mummy, I know that’s right’; not ‘God bless Daddy, because he buys me food and clothes,’ but ‘God bless Daddy, I quite forgot’; not even the egotism of ‘God bless Me, because I’m the most important person in the house,’ but the super-egotism of feeling so impregnable that the blessing of this mysterious God for Oneself is the very last thing for which it would seem necessary to ask. And since this is the Truth about a Child, let us get all these things into the poem, and the further truth that prayer means nothing to a child of three, whose thoughts are engaged with other, more exciting matters; but since the Truth about a Child is also that, fresh from its bath, newly powdered and curled, it is a lovely thing, God wot, why then, let us try, however inadequately, to get at least a hint of this upon paper, so that, if possible, the reader, no less than the spectator, may feel that Beauty is hovering. . . . For some day we may be describing a Scientist Shaving and calling it Matins, and then there will be no need to wait upon Beauty.
5
Winnie-the-Pooh was written two years later, and was followed by a second book of verses and, in 1928, The House at Pooh Corner. The animals in the stories came for the most part from the nursery. My collaborator had already given them individual voices, their owner by constant affection had given them the twist in their features which denoted character, and Shepard drew them, as one might say, from the living model. They were what they are for anyone to see; I described rather than invented them. Only Rabbit and Owl were my own unaided work.
These books also became popular. One day when Daphne went up to the nursery, Pooh was missing from the dinner table which he always graced. She asked where he was. ‘Behind the ottoman,’ replied his owner coldly. ‘Face downwards. He said he didn’t like When we Were Very Young.’ Pooh’s jealousy was natural. He could never quite catch up with the verses.
It is easier in England to make a reputation than to lose one. I wrote four ‘Children’s books,’ containing altogether, I suppose, 70,000 words—the number of words in the average-length novel. Having said good-bye to all that in 70,000 words, knowing that as far as I was concerned the mode was outmoded, I gave up writing children’s books. I wanted to escape from them as I had once wanted to escape from Punch; as I have always wanted to escape. In vain. England expects the writer, like the cobbler, to stick to his last. As Arnold Bennett pointed out: if you begin painting policemen you must go on painting policemen, for then the public knows the answer–Policemen. If you stop painting policemen in order to paint windmills, criticism remains so overpoweringly policeman-conscious that even a windmill is seen as something with arms out, obviously directing the traffic. These last ten years in which I have been writing plays, novels and invocations against war are littered with affiliation orders on behalf of all the ‘juveniles’ born so lovingly and with such complete absence of labour into the book world. If I didn’t put my name to them, ‘that,’ as the King of Hearts said, ‘only makes the matter worse.’ It proves that my spiritual home is still the nursery, that I am still thinking of policemen. As a discerning critic pointed out: the hero of my latest play, God help it, was ‘just Christopher Robin grown up.’ So that even when I stop writing about children, I still insist on writing about people who were children once. What an obsession with me children are become!
Chapter Fifteen
I
It has been my good fortune as a writer that what I have wanted to write has for the most part proved to be saleable. It has been my misfortune as a business man that, when it has proved to be extremely saleable, then I have not wanted to write it any more. It has been my good fortune as a husband that I have been encouraged to be a writer, not a business man.
I like writing, by which I mean that I like putting down certain words in a certain order. Because it gives me no pleasure when I am writing a play just to put down ‘Exit Smith,’ and less than no pleasure to put down, as I read the other day, ‘They exit together,’ I gratify myself by taking as much time and trouble over stage directions which may never be seen as I should over an inscription in stone on an inescapable monument. This is due, not entirely to that pride or self love which makes a woman wear pretty knickers even if nobody is going to discover them, but to a laziness which at times approximates to torpor. I hate writing; by which I mean that I hate the business of putting down words with a pen. Unless I can get some sort of ‘kick’ out of them I can hardly bring myself to the drudgery of inking them in. To spend two days in writing a difficult letter to The Times is not work but continuous excitement; to spend five minutes regretting my inability to give the prizes away at St Etheldreda’s is to live again through all the wasted hours in form and lecture-room.
When I read one of those 8/6 novels whose weight well qualifies them for a permanent place in literature, I never find myself thinking ‘How boring this is to read,’ but always ‘How boring this must have been to write.’ This is no criticism of the book either as a work of art or as a work of interest. I doubt if any 8/6 novel could be as dull as parts of Paradise Lost, but the author of Paradise Lost in his most uninspired moments is leading an exciting life. So is the author of what you have thought the most unhumorous ‘humorous book’; for he, plainly, was amused. From time to time I feel that the writer of the 8/6 novel which I am reading was neither amused nor interested, and I envy him the staying-power which kept his pen at work.
In the beginning of that abortive revue which I designed for the Palace Theatre I wrote what I thought of as a lyric, to be sung by the comedian of the company. It was, in fact, a set of light verses, as clever as I could make them. Sir Alfred Butt, profoundly shocked, pointed out that there was a laugh in every line. I agree complacently. ‘But you can only have a laugh in the last line of a verse,’ he protested. I asked why. He explained, quite convincingly, why a song went backwards and forwards across the footlights more effectively this way; and I explained, quite unconvincingly, why I was unable to write three lines which were just any old words, in order to introduce one line which was worth writing. This was about the moment when we began to say good-bye to each other. Probably I thought that I was being an artist, but I know now that I was just being lazy.
It is, no doubt, this laziness which has made me try so many different forms of writing.
2
The most exciting form of writing is the writing of plays. There is, however, this to be said against it: that, when once the play is written, the author is never really happy again until it has been taken off.
One writes a book; a publisher is waiting for it; a date of publication is fixed for it. The book will be printed just as one wrote it, exact to the last comma. Whether criticism blows fair or foul, the book remains in being; it is there for anyone to read.
One writes a play; no manager is waiting for it; the play may be sold this year, next year, sometime, never. Be
ing bought, it may be produced this year, next year, sometime, never. If produced, it will not be produced, exact to the last eyebrow, as the author saw it, for the reason that its characters live in the author’s imagination, and that, even if they have autotypes in real life, it is extremely unlikely that these will be actors and actresses by profession, available for this production. Finally, when some version of the play has been launched, a puff of foul criticism, a week of fog, a few days of crisis, a ’bus strike, the sudden indisposition of the leading man may be enough to sink it for ever. Even if the play runs, every visit to it brings to the author the realization that this is not the play which he had thought he was writing. Oh, well–next time perhaps. The play comes off, and he loses himself happily in a world of his own imagination, peopled by characters for whom no alien flesh and blood need be sought; he writes a novel.
I take down a novel at random from my shelves; I open it at random. I read this:
The page followed him in silence into the Abbot’s house, where, stepping into the first apartment which he found open, he commanded one of his attendants to let his brother, Master Edward Glendinning, know that he desired to speak with him.
It may be Scott’s fault rather than mine that at first I supposed it was the page who was brother to Master Edward. If you felt that way too, then we can write: ‘Followed by the silent page he entered the Abbot’s house, where . . .’ and all will now be clear. Perhaps my thesis will also be clear, which is this: that a novel continuously demands from the author paragraphs, sometimes whole pages, in whose composition no delight can be taken. There is no kick whatever to be got out of writing: ‘Stepping into the first apartment which he found open, he commanded one of his attendants to let his brother Master Edward Glendinning, know that he desired to speak with him.’ Wodehouse, desiring to convey the same scene, might have written: ‘Seeping into the first apartment,’ and by so writing would have chosen his word and have given expression to his art. But Scott could do nothing but stub the words down his pen and look forward to Sir Halbert Glendinning’s next speech. (‘Thou mayest have remarked, stripling, that I have but seldom distinguished thee by much notice. . . .’) Whatever the words now, they are words which must be sought for: particular words to suit the occasion, the character of the speaker, and the state of the person addressed. However ill-chosen, their choosing keeps the writer at full stretch. He gets value for his labour.