I think my indolence is more apparent than real; or perhaps I should say that it is real, but I overcome it pretty well. I have written in the last five years: six full-length plays, four short plays, two novels, about a book and a half of essays and sketches, a book of verses, three short stories and various oddments: in addition, of course, to the more mechanical labour of seeing 9 books through the press, and rehearsing seven full-length plays, which is not too bad.
Quite frankly I could not bear to write regularly for Punch again. I’m sorry, but there it is. It would make me miserable. And I suspect that what you really want is that ‘Billy Book’ you have been urging me to write; and you feel that, if I began a few chapters for Punch, I should be more likely to pull it off. Fear not. I will do it yet. I like writing; the sort of writing which doesn’t come into plays; and I will do that book, or some other book, directly, which will make you say ‘I always said he could write.’
I will send you 20 or 30 of the poems next week, if you would like to see them – officially as Methuen’s friend, or unofficially as mine. A mixed lot. So mixed that I think (hooray!) that they will require a prose introduction.
The poems duly arrived in Lucas’s office at Methuen. E. V. Lucas was extremely influential at both Methuen and Punch at this time. He was just about to become chairman of Methuen and he had been the editor Owen Seaman’s deputy at Punch from the days when Milne had first worked there. Although in his memoir Reading, Writing and Remembering Lucas praises both Milne and ‘his collaborator with the pencil, Ernest Shepard’, he does not himself claim responsibility for that remarkable partnership, which was to seem as apt and inevitable as Gilbert and Sullivan. But there seems no question that it was his idea.
As soon as Lucas saw the children’s poems, he realised that they would make a splendid book when there were enough of them, and that, in the meantime, some of them should appear in Punch. It was obviously important to find the right illustrator. ‘Vespers’ had not been illustrated when it first appeared and Harry Rowntree, who drew the pictures for ‘The Dormouse and the Doctor’, was extremely good at animals (he spent days at the London Zoo), but not so much at home in the nursery. Lucas was sitting next to Shepard at the Punch Table, a sociable editorial meeting, when he suggested (so Shepard remembered) doing some drawings and seeing what Milne thought of them.
Milne knew Shepard’s work well, though Shepard had not actually joined the Table until 1921, after Milne had left Punch. Before the war, when Shepard was contributing his first cartoons, Milne had actually said more than once to the art editor, F. H. Townsend, ‘What on earth do you see in this man? He’s perfectly hopeless.’ And Townsend had replied complacently, ‘You wait.’ Shepard had always had difficulty with the jokes.
The Shepard who illustrated Milne’s first collection of children’s poems, and who would go on to illustrate the other children’s books, was the one for whom Milne had waited. As men, they had very little in common – despite some odd links. For instance, there was the fact that they had lived as small children only a few streets apart, and Shepard had actually been at the same kindergarten in Upper Baker Street as Milne’s friend Nigel Playfair. Later, Shepard’s sister Ethel had been bridesmaid at the wedding of John Vine Milne’s most famous ex-pupil, Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe and eventually owner of The Times. Harmsworth, who had showered pennies on small Alan Milne, had taught young Ernest Shepard how to bowl overarm. That was not much of a basis for friendship, and they were of very different temperament. Milne found Shepard’s attitude to the war particularly hard to take. They had both experienced the horror of the Somme in 1916 – and Shepard had gone on to win the Military Cross at Passchendaele. ‘For him,’ Rawle Knox would write, ‘“The Great War” was a natural extension of his life, practically all activity interested him and this was more exciting than most . . . He had always been fascinated with guns.’ Shepard ended up ‘a pillar of Sussex society’, as Milne would never be.
There were plenty of other candidates for the job of illustrating Milne’s children’s poems. Looking at Punch for the year before the book came out, one sees E. H. Shepard’s drawings of children as no better and sometimes rather worse than those of several other artists. The choice might easily have fallen on A. E. Bestall (who would become less famous for another bear, Rupert, when he took over Mary Tourtel’s creation) or D. L. Ghilchik or G. L. Stampa. But Shepard turned out to be perfect in most people’s eyes, though R. G. G. Price would speak of his bourgeois ‘prettification’ and Geoffrey Grigson (notoriously hard to please) of his ‘splendid insipidity’. Milne himself was delighted from the moment he saw the first drawings Shepard did – the ones for ‘Puppy and I’, the poem that recalls a long-ago Gordon Setter, Brownie, who appeared out of nowhere just as the puppy does in the poem. The child and the puppy demonstrate admirably Shepard’s particular pleasure in what Penelope Fitzgerald has called ‘the characteristic movement of the design from right to left’. It was the feeling of life, ‘the tension of suspended movement’, in Shepard’s drawings that made him so outstanding when he was doing his best work.
One critic would say that Shepard’s illustrations belong to the verses ‘as intimately as the echo does to the voice’. Certainly, the extraordinary success Milne would enjoy owed a good deal to Shepard, but any suggestion that it was because of Shepard can be easily dismissed when one looks at the long-forgotten books of children’s verse Shepard would also illustrate delightfully in the next few years, such as Georgette Agnew’s Let’s Pretend and Jan Struther’s Sycamore Square. A lot of people would try to jump on the merry-go-round. One can’t help wondering what Milne felt as he read E. V. Lucas’s own contribution Playtime and Company (published a year after Milne’s first poems), complete with Shepard’s Pooh-like bear on a bed, a Christopher Robin lookalike and even a poem about rice pudding, with these strange lines addressed to the reluctant nursery eater:
When you next the pudding view,
Suppress the customary ‘Pooh!’
And imitate the mild Hindu.