by A. A. Milne
A Book of Free-verse underneath the Bough,
A Saxophone, a Gin and It—and Thou
Beside me crooning in the Wilderness—
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!
Praise be to Allah.
3
As for ‘What I Believe,’ I put this into print once at the request of a Bishop: the only Bishop who ever came into our house. (When he left, we found five threepennybits on the sofa. We gave them to the Salvation Army, and tried to take our minds off the matter, but of course we couldn’t help wondering.) This confession of faith formed one of a series of pamphlets, and may so remain. I wrote another pamphlet once called Peace With Honour. This also need not be paraphrased here. I find it very hard to convince those who are concerned with political and social activities that, unless one is professionally a Public Speaker, one does not want to say the same thing over and over again in different ways. If one has written it once, one had said it as well as one can–for ever. This must be true of most writers; I may be unique in not wanting to say anything aloud at any time. At one of my few public appearances I made a speech which, with the many others made on that occasion, was broadcast to the world. Or so I was told by my neighbour when I sat down: ‘Fancy,’ he said, ‘they heard you in Honolulu!’ Daphne was sitting a table or two away, and when we met afterwards I told her proudly that they had heard me in Honolulu. ‘Good,’ she said, ‘I’m glad they heard you somewhere.’
Well, to those who have been reading this book I have now been audible for quite a long time. It would be as well to sit down. But before I do so, there is something which I should like to say.
Every writer who has put his name to the back of one book or the front of one programme has surrendered some part of his privacy to others. He is not on that account the servant of the public, as the actor so dearly considers himself to be, but at least he and the public are now on visiting terms. In private life we are all very much at the mercy of visitors, and we have to decide for ourselves in what size of lettering the WELCOME on our door-mats shall be displayed. So, too, the writer must decide to what extent he shall leave himself at the mercy of the public. To answer personally every letter he receives: to sign autographs and copy out verses whenever he is asked: to provide unpaid contributions for anybody’s magazine: to make a speech, take a chair, give away prizes at anybody’s bidding: to read and advise upon all the plays sent to him, to help place all the manuscripts submitted to him, to write quotable advertisements for all the books given to him: to accede, in short, to all the strange requests made (I suppose) of every writer, this is to be, not merely the servant but the very slave of the public. On the other hand one has been lucky, one has owed much to the encouragement and kindness of established writers, and one should make some sort of repayment. It may well be that my balance is still a debit one; that the WELCOME on my door-mat has not been so conspicuous as it should have been; that I have ignored too many requests, refused too many invitations. With all these unanswered letters behind me, I cannot help feeling that I have behaved with seeming discourtesy to too many people. If some of them happen to be reading this, I ask their pardon. And to them and to all other readers, I shall say Au revoir, hoping that we may meet again
About the Author
A. A. Milne
A. A. Milne (Alan Alexander) was born in London in 1882 and educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1902 he was Editor of Granta, the University magazine, and moved back to London the following year to enter journalism. By 1906 he was Assistant Editor of Punch, a post which he held until the beginning of the First World War when he joined the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. While in the army in 1917 he started on a career writing plays of which his best known are Mr. Pim Passes By, The Dover Road and an adaptation of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows – Toad of Toad Hall. He married Dorothy de Selincourt in 1913 and in 1920 had a son, Christopher Robin. By 1924 Milne was a highly successful playwright, and published the first of his four books for children, a set of poems called When We Were Very Young, which he wrote for his son. This was followed by the storybook Winnie-the-Pooh in 1926, more poems in Now We Are Six (1927) and further stories in The House at Pooh Corner (1928). In addition to his now famous works, Milne wrote many novels, volumes of essays, a well known detective story The Red House Mystery and light verse, works which attracted great success at the time. He continued to be a prolific writer until his death in 1956.
About Bello
Bello
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Copyright
First published in 1939 by Methuen & Co. Ltd
This edition published 2017 by Bello
an imprint of Pan Macmillan
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ISBN 978-1-5098-6968-8 EPUB
ISBN 978-1-5098-6967-1 PB
Copyright © The Estate of the Late Lesley Milne Limited, 1939
The right of A. A. Milne to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise)without the prior written permission of the publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organizations and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.Any resemblance to actual events, places, organizations or persons,living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
This book remains true to the original in every way. Some aspects may appear out-of-date to modern-day readers. Bello makes no apology for this, as to retrospectively change any content would be anachronistic and undermine the authenticity of the original.
Pan Macmillan does not have any control over, or any responsibility for,any author or third-party websites referred to in or on this book.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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