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

by Valerie Lawson

  Not many students went to the suite for a second lecture. Pamela had no understanding of why she was being left alone. In search of some male company, she agreed to an interview for Amherst University’s Four College radio station WFCH and gave an encouraging interview to the Amherst Record, saying she welcomed students from all the neighboring institutions. “I love meeting people, faculty and students. I don’t want to be left alone on a shelf like a Dresden china ornament. I like to have men come because their questions are so good and the girls become better when men are present.”31

  The gambit seemed to work, and through November she spent time at Amherst with Professor Peter Marshall of the Classics Department who had agreed to work on the Latin translation of Mary Poppins from A to Z. Her namesake Pamela, daughter of her agent Diarmuid Russell, also lived in Amherst with her husband Andrew Haigh. She charmed their friends and their children, but, said Pamela Haigh, “this was a public performance, the way lots of people give them. She saw herself as a performer. She had a theatrical flair. There was quite a difference between the private person and public persona. She was quite lonely and defensive, about her work. And she had no car, she was dependent on us to do the ferrying.”32

  One evening Pamela asked Francis Murphy, an associate professor in Smith College’s English Department, to drive her to a party at Amherst. The house, down an unlit road, proved to be hard to find. Murphy thought she saw something on the road, stopped the car, found it was only a muffler, and threw it in a ditch. Instead of helping, Pamela told Murphy, “Well, do take care, I don’t want to lose my driver.” Remembering the detail of the evening thirty years later, Murphy thought Pamela could not “sort people out because she was intensely self-centered. She treated me as her driver yet I was an English professor. She expected a great deal. She thought that the students would come and ask what they could do for her. She wanted Mary Poppins translated into Latin because Winnie-the-Pooh had been, and she had asked me if there was a good Latinist—a really famous Latin scholar—to do this. She had big intellectual pretensions. There was a lot of Mary Poppins about her, that commanding air, but it didn’t work that way in real life.”33

  On December 13, a few weeks before Pamela left Smith College, Look magazine published an article by Joseph Roddy, well known to Pamela’s friend at Radcliffe, Deane Lord, who was also friendly with the Look editors. Headlined “A Visit with the Real Mary Poppins,” the article featured a flattering photograph of Pamela and began with a word picture of a sophomore knocking on “P. L.’s door,” announcing “I’m looking for peace of mind.” It went on: “ ‘Oh, that’s a marvelous search,’ P. L. says, ‘but peace of mind is not for you my dear. Nobody young can have it.’ ” Roddy, who thought the Smith girls had a “dangerous radiance about their eyes” reported how the talk “leaps across centuries every night P. L. has open house.” Roddy continued, “She wants, to be plain, more men around, because without them, girls will ask her how to write for children. ‘How should I know? I don’t write for children, I turn my back on them…My dear, I delude myself into thinking my books are grown-up books.’ ” Roddy wrote that, “In a moment, the Smith girls were talking about the life stages of women: nymph, mother, crone.” Pamela was “a timeless, gentle lady coexisting in all three.” She told him, “There is too much stress on ramming in knowledge. Education is thinking and listening.” What a pity, she said, that she was treated at Smith “like a piece of Dresden china on a shelf…when I came, they said to me, ‘All we want to do is touch the hem of your garment.’ ”34

  That was really too much for the Smith women. Five planned to write to the editor to complain about the depiction of Smith students “wise beyond their years with dangerous radiance around their eyes” coming to this guru for peace of mind and tea. Later, Patricia Forster wrote in the Smith College Quarterly that “Miss Travers implies in the article she is leaving Smith because she wants more men around. I’m sure if she stepped beyond the confines of her private suite in Smith she would have found men almost every day of the week. One gets the impression from the article that Miss Travers is a witty, benign, delightful well-beloved lady who felt misunderstood at Smith. She claims we treated her like a piece of Dresden on a shelf. If that is true, it is because she made it clear that was what she wanted and expected.”35

  Two weeks after the Look piece, The New York Times published a kind of rebuttal that showed evidence of real digging by the reporter, Richard R. Lingeman. Just the same, he was not able to persuade the Pamela critics to come out in public. He quoted an “English professor” who said, “She’s as touchy as hell. It’s a mistake to say she’s a beloved English writer.” A “visiting scholar, known for his acidulous characterizations of fellow denizens of the academic jungle” said, “I absolutely refuse to talk about her. All I know is a lot of rumor, hearsay and gossip.” A “plump girl at Lamont House” remarked, “Miss Travers—we call her Miss Poppins—is really opinionated and just dismisses everything we say to her. She said you can just knock on the door and go in, but nobody respected her intellectually, so no one made the big effort.” And a “pretty brunette” told the reporter, “Some students felt the college should have invited a more intellectual writer in residence. They don’t respect her because she is a commercial success.”

  Lingeman thought her “penchant for privacy converted her into a sort of ogre lurking behind her door whose meals were brought in.” One day a few students passing saw that hardly anything on the tray had been touched. They wrote a note, “Think of all the starving children in China!” Later, they learned that “Miss Travers suffered from stomach trouble and felt sorry.” On the other hand, he had seen a happy Thanksgiving note pinned to the notice board asking the students to “Come and see me, I’m always at home, just knock on my door.”36

  By the time the article appeared, Pamela had left Smith forever and was soon to return to London. She had one last bit of business on the East Coast. Early that year, she suggested a Mary Poppins bronze statue be erected in Central Park. A letter to the Parks Commissioner of the City of New York, Thomas Hoving, brought a reply in March 1966 that when she came back to the United States next fall, he hoped she would be in touch about the statue. It would be “a lovely thing” for the park, “if the money can be found.” That summer, Pamela had posed on tiptoe at Shawfield Street for sculptor T. B. Huxley-Jones, who prepared some pen-and-ink sketches of Mary Poppins looking more like Julie Andrews than a Mary Shepard drawing. In October, Thomas Hoving held a press conference to say his department would erect the statue. It had three pledges amounting to $4,500 but was calling for more contributions to cover the $10,000, the cost of a life-sized bronze of Mary Poppins. She would join Alice in Wonderland and Hans Christian Andersen in the Conservatory Lake area of the park, near 72nd Street. He handed out copies of the sketch, but declined to name the three contributors.

  In November, Pamela told The New York Times that the statue should not be a climbing statue like Alice. “Mary Poppins is not someone you climb on. Statues have their own kind of dignity too.” The next month, she grumbled that the news on the statue had been given prematurely. It would not be near the statues of Alice and Hans Christian Andersen, as these were “gigantic works and I have never seen Mary Poppins as more than life size but rather less. I have always preferred the small and delicate to over large.” Pamela stuck with the story, telling an academic researcher in the 1980s that “the park people” decided against the statue because “a non climbable statue would not blend in.”37

  But an internal Parks Department memo written in December showed the project failed through lack of interest. The only problem was, what should they do with the money? There was only $2,100 in the account. Of this, $2,000 had been contributed by Pamela. The remainder was made up of very small contributions from about thirty people. “This money with interest, if any, has to be returned to all these people, probably with a delicately drafted explanation. The money returned to Pamela Travers should be accompanied b
y an even more delicately drafted letter.”38

  Pamela was on her way to total obscurity, to the state of Anon which she always claimed she most desired.

  15

  Looking for Pamela Travers

  In her old age, Pamela gravitated to the gurus of the New Age. As the new hippies reveled in the Age of Aquarius, she became their spiritual sister. Rather than settle into the soothing tick tock of the rocking chair, Pamela traveled restlessly from guru to guru, seeking cure after cure, from the Black Forest to Rome, from Switzerland to Ireland, California to New York—still in search of herself, even in her seventies.

  Euripides said that “the wisest men follow their own direction and listen to no prophet guiding them.” But Pamela could never quite discard her prophets. While she stayed faithful to von Dürckheim, she also fell under the spell of the charismatic Indian guru, Krishnamurti. The late 1960s and the 1970s went by in a daze of meditation as she gazed at Buddhas and dabbled with Sufism.

  Three demons drove Pamela now. The first was a fear of her own death. Although she had consistently lied about her age, she knew of course that she would soon be seventy. In an effort to preserve and glorify the public P. L. Travers—soon to be further elevated with an OBE and doctorate—she planned to sell her literary papers to a university and to donate a collection of Mary Poppins mementos to the New York Public Library. The second demon drove the private Pamela to sum up her life through spiritual disciplines. She hoped each of her gurus held the key to her secret self, the one that had fallen asleep in her childhood. As she wrote in About the Sleeping Beauty, if you don’t waken it, life is meaningless. The theory that adult sleepers must wake to enlightenment was underlined by Ouspensky’s and Gurdjieff’s teaching, one she herself passed on to a Gurdjieff group which gathered in her home in the 1970s. Pamela once told the group the story of an angel who comes to all babies at birth and tells them the meaning of life. But sshhhh! they mustn’t tell. The angel places a finger on the babies’ mouths, which is why we all have that distinctive curve of the upper lip—what’s left from the gentle pressure of the angel’s finger. Most people forget the angel’s message, but through diligent seeking, the meaning of life might be recalled.

  None of this was much help in dealing with the third demon, physical distress, which attacked her in the abdomen, the very area she thought was her spiritual center. The pain was always compounded by worry over Camillus. It had been almost a decade since he learned of his adoption, yet Camillus had not rejected Pamela and had never gone looking for his family, unlike his sister Sheila, who went on a search for her real family and found them in 1964 by ringing all the Hones in the Dublin telephone directory. Camillus, whose real mother had died in 1963, retained the name Travers, and stayed on more or less friendly terms with Pamela. But his life, like that of his own father, was badly affected by drinking. It affected whatever job he turned to, from broking to working in a fashion business with a friend, Martin Harris.

  Pamela tried to surrender herself to the idea that she had done everything possible for her son, and would hand him over to God. She never could. In March 1967, Pamela returned to the Salvadore Mundi Hospital where she wrote to a friend that she hoped the treatment would help. But, as this was a chronic condition, much of the cure was a case of mind over matter.1 After Rome, she planned to go on to Todtmoos to see von Dürckheim for another week.

  Pamela’s old journalistic bogeyman—you are nothing without something in preparation or in print at all times—could not let her abandon her Shawfield Street studio. Several projects were on the boil. Still aiming for a posthumous halo, she offered her literary papers and AE’s letters to Texas University (the asking price was $15,000). As well, there was the outline for a possible Broadway play of Mary Poppins, the final proofs to check for a Latin edition of Mary Poppins from A to Z, and, finally, a Mary Poppins Story for Coloring in 1968.2

  There was something rather shameful about a children’s coloring book. All along, she was thinking of something much more profound, the tale of an heroic, godlike monkey. During 1966, she had started work on a project which would be published five years later as Friend Monkey. At first glance, the novel is an overblown imitation of Mary Poppins, but it was designed to be a statement of her religious faith, a summing up of her childhood, and a symbol of her fascination with the legends of India, the birthplace of many fairy tales and myths.

  Set in London in 1897, Friend Monkey tells how a little monkey travels on board a ship to London. There, he is taken in by the family of poor-but-honest Alfred Linnet, a shipping company clerk at the Port of London. Linnet makes lists of goods as they’re unloaded, the crates of tea, bags of sugar and spices and rolls of silk. This monkey is not just a piece of animal cargo, but a servant with a human soul who is so eager to help that wherever he goes he creates chaos from order—the reverse of Mary Poppins. The Linnet household has much in common with 17 Cherry Tree Lane. Mrs. Linnet, like Mrs. Banks, is vague and flustered. The Linnets have two children, with the boy, Edward, being the sensitive equivalent of Jane Banks. But while the Banks are reasonably well off, the Linnets are poor. Their benefactress is their elderly neighbor, Miss Brown Potter. The villain of the story appears to be Professor McWhirter, an animal fancier and collector, to whom Pamela gave a dreadful Scottish brogue—“Nay, he’s a puir, low spirited creature more frightened ah don’t doot than yersel.”

  Pamela admitted to the similarity of themes in Friend Monkey and Mary Poppins—“perhaps I am not very inventive.” She conceded that Miss Brown Potter contained elements of Mary Poppins as well as the explorer Mary Kingsley, and Beatrix Potter, with whom she shared both her name and sheltered upbringing.3

  Pamela never confessed that Miss Brown Potter was in fact another version of Aunt Ellie. While Ellie owned two dogs, Badger and Tinker, Miss Brown Potter has a badger called Tinker and a dog, Badger. Both Ellie and Miss Brown Potter wore black bonnets with flowers, velvet capes studded with jet and elastic-sided boots. They were both shy and lonely girls brought up by governesses. Both remembered watching their parents’ parties, the swish of taffeta, and the tinkle of silver on china and glass against the background of a quartet playing The Blue Danube. Like Aunt Ellie, and Pamela herself, Miss Brown Potter was an inveterate traveler, and in her youth had dreamed of faraway places. She had even considered Australia. And while Aunt Ellie sheltered the Goff girls and Pamela adopted a little boy, Miss Brown Potter took into her household a deaf and dumb African boy called Stanley Livingston Fan. The whole of Friend Monkey is redolent with Pamela’s past in Allora and Bowral and even acknowledges her true beginnings: Mr. Linnet is the alter ego of Pamela’s grandfather, Henry Lyndon Bradish Goff, a London shipping agent.

  As Pamela told the writer Shusha Guppy, “Friend Monkey is really the favorite of all my books because it is based on a Hindu myth of the monkey lord who loved so much that he created chaos wherever he went. If you read the Ramayana you will come across the story of Hanuman on which I built my version of that ancient myth.”

  In Ramayana, Hanuman was the servant of the high king, Rama, whom he helped in a battle with the demon king of Ceylon. When Rama was wounded, Hanuman knew that the only herb to heal the wounds was far away, in the Himalayas. He took one leap from Ceylon to the Himalayas, where he seized not just one herb but a whole mountain top of herbs. Hanuman was enshrined in India as a god of the people. Worshiped in his own temples, he was supposed to bestow the gift of long life.

  Pamela had thought of the meaning of the Ramayana since AE had told her of the myths of India when they walked on the sand in Donegal. Now that she knew much more, from Zen Buddhism to the origins of the fairy tales, the monkey god meant even more. She had traced the fairy tales of Russia, Europe and Scandinavia back to their origins in India and Persia, and she wondered if the Brothers Grimm knew that all their princes had Rama as their “hidden name.” Pamela knew also that the Indian god Vishnu had sent to earth nine avatars (a god in visible form), one being Rama, another Bud
dha, but that Vishnu had yet to send the tenth avatar, who would usher in a new world. This avatar would be a white horse, like the white horse who inspired Mary Poppins when Pamela told the story to her sisters by the fire in Bowral.

  Ever since she looked for salvation in Dürckheim’s prescription of Christianity and Buddhism, Hanuman had been her own personal myth. She was thrilled by his excessive love, the kind that “cannot wait to serve.” There was something magical in the fact that he had no half measures, always overdoing things in his selflessness. But above all, Hanuman was for her the loving servant of God, just as she began to insist that Mary Poppins was, above all, a servant.4

  Pamela had started to write Friend Monkey in her Chelsea studio when Gurdjieff friends asked her to look after a family of three Tibetans visiting London. Yes, they could stay in her studio, she said, privately irritated that her sanctuary would be occupied for weeks. Not only that, but she had to make them special meals complete with extra chilies, do their washing and even find an appropriate doctor when one became ill. When they left at last, she went back to her desk as a thirsty woman goes to water, to find her two-hundred-page Friend Monkey manuscript had disappeared. In line with her New Age beliefs, Pamela called in two dowsers, who went over the house with pendulums. They searched everywhere, even in hat-boxes and luggage, in the bathroom, the garden, under the sofa. Nothing. Resigned at last to the possibility of it having been tossed out in the garbage, Pamela tried to forget the story of the monkey who came to serve.

  • • •

  In 1968 she returned to von Dürckheim’s care in Todtmoos, this time working with him on a translation of his book The Way of Transformation: Daily Life as a Spiritual Exercise. She took notes of her dreams, her fears and resolutions, how she was rich but felt poor, how she might be a good mother to herself, how to build courage, confidence and patience, how to do something different each day, and get rid of “all that blocks inner life.” Slowly Pamela began to rewrite Friend Monkey. The meditation had helped it return. By the time she moved on to Switzerland the same summer, a third draft came to her word for word as it was in the original.