In July, three months before the book was published, someone was already after the manuscript. Milne wrote to E. V. Lucas: ‘If I give a price now, I say ￡350. If the book is a complete failure, this may be reduced to 2/9; on the other hand, it may go up to ￡500 . . . I wouldn’t give ￡350 for anybody’s manuscript . . . But I don’t want to make the mistake I made with the verse.’ In fact, he never did sell the manuscripts of Winnie-the-Pooh or its sequel, and in his will instructed his trustees, after the death of his wife, to offer the two manuscripts to the library of his old college, Trinity, Cambridge, as a gift. And that is where they are now.
Winnie-the-Pooh was dedicated to Daphne in one of those almost embarrassingly open gestures which seem so strange from a man whose son would say, ‘My father’s heart remained buttoned up all through his life’.
TO HER
HAND IN HAND WE COME
CHRISTOPHER ROBIN AND I
TO LAY THIS BOOK IN YOUR LAP.
SAY YOU’RE SURPRISED?
SAY YOU LIKE IT?
SAY IT’S JUST WHAT YOU WANTED?
BECAUSE IT’S YOURS—
BECAUSE WE LOVE YOU.
Here it seems that Alan Milne is wearing his heart on his sleeve – a necessary gesture, perhaps, when the child’s mother has been so totally excluded from both the books for children. Nanny was in the first, When We Were Very Young, over and over again, and so was Milne himself – Shepard actually drew him (with cap and pipe) in ‘Sand-between-the-toes’. All Daphne got was ‘God bless Mummy’ and a possible (undesirable) association with the disappearing mother of James James Morrison Morrison. Long afterwards, Ronald Bryden in the Spectator looked at the poems and decided that whether the mother’s absences ‘betoken drink, drugs, insanity or infidelity, the child has obviously been driven by some emotional deprivation into a life of lonely fantasy, inventing a series of imaginary playmates’: Binker, mice, beetles, even raindrops – quite apart from the toys themselves. The mother has surely failed in her role. Now in Pooh the conversations between the boy and his father make the framework of the book, and there is no room at all for the mother.
Ernest Shepard’s copy of the book would later carry Milne’s inscription:
When I am gone,
Let Shepard decorate my tomb,
And put (if there is room)
Two pictures on the stone:
Piglet, from page a hundred and eleven
And Pooh and Piglet walking (157) . . .
And Peter, thinking that they are my own,
Will welcome me to heaven.
That is Piglet ‘blowing happily at a dandelion and wondering whether it would be this year, next year, some time or never’, whatever ‘it’ was; and Pooh and Piglet (Pooh clasping his special pencil case, so like Christopher Robin’s real one) walking thoughtfully home together in the golden evening, at the very end of the book. This gives us moving evidence of how much Alan Milne admired Ernest Shepard’s contribution to the books.
In the spring of 1926 the Evening News had carried an article by Milne, lamenting the attitude to writers of the British Broadcasting Company, formed three and a half years before. Milne wrote to Ken, sending him his play The Ivory Door to read:
I also send the Evening News: sorry you don’t read it, nor live in London where the whole metropolis is placarded on these occasions with my name, practically life-size. On second thoughts, I think perhaps you’re lucky . . . I called it ‘Authors and the B.B.C. by an author’ and asked for 10 guineas, to which they said promptly ‘15, if you sign it’. Did I hesitate? Not for a moment.
It seems worth giving most of the article here for, if the BBC has, in over ninety years, improved its attitude and payments, the general feeling about writers seems to have stayed much the same. Not long ago, for example, Philip Pullman initiated a campaign in Oxford pressing literary festivals not to expect writers to take part without proper payment.
Complaint was made in the Evening News a few days ago that the programmes of the B.B.C. were of a much lower standard on the literary side than on the musical side. I should like to suggest, from the author’s point of view, some reasons why this is so.
Authors have never been taken very seriously by their fellow-men. ‘A singer is a singer,’ the attitude seems to be, ‘a painter is a painter, and a sculptor sculpts; but, dash it all, a writer only writes, which is a thing we all do every day of our lives, and the only difference between ourselves and Thomas Hardy is that Hardy doesn’t do anything else, whereas we are busy men with a job of real work to do.’ And since writing is, in a sense, the hobby, or at least the spare-time occupation of the whole world, it has become natural for the layman to regard the professional author as also engaged merely upon a hobby . . .
Now the B.B.C. exploits to its highest power this attitude of kindly condescension to the author. To the B.B.C. all authors are the same author. There is a ‘regular fee’ for the author, whoever he is; the fee is what advertisers call ‘nominal’; and with any luck the B.B.C. can avoid paying even this ridiculous amount by an ingenious scheme of its own. It says to the author: ‘If we pay you a fee, we won’t mention your name or your works or your publishers or anything about you, but if you will let us do it for nothing we will announce to our thousand million book-buying listeners where your work is to be bought. And if you don’t like it, you can leave it, because there are plenty of other authors about; and, if it came to the worst, we could write the things ourselves quite easily . . .’
But the B.B.C. is obsessed by the thought of advertisement. Publicity might never have been heard of until the B.B.C. was born. After all, if the B.B.C. says to the author, ‘I shan’t pay you, because I’m helping your books to sell,’ why on earth shouldn’t the publisher also say to the author, ‘And I shan’t pay you, because I’m helping you to get taken up by the B.B.C.’? Why should the Broadcasting Company be the one, and the only one, not to pay?
I suggest, then, that the reason why the literary standard of the B.B.C. is low is simply that the Company has made no effort to attract authors, and is entirely out of touch and sympathy with authors. Let me give an example or two from my own experience.