![\"Ernest](\"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/picWinniePoohMFA05_For_a_long_time_they_looked_at_the_river.jpg\")
<\/a>That was on my mind when I visited \u201cWinnie-the-Pooh: Exploring a Classic,\u201d<\/a> the showcase of Ernest Shepard\u2019s exquisite original drawings for A.A. Milne\u2019s stories on view at Boston\u2019s Museum of Fine Arts through Jan. 6, 2019. (The exhibit, which was organized by London\u2019s Victoria and Albert Museum, also offers a bunch of interactive features for kids\u2014a slide, a bridge with digital Poohsticks, Eeyore\u2019s house to crawl into.)<\/p>\n Here is Pooh worriedly watching Piglet trying to jump up to his doorknocker. Here is Owl\u2019s tumbled down house. Here is Piglet waving out from his flooded house to Owl. Consider even the iconic drawing of the boy Christopher Robin climbed up on the rails of the bridge where they\u2019d been playing Poohsticks. Pooh leans over the bottom rail, looking down at the river, and Piglet stands next to him with his hand touching Pooh\u2019s side\u2014that tiny gesture saying so much about reaching out for reassurance.<\/p>\n \u201cTigger is all right really,\u201d Piglet said, somewhat unsure, to Christopher Robin in Milne\u2019s story. Help Wonderland keep producing our great coverage of local arts, cultures and activisms (and our great festivals) by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n \u2018War Is Poison\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n Alan Alexander Milne (1882-1956) and Ernest Shepard (1879-1976) found each other through Punch, the eminent British weekly magazine of humor and satire. They \u201cwere never close,\u201d according to the 1979 book \u201cThe Work of E H Shepard,\u201d edited by Shepard\u2019s step-grandson Rawle Knox, but they formed one of the iconic partnerships of Western children\u2019s literature.<\/p>\n Milne joined the staff of Punch in 1906, writing light social skits about subjects like cricket matches and weekend shindigs. They were popular enough to get him invited to be part of \u201cPeter Pan\u201d author J.M. Barrie\u2019s cricket team of literary (if not athletic) all stars. (Over the years, other team members included Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle and P.G. Wodehouse.)<\/p>\n Shepard joined the staff of Punch in 1921\u2014after Milne was no longer on staff, but continued to publish in the magazine\u2014and was invited to illustrate Milne\u2019s children\u2019s verses for \u201cWhen We Were Very Young,\u201d which appeared in the publication before becoming the book in 1924.<\/p>\n Milne and Shepard were both veterans of the First World War\u2014and I can\u2019t help thinking that the sad, fretful calm of the Pooh stories has something to do with them being authored in the years immediately after the fighting.<\/p>\n Both men joined the service in 1915. Shepard left behind a young son and daughter in England when he went to France with a British artillery unit\u2014often serving as an observer in front line trenches, guiding the big guns five miles behind the lines. Milne served as a signaling officer, arriving in France for the Somme offensive that began in July 1916. Soon his best friend, Ernst Pusch, was killed (\u201cJust as he was settling down to his tea, a shell came over and blew him to pieces,\u201d Milne recalled) and Pusch\u2019s brother was shot dead by a German sniper. Shepard\u2019s older brother Cyril was killed during the opening day of the offensive as well.<\/p>\n Milne was part of an Aug. 12, 1916, infantry attack on a German trench, his battalion suffering high casualties under German machine gun fire. That November, he got \u201ctrench fever\u201d and was evacuated to England. He began writing a successful series of comedy plays while convalescing. (Milne was frustrated that his great success writing for children overshadowed his other efforts.)<\/p>\n Milne then taught at a signaling school and worked with a secret British propaganda unit to sustain support for the war by getting those on the home front to see the fighting in a positive light. After the war and before Hitler sparked World War II, Milne was outspokenly anti-war. He said he published his 1934 essay \u201cPeace with Honour: an Enquiry Into the War Convention\u201d because \u201cI want everybody to think (as I do) that war is poison, and not (as so many think) an over-strong, extremely unpleasant medicine.”<\/p>\n Milne\u2019s only child\u2014Christopher Robin Milne\u2014was born in 1920, a year after he was discharged. For the boy\u2019s first birthday, his mother, Daphne, bought him a teddy bear (it could growl). The doll was eventually was dubbed Winnie, after a female black bear cub that they liked to visit in the London Zoo. A Canadian soldier had brought the animal with him to England as a regimental mascot, but left it behind when he went off to fight in France during the First World War. Winnie was in fact short for Winnipeg, the soldier\u2019s hometown.<\/p>\n Father Takes Over<\/strong><\/p>\n Milne\u2019s Winnie-the-Pooh stories grew out of his son\u2019s playtime imagining with the toy bear and a growing cast of stuffed animal costars. (Christopher Robin later griped that his father seemed to pick toys for him with too much of an eye toward their story possibilities.)<\/p>\n \u201cIt started in the nursery; it started with me. It could really start nowhere else, for the toys lived in the nursery and they were mine and I played with them,\u201d Christopher Milne wrote in his 1974 memoir \u201cThe Enchanted Places.\u201d \u201cAnd as I played with them and talked to them and gave them voices to answer with, so they began to breathe. But alone I couldn\u2019t take them very far. I need help. So my mother joined me and she and I and the toys played together, and gradually more life and, more character flowed into them, until they reached a point at which my father could take over.\u201d<\/p>\n In January 1923, the fictionalized Christopher Robin first appeared in print in a Milne story in New York\u2019s Vanity Fair magazine. Pooh\u2014though not named that yet\u2014made his first published appearance in a poem called \u201cTeddy Bear\u201d that appeared in Punch before finding a place in the 1924 book \u201cWhen We Were Very Young.\u201d<\/p>\n Pooh then was still Christopher Robin\u2019s name for a swan he liked to feed. Milne writes with his signature wry humor in the book\u2019s introduction, \u201cThis is a very fine name for a swan, because, if you call him and he doesn\u2019t come (which is a thing swans are good at), then you can pretend that you were just saying \u2018Pooh!\u2019 to show how little you wanted him.\u201d<\/p>\n By this point, Shepard had joined the project. He nearly always began by sketching from life\u2014in the case of Pooh, sketching the boy\u2019s stuffed animals as well as Milne\u2019s Cotchford farm weekend cottage, which he\u2019d bought in 1924, and the nearby, bucolic Ashdown Forest, where the real Christophe Robin Milne played. Shepard had photos taken of Christopher Robin and his toys for reference.<\/p>\n Growler, the teddy bear of Shepard\u2019s son Graham, was also an inspiration for how Pooh looks\u2014and had been a model for teddy bears in a 1913 Shepard cartoon about Christmas shopping.<\/p>\n Drawings in the MFA exhibit show Shepard sketching walnut trees, alders, chestnuts, pines, beeches\u2014trees that served as models for the character\u2019s homes and Christopher Robin\u2019s Hundred Acre Wood. Even though Milne doesn\u2019t much describe the locales, Shepard\u2019s drawings transport us there.<\/p>\n Shepard drew in precise, sensitive, flowing pencil. He then transferred the drawings to another page, which he finished in fine, scratchy pen and ink.<\/p>\n In the MFA exhibition, we see Shepard working out iconic scenes\u2014like the first appearance of Pooh as Christopher Robin carelessly drags the bear down the stairs, \u201cbump, bump, bump, on the back of his head.\u201d There are faint ghost lines depicting arms and legs of the boy and bear as Shepard seeks just the right gesture to convey his feeling. Shepard deftly uses body language to convey the interior emotions of Milne\u2019s deeply philosophical critters. And consider his precision\u2014and humor\u2014in making Pooh move stiffly, because he\u2019s just a stuffed animal, as he climbs a tree toward the honey in a beehive.<\/p>\n Milne\u2014with \u201cdecorations by Ernest H. Shepard\u201d\u2014would publish \u201cWinnie-the-Pooh\u201d in 1926 and \u201cThe House at Pooh Corner\u201d in 1928. (Pooh also made cameos in their 1927 book of children\u2019s verse \u201cNow We Are Six.\u201d) The books were immediate popular successes.<\/p>\n The Pooh stories feel Victorian (or, I guess, Edwardian) because of the Milne\u2019s polite phrasing and Shepard\u2019s carefully observed, woodsy naturalism. They depict a child\u2019s escape from the responsibilities of the adult world\u2014as well as a tentative oasis of calm between the world wars. They feel like the end of an era, and not just because they\u2019re about growing up. They\u2019re suffused with a bittersweet longing for a place and time before the First World War, pastoral, pre-modern.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat I like doing best is Nothing. \u2026. It means just going along, listening to all the things you can\u2019t hear, and not bothering,\u201d Christopher Robin tells Pooh at the end of \u201cThe House at Pooh Corner,\u201d when he is growing up and \u201cgoing away.\u201d The real boy, Christopher Robin Milne, long had a torturous relationship with his alter-ego in his father\u2019s books, saying he was bullied at school because of his fictional fame. He gave his actual toy bear to the book\u2019s American publisher in 1947, which for some reason donated it to the New York Power Authority in 1987, which rightfully placed it at the New York Public Library<\/a>.<\/p>\n Graham Shepard\u2019s bear Growler was passed onto Graham\u2019s daughter Minette. \u201cThe Work of E H Shepard\u201d reports that when the girl and her mother moved to Canada to escape World War II, she took the bear with her, and there it met its end, \u201csavaged by a dog.\u201d<\/p>\n Previously:<\/strong> Help Wonderland keep producing our great coverage of local arts, cultures and activisms (and our great festivals) by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n There are moments of delight and happiness in the tales of Winnie-the-Pooh\u2014like the very first one, the comedy of the stuffed bear pretending (badly) to be a rain cloud so that he can get at some bees\u2019 honey. Or Christopher Robin with an umbrella playing in the rain puddles. Or the beautiful quiet moment of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8667,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100,107],"tags":[211,216],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8653"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8653"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8653\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8685,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8653\/revisions\/8685"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8667"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n\u201cOf course he is,\u201d said Christopher Robin.
\n\u201cEverybody is really,\u201d said Pooh. \u201cThat\u2019s what I think,\u201d said Pooh. \u201cBut I don\u2019t suppose I\u2019m right,\u201d he said.
\n\u201cOf course you are,\u201d said Christopher Robin.<\/p>\n
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\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>
\nA bit later he adds, \u201cI\u2019m not going to do nothing any more.\u201d
\n\u201cNever again?\u201d Pooh asks.
\n\u201cWell, not so much. They don\u2019t let you.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/a>
\nThe Man Who Took Care Of Winnie-The-Pooh\u2019s House At Harvard.<\/a><\/p>\n
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\n<\/a>