The origin of Winnie-the-Pooh

A.A. Milne didn't intend to use his son as a stepping-stone to fame and fortune. So writes Ann Thwaite in Goodbye Christopher Robin, the basis for a recent movie with the same title.

For one thing, Milne already had fame and fortune. He was, in the early 1920s, the most successful playwright in Great Britain. He had also written novels, including The Red House Mystery, and had been a popular writer for Punch. He didn't need either Christopher Robin or Winnie-the-Pooh to make his mark in the world.

For another, while Christopher Robin may have been his little boy's real name, it isn't what Milne or anyone else called him. He was called Billy Moon, or just Billy or, more often, just Moon. At the time the "Christopher Robin" of the poems and stories almost seemed like somebody else, an invented character.

This latter point seems a stretch. Other characters, including Winnie-the-Pooh himself, were clearly based on his son's toys. He and his wife even went shopping for new toys for their son, Kanga and Roo, to give Milne more characters to work with. E.H. Shepard came to the nursery to see both Christopher Robin and his toys before doing his drawings for the books. So how could Milne have imagined the character of Christopher Robin was anyone other than his own son?

But the young author never expected his poetry for children (When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six) and his Winnie-the-Pooh books to become as popular as they did or to cast everything else he wrote into the shadows. Besides, at the time both Milne's wife and his little boy loved the books and the attention they brought. Only later, as Christopher Robin grew into manhood and struggled to find his own place in the world, did resentment grow and Milne fully realize his mistake.

The son later referred to the attention received through his father's books, both as a child and as an adult, as "empty fame." It had nothing to do with anything he did. Christopher Milne ran a bookshop and later wrote memoirs of his life as Winnie-the-Pooh's friend and A.A. Milne's son.

Thwaite quotes extensively from these books, as well as from A.A. Milne's letters and other sources. These long, usually dull, excerpts are her book's major weakness. They interrupt her narrative and suggest that she, or her publisher, felt padding was needed to make her book, barely 250 pages, longer. But fans of Winnie-the-Pooh, the people who will read Goodbye Christopher Robin, don't mind short books.