"If I write anything less realistic, less straightforward than 'the cat sat on the mat,'" A. A. Milne (rhymes with kiln) once complained, "I am [called] whimsical." To Alan Alexander Milne, whimsical was the most "loathsome adjective," but it was one that he could never escape. No matter how many adult plays and novels he wrote, he was forever the biographer of Christopher Robin and Winnie-the-Pooh. On starting one of his children's books. Critic Dorothy Parker once reported that on page five "Tonstant Weader fwowed up." Milne's other readers had an entirely different reaction—and they could be counted in the millions.
The third and youngest son of a London schoolmaster, Milne remained throughout his life fascinated by childhood. "When I read the biography of a well-known man," he wrote, "I find that it is the first half of it which holds my attention." His own childhood was unusually happy. He knew how to read at two, was confident that his parents loved him, learned his first smatterings of science from an awkward young teacher named H. G. Wells.Though he had trouble with Greek, he breezed into spartan Westminster School, and in spite of the fact that there was not a single bath in the place ("It was enough that it was built by Christopher Wren"), he enjoyed himself thoroughly. He went on to Cambridge and to the fulfillment of his first literary ambition: the editorship of the undergraduate Granta.
What's My Line? After graduation, his father made up his mind that A. A. should be a schoolmaster, for he "was convinced now that I was not good enough for the Civil Service." But Milne had already decided to become a writer. He took the £300 coming to him and moved into his own flat.
Though he managed to sell a few articles to Punch, his first book, Lovers in London, received such notices as: "The only readable part of this book is the title." Milne became an assistant editor of Punch, got married, and while serving as a signaling officer in World War I. wrote a play called Wurzel-Flummery. By 1923, he found himself a success. Then one day the lady editor of a new children's magazine asked him to write some verses. "I said that I didn't and couldn't, it wasn't in my line." As it turned out, it was.
Heffalumps & Wallaboos. The verses and stories that were to be When We Were Very Young, Now We Are Six, Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, were based on the doings of his three-year-old son, Christopher Robin Milne,* who insisted on calling himself Billy Moon. As Christopher Robin, Billy eventually became a fixture in thousands of nurseries in England and the U.S. If he went to the zoo or to see the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, his father put it all into rhyme. Even his evening prayers ("Oh! God Bless Daddy —I quite forgot") and the tantrums of his little friends ("What is the matter with Mary Jane?") worked their way into the repertory of mothers, nannies and children on both sides of the Atlantic. Billy's stuffed animals came to life as Pooh, Piglet, Tigger, Eeyore, Kanga and Roo. As if these animals were not enough, Milne invented some others, e.g., the Heffalump and "a sort of a something which is called a wallaboo."