Mary Poppins, She Wrote

by Valerie Lawson

  Pamela also borrowed from her adult life—the Pegasus she won at a fairground at Tunbridge Wells and the woman she called the “Duchess of Mayfield,” apparently a snob from the local village. In the “Balloons” chapter in Mary Poppins Comes Back, the illustrator Mary Shepard sketched herself, Pamela and her pet dog, Cu, all holding balloons with their real names on the side.

  The Poppins adventures are crammed with other, incidental, autobiographical detail. Pamela wrote that “every Mary Poppins story has something out of my own experience…several record my dreary childhood penance of going for a walk. But against that is set the blissful forgiving moment at bedtime when I suddenly felt so very good. Of the glimpse when the fire was lit and the lamp glowed, of the nursery reflected upon the garden.”23

  Pamela always insisted that both she and Mary Poppins were servants who served a purpose. Pamela became a servant of a succession of gurus while Mary Poppins was both guru and handmaiden. She claimed that Mary had lived for centuries, that she was “the nurse of Beauty, Truth and Love” (an idea developed in the fourth Mary Poppins book, published in 1952) and that “she knows an awful lot about the stars,”24 implying she might be part of the Pleiades or another constellation.

  Like Mary Poppins, though, Pamela never became too pompous about it all. She continually stressed that her nanny represented the business of ordinary, everyday life. As Pamela said, “We cannot have the extraordinary without the ordinary. Just as the supernatural is hidden in the natural. In order to fly, you need something solid to take off from. It’s not the sky that interests me but the ground…When I was in Hollywood the [script] writers said, surely Mary Poppins symbolizes the magic that lies behind everyday life. I said no, of course not, she is everyday life, which is composed of the concrete and the magic.”25

  • • •

  Pamela claimed she scribbled the Mary Poppins stories on any bits of paper that came to hand at Pound Cottage, old bills and envelopes, even income tax demands.26 But it’s more likely that one evening, she showed Madge Burnand her old stories, pasted into scrapbooks.

  Madge, who had many contacts in London publishing houses, might have encouraged Pamela to expand her articles into a book of short stories that Madge herself could try to sell. Pamela did say that the stories were taken by “a friend” to show publishers. And it was Madge who eventually found a buyer in Gerald Howe, head of a small publishing house in Soho. Howe asked to see the author.

  Pamela insisted that her rules applied from the start. She told Howe she wanted a major role in the publication, suggested she would find an illustrator and would even choose the type—in consultation with him.27 It was not a happy beginning. Pamela later remembered Howe as an enemy. He was, she said, only a very small publisher and she an “innocent,” without an agent. She complained that the contract was “bad,” but in any case it hardly mattered because the manuscript was sent to the United States, where more than ten publishers wanted to publish.28 She settled with Eugene Reynal of Reynal & Hitchcock (later taken over by Harcourt Brace and her agent, Diarmuid Russell, AE’s son in Chicago).

  Pamela claimed she wanted the author of the book to be called “Anon,” but “the publisher threw a fit and put my name on it.29 I signed my name P. L. Travers originally because it seemed to me at the time that all children’s books were written by women and I didn’t want to feel that there was a woman or a man behind it, but a human being.”

  She definitely did not want to be “one more silly woman writing silly books. That’s the idea, among publishers: “Oh yes, these curly headed women, they do it very nicely.” It’s never respected as literature, it’s never given a high place in that sense.”30

  Mary Poppins was dedicated to her mother, who had died six years before. About a year later, the sequel was published by Lovat Dickson & Thompson.

  The period charm of the books lies not just in the text but in the delicate drawings of Mary Shepard, the daughter of Winnie-the-Pooh illustrator Ernest Shepard and his artist wife, Florence. Pamela had wanted Ernest Shepard himself to illustrate the Mary Poppins books. She knew his cartoons and drawings from Punch, essential reading at Pound Cottage, partly because Madge’s father had once been the editor. Ernest Shepard illustrated A. A. Milne’s When We Were Very Young verses, which had appeared in Punch in 1923. Pamela never admitted she had asked Ernest Shepard, but in unpublished autobiographical notes Mary Shepard wrote: “In 1933 Pamela Travers approached my father with her first Mary Poppins book of the series, but he had to turn down the offer, very regretfully, because by this time he already had too much work in hand.”

  Pamela found his daughter’s work by accident, through a Christmas card sent to Madge. Florence Shepard, who had died in 1927, was an old friend of Madge’s. At Christmas 1932, her daughter, Mary Shepard, sent Madge a card which she had drawn herself. It showed a gloomy horse, resembling a rocking horse, ridden by a little knight holding a banner. He soared through the sky, just like Mary Poppins. In the snow underneath was a hoofprint.

  There it stood among the many other Christmas cards on the old mantelpiece at Pound Cottage. “Of course it wasn’t Leonardo, but I didn’t need Leonardo,” said Pamela in a later interview. “I was after a happy imperfection, innocence without naivete and, as well, a sense of wonder. The flying horse did indeed look dejected, as though it had just received bad news. But the rider was joyfully waving his banner, sunlight behind him, snow light before, a paradigm for the human condition, and, best of all, down in the castle courtyard the horse, as he took off into the air, had left in the snow a footprint!”31

  She thought there was something happy about the drawing, imperfect though it was, and asked Madge to introduce her to Mary Shepard.32 Shepard, then twenty-four, had just left the Slade School of Art. From the day she agreed to illustrate the books, the relationship of teacher and pupil was established. Shepard felt she had to do whatever Pamela asked her to do. Privately, she called herself Eeyore, after the downcast donkey in Winnie-the-Pooh.33

  Pamela explained to interviewers that Mary Shepard “struggled nobly with the text.”34 She found her first drawings impossible. Pamela showed them to AE and Orage, who both suggested she should try another illustrator. But she persisted, taking Shepard for walks in Hyde Park, pointing out children as suitable models.

  “We walked, like explorers… ‘There,’ I would say, and again ‘Look, there!’ And still Mary Poppins was not in the sketch book. Other young ladies. But not she.”35 At last they discovered the right look when Pamela found a Dutch doll—like the one she had as a child—and gave it to Mary, “and suddenly it seemed as though she…came to life, tentatively, very imperfect, but some of the atmosphere of the book came through.” At various times Pamela said she came across the doll in “an antique shop,” while at other times she claimed the doll had been found in an attic. Shepard maintained that it was she who bought the Dutch doll, and that it was only then that she managed to get a suitable-looking Mary Poppins.

  “Eeyore” was overruled on many suggestions. She wanted to show Mary Poppins standing in the fifth ballet position, feet turned out, the heel of one foot lined up with the toes of the other. As a compromise, Mary usually did appear with turned-out feet, but in first or fourth position, or up on half pointe. This was appropriate as the books are full of dancing. Mary dances, of course, but so do inanimate objects, from the trees to the stars. In her normal nanny mode, however, there was nothing balletic or theatrical about Poppins. Pamela even insisted to Mary Shepard that she “must have no figure.”36

  Later, Shepard’s Mary Poppins drawings tended toward the comic, becoming too pert, and rather like the cartoons in Punch. Pamela believed Shepard was greatly influenced by Punch and the Strand magazine. Gerald Howe was very skeptical about Shepard, asking Pamela, “But has she any experience?” “Well, no, not really,” she answered, “but then neither have I.” “Mmm,” Mr. Howe said and, when he was shown the scrapbooks with Shepard’s first attempts, muttered, “Mmm” again.
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  Mary Shepard illustrated all the Mary Poppins books, completing the first two at her father’s Surrey home. In 1937 she married the editor of Punch, E. V. (Edmund Valpy) Knox, whom she met through her father. After the war, when the Knoxes lived at Hampstead, “Evoe” Knox, as he was known, sat as a model for Mr. Banks in the fourth book, Mary Poppins in the Park.

  Despite the obvious appeal of the Mary Poppins books for children, Pamela always denied that she wrote with an audience in mind. “I wouldn’t say Mary Poppins is a children’s book for one moment. It’s certainly not written for children.”37 “I never know why Mary Poppins is thought of as a children’s book,” she grumbled to an audience of students at Radcliffe College at Harvard in the mid-60s.38 “Indeed I don’t think there are such things. There are simply books and some of them children read. I don’t think there is any such thing as a children’s book…I dislike the distinction very much. People say “tell us the secret, how do you write for children?” I have to say that I don’t know because I don’t write for children.”

  She knew she would be more readily accepted as a serious writer if she was not labeled a children’s writer, but there was another, private reason for her insistence. She was writing to please a man she was beginning to love—Francis Macnamara, whom she described over the years as “an Irish poet,” “the great Irish critic,” “a great friend,” “very beautiful, fair, highly intellectual, loved by women and much liked and envied by men.” He had warned Pamela not to expect him to read Mary Poppins. He hated children’s books. She sent it to him anyway and he read it, reluctantly. His reaction had a profound effect on her. He wrote, “Why didn’t you tell me? Mary Poppins, with her cool green core of sex, has me enthralled forever.”39 Pamela believed Francis Macnamara understood more of Mary Poppins than anybody ever had, even more than she did herself.

  The trouble was, Pamela did not understand Francis at all, though he understood women perfectly. He knew what they wanted to hear. Francis told them how he loved their minds, so funny and bright and witty, and watched as their pupils dilated as they grew more and more sure of their own charm and wit, until suddenly they were laughing all the way to bed. Other women he reserved for vestal virgin status, fantasizing that they were actually virgins, his untouchable ones.

  In her never-ending search for Mr. Banks, Pamela could not have chosen a worse candidate than Francis Macnamara, but it was easy to see why she fell. Tall, golden-haired and blue-eyed, Francis was a wit, dandy, thinker, poet, sometimes riotous and great fun but more often slipping into a maudlin state. Francis Macnamara was expected to make a fortune or write a masterpiece. He did neither. Like most of his contemporaries, he was a boozer, happy in any pub from Chelsea to Galway Bay. There he flirted, said his daughter Nicolette Devas, in the manner of Fielding’s Tom Jones.40 He told anyone who would listen that he believed in “free love,” that “women were a blank slate for a man to scribble on.”

  Francis did not have to struggle. He was the son of the high sheriff of County Clare, Henry Macnamara, who owned a great deal of land in the county including the market town, Ennistymon. His Australian mother was Edith Elizabeth Cooper, the daughter of Sir Daniel Cooper of Woollahra who made his fortune from gin distilling. She delivered all her children in a suite she booked specially for the purpose at Dublin’s Shelbourne Hotel.

  Francis was sent to Harrow and Oxford, but the temptations of a bohemian life were too great. He gave up his legal studies to mix with the Bloomsbury and Slade School of Art sets who congregated around Augustus John. He wrote a book of poems, Marionettes, in 1909, and became close friends with Augustus John, who wrote that Francis was “much given to solitary and gloomy cogitation” until, “warmed with what he called the hard stuff, became genial, popular and, the police were apt to think, dangerous.”41

  In 1907, Francis married a pretty Frenchwoman, Yvonne Majolier, whose sister was even prettier, according to Oliver St John Gogarty, who spread the word that “he slept with his sister-in-law and wife in the same room to save hotel expenses.”42 But in 1914, Francis abandoned Yvonne and their four children, including Caitlin (who was to marry Dylan Thomas), for another woman. In the 1920s he married Edie McNeil, the sister of Augustus John’s wife Dorelia. He liked to call Edie the “Virgin Goddess.”

  Francis was equally at home in Dublin, on his yacht, the Mary Anne, or at the family seat, Ennistymon House, a Georgian mansion overlooking a valley across to the town of Ennistymon, or at his flat in Regent’s Square, London. Like many of his homes, the London flat was arranged with the compact look and efficiency of a ship. At Ennistymon and the nearby fishing village, Doolin, he was treated as the hereditary squire. His daughter Nicolette heard it rumored that Francis had fathered many illegitimate children “trying to produce a child worthy of himself.”43

  He met Pamela through the Irish literary network. Francis had idolized Yeats, and was the guest of Yeats and Lady Gregory at Coole Park during his honeymoon. Yeats offered to help him with his writing, but Macnamara did not take him up on the offer. Many years later, Yeats said, “Francis Macnamara had some poetic talent once but he lost it by not attending to the technique of verse.”44

  When Pamela sent Francis her Mary Poppins adventures in 1933, Francis was preoccupied with his next big affair, this time with a sensual young woman, Iris O’Callaghan. She lived on his yacht, then moored in Dover Harbor. Iris had pursued Francis like a stalker. Her great weapon was her youth. At twenty-two—less than half his age—she had him thoroughly flummoxed. She might have been almost illiterate, with a chaotic mind and a tendency toward screaming matches in which clocks and crockery were thrown and clothes cut up. But Iris, full-lipped and absolutely ripe, was a lethal weapon herself. While Pamela dreamed of life with Francis at Regent’s Square, Iris had already moved in.

  8

  A Beautiful Night for a Death

  There is an intersection in a woman’s life where she feels like the many-armed Shiva, juggling the roles of mother and lover, daughter and wife, child and grandparent, the all-purpose female, all in one. She is the night nurse, gliding through the wards at midnight soothing anxious patients, wondering who is going to soften the blows when they fall on her. Between 1934 and 1939, Pamela became that woman. It began with AE’s death.

  Late in 1934, AE was suffering from bowel cancer. He did not suspect it, nor did his doctors. He was tired but not tired enough to reject an offer, which came though a bombardment of cables from Mary Rumsey, to visit the United States in December. Rumsey wanted him back in Washington, D.C., to lecture and advise on American rural communities. He might also give advice, she said, on the repatriation of the Mexican Indians.

  AE was fascinated by the spiritual lives of American Indians. He always told his Irish acolytes that the Native Americans had religions of “a rather profound pantheistic character. Nature, its works, trees, earth, lakes, clouds, are Being to them.” But he did want to warn his friends in America that he was four years older than the last time he saw them, not yet senile, but “out of harness.” After one of the cables arrived, AE had asked Pamela’s advice. She told him “Go at once.” And he sailed on the Aurania on December 13, 1934.1

  When he arrived in New York City two weeks later, he found Mrs. Rumsey had died. AE felt old, tired, finished himself. But once again, the Americans greeted him as a seer. He lunched with the president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and his secretary of agriculture, Henry Wallace, who was, he told Pamela, “my special friend, a great man.” John Collier, who had been commissioner of Indian affairs for two years, was overjoyed to see him back in the States. Early in January, Collier invited him to “go south to see the Indians on the reservations.”2

  Collier had seen Taos as a Red Atlantis that held secrets needed by the white world.3 This impressed AE, who regarded Collier as a mystic who “loved the Indians and thinks I, as a pantheist and visionary, could get into the minds of the chiefs of the tribes and expound to them the cooperative policy which Collier thinks will strengthe
n the Indian organization.” He thought it amusing that Collier, who had read his poems and his book Candle of Vision, “should have picked me as a kind of possible ambassador to the tribes.” Collier wanted him to beguile the Indians “into safeguarding their ancient culture and industries by cooperative methods. I would love to see them…but I feel too aged for such adventure, going so many thousand miles.” In the end, he rejected the New Mexico adventure.4

  For Pamela, AE had a great piece of news. During a trip to Chicago to see his son, Diarmuid, and meet his daughter-in-law, Rose, he had had lunch with the head buyer in the book department at the giant store Marshall Field’s. As AE told Pamela, “She was the person whose enthusiasm for Mary Poppins gave your book a send off. The [commercial] traveler gave her a copy. She read it and ordered 500, to the traveler’s astonishment. She actually sold over 1,100! I heard the book talked of with delight, to my great delight. I said with pride I knew you, and they wanted to know all about you.” A special advertisement had been placed in the Chicago papers to promote the book which was “a best seller, Pamela dear. Hunger and cold fade from your horizon.”

  The Marshall Field’s buyer assured him that if Pamela ever came to Chicago she must visit. The buyer would “show you around and get you to give talks which means dollars,” he wrote to Pamela. Overall, Pamela thought AE’s letters from the United States were tired and dispirited but she had no idea just how exhausted AE felt by February, when he sensed the full extent of his illness. The main problem was his frequent, urgent need to empty his bowels. He sailed home, again on the Aurania, arriving in mid-March 1935, and found new lodgings at 14 Tavistock Place, near Euston Station.

  Pamela heard nothing more until late March, when AE wrote that he had “some inflammation in my insides and they are investigating me bacteriologically.” His doctor and friend, Hector Munro, diagnosed dysentery and ordered a diet of milk, barley water and junket. Pamela did not trust Munro. She sent AE barley sugar and homemade treats, and worried even more, although his letters to her in April reassured her that he was “getting better rapidly.”