Bertie Wooster v. Christopher Robin

P.G.Wodehouse and A.A. Milne were the same age and in 1941 they were both close to 60. As young men about town in Edwardian London they had moved in the same social and literary circles, belonged to the same club and played on the same cricket team. They were friends. 

Bertie Wooster and Christopher Robin are of course fictional characters (although the latter was based on Milne’s own son of the same name) so they actually never met, not being real and all that. 

I’ve read many of Wodehouse novels and stories over the years and several in the last week or so. And also – for the first time – some  Winnie the Pooh. Yes – for some reason my childhood was Pooh-less although knowing something about him and the 100-acre wood and all the rest was culturally inescapable. 

For instance, this ditty was a staple on BBC Home service Children’s Favorites in the 1950s: Here is child star Ann Stephens in 1941. Just listen to that voice!

They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace –
Christopher Robin went down with Alice.
“Do you think the King knows all about me?”
“Sure to, dear, but it’s time for tea,”

Says Alice (Milne 1924)

In the years after WW1, Milne was a pacifist. In 1934 he published an essay  “Peace with Honour’” – a serious political response to war that asserted “war is something of man’s own fostering, and if all mankind renounces it, then it is no longer there.” 

Milne thought war could be averted and he was hopeful that international peace could be maintained by diplomacy. When Hitler’s aggressive ambitions became known, Milne changed his attitude completely. He wrote another essay entitled “War With Honour”. He became a full-throated supporter of British war aims.  

Wodehouse by contrast took little notice of politics. There is one notable exception  – the odious British fascist Roderick Spode in The Code of the Woosters (1938). Spode is the blustering blowhard bully founder of the British Black Shorts.

By the way, when you say ‘ shorts,’ you mean ‘ shirts,’ of course.”
” No. By the time Spode formed his association, there were no shirts left. He and his adherents wear black shorts.”
“ Footer bags, you mean ? ”
” Yes.”
” How perfectly foul.”
” Yes.”
” Bare knees ? ‘*
” Bare knees.”
” Golly! ”
” Yes.”
A thought struck me, so revolting that I nearly dropped my gasper.

The scene where Spode is bested by the apolitical but basically harmless good chappie Bertie is one of the funniest set pieces in all Wodehouse. 

Throughout the interwar years, Milne and Wodehouse were friendly rivals and collaborators. In What ho! George Orwell and Cancel Culture you can read about how Wodehouse was arrested and interned by the Nazis and how on his release in 1941 he made five radio broadcasts intended to thank his well-wishers in the US. You can find links to the actual broadcasts which were not political and are funny and light-hearted accounts of his ordeal. They are very much in the spirit of the WW1 humorists who wrote for The Wipers Times and of the cartoonist Bruce Bairnsfather.

The broadcasts set off a firestorm in Britain.

Wodehouse – always rather oblivious in political matters except when it came to avoiding taxes – had been in an information vacuum and out of touch with life in a Britain, battered by Dunkirk and the Blitz and where anti-German sentiment ran strong. Before the broadcasts were heard in Britain the BBC aired a pre-emptive strike. See the sidebar below left. 

Connors’s speech was disowned by the governors, of the BBC and criticized in 133 out of 166 letters or telephone calls to the Corporation. However, his rant with its egregious inventions and Biblical flourishes riled many into righteous indignation.

It was a time – before the US entered the war – when Britain seemed to stand alone. To hear of a beloved figure (or a playboy toff) apparently betraying them was bewildering and enraging. Even calmer voices were dismayed by his naivete in becoming a pawn of German propaganda.  Harold Nicholson wrote in his diary:

I do not want to see Wodehouse shot on Tower Hill. But I resent the theory that “poor old Wodehouse is so innocent that he is not responsible”. A man who has shown such ingenuity and resource in evading British and American income tax cannot be classed as impractical.

Connor’s vicious and hyperbolic condemnation launched a tirade of vitriol. The British media, some politicians, and many fellow writers roundly condemned Wodehouse’s decision to make the broadcasts.  

Prominent commentators used their attacks on Wodehouse’s alleged treachery to proclaim their own patriotic virtue.

Prime among them was A.A.Milne. He launched a vicious and highly personal tirade in the Daily Telegraph on July 3rd 1941. See sidebar right. 

It was an over-the-top, vindictive, character assassination. 

The two men had been friends and had worked together. That was now over. 

In the House of Commons, Sir Anthony Eden, the  Foreign Secretary weighed in: While Wodehouse was clowning, he said,

…British boys were resisting the Germans, and there can be nothing but contempt for the action of a man who, in order to live in a hotel more comfortably than his fellow prisoners, did that kind of a thing against his own country… 

Milne launched his attack in July 1941 but it was several months before Wodehouse – still in Germany – was aware of it.

Meanwhile, in Britain, it seemed that everyone – certainly his friends and literary collaborators – had an opinion and joined the fray. Most aligned themselves with Milne and admonished Wodehouse for treason and betrayal. The Irish playwright Sean O’Casey referred to Wodehouse as “English Literature’s performing flea”.  Colin Vincent and L.B. Wilson accused him of writing books that were “the breeding grounds for fascism”. E.C. Bentley commented that  Oxford bestowed “one of the highest literary distinctions in the world to one who has never written a serious line” and that “those who awarded this honor can take the earliest opportunity of removing it”. 

One exception was Compton Mackenzie who wrote:

There is a curious infelicity in Mr A.A. Milne’s sneer at Mr P.G. Wodehouse for shirking the responsibility of fatherhood. Such a rebuke would have been more decorously from a father who has abstained from the profitable exhibitionism in which the creator of Christopher Robin has indulged. I gather that Mr. Wodehouse is in disgrace for telling the American public over the radio about his comfortable existence at the Hotel Aldon. Not being convinced that I am morally entitled to throw stones at a fellow author, and retaining as I do an old-fashioned prejudice against condemning a man unheard, I do not propose to inflict my opinion upon the public, beyond affirming that at the moment I feel more disgusted by Mr. Milne’s morality than by Mr. Wodehouse’s irresponsibility. 

Mackenzie’s letter to the Daily Telegraph was never published but with that evenhanded rebuke of Milne, the lines were drawn.

Wodehouse had been successful for decades – an incredibly industrious author who churned it out as an obsession.

By contrast, Milne seemed to be forever the man who created a loveable character in children’s literature – Winnie the Pooh – and based Christopher Robin on his own son. Whatever else he wrote, he was always trapped by that fame and celebrity status. It certainly raised the issue that he was motivated by professional jealousy and that perhaps explains the very personal nature of his attack.

Milne had not confined himself to the political in his letter. He went deeply personal with his comment about Wodehouse and fatherhood. It was a flat-out character assassination. Wodehouse, he implied, shirked his duty as a patriot just as he shirked responsibility as a parent. 

The anecdote about parenting that Milne alleges Wodehouse said to him in person is actually a quote from a novel Wodehouse wrote in 1908 – Psmith in the City ( the p is silent as in ptarmigan and pshrimp). It’s a family supper scene in Clapham, and Mike Jackson is seated next to the householder’s insufferable son: 

Mike got on with small girls reasonably well. He preferred them at a distance, but, if cornered by them, could put up a fairly good show. Small boys, however, filled him with a sort of frozen horror. It was his view that a boy should not be exhibited publicly until he reached an age when he might be in the running for some sort of colours at a public school.”  Psmith in the City Chapter 17

So Milne’s attack was personal but based on the words of a character in a comic novel. 

After the opening salvo of this defamatory letter, Milne seems to have nothing more to say about Wodehouse in public. 

After the war, Wodehouse moved to New York and never visited Britain again. But he was not done with Milne although he took some time developing his revenge. 

In 1949 Wodehouse published The Mating Season – a Wooster and Jeeves novel with a typical plot with Bertie in the romantic bouillon and Jeeves to the rescue. It features the simpering Madeline Bassett who is described as the ultimate Milne fan:

Madeline is Gussie Fink-Nottle’s fiancee and whenever there’s a rift in the relationship she transfers her affections to a horrified Bertie. It’s clear she is totally idiotic as proven by her literary taste.   

Though externally, as you say, a pippin, she is the sloppiest, mushiest, sentimentalist young gawd-help-us who ever thought the stars were God’s daisy chain and that every time a fairy hiccoughs a wee baby is born. She is squashy and soupy. Her favorite reading is Christopher Robin and Winnie the Pooh.

Later Bertie delivers another dig. He’s asked to deliver some lines from Milne’s poetry at a village concert:

It is unnerving to know that in a couple of days you will be up on a platform in a village hall telling an audience, probably well provided with vegetables, that Christopher Robin goes hoppity-hoppity-hop. Indeed, a fellow who comes on a platform and starts reciting about Christopher Robin going hoppity-hoppity-hop (or alternately saying his prayers) does not do so from sheer wantonness but because he is a helpless victim beyond his control […] While an audience at a village concert justifiably resents having Christopher Robin poems recited at it, its resentment becomes heightened if the reciter merely stands there opening and shutting his mouth in silence like a goldfish.

As per Bertie – no rational person with taste would ever read Milne’s verse aloud to an audience which in turn would resent having these ridiculous words recited at them like some kind of cultural water-boarding.

Bertie complains to his pal “Catsmeat” Potter-Pirbright about having to recite Christopher Robin poems. Catsmeat replied:

“Pah!” he said. “It might have been Winnie the Pooh.” Well, there was that, of course.

Soon after The Mating Season, Wodehouse took his revenge vendetta up a notch with his short story  “Rodney has a Relapse”. Rodney Spelvin is a writer who

had once been a poet and a very virulent one, too; the sort of man who would produce a slim volume of verse bound in squashy mauve leather at the drop of a hat, mostly on the subject of sunsets and pixies 

Rodney Spelvin started his career – like Milne – by writing detective stories. But to everyone’s horror has started to write sickening sentimental verses about his infant son. His brother-in-law William is disgusted with him:

Do you know where Rodney is at this moment? Up in the nursery, bending over his son Timothy’s cot, gathering material for a poem about the unfortunate little rat when asleep. Some boloney, no doubt, about how he hugs his teddy bear and dreams of angels. Yes, that is what he is doing, writing poetry about Timothy. (orrible whimsical stuff that […] Well, when ) tell you that he refers to him throughout as ‘Timothy Bobbin’, you will appreciate what we are up against.

I am not a weak man, but I confess that I shuddered.

And to rub the salt in the wounds:

What it comes to,” said William, “is that he is wantonly laying up a lifetime of shame and misery for the wretched little moppet. In the years to come, when he is playing in the National Amateur, the papers will print photographs of him with captions underneath explaining that he is the Timothy Bobbin of the well-known poems.

By the time Wodehouse wrote that rather grim indictment, the real Christopher Robin was 30, had returned from military service, and was estranged from his parents. All part of a sad and painful family saga. Fictional Rodney sees his son as source material. The adult Christopher Robin Milne believed his life had been ruined by his father’s callous and unscrupulous literary exploitation.

That real Christopher Robin told Gyles Brandreth years later that his father “had got where he was by climbing on my infant shoulders, that he had filched from me my good name and had left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son.”

Three years after “Rodney has a Relapse” Milne had a stroke that ended his career as a writer. He died just over three years later in January 1956.

While Milne was ill, Wodehouse wrote to Alastair Wallace:

Poor Milne. I was shocked to hear of his illness. I’m afraid there seems to be little chance of him getting any better. It is ghastly to think of anyone who wrote such gay stuff ending his life like this. He has always been about my favorite author. I have all of his books and re-read them regularly.