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A(lan) A(lexander) Milne (1882-1956) |
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English writer, the creator of Winnie-the-Pooh. Milne wrote many different kinds of books, humorous verses and light comedies as a staff member of Punch, and the detective novel The Red House Mystery (1922), which was severely criticized by Raymond Chandler. In spite of his fame as a children's book writer, A. A. Milne was not "inordinately fond" of children. On Wednesday, when the sky is blue, Alan Alexander Milne was born in London. His father, John V. Milne, owned a private school at Mortiner Road, the Henley House. Among the teachers were, for some time, the science fiction writer H.G. Wells. Milne said of his father that he "was the best man I have ever known: by which I mean the most truly good, the most completely to be trusted, the most incapable of wrong." (Fathers of Influence: Inspiring Stories of Men Who Made a Difference in Their Children and Their World, 2006, pp. 60-61) Milne's mother, Sarah Maria Heginbotham, entrusted the upbringing of her sons to her husband. Sundays were reserved for religion: the children did not read secular books. He read them Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. A gifted mathematician, Milne won a scholarship to Westminster School when he was only eleven. He studied mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, and edited the undergraduate magazine Granta. After receiving his B.A. in 1903, he started his career as a freelance writer. Milne's essays and poems were published in the satirical magazine Punch and St. James' Gazette. In 1906 he joined the staff of Punch, becoming the magazine's assistant editor. At H.G. Wells's suggestion Milne turned some of his sketches
into a novel. His first work, Lovers in London, came
out in 1905. The following books were collections of his Punch
pieces. In the 1910s Milne became well known as a playwright, notably
for Mr
Pim Passes By (1919). In 1913 Milne married Dorothy de Sêlincourt – "She laughed at my jokes," he said later in his autobiography. Their only son, Christopher Robin Milne, was born in 1920. During World War I Milne served in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment as a signals officer. He was posted to France briefly in 1916 and wrote propaganda for the Intelligence service. The horrors he witnessed in the war left him a lifelong nostalgia for the idyllic fantasies of childhood. "A 'children's book' must be written, not for children, but for the author himself," he once said. When the disillusioned post-war writers depicted the contemporary "lost generation," Milne took a look in the past, the Winnie-the-Pooh world of safety. After the war the comedy The Dover Road (1921)
continued
Milne's successful career as a playwright. Toad of Toad Hall (1929),
a dramatization based on
Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1908), seems to
have survived perhaps as well as the original work. The majority of Milne's plays were produced in London and in Broadway. Their popularity enabled him to buy in 1925 a country home, Cotchford Farm, in Sussex. Most of the time the family still spent in London, going down to Cotchford only at week-ends. There, in a small and dark room, with a window that looked over the courtyard, Milne wrote his works, smoking his pipe. And after dinner, he usually solved crosswords. The Cotchford Farm was bought by the original leader of the Rolling Stones, Brian Jones, who drowned in 1969 in the swimming pool. The Stones' guitarist Keith Richards wrote in his autobiography, that the construction worker Frank Thorogood, who lived in the house, made a deathbed confession that he had killed Jones. "Whether he did or not I don't know. Brian had bad asthma and he was taking quaaludes and Tuinals, which are not the best things to dive under water on." (Life by Keith Richards, 2010, p. 272) Milne's The Red House Mystery draws heavily on the tradition of Sherlock Holmes. Its lack of realistic details and cosy atmosphere prompted Raymond Chandler to write: "The detective in the case in an insouciant amateur named Anthony Gillingman, a nice lad with a cheery eye, a cosy little flat in London, and that airy manner. . . . The English police seem to endure him with their customary stoicism; but I shudder to think of what the boys down at the Homicide Bureau in my city would do to him." ('The Simple Art of Murder,' in Pearls Are Nuisance, 1964, p. 188 ) Milne's other mysteries include Four Days' Wonder (1933) and the drama The Fourth Wall (1928). It was made into a film under the little Birds of Prey (1930; U.S. title: The Perfect Alibi), directed by Basil Dean, starring Frank Lawton and Dorothy Boyd. "For today's audiences, about the only interest this curio holds is seeing later screen stalwarts Frank Lawton, C. Aubrey Smith, Nigel Bruce and Jack Hawkins . . . working at the start of the sound era." (RKO Radio Pictures Horror, Science Fiction and Fantasy Films, 1929-1956 by Michael R. Pitts, 2015, p. 229). At the age of 42 Milne published When We Were Very Young, a collection of poetry for children. It was illustrated by his friend and colleague from Punch, E.H. Shepard, who was paid fifty pounds for the job. Shepard illustrated books for nearly thirty years for various authors, among them Kenneth Grahame (The Wind in the Willows) and Frances Hodgson Burnett (The Secret Garden). Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) was also originally illustrated by Shepard. The best-selling of Milne's books was set in Ashdown forest. Its stories feature Milne's son Christopher (1920-1996) with various talking animals and animated versions of his toys – the famous teddy-bear, Piglet, Tigger, Eeyore, and others. The House at Pooh Corner (1928) presented the further adventures of Pooh Bear and his friends. During Milne's lifetime, Pooh already became an industry, producing toys, and later comics and such films as Winnie-the-Pooh and the Honey Tree (1996) from Disney. Like Peter Pan and Lewis Carrol's Alice, Winnie-the-Pooh has been a target of psychological analysis. Much attention has been paid to the absence of Christopher Robin's mother. However, this is not a unique trait of the book. Walt Disney also left mothers (and fathers) out of the world of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse. Religious imagery is missing, too. Milne had examined his religious beliefs in The Ascent of Man (1928) and recorded twenty years later his thoughts in the long poem The Norman Church (1948), published by Methuen. He made a clear distinction between the subjective God "made in Man's own image" and "the objective GOD". "We think of God as 'Him' because / Man ruled the world and made the laws, / And, seeking GOD, could only find / A man-like image in his mind. / To women, too, of Eastern race / Who meekly sat with covered face, / Submissive to their lord's degree, / The Lord was naturally 'He' — / What other pronoun use? What else was there to be?" This book was not published in the United States. Milne's son Christopher received a conventional religious education. Although he was given two Christian names, he was never christened, nor confirmed. Milne left him to develop his own faith. Christopher Milne has said that he had problems
coping with the legendary literary figure created about him.
(Nevertheless, his life wasn't a tragedy, as it was the in case with
Michael Llewelyn Davies, the model for J.M.
Barrie's Peter Pan.) According to Christopher Milne, his mother, Daphne, invented stories about toy animals
and provided most of the material for his father's books. His
relationship with his parents Christopher Milne analyzed in Enchanted
Places (1975). He emphasized that his father did not feel
sentimental about children. Noteworthy, Milne's famous
poem 'Vespers' – beautifully sung by Vera Lynn – is actually
about a little boy who is pretending to say his prayers; they mean "nothing to a child of three, whose thoughts are engaged with
other, more exciting matters", Milne wrote in 'Preface to
Parents.' Dorothy Milne sent the poem to Vanity Fair
in New York, where it was published in January 1923. Christopher Milne
said of 'Vespers': "It is one of my father's best know and one that has
brought me over the
years more toe-curling, fist-clenching, lip-biting embarrassment than
any other." (Enchanted
Places, p. 42) In the 1930s and 40s Milne was active in religious and pacifist polemics. He was certain that war would extinguish civilization. Milne recognized the threat of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy but regarded preparations for defense as dangerous to peace as preparations for war. At the age of fifty-six he published his autobiography, It's Too Late Now (1938), which focused mostly on his childhood years. For the Pooh books he devoted eight "rather unhappy" pages, as Christopher Milne put it. During WW II, after P.G. Wodehouse
made some light-hearted broadcasts from Germany for CBS radio shortly
after being captured in 1940, Milne broke with his former friend and
became his bitter opponent. "We were supposed to be quite good friends,
but, you know, in a sort of way I think he was a pretty jealous chap",
Wodehouse explained later in an interview. "I think he was probably
jealous of all other writers." ('P.G. Wodehouse
(1975)' in The Paris Review
Interviews, IV, introduction by Salman Rushdie, 2009, p. 168)
Milne gave up his pacifism for a period. Like many famous British authors, from H.G. Wells and Somerset
Maugham
to C.S. Forester, Milne was enlisted by the British Information
Services
(BIS) to do propaganda work. In Hartfield and Forest Row he served as a
Captain of the Home Guard. Christopher Milne fought in the
Middle East and Italy. While in Trieste, he fell in love with a girl
named Hedda. Christopher Milne tells in his autobiography The Path Through the Trees (1979)
that she taught him "a lot of things: about Italy, about
Italians, about women, about love, about myself" (The Path Through the Trees, p. 114) Moreover, she helped him to loosen
the bond that tied him to his father. An
operation on Milne's brain in 1952 left him an invalid
during the last four years of his life. "It is ghastly to think of
anyone who wrote such gay stuff ending his life like this," Wodewhouse
said in a letter. (P.
G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters, edited by Sophie Ratcliffe,
2011, p. 467) Milne died in Hartfield, Sussex,
on January 31, 1956. After his wife's death in 1971, part of the
fortune earned by the Pooh books came to the Royal Literary Fund,
providing for writers in financial distress. What becomes of Pooh's name, Milne said in the 'Introduction' of the 1926 McClelland & Steward edition of Winnie-the Pooh: "Now this bear's name is Winnie, which shows what a
good name for bears it is, but the funny thing is that we can't
remember whether Winnie is called after Pooh, or Pooh after Winnie. We
did know once, but we have forgotten. . . ." (Ibid., Fifth Printing. 1931, p. viii) For further reading: The Enchanted Places by Christopher Milne (1974); A.A. Milne: A Critical Biography by Tori Haring-Smith (1982); Secret Gardens by H. Carpenter (1985); A.A. Milne: The Man Behind Winnie-the-Pooh by A. Thwaite (1990); A.A. Milne by J.C. Wheeler and R.A. Walner (1992); The Brilliant Career of Winnie-the Pooh by Ann Thwaite (1994); The Pooh Dictionary by A.R. Melrose (1995); The Lives and Fantasies of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, J. M. Barrie, Kenneth Grahame and A. A. Milne by Jackie Wullschlager (1996); A. A. Milne: His Life by Ann Thwaite (2007); Goodbye Christopher Robin: A.A. Milne and the Making of Winnie-the-Pooh by Ann Thwaite (2017); The Art of Winnie-the-Pooh: How E. H. Shepard Illustrated an Icon by James Campbell (2017); Winnie-the-Pooh: Exploring a Classic by Annemarie Bilclough and Emma Laws (2017); The Extraordinary life of A.A. Milne by Nadia Cohen (2017); Positioning Pooh: Edward Bear after 100 Years, edited by Jennifer Harrison (2021) - Other translations into Finnish: Suomeksi on julkaistu myös Nalle Puh - kootut kertomukset ja runot (1997, Winnie-the-Pooh: the Complete Collection of Stories and Poems), joka sisältää Winnie-The-Pooh -teoksen lisäksi myös lorukirjat When We Were Very Young ja Now We Are Six. Muita suomennoksia: Kaniinin aamiainen (1987, The King's Breakfast); Nalle Puh seikkailee (1980, Winnie the Pooh - Walt Disney adaptation); Puhin jumppakirja (1991); Nalle Puhin mietekirja (1991, several rep., The Pooh Book of Quotations); Nalle Puhin päiväkirja (1991, Winnie the Pooh Journal) Selected works:
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