Monday, August 21
Christopher Robin
Christopher Robin Milne, the son of A.A. Milne and the model for the human hero of the Winnie the Pooh books, was born in London on this day in 1920. As an adult he would complain bitterly, "The fictional Christopher Robin and his real-life namesake were not always on the best of terms. In pessimistic moments, it seemed to me, almost, that my father had got to where he was by climbing upon my infant shoulders. Quite frankly, I can hardly stand the thought of those awful books--Pooh and Piglet and Eyore are but lamentable, even detestable, characters in my sight. I was robbed of my childhood by the very stories that seem to have defined the childhood of myriads of others. Such is the awful irony of celebrity." Ironic indeed.
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3 comments:
How sad that stories that have brought so much joy to others, myself and my children included, was the source for such bitterness in Christopher Robin. Boy, is that ever a life-lesson for all of us. Thank you for the way you constantly provoke our thinking and prompt our values.
I was a Pooh addict as a child. Some of my earliest memories are of my mother reading Milne's works to me as I sat in her lap.
TTFN
He wrote those lines at a very bad time in his life. He later expressed regret for those harsh words and said that he was fond of them and he had made his peace with his childhood.
One of the things that seems to have started the resentment was having his classmates at boarding school find a copy of a record of him reciting vespers as a small lisping child. They played it over and over in the dormitory. That would make anybody sour on it for a few years.
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