Mary Poppins, She Wrote

by Valerie Lawson

  At Christmas, not long before Pamela’s time at Radcliffe came to an end, the Oettingers suggested she hold a children’s party. She agreed, reluctantly, and sent handwritten notes to about twenty children. Not many wanted to go. They had heard of the cranky lady in Whitman Hall. Some children were bribed to attend and one even had to discuss it with his psychiatrist. It turned out to be not so bad. A flautist recruited from Harvard played carols. Pamela turned off the lights, and in the semidarkness the children each held a candle, stood in a circle and obediently sang the Christmas songs. They drank ginger ale with maraschino cherries, scoffed Vienna sausages on colored toothpicks and Mary Poppins cake, stuffed with dimes.

  Pamela’s manner with children was clearly revealed in a question-and-answer session on Boston Forum, a radio program hosted by Palmer Paine on Boston’s WNAC—“your companion station.” Alternately bullying and charming, threatening and motherly, she alarmed the children who had phoned to ask questions. She instructed young John to make a fuss when he could not find her books, demanding he tell the bookstore owner that “the author is very cross, really. Go and tell them that.”

  A little girl wanted to know if there would be another Poppins book, to which Pamela replied, “I can’t bring another book out of my hat! It takes quite a long time to write a book, you know. Have you read all the Mary Poppins books? No? Then you jolly well read those before you ask me for more!” The little girl whispered “Oh. Bye.”

  The program reveals more clearly than any other interview or college recording the public personality of P. L. Travers at sixty-five, and, coincidentally, the acquiescent nature of the media at the time. Palmer Paine appeared to be on automatic pilot, smoothly reading ads for Prudence in the Pantry Roast Beef Hash for “all you modern young women, when your husband brings home unexpected guests.” In between promos, he asked Pamela questions and interjected at regular intervals, “This is Palmer Paine. Our subject—what [pause] do our children read. Our lines are open now. Good evening, you’re on the air, may I have your question or comment please?” Nothing appeared to surprise him, no quirkiness was allowed to upset the even, fruity patter.

  In contrast, Pamela was vividly alive, stressing her words in an actressy manner, at times lowering her voice to a breathy sigh, at others enunciating crisply, “That pleases me verrrry much!” She responded to Paine’s questions like the Allan Wilkie Shakespearean actress of her past. When he asked, without much interest, “Where does Mary Poppins go?” she replied “You’re asking me, as if I knew.” She did offer, though, that when Mary had flown away, her typewriter was “drenched with tears!”

  When the conversation moved around to “young people today” she advised listeners to follow the recent advice of the head of the women’s college Girton and “stick to your own values no matter how much young people attack. You must stand like a rock amid the tide, amid the storm.” She confided that one young person she knew told her, “You live in a fug of values.” Nevertheless, she told this young person, not naming Camillus of course, “ ‘They are my values, they may seem very fuggy to you.’ And he said to me rather shamefacedly, ‘Oh, but they’re my values too.’ And I said, ‘No, no, they had to be worked for very hard and suffered for, these values. And they’re mine. They might be yours one day.’ ”15

  In early February, Pamela said good-bye to Radcliffe with all the right polite words. She told the staff and girls she had never received a prize or gold medal for writing but this semester past was her prize, to be the first writer in residence at Radcliffe. She was sorry that she couldn’t stay longer but “I have a home, you know.”

  • • •

  Shawfield Street welcomed her home, the narrow house embracing her with its odd blend of Kyoto and Chelsea decor. She thought of number 29 as a person, disconsolate and lonely when she first found it, now a warm haven behind the front door painted lolly pink. (The other doors in Shawfield Street were sensible brown or green or blue.) The architect had tut tutted at the narrowness of the front hall. Where was she going to put her books? She had suggested taking off the roof, and suddenly his eyes had gleamed as he began to design in his mind a top-floor studio with big sliding glass doors. This became her sanctuary. Up the three flights of stairs, up there in the studio, she could dream on the sofa by the window, sit at the desk with its modern paper-shaded lights that swung to and fro. She loved the straw scent of the tatamis and the Buddha on the big terrace, loved to see the sun set over the chimney pots of the Georgian roofs. A bookcase ran the length of the room, the volumes of Blake in the best spot, by the window.16

  In her bedroom overlooking the street, Pamela drew the curtains she had specially chosen for their whirly night sky pattern, and lay down in bed. But nothing was as she hoped. The meditation she had practiced in Kyoto would not push away the fear which often felt impenetrable, solid, separating the upper and lower parts of her body. She felt as if she was becoming this black fear, which at its worst, extended dark rays into the other parts of her. Even when she wrote of the fear, to herself, her breath came up too quickly to her chest. Pamela began to type out little notes, which she stashed in her desk, expressing her fear—a fear like the devil, she thought.

  It helped if she faced the sun, as if the heat might flood the blackness away. She wanted all her rooms to face west. As she had told the Radcliffe students, all she wanted now were two comforters, “a rocking chair and a west window.” They went back “to my early anxiety and love for the sun, and the anxiety of seeing it go down…I’ve always gone westward, this westward pull…In any house I have, all rooms should be turned to the west, I don’t want to lose any part of the sun.” The rocking chair “means so much to me. Sitting on a rocking chair is like sitting on a merry-go-round horse, even as a child I used to feel I was going somewhere and when the music stopped and I had to get off, I felt the same sorrow I felt when the sun went down. Rocking, I can go almost anywhere. It goes tick tock tick tock.”17

  Again, she returned to von Dürckheim in Todtmoos and tried to focus her thoughts on another autumn in America. Pamela wrote to Smith College, a couple of hours’ drive from Boston, would they like a writer in residence?18 They would. Like Mary Poppins who went to the Banks home with a mission, she had two reasons to go to Smith, or rather two people to find. One would translate her Mary Poppins into Latin, the other would translate it into Russian. Or so she hoped. Pamela had had an obsession with a Russian version since the early 1960s. In 1962, she told The New Yorker, “My great hope is having her [Mary Poppins] translated into Russian. I know we don’t have any copyright agreement with Russia, but I say to my agent, never mind, leave her around where the Russians can steal her.”19 (Her agent, Diarmuid Russell, had in fact told her to be careful. He thought “a Russian nibble might turn out to be a shark’s bite.”)

  Three years later, at Radcliffe, she was still complaining to students and journalists that although Mary Poppins was now in seventeen languages, there was no Russian translation. In an interview with The Harvard Crimson, she grizzled, “I’ve told my agents not to worry if the Russians steal them. I’ve told them I’d like them to hide the books in lavatories and in parks—anywhere people might pick them up and steal them.”20

  A Latin translation became more pressing when she heard of the plans to publish Winnie-the-Pooh, Alice in Wonderland and Pinocchio in Latin. Pamela wrote to the news director of Smith College, Peggy Lewis, asking for the names of all suitable academics at Amherst College, a brother college of Smith’s. Lewis suggested she get in touch with Professor Peter Marshall, chairman of Amherst’s classics department, and thought someone at Smith College’s Russian department might be just right for the task.21

  Pamela had already given Lewis a list of instructions of how she was to be treated at Smith and had filled out a questionnaire for the Smith College news office. In the questionnaire, she gave her date of birth as 1907, and under “place of birth,” coyly wrote “British Commonwealth”—less shameful, obviously, than Australia. H
er initials, she explained to Lewis, were sacrosanct and she was to be known only as P. L. Travers. She pointed out that Smith College was also host to another English author, commonly known as V. S. Pritchett, not Victor Pritchett.22

  Fall was the prettiest time of year at Northampton, a smalltown hub of four colleges, two of which were for women only. Northampton maintained the look of Main Street, USA, as nostalgic as a Norman Rockwell cover with its tall and tidy brick buildings and churches columned and porticoed in the Greco-Roman mold. Smith College was a microcosm of the town, a delicate collection of red-brick buildings, aloof and stately, each a hubbub of girls intent on a liberal, though ladylike, education. The college had been founded in 1871 by Sophia Smith to “furnish for my own sex means and facilities for education equal to those which are now afforded in our colleges to young men.” The poet Sylvia Plath had been there in the 1950s when the girls played bridge and had a rigid code of what was right for casual and dressy occasions. (Plath felt she never had the proper clothes.) Now, in 1966, the education for the twenty-three hundred students was still going to lead most of them to the altar. They hoped. In the English faculty—Pamela’s hosts—only seven of the eighteen professors were women and it was to be nine years before Jill Ker Conway became the first woman president.

  Late in September, Pamela was taken to her guest suite downstairs in Lamont House, a dormitory built eleven years before on money bequeathed by another benefactor, Florence Corliss Lamont. Immediately, she felt confined in a beautiful prison. As she wrote to Deane Lord at Radcliffe, after three days in her suite she felt like a dog turning around in its basket. Making sense of being a woman was all very well, but Pamela still hankered for men. She kept her distance from Pritchett, busy in another suite with his biography of Balzac and giving lectures on “Certainty and Uncertainty.” The charming Victor Pritchett, now sixty-six and a practiced writer in residence, told interviewers he found it “rather engaging to live in a small town in such a beautiful part of the country. Smith is a very civilized place and incredibly hospitable.”23

  Pamela found it much less so. Unlike Radcliffe, neither students nor faculty had much interest or respect for the supposedly famous author. And it was, after all, a year later. The mood of the nation’s universities was creeping toward revolt, to the ferment of the shootings at Kent State and the love-in at Woodstock. Smith students, like students everywhere in 1966, managed to be both compliant and rebellious, anxious and flippant. Some wore a popular lapel button, “Mary Poppins Is a Junkie.”

  By now, Pamela’s halo of fame from the Disney movie was fading. Students at Smith loved The Hobbit, Peanuts, and “books of spiritual realism,” according to the owner of the The Quill student bookshop. His best-sellers were Gibran’s The Prophet, the Springs of Wisdom series with their quotations from great philosophers, and “the philosophical nature books of Anne Morrow Lindbergh and Rachel Carson.”24

  An assistant professor in the English faculty, Elizabeth von Klemperer, heard that Pamela was hurt “because more of a place was not made for her. She was in an odd slot because she was a writer for children. At that time, children’s literature was not the big thing it became later. I don’t think her interests and the department’s coincided. It was a sad chapter.”25

  When a new professor came to Smith, the students usually invited them to dinner or afternoon tea on Friday. The Lamont House women planned to ask Pamela to join them at the Mary Marguerite tea room one afternoon soon after her arrival. They were soon discouraged by gossip that she refused to go anywhere without a formal invitation, even to dinner in Lamont House. She made it clear quite quickly that she wanted the girls to come to her rather than vice versa.26

  Some did, approaching her with caution. Late in September, two reporters from the college paper, the Sophian, were greeted with the usual warnings when she told them she could not discuss her current projects, as “writing was private, like having a baby.” They stared at her bookshelves, noting a Latin dictionary near Three Pillars of Zen. She explained, “I’m preparing Mary Poppins from A to Z for Latin and hope very much to find the right translator while I am here either at Smith or Amherst.” Then there was a more peculiar book, on gorillas—her favorite animal, she told the interviewers. Suddenly, she said, “I don’t like pets…if somebody could make a very small cow to fit on my rug then I’d certainly have an animal pet.” Why was the cow her favorite? Thinking of an ideal Pamela, and how she might like to be seen, she replied, “The cow is the most meditative of creatures, very quiet, very simple, highly curious and inquisitive and she looks beautiful. She has a beautiful coronet of horns like a duchess and she bears herself proudly and well. And she’s so serene and independent, I love her.” But gorillas? “You can never make a gorilla small enough to fit into a walnut shell and that’s the only kind I could have with me.”

  This seemed like seriously weird stuff to the students, who nevertheless kept working doggedly through their list of questions. In one exchange worthy of Oscar Wilde, they asked, “Do you have a very unusual approach to life?” “Oh,” said Pamela, “you don’t approach life, you live life. You approach a railway station.” Veering off on another tangent, the author intoned, “I’m very interested in that phrase, ‘rapture in precision.’ You can’t have rapture without precision, or that’s what I think and for me there’s a kind of precision in rapture.”27

  The free-floating exchange between Pamela and her inquisitors continued on two parallel paths, never meeting. It had a slightly unhinged quality, the subject not so much a crone in a rocking chair dispensing wisdom, as a woman locked into herself. She might have engaged them by explaining her fascinating theory on the rapture to be found in precision, but instead sat back and waited for the students to reject her.

  In the first of only two public appearances at Smith, she dutifully emerged in a suit, coat and pale leather gloves to sign books at a fund-raising fair, Sophia’s Circus. The college had organized a Mary Poppins theme, with Poppins Popwiches, sold by three professors, Poppins Posies, and a stall called Spoonful of Sugar, manned by faculty wives who had prepared baked goods, Mary’s Pops and ice cream.28

  Press photos show a tireder, plumper and more solid figure than the one she presented at Radcliffe. Two days later, on October 7, she delivered a long lecture called “Myth, Fairy Tale and Mary Poppins” at Sage Hall. A writer for the Smith College Quarterly thought that “after an hour’s rambling about her childhood in Australia and the years she spent in Ireland working with W. B. Yeats and AE, she got to her myth, fairy tale and Mary Poppins. She didn’t tie the subjects together, and the only thing I can remember clearly was her assertion that a writer doesn’t create a character, he “summoned” him.”29

  Her ninety-minute talk was a dress rehearsal for a more significant lecture she was to give late in October at the Library of Congress in Washington. To celebrate National Children’s Book Week, the library had asked Pamela to speak as the lecturer chosen that year by its Gertrude Clarke Whittall Poetry and Literature Fund. Her first lecture, on October 31, was called “Only Connect,” her second, the next day, “Never Explain.”

  “Only Connect” meant several things to Pamela. She told her audience it was an attempt to link her skepticism with the desire for meaning, to find the human key to an inhuman world, to connect the individual with the community, the known to the unknown, the past to the present and both to the future. “Only Connect” was taken from E. M. Forster’s novel Howards End. The phrase, she said, had become a kind of motto for her, one she would like on her gravestone.30 The lecture was a long autobiographical statement, beginning with her romanticized childhood drenched in the Celtic Twilight, then moving on to AE and Yeats and how she was now enthralled by fairy tales which she saw as “minuscule reaffirmations of myth,” not hocus pocus but old wives’ tales. Naturally, she believed in old wives’ tales. It was “the proper function of old wives to tell tales.” Becoming a crone, she believed, was the last great hope of women. The lecture was gi
ven on Halloween, the night when the shadows came alive in Mary Poppins in the Park, and for Pamela that night, “the fairy tales are abroad…good fairies and demons.”

  Back at Smith, she felt duty bound to talk to the pesky students. They read on their notice boards that P. L. Travers would be “at home” in her Lamont House suite on Wednesdays at 8 P.M. Patricia Forster and four of her friends thought they might give it a try. Pamela greeted them in a kimono and slippers, ushering them into the living room. “Talk,” she instructed. One student ventured a question about Mary Poppins. “No, no, no, not that kind of question. Surely you must be wondering about life’s questions. That’s what we should talk about.” The five girls sat mute. She asked them about themselves. Forster told her she was an English major interested in teaching. This rekindled Pamela’s insecurity about her formal education. One learns, she said, by thinking and listening not by jamming facts into one’s head like so many little cod liver oil pills. Formal education stifled the imagination and, once the imagination was dead, so was the spirit.