Description:

Milne A.A.



A.A Milne, Author of the Winnie The Pooh Series, Attempts to Tame his Golf Club

 

Single page autograph letter, signed as "A.A.Milne" ,  on stationary with letterhead of 13, Mallord Street, Chelsea, S.W.3. Tel Flaxman 2074. Undated but accompanied by a postmarked and stamped handwritten envelope with a postmark date of "4.18.31". 5.75"x 4"  Expected center fold. Fine condition.

 

A warm, jocular letter written by Milne to his dear longtime friends, the Seligmans. Both Milne and his wife Daphne would maintain a close rapport with this couple beginning in the early 1920's. Milne writes a thank you letter to "Bobs" (Barbara Seligman) for the new club which he most humorously is beating into submission. Along the bottom in a post script , Milne additionally makes a comment to her that it is his 18th anniversary. (He and Daphne married in 1913). The letter is shown in full below:

 

"Dear Bobs,

Thank you so much for the club. I tried it Friday and though it didn't play quite as well as yours did on that memorable afternoon when I had the pleasure of beating you at Ashdam Forest, I think it will get all right with a little practice. When it did hit the ball, it hit it a very long way, and as soon as it realizes that I'm not going to (illegible) any nonsense from it we shall get along all right.

 

So again my many thanks indeed; it was charming of you to send it.

 

Yours ever

A.A. Milne

Give my love to your husband and thank him again for his matches.

 

The 18th anniversary of our wedding day!"

 

A.A. Milne played a fair amount of golf, in the mid-1920s he mentioned he got “his handicap to 9”. In his autobiography published in several years later,  Milne talks about golf. “To-day, I could be happy without a car, I could be happy without a country cottage, but I shouldn’t be happy if I couldn’t be reckless about golf balls, taxis, the best seats at cricket grounds and theatres, shirts and pullovers, tips, subscriptions, books and wine-lists.” While discussing the creative process of writing Milne says, “I have spent many mornings at Lords [Cricket Grounds] hoping that inspiration would come, many days on golf courses; I have even gone to sleep in the afternoon, in case inspiration came to take me completely by surprise. In vain.” Milne’s biographer Ann Thwaite mentioned his playing golf at Addington, Royal Wimbledon and Walton Heath and that he played at least on one occasion with Bernard Darwin. He called Walton Heath, “about the most difficult course in London, with heather a foot high on each side of a narrow fairway, and a perpetual wind. I play a terrible lot of golf now – always twice and often 3 times a week, and it’s really time I settled down to work again.” After he moved out of London Milne also played the nine-hole course Holtye golf club in Sussex with his son often. The course was a ten minute drive from his cottage in Sussex which is also located near Royal Ashdown Forest Golf Club.

 

But in typical Milne reflective thoughts on life, his most famous line about golf is from The Charm of Golf, published in 1920 in, Not That It Matters, “Golf is so popular simply because it is the best game in the world at which to be bad.”



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