Winnie the Pooh
A British comedy of manners, for kids
Hey Snarf fans, I’m back. Or at least this newsletter is.
Before we get going, thanks so much for forwarding this to that neighbor of yours with kids around the same age. Oh, you didn’t do that? Well you still could.
Here’s the subscription link and the archives for anyone who is new or just wants to peruse the old volumes.
One of my biases in picking kids books is that I aim for stuff written in the last 20-30 years. Before that, there’s just so much iffy gender and racial stuff. Not to say there’s none of that afterward, but there’s a much better chance that the books will be paddling in the same direction as my family in terms of imparting lessons on who can do what, etc.
Anyway, that’s neither here or there for this review, except to say that these books are nearing their one hundredth birthday. And they’re awesome.
The Series: Winnie the Pooh
The Author: A.A. Milne
The Illustrator: Ernest Shephard
Length/Picture Density: 160-190, pictures on most spreads
I didn’t read the Winnie the Pooh books as a kid, and I don’t quite know what I was expecting, but whatever it was, they are different and better. And, kind of high brow? (We’ll delve in on that in a moment.)
For the uninitiated, Winnie the Pooh is a bear who lives in a forest with a small, meak, but very caring piglet, an infinitely dour mule (or a donkey? Whatever Eeyore is), an owl and rabbit who are both very self-important as thinkers and doers respectively, a tiger who loves to play and bounce, a young kangaroo that likes to play and bounce, and his mom who watches after him with love and concern. There’s also a kid, Christopher Robin, who is learning-to-read age and has the full respect of all the animal characters as someone who can handle all manner of situations. He’s not the main character, but the others often act as foils to him, casting the kid as the one who has things under control.
There are only two Pooh books, Winnie-The-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, and they are comprised of short stories, 10-20 pages each.
The plots are charming and simple – think the Frog and Toad books stretched out to 150 pages. There are things that happen (sometimes), but the books are character-driven, and most of the stories I would describe as comedies of manners. The humor is largely around reinforcing certain character traits, and the narration gets whimsical in its descriptions of what the characters are thinking and doing (made up example: “Pooh thought he had a thing, but it wasn’t very thingish, and so he didn’t.”)
It makes more sense than that when you actually read it in context, though I wasn’t always able to tell how much of the wordplay Leo was tracking.
They remind me less of other children’s books, and more of British sketch comedy (of the subtler, less bombastic variety – in fact these books have a charming absence of bombast).
There are entire pages of characters trying to say something and stumbling over their words, or trying to avoid saying something and awkwardly talking around it, and the narration never explicitly calls out the social tangles on display, it just lets its characters wave in the wind.
Owl, for instance, who has a very brainy reputation, will sometimes get caught in a situation where he feels he has to pretend to know something, but doesn’t, and the dialogue will go something like,
RABBIT: What does it mean?
OWL: Precisely my feeling as well.
RABBIT: What is?
OWL: Indeed.
RABBIT: Indeed what?
OWL: My sentiments exactly.
It’s not always going to be easy for younger kids to get the joke, but the books never lose their light touch.
The soul of the Winnie the Pooh books is that the characters really care about one another, and occasionally that comes out in really heartwarming ways. Most of the stories don’t end with a squnchy huggable moment, but when they do, they feel, not tear-jerky (like the ubiquitous coming-of-age kid reconciling with their parents) but warm, like being in the presence of an old friend.
My only point of caution is that Rabbit occasionally tries to enact a cruel scheme to teach someone a lesson, namely kidnapping Roo, the young Kangaroo, so that the kangaroos would leave the woods, and losing Tigger in the woods so that he would come back more subdued and thankful for everyone around him. These backfire onto Rabbit, but it makes for some uncomfortable reading until it does.
Also, Pooh and the others sometimes refer to how Pooh “has very little brain,” which obviously sounds mean out of context. What makes it feel more okay in the books is that Pooh says it himself, and while one kind of knows what he means, he isn’t any less intelligent than any of the other animals.
I was surprised to learn that there are only two Winnie the Pooh story books (plus two nursery rhyme books, which I have not read), given how the character has persisted so well decades. They were written for Milne’s kid, Christopher Robin, about his stuffed animals, and, if Wikipedia is to be believed, Milne changed the type of writing he did frequently, never wanting his work to feel unoriginal, and after a couple of years of writing these, his son was aging out of being the fictional Christopher Robin.