A. A. Milne

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A.A. Milne (1882-1956) worked as an essayist, a playwright, a poet, and an adult novelist, in addition to his important contribution as an author of juvenile books. Although he attempted to excel in all literary genres, he was master of Christopher Robin and Winnie-the-Pooh. His nature defied labels, such as "writer of children's literature," even though that was where he excelled.

Modern-day readers might be surprised to learn that A.A. Milne did more than just write children's books, specifically the four books which remain popular today: When We Were Very Young, Winnie-the-Pooh, Now We Are Six, and The House at Pooh Corner. Milne jumped from one creative venture to another, reluctant to concentrate his attention in one field for any extended period of time.

Educated in Style

Born Alan Alexander Milne on January 18, 1882, in London, England, he was the youngest child of Sarah Maria Heginbotham and John Vine Milne. His father was the headmaster at Henley House, a private school, where Milne received his early education. He shared a special kinship with his brother, Kenneth, and they remained close throughout their lives. At the age of nine, Milne and Kenneth, along with a childhood friend, dramatized a novel they had read. This exercise awakened his love of theater.

In 1893, Milne began his studies at Westminster School as a Queen's Scholar. Next he attended Cambridge University, following in his brother's footsteps. He was elected the editor of the literary magazine, Granta. Milne also wrote light verse for this publication. In 1903, he graduated with third honors in mathematics from Trinity College at Cambridge.

Lucky Offers

After completing his college education, Milne began a career as a freelance writer. Within a short time, he was hired as an assistant editor for Punch magazine. His weekly essays were consistently light in tone, but tended to ramble. Milne had two goals: to please himself and then to entertain others. During this period he also published his first novel, Lovers in London, a collection of sketches. It was considered a critical failure and has since gone out of print.

Milne became active in London society. Although he was not born into the aristocracy, it fascinated him. At times he was known to have satirized the social elite, but he was also drawn to it. Considered to be an eligible bachelor, mothers of marriageable daughters sought him out. He was a frequent guest at weekend country estates.

Loved to Make Them Laugh

On June 4, 1913, Milne married Dorothy de Selincourt. Later their son, Christopher, would write in The Enchanted Places that the couple had very few interests in common, but she laughed at his jokes. He seemed to have a need for her reassurance. The year following their wedding, Milne joined the army to offer his services at the beginning of the First World War.

Milne began as a signaling officer for the Fourth Royal Warwickshire Regiment and later served as an instructor on the Isle of Wight. Two years later he was stationed in France, where he wrote comical plays to lift the morale of the soldiers. His military service was interrupted when Milne contracted a serious fever and was sent home to recover.

Critical Acclaim

In 1917, Wurzel-Flummery, Milne's first play was produced in London. He also published Once on a Time, which was originally written as an adult fairy tale for himself and his wife. Later, it was reclassified as a juvenile fairy tale. When Milne retired from the army in 1918, he decided to continue writing plays for a living and settled in London with his family. The following year, Milne achieved his greatest success as a playwright with Mr. Pim Passes By. It was produced in Manchester, London, and New York City. Both audiences and critics loved it.

Milne's only child, Christopher Robin, was born on August 21, 1920. He drew from his young son's life, in order to create the fictional character, Christopher Robin. It was meant as a tribute, but his son grew resentful of his fame-by-association later in life. The first book of the famous four, When We Were Young, was dedicated to his son. Shortly after the birth of Christopher, Milne purchased Cotchford Farm, which became the setting for subsequent Pooh stories. Most of the animals in the series were inspired by his son's stuffed animal collection. The teddy bear was originally named after their pet swan, Pooh. Only the characters of Rabbit and Owl sprang from Milne's imagination.

Stale Drawing Rooms

Milne wanted to continue writing plays. However, after the success of the Pooh books, interest in his drawing room satires had waned. He sometimes ventured beyond the drawing room genre, but for the most part Milne seemed to fall back on what had worked for him in the past. Unfortunately, times were changing, and his lucky star was fading. No one was interested in the old-hat comedy of manners when fresh dramas from playwrights like Eugene O'Neill were being staged. Audiences turned their backs on his plays, which became increasingly mediocre. Publishers wanted more children's stories from Milne. The one exception was The Red House Mystery, which was well-received and remained a classic among mysteries.

By the 1940s, Milne shifted his energies toward writing novels, short stories, and war pamphlets. His financial situation was secure enough to permit the hiring of a cook and gardener. Milne spent his days writing from mid-morning until dinner, aside from breaks for lunch and tea. After dinner he enjoyed playing golf and completing crossword puzzles. Milne's life was pleasant, if not exciting or adventurous. Some critics have suggested that if he had not lived such a conventional life, his writing might have contained more passion.

Milne's Private World

Milne was a very reserved person. His privacy affected not only his writing but also the relationship he had with his son. Since he was not an emotionally expressive man, it was difficult for Milne to reach out to his son. He may have made an attempt through the Pooh series, by basing the Christopher Robin character on traits that he observed in his son. While they did not interact a great deal, they did enjoy occasional activities together.

Throughout his life, Milne maintained a strong sense of loyalty to friends and family. As Charlotte F. Otten writes in Dictionary of Literary Biography, "Milne valued loyalty to one's friends and relations, displaying his own loyalty to, and love for, his brother Ken, by supporting him financially during his debilitating illness. Milne continued to support Ken's family after Ken's death." His high regard for friendship carried over as a strong theme in the Pooh books. One could not overlook the strong bond between Piglet and Pooh.

In 1952, Milne suffered a stroke, which rendered him partially paralyzed. He wrote little, if anything, after that. He died in the English town of Hartfield, Sussex on January 31, 1956.

Although Milne's first priority was to write for his own pleasure, he did enjoy the praise of an audience. He was determined to escape the limits of a label and did so by becoming prolific in many different genres. However, despite other moderate successes, Milne achieved greatness in one area alone. His Winnie-the-Pooh character has delighted children throughout the world. Even college students, considerably older than the target audience, responded with Pooh Societies. His legacy lived on in the form of animated movies, songs, and merchandise for infants and adults alike. Translations of his famous four books were produced almost immediately after Winnie-the-Pooh was first published. The little honey bear had firmly established itself as an enduring classic.

Further Reading

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 160, Gale, 1996.

Milne, Christopher, The Enchanted Places, E.P. Dutton & Co., 1975.

Something about the Author, Volume 100, Gale, 1999.

Swann, Thomas Burnett, A. A. Milne, Twayne Publishers, 1971.

Milne, A. A. (Alan Alexander Milne, 1882–1956), British humorist, playwright, and children's writer. Best known for his children's poetry and for his toy stories, Winnie‐the‐Pooh (1926) and The House at Pooh Corner (1928), Milne was also intrigued by the form and conventions of the fairy tale and wrote a number of literary fairy tales for adults and for children. Indeed, according to his own account in It's Too Late Now (1939), as the youngest of three sons, he grew up half‐expecting the charmed future fairy tales predicted for him. At Henley House, the small school run by his father in London, he showed outstanding promise in mathematics and won a scholarship to Westminster School at the remarkably early age of 11. Deprived of his father's imaginative teaching, however, he soon lost interest in schoolwork. His hobby of writing light verse in collaboration with his brother Ken became an avocation, and at Cambridge University his chief ambition was to edit Granta, then known as the Cambridge Punch. Having scraped through with a Third Class degree in mathematics, Milne spent several precarious years in London as a freelance writer before being invited, at 24, to be Punch's assistant editor. Although his Liberal politics prevented his being asked to join the Punch Table (where editorial policy was determined) until 1910, his witty and light‐hearted sketches found an enthusiastic audience and were repeatedly collected and republished. Milne married Daphne de Sélincourt in 1913, but this happy period ended with World War I. Although Milne survived the trenches, the degrading years of military service left him a committed pacifist. After the war, he turned to playwriting—in the early 1920s, he was Britain's most popular dramatist—and, at the suggestion of Rose Fyleman, to writing light verse for children. The phenomenal success of When We Were Very Young (1924), Now We Are Six (1927), and the Pooh books left Milne unwillingly but permanently typecast as a children's writer, though he continued to publish plays, novels, stories, and essays into the early 1950s.

Like Thackeray's The Rose and the Ring and Dickens's The Magic Fishbone, the handful of fairy tales for adults Milne published in Punch before World War I and included in Those Were the Days (1929) satirized the conventions of the genre. In ‘The King's Sons’, a fairy tests the three sons by transforming herself into a dove pursued by a hawk. The youngest son, kind‐hearted Prince Goldilocks, is prompt with his bow; unfortunately, he is a poor shot, and hits the dove. ‘A Modern Cinderella’ transposes the story to present‐day London. A blasé debutante, Milne's Cinderella, is tired of balls; she kicks off her shoes at a dance—and loses one—simply because her feet are hurting. In ‘A Matter‐of‐Fact Fairy Tale’, Prince Charming sets out to kill the Giant Blunderbus and rescue Princess Beauty's brother Udo, transformed by the giant into a tortoise seven years before. Here, as in the other tales, Milne associates the fairy‐tale tradition with a sentimental and unrealistic view of life and human nature. Udo is unromantically preoccupied by his ignorance of what tortoises are supposed to eat. Prince Charming is disillusioned when the dying giant reveals that Udo is not Beauty's brother, while the lovers, reunited at last, discover that they are no longer attracted to each other.

Milne's A Gallery of Children (1925) includes his few and disappointing fairy tales for children, some of which were originally published in the annual Joy Street. Lacking the ironic bite of his fairy tales for adults, such stories as ‘Prince Rabbit’ and ‘The Princess and the Apple Tree’ seem insipid imitations of traditional folk tales. Clearly, Milne needed the fresh inspiration of his son's toy animals before he could realize his gifts as a children's writer.

His most successful experiment with the fairy tale was written for the pleasure of himself and his ‘collaborator’ Daphne, during the wartime months when, as a signals officer, he was expecting at any moment to be shipped out to France. Once on a Time, which appeared, virtually unnoticed, in 1917, takes place in the imaginary kindom of Euralia. When King Merriwig sets off to war with the neighbouring kingdom of Barodia, the wicked but delightful Countess Belvane attempts to seize power from Merriwig's shy young daughter, Hyacinth. The Princess sends to Prince Udo of Araby for help, but Belvane uses a wishing ring to transform him into a ridiculous composite animal—part‐rabbit, part‐lion, and part‐sheep. Like his predecessor in ‘A Matter‐of‐Fact Fairy Tale’, Udo becomes egotistically obsessed by the problem of what to eat, and easily succumbs to Belvane's manipulations. But Hyacinth discovers an ally—and a lover—in Udo's more intelligent companion, Coronel, and the two succeed in putting the Countess in her place. Merriwig returns triumphantly from a bloodless war and marries Belvane, Hyacinth marries Coronel, and Udo returns to Araby in his proper shape but alone.

In Once on a Time, which can be enjoyed by both adults and children, the fairy tale is no longer the target of Milne's satire but the medium through which he observes human foibles and pretensions (including such foibles as absurd and unnecessary wars). The imaginary kingdom ‘once on a time’ frees his characters from the constraints of time, place, and social milieu, while a light touch of magic reveals more clearly what they are. Having discovered this new capability of the fairy tale, Milne made similar use of it in several plays for adults. Portrait of a Gentleman in Slippers (1926), The Ivory Door (1927), and The Ugly Duckling (1941), while unsuccessful as stage plays, are closet dramas of high quality.

Bibliography

• Milne, A. A., Its Too Late Now: The Autobiography of a Writer (1939).
• Swann, Thomas Burnett, A. A. Milne (1971).
• Thwaite, Ann, A. A. Milne: The Man Behind Winnie‐the‐Pooh (1990).

— Suzanne Rahn

Winnie the Pooh and His Bouncy Friend, Tigger

A.A. Milne once wrote, "To the uneducated, an A is just three sticks." And Winnie-the-Pooh is just a bear. Milne's beloved children's stories were inspired by stuffed animals that belonged to his son, Christopher Robin, who also appears as a character in the series. Born on this date in 1882, Milne wrote of the adventures of Pooh and his friends, Piglet, Tigger, Eeyore, Rabbit and others, who live in the Hundred Acre Wood. The books were illustrated by E.H. Shepard. Milne also wrote books of children's poems, When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six.

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Milne, A. A. (Alan Alexander Milne) (mĭln, mĭl), 1882-1956, English author. Milne began his literary career as a journalist and later became a regular contributor to Punch. He is best known for his collections of verses for children, including When We Were Very Young (1924) and Now We Are Six (1927), and for the books Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) and The House at Pooh Corner (1928), which established the characters Christopher Robin (named for and based on his own son, 1920-96) and his toy animal friends, including Pooh Bear, Piglet, and Eeyore. These stories have become classics, beloved by adults as well as children. Milne's detective novel, The Red House Mystery (1921), is one of the best in its genre. Also a successful dramatist, he wrote several comedies, including Mr. Pim Passes By (1920) and The Dover Road (1921).

Bibliography

See his autobiography (1939); Inventing Wonderland (1995) by J. Wullschläger.

Quotes:

"No doubt Jack the Ripper excused himself on the grounds that it was human nature."

"If one is to be called a liar, one may as well make an effort to deserve the name."

"One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries."

"Organizing is what you do before you do something, so that when you do it, it is not all mixed up."

"Whatever fortune brings, don't be afraid of doing things."

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