![]() Milne had a long, successful career in the theatre – a world in which the writer becomes accustomed to a certain amount of petting and caressing. Frankenstein was so eclipsed by his own creation that it has robbed him of his name. Watch the official trailer for Goodbye Christopher Robin Milne’s life story brilliantly illuminates what it feels like to be tested by huge, unlooked-for success. ![]() ![]() Failure at least has the comfort of hope. ![]() You want to move on but your global hit exerts all the gravity of a planet and you are trapped in its orbit. You want to be Hamlet but you’re hailed as a clown, and now you can never be any kind of Hamlet. One of the great secrets of success is that, more often than not, it is not the kind of success you were hoping for. Pooh is one of a tiny handful of creations that are so enormously successful we forget the infelicity of their names: Boots, the Beatles, Star Wars, Winnie-the-Pooh. ![]() A s Quentin Crisp once pointed out in a lecture: if he were to bring a distinguished old Yorkshireman on stage, the audience might be perplexed but if he brought a polished abstract sculpture with a hole in the middle, the audience would cry out, “Ah! Henry Moore!” So AA Milne’s long career as poet, playwright, polemicist, peace campaigner and novelist is completely eclipsed by four short children’s books which, as he put it in 1952, he created, “little thinking / All my years of pen-and-inking / Would be almost lost among / Those four trifles for the young”. ![]()
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