Goodbye Christopher Robin

by Ann Thwaite

  Now We Are Six

  94,000

  Winnie-the-Pooh

  80,000

  When We Were Very Young

  169,000

  So the new book, not much more than two months after publication, had already overtaken the bestselling Winnie-the-Pooh, published a year earlier.

  At Christmas, Milne looked back on the year. Things were good. ‘The Ivory Door goes on well in New York, playing to bigger houses each week, and should be in for a good run. But it had to fight its way against the seas of Sex and Crime which pour down Broadway at the moment, and nearly got swamped. Talking of Crime, the Haymarket has just taken my detective play.’ It would open on 29 February 1928 – the day after a revival of Mr Pim Passes By at the St Martin’s, with Marie Tempest in Irene Vanbrugh’s old part. ‘Having had no play in London for three years’, Milne rather wished The Ivory Door was coming on first, but The Fourth Wall would be far more successful than The Ivory Door.

  Life was a little overshadowed in December 1927 because ‘our beloved Moon has chicken-pox’ – not too badly, but ‘he was to have sung various solos and duets at his school breaking-up and now he won’t. We were looking forward to it more eagerly than to any first night of mine. He sings jolly well.’

  He did indeed, well enough only a little later to make a recording of four of the poems Fraser-Simson had set to music.

  When the idea first came up, the following argument took place, or so Milne would lead Ken to believe:

  ME: (when it was first suggested) Bah!

  DAFF: It will be a Wonderful Thing to Have!

  ME: Who is Moon? . . . I’m the only important person in this house. Christopher Robin doesn’t exist. He is a pigment-figment of the imagination. Why should a small unimportant boy—

  DAFF: It would be a Wonderful Thing to Have – Afterwards.

  ME: After what?

  DAFF: I mean—

  ME: Now if they’d asked Me—

  DAFF: I thought you said they did?

  ME: Oh! I didn’t know I’d told you that.

  DAFF: I wish you would! It would be a Wonderful Thing to Have – Afterwards.

  ME: After what?

  DAFF: I mean—

  ME: I think the Whole thing is Perfectly Disgusting; I’ll have Nothing to do with it. You can do what you like about it. I wash my hands of it. (Exit to bathroom.) So Daff went to the Gramophone Co., they all fell on her neck—

  and the record was the result. Whether the whole idea was Daphne’s own, as this suggests, we don’t know for certain.

  One of Christopher’s cousins remembered the record well and thought it ‘the unacceptable face of Poohdom’. That was not so much ‘the sound of the record as the idea’. As for the record itself, ‘it was the voice of a small boy who was obviously musical – dead in tune and sweet of tone – and who was obviously giving the performance all he’d got. (Perhaps this added to my feeling that the poor child was being exploited.) There were four songs – “Vespers”, “Buckingham Palace”, “Fishing” and the one about the train brake that didn’t work.’

  There were preliminary rehearsals in the first-floor drawing-room at Mallord Street (the room with the golden walls), a final practice in the Fraser-Simsons’ house round the corner (with some coaching from Cicely Fraser-Simson, to whom The Hums of Pooh would be dedicated in 1929) – and then to the HMV studio. In fact, there must have been two records, for the one that Christopher remembered included ‘The Friend’. He had to put on a Poohish voice when he sang: ‘Well, I say sixpence, but I don’t suppose I’m right.’ Rather a difficult thing to do.

  It was ‘Vespers’, however, that returned to haunt him years later when boys in the next study at Stowe would play it over and over again, remorselessly. It was ‘intensely painful’ for the singer. ‘Eventually the joke, if not the record, wore out, they handed it to me’ (the record not the joke) ‘and I took it and broke it into a hundred fragments and scattered them over a distant field.’ Years later, his cousin Angela allowed her children to hang the record on a tree, a string through the hole in the middle, and to throw things at it. One wonders how many copies remain in attics along with Ernest Lush singing ‘O for the Wings of a Dove’ and Harry Lauder’s ‘I Love a Lassie’.

  Christopher had another important part in the spring of 1928. Milne wrote to Ken:

  Daff is terribly busy, and so am I up to a point, in arranging this Pooh party. Beginning with no more than a kindly interest in the proceedings, and a gracious permission to certain performers to sing certain songs, we have got more and more dragged into it, until now we provide the whole programme, company, organisation and everything else. Moon makes three appearances – besides acting as host and shaking hands with the 350 odd guests! (We have told him to ooze away at about the 50th.) He sings The Friend with Pooh by his side – delightfully and really funnily. He recites with another small boy (W. G. Stevens’ son) Us Two, and he plays in Eeyore’s Birthday the part which is Owl’s in the book, but has been made Christopher Robin’s in the play. He loves it, is quite unshy, and speaks beautifully. Piglet is played by a darling little fat girl, Veronica, aged 4, with a very deep voice which comes out loudly and suddenly on all the unimportant words – ‘Many happy returns OF the day’ – ‘Perhaps EEYORE doesn’t like BALLOONS so very VERY much’ – it’s frightfully funny, and she looks superb. Eeyore is Anne Hastings Turner – terribly bad, but from sheer vanity may pull it off on the afternoon – and Pooh is the Stevens boy, also quite unshy and intelligent, but unfortunately with rather a niminy-piminy voice, quite unlike Pooh’s gruff voice as inspired by Moon. Anne Darlington, alas, wasn’t allowed to appear, as she gets too excited and upsets herself. Dress rehearsal this afternoon. We burst two balloons at every rehearsal, which seems rather a pity.

  And in July 1929 there would be a pageant in Ashdown Forest twice a day for four days. The Mackails would go down with the Milnes (‘the sun nearly roasted us to death,’ Mackail foolishly complained) to see Christopher Robin (afternoons only) playing himself and the children of Park House School playing ‘Winnie-the-Pooh and the other toys’. There would be a procession as the finale of the pageant – which included practically every historical character you could think of: Earl Godwin, Queen Elizabeth, Nell Gwynn, Cromwell, Lady Hamilton, Wellington . . . And then, in among them, there was Christopher Robin and the children representing ‘Ashdown Forest today where a boy and his bear will always be playing’. Christopher enjoyed it: ‘Exciting without being frightening. For there was nothing to be nervous about, nothing to go wrong. It was not like acting in a play or making a gramophone record when your voice might go funny.’ There was nothing to go wrong. But for Milne himself, by July 1929, everything had gone wrong.

  We have leapt ahead, following the boy in his starring roles, enjoying for the last time his part as Christopher Robin. Now we must go back and look further at the children’s books – Now We Are Six and The House at Pooh Corner – which were keeping them all so firmly in the public eye, on both sides of the Atlantic.

  In America, 90,000 copies of Now We Are Six had already been ordered on publication day in October 1927. The Retail Bookseller said it was ‘another unquestionable bullseye’. It was top of the general bestseller list during its first month on sale. ‘For the third time A. A. Milne has demonstrated that a book for children can outsell all other books in the country.’

  One strong voice stood out against the general murmur of pleasure. Dorothy Parker, disguised as ‘Constant Reader’, mounted her first attack. In the New Yorker on 12 November 1927 she had great fun with two new children’s books – Now We Are Six and Christopher Morley’s I Know a Secret, which the publishers had claimed to be fit to stand in the company of Alice, Peter Pan and When We Were Very Young. Mrs Parker said she found it difficult not to confuse Christopher Morley with Christopher Robin. Indeed, she found that:

  during those fretful hours when I am tossing and turning at my typewriter, during the mellow evenings, during the di
m, drowsy watches of the night, my mind goes crooning:

  Christopher Morley goes hippety, hoppety

  Hippety, hippety, hop.

  Whenever I ask him politely to stop it, he

  Says he can’t possibly stop . . .

  The thing is too much for me. I am about to give it all up. I cannot get those two quaint kiddies straightened out.

  But Mrs Parker doesn’t give up. She goes on and on and on, just like the tail of Christopher Robin’s dormouse. She says if anyone had addressed her, as Morley does, as ‘dear my urchin’, when she was a little one, she would have doubled her dimpled fist ‘and socked him one right on the button’, and we can well believe it. Morley’s book ‘set new standards of whimsy, plumbed new depths of quaintness’. Unlike Now We Are Six, it has sunk without trace and was hardly worth Mrs Parker wasting her typewriter ribbon. When she finally leaves Morley and gets to Milne, it goes like this:

  While we are on the subject of whimsies, how about taking up Mr A. A. Milne? There is a strong feeling, I know, that to speak against Mr Milne puts one immediately in the ranks of those who set fire to orphanages, strike crippled newsboys, and lure little curly-heads off into corners to explain to them that Santa Claus is only Daddy making a fool of himself. But I too have a very strong feeling about the Whimsicality of Milne. I’m feeling it right this minute. It’s in my stomach.

  Time was when A. A. Milne was my only hero. Weekly I pounced on Punch for the bits signed ‘A. A. M.’ I kept ‘Once a Week’ and ‘Half Hours’ [she means ‘Happy Days’ presumably] practically under my pillow. I read ‘The Red House Mystery’ threadbare. I thought ‘The Truth about Blayds’ a fine and merciless and honest play. But when Mr Milne went quaint, all was over. Now he leads his life and I lead mine.

  ‘Now We Are Six’, the successor to ‘When We Were Very Young’, is Mr Milne gone completely Winnie-the-Pooh. Not since Fay Bainter played ‘East is West’ have I seen such sedulous cuteness. I give you, for example, the postscript to the preface: ‘Pooh wants us to say that he thought it was a different book; and he hopes you won’t mind, but he walked through it one day, looking for his friend Piglet, and sat down on some of the pages by mistake.’ That one sentence may well make Christopher Morley stamp on his pen in despair. A. A. Milne still remains the Master.

  Of Milne’s recent verse, I speak in a minority amounting to solitude. I think it is affected, commonplace, bad. I did so, too, say bad. And now I must stop, to get ready for being ridden out of town on a rail.

  CONSTANT READER

  Anne Darlington could be numbered among those unspeakable characters who reveal the awful fact that Father Christmas does not exist; Christopher Milne could still point out the exact place where one morning on the way to the kindergarten in Tite Street with their nannies, Anne made her revelation. Now We Are Six is dedicated to Anne:

  TO

  ANNE DARLINGTON

  NOW SHE IS SEVEN

  AND

  BECAUSE SHE IS

  SO

  SPESHAL

  That spelling of ‘special’ has made other gorges rise besides Mrs Parker’s. Somehow it seems all right when Christopher Robin can’t spell and leaves his famous note:

  GON OUT

  BACKSON

  BISY

  BACKSON

  When Milne himself pretends he can’t spell, there is a good deal of revulsion from even his most dedicated admirers. But his inscription in Anne Darlington’s own copy of the book is beautifully turned and shows clearly his special devotion to the child:

  This book of songs

  Dear Anne, belongs to you.

  It carries much

  Of love and such from Blue.

  And for the rest

  It says as best it can

  ‘Be never far

  From Moon, my darling Anne.’

  Her father, W. A. Darlington, would remember the children playing on the nursery floor in Mallord Street with Daphne who ‘helped to bring the toy animals to life and give them their character’. He said that Alan Milne ‘never joined in their games but watched them with delight’. Christopher’s nanny, as we saw, remembered Milne himself entering into the games; he ‘spoke to the toys as if they were real people’. Both could be right. Other days, other moods. Christopher would remember that he and his mother and the toys played together, ‘and gradually more life, more character flowed into them, until they reached a point at which my father could take over. Then, as the first stories were written, the cycle was repeated. The Pooh in my arms, the Pooh sitting opposite me at the breakfast table was a Pooh who had climbed trees in search of honey, who had got stuck in a rabbit hole . . .’

  Certainly, from Milne’s letters one would imagine that all the ideas for the stories came entirely from Milne’s head (together with Owl and Rabbit) and that it was only the toy animals themselves which came from the nursery – their characters and voices certainly owing a good deal to Christopher himself and Daphne. Daphne was undoubtedly obsessed by the pretence that Pooh and the others were alive. There is a rather rebarbative glimpse of her in a gushing article by the American May Lamberton Becker, who had first met the Milnes a few years earlier and had sent Christopher a marvellous Indian headdress as a present. Daphne’s ecstatic thanks perhaps gives a flavour of her talk: ‘Christopher Robin was simply too enchanted . . . It was really lovely of you to remember him and he does thank you ever so much . . . I do wish you could see him going out in it, he does look such a duck.’ Gushing seemed to be the flavour of the time . . . In 1928 Miss Becker came more as a friend than a reporter. When she arrived, Christopher was attacking his father with boxing gloves:

  A long nursery with walls the colour of sunshine; an eminent author crouched in the window-seat, clutching to his breast a fat yellow sofa-cushion; facing him at a convenient distance for attack, a little boy in boxing-gloves, his golden hair tossed back from the brightest and brownest eyes in London, his feet tapping back and forth in the proper professional preparations.

  The real Christopher Robin still looks like Mr Shepard’s pictures; that is, in moments of comparative repose, and when completing a particularly good tea at the round table in the yellow nursery. But only a cinema, an earnest one up to its business, could deal with Christopher Robin’s boxing. It is the real thing and no mistake. Besides his school, he now goes to a famous gymnasium – oh yes, he’s still a little boy, but when you say he is, you should stress the second word instead of the first.

  As I watched the pillow take punishment, a small, gruff voice – the voice Pooh uses when Mrs Milne is in the room – cried ‘Here! hold me up! I mustn’t miss this!’ and a brown bear came tumbling over my shoulder down into my lap. I had him right-side up directly; I kept my cheek on his good comfortable head for the rest of the bout. I was thinking of the American children whose eyes would shine when I told them, ‘It was just this way that I held Pooh in my arms so he could watch Christopher Robin boxing.’

  Pooh has been told that there will be no more books about him after this one that is just coming, The House at Pooh Corner. I do not know if he has quite taken it in; ideas come rather slowly to Pooh, and he makes no special effort to assimilate unpleasant ideas. What! retire from literature just when one has performed the unprecedented feat of changing the name of a household institution on the other side of the earth? for this is what happened when almost over night all the Teddy-bears of America became Pooh-bears in the vocabulary of childhood.

  It seems there are to be positively no more Christopher Robin books. Mr Milne says so, and he ought to know. ‘No, more Christopher Robin books!’ said Mrs Milne. ‘Look, Pooh’s crying!’ And indeed the brown bear in her arms had his paws over his face. But between them his candid eyes looked out confidently. Pooh knows that his place in literature is safe.

  Claude Luke, another visitor that year, gave readers in John o’London’s a further view of the happy family in the sunny house in Chelsea which somehow, mysteriously, seemed full of the ‘breath of mornin
g, morning in a very young world’. After some lamenting over ‘the tragic ephemerality of such splendid childhood’, Luke yet managed to convey a very realistic small boy and his nursery – the animals (‘not the original Piglet which, alas, had been chewed by a dog’ and replaced by one of more suitable size), the books, including Dr Dolittle, the walls hung with Shepard drawings, a coloured Spy sketch of his father, that pictorial map of Africa, that Indian headdress. When Luke asked him the obvious question about whether he liked his father’s books, instead of doubling up his dimpled fist as the young Dorothy Parker would have done, Christopher Robin just ‘gazed at me for a moment, amazed at the immense foolishness of humans and then turned to his nurse with the expressive remark, “Do I, Nanny?” as though to say, “Throw out this absurd man!”’

  When Nanny had gone downstairs to see about lunch, Christopher favoured Mr Luke with a glimpse of a row of bottles in a secret corner:

  ‘They’re my poisons!’ he whispered, in a voice that would have thrilled Edgar Wallace. I read the labels inscribed in a childish scrawl. One was ‘Salerd dressing for letters’; another ‘Cind of frute salerd – it is good to drink’; and a third ‘Loshun for the mouth’. He opened one for me to smell.

  ‘I can’t face that one,’ he admitted, wryly, and confessed that it was composed of ipecacuanha wine, flour paste, and ink! We agreed it had a deadly odour.

  It was all getting a bit much. The time had obviously come to call a halt, to bring the whole business to an end. Milne would try, but as May Lambert Becker had said, ‘Pooh’s place in literature was safe’, and that meant that Christopher Robin would never go away either. Somehow the real boy, whose name had been taken, would have to continue to live with him, would have, eventually, to come to terms with him.

  The House at Pooh Corner was published in both New York and London in October 1928. On the British jacket the totals of the sales were now: