By Stuart Mitchner
Having just finished off another two-pound jar of honey with three big spoonfuls for my morning coffee, I’ve come to the realization that I was born to write about Winnie-the-Pooh. My fate was sealed 50 summers ago in England by a book on the manifold life-sustaining virtues of Pooh’s golden elixir.
That summer ended in Madrid with a feast at Casa Botin, “one of the best restaurants in the world,” where Jake and Lady Brett Ashley dine toward the end of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Brett “didn’t eat much” while Jake was feasting on roast young suckling pig and drinking three bottles of rioja alta. I mention that summer because it ties together a centenary coincidence, The Sun Also Rises having been published in October 1926, a week after A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh. Never one to pass up a convenient coincidence, I’ve been sampling both books.
I’m also still reading Harold Bloom’s letters in The Man Who Read Everything, a very short book worth savoring slowly. Knowing Bloom would have a soft spot in his heart for Winnie-the-Pooh, I found an online interview in HomeArts Magazine under the heading, “Harold Bloom on the Western Canon Jr.” Asked which books he’d include in a children’s canon, Bloom began with The Wind in the Willows (“which broke my heart many times”) and Alice in Wonderland (which “captivated me”) before declaring A.A. Milne’s Pooh “a charming and beautiful book,” while pointing out the stuffed animals on the couch facing him: “This is a little duck-billed platypus whom I’ve named Oscar, in honor of my hero, Oscar Wilde. And this baby gorilla, whom my wife gave me for my last birthday, we’ve named Gorilla Gorilla. And I’ve named this wonderful donkey Eeyore. That, I’m sure, will give you an idea of how I feel about Winnie-the-Pooh.”
Pernod and Honey
The same day I found the anecdote about Bloom and his stuffed animals, this bracing quote from Ernest Hemingway mysteriously appeared on my computer: “All things truly wicked start from innocence.” The sentence can be found on the penultimate page of his Paris memoir, A Moveable Feast. Meanwhile, in my hasty venture into the worlds of Milne and Hemingway, I noticed a parallel of sorts between the highs and lows of Jake’s drinking and the ups and downs of Pooh’s first recorded quest for honey. In the third chapter of The Sun Also Rises, Jake observes that pernod is “greenish imitation absinthe” that “tastes like licorice” and “has a good uplift” but “drops you just as far.”
I came to Papa’s drinker’s wisdom fresh from Pooh’s observation that the only reason for bees making honey “is so as I can eat it,” spoken prior his climbing the tree with the bees nest at the top; whereupon he “climbed and climbed” until a branch cracked under him (“Oh, help!”) and he “dropped ten feet to the branch below him,” then twenty feet to the next branch before turning head-over-heels, and crashing on to another branch thirty feet below. As he said good-bye to the last branch: “It all comes, I suppose, of liking honey so much. Oh, help!”
Excitement for Breakfast
If I can do Pooh and Jake Barnes, why not take on Piglet and Brett? Near the very end of Milne’s tale, Piglet asks Pooh, “When you wake up in the morning, … what’s the first thing you say to yourself?” Pooh’s answer is “What’s for breakfast? What do you say, Piglet?” And Piglet says, “I wonder what’s going to happen exciting to-day?” To which Pooh, nodding “thoughtfully,” says, “It’s the same thing.”
I can see a hint of the worldly bear’s attitude in The Sun Also Rises, which ends with Jake and Lady Brett going for a cab ride through Madrid. “We sat close against each other. I put my arm around her and she rested against me comfortably…. “Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.” Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me. “Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
I have to admit that’s nothing like what Pooh would say. It’s more like a translation of a wisecrack from J.D. Salinger’s Holden “David-Copperfield-kind-of-crap” Caulfield, who turned 75 on July 16.
A Centenary Merry-Go-Round
When I learned that August 26 would be the date of this week’s column, it seemed a dauntingly ordinary number until my inner Pooh, a bear of very little brain, comprehended the centenary enormity of 2026’s 26th day. First and foremost for a lifelong fan, this is the 100th anniversary of the Cardinals’ 1926 World Series defeat of the Yankees, an event imagined in the conversation between Nick and Bill in Hemingway’s story, “The Three Day Blow.” (“I wonder if the Cards will ever win a pennant?… Gee, they’d go crazy”).
Not only did St. Louis win, they beat the New York Yankees in a seven game series thanks in great part to the pitching heroics of Grover Cleveland “Old Pete” Alexander, played two decades later by future president Ronald Reagan in The Winning Team (a cute reference to his fictional marriage to Doris Day).
Arriving in 1926
I’m thinking now of 1966, the year the Beatles made their greatest record, Revolver, under the inestimable guidance of producer George Martin, who was born January 3, 1926. I’m also thinking of Jack Kerouac’s inimitable On the Road, which would not exist without Jack’s pal Neal Cassady, born February 8. Cardinal baseball is here again with the Feb. 12 advent of St. Louis native Joe Garagiola, catcher for the World Champion 1946 (the magic six again) Cardinals.
Jerry Lewis
On March 16 comes comedian Jerry Lewis, who my best friend and I used to take turns playing on balmy lakeside Indiana summer nights, doing Jerry-style travesties of movie stars, Jerry as James Dean, Jerry as Brando the Nazi soldier in The Young Lions ambushing Dean Martin as he saunters along singing “That’s Amore.” We knew all the screechy spastic manic Jerry moves. “Oh da pain!” was our password. I have to add that the poet C.K. Williams actually knew Jerry as a babysitter, the poet and the clown both born and raised in Newark and East Orange.
The Queen
Elizabeth II, born April 21, 1926, looked lovely when I saw her motorcade on Queens Road in Bristol in the early spring of 1972. She’d have been in her forties, but she looked 10 years younger. I remember her best for her encounters with the Beatles and song lyrics like this one from Abbey Road (“Her majesty’s a pretty nice girl, someday I’m gonna make her mine oh yeah”).
Miles Smiles
Nice to see a photo of young Miles Davis (born May 26) smiling on thisday.com. The first in-person view of him that comes to mind was when he walked onstage with a Black Power sign during a concert. The nicest present I ever got from a girlfriend was a copy of Miles’ Sketches of Spain, which I should be playing for background music this morning, except it belongs always in the foreground, especially the adagio from “Concierto de Aranjuez,” which is on as I write.
I’ll have to save the other illustrious centenarians for subsequent columns: Marilyn Monroe, born June 1 in the charity ward of Los Angeles County General Hospital; Allen Ginsberg, born two days later in Newark; John Coltrane, born September 23; and Chuck Berry, born October 18 in St. Louis, no doubt a Cardinals fan.