When Fanfiction Took Over British Children’s Publishing

The Horn Book just published Caroline Fraser’s excoriation of how Penguin has recently exploited Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit with an aggressive copyright claim, broad product licensing, spin-off titles, and, most recently, commissioning sequels from actress and writer Emma Thompson.

British publishing seems to be crazy about such latter-day sequels lately. Such books have always been with us, of course, but the latest wave is distinguished by a couple of features:

• Many of the intellectual properties involved are still under copyright, meaning the new books were authorized or commissioned by the companies or trusts controlling those properties.
• The authors of those latter-day books aren’t work-for-hire hacks or even solid writers without a recent hit (like David Benedictus, author of Return to the Hundred Acre Wood) but well-known authors who could get reasonably well paid for their own original work.

Thus we have Oscar-winner Thompson writing about rabbits (though not, as Sutton says, with the zoological precision of Potter). Penguin can thus benefit from the Peter Rabbit brand name and good will, Thompson’s celebrity, and the now-increasingly-common media story of a new sequel to a beloved classic.

Likewise, we have Carnegie Medal winner Geraldine McCaughrean writing an authorized sequel to Peter Pan, and competing in the marketplace with the not-originally-authorized American titles from Ridley Pearson and Dave Barry. Dame Jacqueline Wilson was commissioned to extend E. Nesbit’s Psammead trilogy. Former British poet laureate Andrew Motion penned a sequel to Treasure Island.

In other worlds, it appears the British children’s literature establishment has turned to fanfiction.

Wodehouse v. Milne

The Paris Review’s blog recently looked back on the falling-out between P. G. Wodehouse and A. A. Milne. I’d read versions of this story before in the Boston Globe and Robert McCrum’s fine biography of Wodehouse. A particularly pro-Wodehouse retelling appeared in the Daily Telegraph in 1996 and is archived by the Russian Wodehouse Society.

Wodehouse and Milne were the same age and from the same class. They socialized and played cricket together, and Milne put up some money for a stage adaptation of one of Wodehouse’s novels. Their careers ran in parallel for a while, both writers striving in various forms and media, particularly theater and fiction. Both men became very popular writers on both sides of the Atlantic, Wodehouse for his farcical novels about British twits and Milne for his four volumes of children’s verses and stories.

After Wodehouse was interned by the Germans near the start of World War 2 and recorded a few radio broadcasts for the Reich in 1941, many British authors wrote public letters lambasting him. Milne was among the sharpest critics. He reminded newspaper readers that Wodehouse had spent the previous World War far away in America and had moved around in the 1930s to find tax havens.

Many analyses of the rift say Milne was jealous of Wodehouse’s success. Wodehouse himself advanced this idea in his 1975 interview with The Paris Review, and it may have been true. The Milnes do seem to have been capable of nursing great resentment over time.

However, both authors were tremendously successful. The difference was that Milne hated how the public and critics had pigeonholed him while Wodehouse embraced those limits. Milne kept trying to write adult novels, plays, mysteries—anything but children’s books. Wodehouse had stopped writing quasi-serious novels like The Coming of Bill and musical comedies and dove into the capers his readers wanted. He also eschewed politics while Milne kept writing about that concern.

Another factor not usually noted is that Milne had helped his son Christopher join the British military. I don’t think it was coincidence that as another example of Wodehouse’s irresponsibility Milne quoted his quip that he wouldn’t care about a son until he was in the First Eleven. Milne knew that Wodehouse had no sons, and thus no sons in the war. (Yet another factor: Milne had been pacifist until shortly before the war, so he wrote with the zeal and gnawing conscience of a convert.)

Ironically, Wodehouse’s stepdaughter Leonora, whom he was very close to and who telegraphed him to stop broadcasting, died in 1943. Thus, by the time Wodehouse was free to digest the controversy, he had actually lost a child during the war. Christopher Milne survived to carry on his own resentments.

Twice in the 1950s Wodehouse, now permanently settled in America, used his fiction to attack Milne. In 1975 he claimed to have gotten over the feud, at least enough to appreciate Milne as a writer, but by then Milne was dead.

Moorcock: “the prose of the nursery-room”

From Michael Moorcock’s essay “Epic Pooh,” as archived at Revolution SF (it was originally written in 1978, revised in 1989, and revised again to note recent authors):

The sort of prose most often identified with "high" fantasy is the prose of the nursery-room. It is a lullaby; it is meant to soothe and console. It is mouth-music. It is frequently enjoyed not for its tensions but for its lack of tensions. It coddles; it makes friends with you; it tells you comforting lies. It is soft:

One day when the sun had come back over the forest, bringing with it the scent of May, and all the streams of the Forest were tinkling happily to find themselves their own pretty shape again, and the little pools lay dreaming of the life they had seen and the big things they had done, and in the warmth and quiet of the Forest the cuckoo was trying over his voice carefully and listening to see if he liked it, and wood-pigeons were complaining gently to themselves in their lazy comfortable way that it was the other fellow's fault, but it didn't matter very much; on such a day as this Christopher Robin whistled in a special way he had, and Owl came flying out of the Hundred Acre Wood to see what was wanted.

Winnie-the-Pooh, 1926

It is the predominant tone of The Lord of the Rings and Watership Down and it is the main reason why these books, like many similar ones in the past, are successful. It is the tone of many forgotten British and American bestsellers, well-remembered children's books, like The Wind in the Willows, you often hear it in regional fiction addressed to a local audience, or, in a more sophisticated form, James Barrie (Dear Brutus, Mary Rose and, of course, Peter Pan).

Unlike the tone of E. Nesbit (Five Children and It etc.), Richmal Crompton (the 'William' books) Terry Pratchett or the redoubtable J.K.Rowling, it is sentimental, slightly distanced, often wistful, a trifle retrospective; it contains little wit and much whimsy.

Wait a minute! Milne’s characterization of Eeyore is hilarious. But his narrative voice is indeed the voice of an adult looking back/down on childhood. Nesbit’s narrative voice, on the other hand, is an author in conspiracy with young readers.

Perhaps the “voice of the nursery-room” is one reason why some of the novels Moorcock mentions—Lord of the Rings and Watership Down among them—are treated as books for young people even though their authors conceived them as books for adults.

New Pooh?

This report from The Bookseller, a British publishing-industry journal, has already been echoed around the world:

An authorised sequel to A A Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner is to be released by Egmont Publishing in October. The contents of the book are a closely guarded secret but will reflect Milne’s idea that "whatever happens, a little boy and his bear will always be playing," said author David Benedictus.

The forthcoming title, Return to the Hundred Acre Wood, will be published in a similar format to the existing Classic Winnie-the-Pooh books. The text will be illustrated by Mark Burgess who has already illustrated a number of Winnie-the-Pooh titles.

At first I was a little troubled that the Milne and E. H. Shepard estates were chasing more bucks before their lucrative copyrights run out in 1926. We've seen the heirs of Margaret Mitchell, J. M. Barrie, and James Joyce do that in various ways, and the results have been mixed.

I began feeling a little better about the idea when The Bookseller went on to report:

• Benedictus wrote this new book after working on some Pooh adaptations and then submitted it to the Milne and Shepard estates for their authorization; the estates didn't set out to commission a sequel.
• The estates had actually turned down some other "suggested sequels."

But then I recalled that the Disney Company bought a lot of the rights to Pooh about ten years ago, paying the heirs a lump sum--which means they won't see more money unless they produce new intellectual property. There has been a long series of lawsuits among those heirs, the Slesinger family who originally licensed the Pooh characters, and Disney, running up lawyers' tabs. So the estate's decision to authorize Benedictus's book might not be based purely on literary merit. We can only hope it is.

I resist an automatic reaction against latter-day sequels. I've enjoyed some of those stories very well. Others not only miss the target, they seem to miss the point of the original.

ADDENDUM: Today's Publishers Weekly report added more food for thought about the genesis of this project:

While working on post-production for those audiobooks--which required the approval of the Trustees of the Pooh Properties--he [Benedictus] decided to write a pair of stories about Pooh and send them to the trustees (the four trustees own the copyright for the text and represent the estate of Pooh illustrator E.H. Shepard).

Eight years passed, according to Benedictus, but in 2006 he got a call from the trustees. Over the years the trustees had seen several proposals for sequels. “We had looked at a number of people, including my own poor efforts,” said Michael Brown, chairman of the trust, adding that the idea for authorizing a sequel had been in his mind “for a very long time.” But he said that the timing of the book’s release this year was a matter of various pieces coming together--including finding the right contributors.

So Benedictus wrote his first Pooh stories in 1998, and the estates started to pursue the idea with him in 2006. How do those years match up to the business timeline?

Update on E. H. Shepard Auction

In November, I noted an upcoming auction of E. H. Shepard drawings from the Winnie the Pooh books at Sotheby's in London. Last week Reuters reported that the sale exceeded even the high expectations, with "He went on tracking, and Piglet...ran after him" selling for £115,250 and "Bump, bump, bump--going up the stairs" for £97,250. Even the latter-day Piglet drawing I linked to turned out to be worth £8,750.

Getting Ready for the Party

It seemed a little unfair that Sotheby’s estimate for this E. H. Shepard illustration of Piglet is only £7,000-9,000 when pictures of Pooh and others are £20,000-70,000. Yes, Piglet's small, but is that a fair determinant of his value?

Then I realized from the auction’s catalog that this is actually a sketch that Shepard created in 1958, based on his earlier, published drawing. And that’s probably the reason for the lower price. Sotheby's estimates for Shepard drawings not connected to Winnie the Pooh at all are even less, though still in the four figures.

Incidentally, the malls will be so crowded tomorrow. Why not shop for me online? I'm only trying to make it easier for you.

Gaiman on Milne on Grahame

With the twentieth anniversary of The Sandman comics, new novels coming out, an upcoming gig on the last days of Batman, and a movie adaptation of Coraline under way, Neil Gaiman is on a roll. But this 2001 interview with the online magazine January shows he has a keen sense of how popular authors can be forgotten:

1930. Probably the most prominent English essayist was A. A. Milne: the editor of Punch, famed for his comedic essays, and a man with several plays running in the West End concurrently. A man who had bestselling books with titles like The Daily Round and hilarious collections of essays and sketches. One of the funniest writers of his generation and an accomplished playwright.

I did an Amazon search several months ago just out of interest to see just what of his was actually in print. And it listed 700 books: all of which, as I went down page after page, were variant editions of the two Winnie the Pooh books and the two books of comic verse for children that he wrote. And that's all that we have left of A. A. Milne, and he's in better shape than most of his contemporaries whose names we do not remember at all. . . .

There's one other thing we remember [Milne] for. His attempt to revive something forgotten which, again, worked brilliantly. To the point now where we didn't even know that it ever was forgotten. He wrote Toad of Toad Hall as a stage play, because he loved--and was furious that it had been forgotten--The Wind in the Willows.

And Kenneth Grahame's book came out [in 1908] and was a huge dud. Kenneth Grahame's other two books--Dream Days [1898] and The Golden Age [1895]--now completely forgotten. Portraits of sort of being a child in early Edwardian, Victorian days--were seized on and loved by the Edwardians as these beautiful, sentimental portraits of childhood. These were Grahame's bestselling books.

And The Wind in the Willows was a dud: it was completely forgotten to the point where A.A. Milne wound up writing an essay in the 1920s saying: Let me tell you about one of the best books in the world, and you have never heard of it. It was called The Wind in the Willows, and [Milne] went on and did Toad of Toad Hall, the theatrical adaptation, which then revived the book to the point where it's now considered one of the great children's classics.

Actually, I own Grahame's Dream Days and The Golden Age, with Maxfield Parrish illustrations. Gaiman is right that the text hasn't survived as well. The same sentimentality plays better with water rats and moles.