You may well know how much I love A.A. Milne. I wrote all about it back in 2014, and he is such an instrumental part of me establishing my literary taste and discovering what being a bibliophile and book-hunter looked like. And so I was excited to learn that Gyles Brandreth had written a new biography of Milne – and of Winnie-the-Pooh, so goes the subtitle. Called Somewhere, a Boy and a Bear, it is clearly intended to charm an audience more invested in Winnie-the-Pooh than Wurzel-Flummery or Chloe Marr. On whatever front, I was ready to be charmed – and Mum and Dad got me a copy for Christmas.
Brandreth has written a fair few books, but I’d say he is best known in the UK as a sort of cultural curio. He turns up on breakfast TV shows or Celebrity Gogglebox wearing jumpers with teddy bears on them, and says posh, eccentric, kindly things. You can easily imagine that he would love everything connected with the 100-acre wood with the same upper-class simplicity that he probably approaches toast and marmalade, or going to Lords. (He was a Conservative MP for five years, but we won’t hold that against him. It was probably inevitable.)
And so, what sort of book has he written? It is much more focused on Milne than I’d anticipated – it goes through his childhood, his unhappiness at school, his happiness at university, his dizzyingly early achievements as a sketch-writer, comic essayist and playwright. We tread the path through his wartime experience, his sudden and brief success as a detective novelist before the children’s books dominate – and then we wind down on his gradual fading from literary grandeur.
Winnie-the-Pooh et al certainly get plenty of the book, but less than I’d expected – and I was quite grateful about that. Brandreth hasn’t shunted the rest of Milne’s career to the sidelines to give the children’s books unparalleled attention. Rather, he considers them as part of Milne’s long and often-glittering literary reputation. The only exception to this is the way that he intersperses otherwise unrelated sections with quotes from the Pooh books, slightly awkwardly placed in boxes in the middle of the text.
As a Milne aficiando, there wasn’t anything new to me, but I still loved reading it. Brandreth writes with an ease and affection that is infectious. He has clearly read everything he could get his hands on, and it’s evident which works particularly chimed with him – he returns to Chloe Marr quite often, for instance. But… it really is just an affable rehash of Ann Thwaite’s magisterial biography A.A. Milne: His Life. I did wonder if that was why it has no formal referencing – because the source of almost everything he writes is almost certainly Thwaite’s book. It’s a bit of a pity that, 35 years later, there is nothing new to add – but that’s probably because of the sort of writer Brandreth is.
Brandreth is an enthusiast – he is not a researcher. The only new things he brings to the book say more about the world he lives in, because the novel material comes from friendship with Christopher (Robin) Milne. He doesn’t hide this, nor is he needlessly showy about it – he simply shares discussions and perspectives that Christopher Milne shared with him. This largely came when Brandreth was putting together a play, Now We Are Sixty, though it does sound like it flourished into a friendship rather than simply a fleeting professional relationship.
“We were so close,” Christopher told me, “until I left school and beyond, until after the war, really.” Father and son had sport, nature and mathematics in common. Alan delighted in his boy as once he had delighted in his brother.
One presumes that Brandreth is turning to old notes, rather than remembering conversations of many decades earlier.
This is not an insignificant contribution – it takes the book more into the territory of the friend-of-the-family memoir, which is a genre I greatly enjoy, even if Brandreth is certainly on the peripheraries. And it’s a good job that he brings his individual charm to the tone, because otherwise (besides the lack of new material) there are a few things that would otherwise make Somewhere, a Boy and a Bear feel a bit howlery. It seems rather rushed and repetitive – as one example, he is unable to mention Milne’s brother Barry without rehashing that Milne didn’t like Barry but did get on with Barry’s wife. It is probably repeated six or seven times. And then there are unforgivably bad sentences like this:
Boldly, for this feature, in June 1902, for the special May Week issue of The Granta, Alan wrote about the soon-to-be-crowned new king, Edward VII, who had succeeded his mother, Queen Victoria, on her death in January 1901.
How fast do you have to be rushing a book out to let that comma-strewn monstrosity get through? He also has a habit of this sort of chatty, decisive tone, that feels a bit like listening to a self-styled expert in a bar:
When Alan first met the young woman he was destined to marry, he was delighted to discover that she could quote episodes from The Rabbits line by line. Perhaps that’s why he married her. Seriously. He liked that. He liked it very much.
I know I’m singling out suspect sentences, but this isn’t intended as a censure. I only mention them to explain the sort of book this is: it’s a chatty, charming book about an author I love, written by someone who shares that love. Somewhere, a Boy and a Bear is not the work of a biography exploring new territory. It’s a bibliophile sharing his enthusiasms. And, you know what, that was exactly what I was in the mood for.
