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  • Instigorating Winnie the Pooh
  • Ellen Tremper (bio)

Apologies are due at the start of a paper that presumes to analyze the humor of Alan Alexander Milne. For, despite the buoyancy and irrepressibility of Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, the coldness of the analytical eye temporarily deadens what seem to me, by turns, the most delightfully arch, witty, and humorous books ever written for children or, I should say, for adults.

I make the correction of "adults" for "children" because while children certainly appreciate the stories, their sometimes exquisitely side-splitting humor is available almost exclusively to the grownups reading to the children. I could not have been sure of the double appeal of "Winnie-ther-Pooh" until I had, in the words of the popular song, "looked at [. . . the little black cloud] from both sides now." I remember distinctly the pleasure of having Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner read to me by my mother on summer days in our urban backyard (a poor excuse for the Sussex Forest of Christopher Robin and friends) when I was six or seven. I loved Pooh and Piglet and their "explores." But I never laughed. In fact, I remember being puzzled by my mother who was obviously enjoying herself in a way I was not. But now that I have read the stories to my own child, it is easy to see why children respond to them with great earnestness while adults are bowled over by their profound funniness.

In her recent commemorative review of the Pooh books (Winnie-the-Pooh was first published fifty years ago in 1926), Alison Lurie says:

Though the characters in "Winnie-the-Pooh" may have been drawn from Milne's own childhood, or his son's [End Page 33] they are also brilliant portraits of figures that might appear in any childhood. Who has not had a cheerfully reckless friend like Tigger, or a wryly gloomy one like Eeyore? . . . Even more to the point, what child—or adult—has not had days when he felt like Tigger or like Eeyore, or like Pooh himself?1

The universal appeal of these animals has little to do with a young listener's finding adequate representations in them of real life friends. Making such connections between fiction and life, indeed, being conscious enough of personality to discriminate Poohs, Piglets, and Eeyores among one's friends, requires sophistication that few five or six year olds have. It is much more likely, as Ms. Lurie later states, that a child will subconsciously sense that at one time or another he has been all of these animals himself. He identifies with them and for this very reason does not regard them as particularly funny. Seeing one's own behavior as humorous requires objectivity beyond the reach of children, if not of most adults.

The second, perhaps more important reason for a child's earnest response to the books concerns the character of much of their humor. Milne seems to have had a wonderful time creating these stories, writing them more for himself, I suspect, than for his son Christopher. They are filled, that is, with witty work play and ironic repartee way over a child's head. So while the popularity of these stories may well rest on children's primitive identification with archetypal figures and situations, their high comedy is grownup business, of value to their writer and readers, not to their listening audience.

While it is true that Christopher Robin had given names to all the animal characters in these stories, he is not their creator.2 The first chapter of Winnie-the-Pooh lets us in on the secret of the origin of the dramatis personae and the adventures. Milne, who makes no mystery of his being the narrator, [End Page 34] tells us:

Sometimes Winnie-the-Pooh likes a game of some sort when he comes downstairs, and sometimes he likes to sit quietly in front of the fire and listen to a story. This evening——

"What about a story?" said Christopher Robin;

"What about a story?" I said.

"Could you very sweetly tell Winnie-the-Pooh one?"

"I suppose I could...

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