PRISONERS OF STORYTIME

By MIMI KRAMER

Journalism loves an easy irony--and no irony is sweeter than the idea that some creator of a cherished work should have proved less lovable than his or her creations. What most adult lovers of the Winnie-the-Pooh books seem to know about author A.A. Milne is that through a combination of obliviousness and neglect, he saddled his only son Christopher with a perfectly awful childhood--a fact that rocked the world in 1974 when Christopher Milne's memoir The Enchanted Places first appeared. In it, the "real" Christopher Robin painted the portrait of a father who was cold and remote, with whom thrice daily visits were a matter of pro forma routine. He also revealed his youthful anguish and embarrassment over a notoriety he was never able to escape.

Subsequent scholarship, meanwhile, has done a little of its own debunking. In her 1990 biography A.A. Milne: The Man Behind Winnie-the-Pooh, Ann Thwaite used letters the father had written to which the son would not have had access to show that Milne was actually far more involved in his son's life and upbringing than Christopher had remembered.

Nevertheless, when Christopher Milne died last week at 75, the newspapers were again full of polite reproaches for the neglectful father of Christopher Robin. Days later, with the passing of another of English-speaking childhood's most beloved figures--Pamela Lyndon Travers (known to her fans as "P.L.")--the papers seemed to reflect another kind of disillusion. This time, it was a thinly veiled disappointment that the creator of Mary Poppins should have proved less saccharine than the character portrayed by Julie Andrews in the Walt Disney movie.

Obituaries of Travers--who died last week at 96, and whose real name was Helen Lyndon Goff--invariably (though respectfully) depicted her as a curmudgeonly grouch with a tendency to be "fierce" and "short" with her interlocutors, a woman who didn't "suffer fools gladly," a regular old crosspatch. They all recounted the rounded, well-traveled life she had led. (Before writing the first Mary Poppins book, she had been variously a dancer, a poet, a journalist, a theater critic and a Shakespearean actress.) Still, the implication that seemed to lurk behind the articles about Travers was that she hadn't really liked life or the world very much. In fact, interviews with Travers suggest little more than that she couldn't abide journalists and had little patience with people who yearned to elicit trivial, simplistic or self-evident answers from her. In this, she resembled the unconventional governess she created.

For, of course, Disney's Mary Poppins and the character in the Travers books are two entirely different beings. The latter is somewhat fierce, somewhat formidable and perennially unfair. The point about the Mary Poppins of the books is that although wonderful things begin to happen when she arrives, she's not very nice to be around.

The invention of an authority figure who was imperfect though invariably wise and right was a novel idea, Travers' gift to the modern children's book, just as the idea that a little boy could go off and have unsupervised adventures with his stuffed animals, however fantastical, was Milne's. Both writers were emerging from a Victorian tradition that saw children's literature as a didactic form whose function--if it wasn't to romanticize childhood--was to instill a respect for adult values and behavior.

Travers and Milne were subversives to the extent that they wrote about childhood in a tone that was respectful without being breathless. They were pioneers, in a sense, of a genre that for the first time was offering children something that literature had always offered adults: imaginative independence. Their stories endow their child-protagonists with a moral autonomy that would have been unthinkable before the 20th century. Both Travers and Milne depicted a world of children who pretty much do what they do and go on about their business, all without much care for what grownups will think.

Critic Mimi Kramer is currently writing a book about children's literature.