There's More to AA Milne than Pooh and Piglet!

I read this on my Kindle, courtesy of
Project Gutenberg, and have no 'real'
book, so here is a frontispiece from an
edition illustrated by  Charles Robinson,
whose work I love. 

King Merriwig of Euralia sat at breakfast on his castle walls. He lifted the gold cover from the gold dish in front of him, selected a trout and conveyed it carefully to his gold plate. He was a man of simple tastes, but when you have an aunt with the newly acquired gift of turning everything she touches to gold, you must let her practise sometimes. In another age it might have been fretwork.

Into this idyllic setting comes the king of Barodia, blocking the sun as he travels along in his seven-league boots. Since no-one likes their breakfast disturbed (let alone having the sun blotted out, even for a few seconds), Stiff Notes are written, and before you can say Jack Robinson, a petty quarrel has escalated into full-scale war, in which the Barodian ruler's fearsome whiskers (or, to use the modern term, his moustache) take on a great significance, and he admits he never wanted to be a terrifying sovereign.

There, in a nutshell, you have the plot of AA Milne's Once On a Time, which is another of my Great Discoveries, and definitely a Best Book of the Year (and yes, there do seem to be a lot of Best Books, because on the whole I seem to read books I like, but since reading is supposed to be a pleasure, where's the harm in that?).

Anyway, this fairy tale for adults is one of the most delightful stories you could wish to read, and shows that there is more to Milne than Pooh and Piglet. It has a suitably happy ending, although it may not be what you would expect from a more conventional fairy tale. Milne avoids the trap of falling into tweeness (I apologise if that's not a word, but it should be)  by writing in wonderfully chatty, matter-of-fact style, which includes asides explaining his differences of opinion with 'historian' Roger Scurvilegs, who penned the monumental work 'Euralia Past and Present', in seventeen volumes! 

Princess Hyacinth, by Charles Robinson.

To return to the story, King Merriwig marches off to war, leaving the kingdom in the charge of his inexperienced daughter Hyacinth. And, since the Princess lacks a mother's guiding hand (her mother was carried off by a dragon) the king appoints the Countess Belvane (for whom he has a soft spot) as chief advisor. But the Countess has her own agenda and is not to be trusted...

The Countess Belvane! What can I say which will bring home to you that wonderful, terrible, fascinating woman? Mastered as she was by overweening ambition, utterly unscrupulous in her methods of achieving her purpose, none the less her adorable humanity betrayed itself in a passion for diary-keeping and a devotion to the simpler forms of lyrical verse. That she is the villain of the piece I know well; in his 'Euralia Past and Present' the eminent historian, Roger Scurvilegs, does not spare her; but that she had her great qualities I should be the last to deny.

She is by far the most interesting – and the most clever - character and, despite her scheming its hard to dislike her because she's not malevolent or evil like Snow White's Stepmother. Mind you, she's not kindly or well-meaning either, just very self-interested and self-promotional. How could you dislike anyone who writes 'Became bad' in her diary on Monday, June 1^st, followed at a later date by the entry 'Became good'? And her badness is very ingenious. When the Princess asks to review the brave Women Defenders of the Home Defence Army, Belvane has a problem, because there is no such military unit, and she has taken the money allocated for paying the non-existent soldiers and flung it to the populace to boost her popularity. A lesser woman might have been worried, but Belvane rises to the occasion quite magnificently and persuades Woggs to march round and round and round a tree!

However, it has to be admitted that she is not at all nice to Prince Udo of Araby when Hyacinth, desperate to exert her own authority, asks for help. Using a magic wish stolen from Wiggs, Belvane calls for 'something humorous' happen to Udo, and manages to turn him into a strange creature with rabbit's ears, a woolly body and a lion's tail. Speaking in her defence I would have to say that Udo is a pompous ass, who is much nicer in animal form, and I would have left him like that, which probably makes me bad as well.

By the way, in case you're wondering, there is a hero with whom the Princess falls in love: Coronel, the Prince's friend, is good-looking, quick-witted, very capable, and not at all loyal to his Royal master. When it comes to getting what he wants he's quite as devious as Belvane, and uses guile and cunning to gain Hyacinth's hand and half her father's kingdom.

'Once On A Time' is absolutely enchanting, and has many of the ingredients of traditional fairy tales – cloaks of darkness, a magic ring, swineherds, spells, fairies, swords which may (or may not) be magical – but nothing happens quite as you expect. Written in 1915, and first published in 1917, it could easily be seen as a satire on events in Europe at that time, but Milne always denied this, claiming it was written 'for the amusement of my wife and myself at a time when life was not very amusing'. And he said: “But, as you see, I am still finding it difficult to explain just what sort of book it is. Perhaps no explanation is necessary. Read in it what you like; read it to whomever you like; be of what age you like; it can only fall into one of two classes. Either you will enjoy it, or you won't. It is that sort of book.”

It is that sort of book, and I am one of those who enjoyed it, and I can only hope that others read it with just as much pleasure.

Lady Into Fox

Some of the books I’ve read this year do seem to be rather odd – and David Garnett’s Lady Into Fox is the most peculiar of all. Basically, it tells the story of Mr Tebrick and his wife Silvia, who is transformed into a fox while they are out walking.

Hearing the hunt, Mr Tebrick quickened his pace so as to reach the edge of the copse, where they might get a good view of the hounds if they came that way. His wife hung back, and he, holding her hand, began almost to drag her. Before they gained the edge of the copse she suddenly snatched her hand away from his very violently and cried out, so that he instantly turned his head.

Where his wife had been the moment before was a small fox, of a very bright red. It looked at him very beseechingly, advanced towards him a pace or two, and he saw at once that his wife was looking at him from the animal’s eyes. You may well think if he were aghast: and so maybe was his lady at finding herself in that shape, so they did nothing for nearly half-an-hour but stare at each other, he bewildered, she asking him with her eyes as if indeed she spoke to him: “What am I now become? Have pity on me, husband, have pity on me for I am your wife.

Mr Tebrick is distraught, but he still loves his wife, despite the fact that she is now a vixen, so he takes her home, dismisses the servants, and shoots the dogs, so they cannot attack her. At this stage Silvia still has human feelings and sensibilities, and Mr Tebrick continues to treat her like a woman.  She does not wish to be naked, so he dresses her in a little jacket; he sits her on cushions on an armchair and feeds her with bread and butter, toast and jam, and eggs and ham. Each morning he sponges and brushes her, using scent ‘very freely’ to mask her rank smell. She even plays cards and shows him how to do the housework.

But gradually the fox’s animal nature takes over, and when Old Nanny returns Mr Tebrick moves into her isolated cottage, where there is an enclosed garden and his vixen can run about in safety. However, the animal is desperate to escape, and eventually he lets he go because he cannot keep her against her will. Still, he puts food out every night, and roams the woods hoping to catch a glimpse of her.

 Every one of her foxey ways was now so absolutely precious to him that I believe that if he had known for certain she was dead, and had thoughts of marrying a second time, he would never have been happy with a woman. No, indeed, he would have been more tempted to get himself a tame fox, and would have counted that as good a marriage as he could make.

When the fox finally returns, she has her cubs with her, and initially he is jealous. Nut he becomes resigned to her condition, and realises she must now be judged as a fox, not a woman. He finds happiness playing with the young animals, hunting with them, and finding food they might not otherwise have.

 The ending is shocking but inevitable, for there can be no happy ever after between man and vixen. Garnett’s story is like a subverted fairy tale – one of those where a beautiful maiden restores an enchanted prince to his human shape with a kiss, but there is no restoration here. And there are echoes of the metamorphoses in ancient Greek and Roman myths, where men and women are transformed into other creatures (or even trees and plants), as a punishment, or to avoid some worse fate. Then, of course, it could be read as an allegory to show the difference between men and women, or knowing and accepting a person’s true nature, or to explore what it is that makes us human. I do wonder how I would view the story of it were written by a woman – Angela Carter perhaps, or Michele Roberts.

It’s difficult to tell what Garnett had in mind when he wrote this, and he offers no explanation, though there are hints of something unnatural in Sylvia’s family. Before her marriage she was a Miss Fox, has always been scared of hunting, and Old Nanny says she was always a little wild. Then there’s the story that one of her forebears kept a fox chained in the inner courtyard of their home...

David Garnett painted by Dora Carrington in 1919

 I don’t know that enjoy is really the right word to describe Lady into Fox, but I liked it the same way I like fairy tales, myths and legends, and I shall be more than happy to reread it. Like all good fairy tales, parts of it sent a shiver down my spine, and parts are quite dark (especially the scene where Mr Tebrick gets drunk and decides if his wife is a beast, he may as well behave like a beast too). His love for his wife/vixen is obsessive, and leads to some very strange behaviour – I can see why people think he is mad. But his feelings for the fox, and her cubs, are very tenderly described.

I downloaded my copy from Project Gutenburg, so I’ve illustrated this post with wood engravings by RA Garnett, who I assume is the artist Rachel (‘Ray’) Marshall, who was his first wife.