SOMEWHERE, A BOY AND A BEAR

It’s always sunny.

The British writer A.A. Milne (1882-1956) is best known today as the author of the children’s classic Winnie-the-Pooh. At the heart of author and broadcaster Brandreth’s book is the making of the work, the bear, and the boy hero. Behind it is Milne’s own longing for the Edwardian world of his young adulthood, just before the First World War. Writes Brandreth, “His twenties and early thirties were magical to him, too—the time he spent in the happy, innocent, everyday world he depicted week in, week out, for more than a decade in the pages of [the humor magazine] Punch.” It was not just war that changed Milne, though. He married Daphne de Sélincourt in 1913, and they had a child, Christopher Robin (born in 1920), who would become the basis of the famous character of the same name. That son is the subject of this book’s second half. Despite fame and attention (or even exploitation), writes Brandreth, Christopher “survived it….He and Winnie-the-Pooh had something very special in common. Both the boy and the bear believed in ‘living gratefully.’” That is the lesson of this book. The story of the Milne family is the story of holding the temptations of a pastoral imagination together with the traumas of the real world. Winnie-the-Pooh endures because he faces each day unmaimed by war or wilderness. “What day is it?” he famously asks Piglet. “It’s today.” It is always a sunny today in the Hundred Acre Wood, though in this book, sunniness often turns to sentimentality. In the end, this is less a work of biographical literary criticism than it is a personal journey of rediscovering childhood in all its glossy nostalgia.

The family life of A.A. Milne as a lesson in childhood innocence, its loss, and its recovery in storytelling.