Happy spring Monday dear readers! I’m hardening off my tomato and pepper seedlings as I work on a plan to combat invasive Japanese beetles before they can shred my Bing Holla! cheery tree, which is now in flower. The days have grown longer, and my crop of dandelions thrives in what is generously called my “lawn.” A fat bee is humming from yellow to yellow on my lawn. The natural world calls as it wakens from winter slumber. It’s time to head back to the 100 Acre Wood.
What was your first exposure to Poohdom? How did Poohicity appear in your life? What was the earliest thump, thump, thump sound of Winnie-the-Pooh tumbling into your life?
For me, there were some Disney Pooh books lying around, and a little later, the Disney animated show appeared. What I first remember, though, was a reading of Winnie-the-Pooh on CBC radio when I was very little, sitting in the back of our Datsun on a weekend drive. The audio reading brought Mr. Shepherd’s drawings in Mr. Milne’s slim volumes to life for me. The pen-and-ink sketches filled with colour, as it were–an experience that came back to me when a late 90s audio adaptation appeared (though you can hear in the podcast below, I might have confused some of the actors).
Once again, I’ve had the privilege of joining Derek Holser on The Plunge Podcast. After meeting Derek at a George MacDonald conference at Yale, I joined him for his Tolkien’s Greatest Characters series, talking about Samwise Gamgee (for obvious reasons). Prompted by another guest in the “Animals in Literature” series, Derek invited me to talk about Winnie-the-Pooh. We chat about the characters–classic Pooh, fretful Piglet, lumpy Eeyore, and Rabbit, who can spell Tuesday–but I was particularly interested in the 100 Acre Wood as a fictional world.
The pod includes lots of nonsense, of course, and a good amount of fun. Some of this blue-sky chatter about rooted things, however, is heartwarming. I hope it echoes the tug of homely nostalgia that the original series of stories evoked in its readers.
And, of course, I talk about the Canadian connection! And you can see my punk son at 8 months sitting at the feet of Winnie’s statue–one of Canada’s roadside wonderlands. Direct link is here, and you can click YouTube or Spotify below the description. I hope you enjoy!
The Hundred Acre Wood: (Stuffed) Animals in Literature with Brenton Dickieson
Welcome to Episode Twelve in our Animals in Literature series. Today’s conversation features a fun, nostalgic, endearing discussion of Christopher Robin and his friends in The Hundred Acre Wood, created by A.A. Milne. Today’s guest is returning Plunge favorite and great friend, Brenton Dickieson. Brenton is a father, husband, friend, university lecturer, and freelance writer from Prince Edward Island, Canada.
As the author of more than 1,100 articles, blog posts, and reviews, Brenton has worked as a freelance author, columnist, and policy writer for Canadian magazines and the government of Prince Edward Island. As a theologian of literature, Brenton writes the popular website, A Pilgrim in Narnia, which explores the intersections of faith, fantasy, and fiction. With more than 1.1 million website hits and a yearly readership now exceeding 200,000, more than 8,000 social media followers, and significant networks within the scholarly and readerly worlds of C.S. Lewis and the Inklings, Brenton has a powerful platform for considering the literary, spiritual, and theological interest of some of our most famous world-builders, including C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, L.M. Montgomery, and others.
My first encounter with Pooh came through my mom, who was an avid collector of memorabilia from the Disney animations. Most of that stuff has gone now but I still have the four books in my library. It took quite a long time for me to actually read them. I believe I read Narnia and Lord of the Rings before ever reading the original Winnie-the-Pooh. Lol
It could be that Pooh is best for younger children and adults–but I find all of those books richer as an adult. Have you seen the Christopher Robin collection at the New York Public Library?
I think I started with a 45 rpm record with the Heffalump chapter. Much later I was delighted to encounter a recording of Robert Tear singing Harold Fraser-Simson settings of Pooh (and other) Milne songs and poems – and happily find a great variety of recordings on YouTube, now. En famille, we not only delighted in reading both Pooh books aloud till memorized (or nearly), but in audiobooks by Charles Kuralt – and even more by Nigel Hawthorne (who clearly knew his Fraser-Simson settings) – and the splendid Pooh references in Yes Minister, for that matter.
Also, thanks to YouTube, we have long delighted in the (Soviet!) Russian ‘Vinni Pukh’ cartoon versions.
I have not watched Vinni Pukh, but each time I reread these, I try to find something from the past.
It is a great gap that I haven’t watched Yes, Minister!
I hope you can catch up – both series are superb – and available ‘out there’ one way and another (we even have some official BBC audiocassette of a couple episodes, as well as the dvds! – though I have not yet joined the other family members who are also familiar with the book versions).
For many years, I was an only child whose friends were mostly of the nonliving variety, so the Pooh stories resonated with me. However, the idea first took root in my head through reading the Patrician Scarry book Waggy & His Friends, which I never realized was an homage or rip-off of A.A. Milne.
I don’t know Scarry/Waggy, I wonder why? Perhaps because I grew up in rural Canada?
There is a kind of loneliness hinted in the Christopher Robin character, but I love how his imagination sets the world alive.
I’m not sure how popular the Scarry book was. I think I was in the first grade, when my dad was stationed in Puerto Rico. Her husband Richard got mega-popular with his Busytown series, but those animal-headed people freaked me out.
Haven’t caught up with the broadcast, yet, but suddenly realize I cannot remember whether stuffed animals are addressed in the ‘Storge’ part of Lewis’s Four Loves (or just which ‘Boxen’ details have been ‘public knowledge’ for comparison with Pooh and friends – and Rabbit’s relations – since Surprised by Joy) – fun rereading calls!
There’s lots in the Storge chapter about animals, but a quick scan didn’t pop anything up of interest. Thanks to Rebekah Choat, who transcribed the Four Loves broadcast, I can check both. However, I found this funny note that I love in the talk:
“Thirdly, we have the view which Saint Francis expressed when he called his body “Brother Ass.” All three may be (I’m not sure) defensible; but Saint Francis for my money. “Ass” is exquisitely right, because no one in his senses
could either reverence or hate a donkey. It’s a useful, sturdy, lazy, obstinate,
lovable, and infuriating animal, deserving now the stick and now a carrot, at once pathetically and absurdly beautiful. So the body. There’s no living with it unless one recognizes that part of its function in our lives is to play the role of buffoon.”
A 1959 letter about possible Narnia Adaptation at the BBC:
“But I am absolutely opposed–adamant isn’t in it!–to a TV. version. Anthropomorphic animals, when taken out of narrative into actual visibility, always turn into buffoonery or nightmare. At least, with photography. Cartoons (if only Disney did not combine so much vulgarity with his genius!) wd. be another matter. A human, pantomime, Aslan wd. be to me blasphemy. ”
And I found this footnote from Walter Hooper from the E.R. Eddison archive:
In the draft of his letter of 10 August 1943 Eddison gave his impressions of Out of the Silent Planet. After the beauty of Tor and Tinidril in Perelandra, he was greatly disappointed with the creatures who inhabit Malacandra: ‘The Sorns & Pfifltriggi I shd. not myself be eager to consort with, or long look upon: to reap the full advantage of intellectual discourse with them, I shd. wish to conduct it in the dark or blindfold. In this you will recognize again my unfortunate anthropomorphic ideas: a minotaur, a centaur, a titan, a siren, even sphinx, gorgon, or harpy, can be admirable to the eye, for in them humanity’s shape is not distort or confounded but merely linked with unhuman attributes’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/2, fol. 69).
While thinking about your question, I pulled out this funny quote from a 1939 letter to Hamilton with a fine anti-American closing:
But about Snow-White. Leaving out the tiresome question of whether it is suitable for children (which I don’t know and don’t care) I thought it almost inconceivably good and bad–I mean, I didn’t know one human being could be so good and bad. The worst thing of all was the vulgarity of the winking dove at the beginning, and the next worst the faces of the dwarfs. Dwarfs ought to be ugly of course, but not in that way. And the dwarfs’ jazz party was pretty bad. I suppose it never occurred to the poor boob that you could give them any other kind of music. But all the terrifying bits were good, and the animals really most moving: and the use of shadows (of dwarfs and vultures) was real genius. What might not have come of it if this man had been educated–or even brought up in a decent society?
Woo-woo! (re. the last) – thank you for this treasure-trove!
I did not know anyone had transcribed the original audio version: hurray for, and thanks to, Rebekah Choat! (Is it easily accessible anywhere – yet? Or is an edition in the works?)
Donkey tangent: The Dutch powers that be are (to my mind, bizarrely) very reticent in doing anything about the wolves they have encouraged to prosper in our part of the country, but I saw an article in our local paper about some folks’ success with setting a donkey out in their pasture to scare them off efficiently.
I can’t exactly remember my first encounter with Pooh. I think the book was in my school library, but for some reason it didn’t hold my attention enough to check it out and bring it home. The Disney version was entertaining but came out when I was a young teenager, and again for some reason I wasn’t drawn to the original.
I paid more attention when the Disney animation was shown on TV and my children watched. They enjoyed it. Again, no incentive to delve into the original. This is quite unlike Disney treatments of other children’s lit – I always wanted to read the originals of those, and I knew the original fairy tales before I was exposed to the Disney versions. I think the Disney Pooh seemed more “realistic” to me, as in a realistic child’s imagination of Pooh’s and his friends’ adventures and relationships. It didn’t seem as treacly sweet as the other adaptations.
Dana
We are telling our Poohcounter stories! Excellent analysis. Do you have the Pooh music in your head when you read?
No, I don’t hear the music… unless someone suggests it to me 🙂 I have so much music crammed into my head that sometimes it’s just random that I hear what I hear in there… (“Where the heck did that snippet come from???”)
D.
I was born in 1949, in Australia, and raised on A.A. Milne’s “Christopher Robin” poems. Then as a child in the 1950s I heard the BBC audio version of the stories about “Winnie the Pooh”, with Pooh voiced brilliantly, definitively, by Norman Shelley. (He was also involved, I believe, in a BBC audio version of “The Wind in the Willows”.
A little later I bought paperback copies of all four “Christopher Robin / Winnie the Pooh” books: the two sets of stories, and two books of poems — ALL illustrated incomparably by Ernest Shephard (who also did definitive illustrations for “The Wind in the Willows’).
By the time Walt Disney acquired the rights, and had the characters redrawn for animation, the charm of Shephard’s art was lost in the bland Disney Studio approximations, and the introduction of characters who were never in the book.
So, writing now (aged 77), I am a rusted-on purist who insists on ERENEST SHEPHERD and no other artist (or studio), and NO OTHER “sequels”, and comic strips, and cartoon spin-offs.
I also came across an excellent article (online, from a British magazine) that argued that the animal characters Milne created were aspects of his own personality, struggling after terrible experiences in the Great War with “shell shock”, or what we now call PTSD. So “Eeyore”, for example, is the pessimistic and cynical aspect of Milne’s psyche, and Pooh is the bumbling optimist.