The reactions to those first appearances, and the initial orders for the book, had prepared Milne for the fact that he was about to repeat the success of When We Were Very Young – but the reviewers could hardly believe it. The New York Herald Tribune said, ‘As you read the conviction grows on you that Mr Milne has done it again. There are not so very many books that, sitting reading all alone, you find yourself laughing aloud over. This is one of them. Here is nonsense in the best tradition . . . with the high seriousness about it that children and other wise people love.’
Vogue thought it was ‘not quite as nice as When We Were Very Young, but still it has tremendous charm and is great fun to read aloud’; a St Louis paper also couldn’t convince itself that the new book was quite as clever as the first one. But the great majority of the reviewers raved about it. ‘Almost never has there been so much funniness in a book.’ ‘Mr Milne has repeated the rare coup. Once more he has written the perfect book for children.’ ‘It is even better than When We Were Very Young, which is saying much,’ said the Saturday Review, and a week later May Lamberton Becker wrote in the same place: ‘When the real Christopher Robin is a little old man, children will find him waiting for them. It is the child’s book of the season that seems certain to stay.’
And, like the first book, it was apparently not only the child’s book but the adult’s book as well. It seemed Milne’s books always had the double ability to open up the future for the child looking forward (filling in obscure pieces of the puzzling jigsaw that is life), and the lost past for the adult looking back. My own copy of the first edition of Winnie-the-Pooh was given by my father to my mother long before they had any children. ‘Adults loved him first,’ Elliott Graham of Dutton’s told me, extravagantly. ‘Every intellectual knew the books by heart. It was easily a year and a half before any children saw the books.’ Earlier in the year, the Churchman had congratulated adults on the way they had taken the poems to their hearts. ‘This book appeared in childless New York apartments, in Pullman smokers and in doctors’ offices – an innocent bestseller. Mr Milne’s success seems to indicate that Americans are as yet neither completely commercialised nor completely sophisticated.’
The phenomenal success of both When We Were Very Young and Winnie-the-Pooh was seen as a tribute to the mental health of thousands of Americans. One hundred and fifty thousand copies of Winnie-the-Pooh were sold in the United States before the end of the year. Three weeks later, Milne would say: ‘In America, by the way, they seem at least twice as keen as they were on WWWVY’ – so it seemed, though sales of the poems would keep slightly ahead of Pooh for many years. That was also true in Britain, where the reviews were similarly enthusiastic. ‘Another book full of delight for all children under seventy,’ the Nation said, rather strangely. (Why exclude all those over seventy?) In spite of the fact ‘that it has not the advantage of demanding that it be learned by heart’, it is likely ‘to gain quite as many firm and unshakable admirers’. Milne would soon report that Christopher Robin himself ‘knows Winnie-the-Pooh absolutely by heart’, and there would be many like him.
Methuen had had such confidence that the first British printing was seven times the size of that of When We Were Very Young. In the shops on the day of publication were 32,000 copies bound in dark green cloth. Another 3,000 were bound in red, blue or green leather and there were other limited editions, specifically aimed at book collectors. For Now We Are Six, the following year, the first printing would be 50,000 and for The House at Pooh Corner, 75,000. Within a remarkably short time the worldwide sales of Milne’s four children’s books, in a multitude of languages, would be counted in millions.
6
THE END OF A CHAPTER
Not long after Winnie-the-Pooh was published, the Milnes were at Cotchford for the weekend and had one of Piglet’s floods on the Saturday night. They were not entirely surrounded by water (Cotchford Farm is built on the side of the valley) but the water came up to the wall at the edge of the terrace ‘and from there was one large sheet of water as far as you could see in the moonlight. Unfortunately Billy was asleep, which was very unfair.’ Milne resisted the temptation, writing to Ken, to quote himself: ‘It wasn’t much good having anything exciting like floods, if you couldn’t share them with somebody.’ But Daphne was there, gazing out at the water too; and if she was not quite as excited as the boy would have been, that was only to be expected.
He went on:
Moon tells me that Pooh is ‘what I call a good sort of book’, which has encouraged me greatly. He is terribly sweet just now – and so is Daff – and so am I – and I have just finished with the dentist for another 9 months or so, and am feeling rather bucked.
There was none of that terrible uncertainty about what he was going to do next. Half of the poems for Now We Are Six were already written and the ending of Winnie-the-Pooh deliberately paved the way for a sequel:
‘And what did happen?’ asked Christopher Robin . . .
‘I don’t know.’
‘Could you think, and tell me and Pooh some time?’
‘If you wanted it very much.’
‘Pooh does,’ said Christopher Robin.
Indeed, the Evening News Christmas edition again carried a new Pooh story, just as it had the year before. Milne had every reason to feel pleased with himself, but he could hardly believe his luck would last. He was finding the financial side of things difficult to manage. ‘I feel I must save quickly, and I never know how much. It’s so easy for a writer to drop out and be forgotten. I have just been helping Edwin Pugh,’ he told Ken, ‘who is starving and has had one article accepted in the last 18 months.’ The lack of security never interfered with his generosity.
One indication of Milne’s unusual reputation at this period was that he was invited to join the Athenaeum ‘under the provisions of Rule II’. Most men put their names on a waiting list and waited, hoping to get there in the end. To be invited was a considerable honour and a rare one; certainly not one to be refused. Rule II required that the Members elected should be ‘persons of distinguished eminence in Science, Literature, or the Arts or for Public Services’ and that at the relevant meeting ‘nine at least of the Committee be actually present, and the whole of those present unanimous in their Election’. Milne was rather pleased about it. He thought when he first lunched there that the denizens were more human than he expected. The Chicago Daily Tribune, giving the story of Milne’s election, called it ‘one of the most awesome and one of the most legendary places on earth’.