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

by Valerie Lawson

  Again to feel your fingers in my hair

  Bending my half unwilling back…and back . . .

  Until the fortress of my womanhood

  Is shattered by your crushing, conquering arms.

  In a short verse called “O-o-h, Shocking!” she wrote of “unutterable ardors…wake up, wake up! Hold me tight in your arms…tighter, tighter…crush me close, close against your heart…I am so afraid!”

  She even told of the intimate pleasure of undressing: “The clip clip of fastenings giggling deliciously as they fly apart…and then the silky hush of intimate things, fragrant with my fragrance, steal softly down, so loth to rob me of my last dear concealment…but there is left this flower white, flower pink, radiant shy thing, tremulous. It’s Me, Me, Me!…Ah, darling God, how dear of you to make me! My sobbing laughter is buried in the pillow’s lavender. Life is so sweet…so sweet…God!” Pamela was a tease who sighed in one poem “You must take my No for Yes, my mouth will be a long caress . . .”

  But despite all the heavy breathing, Pamela was more a flirt than a woman of the world. And she was well aware of the tricks of journalism, how one affects honesty to hide artifice. In the July 1923 issue of The Triad she wrote in a poem called “Friend (to HB)” that “the dress of passion that I sometimes wear has less of sorcery than this calm robe you fling about my life.”

  HB is likely to have been her Triad colleague, Hector Bolitho, who also edited the Shakespearean Quarterly. In the May 1923 issue, within a series of quips under the subheadline “So There Hector!” she declared, “Men are never interested in women. They are only interested in showing women how interesting they themselves are.” In the style of Oscar Wilde, she told her readers that “A woman loves a man first, and then his face. A man loves her ankles, and then the woman.” And, “There is only one thing more annoying to a woman than the man who doesn’t understand her, and that is the man who does.”

  In another column, the two sides of Pamela were revealed in a piece called “The Moon and Sausages,” in which she wondered how she could make money. Perhaps by sending a poem to the Herald, which might give her five pounds. “I think it had better be about love, all sonnets are about love…Here in the shade of this low whispering pine…What rhymes with moon, broom? No, swoon.” Pamela’s moon, June, swoon fantasies were interrupted by her mother asking her to “go and get a pound of sausages, and don’t get chops by mistake…deep in an ecstasy of love I swoon…did mother say sausages or chops?”

  As she went spinning around the city, Pamela watched with the intensity of a journalist or outsider. She saw “shabby” children in a toy shop, the partygoers at the Artists Ball, the crowds at the races with “orange sun-shades warring with red hats and shoes, shoes, shoes, shiny mirroring patent leather shoes very black and conscious of their blackness…” She watched the men at the fruit stalls, the statues in Hyde Park, the speakers in the Domain, the shoe sale in Pitt Street, and eavesdropped on gossip exchanged on the tram in William Street, in the auditorium at the Cat and the Canary, on the ferry to Manly (where Morton lived), at the State Orchestra and a private exhibition of etchings. She gazed at a green dress in a window and yearned to buy it. Next day it was sold, she thought to a fat lady who would wear it to the races.

  Pamela showed more contempt than compassion for her countrymen. She thought Australians “took their fun very seriously…were incapable of undressing delight delicately, garment by mysterious joyous garment.” She criticized the “stodgy, mutton fed” Australian sense of humor, complained that Australians were not a gay people, too self-conscious, too steeped in an overpowering sense of their own importance to let themselves go. “They are good fellows, hearty eaters, amusing companions but they lack the dancing, bird-like delight of the Gaelic races.”

  Australians had not found any “workable philosophy of life.” Pamela, with the certainty of a woman in her early twenties, complained that “they sin, and then dear babes, regret, not knowing how to laugh at fortune. They brood, not knowing how to fling out their hands and say, well that’s over, what’s next!”

  Australians were too intolerant of tradition to have any “legendary lore” of their own, she explained. She never mentioned Australia’s Aboriginal people, then invisible to white city folk, but Pamela was hardly alone in her ignorance. Her myths all came from Ireland and England.

  Pamela paraded her knowledge of literature with quotations from Rupert Brooke and John Keats, and with attempts to write in the style of Ethel Turner, Katherine Mansfield, Rudyard Kipling, Samuel Pepys, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and even Shakespeare. Glimpses of her own storyteller, Mary Poppins, could be seen in some essays, one of which explained that the man in the moon was actually a woman. In another, “Nocturne,” she wrote that at midnight, a crack of twelve seconds opens up throughout the world. Within the crack lie enchantment and magic.

  And the stars kept creeping back, too. Some stars sang cadenzas above Pitt and George streets, but above Castlereagh Street they sighed and whispered lullabies and staves from old forgotten tunes. Then there was a little girl who asked of her mother in the tram “who put the stars in the sky?” and yes, she knew it was God, “but where did God get them?”

  Beneath all the pieces was a sense of yearning, most notable in “Woman”: “I want the moon…I want the world…I am a woman and the world sleeps on my breast.” For all her idealization of women, though, Pamela was scornful of feminism. In one of her last columns written in Australia she explained that feminists wanted “all the rights of men and none of its [sic] drawbacks.” Feminists were “drunk with the newness of their ‘freedom’ ” and hated themselves for being women.21

  For all the apparent certainty in her prose, Pamela confided to an interviewer that she “always felt rather reluctant to judge my bits of success. They praised my poems, and they liked my writing, but how can they be the judge? I’m afraid I felt that way about Australia, that there was nobody who could be quite sure, and consequently, I could never be sure. I decided quite secretly that I would save enough by my writing and acting to go to England.”22

  In fact there were some experienced literary editors, among them A. G. Stephens, who could have considered and reviewed her work, but it is more likely that she was afraid of their judgment. In any case, following the precepts and programming of Travers Goff, she had almost no alternative but to sail away.

  All these years, she never had a moment’s doubt what she was saving for. It was “to slay the enemies of Ireland. The sorrows of that country got into me very early. How could it help doing so with father’s nostalgia for it continually feeding the imagination.”23 Naturally, Aunt Ellie chimed in, “Don’t be an idiot! Ireland! Nothing but rain and rebels and a gabble of Gaelic.” And later, “What’s this I hear about you going to England? Ridiculous nonsense. You were always a fool. Well, how much is the fare? I’ll send you a cheque for it.”24

  At the end of September, The Bulletin published her poem “Song Before a Journey.” It began:

  Before I go to London-town

  Where streets are paved with gold,

  I’ll buy me little flame-red shoes

  To keep my feet from cold,

  And skins of little rabbits grey

  Will wrap me tenderly

  When I go up to London-town

  That holds the heart of me

  The Triad was bulging with advertisements and free editorial for shipping lines and their luxurious fleets. Pamela studied the choices. Like Hector Bolitho who had sailed before her, she lingered at the windows of shipping offices decorated with posters of steamers floating on a background of Mediterranean blue.

  Frank Morton suddenly died (of nephritis) in December 1923. His friend, the newspaper editor Adam McCay, wrote a full-page eulogy for The Triad: “Farewell Frank Morton, Lover of Beauty, Craftsman, Satirist” (and writer of “fantastic erotics”). The magazine was to continue until 1927, but Pamela was ready to search for another Mr. Banks.

  In January 1924,
with Ellie’s money, she paid for her passage to England at the agents Dalgety and Co., giving her occupation for the passenger list of the Medic as actress. The White Star liner would take her to Southampton, calling at South Africa and the Canary Islands. A few days before she sailed, the feather of a bird flying above drifted down to her feet where she walked in Pitt Street. Pamela scooped it up. Black and white, soft, but finely shaped, the tail feather might have come from a magpie. She tucked it into her handbag. This omen was to travel with her, those fifty days to London.

  She sailed at 11:30 on the morning of Saturday, February 9, 1924. “Not to cry, not to cry, so terribly difficult not to cry,” she wrote when she remembered the moment when the streamers linking mother and daughter were about to break. For a column in the Christchurch Sun, Pamela described the scene that morning at Dalgety’s Wharf on Millers Point. She saw herself as a wild-haired girl with a wild heart. Clasping flowers, a book or two and a few gifts, Pamela watched her slender gray-eyed mother and heard “Good-bye, good luck, laughter to you, sprite” as she clung as long as possible to the outstretched hands. “Rattling of many chains, and far away notes of old farewelling songs and tears dripping through a thousand voices.” The flowers nodded against her face. She watched the waving hands grow indistinct as the rift of water widened. Suddenly there was “no land and no sea: only the blue of colored ribbons rainbowing my tears.”25

  Two days later, The Triad’s February issue announced: “When this issue of The Triad is in your hands, Miss Pamela Travers will be on her way to England, there to chase to its lair in London the will-o’-the-wisp of literary Fame and Fortune. Readers of The Triad will remember Miss Travers chiefly through her brilliant work in “A Woman Hits Back,” that pageful of candid feminism which each month set so many of us blinking. By the time our impulsive young contributor reaches London her book of verse (Bitter Sweet) will have passed through the Kirtley Press, thence to be scattered round the Earth in the bookshops of the Empire.26 If youth and fiery enthusiasm and indubitable talents are a combination to ensure success, then Miss Travers has little to fear in her latest adventure. May the best of luck attend her!”27

  5

  Falling into Ireland

  Pamela suffered dreadfully from seasickness. But as the Medic plowed down to Melbourne then around to Cape Town, she scribbled poems, features, fantasies and travel articles to send back to her most faithful newspaper client, the Christchurch Sun. She was too proud by far to rely simply on Aunt Ellie’s generosity. That might be needed eventually, but first she was determined to pay her own rent.

  When she allowed herself to dream, the pragmatic Pamela faded behind her fantasy that she was now embarked on a mythical journey. She believed she was sailing to her romantic motherland, to Ireland, a place of poets and druids still living in the Celtic Twilight, the title of a book Yeats wrote in the 1890s. This Pamela she saw as a little brown hen, a plaything of her Irish ancestors, who had called her home with insistent voices.1

  She had no way of knowing that Ireland now was far from romantic, deserted by many of its disillusioned writers and brutalized by the Easter 1916 Rising. By the mid 1920s, romantic Ireland had been buried under the realities of Sinn Fein and the Irish Free State.

  In those seven weeks to Southampton, Pamela was often burdened by homesickness. She wrote poems for her mother, whom she remembered pottering about her garden, her feet slow and tender, “shadows of silver dappling her hair.”2 But she consoled herself with the knowledge that there could be no other course. Pamela thought she had not so much left Australia, as she had fallen from it, as an apple falls from the tree, and as if at the summons of a bell.3

  On her journey around the world, each port offered a chance to make more contacts, essential to a freelance journalist. In Cape Town, she called on friends of Allan Wilkie, who promised her casual work as a publicist. Eventually this led to an assignment in London where she scribbled press releases for the International Variety and Theatrical Agency, which booked shows for South Africa. As Pamela once told a reporter, “I got into publicity writing for the theatres of South Africa. I had to see all the stars of the theatre who were going to South Africa.”4

  The Triad, though, remained her best outlet, even publishing travel features such as her article on Tenerife in the Canary Islands. Pamela first saw Tenerife at midnight, when “the moon had trodden a white path across the seas and was standing mature and arrogant upon the highest hill. Her silver train swung in and out of the shadowed valleys; she had dropped a feather from her hair on the sea’s edge, and it bestowed upon the red glow of the little golden town a thousand shimmery and elusive witcheries.”5 Pamela was trying far too hard, burying the lighthearted style of her Sydney pieces under the dead weight of overwrought metaphors.

  She had a standard story about arriving in London. It always went like this: “I had £10 in my pocket, £5 of which I promptly lost.” Pamela only once disclosed that the pocket was not really empty. A financial safety net under her London adventure was thrown by rich relatives. “I was allowed to depart Australia on condition that I was met and stayed with specific members of the family. This happened as they had hoped. I was welcomed to a big house with three cars just outside London.”6

  These Morehead relatives, nieces and nephews of Aunt Ellie, were about to leave for their spring holiday in Cannes. Pamela must come too, they insisted, return in time for the season, and give up her dreams of art and literature. She begged off Cannes. By the time they returned, she had done the rounds of editors’ offices and found a place to stay. Number 10 Mecklenburgh Square was not the poet’s attic she had imagined, but it was a reasonable little place not far from the heart of Bloomsbury, near London’s publishing heart, Fleet Street. “There, at last, I was where I wanted to be.”7

  Before long, she had a card printed with her London business address, care of Australian Cable Service, 19 to 22 Bouverie Street, EC4. She listed herself as a representative of the Sydney Sun, Melbourne Sun, Newcastle Sun, Sydney Bulletin, Sydney Theatre Magazine, Green Room magazine, Sydney Triad, Christchurch Sun and Hobart Mercury. Along with the card, Pamela gave editors a reference from Theatre Magazine: “Miss Pamela Travers, one of our most valued contributors, is going to London to report on theatres and matters theatrical and to interview prominent playwrights and producers.”

  At least that was the idea. Instead, she covered the rent by writing for the Christchurch Sun. She scurried around London for material, just as she had scoured Sydney for column fodder. By Christmas 1925 she had visited Paris—“absurd and adorable”—three times. Everything was a source of wonder, from the Sacré Coeur to the London tube.

  All the romantic notions gleaned from her parents’ books, then from Allan Wilkie, Lawrence Campbell and Frank Morton, hardly prepared her for England in 1924. The England she had imagined back home was as Edwardian as Disney’s Mary Poppins movie, benevolently ruled by George V and documented by the author–heroes of her youth. This was the England of Kipling, H. G. Wells, Galsworthy and Joseph Conrad. Her father’s old literary heroes, though, were now the ancients in the eyes of writers like Ezra Pound, who saw Yeats as “Uncle William, still dragging some of the reeds of the nineties in his hair.” London was ruled by a new elite, the dandies, in the label given them by historian Martin Green. The dandies loved all things baroque, commedia dell’arte, and Byzantine painting. Among their leaders were Noël Coward, John Gielgud, Cecil Beaton and the Sitwells, all of whom, as D. H. Lawrence said, taught England to be young.

  These were the sons who had survived the Great War, not bearded uncles or old literary figureheads but clean-shaven, their hair slicked into Pierrot-like skullcaps. It was all divine and modern and mad and sometimes, as Beaton said, “terribly unfunny, darling.”8

  The dandies identified with Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, whose caravan of dancers and artists included such dandies’ heroes as Cocteau, Picasso, Stravinsky, Anton Dolin and Leonide Massine. Diaghilev’s troupe dominated London�
�s cultural life in the 1920s but the whole stage scene was booming with the Blackbirds’ review, George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, and the comedies of Noël Coward, “the spokesman of modernity,” whose play Vortex, about drug taking and homosexuals, premiered in 1924.9 Pamela, an outsider, knew little of the trailing comet of the Bloomsbury set, or of Pound, James Joyce and T. S. Eliot. While her ideas remained landlocked in the 1890s, London was moving on to The Waste Land, To the Lighthouse, and Ulysses.

  The new Labour government, briefly in power when Pamela arrived, was led by Ramsay MacDonald; the mood was one of conciliation, progress and pacification, marred by the general strike in 1926.10 “He wishes to do the right thing,” sighed King George V in his diary the day MacDonald took power. The King stood for old power, MacDonald for progress and the new. (The dandies’ royal hero was George’s son, the Prince of Wales, the Pierrot figure who symbolized new England.)

  In 1924, the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley summed up Britain’s sense of pride in progress.11 The Times thought that “many a young man of our cities will find it difficult to walk past the overseas pavilions—with their suggestion of adventure, and space, and a happy life under the open skies of the bush, the prairie and the veld—without feeling that almost irresistible tugging at the heart strings which drew the pioneers of old to cross the oceans and to blaze the trail for those who followed.”

  Pamela was not as enchanted by the pavilions as she was by the arrival at the exhibition of the King. As she reported for The Triad, “I was to see the King for the first time…and then he came…the crowd swept into a sobbing paean of welcome…“The King! The King!” went stepping from mouth to mouth as round the green the little happy horses pranced and bore him to the glaring dais…boom, boom, boom went the guns in Royal salute as the King led the Queen up the steps to a pair of gilt thrones…then the King spoke…The deep firm voice spoke to the Empire, and the Empire in the persons of those members of it who listened there, acclaimed him. I had seen the King!”12