Everyone was quoting the poems and parodying them. A university wife in Kansas wrote to say ‘No dinner with guests is complete without “Sir Brian Botany” or “James, James” or “Mr Teddy Bear”. (You’d be surprised at the number of faculty people trying to reduce.)’ Children at table no longer asked for butter but for ‘some butter for the Royal slice of bread’. If anything was big, it was always ‘enormouse’. And whenever something was lost, the cry would go up, ‘Has anyone seen my mouse?’
A woman in Nashville, Tennessee, was typical of many who said that the poems appealed to all ages – her four-year-old ‘found and recognised himself in almost every poem’, but her eleven-year-old also loved ‘The King’s Breakfast’, ‘Bad Sir Brian Botany’ and ‘Three Foxes’. The most bizarre report was from the Hon. Edwin Samuel, who said he had read some Milne verses at a Jaffa Chamber of Commerce lunch. ‘All those busy Arab merchants took the afternoon off for endless repeats of “Christopher Robin goes hoppity, hoppity, hop”.’ Everyone was hopping. A New York woman reported, ‘We all had to hop. We kept it up until I was overcome by exhaustion and avoirdupois. Then just the children hopped.’ They wanted to know about Christopher Robin. Does he really hop all the time?
An uncomfortable spotlight was already beginning to shine on the small boy himself. ‘Grown-up readers as well as his contemporaries will thank him for helping to inspire the gay verses,’ said someone on the Sunday Herald Post. The accompanying photograph of Milne showing a book to his curly-haired child, with a rather cool Daphne looking on, is captioned ‘A. A. Milne, his wife and little daughter’.
The book was the subject of a leader in the New York Herald Tribune, in March, which quoted Coventry Patmore’s ‘The Toys’ and said that ‘pathos digs perhaps the most treacherous of pitfalls’ when one is writing about children. ‘Our own emotions get between us and the child’s. It takes genius to identify itself with a child’s blithe inconsequence . . . Lewis Carroll had the gift. Stevenson had it . . . Kipling when he wrote the Just So Stories. There are unmistakable signs of it in Mr A. A. Milne, the English playwright.’ The paper suggested that anyone who didn’t appreciate the book was a ‘biffalo-buffalo-bison, who deserves to find treacle in his sockses’.
Milne wrote to E. V. Lucas on 3 April, saying ‘It’s in its 23rd edition in America! But of course not such big editions as you have been printing.’ Sales escalated throughout the year, reaching a tremendous high with the run-up to Christmas 1925. ‘Everybody’s Talking about this Book’, above a photo of Christopher Robin, was a headline in the New York Telegraph for November 1925, and in the following January the Retail Bookseller said that the sales record of When We Were Very Young ‘is practically without parallel for any book in the last ten years’. It was generally agreed to be a book to put alongside Stevenson’s Child’s Garden, and A. A. Milne himself to be as ‘quotable, contagious and personal an institution as Lewis Carroll’.
Milne pondered on the whole, extraordinary business. Before he had heard the mounting chorus of adulation, he had been a little irritated by Drinkwater’s review which had ‘a delightful air about it of how dare this fellow try to write poetry without a proper licence?’ But could he now call himself a poet? If he found being a dramatist so horrible, what sort of writer did he want to be? A time would come when Auden would make a slightly ambiguous reference in his ‘Letter to Lord Byron’:
Light verse, poor girl, is under a sad weather;
Except by Milne and persons of that kind
She’s treated as démodé altogether.
It’s strange and very unjust to my mind . . .
Kingsley Amis, in the introduction to his New Oxford Book of Light Verse, noted Auden’s ‘good word’ for A. A. Milne and quoted at length, and with tremendous approval, Milne’s account of light verse in the course of an essay on C. S. Calverley, his old hero. Part of it echoes neatly Milne’s account, in his autobiography, of writing for children:
[It] is not the relaxation of a major poet in the intervals of writing an epic; it is not the kindly contribution of a minor poet to a little girl’s album; it is not Cowper amusing (and how easily) Lady Austin, nor Southey splashing about, to his own great content, in the waters of Lodore. It is a precise art . . . Light verse is not the output of poets at play, but of light-verse writers . . . at the hardest and most severely technical work known to authorship . . .
From time to time anthologies of light verse are produced. The trouble with most of the anthologists is that, even if they have an understanding of their subject, secretly they are still a little ashamed of it.
The same can be said of many writers for children. When the two come together, light verse written for children, there are some complex feelings going on, even as the writer looks at his extremely satisfactory bank balance.
Milne had done so much for Methuen’s bank balance that in April 1925 they published a small collection of his adult light verse, For the Luncheon Interval, in card covers at one shilling and sixpence. It went into a second edition within the year, but no one regarded it as anything but a poor relation of the children’s poems. Neither Auden nor Amis, when they came to make their light-verse anthologies, could find a single specimen of Milne to earn a place, though, curiously enough, Grigson did include ‘Lines Written by a Bear of Very Little Brain’ in his Faber Book of Nonsense Verse. Stephen Potter, in his exploration of the British sense of humour in 1954, suggested that there had been a revulsion against Milne by his generation, almost because he seemed then, in the early 1920s, ‘so deliciously funny’, with the funniness ‘toppling over into sweetness and niceness’. The second half of the twentieth century prefers its humour blacker, less nice.
Milne would go on speaking out for comedy to be taken as seriously as tragedy, for light verse to be taken as seriously as serious verse. After all, ‘in modern light verse the author does all the hard work, and in modern serious verse he leaves it all to the reader . . .’ But he would gradually have to accept that it was only as a writer for children that anyone would take him seriously. In a poem in For the Luncheon Interval addressed to his nephew Jock, Barry’s elder boy, and written long ago, in 1909, Milne had brooded on
we, who bear your name;
Content (well, almost) with the good old game
Of moderate Fortune unrelieved by Fame.
He had now won, in no small measure, both Fame and Fortune. Whether they would make him content was another matter.
Drinkwater sent him his review copy to be autographed and Milne amused himself by parodying ‘Happiness’ in the front of it:
John has a
Great Big
Actor-proof
Play on,
John has a
Great Big
Mayfair flat . . . etc. etc.
He gave him a bit of ‘The Christening’ too:
I sometimes call him Terrible John
’Cos his plays go on –
And on . . .
And on.