Mary Poppins, She Wrote

by Valerie Lawson

  The American reaction to About the Sleeping Beauty was mostly negative, with the Kirkus Reviews attacking the afterword as “repetitious and windy…buried in self-infatuated blah.”15

  But when the book was published by Collins in England in 1977, the Times Literary Supplement praised it as a “brilliant success.”16 In both countries, the everyday reader who had been captured by the simple magic of Mary Poppins was lost in the maze. Who had the time or inclination now to follow these intricacies? This book had been one for the insiders. Or perhaps for Pamela alone, a woman talking to herself.

  • • •

  Early in 1976 Pamela decided to return to London, not just as a homing pigeon returning to the city she felt was her birthplace, but for practical reasons. She owned two houses, one in Shawfield Street in London and one in Upper Leeson Street in Dublin, but was paying rent in New York. As a British citizen, though a rich one, she lived in New York on an allowance of U.S. dollars. She worried that the dollars never went far enough. By summer, the York Avenue apartment was packed, Pamela ready to go, her coffee tables strewn with books, the living room stacked with cases. She confided in interviewers and friends alike of her nervousness, even timidity about this “great move” home.

  In a letter to Bergsten, Pamela said she belonged in the United States, a nation that was always in renewal. Yet London would be a new beginning too, she told him, not really convinced. There might be another Mary Poppins in the wind, but she was not sure if such a story was “needed.” Pamela felt she might have nothing left to say. In a desultory way, she had edited her essays and lectures, to make a book out of them. Two American publishers wanted that, she told Bergsten. She had taken to heart someone’s flippant comment that she was not fulfilling her destiny if she was not writing. This had upset her. She denied it. No, one’s destiny must be in something deeper than that. Destiny meant allowing oneself to dwell in what Keats called the “vale of soul making.” She told Bergsten everyone wanted her to stay in the United States to lecture, but she had to go, even though, unlike Mary Poppins, parting was always to die a little. Pamela told him she must “hold hard to the parrot-head of my inner umbrella and go.”17

  • • •

  At the end of June, Pamela flew to Ireland and then on to Scotland for a holiday before settling back into Shawfield Street in September. Though she had dismissed the thought with Bergsten, death really did seem close, so close she told Jenny Koralek she had come home to die. Later in the year, she began thinking just where she might die.

  Camillus, now in his mid-thirties, had decided to marry. The days of raucous drinking and partying with his friend Martin Harris, with whom he worked at Martinique Fashions, were over. In June, he had written to his mother in New York about his plans. There would be no church wedding, he had booked the Chelsea Registry Office for his marriage to Frances on July 30 at 11 A.M., then on to lunch. This might be all he needed, at last, to stop the drinking which had led to so much heartache, including his treatment at the private hospital Ticehurst, in East Sussex. Pamela must have prayed, too, that this was the end of the agony.

  Soon after she arrived back in England, she was captivated by an article in the Listener. Its message was religious, suggesting that a sin truly repented is “unhappened.” The promise filled her with sudden light. Pamela knew now, that was it, a thing or event could be unhappened! Not just in the head but in the whole person. This was quite in keeping with Gurdjieff’s idea, which he had discussed with her, that one could “repair” the past. She gave Camillus a present, the bronze head sculpted of him as a boy by Gertrude Hermes. After a honeymoon in Ireland, Camillus and Frances moved into a house in Ifield Road, Fulham, next to Brompton cemetery, where Pamela liked to walk, thinking of her son, dreaming of the churchyard in Allora where she had read the gravestones for all the lost children.

  By the end of the year, Pamela was certain that she had no life left in her, nor any will to live. She wrote to the deputy medical director of St. Christopher’s Hospice, in Sydenham, asking for advice. He suggested they get in touch the following year. There was clearly no urgency as far as he was concerned.

  Only one thing remained. She went up to the studio and started writing again. Up there, she found comfort in her touchstones. On one wall was a copy of a nineteenth-century Indian painting showing Hanuman carrying Shiva in his heart. On another wall, her Sengai scroll paintings depicted a willow almost breaking in the wind, six persimmons, a cock crowing to the morning and a little hen nearby. She gazed again on her ox-herding pictures, an allegorical series of paintings meant as a training guide for Chinese Buddhist monks. Alongside were her photos of Buddhas, including Maitreya. She liked the way the Buddha’s raised hand said, “Silence, don’t explain, it cannot be explained.” On the terrace sat her small marble Buddha in the midst of camellias and a bay tree. In the kitchen, her collection of hens sat brooding on the dresser, and at the back door she lovingly tended her twenty varieties of herbs.18

  One day, the postman brought a letter from her friend in New York, Dorothea Dorling. Would she write for Dorling’s new magazine? In the winter of 1976, Dorling had begun a brave new venture, a quarterly journal she called Parabola, “The Magazine of Myth and Traditions.” For Dorling and Pamela, the word parabola meant “getting back to the beginning.” A parabola curved and came back to rest. In the same way, they thought, all the myths and fairy tales went back to the beginning; you could search as much as you liked, but you couldn’t find where they started. Dorling had talked to Pamela about the project in New York, persuading her to become a founding editor. Many threads linked Dorling back to Gurdjieff. Her sister had been one of Gurdjieff’s original disciples in Fontainebleau and she herself had met Gurdjieff in the United States in 1948. In the 1950s, Dorling left her husband, a rancher in Montana, and moved to New York, where she met Pamela. The two women collaborated on a book, A Way of Working: The Spiritual Dimension of Craft, which was partly a model for Parabola magazine.

  When she started the magazine, Dorling was sixty-six. She had been convinced years earlier that the wisdom in traditional myths enlightened her own search for meaning. In her prospectus for Parabola, Dorling explained to potential advertisers and readers that each issue of the magazine would be devoted to one theme. Parabola was not an official organ of the Gurdjieff Foundation nor was it “limited, as to readers or writers, to members of our groups, but it must have a point of view and this must be consonant with Gurdjieff’s teaching, not in order to give answers, but to orient a search for man’s place in his world.” The aim was to bring together “the greatest formulations we can find…of the ideas in the fourth way as it appears in all traditions.” Was there a way, the prospectus wanted to know, of recovering the “sense of a sacred dimension in our existence”? The editors felt sure that sacred tradition could still speak to “the present need.” Parabola would include articles on legends, myths and folk tales, on Sufi and Zen stories, by some of the best writers it could find.

  The theme of the first issue was The Hero. The byline of P. L. Travers appeared in this winter 1976 number and for most subsequent issues. Good writers and wealthy women’s money kept the whole risky venture afloat. Over the years, Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote on death, the Dalai Lama on obstacles, and Pamela spoke with Laurens van der Post on “dreams and seeing.” Many others sympathetic to the fourth way were writers whose names could help sell subscriptions—Joseph Campbell, Italo Calvino, John Updike, Peter Brook, Robert Bly, Lincoln Kirstein, Dag Hammarskjold, Krishnamurti, Karlfried von Dürckheim, David Malouf and Prince Charles. Their subjects ranged from addiction to death, to healing, sacred dance, the sun and moon, theft, sadness, mask and metaphor, and ceremonies.

  Pamela wrote for Parabola on being one’s own hero, on the dreamtime, on a Sufi poet, on Zen koans, on going to a druids’ ceremony for All Souls Day, on Stonehenge, Silbury and Avebury, on the great goddess, the simpleton, and the youngest brother. Her densely packed essays, all in mythological code, allowed
only glimpses of the intimate, personal life of Pamela. Now and again she talked of her childhood; another time, of her anticipation of death as she walked in the Brompton cemetery thinking of Camillus preparing to be a father.19

  Parabola’s circulation was never high, but the magazine was still alive in 1999, its advertisements symbolizing the nervous nineties with offers of a bachelor’s degree in “transpersonal psychology,” books on the sexuality of the soul, catalogues from the Krishnamurti Foundation and fourth way books by Ouspensky, Bennett and Gurdjieff. For the truly diligent seeker, one company advertised “wilderness in the Rocky Mountains for the re-enchantment of ourselves, fathers and adult sons—therapists’ journey.”

  Despite the Buddha on the Shawfield Street terrace and the philosophy of Zen in her spirit, Pamela had taken to heart von Dürckheim’s advice, that the sure way to peace came with a balancing dose of Christianity. She took communion at the nearby Christ Church, an Anglican church in Chelsea, and, as she knelt on the pew, she told herself she was not merely kneeling before the cross, but offering herself up as an empty vessel, in a gesture of submission. To the parishioners of Chelsea she no doubt seemed a traditional upper-middle-class elderly lady, with a cut-glass accent, her clothes suitably conservative, despite the Navajo bangles and a tendency to wear slightly eccentric tent-shaped dresses ending with a flounce. The neighbors and fellow members of the congregation kept their distance at first—she had retained, even increased, her superior manner and the air of a snob, bred from an outsider’s insecurity.

  Pamela was overjoyed to learn she was to receive an OBE in the New Year’s honors list of 1977, asking the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Martin Charteris, whether she should wear a hat for the investiture. In a letter to Charteris, she explained that when she once met President Roosevelt, she had bought a hat for the occasion, but, Pamela knew, times had changed. Would a hat still be proper? She also wanted the Queen to know how moved she was by her Christmas speech, so regal and yet so full of feeling.20

  Early in 1977, she returned to New York to lecture at the Cosmopolitan Club, the Jung Foundation and the St. John the Divine church, where she read from The Fox at the Manger. To her audience at the church, she seemed an eccentric figure in her gray lambskin coat and brown galoshes. From under her pink-toned plaid suit peeked a shimmer of silver, her arms still laden with the work of the Navajo.21

  Back in London, a letter was waiting from Professor Bergsten, who had now moved in closer to his thesis subject. Would she tell him something more of herself, not just of Mary Poppins? In her longest and most emotional letter to Bergsten, in February 1977, she wrote of her father’s drinking and her sense of shame about his death. She knew he was an alcoholic although her sisters denied it. What’s more, she had always suffered from the drinking of men who were close to her.

  In the next letter, the following month, she told Bergsten she had no regrets about revealing so much. She still longed for the United States. Her hopes for a new beginning in England had come to nothing. In fact she was not even sure why she had come back at all.22

  Pamela collected her OBE at Buckingham Palace late in March—not from the Queen, but from the less grand Duke of Kent. To the media, she solemnly declared “I have accepted it for Mary Poppins,” but to Bergsten she confessed she was still an ignoramus. The letters after her name could have been given to an idiot.

  In April 1977, Frances Travers gave birth to Katherine Lyndon Travers. About six months later, Camillus’s drinking problem returned. Pamela’s friends tried to console her, but she seemed, now, more dogged and resigned than before, steadfastly keeping to her schedule of talks, including a regular reading in New York each Christmas from The Fox at the Manger. Pamela also maintained her own Gurdjieff group at Shawfield Street, trying to impart her guru’s principles to shy and much younger adherents than herself.

  The Bergsten connection was about to end, with the professor’s publication in Stockholm in 1978 of his thesis, Mary Poppins and Myth.23 He sent Pamela a copy, inscribed to “the mysterious P. L. Travers.” Pamela was unhappy, she told him, to see her name given in the first chapter as Pamela and not P. L., but not annoyed enough to cut off communication. She planned to send him a thesis by an American woman on the Mary Poppins books which compared them with the work of E. Nesbit, “an honor for me.” The student had insisted that all the books were about growing up, losing all the things one knew early in childhood, with Mary Poppins being the only one who does not forget. Pamela saw this as a valid point of view.24

  At last, she was to be given the prize she had yearned for since her first books were published forty-five years before. Not a literary acknowledgment, but a validation of her intellect, at least. In May 1978, Chatham College in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, gave her an honorary doctorate degree in humane letters. Chatham was a small women’s college with fewer than eight hundred students, itself seeking publicity by conferring honorary degrees. But Pamela seized on the doctorate with great pride, forever after insisting that she be called Doctor. Now that she had shed the honorific Miss (never Ms.), she dreamed again of her old love, Francis Macnamara. In the dream, he spoke to a circle of men around him: “That’s Pamela, we must call her Doctor now.” She wondered if doctor was a metaphor for some new feeling of his. In the dream, she met Francis’s wife. This was the moment, she knew, to reveal their love. In other, more turbulent dreams, she had seen AE ill, in a swimming pool, and Gurdjieff, sad, dispirited. Pamela wrote a note to herself, almost a postscript to her life, that “all our days are as grass.”

  In July 1979 Jonathan Cott, a consulting editor of Parabola, came to her in a depressed state. She called him “my dear,” this other young man in search of help. In a long interview for a book, Pipers at the Gates of Dawn, Cott drew out of Pamela the way in which she now dealt with her own inner turbulence. She told him to “accept everything that comes and make jewels of it.” She did not mean to sound pious but “I feel like that, and that’s what I call the hero nature, you can only be the hero of your own story if you accept it totally.”

  She played with the idea of Sufism, absorbed the poems of the Sufi poet Jalalu’ddin Rumi, meditated on “the great bowl of the abdomen,” and lay awake thinking how Little Bo Peep had lost her sheep, but when she left them alone, they all came home. You must, she thought, leave a problem alone. Don’t even look for its solution, and it will come home. “I know where I leave it alone, right in here two inches below the navel, the vital center, that’s where everything goes and is allowed to simmer.”

  She took Cott on a tour of her home, noting AE’s portrait of her reclining in the tree (she said AE was the “tutelary deity of the house”), the Japanese scrolls, and, in the hallway, a rocking horse that she had bought for the grandchildren but loved too much to give away. Here, in the rocking horse, were all the things she loved in one, the merry-go-round, the rocking chair, the Pegasus.

  Early that year her sister Barbara Moriarty had died in Sydney, the little sister who had been so much prettier and had life so much easier, the sister who had hardly journeyed beyond one suburb for decades. Pamela left no record—in a poem, letter, or note of any kind—of her feelings about the death. Moya stayed on alone, in Mosman, turning to a neighbor for friendship and support.25

  • • •

  By now, Pamela had become more of a guru herself than a disciple. As Dr. Travers, the great lady who once knew Ouspensky and Gurdjieff, she was in demand as a counselor for the third-and fourth-generation Gurdjieffians. In May 1979, she spoke to a gathering on “Gurdjieff: a Universal Man.” Her voice was deep but muffled, slightly slurred with age, breathless, in contrast to the cool, clear and crisp younger voices of her audience. She told them of her friendship with Ouspensky who advised her to “speak in other categories, think in other categories,” and how she remembered thinking, “How could I think, with no scientific mind, of the fourth dimension?”

  Dr. Travers asked for questions. There were none. After a long silence she said
, “I was thinking, at least let me do no harm.” Another long silence. Then, “We have talked a lot about Mr. Gurdjieff as man and teacher, not so much about his ideas, I wonder if anyone has anything to say?” Silence. She told them that in Paris, he sometimes gave talks but more often would call for questions. Deathly silence. At last, a woman asked meekly whether Gurdjieff spoke about reincarnation. Pamela crossly replied that she never heard him do so. She could only point to Ouspensky’s book, In Search of the Miraculous, in which he talked of recurrence, that our lives go around and around on the same old track. Pamela explained that she did not want to be specific or absolute about anything. As she grew older, she knew less. In fact, if they knew Henry Moore’s reclining women, studded with holes, she was very like that and getting “holier” every day. But she, too, found the idea of repairing the past essential.

  The session ended with one of Pamela’s favorite quotations from Ecclesiastes:

  or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken…then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.

  Tiring, she told them that was that. “If things go too long, things devolve and people chatter and it’s lost.”

  It was extraordinary that, at eighty, she kept up the pace. As she wrote to Jessmin Howarth in November 1979, she had lost her housekeeper of the last six years, had found no replacement and grew more exhausted every day trying to run the house, cook and work. A lecture the previous month had been a great success but a drain on her energy. Things were, in fact, ghastly. Even writing a letter in her studio, with her ear cocked for the doorbell, was a chore. She was struggling constantly to retreat to the “green pastures” of her mind.

  Pamela kept the pressure on herself. Her only relief seemed to come from the support of younger members in her group, and the love she felt for her granddaughters. (Frances and Camillus had another baby in November 1979. She was given the Christian names of girls in the Goff and Morehead families, Cicely Jane.)