Happy Half-Hours

by A. A. Milne

  Notting Hill Editions is an independent British publisher. The company was founded by Tom Kremer (1930–2017), champion of innovation and the man responsible for popularising the Rubik’s Cube.

  After a successful business career in toy invention Tom decided, at the age of eighty, to fulfil his passion for literature. In a fast-moving digital world Tom’s aim was to revive the art of the essay, and to create exceptionally beautiful books that would be lingered over and cherished.

  Hailed as ‘the shape of things to come’, the family-run press brings to print the most surprising thinkers of past and present. In an era of information-overload, these collectible pocket-size books distil ideas that linger in the mind.

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  HAPPY HALF-HOURS

  –

  Selected Writings of A. A. Milne

  Introduced by

  Frank Cottrell-Boyce

  Contents

  – Title Page –

  – Introduction –

  LITERARY LIFE

  – My Library –

  – Children’s Books –

  – Lewis Carroll –

  – The Robinson Tradition –

  – Oscar Wilde –

  – Introducing Shepard –

  – The End of a Chapter –

  MARRIED LIFE

  – Wedding Bells –

  – Love and Marriage –

  – The Order of the Bath –

  – Heavy Work –

  HOME LIFE

  – Fixtures and Fittings –

  – The Cupboard –

  – The Stream –

  – Cotchford Farm –

  PUBLIC LIFE

  – In London –

  – The Painter –

  – The Younger Son –

  MEDITATIVE LIFE

  – By the Sea –

  – Midsummer Day –

  – Geographical Research –

  – The Mathematical Mind –

  – The Charm of Golf –

  – A Question of Form –

  – Superstition –

  – Spiritualism and the Value of Evidence –

  – Age –

  PEACEFUL LIFE

  – Men at Arms –

  – The Honour of Your Country –

  – King and Country –

  – Pro Patria –

  – Fighting for Peace –

  – Put Out More Flags –

  – In Summary –

  – Other titles from Notting Hill Editions –

  – About the Author –

  – Copyright –

  Frank Cottrell-Boyce

  – Introduction –

  How does a nation pull itself together again after a disaster? How do we move on from overwhelming experiences? There was no doubt in A. A. Milne’s mind that the First World War was a disaster. On the Somme, he’d witnessed ‘a lunacy that would shame the madhouse’. One Austrian Archduke had been killed, he said, and this ‘resulted directly in the death of ten million men who were not archdukes’. Before the war he had been a star turn at Punch under the editorship of Owen Seaman. Seaman was a gloomy character who was partly the model for Eeyore. He was also an enthusiastic publisher and perpetrator of the kind of patriotic doggerel that cheered those ten million up the line to death. Milne was painfully aware of the part that culture played in soliciting sacrifice. ‘Wars are fought for economic reasons,’ he wrote, ‘but they are fought by volunteers for sentimental reasons.’ Seaman whipped up a lot of sentiment. Milne had been a pacifist since 1910. Seeing the Jingo-machine close up must have left a bitter taste. The pressure of it may have been partly why – despite his pacifism – he decided to sign up in 1915. Of course he didn’t know then that this was only the first of the World Wars. He had every reason to believe that this was the War to End Wars – a phrase that was coined by H. G. Wells, who sometimes played for the same cricket team as Milne. The Great War did not end all wars. But he learned that early on. In The Honour of Your Country he said that after the Somme ‘all the talk in the Mess was of after-the-war’. He goes on to describe a conversation with a colonel whose ‘idea of Reconstruction included a large army of conscripts’. The more Milne debates with him the more it becomes clear that nothing that happened on the Somme discredited the idea of war as a tool of diplomacy. The wittier Milne’s responses become, the more obvious it is that war will continue to be part of the way we do things.

  That cricket team he was in with Wells also included – at various times – J. M. Barrie, Kipling, Conan Doyle, P. G. Wodehouse, and G. K. Chesterton. It was Barrie who formed the team and named it the Allahakbarries, thinking he was playing with a phrase that meant ‘God Help Us’ – because he himself was such a bad player. So bad, in fact, that he banned the team from warming up at away grounds because the sight of them in action would only add to the opposition’s confidence. In fact the phrase means ‘God is Great’ as you’ll know from its appearance in various terrorist atrocities. The kind of violence Milne had witnessed does not go away.

  In fact, Milne’s ‘after-the-war’ was a streak of enormous luck. Despite seeing active and highly dangerous service as a signals officer, his later posting – on the Isle of Wight – somehow left him time to start writing plays. His first was for the children of his colonel. He wanted to give them something amusing ‘at a time when life was not very amusing’. Which is a decent enough mission for any writer. Certainly a better one than stirring up jingoistic sentiment (Milne’s definition of a patriot was, someone who accuses other people of being unpatriotic). He moved away from Punch, ready to hit the West End running. As a successful playwright he would often earn £500 a week at a time when the average wage was about £4. He’d been lucky and he knew it. The American edition of his autobiography was actually called What Luck. The sense of being lucky gives the pieces he wrote about domestic life – about sorting out his books or redecorating the bathroom – the glow of unstated gratitude. He was lucky to have books to sort out. Lucky to be alive. Lucky to have got through the war without ever having to fire a shot in anger. Lucky therefore not to have had to compromise his pacificism.

  Luck carries with it a sense of responsibility. Lucky survivors often feel they’ve been saved for some great purpose, or at least that they should make the most of their opportunity. You can sense this in how hard Milne worked to give those pieces their hospitable ease. Nothing is harder than making things look easy. If you read ‘On Writing for Children’ you’ll see he had no patience for any writer who was ‘not bothering’. Of a poem that was then a nursery favourite – John Gilpin – he says ‘there are sixty-three verses in it; it should have taken him a month of the hardest work within the capacity of man. When we read it, we know why it did not take him a month.’ He was a fierce and fearless critic. In one very funny piece he takes a Sherlock Holmes story to pieces to demonstrate that it cannot be put back together again because it was only held together with chewing gum and sellotape. I don’t think I’ve ever read a more insightful or bracing piece of criticism than his piece on Lewis Carroll and why the ‘it was all a dream’ ending is such a betrayal. His friend Frank Swinnerton said that Milne ‘combined a gift for persiflage with the sternness of a Covenanter’, and it shows in the sheer work ethic he brought to the task of making it look like he was doing nothing.

  Of course no covenanter is going to be satisfied with ‘merely’ being amusing. One of the most moving and tortured pieces in this collection is ‘The End of a Chapter’, his account of why he has to stop writing about Christopher Robin. It’s part excuse-note, part examination of conscience. He admits that Christopher Robin only got his name because the Milnes wanted their son to be a great cricketer and great cricketers – like W. G.
Grace – have initials rather than names. He jokes about writer’s jealousy of his own creation:

  Imagine my amazement and disgust, then, when I discovered that in a night, so to speak, I had been pushed into a back place, and that the hero of When We Were Very Young was not, as I had modestly expected, the author, but a curiously-named child of whom, at this time, I had scarcely heard. It was this Christopher Robin who kept mice, walked on the lines and not in the squares, and wondered what to do on a spring morning; it was this Christopher Robin, not I, whom Americans were clamouring to see; and, in fact (to make due acknowledgement at last), it was this Christopher Robin, not I, not the publishers, who was selling the book in such large and ridiculous quantities.

  Overwhelming success is harder to deal with than failure. At least failure has an element of hope in it. Success asserts a huge gravitational pull from which it’s almost impossible to achieve escape velocity. Look how Conan Doyle struggled with Sherlock Holmes. How Steve Coogan keeps going back to Alan Partridge. How J. K. Rowling keeps returning to the Potter universe. Milne never returned. His refusal to dilute the legacy is partly why the colours of the Hundred Acre Wood are so fresh. He walked out of the trees, up to Galleon’s Leap, and out into the World. Then he tried to stop a war.

  The man who invented Winnie the Pooh said that the book he was most proud of writing was Peace with Honour – an anti-war polemic written in 1934. Nowadays, the whole idea of campaigning for appeasement in the 1930s has such a bad reputation that it’s easy to forget that Milne was not the only one to argue against going to war with Nazi Germany. The book was a bestseller. You can feel how passionately he felt about this just by looking at the sheer rhetorical firepower he brings to the field. Scenes, sketches, aphorisms, statistics. It’s a compelling read not least because Milne is genuinely wrangling with his conscience, trying to find a way of squaring his love of his country with his hatred of war. Of course by the time the true nature of Nazism became clear he had to renounce – or modify – his pacifism in the sequel to Peace with Honour – War with Honour. Clearly there’s something ridiculous about performing such a flip-flop but you have to admire the honesty and the energy with which he tried to think through his change of mind. War with Honour is an angry, hectic book. Reading it is like watching a smartly-dressed gent desperately wrestling with a well-oiled snake, while trying to keep his tie straight. This is a book calling for peace in which the harshest words are aimed at Conscientious Objectors and the most hope is pinned on the atom bomb. ‘The only logical protest for a Conscientious Objector who refuses to take part is suicide; preferably at sea, so that the war effort shall not be interrupted by the need for burying the body.’ The atomic bomb on the other hand fills him with hope of a better world. Part of the thrill of the book is reading a man whose urbane voice normally comes at us from the nursery or the Garrick Club wrangling with an unusually apocalyptic version of nuclear deterrence. In the 1920s, he says, everyone was a pacifist. He talks about the optimism of the League of Nations and votes for women, for peace under the banner of hope. Here he is holding out for peace under the banner of planetary destruction. What Milne is really struggling with here is the clash between crisp clean principles and the murky, tempestuous nature of a fallen World. What can a writer bring to such a world?

  Milne had already answered that with the Hundred Acre Wood. Children’s books of the 1920s are thronged with children who never grow up, lead of course by Barrie’s eternal Pan. But Christopher Robin is different. In the Hundred Acre Wood, Christopher Robin is the grown-up, dispensing wisdom and help, solving problems, putting things right. He’s a boy at the very end of childhood, aware that this is soon going to end. That’s why everything shimmers with its own transience. In the difficult, distracting, dangerous world into which he is heading when he walks beyond the wood (and in the end, the boy was off to another war), the best the writer can do is to bring the good things to our attention, to help us hold them in our hearts and memories, so that when we need them those little things – sorting out your books, picking a new bathroom, the honey and the humming – can be our stepping stones through the bad times. The joke in ‘Vespers’ is that the little boy who is supposedly praying is in fact distracted by everything from bath water to dressing gowns. But another way of looking at it, is to say that the boy was sure that everything from bath water to dressing gowns was important and had its place in the mind of God, or the universe. Everything matters. Everything in life is worth looking at. Milne’s gift to write amusingly about the most trivial things is far from trivial. It’s a kind of blessing. The kind that can put you back together again when all else fails.

  LITERARY LIFE

  – My Library –

  When I moved into a new house a few weeks ago, my books, as was natural, moved with me. Strong, perspiring men shovelled them into packing-cases, and staggered with them to the van, cursing Caxton as they went. On arrival at this end, they staggered with them into the room selected for my library, heaved off the lids of the cases, and awaited orders. The immediate need was for an emptier room. Together we hurried the books into the new white shelves which awaited them, the order in which they stood being of no matter so long as they were off the floor. Armful after armful was hastily stacked, the only pause being when (in the curious way in which these things happen) my own name suddenly caught the eye of the foreman. ‘Did you write this one, sir?’ he asked. I admitted it. ‘H’m,’ he said noncommittally. He glanced along the names of every armful after that, and appeared a little surprised at the number of books which I hadn’t written. An easy-going profession, evidently.

  So we got the books up at last, and there they are still. I told myself that when a wet afternoon came along I would arrange them properly. When the wet afternoon came, I told myself that I would arrange them one of these fine mornings. As they are now, I have to look along every shelf in the search for the book which I want. To come to Keats is no guarantee that we are on the road to Shelley. Shelley, if he did not drop out on the way, is probably next to How to be a Golfer though Middle-aged.

  Having written as far as this, I had to get up and see where Shelley really was. It is worse than I thought. He is between Geometrical Optics and Studies in New Zealand Scenery. Ella Wheeler Wilcox, whom I find myself to be entertaining unawares, sits beside Anarchy or Order, which was apparently ‘sent in the hope that you will become a member of the Duty and Discipline Movement’ – a vain hope, it would seem, for I have not yet paid my subscription. What I Found Out, by an English Governess, shares a corner with The Recreations of a Country Parson; they are followed by Villette and Baedeker’s Switzerland. Something will have to be done about it.

  But I am wondering what is to be done. If I gave you the impression that my books were precisely arranged in their old shelves, I misled you. They were arranged in the order known as ‘all anyhow’. Possibly they were a little less ‘anyhow’ than they are now, in that the volumes of any particular work were at least together, but that is all that can be claimed for them. For years I put off the business of tidying them up, just as I am putting it off now. It is not laziness; it is simply that I don’t know how to begin.

  Let us suppose that we decide to have all the poetry together. It sounds reasonable. But then Byron is eleven inches high (my tallest poet), and Beattie (my shortest) is just over four inches. How foolish they will look standing side by side. Perhaps you don’t know Beattie, but I assure you that he was a poet. He wrote those majestic lines:

  The shepherd-swain of whom I mention made

  On Scotia’s mountains fed his little flock;

  The sickle, scythe or plough he never swayed –

  An honest heart was almost all his stock.

  Of course, one would hardly expect a shepherd to sway a plough in the ordinary way, but Beattie was quite right to remind us that Edwin didn’t either. Edwin was the name of the shepherd-swain. ‘And yet poor Edwin was no vulgar boy,’ we are told a little further on in a line that should liv
e. Well, having satisfied you that Beattie was really a poet, I can now return to my argument that an eleven-inch Byron cannot stand next to a four-inch Beattie, and be followed by an eight-inch Cowper, without making the shelf look silly. Yet how can I discard Beattie – Beattie who wrote:

  And now the downy cheek and deepened voice

  Gave dignity to Edwin’s blooming prime.

  You see the difficulty. If you arrange your books according to their contents you are sure to get an untidy shelf. If you arrange your books according to their size and colour you get an effective wall, but the poetically inclined visitor may lose sight of Beattie altogether. Before, then, we decide what to do about it, we must ask ourselves that very awkward question, ‘Why do we have books on our shelves at all?’ It is a most embarrassing question to answer.

  Of course, you think that the proper answer (in your own case) is an indignant protest that you bought them in order to read them, and that you put them on your shelves in order that you could refer to them when necessary. A little reflection will show you what a stupid answer that is. If you only want to read them, why are some of them bound in morocco and half-calf and other expensive coverings? Why did you buy a first edition when a hundredth edition was so much cheaper? Why have you got half a dozen copies of The Rubáiyát? What is the particular value of this other book that you treasure it so carefully? Why, the fact that its pages are uncut. If you cut the pages and read it, the value would go.

  So, then, your library is not just for reference. You know as well as I do that it furnishes your room; that it furnishes it more effectively than does paint or mahogany or china. Of course, it is nice to have the books there, so that one can refer to them when one wishes. One may be writing an article on sea-bathing, for instance, and have come to the sentence which begins: ‘In the well-remembered words of Coleridge, perhaps almost too familiar to be quoted’ – and then one may have to look them up. On these occasions a library is not only ornamental but useful. But do not let us be ashamed that we find it ornamental.