A(lan) A(lexander) Milne Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on A(lan) A(lexander) Milne

Alan Alexander Milne was born in London. Youngest son of schoolmaster John Vine Milne, he attended Westminster School and later Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was graduated in 1903 with honors in mathematics. Upon completion of his studies, he immediately began his long career in writing, contributing light essays to several magazines. His first novel, Lovers in London (1905), was published when Milne was twenty-three. In 1906 he joined the staff of Punch as an assistant editor, contributing a weekly essay. His work as a dramatist began a decade later, during his service in World War I. His first play, Wurzel-Flummery, appeared in 1917, and his one unqualified success in the theater, Mr. Pim Passes By, was completed and produced in 1919. By the time of his death in 1956, more than two dozen plays by Milne had been produced in London or New York. However, there is no question that Milne's most lasting monument lies in four slim volumes of children's literature: two books of poems and two books of the adventures of Christopher Robin's friend Winnie-the-Pooh. He also wrote two mystery novels; his Red House Mystery (1921) is considered a classic in the genre.

Milne left his position at Punch in 1914 to join the army. As a signal corps officer and occasional instructor in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, he was stationed on the Isle of Wight and served briefly in France. Finding himself with plenty of time on his hands, Milne began to dabble in playwriting. He suggests in the introduction to First Plays (1919), a collection of five early works, that some of the junior officers turned to bridge or golf as a way of occupying leisure time; he puts his writing in the same category. He states, "These five plays were written during the years 1916 and 1917. They would hardly have been written had it not been for the war.... To his other responsibilities the Kaiser now adds this volume."

Three people in Milne's life influenced and assisted in furthering his dramatic career. The first was his wife, Dorothy ("Daphne") de Sélincourt, whom he married in 1913. She was a principal help to him in his early writing efforts, serving as scribe while he composed and dictated. The second was James M. Barrie, already established as a major force in British theater, who befriended the young author and became Milne's literary patron after reading his early work in Punch. In 1917 Barrie helped arrange the production of Wurzel-Flummery. But it was Dion Boucicault, son of the famous nineteenth-century actor-playwright and himself a noted producer-actor, who was most closely identified with Milne's early plays. Three years after Boucicault's production of Wurzel-Flummery, Boucicault's wife, actress Irene Vanbrugh, created the role of Milne's most notable stage heroine, Olivia Marden, in Mr. Pim Passes By. Boucicault played the title role as well as producing the play. No doubt Milne's association with Boucicault and Barrie helped insure the commercial success of his works in the West End.

In 1917 Wurzel-Flummery foreshadowed the nature of most of Milne's dramatic writing. In the play, when solicitor and occasional playwright Denis Clifton infuriates Crawshaw, a stuffy member of parliament, Crawshaw accuses him angrily of "writing unsuccessful farces." The playwright responds by offering a distinction: "Pardon my interrupting. But you said farces. Not farces, comedies--of a whimsical nature."

While frequently amusing, Wurzel-Flummery has a simple plot. As a practical joke, a man leaves a substantial sum of money to two politicians; the condition attached to the bequest is that they must change their family names to the made-up name Wurzel-Flummery. The fun in this idea derives from the squirming that goes on before both politicians inevitably decide that progress, justice, and British government can be well served by their agreeing to such a change. It is the kind of play that can be read quickly and forgotten just as quickly. Some measure of the depth can be suggested by an examination of the history of the published version. The play was first written in a full-length, three-act format. For the London stage it was cut considerably and presented in two acts. For publication it was cut even more and became a one-act play. Wurzel-Flummery is significant only because it was Milne's first play.

After coming out of the army, Milne began his dramatic career in earnest, and the plays he wrote during the first decade after the war are his best by far. The Lucky One (1922), The Boy Comes Home (1918), Belinda (1918), and The Red Feathers (1921), were all written early and collected with Wurzel-Flummery in 1919 as First Plays. Of these, only Belinda and The Boy Comes Home received London productions at or near the time of their writing. Like many young playwrights, Milne was finding it easier to write dramas than to have them produced commercially onstage.

Milne's fortune changed in 1919 with the production of Mr. Pim Passes By, his one unqualified stage success and a genuinely warm, witty play. (In 1921, Milne adapted the play into a successful novel, which was published in 1929.) The play focuses upon the confusion in the lives of George and Olivia Marden caused by the "passing by" of an absentminded little man, Carraway Pim. Mr. Pim brings news from Australia that Olivia's nasty exhusband, long presumed dead, is really alive. By the time everyone learns that Pim is, as usual, confused, that the rogue in question is Ernest Polwittle, not Jacob Telworthy, Olivia has been subjected to a series of degrading insults by her husband. She manages, however, to turn the tables on George and in the end is firmly in control of the situation. As deus ex machina playing preposterous name games, Pim is in many ways an extension of the original Wurzel-Flummery device. However, Milne's progress from his first play to this one is substantial. In particular, Olivia shines as an example of the English heroine reaching back to her namesake in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. The play ran for 246 performances in London.

Critics who felt that the British stage was now blessed with another superior practitioner of drawing-room comedy were in for disappointment with Milne's succeeding dramas. The Truth about Blayds (1921) and The Dover Road (1921) demonstrate moments of clever plot and occasional witty dialogue; however, by the mid-1920s, Milne turned his attention to the works for which he is best known. His first volume of poetry, When We Were Very Young, was published in 1924, and Winnie-the-Pooh in 1926. With the exception of a few plays for children, there is nothing of great interest in the plays that Milne wrote after that date.

Milne was writing drawing-room comedy at a time when the younger generation found drawing-room society old-fashioned, but his work was pleasant, rarely abrasive, often amusing, and at best witty. His plays after Mr. Pim Passes By were rarely successful with critics or audiences, but his reputation as a writer of children's books was sufficient to insure that the plays received a hearing. (Suffering one of the more notable insults in the history of literary criticism, Milne was the victim of Dorothy Parker's famous quip, offered on the occasion of the publication of The House at Pooh Corner (1928): "Tonstant weader fwowed up.")

In later years the author lived a rather uneventful life in London, answering questions about the mythical bear of his stories and trying unsuccessfully to fend off the label "whimsical." He traveled in the United States in the fall of 1931 and continued writing mostly unnoticed books and plays until 1952, four years before his death at his home in Sussex.

Milne wrote in the tradition of Oscar Wilde but without the harsh cutting edge; he wrote in the style of Noel Coward, but without the sophistication; he wrote in the mood of his mentor, Barrie, but without the same firm grip on staging. He even occasionally wrote in the problem-play tradition of Shaw, but without Shaw's piercing wit. He was early dismissed by George Jean Nathan as a lesser playwright suffering from a "heavy effort to be insistently light." Novelist James Hilton, reviewing one of Milne's late autobiographical books, offered the appropriate summary: "He has perfect vision out of a small window; and even when he looks through a bigger one the slight distortion can be very charming."