Out of the sky she had come, back to the sky she had gone …
When she was child, Lyndon [Helen Lyndon Goff]’s mother would say to her ‘Better be careful or the wind will change and you will look crabby forever …
Frontispiece to Mary Poppins in the Park, “Sitting bolt upright against the tree” (Mary Shepard)
Dear friends and readers,
Some weeks ago I finished reading Valerie Lawson’s marvelous literary biography of Helen Lyndon Goff who insofar as she is known to the world became known as P.L. Travers, author of the Mary Poppins books (1952). The latest title is Mary Poppins, She Wrote. Her life and work belongs on Austen reveries: she was another unconventional spinster writer, part lesbian, with a witty withdrawing mind. I have no proof, but assume she read Austen’s novels. She was a great reader of books of the romantic period.
Lawson’s is a quietly poignant book of about woman who created an idyllic inner world for herself through writing wry children’s books, with a prickly apparently saturnine governess who turns out to be a cynosure of fantasy and good feeling. What is so good about Lawson’s book is the subtlety and details with which her peripetatic life-story is told (from Australia to London, to Ireland, place to place in the UK itself, on the continent at times, to all over the US), from the point of view of her career as journalist, poet, briefly an actress, author of children’s books and continuing journalist, and that of her life, her childhood retold somewhat melodramatically in Saving Mr Banks. Most of her adult associations came from Australians who moved to England and then colonial British living in London, including Irish — there she made her connections and relationships. She lived in Ireland and become a close follower and friend of George William Russell known as AE (part of the turn-of-the-century Celtic Renaissance), who was especially genuinely important to her as a journalist, poet, writer and person (she loved him):
1934: Travers and George William Russell at Pound Cottage, Mayfield
A poem written while under his influence:
I would find by the edge of that water
The collar bone of a hare
Worn thin by the lapping of the water,
And pierce it through with a gimlet and stare
At the bitter old world where they marry in churches
And laugh over the untroubled water
At all who marry in churches,
Through the white thin bone of a hare.
George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff was the first of a series of unscrupulous gurus who she followed in her aspirations to find some better spiritual world. She was bisexual, living for many years with Madge Burnand, close friend-lover (?) with Jesse Orage too who had children of her own.
Madge Burnand
There was rivalry between the three and sometimes bitter in-fighting (so to speak). She also adopted a child (from an impecunious couple who were members of her Irish circle), one of a pair of twins, Camillus, who became an important person in her later years and lived in her London house in his later years.
Travers and Camillus at Gstaad, 1947
She was conventional enough continually to send the boy away to boarding schools that he hated; she misses him terribly and yet she persisted in sending him away to make him part of an upper class male group. It rather had the unfortunate affect of making him angry, rebellious in ways that got him in trouble with the law during his later teens and early 20s. Her son became an alcoholic but he and his wife managed – with considerable help from Pamela. There were two granddaughters who seem to have meant a lot to the grandmother. Her was an independent woman writer’s life of her era: her luck was she inherited her aunt, Ellie Morehead’s money and she could get along on that and what freelance writing she got, plus the sales of the two books — until the Disney movie.
On Disney and her relationship: Disney did already own the rights when Pamela went to Hollywood; she needed the money and understood that her book would probably be much changed — not as much as it was. Disney did not only not charm Travers, he could and did behave ferociously to her when he thought it would cow her and it did. He was never any kind of benign boss and Disneyland today is one of the worst places to work in the control it exerts over employees (to smile, to behave a certain way, yuk). No she never danced. She did cry during the premiere but not from happiness, a kind of sudden hysteria and Disney and his people found this very embarrassing. The split was not amicable but what is important to know is that at first Travers wrote positively about the movie because she did hope for a sequel. A sequel was never in the works; Disney was against them. Once there was clearly not going to be a sequel Travers begin to say how she hated the film and would not sell rights any more from her book, but then it was unlikely she was going to get anything.
She did become comfortably rich in her older age because of the royalties and money she received. She also got more publications which made her happier. She was not alone in the world: she had friends and yes an adopted son but after the movie her relationship with her son worsened for a while, and this did make her very sad. No she was not prim and proper though she had old fashioned manners. Her character is prim and proper. She had lived an unconventional life — with other women, with male lovers, chasing after gurus in effect. And late in life she was still an aspiring lonely woman looking for meaning in life and to leave art that had integrity of vision. Her home remained her older British house in London but she did try traveling and living in the US, but could not make the adjustment to behaving in an class-free open way and when she managed herself invited to be a writer in residence at two girls’ colleges (one Smith), she behaved in intolerable ways: all prickly, difficult (for real), snobbish, as if she wanted to make people go away. She sought again for a guru type and found one and hung around him; after he died (she was long lived) she became herself a central figure. Much mysticism — she wrote two more books which were savaged by the US press; the second by the UK (About Sleeping Beauty) treated more kindly. She worked to get her papers into great Australian research libraries; she was active and lively to the end — very admirable and stubborn.
What lifted the book beyond telling his unusual life were me Lawson’s chapters where she analyses the Mary Poppins books engagingly and astutely; she supplies context by telling of Travers’s own favorite children’s authors (Beatrice Potter, Blake’s poems) and her love of romantic and Yeatsian poetry, her readings in books of reverie. It’s good that the books have a left-liberal outlook politically (at least the first two do), but that’s not what is unique and alive about them. Lawson then retells the stories in ways that bring out their peculiar quality and recalled to my mind the original stories, picking the ones I recall as the most important or memorable — and (whatever Disney asserted in either of his movies) these are not the stories about Mr. or Mrs. Banks — they are about Jane and Michael taken from some vexed or unhappy time (when they are misbehaving or something has disappointed them) to a realm Mary suddenly creates around her with magical people associated with the zodiac, stars, archetypal stories and English types (an Admiral, Miss Lark. For example, Lawson writes of the first two books:
The first two books mirror one another, even to chapter titles — “Bad Tuesday” and “Bad Wednesday,” “Miss Lark’s Andrew” and “Miss Andrew’s Lark,” “The Day Out” and “The Evening Out.” Mrs. Corry and the Bird Woman of the first book relate to the Balloon Woman of the second, and the Dancing Cow in the first book and Robertson Ay’s story of the second both tell nursery rhyme tales mixed with parable.
In Mary Poppins, the most eerie and fantastic story concerns Mrs. Corry and her two big daughters Annie and Fannie. In Mary Poppins Comes Back, an equally frightening adventure, “Bad Wednesday,” is a ‘cautionary tale; Jane in one of her rare naughty moods gets trapped in time, inside the lives of boys who live on a Royal Doulton bowl. She might have been there forever if Mary had not dragged her back home. The most charming adventure in Mary Poppins is “John and Barbara’s Story,” the tale of the baby Banks twins who know the language of the universe but only for a year or so, until they become fully human. The most wistful adventure concerns the visit of Maia, the second-eldest of the Pleiades, who has come to earth to do some Christmas shopping for her six sisters.
Maia (Mary Poppins)Both Mary Poppins and Mary Poppins Comes Back include chapters in which Mary guides the children to the secrets of the universe. In “The Evening Out” (Mary Poppins Comes Back), Mary is the honored guest at a huge circus in the sky. The Sun is the ringmaster while Pegasus, Orion, Pollux and Castor, Saturn and Venus are among the entertainers whose finale is the Dance of the Wheeling Sky.
This great cosmic dance, with its literary and mythological connections, touches on Yeats’s theory, explained in his book A Vision, of wheels and gyres, and on the dance of the spheres in Dante’s Paradiso. 1, “The Evening Out” reveals how much faith Pamela put in astrology and has its precursor in the Grand Chain dance of the animals in “Full Moon,” in Mary Poppins. One night — the night of Mary Poppins’s birthday — there is a full moon. The Banks children and Mary visit the zoo where the animals strut around outside, laughing and pointing at the antics of the humans inside the cages.
In both “Full Moon” and “The Evening Out,” the children appear to encounter God in the shape of the Hamadryad and the Sun. In “The Evening Out,” Mary Poppins dances with the Sun who plants a kiss on her cheek. Next day, back at Cherry Tree Lane, the Sun’s lip marks can be clearly seen by the children, burnt into the flesh of her cheek.
Mary Poppins Comes Back contains one chapter that takes the reader beyond the fantastic, to the realm of myth, religious symbolism and poetry. Called “The New One,” it is inspired by Wordsworth, and by AE’s favorite poet, William Blake whom Pamela also revered. The “new one” is Annabel, the Banks’s new baby, who has traveled on a long journey through the universe to arrive in the Banks household. She is not just a time traveler, but part of the universe itself, every part, from the sea, to the sky, to the stars, to the sun.
Mary leaves by getting into an ordinary carousel which proceeds to become a cosmic merry-go-round (Mary Poppins Comes Back)Eventually, she for gets her origins, just as her older siblings, John and Barbara, have forgotten their journey and how they could talk to the sun and wind. Pamela wrote “The New One” with no experience of staring in awe at a newborn baby of her own, with that instinctive feeling that a child has come from God.
The illustrations for these sorts of stories are most the most piquant and strange of the books and are not the ones Disney imitated or what is mostly found on the Net. I did and still do love them. The mysterious Malkin to whom Michael kneels is typical:
(Mary Poppins in the Park)
Cats as decorative vignettes grace this last book.
Mary Poppins in the Park was my favorite book of the four when I was 8, perhaps because I lived in the Southeast Bronx which was hard city, a slum, though we had a big (and to me) beautiful park, Crotona Park, 3 blocks up from the apartment house we lived in: I’d sit and read it, look at the map of the park on the end papers, draw over the lines of my favorite illustrations, read and reread it. I had loved Mary Poppins (1934), Mary Poppins Comes Back (1935) and (not as much really) Mary Poppins Opens the Door (1943), not realizing the first time reflected the depression in London among the upper middle classes, the third, a war-time atmosphere, and this last 6 years after I was born, post-war England. I must’ve been one of the few people who went to see the 1964 movie, Mary Poppins, famously starring Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke and felt dismayed to see the books I had loved erased, even if I loved the song-and-dance numbers so much.
The original balloon woman (Mary Poppins Comes Back) from whom the old woman feeding the birds derived:
Travers became somewhat known despite the disparate nature of the books — people did buy them for their children or themselves. Disney clearly saw in them an opportunity for Disneyification, and as far as I can see from this new bout of commentary, most people seeing the movie never read the books, and many when they did did not at all enter into their original spirit or meaning. So without Disney what would there be for Travers to sell? she therefore simply accepted the continual big checks for the rest of her life. Disney replaced the books with matter really highly disparate from the original, and Saving Mr Banks does not bring out the quality of those books at all but again turns to a family story this time tragic instead of comic — except we are given a moral by the great and good Mr Disney (oops — Walt): “we should hope on, see how hard and individual effort lead to success, and how he and now Pam have made it.”
Sheer Ayn Rand.
****************************
At age 66
She was a woman writer and on my WWTTA listserv at Yahoo was compared to J.K. Rowling who similarly tried to disguise her gender by using two initials. But Rowling’s disguise is the more thorough: Rowling’s books centered on boy heroes in a boy school, with active boy adventures, with the girl as grating hanger-on at first. To my mind Travers is the far more faithful woman writer than Rowling. And one can see influences of Travers here and there on other women writers. There’s a longish essay on Drabble in a recent NYRB (I mean to read it first and then send on a recommendation) by April Bernard: one of the books by Drabble I picked up and read had a cover that reminded me of Mary Poppins books: The Seven Sisters and I remember while reading I was touched by Maia as something there in the Pleiade was similar.
Yes the film did lead more people to read Travers and, especially if young enough (and usually) girls did go on to read all four and appreciate them – and the later couple of short stories, but this I fear was not common. It seems most readers coming to the books with a wrong set of expectations, turned away from them. So the movie did Travers’s reputation a disservice as well as her books if it also supported her and now her son and grandchildren in comfort.
Happy Ever After (from Mary Poppins Opens the Door)
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
We got into some good conversation on WWTTA while I was reading Lawson and writing about it onlist and while several of us saw Saving Mr Banks. Some compared her to Rowling. On other listserv, Trollope19thCStudies people talked of their happy memories of the film, Mary Poppins. Here’s what Diane Reynolds wrote:
But what I was really thinking about was how US children’s literature
seems to veer much more strongly to realist–I use the term advisedly
and perhaps would be better to say sentimental-realistic–literature
than the charmingly fanciful, truly magical thread that weaves so
through British children’s literature–at least what we still read–I
will leave aside the imperialist and racist literature Dixon so
scathingly takes apart. The books that reign in American literature
(except for the Oz books)–going way back but picked up in Shirley
Temple movies–are books like Queechy and Wide, Wide World,
sentimental novels grounded completely in the here and now, the Little
Women books (influenced by Queechy), again sentimental but grounded in
this world–no flying, no magic, no talking animals, etc–the Five
Little Peppers, Nancy Drew–all about rationalism, as are all the
series books I can recall, including Encyclopedia Brown, as if US
children’s lit glommed onto Sherlock Holmes and never let go. In the
British tradition, however, we think of Alice in Wonderland, Mary
Poppins, Beatrix Potter, the Wind in the Willows, the Hobbit, Harry
Potter–even the more adult Golden Compass books seem to me to be
profoundly influenced by Mary Poppins and the fanciful tradition with
the talking polar bears, even the compass (!) etc. Am I right about
this–certainly more “fanciful” fantasy children’s books have been
emerging in the US markets as a response to Potter, but have any of
them “taken” in the same way?–maybe the Lemony Snickett books, but
even those fit, if at the very edges, in a realist mode–not entirely,
as in one book the baby must work as a secretary and use a typewriter,
but Snickett is a departure.
This seems to me so accurate. I find violence endemic in the US character from the earliest time we can say there is such a thing as a US culture and character — around the time of the 1812 war when the US attacked Canada. It’s also a culture where religion is intensely important, and that too belongs to the earliest settlements. Unlike Australia, the character of people did not move into communitarian probably because the emigration was so disparate, from all over the world. American books for children tend to the earnest and allegorical. Myself I’ve ever preferred British literature, hybrid literatures, European to American — once I got older and more aware. We should note though that it’s said Mary Poppins books were a bigger hit in the US than the UK; there are others like this, books written by British people who came to the US (or vice versa) and are written in the British traditions and yet catch on to US popularity: Secret Garden comes to mind. US people might like Downton Abbey better than the British…
We should factor in though the control of the press. It’s not as if readers really chose what they read: they have to take from what’s on offer. Parents control what is published for children still — what is respected. And nothing socialist or what will go against a group of highly reactionary norms will get published easily in the US (or elsewhere). I used to “do” children’s literature in my 302 Advanced Writing on the Humanities and the last time I went over the magazines and periodicals that elementary and high school teachers read I was struck by how the writers for younger children (adolescence) are often traditional women presenting their heroines in traditional roles. I’ve not read Hunger Games but as far as I can see from what’s written about it it’s strongly violent, uses violence supposedly to critique a coercive violent society — a double mirror of US.
Chiming in to say that of course, I loved the books too, at the same age you did. My favorite bit was Mrs. Corry, whose delicious fingers become stars! Must read them again sometime…
I loved the essay, Ellen. Thanks so much. I was interested to in Diane’s remarks about the differences in English and American children’s literature. I think there is much in what she says. I loved books with animals and magic, especially “The Wind in the Willows” and Elleston Trevor’s “Deep Wood”. “Women”, “Little Lord Fontleroy” and other American classics puzzled me on first reading. I only really appreciated them later at probably 8 or so. I’ll have to look for the biography you mention. Thanks again.
Clare
I realise that “Little Lord Fauntleroy” is by a British author, but always seems to me more in the American tradition, hence it’s great popularity in the US.
Kevin: “Did you ever read about what happened when Travers made a pilgrimage to meet W.B. Yeats?”
Diana: “I’ve been there, and also to Thoor Ballylee – but I didn’t know about Travers’s pilgrimage”
Thanks for sharing, Ellen. I found this all very interesting. I admit I only read the first book, though I read it twice, each time planning to read on to the others but disappointed it was not the film version. Perhaps now as an adult, I can appreciate them more. Travers’ life itself sounds fascinating to me.
The trouble, Tyler, is they are really children’s books. I tried to reread them and they don’t read well for adults. Naive in ways adults don’t enter into; too didactic at moments. The Secret Garden may be read as an adult book, but not these. But you can get a lot from Lawson 🙂 Probably her About Sleeping Beauty might be interesting as an interpretation about a myth, but you’d have to be interested in her.
Thanks, Ellen. Maybe I will try About Sleeping Beauty. I’m always interested in reworkings of myths and fairy tales.
As a child (long before the film) I was terrified by the Mary Poppins books. Not sure why since I loved myths, legends, and fairy tales (which can be pretty gruesome). The one scene where the children went back to look for a house they’d visited with Mary–Uncle Albert’s?–and the house had disappeared (!) haunted me for years. I kept expecting to walk home from school and find my house gone. I was even more terrified by Alice in Wonderland. I must have been an oddly literal and credulous child. Thanks for this essay, Ellen; I will try reading them now.
I agree. I think they are scary. I didn’t do enough justice to that. Just look at Michael bowing down before that cat. In some of the adventures huge mythic creatures are inexplicable and (we can see) under no specific control and Mary Poppins rescues the children from them. There is nightmare in the Poppins books too.