Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P. L. Travers

by Valerie Lawson

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  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Epigraph

  Preface

  Part I: The Nymph, 1899–1934

  Prologue: The Moment Between Day and Dark

  Chapter 1: The Real Mr. Banks

  Chapter 2: Ellie and Allora

  Chapter 3: Old England in Australia

  Chapter 4: The Creation of Pamela

  Chapter 5: Falling into Ireland

  Chapter 6: Lovers, Gurus and the Glimmering Girl

  Part II: The Mother, 1934–1965

  Prologue: Out of the Sky

  Chapter 7: Poppins and Pamela in Wonderland

  Chapter 8: A Beautiful Night for a Death

  Chapter 9: The Crossing of Camillus

  Chapter 10: Through the Door to Mabeltown

  Chapter 11: Monsieur Bon Bon Says Au Revoir

  Chapter 12: Shadowplay

  Chapter 13: The Americanization of Mary

  Part III: The Crone, 1965–1996

  Prologue: An Old Woman in a Rocking Chair

  Chapter 14: A Crone among the Sleeping Beauties

  Chapter 15: Looking for Pamela Travers

  Chapter 16: Fear No More the Heat of the Sun

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  About Valerie Lawson

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Published Books by P. L. Travers

  Index

  Illustration Sources

  List of Illustrations

  Margaret Goff

  P. L. Travers aged twenty months

  Travers Goff

  Allora

  Lyndon, Moya and Biddy Goff at Bowral

  A youthful Travers

  Travers in 1923

  A publicity shot of Travers

  Travers the actress

  Travers in Julius Caesar

  Travers and AE

  Madge Burnand at Pound Cottage, 1930s

  Pound Cottage, Mayfield

  Mary Poppins arrives

  Jane and Michael Banks with Mary Poppins

  Mary Poppins departs

  The balloons illustration

  Detail of the balloons illustration

  George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff

  Travers in 1941

  Travers with Camillus in 1941

  Travers with Camillus in 1947

  Camillus aged 19

  Julie Andrews and Tony Walton

  Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins in a rain scene

  Julie Andrews and Walt Disney

  Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins in chimney-sweep scene

  Julie Andrews, Walt Disney and Travers at the film premiere

  Choreographer Marc Breaux rehearsing Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke

  Police pass for premiere of Mary Poppins

  Two letters from William Dover to Travers

  Letter from Samuel Goldwyn to Walt Disney

  Travers at Smith College, 1966

  Travers at Radcliffe, 1965

  Advertisement for Mary Poppins nylons

  Advertisement for Mary Poppins–themed contest

  Travers’s collection of mementos

  Travers in 1966

  Travers in 1995

  For Lucy and Annie

  What we call the beginning is often the end

  And to make an end is to make a beginning.

  The end is where we start from. And every phrase

  And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,

  Taking its place to support the others,

  The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,

  An easy commerce of the old and the new,

  The common word exact without vulgarity,

  The formal word precise but not pedantic,

  The complete consort dancing together)

  Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,

  Every poem an epitaph. And any action

  Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat

  Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start…

  We shall not cease from exploration

  And the end of all our exploring

  Will be to arrive where we started

  And know the place for the first time.

  T. S. Eliot,

  “Little Gidding,”

  Four Quartets

  Preface

  When the poet Ted Hughes was sent a collection of Mary Poppins books, he wrote in a note of thanks to the publisher, Collins:

  I’m sorry my wife, Sylvia Plath, could not see these because Mary Poppins was the fairy godmother of her childhood. She spoke of her a great deal.1

  As Plath instinctively knew, Mary Poppins was not so much a plain old nanny as a good mother from a fairy tale. Hiding behind the facade of a British nanny pushing a pram in Kensington, Poppins was more magical than Cinderella’s godmother, more mysterious than the good fairy of “The Sleeping Beauty.” But Poppins had yet another aspect. Something sinister lay behind the blue button eyes and flowerpot hat. As P. L. (Pamela) Travers, the creator of Mary Poppins, wrote, every good fairy has her evil counterpart, the necessary antagonist.2

  In Mary Poppins, Travers created more than the saccharine image we know from the Walt Disney movie of the 1960s. Poppins has lasted because she is as peculiar as she is kind, as threatening as she is comforting, as stern as she is sensual, as elusive as she is matter of fact. Where did she come from, where did she go? The Banks children, her charges, knew only one thing: out of the sky she came, and back to the sky she would go.

  Since the first book was published in 1934, Mary Poppins has become imprinted in the popular culture of many countries, almost a cartoon character, reinforced by the Walt Disney movie of 1964, its rereleases in 1973 and 1980, then the movie’s release on video and DVD. The six Poppins books are still in print and have been translated into more than a dozen languages. The words “Mary Poppins” have become a catchphrase, a slogan, for an idealized woman. Most recently, the nanny made a reappearance in The Simpsons, transformed into Sherry Bobbins, who tried, but failed, to make order of the chaos in that household. Even that treatment did not destroy her. Instead, it enhanced her.

  The image of Mary Poppins with her umbrella flying over the rooftops of London is indelible, but the concept of Mary Poppins is even stronger, implying a secure childhood and an answer to women’s perennial problem: how to balance their lives between their needs and their family’s demands.

  Mary Poppins flew into a 1930s household where the mother did not work. (In the movie Mrs. Banks became a silly suffragette, an interesting change of perspective which represented Walt Disney’s response to the dawn of the new age of feminism.) By the end of the twentieth century, most women did work and most mothers need child care. If they can afford it, they hire a nanny; if not, the “nanny” is a worker in a child care center or a family day-care home. Whoever the caregiver is, the mother and father are ambivalent about the surrogate parent.

  The parents want to believe the best but often they sense, or imagine, a bad witch’s face behind the good. The mother feels anxious that the nanny will steal either her child or her husband. (In popular culture the nanny is often portrayed as a bimbo, marking time while she lures a husband, like Fran Fine, the pretty Jewish nanny with the fabulous cloth
es in the TV series.)

  Parents’ anxieties are reinforced by the vivid accounts of real-life nannies who kill by shaking a helpless baby to death. As they leave the law courts, the nannies look like freshly scrubbed angels, their blond hair held back by an Alice band, their hands clasping a handbag, their body enclosed in a neat little suit.

  Hammer Studios understood all this very well. In 1965, a year after the film Mary Poppins was released, the English company which specialized in horror movies released The Nanny, in which Bette Davis in the title role is referred to as “Mary Poppins.” Davis plays a really scary crone. Those bug eyes perform their usual Davis magic under sinister black slashes of eyebrows. By night, this nanny braids her hair into a Poppinsish plait.

  In the first household scene, we see the mother in hysterics. Her young son is due home from a mental institution where his chilly father and hapless mother had sent him. The boy had refused to eat or sleep, claiming the nanny planned to poison him or drown him in his bath. It is clear that something awful has happened to his little sister. Davis’s nanny creates a sense of unease and distrust as she infantilizes the incompetent mother. She alternates between spoon-feeding her mistress and calling her “Modom.” Toward the end of the movie, when we realize the nanny is a psychopath, Davis says: “Being a nanny is based on trust.”

  The Nanny represents the negative image of the positive Mary Poppins, black to white, evil to goodness, the Wicked Fairy to the Good Fairy. The Nanny has come to kill. Mary Poppins has come to repair, to make order from disorder, to create unity from disunity. Once she has done so, Mary can leave for a secret place in the heavens.

  Pamela Travers once said: “A Zen priest with whom I studied told me that Mary Poppins was full of Zen, that in every Zen story there is a single object which contains a secret. Sometimes the secret is revealed, sometimes not. It doesn’t matter, but it is always present.”3

  The same can be said of Travers’s own life. Almost everyone has heard of Mary Poppins but hardly anyone knows of Pamela Lyndon Travers. “I don’t want to be labeled. I’ve got a distaste for it,” she once told an interviewer.4 She stipulated that she did not want a biography written about her after her death. Like Oscar Wilde, perhaps, who called biographers “body-snatchers,” she deeply resented anyone prying into her personal life. “I don’t let people dig around in my life…I don’t wear my private life on my sleeve,” she boasted to a friend.5

  No, she placed it in labeled boxes instead. If Travers had been serious in her wish for privacy, she would have destroyed all her personal letters, all her notes, all the audiotapes made of her lectures, formal and informal, and her collection of photographs. Instead she sold her papers, including private papers, to the Mitchell Library in Sydney, where access to the material is unrestricted. Each photograph and letter and poem and haphazard thought was carefully preserved and even annotated for future readers. But perhaps by leaving such a large treasure trove Travers was trying to label her own life rather than have anyone else interpret it.

  Despite her wish that no biography be written, I believe her death meant the ground rules changed. I took the same point of view as the biographer Michael Holroyd, who has said “I discriminate between the rights of the living and the dead…When we are living we need all our sentimentalities, our evasions, our half-truths and our white lies, to get through life. When we are dead different rules apply.”6

  For me, Travers became more fascinating the more I learned of her mystery. That was what intrigued me most, not her subject matter, although I liked Mary Poppins as a child, and understood the feelings of both comfort and fear of having a nanny. Our nanny was “Hendy”—Mrs. Henderson, from next door—who baked Afghan biscuits and was proper, fair, and gruff. She had such a different manner from my mother, who looked softer, but was just as determined. My mother worked—an unusual thing for a New Zealand woman in the 1950s. I loved Hendy yet I sometimes feared her.

  My search for Pamela Travers began with the discovery that she was an Australian. Like myself, she had been a dancer, actress and writer. Going on “the Pamela hunt” became a five-year journey of discovery that took me down unexpected paths, both geographically and emotionally. The most marvelous part of the journey was the setting out, knowing little. I wrote to her agent. Travers replied. The blue aerogram was dated August 22, 1994.

  Dear Miss Lawson,

  I don’t like personal publicity but I’m willing to talk about my work any way you like.

  Her letter went on to say she had broken her shoulder and, with this, had broken some of her memory as well. Had I read her newest book, What the Bee Knows? The letter ended: “We’ve been having such violently hot weather that I often long to meet a southerly buster7 at evening!” Dictated to a person with simple, childish handwriting, the letter was signed P. L. Travers in a wavering script.

  From an obscure Californian publisher I ordered a copy of What the Bee Knows, a book I quickly cast aside…I had no time then for Travers’s mythological references and search for heroes.

  One morning eighteen months later I woke knowing this was the right time of my life to write the book. Something Travers had written had taken hold. I understood what she meant about the three phases of a woman’s life—“nymph, mother, crone”8—because they were all part of me, coexisting, just as a baby girl has all the eggs in her body for her own future babies.

  The serious journey began in the Dixson Reading Room of the Mitchell Library in Sydney, a place of contemplation and peace, where Travers’s life unfurled as I unwrapped each of her old letters or stories from its tissue paper and white ribbon packaging.

  In 1996 I wrote again to her literary agent to ask if I could meet Travers in London in early May. Her agent replied that Travers was extremely ill. The day after that letter arrived, Travers died. I wrote her obituary for the Sydney Morning Herald. The next week I went to London anyway, to cover a court case that was to be a coda to a book I had written about a scandal in a law firm. The case was settled. It was definitely time to move on. I walked down the street—Shawfield Street, Chelsea—where Travers had lived for more than thirty years, with a feeling made up of one-third fear, one-third sadness and one-third excitement.

  I thought about Pamela’s own journey in 1924 from Sydney to London, about her wistful memory that “as a child I always had a strong wish, that I think I was born with, of wanting to get to England and Ireland. I built the whole of my life to it.”9

  Shawfield Street is a short street. It seemed shorter that day. I reached Pamela’s pink front door too soon and rang the bell, hoping no one would answer. No one did. In the time it took to reach the Kings Road, everything jelled: the passage of time, journeys taken or not taken, and how this story was now imperative.

  The next three years spent searching for the truth about Pamela became an end in itself, the search as important as the conclusion. At the end of 1997 I traveled through New Mexico, to Washington, New York and Boston, then through County Donegal to London, where I met Pamela’s son, Camillus Travers. He was living at 29 Shawfield Street, as familiar to me as an old photo although I had never seen inside. Upstairs was her studio. He led the way. Up there her writing desk seemed untouched since her death.

  It wasn’t right to leave London then. The studio was lodged in my mind, the book impossible to write without returning.

  Nine months later, I flew back to London. All day I sat at her desk, tidying as I went, combing through each drawer, pulling out yellowing photos, the remains of a diary, scraps of paper, making rough order, placing paper clips and rubber bands in piles. I was all alone. Camillus left early and came home after I had gone.

  One day I discovered her old long-playing records of music composed for exercises created by her guru Gurdjieff, and lowered one onto the turntable. The piano music was more soothing than I had expected. Pamela’s spirit returned to the room that morning. Near the end of the first week, late one morning, a wind suddenly slammed the studio door closed. Again, Pamela�
��s presence was strong in the studio. The hairs on the nape of my neck stood up.

  Each evening at twilight I walked down the Kings Road, past the string of makeup shops and the high street fashions, around this twisty road and that to South Kensington, notes tucked in a folder, a life in bits, not yet codified. Pamela Travers seemed all around me.

  • • •

  Travers said all happy books are based on sadness. She must have had her own in mind. Pamela Travers, too, was full of sorrow. As she knew, “the cup of sorrow is always full. For a grown-up it’s a flagon, for the child, it’s a thimble, but it’s never less than full.”10

  She thought “we are all looking for magic. We all need to feel we are under a spell and one day a wand will be waved and the princes that we truly feel ourselves to be will start forth at last from the tattered shapeless smocks. But indeed we have to wave the wand for ourself. If only we could refrain from endlessly repairing our defenses. To be naked and defenseless. Oh we need it.”11

  She needed that but didn’t find it, creating more defenses and masks with age. The writer Salman Rushdie summarized such a life—and so many of our lives—in his comment to an interviewer: “We live in a world of disappointment. You begin with high hopes and the beautiful innocence of childhood but you discover that the world isn’t good enough, nor are our lives and nor are we. But there are moments in life when we can have an experience of transcendence, feel part of something larger, or simply our hearts burst inside.”12

  Travers experienced that marvelous transcendence more than most, I believe. It came unexpectedly, as it always does, in the pleasure of her search for a pattern and meaning in her life. As she told one of her favorite writers, Jonathan Cott: “There’s a wonderful line in a poem by Theodore Roethke which says ‘you learn by going where you have to go.’ You can’t learn before you set out, can you? You go along the road and learn as you go.”13

  Her life was much more than I ever imagined. My life expanded in the writing of hers.

  Valerie Lawson