1) A book of verses (about 15 done to date) to appear in 1927 or 1928, but they have to be done fairly soon, so as to be illustrated and then serialised (horrid word) in America. [This would be Now We Are Six.]
2) A book – at Daff’s and Billy’s special request – of Winnie-the-pooh. 2 done. The Evening News one, and one for Eve in February.
3) A book of short stories I want to get out some time. There are about 6 available and I want to do some others – am, in fact, in the middle of one now – grown-up ones, of course. [This would be The Secret and other stories, but it contained only four stories and appeared in 1929, in a limited edition only.]
4) Playfair thinks I’m doing a pantomime for the Lyric, Hammersmith next Christmas, but I think I’m not.
5) I am doing an introduction for a collected edition of Saki [The Chronicles of Clovis, 1928].
6) Proofs of Four Plays to correct.
It was not actually a very substantial or demanding list, at least not for someone with Milne’s fluent pen. The manuscript of Winnie-the-Pooh does not really show how few changes he made because it was his practice to make a pencil draft, which was thrown away, before the surviving ink manuscript, but there is no doubt that he did write quickly and fluently, that the stories came easily. Eeyore, Piglet and, of course, Pooh, the toys already in the nursery, were at the heart of the book. He had invented Owl and Rabbit, and then he and Daphne had returned to the toy department at Harrods on a deliberate mission to acquire a new character or two. Kanga and Roo had looked the most promising candidates and duly inspired the seventh story. By March Winnie-the-Pooh was largely written.
None of the stories in The Secret were written after the date of the list. The proofs of Four Plays were swiftly returned, in time for Chatto and Windus to publish on 15 April. There was no hurry about the Saki introduction or the further children’s poems, and he remained reluctant to write a pantomime for Playfair.
So it is no wonder that he had plenty of time to involve himself in the whole business of the illustration, design, layout, production and the finances of Winnie-the-Pooh. ‘Milne’s instructions were detailed, far more so than any Kipper had received from other authors,’ said Rawle Knox. ‘Kipper’ was Shepard’s nickname, but Milne never used it. They were still not at all close. ‘I always had to start again at the beginning with Milne every time I met him, I think he retired into himself – very often and for long periods,’ Shepard said much later, but the letters suggest Milne was not at all withdrawn at this point. He often pressed Shepard for meetings.
Shepard had always worked from models – ‘The idea of working without models never occurred to him.’ Milne knew this and was anxious, in March 1926, that the artist should come to Mallord Street and meet the toys. ‘I think you must come here on Thursday, if only to get Pooh’s and Piglet’s likeness.’ But he wanted Piglet small ‘as you will see when you read the sixth story’ – that is the one where Piglet is too small to reach the knocker. In the original sketch, in the Royal Magazine, Piglet is shown in mid-air, jumping up and down. For the book, Shepard provided a convenient flowerpot. In fact, it was even more important that Piglet should be small for the seventh story – the rather disquieting story where Kanga and Roo are not welcomed to the Forest, and Piglet impersonates the kidnapped joey and jumps into Kanga’s pocket in his place. ‘It is hard to be brave when you’re only a Very Small Animal,’ says Piglet, and Rabbit responds, ‘It is because you are a very small animal that you will be Useful in the adventure before us.’
From the beginning the appearance of the toys had shaped their characters. Milne himself had said that you could see at once that Eeyore was gloomy and Piglet squeaky. ‘As for Pooh’, Milne wrote (sending four of the stories ‘so that you can get an idea of them at once’): ‘I want you to see Billy’s Bear. He has such a nice expression.’ But Shepard had been drawing teddy bears for years, based on his son Graham’s Growler, that magnificent bear, and he was really not inclined to change now. Growler was there already, anyway, in When We Were Very Young, not only as himself in ‘Teddy Bear’, but clearly identified as Christopher Robin’s own bear, on his bed in the last picture in the book.
Shepard would even go so far as to say (after Milne’s death and, indeed, after the death of his own son) that he used Graham as the model for the child: ‘Christopher Robin’s legs were too skinny. So I decided to draw my own son, Graham, who was a sturdy little boy. Otherwise I was a stickler for accuracy. All the illustrations of Christopher Robin and Pooh and Piglet and the other animals were drawn exactly where Milne had visualised them – usually in Ashdown Forest.’ It was a natural enough claim for Shepard to make in his extreme old age. But Graham was eighteen at the time of Winnie-the-Pooh, and indeed anyone who has seen the juxtaposition in Christopher Milne’s own memoirs of the ‘butterfly photo’ and one of Shepard’s drawings would find it difficult to give much credence to Shepard’s claim. Christopher’s real legs look quite as sturdy as in the drawings, and Christopher himself would say, ‘It is true that he used his imagination when he drew the animals but me he drew from life. I did indeed look just like that.’ The clothes, the hairstyle – that was just how they were, his mother’s ideas carried out by Nanny, who made the smocks and shorts and cut (rather rarely) his hair.
John Macrae of Dutton’s, Milne’s American publisher, claimed to have been in the room, presumably in March 1926, when the partnership was in action.
During the process of bringing Winnie-the-Pooh into existence, I happened to be present at one of the meetings of Milne and Shepard – Milne sitting on the sofa reading the story, Christopher Robin sitting on the floor playing with the characters, which are now famous in Winnie-the-Pooh, and, by his side, on the floor, sat E. H. Shepard making sketches for the illustrations which finally went into the book . . . Christopher Robin, the true inspiration of these four books to both the author and the artist, was entirely unconscious of his part in the drama.
This sounds a little too neat, a little too good to be true, but it is accurate enough to what we know (Shepard did sketch the animals in pencil from what Milne called ‘the living model’) and was written only nine years after the event.