P. L. Travers

P. L. Travers: The Woman Who Refused the Sugar

At the after-party for the 1964 premiere of Mary Poppins, in a room full of people congratulating themselves, the author of the book announced loudly: "Well. The first thing that has to go is the animation sequence." Walt Disney's reply has entered Hollywood folklore. "Pamela, that ship has sailed." She never permitted another film adaptation in her lifetime, and she wrote the prohibition into her will.

Maryborough

She was born Helen Lyndon Goff on 9 August 1899 in Maryborough, Queensland. Her mother, Margaret Agnes Morehead, came of Scottish and Irish stock and was the sister of Boyd Dunlop Morehead, Premier of Queensland from 1888 to 1890. Her father, Travers Robert Goff, was London-born of Irish descent and worked as a bank manager until alcoholism cost him the job and he was demoted to clerk. He died at home in January 1907, when she was seven. She would, in her own account, struggle to come to terms with the fact for the next six years. Anyone who has read the Banks family, with its absent, harassed, financially precarious father, has read the consequence.

She grew up between Maryborough, Brisbane, Allora and Bowral in New South Wales, and boarded from 1912 at Normanhurst School in Sydney. She could read at three. She built what one account calls a form of self-sufficiency and an idiosyncratic fantasy life, spending long stretches pretending to be a mother hen. Her great-aunt Helen Morehead, of Woollahra in Sydney, had a habit of saying "Spit spot, into bed."

Becoming Pamela Lyndon Travers

From 1921 she worked as a Shakespearean actress under a name she assembled herself: Travers from her dead father, and Pamela because she thought it a "pretty" name that "flowed" with it. She also published poetry and journalism, in The Bulletin in Australia and The Sun in New Zealand. On 9 February 1924 she left Australia for England and settled in London. She returned to the country of her birth exactly once, in the 1960s.

Yeats, Gurdjieff and the Serious Business of Myth

In Ireland in 1925 she met the poet George William Russell, who wrote as Æ and edited the Irish Statesman. Through him she met W. B. Yeats and the circle around him, who fostered her interest in and knowledge of world mythology. This was not a literary affectation. She went on to study with Carl Gustav Jung in Switzerland and, after visiting Fontainebleau, became a disciple of the occultist George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. From 1976 until her death she edited Parabola: the Magazine of Myth and Tradition. The nanny with the carpet bag was written by a woman who spent her life on comparative religion.

Mary Poppins

The character appeared first in 1926, in a short story called "Mary Poppins and the Match Man" published in The Sun in Christchurch, which already contained the nanny and Bert. In the winter of 1933, living in a thatched cottage in Sussex with her friend Madge Burnand, she began the book. Mary Poppins was published in London in 1934 and was her first literary success. The illustrations were by Mary Shepard, then twenty-three, brought in after her father E. H. Shepard proved unavailable. Seven sequels followed, the last in 1988, when Travers was eighty-nine: a fifty-four-year conversation with a single character.

On Desert Island Discs in May 1977 she said the name "M. Poppins" had come from stories she invented for her sisters in childhood, and that she still owned a book from that period with the name written inside it.

Disney

Walt Disney's daughters were fans, and from the 1940s he pursued the rights. She resisted for two decades. In 1961 she flew to Los Angeles on a first-class ticket Disney had paid for and finally sold, in no small part because she was in dire financial straits. She was engaged as an adviser and hated the result: the softening of Poppins herself and, above all, the animation, whose use led her to rule out any further adaptations. When the stage musical was eventually negotiated, she stipulated that British writers alone and nobody from the original film production be directly involved, specifically barring the Sherman Brothers from writing new songs. She put the conditions in her last will and testament.

By 1977 she had cooled slightly. "I've seen it once or twice, and I've learned to live with it," she told the BBC. "It's glamorous and it's a good film on its own level, but I don't think it is very like my books." The film also made her rich; her estate was valued for probate in September 1996 at £2,044,708.

Camillus

She never married. She lived with Madge Burnand in a London flat from 1927 to 1934, then at Pound Cottage near Mayfield in East Sussex. At forty she adopted a baby boy from Ireland, Camillus Travers, and did not tell him that he had been born a twin. He learned it at seventeen, when his brother Anthony, fostered in Ireland by the family of the essayist Hubert Butler, turned up at her Chelsea home and demanded to see him. Travers refused and threatened to call the police. Camillus found his brother afterwards in a pub on the King's Road.

During the war she worked for the British Ministry of Information, spent five years in the United States and published I Go by Sea, I Go by Land in 1941. She spent two summers living among Navajo, Hopi and Pueblo people, studying their mythology. She was writer-in-residence at Radcliffe from 1965 to 1966 and at Smith in 1966, and lectured at Scripps in 1970. She was appointed OBE in the 1977 New Year Honours, receiving the insignia at Buckingham Palace from the Duke of Kent.

Why Pamela Is Called a Genius

The case is a real one and it is not about charm. Travers took the machinery of comparative mythology, learned from Yeats's circle, from Jung and from Gurdjieff, and built a children's book on top of it without ever explaining what she was doing. Mary Poppins is not a nanny; she is a mythic visitant of the oldest kind, arriving unbidden, disordering the household, performing wonders she then flatly denies, and leaving when the wind changes. The refusal to explain is the engineering. Children read the books as adventures and register, without being told, that they have met something with authority over the world. That is an extremely difficult effect to produce, and it is why the character survived a fifty-four-year sequence without going soft.

Her judgement about Disney, widely treated at the time as the crankiness of a difficult old woman, was in fact a precise diagnosis. Sweetening Poppins removed the thing that made her frightening, and the frightening part was the point. She was right, and she held the position for the rest of her life at considerable social cost.

The counter-case is substantial. Her body of work is essentially one figure; outside the Poppins books and some journalism, poetry and a wartime volume, the output is thin, and the mystical apparatus can read as self-mythologising in a woman who invented her own name. Worse, the private record undercuts the public one: the author of literature's most famous magical parent separated twin brothers, lied to her son for seventeen years and threatened to call the police on the other. She herself distrusted the whole exercise of assessment, saying she most identified with Anonymous as a writer and doubting whether biographies are of any use at all.

Legacy

Travers died in London on 23 April 1996, aged ninety-six, and is buried at St Mary the Virgin's in Twickenham. Her birthplace in Maryborough is now a museum called The Story Bank, the town holds an annual Mary Poppins festival, and in 2018 a crater on Mercury was named for her. Emma Thompson played her in Saving Mr. Banks in 2013 and called her a "blissful joy to embody," while noting she had "never really played anyone quite so contradictory or difficult before." Emily Blunt took the carpet bag in 2018, fifty-four years after Julie Andrews. The animation sequence is still in the film.