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A reserved, debonair man with "one wife, one son, one house, one recreation—golf," A. A. Milne tried in vain to make the playwright and the novelist keep up with the author of Winnie-the-Pooh. He insisted that he did not even like children very much, that they had become merely "an obsession with me." His obsession sold more than 2,500,000 copies in the U.S. alone, brought him a fortune in royalties from records, toys, stationery, pop-up books. Last week, when he died at 74, the books that he had written so lightheartedly had become nursery classics. In the closing words of his last children's book, A. A. Milne unintentionally summed up his own claim to immortality. "Wherever they go," he said of Pooh and Christopher Robin, "and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing."
* A graduate of Cambridge and a World War II veteran, Christopher Robin, now 35, owns a bookshop in Dartmouth, England.