The Countercultural Winnie-the-Pooh

Though the characters in “Winnie-the-Pooh” were drawn from A. A. Milne’s own life and that of his son, they are also figures that might appear in any childhood. Who has not had a cheerfully reckless friend like Tigger, or a wryly gloomy one like Eeyore? Even more to the point, what child--or adult--has not had days when he or she felt like Tigger or like Eeyore, or as small and nervous as Piglet?

It was Milne’s genius to have created, working from such apparently simple materials, these universal types, and to have constructed in a few acres of English countryside a world that has the qualities both of the Golden Age of history and legend, and the lost paradise of childhood--two eras that, according to psychologists, are often one in the unconscious mind.

Among the characters seen from a child’s viewpoint, Pooh is the child himself. The rest have virtues and faults particular to some adults and some children; Pooh, the hero, has the virtues and faults common to all children. He is simple, natural and affectionate. But he also is a Bear of Very Little Brain, continually falling into ludicrous errors of judgment and comprehension--he is so greedy that he eats Eeyore’s birthday jar of honey on his way to deliver it. Yet these faults are also endearing; all of us at birth were stupid and greedy, but no less lovable for that. As Milne himself has remarked, children combine natural innocence and grace with a “brutal egotism.”

“ ‘Oh, Bear!’ said Christopher Robin. ‘How I do love you!’

“ ‘So do I,’ said Pooh.”

But slow though he is, Pooh always comes through in an emergency. When Roo falls into the river, everyone behaves in a typical way:

“ ‘Look at me swimming,’ squeaked Roo from the middle of his pool, and was hurried down a waterfall into the next pool.

“Everybody was doing something to help. Piglet . . . was jumping up and down and making ‘Oo, I say’ noises; Owl was explaining that in a case of Sudden and Temporary Immersion the Important Thing was to keep the Head Above Water; Kanga was jumping along the bank, saying ‘Are you sure you’re all right, Roo dear?’ . . . Eeyore had turned round and hung his tail over the first pool into which Roo fell, and with his back to the accident was grumbling quietly to himself. . . .

“ ‘Get something across the stream lower down, some of you fellows,’ called Rabbit.”

But it is Pooh who rescues Roo just as he later rescues Piglet; it is Pooh who discovers the “North Pole.”

If Pooh is the child as hero, Christopher Robin is the child as God. He is also the ideal parent. He is both creator and judge--the two divine functions shared by mortal parents. He does not participate in most of the adventures but usually appears at the end of the chapter, sometimes descending with a machine (an umbrella, a popgun, et cetera) to save the situation.

Milne’s ironic view of the adult world and its pretensions is sometimes undercut by another sort of irony addressed to adults who might be reading the book aloud. These passages, which appear mostly at the beginning of “Winnie-the-Pooh” (there are none in the sequel), take the form of condescending conversations between the author and Christopher Robin.

“‘Was that me?’ said Christopher Robin in an awed voice, hardly daring to believe it.

“ ‘That was you.’

“Christopher Robin said nothing, but his eyes got larger and larger, and his face got pinker and pinker.” Behind the godlike child is another and more powerful deity: A. A. Milne, who has created both Christopher Robin and Pooh.

There are other partly concealed messages from the author to the adult or adolescent reader. The verbal hypocrisies of greed are mocked in Tigger, those of cowardice in Piglet, and those of polite etiquette in Rabbit. A similar criticism may lie behind the frequent attempts of the characters to elaborate some error or misunderstanding into a system, as with Pooh and Piglet’s hunt for the Woozle. As soon as a real fact or observation is introduced, the system collapses, and the Woozle vanishes.

Milne’s language, too, contains hidden messages. He pretends not to understand long words and makes fun of people who use them. He employs a special form of punctuation, capitalizing words usually written with a lower-case letter, as is done now only in theatrical and film publicity.

But in the Pooh books the effect is reversed: Milne capitalizes to show that though the character takes something seriously, the reader need not do so. When Pooh remarks “I have been Foolish and Deluded,” the words are weakened by the capital letters; to have said that Pooh was foolish and deluded would have been much stronger.

A subversive side effect of this procedure is to weaken words that are conventionally capitalized and, by extension, the things they stand for. Milne was aware of this; in an essay on his poem, “The King’s Breakfast,” he makes a suggestion for reading the lines:

The King asked

The Queen and

The Queen asked

The Dairymaid:

“Don’t be afraid of saying ‘and’ at the end of the second line; the second and third words have the same value, and you need not be alarmed because one is a royal noun and the other is only a common conjunction.”

When Milne uses a word, it means what he tells it to mean; his Bears and Expeditions are of a very special kind. He makes the rules; he determines what things and emotions will be allowed into his books and on what terms.

In the same way, when Milne came to write his “Autobiography” he tended to remember selectively. His own childhood appears through a kind of golden haze: “The sun is shining, goodness and mercy are to follow me (it seems) for ever . . . fifty years from now I shall still dream at times that I am walking up Priory Road.”

As Milne himself once announced, “Art is not life, but an exaggeration of it; life reinforced by the personality of the artist.” And an exaggerated, sentimental--and also sometimes rather condescending--tone appears at times in the “Autobiography,” especially when Milne speaks of his father. Describing his own departure for boarding school, he writes:

“Farewell, Papa, with your brave, shy heart and your funny little ways; with your humour and your wisdom and your never-failing goodness; . . . ‘Well,’ you will tell yourself, ‘it lasted until he was twelve; they grow up and resent our care for them, they form their own ideas, and think ours old-fashioned. It is natural. But oh, to have that little boy again, whom I used to throw up to the sky, his face laughing down into mine--’ ”

This nostalgic theme recurs in the Pooh books, particularly in the final chapter of “The House at Pooh Corner”:

“ ‘Pooh, when I’m-- you know . . . will you come up here sometimes?’

“ ‘Just Me?’

“ ‘Yes, Pooh.’

“ ‘Will you be here too?’

“ ‘Yes, Pooh, I will be, really, I promise I will be, Pooh.’

“ ‘That’s good,’ said Pooh.”

This is also sentimentality, but a sentimentality that rises into pathos, by means of the pathetic fallacy. In fact, the world of childhood and the past, our discarded toys and landscapes, will not mourn us when we leave; the regret will be felt by our own imprisoned earlier selves. Milne ascribes to his father and to Pooh the passionate regret he feels for his own lost paradise.

“Winnie-the-Pooh” is essentially a modern version of an archetypal legend. It is a very old one (almost the first, in biblical terms)--the story of a peaceful animal kingdom ruled by a single benevolent human being. Milne even tells us that Christopher Robin, like Adam, gave names to his subjects.

It seems no accident, therefore, that the threat of change and loss enters this Eden in the shape of a tree of knowledge. One day, Christopher Robin is discovered to be missing from the Forest. He has gone to school for the first time and is learning his alphabet, beginning with the letter A.

Piglet comes across this letter A, arranged on the ground out of three sticks, and thinks “that perhaps it was a Trap of some kind.” Eeyore, a little later, is first respectful and then contemptuous: “ ‘Clever!’ said Eeyore scornfully, putting a foot heavily on his three sticks. ‘Education!’ said Eeyore bitterly, jumping on his six sticks. ‘What is Learning? . . . A thing Rabbit knows!’ ”

He is right to be bitter. It is Education that will, by the end of “The House at Pooh Corner,” have driven Christopher Robin out of his self-created Eden.

No wonder that this particular lost paradise, this small safe, happy place where individuality and privacy are respected, should appeal to people growing up into a world of telegrams, anger, wiretapping, war, death, and taxes--especially to those who would rather not grow up.

Milne’s loosely organized society of unemployed artists and eccentrics, each quietly doing his own thing, might have a special attraction for counterculture types. For them, Pooh Corner would be both the lost past and the ideal future--at once the golden rural childhood they probably never knew, and the perfect commune they are always seeking.

From “Don’t Tell the Grownups: Subversive Children’s Literature,” to be published on Thursday by Little, Brown & Co. Alison Lurie is a professor of English at Cornell University, where she teaches writing, folklore and children’s literature. Among her novels are “The Truth About Lorin Jones,” “Foreign Affairs” and “The War Between the Tates.” Reprinted by permission of Little, Brown & Co. (Inc . ).