In the children’s book news recently, I saw that the A. A. Milne books became public domain on January 1, 2022. It set me thinking of the pleasure they had brought me and of the shared pleasure they had brought with my own children and with the kindergarteners and second graders I taught. You can see from the picture that the two books at the top are well-worn! I bought the others at some later date.
I decided I needed to post a blog to celebrate Milne’s 140th birthday (January 18, 2022) and began to look for more information about him. Most of it turned out to be sad. He became estranged from his son Christopher Robin. Christopher hated the books and felt exploited by them. He thought they thrust him into the public eye and made him nothing more than the son of the Pooh book author. Milne himself was no happier with the way things turned out. He had written for literary magazines and was a novelist, poet, and playwright, but his fame came from what he saw as the lesser world of writing for children.
This made me sad for both of them. I can understand Christopher Robin wanting to be a person in his own right and not confined forever to the role of caretaker for a bear-of-very-little-brain. I am less sympathetic to Milne who missed entirely the joy he has brought to more-than-can-be-numbered children (and some adults who haven’t lost their whimsy). Then there are the Pooh quotes that pop up everywhere suggesting that the bear may have had more than a little brain. I repeat my personal favorite when I experience a loss, “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”
Now, I’m aware that the Disney Company has added much to Pooh’s fame and made a fortune in the process, and I’ll not begrudge them. However, I much prefer the Now We Are Six and When We Were Very Young with a title page that reads, “Books for boys and girls by A. A. Milne with Decorations by Ernest H. Shepard.” I started every school day with my second graders with a poem. You can see the penciled in date in the picture to be sure I did not repeat, at least not often. If you are not familiar with it, I recommend searching online for “The King’s Breakfast” which is too long to put here. It was a favorite for my second graders and me, and I may have ignored my pencil mark and read it more than once each year.
So happy birthday, A. A. Milne! I can only wish you had known that writing poems and books for children is never “lesser.”