A.A. Milne wrote naughty Novels…
Tracy Quan on A.A. Milne in The Draw Bridge:
"Discovering that Pooh’s creator wrote edgy irreverent ’40s chick-lit is like finding out who your parents were shagging on the side. Indeed, there was something illicit about reading a grown-up Milne story, so I didn’t gobble it up in one bite.
Chloe [ Marr, a well-bred party girl] moves "with elegance and grace" through Mayfair, waking just before noon most days. Emerging "like a goddess" from her bath, Chloe tidies the bed with practised carelessness, because an excessive show of chastity might lead her next visitor to suspect she spent the night elsewhere.
Milne was trying, you might say, to recapture his adulthood after too much success with children. His grown-up novels and essays, along with his magazine career, had been snuffed out by Pooh’s popularity. Until Chloe entered my life, I had no idea Milne had been an editor at Granta and Punch, a successful playwright, and a polemicist who wrote two books about war.
Adult Milne is very adult, but never crude, and often whimsical."
December 12th, 2009 at 5:17 AM
Thanks to Quan, I may have to splurge on Chloe Marr as a Christmas present to myself. Fortunately, I have Amazon to help me with this as I do not have the resources in NYC, but so far, I have not seen any reprints and am settling for a “very good” copy from PA. Thanks for this write up. Writers who are successful in crossing the line between work primarily for children and work that is more suitable for adults are always of interest to me, though I sometimes think children’s authors tend to be downplayed a bit in terms of their talent, wisdom, and flexibility. Maybe I’m wrong in this. I hope so.