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  • Back to Pooh Corner
  • Alison Lurie (bio)

Help me if you can, I've got to getBack to the House at Pooh Corner . . .Back to the days of Christopher Robin and Pooh.

—contemporary rock lyric1

I was surprised when I heard these words sung to the accompaniment of electronic instruments, and also when, in the same week, I saw on the cover of Rolling Stone an advertisement of another rock group called "Edward Bear." But inquiry among my students confirms it—Pooh is still a big culture hero. He means as much to the Now Generation as he did to us Back When.

My friends and I not only read Milne's books over and over as children; all through high school and college we went on speaking his language, seeing people and events in his terms. My husband lived his first term at Middlesex as Piglet, with friends who were Pooh and Eeyore, and the school grounds and surrounding country were remapped accordingly; at college, I knew girls who went by the names of Tigger and Roo. Even today, occasionally, I will go back and reread a favorite passage.

Writing about the Pooh books, on the other hand, has been awkward (if not impossible) since 1963, when Frederick C. Crews published The Pooh Perplex. It is not often that a satirical work achieves such success that it effectively destroys its object, but Crews almost managed it. He was not able to laugh into silence any of the dozen varieties of current literary criticism he so brilliantly parodied; but he did manage to stifle almost all critical comment on Winnie-the-Pooh for a decade.2 No one likes to imitate an imitation, and anyhow Crews had said most of what could be said about Pooh in one disguise or another; his best insights occur in the essay by "Harvey C. Window," which appears to be self-parody. Even now, I begin this piece with some embarrassment, aware that I am in part only following one of the suggestions for further "responsible criticism" made by Crews' "Smedley Force," a prominent member of the MLA who was "struck by the paucity of biographical connections between Winnie-the-Pooh and the [life] of A. A. Milne."

At first glance, Milne appears to be writing about his son, Christopher Robin, who was six when Winnie-the-Pooh appeared in 1926, and about his son's toys. But there are indications in the books that Milne was also thinking of his own childhood, and the people that surrounded him in the past.

Born in 1882, Alan Arthur Milne was the youngest of three sons of John Vine Milne, the headmaster of a small suburban London school for boys. At Henley [End Page 11] House the three Milne children lived a half-private, half-public life, playing and eating with their father's pupils, and joining the classes as soon as they were old enough. The world of Pooh repeats this in many respects. It is a very old-fashioned, limited society, without economic competition or professional ambition. There are no cars, planes, radios, or telephones; war, crime, and serious violence are unknown. Aggression is limited to the mildest form of practical joke, and even that generally backfires. Except for Kanga and Roo, there are no family relationships. The principal occupations of the inhabitants are eating, exploration, visiting, and sports. The greatest excitement centers around the capture of strange animals or the rescue of friends in danger; but the danger is always from natural causes; accidents, floods, storms. Apart from occasional bad weather, it is a perfectly safe world.

The setting seems to suggest pre-1900 Essex and Kent, where Milne spent his holidays as a child, rather than the milder and more thickly-settled countryside of Sussex where he lived as an adult. The landscape is fairly bare and uncultivated, consisting mostly of heath and woods and marsh. There are many pine trees, and the most common plants seem to be gorse and thistles. Rain, wind, fog, and even snow are common.

Milne claimed in his Autobiography that he did not invent most of the characters in the Pooh books, but merely...

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