The most mystical experience of her summer came one night in the middle of the desert, when she rode out “a long, long way and it was full moon and there was some ceremony of dancing. Some two thousand Navajos were gathered, and there wasn’t a sound amongst these men, not a sound, except a bridle clinking.” They had made a fire to heat water. All she could hear was the crackle of the sagebrush on the fire or a baby crying. Nothing else, not a sound. “There they were, just sitting, meditating, and one man got up and started to sing and the others began to take it up, and then they were quiet again for a long time and then they got up and danced and then again were quiet.” This marvelous capacity for being quiet enchanted her.36
The day after she received her secret name, Pamela rode at twilight through the Canyon de Chelly, believing her name had been borne on the wind before her.37 The canyon, sometimes called “the baby Grand,” was to Pamela “marvelous, so subtle and lonely. You know there wasn’t a tourist for a hundred miles.” (Pamela might have felt the same sense of mystery in Uluru in Central Australia, had she not been such a stranger to her own native land.) Even the most skeptical traveler falls under the immense spell of the Canyon de Chelly, pronounced “chey” but named for the Navajo word tsegi, meaning rock canyon. Here, the Anasazi tribes lived for four thousand years, then the Hopi and Navajo people. Pamela had already traveled through it on horseback. At first she wore what all the Anglo women wore: blue jeans, high boots, cowboy shirts. “Then suddenly I saw the Navajo women wearing those full skirts, seven yards around…with velvet jackets.”38 She had to have one, too. From these days she adopted two fashions she wore until old age: tiered floral skirts and Indian jewelry, turquoise and silver, with bracelets stacked up each forearm like gauntlets.
At twilight, she found the canyon “most mysterious, because…you go up and it looks as if it is a blank wall and the two sides close in and you don’t really know but your sense tells you that there is a turning. And it is like going up door after door, rising through this opening and the next one. And it was very dark and then the opposite happened, you see and the doors were closing behind me.” There, she was stopped by a group of Navajos who asked her to share their meal and told her how, the night before, they had danced away a nightmare of a woman who had been called by the wrong name. They danced the nightmare to the lip of the canyon, so it was finished with, danced away.39 Pamela thought if only she could dance her nightmares away she would have no pain, no need of any psychiatrist.
Pamela wrote to Jessie to say she was returning to Santa Fe. “Well,” Jessie huffed to her diary, “I’m not very pleased about it. Why can’t she go somewhere else?” But the old friendship survived—just. On July 19, Jessie found Pamela ill in bed at her Santa Fe hotel. When Pamela recovered Jessie did her social duty, playing hostess, taking Pamela on the rounds of Santa Fe. She drove her seventy miles north to Taos, the cultural colony dominated by Jessie’s friends Mabel Luhan, her Indian husband Tony Luhan, the painter Dorothy Brett and the widow of D. H. Lawrence, Frieda Lawrence.
Mabel Ganon Evans Dodge Sterne Luhan was the presiding spirit of Taos. A writer, arts patron and indefatigable hostess, she was a figure of fun to many. Mabel saw Taos as a garden of Eden where the innocents lived in the Taos Pueblo. Home for centuries to the Tiwa Indians, the pueblo resembled an organic sculpture made up of adobe apartments, each reached by a ladder. The pueblo was a magnet for artists as well as social scientists and Jungians, including Carl Jung himself, who after a visit in 1925 saw the Indians of the Taos Pueblo as “the manifestation of prehistoric archetypes.”40
Mabel had lived in New Mexico since 1917, when she followed her third husband, Maurice Sterne, to the capital Santa Fe, where he set up an artists’ studio. They moved to Taos, where she presided over a famous salon of artists and writers who half-loved her, half-loathed her. They sat at her feet or mocked her, just as they had at her equally famous salons in Florence and Greenwich Village. In Taos she found her Shangrila, a place where “the whole world [was] singing in a new key.”41 Mabel and Maurice bought twelve acres of orchard and meadow next to the pueblo and began to invite groups of Indians to their home, Los Gallos, named for the decorative ceramic roosters on the roof. At Los Gallos, the Tiwa Indians played their drums, sang and danced. Mabel, who had led a Dionysian life up until now, regarded them as Apollonian. She cut her hair into a bob, wore a serape, shed Maurice and married Antonio (Tony) Luhan, a full-blooded Pueblo.42
Mabel, they said, had “talons for talent”43 and, once smitten by Taos, was desperate to have it documented by writers, poets and musicians. She said she willed them to come. Around Mabel, one did as one was told. As a friend once said, Mabel was like “an aeroplane laden with explosives.” Her first important recruit to the Taos way of life was John Collier, whom she met in New York when he was a social worker. Next, Mabel lured D. H. Lawrence. She had read his Sea and Sardinia and decided he should write about Taos. Mabel summoned him from Australia, willed him into submission in 1922. At first he was drawn to “the secret essence and mystery of the American continent.” Deeply stirred by the pueblos, desert, the mountains and the Indians, Lawrence found that “the moment I saw the brilliant proud morning sun shine high up over the deserts of Santa Fe something stood still in my soul and I started to attend.” He described New Mexico as “the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had.” But Mabel herself overwhelmed him. With Frieda, he moved to a ranch outside Taos and later wrote with venom about his patroness, whom he described as a “culture carrier who hates the white world and is in love with the Indian out of hate.” Taos, he sneered, was “Mabeltown.”44
Mabel also tried to hook George Gurdjieff. She had heard Gurdjieff and Orage speak at public lectures in New York in 1924, and offered Gurdjieff $15,000 and the use of her ranch as a branch of his French institute. It came to nothing. Gurdjieff wasn’t interested and Orage recommended against it. But, in 1934, Gurdjieff decided to take up the offer. This time Mabel rejected him.45 By the 1930s, Mabel had called to Taos the artist Georgia O’Keeffe, the photographer Ansel Adams, and writers Edna Ferber and Thornton Wilder.
Jessie Orage had been mixing with the Mabel circle since her first year in New Mexico, and in July 1944 she took Pamela to see them all, chronicling in her diary a round of social engagements with Mabel, Tony and Dorothy Brett. But by now, Jessie was near the end of her patience with the self-absorbed Pamela. She asked her friends, was it just her? No, of course not. One said Pamela was too “grasping,” or “too tiresome to bother with,” another found her “too egotistical for words.” By the end of October 1944, Jessie decided: “I think it’s best not to see Pamela again.”
A month before, she had helped Pamela find a house to rent in Santa Fe. It was, perhaps, the oddest house in town. Known locally as the round house, it was the only circular residence in a city of square ones. El Torreon was at 808 El Caminito, near Canyon Road, the long and winding street which later became a street of artists’ studios. The house had been designed to resemble a Spanish colonial torreon, or defensive tower. It might have reminded Pamela of the martello towers along the coast near Killiney in Ireland, where she had picked up Camillus as a baby.
Inside her tower, Pamela longed for home. By November 1944 she was obsessed by the war in Europe, studying the bad news in the Santa Fe New Mexican, which reported that summer: “German flying bombs have killed 2,752 persons and wounded 8,000 others since blind robot attacks centered on London started three weeks ago.” Storm clouds often thundered over Santa Fe. She told Camillus not to cry, it was only the angels moving the furniture in heaven. Sometimes, after the storms, she sensed that the mountains were prowling around the house, in two opposing lines, like a grand chain. After a giant storm one day she walked, as usual, up the back road from El Torreon. Back at the house, she wrote that the mountains had stalked her, like hunters. But when she turned to face them, they all stood still, seeming to say “Well, here we are.” She imagined the piñons were undergoing
a secret experience. Maybe the rain was trickling down their roots, as they stood still “as we stand still sometimes, to feel love trickling down to our hearts’ fibers. The world was still and washed and I was, within myself, on my knees with the adoration of it all, the mountains and the sun and the pale blue thread of the road running out to Tesuque [north of Santa Fe] and I feel a passion of praise for whatever brought me here, even though to suffer.”46
Camillus loved to go with his mother on “jewel walks.” She told him the pieces of mica they picked from the road were diamonds, rubies, sapphires.47 What was under all the sparkles? he asked, and opened his eyes very wide when she answered: “a great ball of burning fire.” One night, he stared through the high windows of El Torreon, then came running to her. “The moon is broken, the moon is broken!” Tears rolled down his cheeks. She went outside and, sure enough, there was only a sliver of moon in the sky. All she could do was to watch with him, night after night, as the moon mended itself, growing and growing.48
That autumn, Pamela prepared her fourth Christmas gift book for her friends. Johnny Delaney, she called it, in honor of another romantic figure from her mythical past. Delaney was supposed to have been the groom on her father’s sugar plantation. The book was dedicated to “Frieda Heidecke Stern, for showing me the way through the canyon.” The canyon is both the Canyon de Chelly and a metaphorical canyon, the kind a woman of forty-five has to cross, from nymph to middle age, from hope to acceptance.
But who was Frieda Heidecke Stern? An extensive search in New Mexico proved fruitless. Perhaps she was an amalgam of Frieda Lawrence and Mabel Dodge Sterne (with the Sterne misspelt.) “Frieda Heidecke Stern” was obviously German, as was Frieda Lawrence, whose maiden name was Frieda von Richthofen. Under the name “Frieda Heidecke Stern” in Johnny Delaney are the words “Wenn ein Tuer zue geht an anders Tuerle geht uff.” This is misspelt German for “If one door closes, another opens.” The fragments Pamela left of her life are sometimes barely adequate to piece together what she hoped to conceal, and this is one such gap in her life. The pain she felt, whether for Francis, Jessie or Gertrude, or all three, remains her secret.
• • •
In February 1945, when Pamela had been back in New York for a few months, Jessie wrote to say she planned to return to Britain. The Atlantic was now relatively safe. Pamela said she would follow, soon. On their last day in New York, the iceman Sam Gloriano came to say good-bye. He dropped a medal of St. Christopher into Pamela’s palm.49 “That Atlantic’s a pretty big sea,” he remarked, “but the kid will be safe with this.” Camillus’s friend, Solomon, stood in the apartment block doorway, watching them climb into the cab. He didn’t wave. He simply held his hand above his head and kept it there until the car turned the corner. At the last moment, Pamela thought he bent and trembled, but perhaps “I saw him through tears.”50
They sailed in March. On the ship, as the last of the bombs were flying over Mayfield, she wrote for the New English Weekly that a lone remaining wolf pack was harrying the convoys bound for home. Once she had visualized the Atlantic as a “sea space separating two countries dear to me.” Now it was the link that joined them—the place where the waters of the Thames and the East River ultimately met.51 The door to both countries now remained always open.
On the ship, Pamela contracted mumps. She was met at Liverpool by officious representatives from the Board of Health and taken by ambulance to an isolation hospital, cut off from friends, forbidden even to use the telephone. Pamela began to feel she had gone mad and “been tidily put away.”
Camillus had been collected by Madge and taken to her new home in Devon. To everyone’s surprise, Madge had married during the war. Her husband was a diplomat, Don Gregory. Camillus wandered, lost, sad and sniffly, among the big trees and huge spaces of the Gregorys’ garden. When her fever had gone, Pamela was free. She traveled by train to Sussex, overcome by the greenness of the grass. The other passengers pointed to the sweet spring lambs, but Pamela could only stare at “the spread and solidity” of the many little fields.52
VJ Day, August 15, 1945, was Camillus’s sixth birthday. The radio crackled out the news of peace from the kitchen into the garden of Pound Cottage, where Pamela sat with Camillus. That night, all Mayfield marched in a torchlight procession to the High Street. The Mayfield Silver Band led the way. At the war memorial, a war widow laid flowers. The villagers marched down Fletching Street to Dunstan’s Croft where they lit a bonfire. After the fireworks, they sang their favorite songs. Over and over came their most favorite, “Bring back, bring back, oh bring back my Bonnie to me, to me…” Someone read a poem, “A Saga of a Village’s War Effort,” written by Major Morris of Little Twitts, Five Ashes. Pamela felt a twinge of guilt. She had not been part of it all.53 But, she later wrote in the New English Weekly, peace—that “cold moment”—was full of possibilities and for Pamela, “the door is hardly opened.”54
11
Monsieur Bon Bon Says Au Revoir
She posed for a snapshot at the door of Pound Cottage in her gingham skirt, layered and frilled in the Navajo style. Pamela seemed the epitome of happy motherhood, a young matron from the pages of a summer fashion catalogue. In her arms was Camillus, his arms entwined behind her neck. She called him “my treasure,” made him drink up all his milk at lunchtime, read him Squirrel Nutkin and Peter Rabbit, worried about his education and decided it must be good, it must be proper. She had gone to the Allora Public School and a college for young ladies in Sydney. He would attend the French school in South Kensington, then Dane Court prep school in Surrey.
At times, Pamela still felt the westward pull of America. It was bracing there. In a piece for the New English Weekly, “Notes on a Homecoming,” she contrasted the United States, vibrant, electric, with sleepy England. America took measurements, asked everything, waited for nobody. England, after the war, made no demands, asked no questions, was without curiosity. England was “heavy and intimate, soft, but firm at the core; sluggish, forever waiting, half asleep on her feet at the crossroads.” Pamela felt a stranger in this stoic, mustn’t grumble land.1
She beat Jessie back to the offices of the New English Weekly by one day. From the quarantine hospital in Liverpool, Pamela had written to the Weekly’s editor, Philip Mairet, asking whether she should resign. She explained something of the tension between Jessie and herself. In any dispute, she had the weaker hand; after all, Jessie owned the New English Weekly. Its masthead listed the editorial committee as “Jessie R. Orage (sole proprietor), Maurice B. Reckitt, Pamela Travers, T. S. Eliot, W. T. Symons and T. M. Heron.”
“Getting in first is typical of Pam,” Jessie wrote in her diary. “When she saw him she said she had thought it over and would let it rest for a time. Philip wanted to know if I minded seeing her. Of course I said no, nor did I see any reason why she should resign or stop writing.” In October, an editorial board meeting was “a bit grim for me because of Pamela, and I was the first to leave although Philip and Symons expected me to dine after. But the thought of a whole evening of Pamela’s presence was too much. I preferred not to waste my emotions. When she came in she swarmed all over ‘Dear Philip.’‘Dear Travers.’ I nearly laughed.”
Pamela never relinquished her place on the board nor her role as a major contributor. From 1945 until 1949, when the Weekly collapsed, she wrote for almost every issue under the bylines P. L. Travers, PLT, or Milo Reeve. In all these pieces, Pamela’s tone was confident, superior, as she reviewed films and books, but mainly theatre. Jessie occasionally objected to remarks in her reviews, with Mairet forever playing the diplomat.
Just before Christmas 1945, Jessie and her children moved into the bottom half of a house in Oakley Street, Chelsea. Above them lived Stanley and Rosemary Nott. Jessie’s diaries end in February 1946, her relationship with Pamela still unresolved, but Pamela’s own sketchy diary notes show the two remained on reasonably friendly terms until Jessie moved out of her life, leaving London for Kent in the 1950s. Pamela may
have kept a diary for years, but at the time of her death the only notebook remaining covered 1948 and 1949. Because of the gap in dates, there is no record by either woman of a traumatic event in Pamela’s life.
In early 1946, the man she had loved was dying. Francis Macnamara’s illness was a mystery to both his doctors and his friends. He seemed shrunken, his skull shape clearly visible through papery skin. He had decided to move to Dalkey, outside Dublin. His last home stood on a cliff, its garden plunging down to the coastline. Macnamara ordered renovations but never saw them completed. At the age of sixty, he died in his upstairs bedroom. The builders had left most of the house unfinished, in total disorder. Macnamara seemed to have vanished at midpoint in an unsatisfactory journey. One of his German friends, an old professor, compared his death to Tolstoy’s death in a railway station. Just before his death, on March 8, 1946, Macnamara had said to his manservant: “Weighed and found wanting.”
On Macnamara’s own instructions all his papers, including a cupboard full of old letters, had been burned. Joseph Hone thought the best of his writing could be found in his “tempestuous and intensely personal letters,” all written in an ornate hand. Hone wrote Macnamara’s obituary in the Irish Times: “He broke a good deal of crockery on his way through life, that of others as well as his own, but I have never heard that he made an enemy. Perhaps only Ireland could have produced a Francis Macnamara and only Ireland could have so failed to give direction to his remarkable gifts.”
Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P. L. Travers Page 21
