The Contrary View: Glimpses of Fudge and Gold

Once, oh once, did not the Public find its voice in the Poet? Oncebut not now, 0 Apollo -weren't new poems sold, in the largest numbers? Lalla Rookh, and Childe Harold, and Idylls of the King, and Poems and Ballads (and Proverbial Philosophy)? Then T. S. Eliot came; and poetry changed to modem; and did not sell. As such facts are recited (often, if not quite so often as heretofore), how is it that no one remembers Alan Alexander Milne? How is it that no one is asked, in Advanced Level English, even in the Tripos, to estimate the influence upon 'Now I'm engaged to Miss Joan Hunter Dunn' of Hushl Hush! Whisper who dares! Christopher Robin is saying his prayers? A. A. Milne was a poet -he wrote poems, shall I say, no less than John Betjeman, or Eliot; or William Empson. Undeniably When We Were Very Young, his most successful book, is filled with poems. Undeniably these poems have sold (and are selling still). Few other poems in English have sold so enormously. They were published -two years after The Waste Land -in the autumn of 1924: they have been reprinted (this is the fact) fifty-Six times in thirty-four years. This poet was born to a Scottish prep school master, in London, in 1882, six years before our Mr Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri. He was educated (nothing 'wrong' about his education) at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge; and soon enough, after editing the Cranta, the undergraduates' magazine, he was helping to edit Punch in its least aggressive and most evasive days. This young man The Contrary View braces'? They are accustomed, with a full staff, to seaside holidays (I think in North Cornwall), in a rented house: When we got home, we had sand in the hair, In the eyes and the ears and everywhere. Their world is Us, and the Other People. Those of the Other People who sell in shops or work with their hands (Jonathan Jo the gardener) are a little queer, and perhaps need washing (see Bad Sir Brian Botany), but they must be treated with consideration; which averts revolution. Bad Sir Brian blipped 'the villagers' on the head with his battleaxe and kicked them into the pond, and into the ditches, and under the waterfall. But observe that the treatment simply made Bad Sir Brian renounce his title, his battle-axe, and his spurred boots, which he threw into the fire; after which he 'goes about the village as B. Botany, Esquire'. He has become one of Us. The class structure is repaired, and improved. Conclusions? We may now be sure that of these children the males are earmarked for the better schools, then the better colleges, high on the river (mens mediocris in corpore sano), at one of the 'two' universities; and that male and female they come of families comfortable, secure, self-certain, somewhat above the middle of the middle class. Are the poems for other children of such homes? No, rather than yes. Children, in my experience, of every generation since and including the Twenties, have found the poems nauseating, and fascinating. In fact, they were poems by a parent for other parents, and for vice-parental nannies -for parents with a war to forget, a social (and literary) revolution to ignore, a childhood to recover. When We -We -Were Very Y Dung the book is named, after all, indicating its aim; which, like the aim of all natural best-sellers, was not entirely explicit, one may assume, in the author's consciousness. Here mamas of the middle way, and fathers, and nannies, those distorting reflectors of the parental ethos, could be sure of finding Innocence Up to Date. Little Lord Fauntleroyhere he was, stripped of frills and velvet (as we can tell by the splendid insipidity of the accompanying drawings) for modern, sensible clothes; heir, after all, to no peerage, but still the Eternal Child. No hint in these poems of children The Contrary View not earned, and who had scarcely looked a fact in the eye for fifty years? It might be too ponderous. But it would be true. And sometimes out it comes in the charming sick, in the actual stuff, with an ironic unconsciousness. As Christopher Robin says, imagining himself on a desert island instead of his holiday coast of Cornwall, in the land of Betjeman: And I'd say to myself as I looked so lazily down at the sea: There's nobody else in the world, and the world was made for me. A few days after A. A. Milne died the editor of The Times had occasion in his paper (which had just given Milne an obituary not very kind, though much longer, and kinder, than the one it had allowed years before to D. H. Lawrence) to write, in his role as 'Oliver Edwards', on Modern Poetry. He admitted to wondering often, 'heretically, whether, where Mr T. S. Eliot is concerned, Old Possum will not outlive Alfred Prufrock' -hand in hand, no doubt, with Christopher Robin, Hoo, and Pooh. At any rate, more than 745,000 copies of When We Wewe Very Young have been sold. And it is in the bookshops still. 2. The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame was born a century ago, on 8 March 1859. He became Secretary of the Bank of England, published his three principal books, The Golden Age in 1895, Dream Days in 1898, and The Wind in the Willows in 1908, dying at last, a sad and successful master of royalties, in 1932. For his centenary Peter Green has written this very curious life, l having inserted himself as an industrious millipede under the loose bark and discovered there damp things which are not at all pleasant, which are saddening, yet are very fascinating, and will some of them be (I hope) offensive to Tops and Climbers nesting in what is left of the Great Lie. How did this bankers' chief employee come to write The Wind in the Willows, so good a thing in spite of itself, or of himself? Front Matter....Pages i-xi Disliking the Gentlemen of England....Pages 1-6 Hendren-Rhododendron....Pages 7-11 The Mildly Monstrous....Pages 12-22 Uses of Pasternak....Pages 23-29 A Captured Unicorn....Pages 30-33 Skoal to the Stanchless Flux, or the Worst of Henry Miller....Pages 34-38 Leavis against Eliot....Pages 39-43 Lou Andreas-Salome....Pages 44-47 Leopardi’s Hump....Pages 48-50 Jesuit Hopkins: Violets Knee-deep....Pages 51-54 Of Asphodel, that Greeny Flower....Pages 55-57 Our Grandest Lollipop Man....Pages 58-63 Public Honours, or a Peerage for Tennyson....Pages 64-66 A Sectary of Backness....Pages 67-69 Housman....Pages 70-76 William Morris....Pages 77-97 The Book of Quotations: Hypocrisy, Vice, Virtue....Pages 98-101 On Collecting One’s Reviews....Pages 102-104 Emily Dickinson Reconsidered....Pages 105-107 Poems in Early Plain English: Edwin Arlington Robinson....Pages 108-111 Lawrence Twice Over....Pages 112-118 Walter the Rhymer....Pages 119-127 That Very Fiery Particle....Pages 128-131 Lytton Strachey at Last....Pages 132-139 Jonah Barrington, and the Parish of Myddle....Pages 140-145 The Freedom of Horace Walpole....Pages 146-148 Edward Thomas among his Inferiors....Pages 149-154 Knots in the Timber of Robert Frost....Pages 155-165 Four Ways of Making Fudge....Pages 166-176 Dorian Gray: John Gray....Pages 177-182 The Poet Who Did Not Care for Life....Pages 183-195 Three Eastern Notes....Pages 196-205 Browning and the Faces of Poets....Pages 206-210 Seferis on Poetry....Pages 211-214 Poems by Robert Lowell....Pages 215-220 From Imagists to the Black Mountain....Pages 221-229 A Conversation....Pages 230-241 Fourteen Remarks....Pages 242-243