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

by Valerie Lawson

  After the broadcasts, the division received messages from all sorts of places saying “let her go on, let her go on telling us the stories.” “Mind you,” said Pamela later, “it was partly my voice and partly somebody translating into every language, but something in them was welcome. One was able to speak to their childhood, and even now I meet people who discover that it was I who had done those broadcasts. They remembered it was an important moment for them. So you see how much I owe to myths and fairy tales, they opened so many doors for me.”15

  In her apartment on 52nd Street, she opened her old books on myths, pored over them into the night, felt the satisfaction of studying a jigsaw of names and connections that helped her make order of her own life. At night, when Camillus was tucked into bed, she read him the fairy tales that had comforted her in Maryborough, Allora and Bowral, tales of vindictive queens, of princes and frogs, and of pumpkins that turn into coaches.

  She claimed that fairy tales had “great things to teach us.” They were “carriers of a very old teaching, a religion, a way of life, a chart for man’s journey.”16 For The New York Times Book Review she wrote of her love of the Grimms, describing the brothers Jakob and Wilhelm with lavish affection. She told the readers of the universality of fairy tales, how she had heard them in Ireland and told by an Aboriginal woman on a sugar plantation in Australia. Fairy tales, she thought, “live in us, endlessly growing, repeating their themes, ringing like great bells. If we forget them, still they are not lost. They go underground, like secret rivers, and emerge the brighter for their dark journey.”17

  • • •

  At three, Camillus, the infant twin separated from his other self, was already showing a fairy-tale-like ability to be two people in one. He declared: “I am two boys, Goodly and Badly.” Pamela wanted to know which he was right now. With an angelic smile, Camillus replied “Goodly,” then closed the door behind him. Immediately, it swung open again. He looked now like a demon. “This is Badly!” he declared and then, with a dubious, anxious look, asked her which she liked best. Pamela quickly replied that she liked them both the same. Camillus threw himself on her with joy.18

  He was not a calm child, nor was he easy to read. Camillus was frightened of cracks in the ceiling, and he took a sudden loathing to the hot water radiator in the apartment because it clanked and fizzled each night when he went to bed. Pamela stood by the radiator, whispering privately to it each time it hissed and laughing out loud when it honked. Camillus begged to be let in to the private conversation, then became the heater’s confidant himself each night until he fell asleep. Pamela remembered her own fear of the captain tap-tapping behind her bedroom wall at home in Queensland.19

  The boy showed a stubborn determination to know the grisly truth and scolded Pamela when she skirted around the details of Ginger’s death at the knackers in Black Beauty. But she was proud of her little boy’s vivid imagination. He told her: “Once upponer time, I were walking along and I came to a house with three wise old woman ladies. I knocked on the door and they said who’s there and I said Camillus John. So they bited me and I spanked them.” Pamela felt this contained all the elements of a profound legend.20

  She spent much of the summer of 1941 on holiday in Maine, but by autumn her mood was no better than before. One day she called Jessie in Santa Fe, sounding, Jessie wrote, “very low.” Jessie’s diary contains the only remaining evidence of the cause of Pamela’s mood, hinting at a worsening relationship between Pamela and Gert. During 1941, Gert had been staying with relatives in Canada but wrote to Pamela to say she planned to move back to New York. Pamela asked her to stay with her, at the apartment. While Pamela was at work, Gert decided to create a bronze bust of Camillus, then a wood engraving showing a wild sea after the sinking of a submarine.

  At the end of the year, the two women rented a house in upstate New York, at Mt. Kisco, where early in January 1942 Jessie called on them during a visit to the East Coast. After she saw Pamela and Gert at home in their “nice house,” Jessie told her diary she was relieved to find herself “at peace about Pamela at last.”

  In July, Pamela wrote to Jessie that she had been “ill in body and mind.” Jessie does not record why, but it is likely that Gert was the reason. Jessie’s diary and Pamela’s travel notes indicate that Gert and Pamela separated some time in 1942.

  Eventually it was Camillus who led Pamela out of depression. When he turned four in 1943, her boy needed more than the routine of the New York apartment. Playschool, outings, the corner store, his new round made her part of the city, where she discovered that “I had, in fact, a very large family.” She planned to write about the release, scribbling notes for an article under the headline “The Big Family.”21 From then on, she wrote, “I really felt I belonged here as much as I do in England.”22

  Pamela saw New York “in the light of its history. I called by its two rivers, letting their currents flow over my grieving mind so that it became peaceful and limber enough to write a book again. Perhaps I found my third Mary Poppins book in those very waters.” Summer, with its expansive heat, invited friendships. She felt the links between herself and all the nameless people she saw on the street, in groceries, in drugstores. Windows and doors, inner and outer, seemed suddenly to open. The odd-job man in the apartment block, Sam Gloriano, became her friend. Sam was the ice-and-rice man. He carried ice up to her apartment and one day tossed out the rice that was burning on her stove and started over with a new pot of water.23

  She took Camillus to watch the organ grinder at the playgrounds by the East River. The monkey, Rosine, dipped into her begging mug and handed Camillus a nickel. That meant lots of return visits. Others in the big new family were the staff at the grocery store. One reached under the counter and slipped her five Hershey bars on a day when she hesitantly asked for candy. At that time, chocolate was worth its weight in diamonds. The store messenger, a black man called Charlie, took Camillus to playschool one morning when Pamela was ill in bed.

  Once, Camillus brought a stranger to the apartment after school. “This is my friend Solomon—I found him in the drugstore.” She discovered he was Charlie’s grandson. His mother had died. Solomon was three years older than Camillus but centuries older in wisdom. At nightfall he would linger, chortling over Camillus’s bedtime story. “That Peter Rabbit! He certainly was some fella. I guess ma Mammy’d have laughed.” Pamela took his photograph with Camillus outside the drugstore, in front of the scarlet signs advertising Coca-Cola and Chesterfields. They wound their arms around each other. Camillus smiled up, Solomon smiled gravely down. Pamela said she learned from Solomon “how to surmount grief. I think only a child could have taught me this, Solomon all unwittingly and wordlessly said to me: Be Happy, all things pass.”24

  • • •

  Pamela set her mind to what Eugene Reynal most wanted: a third collection of Mary Poppins adventures. She planned to call it Good-bye Mary Poppins, “because I thought it would probably be the last one…it seemed I had said all I wanted to say about her.” But Reynal said, “Oh, you must not. I beg you not to! You never know what will happen. How does she go away this time?” Pamela told him that she just opened the door and disappeared. Reynal said, “Let’s call it Mary Poppins Opens the Door.”25

  The book came together in the summer of 1943, when Pamela felt haunted by the terrible bombings of Coventry and the Ruhr.26 The picture she paints of England in this book is more nostalgic and sweetly sentimental than the previous two Poppins collections. It opens with a foggy winter day in London and imagines nightingales singing in the city, recalling the poignancy of the wartime ballad “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.”

  Mary Poppins Opens the Door tells eight separate stories, which start with Mary arriving by umbrella on Guy Fawkes Day. Mr. Banks is enraged because there’s been no nanny to bring order to the house. He is so furious he kicks the furniture. Somewhere in the heavens, Mary knows it is time to return to Cherry Tree Lane. She flies in as a dying ember of the firewor
ks display in the park and in the Banks’s nursery unpacks her carpetbag, complete with tape measure which sizes up the children and finds them “Worse and Worse” or “Willful, Lazy and Selfish.” The tape measure shows Mary as “Better than Ever” and “Practically Perfect.”

  Mary tells Jane and Michael she will stay until the door opens. The children settle into bed and watch, astounded, as the parrot’s head on the end of her umbrella dips its head and plucks colored stars from the silky folds below, then shakes the stars onto the floor where they gleam silver and gold before they fade.

  In the style of the two earlier books, Mary visits an odd relative, Fred Twigley. Fred, like Miss Quigley of Bowral, keeps large and intricate music boxes. In a story within a story, Mary Poppins tells the tale of a china cat who comes alive to give wisdom to Old King Cole. Her fascination with fairy stories is evident in both this chapter, “The Cat That Looked at a King,” and in “Happy Ever After” (already published as her gift book of 1940), in which all the fairy-tale characters come out and play in the crack which emerges between New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. “Inside the crack,” she wrote, “all things are one. The eternal opposites meet and kiss.” The fairy tale people dance and, unlike Pamela, “everyone had a partner and no one was lonely or left out.”

  Mary also takes the children under the sea in a tale which reads like an inspiration for the “Under the Sea” segment of Walt Disney’s Little Mermaid, when the lobster, Sebastian, and his fellow crustaceans jam to a West Indies beat. In Mary Poppins’s sea adventure, also called “Under the Sea,” the cornet fish play silver cornets, the flounder blows a conch shell and the bass beats on a bass drum. The great god of the underwater world, the Terrapin, greets Mary as another of the ancient ones. But not that ancient. The Terrapin calls her his “young relative.”

  “The Marble Boy,” the fourth adventure in the book, borrows from her 1920s fantasy for the Christchurch Sun. The boy, a statue of the Greek god Neleus, comes to life and talks to the Banks children about his brother Pelias and father Poseidon, who are still back in Greece. Mary Poppins, it turns out, is a very old friend of Poseidon’s. The book closes with Mary disappearing on a cool spring day through a mirage door. The children see their entire nursery reflected in the window. Mary escapes into that reflection and makes her way out to the sky through the reflected door. As Mary leaves, Mr. Banks falls in love once more with his wife. He calls her “my dear love” and waltzes in ecstasy to “The Blue Danube.” The melody had wafted to 17 Cherry Tree Lane from a hurdy gurdy in the park. Miss Quigley in Bowral had once waltzed with Pamela to the same sweet waltz. Peace and happiness cloak Number 17. Mary has made everything right. Now she can go once more—for a while.

  This book, dedicated to Camillus, was published in America by Reynal and Hitchcock in November 1943, and in England by Peter Davies in 1944. Both editions included Mary Shepard’s illustrations. Pamela had scribbled many letters from New York to Shepard in London, all with detailed instructions on how each character should look. She told Shepard that Mrs. Clump should be huge and hideous, with a knob of hair at the back of her head. Mary Poppins, she said, must have a new hat, with a big bow perkily and primly placed in front. Mary obediently did as asked and used her husband, “Evoe,” to pose in his office overcoat as a model for Mr. Banks.

  Pamela told Shepard she was so glad to have the book written. She hoped they would do another, sometime, “but not a Mary Poppins. She is away for good now and I am filled with other ideas.”27 Pamela was homesick for Pound Cottage and the soft fields of Mayfield, soon to be scarred by flying bombs launched from the coast of France and dispatched at 180 miles an hour toward London. On June 12, 1944, Mayfield looked up to see the first of Hitler’s doodlebugs. Pound Cottage was saved, but in the next four months at least seventeen doodlebugs crashed around the village, carving huge craters in the ground.28

  But Pamela’s need for home was washed away when John Collier, the Minister for Indian Affairs, suggested that, as a cure for her homesickness, she spend a summer or two in the southwest, on an Indian reservation. As she wrote of the offer, “it seemed an unlikely antidote,” but, in the end, she found it a healing process.29

  She later felt Collier’s offer came as a kind of magic. The next two summers were to be among the greatest experiences of her life. Pamela moved from the gray reality of New York to the brilliantly colored fantasy of the southwest, just as Poppins moves through a mirage door from her earthly Cherry Tree Lane to her heavenly friends in the sky. Here, Pamela discovered what so many artists and writers had found before and after her: spiritual peace and meaning within a beautiful landscape, brittle, red, gray-green. Even the air was different here, rarefied, dry, and mixed with juniper, sage and piñon.

  Like AE before her, Pamela loved the landscape of New Mexico, the mesas—tabletop mountains—painted rose, white or yellow, standing in brilliant relief against the blueness of the horizon. The mountains fell to the ground in folds, like Grecian robes. In the red sandstone of the mesas, dinosaur remains had been found. But now the only danger came from snakes. Pamela loved the feminine architecture, the houses as round and plump as newly baked bread.

  She wrote that with “its dryness, its sage brush and its desert, the southwest reminded me of the extreme beauty of parts of Australia.” Pamela found it “a wonderful place for an artist…nature is at its purest, and you cannot draw a breath without finding a new truth. My writing has deepened and matured in America, but especially during the few months I spent in Arizona and New Mexico.”30

  Her first visit to the southwest was in September 1943, when she took the train from Chicago to Santa Fe. September was the best time of the year to see the town, the month when Santa Fe celebrated the Spanish conquistadors’ resettlement of New Mexico in the late seventeenth century. Jessie, who was living in Santa Fe, found Pamela “looked well but very self-assertive.” She drove her to the fiesta and listened patiently as Pamela read her a chapter from her new Mary Poppins book. Later they talked, once again through the night. On September 29, Jessie wrote in her diary: “She told me about Gert and her unhappiness. Quite a revelation to me and very distressing.” In Pamela’s many personal papers, some left for posterity, others at her London home, there is no evidence of her relationship with Gertrude Hermes or its outcome, and virtually no word, either, of her friendship with Jessie Orage, another relationship to end badly.

  A year passed before she saw Jessie once more, in summer 1944. This time, Pamela stayed in the southwest for five months. She had accepted John Collier’s suggestion that she live for some weeks in Window Rock, a tiny Navajo settlement in Arizona, near the New Mexico border. It looked like a train stop at the end of the world. Named for a big rock studded with a circular hole which might have been molded by a giant melon ball scoop, Window Rock was the home of the Navajo Tribal Council. The council had been formed by the U.S. government after minerals and oil were discovered on the Navajo reservations in the 1920s. Dirt roads wound between a dozen flat-roofed, squat buildings, all resembling the basic building blocks of a Lego set. The buildings were set among eruptions of rocks and mountains that seemed to grow from the flat ground like camel humps.

  John Collier spent little time here himself, leaving the supervision of the Navajos to the Superintendent of Indians, James M. Stewart, who worked for the United States Department of the Interior. Stewart lived in the government-owned hillside settlement built of native stone, south of the town, along with the few hundred Anglos who worked on federal programs. The Navajos lived on their reservation at the base of mountains on fertile land in the Fort Defiance area west of the town.31

  Pamela liked to say she spent the summer on a reservation, but photographs in her albums show that she and Camillus lived in a western-style building that Pamela indicated in one interview was a boarding house. On the grounds in front, grinning for the camera, Camillus sat perched on the back of Silver, a white horse.

  Pamela was driven from place to place in an
old jeep or a truck. She waited each day at a given spot to be told who would be the guide. On the reservations, she tried to “speak little but hear much,” folding herself away so she did not seem to be listening to the Navajos’ stories. She wanted to share the dances and songs, share the silence.32

  In the mother phase of her life, Pamela understood and appreciated the matriarchal society of the Navajos, the way girls were specially honored at puberty, with a public ceremony. Friends and relatives all gathered to celebrate kanaalda: the girl who had just had her first period ran toward the sun at dawn, a little farther every day. Pamela took notes of the Navajo ways, religion, hierarchy, spiritual leaders: first the Holy Ones who can travel on a sunbeam or the wind, the Changing Woman, the earth mother who teaches people to live in harmony with nature, and her children, the Hero Twins, who keep enemies away.

  Pamela felt as though she was learning the Indian myths “direct, not put on for an audience. Gradually I was able to hear some of their stories, elements of their myths and religions, and so to see that these were related, distant cousins but still related to the stories from the rest of the world. I loved…the sparse hot land, the quiet people.”33

  She ate with the Indians in their octagonal homes, called hogans, sat around fires burning sagebrush, “listened among the mountains to the strong high-pitched voice of the rock.” Camillus was “taken by the hand by grave red men, gravely played with, and, ultimate honor, gravely given an Indian name. Its strange beautiful syllables mean “Son of the Aspen.” I would not ask a better thing for him to go through life protected by that strong, sensitive tree that springs so hardily from its native rock, putting on its round green coinlike leaves in summer and dropping them in autumn as golden money.”34 Pamela was given a secret Indian name and told “I must never reveal it and I have never told a soul.” Her secret name, she said, “bound her to the mothering land,” that is the land of the Earth Mother—her own motherland was far away.35