Mary Poppins, She Wrote

by Valerie Lawson

  Pamela said she bore this in “seething silence,” but that silence was more likely to have been full of intimate unspoken thoughts than hostility. It was possibly the most intimate act AE could dare to perform: Pamela’s bare legs, slipping on the woolly socks, winding string around her calves.

  They set off for the Laws, AE in front as usual, chanting Eastern scriptures—again—his feet sure of every step. Pamela, stuck in the bog, cried out to him. He turned and simply laughed. He told her to take off the boots, to go barefoot, he’d enjoy taking a dryad to lunch. She was silent. Just then, AE seemed for a second to understand her. “I’m a fool,” he cried down to her. “You don’t want a philosophy, you want a life!” He knew and she knew that Pamela had heard enough of the Eastern scriptures to last a lifetime. She wanted someone to clear the obscurity away, not add to it, not burden her that day with another theory and another, but simply to live. A young man might have kissed her then. AE let another opportunity go by. He could see, but he could not react to the little signs that say “come forward, don’t retreat.” Pamela wanted AE to tell her who she was. “Acolyte, daughter, apprentice?” she wrote later. “I never knew.”

  During these days on the yellow tongue of sand on the back Strand, AE painted and sketched her, once in a tree looking down on him. Once, he had started a landscape when he suddenly looked up at her. “Do you see them?” “No,” she answered, half regretful, half awed. Whatever his vision, she knew he wanted her to see it, too. She had failed him.

  AE had felt the old psychic vibrations again. He rapidly sketched a host of fairies. Pamela watched smoke start to emerge from his pocket. “AE, be careful, you’re on fire!” He looked down. The smoke was escaping from the pipe he had slipped into the dark blue serge pocket of his pants. His wife, he told Pamela, would have to reline another pocket. He showed her his fairy canvas. AE had sketched her, too, on the branch, the wild-eyed girl. He was soon to start calling her Pixie.55

  AE wrote to her on July 1, “I was very sad that you went away after so many gray days in a beautiful country.” He was sorry he could not amuse her. “My wretched old mind lost its spring. Even ten years ago I had a super-abundance of energy. I was young enough in my mind to make even you feel I was your contemporary. But you were very sweet to your elderly friend.” At the bottom of the letter was his sketch of Pamela in her walking gear with the message, “Do you remember the paper leggings in the boots?”

  AE praised her vitality, “so much vitality that I am sure when you are 80 you will be able to dominate your juniors or grandchildren and you may remember through the mists of time that you had an elderly friend who wrote poetry under the name AE who wanted to stroke her fluffy hair as you looked like a poor little duckling in a storm, but refrained lest you might think he did not treat you with sufficient dignity. Do you still have the dreams of the little house in the windy gap?”

  He remembered how she dreamed of living up there, on a house on Horn Head, and how from Janey’s he would call her to him by semaphore, for a chat. “You do feel better after your visit, don’t you Pixie dear, I would be terrified if you had gone back from Donegal not feeling better than when you went. With Love, AE.”

  Late in 1927, Pamela told him she was tired of making plans and being responsible for herself. He reassured her that the “seer in me sees some very large man swooping down upon you and marrying you in the near future. I hope he will be very benevolent as well as a very large man. I think you deserve a gigantic husband with the powers like Aladdin to build you a tower in which you can write with ease and peace.”

  It could not be him, of course. “Dear Pamela,” he wrote in December 1927, “pray for me…curse me for being an idiot going away.” AE was about to leave Ireland for the first of his American lecture tours, sailing from Liverpool on January 14, 1928. He left Jimmy Good in charge of the Irish Statesman. The magazine had continued to bleed and the American friends had suggested a lecture tour organized by Judge Campbell as the only way he could recoup the money quickly.

  Pamela asked if he had time to go to London to see her before his three-month trip. No, “I have so many things to do here” before leaving Dublin on the boat to Liverpool. “It was delightful of you to suggest you should come down to see me off but do not go to the expense. Why should you empty your pockets for the sake of a handshake?” But, later, “do let me pay your hotel bill or your railway fare, which ever is largest, I can run to that.”56

  On January 13, the night before the Albertic sailed for New York, Pamela met AE in Liverpool. They went to the movies. Before the show, a man played the violin, badly. AE kept talking until he was hushed by the angry patrons. Pamela went to the dock the next day, in the rain. He held both her hands and stroked her wild and springy hair. “My angel,” he said as they parted.57

  6

  Lovers, Gurus and the Glimmering Girl

  AE’s voyage to New York marked the beginning of Pamela’s own long journey from Ireland to America. Where he led, she must follow. Just as she had caught his coattails in Dublin, she eventually traveled in his wake to Washington, to the universities of the East Coast, and to the rose-amethyst mountains of New Mexico. But first, as usual, came the practicalities.

  Pamela was surviving on a tight budget in Lincoln Square from her fees from The Triad. But this magazine, along with so many others with literary pretensions, lived precariously. She needed to woo new publishers. Before AE left for the United States, she had asked him if she could work at the Irish Statesman. He replied, in October 1927, that he would love to have her for a colleague but it was impossible to employ any journalist full time other than Jimmy Good. “Much of it is written by professors, civil servants, and the like, in their spare time,” he wrote. “All Irish weeklies are run this way, mainly to assist some cause, and in many, there is no payment at all. That is why I have never suggested to you to write articles for me because I know you get paid three times as well in London.” And, he added, if the American friends, who now included a Senator Cullinan, did not help, “the paper will end at the middle of next year or autumn at the latest.’1 AE ended on a flippant note, suggesting that if ever the magazine became rich, he would pay her an income so large that she could “afford to keep a husband.”

  Pamela was more in need of someone to share the rent. AE had suggested Madge Burnand, “an extremely nice girl” who was learning printing. “You want a companion,” he wrote, “it is unpleasant to live alone.” Madge was one of six daughters of the late Sir Francis Burnand, a prolific playwright as well as a barrister with chambers at Lincoln’s Inn. For twenty years, Burnand had also edited Punch, which, under his reign, had expanded its coverage of art and literature.2 His daughter Madge—tall, rangy, bony—was as well educated as her father. She liked Blake—another of Pamela’s literary heroes.

  When AE was in the United States, Madge moved into Pamela’s flat in Lincoln Square. The two women remained together for more than a decade, the friendship growing more and more intense. In the beginning, Madge was mainly a financial prop—paying half the rent—but the relationship always had two other vital elements. The first was practical: Madge, born in Ireland and retaining strong literary connections there, represented an important link for Pamela to the Irish network she loved. The second was messy and emotional. Madge’s practicality was often overwhelmed by a sense of frustration and unprovoked anger, both of which developed as the two women became closer.

  In the late 1920s, the practical Pamela knew that as a freelance journalist she had to remain in London, close to Fleet Street. But the romantic Pamela dreamed of working in Ireland, just like a real writer. AE had written to her in October 1927: “You talk of living in a little cottage in the Wicklow Hills. It is very romantic and rather remote from Dublin. My experience of friends who went to live in the Wicklow Hills is, I see them far less often than I did when they lived in London.” He thought Ireland might lose its glamour if she lived there and pointed out she would have to do all her own cooking. “Wa
s my poem ‘A Cottage on the Mountainside’ responsible?”3

  Whenever she was in Dublin, Pamela attended AE’s salon at Rathgar Avenue, where he had gathered “so many poets to add to the number of your acquaintances and friends.”4 She had loved that room where, AE told her, Maud Gonne used to sit by his fire braiding her hair and “keening for the wrongs of Ireland.”5 One evening, AE took her to Yeats’s sherry party in Merrion Square.6 Yeats insisted she accept copies of a couple of his poems, including “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” written in 1897, which tells of “a glimmering girl with apple blossom in her hair, who called me by my name and ran and faded through the brightening air.”

  Pamela said she set some of Yeats’s poems to music. “He asked me to sing them to him which I did. “Beautiful,” he said, “beautiful. I couldn’t have imagined anything more like them.” Pamela was overjoyed. Next day she told AE. “You must sing them to me as well,” he said, but, breaking the spell, whispered “Yeats is tone deaf.”7

  Among the crowd at Yeats’s and AE’s salons, one man stood out for his wit and his charm. He was Oliver St. John Gogarty, whom Yeats called one of the great lyric poets of the age—though he was better known as a surgeon. Gogarty drove a yellow Rolls-Royce and held his own soirées on Fridays, at home at 15 Ely Place. When Gogarty met Pamela he was almost fifty and married. She thought of him as “an old man…one of the old fathers.”8 But Gogarty had quite a different view of her. He dedicated his book A Gathering of Swans “To Pamela, with admiration” and wrote her dozens of poems, full of agitated excitement. “On First Meeting PT” gushed about her beauty for thirteen verses. It began:

  She came and moved and shone

  and moving smiled

  a lovely woman grown

  yet dear as child.

  Trembling with speed her talk

  her form a quiver

  the way that saplings walk

  moored in a river

  It went on to praise her “clear blue eyes,” her “sweet light,” “silken vesture, her curving gesture.” In May 1930, he wrote “To PT,” in which he swooned over the “sheath of her flesh” and “her sweet presence, so lithe and intense.” Pamela tucked the poem into her copy of another of Gogarty’s books. She laughed off Gogarty, who eventually backed away.

  To Gogarty’s biographer, years later, Pamela explained how she felt about her rejected lover. He was only “a Lothario, a clown and writer of very good minor verse.” It was “wonderful to talk with him…to be educated by him in the scandal of Dublin.” But when poems arrived by the dozen, “I was not overwhelmed.”9

  If Gogarty was the noisiest guest at AE’s literary gatherings, AE’s wife Violet was the most shadowy presence. Pamela saw her moving among them “diffidently, almost invisibly replenishing cups, a fragile gray haired feminine figure,” speaking little and to only a few before she disappeared into the kitchen. Here Pamela sought her out. Could she help? “No,” said Violet. “People come to see George and not me.” But Pamela insisted. At last, Violet let her slice the cake. Pamela wrote that AE might have drawn his strength from Violet. However, she also knew that by the 1930s, Violet did not have much strength to give. Her “nerves were bad and she was peevish…nothing he [AE] did or brought her was right.”10

  Violet might well have been sulking over AE’s friendship with Simone Tery, and a student, Leah Rose Bernstein. The two young women were often on his mind. In 1928, on the way to New York on board the Albertic, he wrote to Pamela about Simone, such a “nice girl…You know I have much discrimination in girls, I have known many, and always made friends of the nice ones, like you.”

  During AE’s months in the United States, when he spoke at five universities including Harvard, he wrote to Pamela often, with warmth and without self-censorship. He liked to boast of his adventures, including the day he met Simone in New York, how they hired a car and drove around and around a park for four hours, holding each other’s hands. When he returned from the States in June 1928, after collecting an honorary degree from Yale University, he met a group of twenty young women from Wellesley College, on their way to Europe. AE succumbed to one of them, nineteen-year-old Leah Rose Bernstein. She was by far the prettiest. Leah Rose, who told him she was twenty-one, sat for him day after day while he painted her portrait in pastels. He did not hide Leah from Pamela, or Pamela from Simone, or Simone from Leah, but kept up a correspondence with them all, telling each about the others.

  AE confided to Pamela that Leah Rose had “nothing to say, but looked lovely. I was content not to talk as long as she sat there, you know the kind of girl.” Leah Rose was one of those girls “you would like to have as an ornament about the house, but dread having to make up a conversation with them. I prefer girls I can talk to.” But at the same time he wrote to Leah Rose, “I think if I would paint you every day for six months I would become quite a good painter, for good art is born out of the affections. You made the journey home delightful to me. There are all kinds of sweet things I would like to have whispered into your ears to awaken the Psyche, but I was slow and old and shy.” The next month, he explained, “You see, dear Leah Rose, I am a poet and I fall in love with every pretty face and I am not fickle for I remember them all and never turn away from them. Dear Leah, you are young and I alas am sixty-two and it is a real friendship to give so much of your time to somebody forty years older than yourself when there must be so many handsome boys waiting to say adoring things in your ears. Sixty-two can never appreciate twenty-one as it ought to be appreciated. I send all my love to my pretty model.”11

  AE wrote to Leah for a year, upbraiding her for cutting in two a photo of herself with her boyfriend, Bernard. He wanted to see him too. AE now told her more about his enchanting friend Simone Tery who was “young, very pretty, very clever. We made friends quickly in spite of nearly forty years between our ages and she writes to me about her young man who is also very noble as yours is. They always are…There are some girls who are fixed stars and some who are erratic comets and my lovely friend Simone is an erratic comet.”12

  • • •

  Pamela was always more of an erratic comet than a fixed star. In the late 1920s, she began to travel often, first to Europe and Russia, then to the United States and Japan. None of the journeys was purely for pleasure, but all took on the aspect of a search, a mission, or a cure; at the time she started her lifetime habit of restless travel, she began to feel almost continuously unwell.

  In the summer of 1928, Pamela and Madge visited Spain and Italy. AE wrote to her: “I like to think of you splashing in water, your hair getting more and more like a lion’s mane around your head. Beware, lest you fall in love with some gentle little man through the mere attraction of opposites, and have to look after him for the remainder of your life. Fall in love with some gigantic boss creature and run away from him if he is too bossy.” AE wondered if she might have been stronger physically if he had insisted on “your walking in bare feet through the grass when you were in Donegal.”13

  On the Italian Riviera the two women stayed at the Grande Albergo Paradiso, at Diano Marina, where Pamela posed for a snapshot in a long-legged swimsuit, revealing hips and legs like a boy’s. She peeled the top down to be photographed, showing off her young woman’s lemon-shaped breasts.

  The European cure did not do as much good as she hoped. AE wondered “how in heaven did you manage to get back so tired…you were so triumphant in Italy striding over the hills.” Her side trip to see the Carrara marble quarries became an article for the Irish Statesman.14

  By now Pamela wrote more prose than poetry, settling into a second-string role as a drama critic. Her reviews began to explore more complex ideas than the simple reporting and awkward jokes of her women’s page for The Triad. Reviewing George Bernard Shaw’s The Apple Cart for the Irish Statesman, she was intrigued by GBS’s masks, just as she had been by the other selves of Yeats and AE. Who exactly was Shaw, she asked, “iconoclast, comedian, philosopher, poet? No sooner have we settled one
mask upon him than Ariel darts away, thumb to nose, and puts on another…lest for a moment anyone should say ‘at last we know him and have seen him plain.’ ”15

  Pamela was learning from the masters the advantages of being evasive—of being many people in one, yet nothing specific. As a young woman she had a few masks herself, but then again, not a great deal to hide. In her twenties her writing showed an artlessness, the joie de vivre of a woman who was curious about life, a natural journalist. As she grew older, with many more secrets to conceal, she began to ridicule journalism and biography, expressing her deepest thoughts in more and more allusive ways.

  Her poetry, though, never evolved from the romantic Yeatsian model she adopted as a teenager, although in the late 1920s the streak of eroticism in her verse grew stronger. By 1927 she was writing of “hiding your sword beneath a farthingale,”16 how “Michael pulled me down into the speckled barley field and bent me backwards” and how she would milk a little cow and pour the milk into her lover’s mouth.17 There is no evidence that she actually had a lover in the 1920s, although her relationship with Madge is ambiguous—the bare-breasted photo is likely to have been shot by Madge, but that is hardly evidence that the two women were sexually intimate.18

  Pamela’s main income still came from journalism, mainly from a monthly column in the Sydney magazine now called The New Triad, in which she presented herself as the sparkly, blithe Pamela Travers, trying to work out how to be in five theatres at once, ridiculing Noël Coward’s new plays, watching Charles Lindbergh’s plane as she ate an ice in Hyde Park, finding this year’s showing at the Royal Academy just a little dull, noting this year’s red hats, shoes and bags, watching the Duke and Duchess of York at Hyde Park corner, and inventing a conversation with a policeman who talked of his fat little baby called Ellen Rubina, a variation of the name of Pamela’s friend from Bowral.