That phrase ‘the world Pooh creates’ seems at first like a slip. Didn’t he really mean to say ‘the world Milne creates’ or ‘the world of Pooh . . .’? In fact, it gives us the clue why Christopher Robin is the way he is – too perfect, flawless, not falling out of trees. It is because he is seen in relation to Pooh and the other animals. Pooh and Piglet are the children and the boy himself takes on the role of the adult. The listening or reading child identifies with the superior strength and power he sometimes resents in the adults around him, however much he loves his parents. Christopher Robin is always resourceful and competent; he is the child as hero. In ‘the world Pooh creates’ it is Christopher Robin who reads sustaining books at moments of crisis, who comes to the rescue, who will make sure that no harm comes to the kidnapped Roo (whatever befell him in real life) and protects the animals from the teeth of fierce things. (‘If Christopher Robin is coming, I don’t mind anything.’) He dries Eeyore’s tail after its immersion in the river (having nailed it on on a previous occasion) and does all the comforting and useful things that parents do. The boy is brave and godlike to the toys, just as the loving parent is to a small child. It is absolutely beside the point to criticise him for being too good to be true.
Just occasionally, as any adult does too, Christopher Robin reveals his frailty, his feet of clay, and this surely adds to his appeal. He has forgotten what the North Pole looks like. (‘I did know once . . .’) It is Pooh who is childlike, egotistical, hungry, alternately boastful and self-deprecating, occasionally managing to be brave and unselfish, accepting things without really understanding them, as children so often have to accept un-understandable explanations. The listening or reading child recognises himself in Pooh and recognises himself as he longs to be, as he thinks he will be, in Christopher Robin. He recognises and enjoys the wit and tenderness of the books.
But after The Pooh Perplex, Frederick Crews’ 1963 parody of a student casebook, one cannot attempt the most rudimentary criticism without seeming to be joking. After ‘The Hierarchy of Heroism in Winnie-the-Pooh’ and ‘A la recherche du Pooh perdu’ (Weltschmerz, alienation and the rest) one’s pen freezes in one’s hand. Perhaps, with all that chasing after honey, the books explore the universality of the sexual urge or the bestiality of the free market? Perhaps the great Heffalump expedition really is a paradigm of colonialism? Eeyore is certainly the archetypal outsider, if not the spokesman for the disillusioned postwar generation of the 1920s. ‘There is something a little frightening about The Pooh Perplex’, as Benedict Nightingale wrote in a review. You begin to wonder if those invented critics may not have something after all, underneath their ludicrous jargon.
As Alison Lurie put it, Crews managed ‘to stifle almost all critical comment on Winnie-the-Pooh for a decade’. She felt she was, in 1972, merely following up one of the suggestions made by ‘Smedley Force’, a prominent member of the Modern Language Association of America, who was struck by ‘the paucity of biographical connections between Winnie-the-Pooh and the lives of A. A. Milne, “Christopher Robin”, and the historical personages who probably lie behind the fictional portraits of “Pooh”, “Piglet”, “Kanga” et alia.’ Lurie makes the suggestion that Pooh’s relation to Piglet is much like that of Milne’s older brother, Ken, to Milne himself. She sees something of J. V. Milne in Owl and something of Milne’s mother Maria in, not Kanga, but Rabbit. She points out, as many others have done, that we all know people like Tigger, like Eeyore, like Kanga. Humphrey Carpenter suggests, ‘Don’t we, indeed, recognise them in ourselves?’ He saw that Milne makes it possible for a child ‘to carry into adult life a perception of human character acquired from his readings’ of the Pooh books. If Milne sets out to depict only a very small fraction of human behaviour, ‘he manages to do so completely within a child’s understanding; the Pooh books can be taken in fully by all but the smallest children.’ And yet the adult reading aloud is not bored. It is an extraordinary achievement.
Richard Adams has suggested that Eeyore is ‘the first portrait in English literature of a type of neurotic we all know only too well’ – though he may owe a little to Dickens’s poor Mrs Gummidge in David Copperfield, ‘the lone lorn creetur’, who did not appear to be able to cheer up, drowned in self-pity as she was. ‘My trouble has made me contrary,’ she said, and Eeyore’s troubles make him contrary too, but Milne makes self-pity far funnier and more lovable. Eeyore has moments of happiness which save him from being a caricature – for instance, when his tail is restored and when he puts his burst birthday balloon into his useful pot. Adams says it was from the Pooh books that he learnt for Watership Down (one of the few comparable bestsellers, at least in the initial years) ‘the vital importance, as protagonists, of a group of clearly portrayed, contrasting but reciprocal characters’, though he does not claim that his rabbits come anywhere near Pooh and his friends.
There have been many different reasons given for the enduring appeal of the books. It has been suggested it is because they are stories of ‘universal perplexity’, that we are all bears of very little brain trying as Pooh does to bluff our way through life. ‘Hardly anybody knows if those are these or these are those.’ And as Pooh can be a brave and clever bear, we feel we could be too, if only life would give us the chance. If the critic John Rowe Townsend, realising ‘how very good they are’, considers the stories ‘as totally without hidden significance as anything ever written’, another critic, Peter Hunt, responds by saying that they are ‘still the complex work of a complex man, and they include a fascinating series of subtexts that can tell us a lot about the relationships of child, adult, story and book.’ It is ‘sophisticated writing, the pace, the timing, and the narrative stance all contributing to the comic effect’.
Alison Lurie suggests it is because Milne ‘created out of a few acres of Sussex countryside, a world that has the qualities both of the Golden Age of history and legend, and the lost paradise of childhood – two eras which, according to psychologists, are often one in the unconscious mind’. The small adventures are concerned entirely with the things children are most interested in – friends, food, birthdays, tree-houses and expeditions, jokes and songs. They are concerned, as children are, with courage that comes and goes. There is no economic necessity or competition. The dangers are all natural ones – bees, heffalumps (possibly), bad weather – and what is celebrated is community, the spirit of co-operation and kindness, most clearly seen in Winnie-the-Pooh when Christopher Robin and Pooh rescue Piglet when he is entirely surrounded by water.
Humphrey Carpenter has pointed out that Milne’s humour is that of a mathematician. ‘Each humorous situation in the Pooh books is reached by the logical pursuit of an idea to the point of absurdity.’ Milne’s pleasure is in playing with words. Carpenter suggests he ‘handles words in the kind of detached manner in which a mathematician deals with figures’ but, in fact, there is plenty of emotion in the Forest. If Christopher Robin is godlike, he is certainly the god of love. The feminist critic, Carol Stanger, sees that the stories appeal because ‘they respect what is traditionally given low status in patriarchal society, nurturing and emotion’. They reflect a pre-sexual, pre-literate world that is kinder and more attractive than the world as it is; and even critics who say – like Roger Sale and Margery Fisher – that they can no longer enjoy the stories as much as they did as children, or as much as college students often do today, none the less find themselves still moved by the thought of their own vanished Pooh-reading childhoods.