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– HAPPY HALF-HOURS – 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 xiv
page 17
– Introduction – not, as I had modestly expected, the author, but a curiouslynamed 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 xv

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– HAPPY HALF-HOURS –

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 xiv

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