In her first year in England she wrote for both The Triad and the Christchurch Sun, admitting in print to feeling like a country bumpkin, overjoyed at the beauty of an English spring, rushing to New Zealand House to read back copies of the papers, buying Canterbury lamb, and all the time tempting her readers with glimpses of life in exotic London.
She wrote verse, too, including a sentimental sonnet to the memory of Frank Morton for The Triad. But her ambitions were greater. She had her eye on the Irish Statesman, a literary magazine published in Dublin and edited by George William Russell. In early 1925, Pamela sent him some poems, with no covering note, just a stamped addressed envelope for their expected return. On March 13, Russell wrote her a brief letter:
Dear Miss Travers,
I like very much some of the verses which you sent me and hope to make use of one or two of them at an early date in the Irish Statesman. I do not remember seeing verse by you before. Have you published anything? I am sure a book of verse equal to the best of those you sent me would find readers.
Yours sincerely,
George Russell.
The hook had been shaped, the bait taken. From now on, Pamela Travers would spend much of her life in an attempt to live out George Russell’s ideas. She did not just love Russell. She felt as if he was her sun. He was Zeus, she once wrote, and Pamela just a page in his court.13
• • •
For all her years as a reporter, Pamela was a girl in love with the idea of being a poetess, so much in love that within one year, she became a pet and protégée not only of Russell but of a circle of men around him: Yeats, James Stephens, Padraic Colum, Oliver St. John Gogarty and Sean O’Faolain. These people “cheerfully licked me into shape like a set of mother cats with a kitten,” which was “a blessing far beyond my deserving.”14
Russell, almost fifty-seven when he met twenty-five-year-old Pamela, was flattered by her adoration. But by his own admission, he did not understand women and, despite a difficult marriage, kept them at emotional arm’s length. He let many opportunities pass by. As Simone Tery, one of his young women friends, wrote to him, he was “a puritan without knowing it.”15 But for all the frustrations in their friendship, he turned out to be a force for good in Pamela’s life. He was, by far, her supreme guru, her ultimate Mr. Banks, generous, big-hearted and selfless.
Until now, Pamela’s world had revolved around poetry and the theatre, which ran through her life like parallel strands of hair. Russell introduced her to the meaning of fairy tales, to myths, the spirit world and Eastern religions. Now the two strands of hair became woven into this third, making a braid of esoteric, interlinked interests.
The joy she felt in reading his first letter was profound. She wrote back next day. It just so happened, she said, that she planned to come to Ireland to visit her relations. Could she meet him?
“Of course,” he wrote, “I would be delighted if you would call to see me whenever you are in Dublin. I am found at the Plunkett House, 84 Merrion Square, any afternoon except Saturday and Sunday when I am at 17 Rathgar Avenue. I showed some of your verses to W. B. Yeats who thought they had poetic merit and that means a good deal from him.”
This was his standard response, almost a form letter to aspiring writers. As Yeats’s biographer, Roy Foster, has written, Russell was “well known for his undiscriminating adoption of young hopefuls.”16 But to Pamela, the invitation was miraculous.17
In the 1920s, Russell was seen as an intellectual colossus in Dublin. His reputation had spread as far as Washington and New York as he transformed himself from artist to visionary, poet to playwright, economist to editor, then charismatic lecturer and later an adviser to the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. Pamela thought his gifts “wheeled about him as a zodiac.” They did not define Russell, who was, she thought, a spirit. “You might as well tie up a lion in a net of silk as try to fit him into a pigeon hole ticketed economist, journalist or artist.”
A recital of his occupations never explained his impact on his contemporaries. Russell was described by the poet and doctor Oliver St John Gogarty as the anarchic angel, a teacher who taught nothing in particular, but who “communicated the best in himself, which consists of poetry, loving kindness and a passion for beauty more than anything else.”18 He was more like Plato, said Gogarty, than Tolstoy or Chekhov, whom he resembled.
Russell did not underestimate his own charisma. He made theatrical entrances, his bulky body draped in tweed, “his flowing tie half seen beneath the rich brown beard.”19 A memoir written by his friend John Eglinton described him as corpulent, moving heavily in his fifties. His brow was “hidden in a tangle of mouse colored hair never trimmed except by himself.” He had a large full face, high cheekbones, round blue eyes behind small circular spectacles and a pugnacious mouth.20 He smoked a pipe, which discolored his large teeth. The composer and novelist Lord Berners once described his kind of face as one that “looked like the pipe had been there first and the face had grown around it.” Russell puffed constantly, packing his pipe with his favorite coltsfoot-and-tobacco mix. He affected the manner of a distracted artist, often slipping his lit pipe into his pants pocket, setting himself on fire. As well, he was careless about food, wasting no time over meals.21
Russell spoke with the mellow, musical accent of his native Ulster. He had worked in Dublin from 1890, as a clerk with the drapery store, Pim Bros., but his talent was for art. At the Metropolitan School of Art he met Yeats, two years older. They became involved in the occult, attending seances. Russell began to paint visionary paintings in the style of Blake and meditated so profoundly that he started to see spirits.
From Russell’s trips into inner space came the idea for his pseudonym, AE. He had conjured up the most primeval thought he could, and the word aon passed into his head. “I was afterwards surprised at finding out that the gnostics of the Christian era called the first created beings aons and that the Indian word for the commencement of all things is aom.”22 His biographer, Henry Summerfield, thinks he embroidered this theory further into a kind of mathematical formula of the letters AEON:
A = Deity
AE = the first emanation from the Deity
O = static continuance for some time
N = change, that is the spirit returns to God
In the late nineteenth century, this was not as lunatic as it now sounds. The fashion of the time was for all things supernatural, for spiritualism, Eastern philosophy, gurus and spiritual experiments. In 1888, Russell attended meetings of the Dublin Theosophical Society and began to use AE, the first sound of AEON, as his pen name. The fashionable new religion of theosophy was based on Buddhistic and Brahmanic ideas, and revolved around the rather sinister figure of Madame Helena Blavatsky, a Russian who resembled an evil crone in a fairy tale. Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society in 1875 and claimed that she was instructed in esoteric wisdom by a brotherhood of masters in the Himalayas. She maintained that “the universe was permeated by a kind of psychic ether called akasa through which clairvoyance and telepathy could operate and in which were preserved Akashic Records of the whole of man’s history.” One could gain access to these records through spiritual perception.23
Madame said the world was a conflict of opposites, that all souls identified with the Universal Oversoul and that every soul passed through the “Cycle of Incarnation in accordance with Cyclic and Karmic Law.” The magic figure seven featured in all this. The soul had seven elements and it passed through seven planets. There were seven races, seven branch races and seven root races. Just to vary the formula, the soul had about eight hundred incarnations.24
Two years after he fell into this supernatural quagmire, Russell delved further into its depths to became a member of the so-called Esoteric Section of the Theosophical Society. He was now a full-scale, full-time mystic, even moving into the society’s Dublin premises for seven years. AE was already fascinated by Eastern and Indian religions and had been studying the ancient sacred Hindu texts, the Upanishads
and the Bhagavad Gita.
Russell studied with James Pryse, a Theosophist who ran Blavatsky’s own press, and had lived with an Indian tribe. Even in old age, AE called Pryse his “guru” and believed him to be the only author to have written on mysticism from real knowledge since the death of Blavatsky.25
Russell already meditated on the chakras, the seven main centers of spiritual power which lie from the base of the spine, through the navel, solar plexus, heart, throat, forehead and crown of the head. Pryse explained that certain visions they both saw were chakras on the face of the earth; Indians, American Indians and Greeks also appeared in their visions.
Russell was also entranced by Irish folklore and believed he could see the little people. He was in the west of Ireland, lying on the sand, when he first heard “the silvery sound of bells.” His vision sounds now like the sincere ravings of a spotter of UFOs. He saw “an intensity of light before my eyes…I saw the light was streaming from the heart of a glowing figure. Its body was pervaded with light as if sunfire rather than blood ran through its limbs. Light streams flowed from it. It moved over me along the winds, carrying a harp and there was a circling of golden hair that swept across the strings. Birds flew about it and over the brows was a fiery plumage as of wings of outspread flame….there were others, a lordly folk, and they passed by on the wind as if they knew me not or the earth I lived in.”26
His poetry at this time dwelt on spiritual journeys and the temptations that lay in store for the mystic. AE liked to linger around twilight and sunrise, explaining that the colors of the sky at these times of day were best for meditation. In this way, and with the emphasis of Yeats’s twilight fantasies, the two poets reinforced in Pamela the significance of the magic of twilight that she had already experienced in Allora.
In 1898, AE married a member of the Theosophical Society, Violet North, who had succeeded Pryse as printer of the Irish Theosophist journal. Violet also saw visions. AE might have gone right over the edge if his common good sense and interest in literature had not acted as a counterbalance. He had joined the Irish Literary Society, which promoted a new Irish school of literature and he helped establish the Irish National Theatre (later the Abbey). Russell’s middle years coincided with those two decades from 1890 to 1910 which saw a blossoming of the arts and literature in Ireland, inspired by the Celtic past. The leaders of the revival formed their versions of European salons, revolving around Lady Augusta Gregory, George Moore and Yeats, all Anglo-Irish and Protestant patriots.27
Before the First World War, his network grew from merely an Irish circle to an international group. Through his promotion by the former Irish politician and social reformer Sir Horace Plunkett he became a cult figure to many, including Henry Wallace, an American preacher and agriculturalist who advised the American president, Theodore Roosevelt. Wallace sent his grandson, Henry Agard Wallace, to Ireland to meet Horace Plunkett and AE. The grandson was most impressed. He shared with AE an interest in theosophy. It turned out to be a useful friendship for AE when Wallace became vice president in the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
AE was not so much the seer that he grew into a downright bore. His friends loved his Sunday night salons, more casual than Yeats’s salons on Monday nights. By the time he settled at 17 Rathgar Avenue in 1906, Sunday with AE was a feature of Dublin social life. He held center stage, explaining and interpreting anything, from dairy farming or the Bhagavad Gita to the Abbey Theatre. He clearly loved the sound of his own voice. Reading from books, or delivering his sonorous monologues, he emphasized the finer points with a flourish of his pipe.
Despite an uneasy tension between AE and Yeats, which lasted all of AE’s life, the two men remained friendly. Yeats recommended to Horace Plunkett that AE become the organizer for a new agricultural banking network within the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society (IAOS), which Plunkett had founded. This was not merely a farming group but the basis for a new utopia, centered on cooperative creameries to be run by Ireland’s poor farmers. Village communities would grow around each creamery. Communal marketing of eggs and butter might then lead to other, domestic and personal ways of sharing. Gymnasiums, libraries and galleries would all serve the people.28 Such visions were shared by Henry Wallace Sr. and later John Collier, who was to become United States Commissioner for Indian Affairs. These men liked to talk of “cooperative life in precapitalist times,” and praise noble savages such as the Eskimos.29 All these connections were to prove important to Pamela.
AE took to the new job like a latter-day brother Grimm, not just talking soil and crops, but collecting folk tales as he went from farm to farm. In 1905, he also became the editor of the IAOS’s magazine, the Irish Homestead, which promoted the cooperative movement’s message, pushed Irish arts and crafts, and published James Joyce.
Two years before Pamela met AE, he had become the editor of the Irish Statesman, which Plunkett published from 1923, and which incorporated the Irish Homestead. Launched with the backing of a group of American Irish investors including the judge Richard Campbell, the group put in enough money for the magazine to last at least five years. The backers did not dictate its politics. It steered “a wide deep middle way, editorially.”30 But it supported the new Irish Free State and it was clear AE had Labour Party sympathies. His columns promoted the need for bigger schools and colleges and less expensive administrations.
AE wrote much of it himself, like Frank Morton inventing pseudonyms “to make the paper look as if it was written by many pens.”31 The magazine included his thoughts on local and international politics, art and literature, and ran contributions by George Bernard Shaw, Gogarty, Padraic Colum and James Stephens. But, always, there was financial stress. The Irish Statesman lost money every week32 and the American guarantors, already edgy, were asked in 1925 to invest even more.
AE’s editorial base was at IOAS headquarters in Plunkett House, at 84 Merrion Square, one door away from Yeats’s home. The door, deep and wide, stood under an elegant semi-circular window set in its Georgian facade. On the second floor, AE sat behind a pile of papers at a mammoth desk. Brown wallpaper was covered by his fantastic murals, among them heroic and supernatural figures, including a woman holding a flaming torch and, over a doorway, a wolf.33
Within this painted gallery of an office, AE offered Pamela some tea in his one unchipped cup. It was lavender. He introduced her to Susan Mitchell, his assistant, and to his deputy editor, Jimmy Good, who sensed the falseness in Pamela’s name. Jimmy insisted she should be Lady Pamela. She liked the sound of that, Lady Pamela Travers. AE told her he would publish all the poems she had offered. He had a few suggestions on her work, of course,34 and asked her to call again on her way back to England.35
In a daze of happiness, she went off to her Goff relatives in County Wexford, bursting to tell them she had met the great AE. They merely lifted their eyebrows. These Goffs had no use for poetry, preferring horses to the Celtic literary renaissance.36 They dismissed Cathleen ni Houlihan as some kind of aberration, regarded twilight as simply a patch of time between night and day, and most definitely did not approve of Pamela’s life in London as a writer. Fleet Street was home to “such frightful people.”37
Pamela did return to Dublin. She walked once more to Merrion Square, AE and the painted room. But, once at the door, she found she could not touch the bell. AE had just been polite, she told herself. AE was a great and busy man. She turned away.38
Three weeks later, answering a knock at her own door in London, she found him there on her doorstep with a great parcel of books under one arm.
“You’re a very faithless girl,” AE told her. “You said you would come on your way back and then you never turned up. I had these books waiting for you.” They were his collected works, each of the books inscribed.
From then on, AE wrote to her at least every month, often in response to her volley of contributions to his magazine. Always he told her his copy box was full or overflowing but that he could not resist one more
poem. In May 1925, he had “enough sketches to last me for months but I like the verses so much I must keep them.” In March next year, “the copy box was well brimmed up and running over but I couldn’t resist the temptation of squeezing your last poem into it.”
In 1925 he published three of her poems in the Irish Statesman. The first, called “Christopher,” appeared in April, “The Coming” in July, and “Te Deum of a Lark” in November. Two poems he published in 1927, “The Dark Fortnight” and “Happy Sleeping,” had strong references to the work of Yeats. In the last verse of “The Dark Fortnight” Pamela wrote:
I will go and find me a spear
of wild goose feather wrought
and fashion the ears of a hare
to a parchment of silk
and pray to the ewes of thought
to let down their milk . . .
An obvious inspiration was Yeats’s “The Collarbone of a Hare,” written in 1917, which ends:
I would find by the edge of that water
The collar bone of a hare
Worn thin by the lapping of water,
And pierce it through with a gimlet and stare
At the bitter old world where they marry in churches
And laugh over the untroubled water
At all who marry in churches,
Through the white thin bone of a hare.
In December 1925 AE gave her what he called the best Christmas gift, news that her verses had been “lifted out of the Irish Statesman to the Literary Digest, which has the largest circulation of any literary journal in the USA.” Early the next year, AE was “sorry the box of poems is full but I cannot resist the temptation of keeping your delightful lyric, “Happy Sleeping,” which I am sure will be in The Best Poems of 1926 if such a thing comes out.”
Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P. L. Travers Page 9
