SOURCE: "He Don't Mean Any Harm," in London Review of Books, Vol. 12, No. 12, June 28, 1990, pp. 17-18.

In the following essay, a review of A. A. Milne: His Life, by Ann Thwaite, Bayley discusses Milne's politics, his personal life, and his frustrated ambitions as a writer of "serious" literature.

Emancipation involves escape, but having got out of the Victorian prison, what then? The new world may seem wholly delightful, like Blake's Beulah or Keats's Chamber of Maiden Thought, or the land of sexual intercourse we entered in 1963, so why not stay in it for ever? Somewhere at the top of the forest a little boy and his bear will always be playing. But this soft magic may end up seeming as hateful and hypocritical as Victorian repression, a new sort of conformity from which the next generation will emancipate itself in derision and disgust. A.A. Milne's favourite novel...