A Little Pooh.

It was my brother who owned When We were Very Young.  I bought The House @ Pooh Corner for our lot.  I could recite, @ one time, all of James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree/ Took great care of his mother/ Though he was only 3...

but I wasn't a fan myself.  Talking animals, talking toys were never my thing ~ with one notable exception: Rumor Godden, who had a knack for writing about dolls as real people.  So though I have read: The Wind in the Willows; all of Narnia; some of Watership Down ~ which I hated & thought absolute drivel; Charlotte's web; some Beatrix Potter [plus an assorted lot of not so classic animal tales] I was never enamoured of them because animals don't talk.  Easier to believe in things that simply don't exist than pretend things that are not so ~ so a good deal of well loved children's classics left me cold. That included A.A.Milne.

I was far more interested in the little boy who somehow was, yet wasn't, Christopher Robin.  So I knew he had had a love/hate relationship with his storybook self & because I knew that I was intrigued when Good~bye, Christopher Robin came out. I never did get to the movies but I pre~ordered the DVD release which I finally got my hot little hands on last week & watched with some dismay.

Now I have issues with how the upper English classes raise their children anyway: Nannies & prep schools followed by boarding schools & live in universities & a detached atheism~ honestly, no wonder the English breed strange eccentrics! And no wonder the children of so many of their writers came to bad ends: the Nesbit lot & the Peter Pan 5 ; the Mitford lot ~as Christopher Milne so nearly did.

That any parent, even ones so self~involved as the Milnes were, could use their child as they did is simply appalling, even given the historical period. So this is not a *feel good* tale of pooh~sticks & snuggly toys ~ though that is, of course, part of it.  The trauma of WWI lurks in the background.  The fear of the next war is an ever present threat.  In between is this magical childhood that Christopher never managed to escape.  As the grown Christopher says to his father: I asked you to write a book for me, not a book about me!

This is also a quite beautiful movie, in the way of English period pieces.  The scenery is stunning; The  period farmhouse atmospheric & the acting top notch.  What it is not is terribly historically accurate ~ though perhaps that doesn't matter because Christopher & his father had completely different understandings of what actually took place with the success of Pooh.  For Alan it didn't impact family life though he was furious & embittered that his trivial children's writings forever defined him & his more serious work never received the attention he felt it was due. For Christopher Pooh forever defined him & it took him his whole life to come to terms with the first 10 years of his life.

I think that is sad.  Is anyone to blame? Probably not.  It was such a different world & when you have read as many authors from this period as I have, it really is not so terribly surprising.  Off hand I can't think of a single one whose personal views weren't rather jaded & whose personal life didn't reflect an amoral atheism that resulted in lives of personal chaos.  That Christopher came out of it as well as he did, finding personal happiness in his marriage & quiet life as a bookstore owner is a tribute to him.