III
The Crone
1965–1996
“An old woman in a rocking chair . . . is like the earth’s clock ticking.”1
BOWRAL, APRIL 1912
Lyndon crept out to the bedroom window and looked up. The sky was so clear she could see the setting of the great constellation of Orion. It was the end of April now, not long before the cold winter months forced her inside to the fire grate.
They told her at school she had to go to Bible study and learn about Jesus, but she had discovered a book in the library about Buddha and one night took it under the covers and read about the giant statues they made in his honor.
“Ginty, turn out the light!” She could hear her mother’s voice, then silence. Five minutes passed. Lyndon thought her head might burst with all it held. Shakespeare’s words were mixed up in there along with a poem she wanted to write for her teacher.
She tried to sleep but the west wind was whipping up over the sleepy town of Bowral, the elm tree branches arching and dancing. Daddy had never talked about death. He just wasn’t there anymore. Perhaps he had gone to play in the sky with Orion and Hesperus.
Pamela climbed out of bed and stood at the window. At the end of the paddock, she could see the creek quite swollen now, the driftwood rushing downstream fast. She felt an emptiness in her tummy, a black kind of feeling as if it no longer belonged to her. What was that lullaby mother used to sing to her: “So la la la la bye bye, do you want the moon to play with, and the stars to run away with?”
Lyndon could see mother rocking to and fro in her creaky rocking chair. Do you want the moon to play with? Mummy seemed to know everything, Mummy and the great aunts. When shall we three meet again? She loved that line. And the wise fairy in “The Sleeping Beauty.” It wasn’t her fault she didn’t get an invitation to the party. Lyndon wanted to be brave and strong and wise like them. She was going to have to do it by herself, though. What were the last words of the hymn at assembly this morning?
We know we at the end
Shall life inherit.
Then fancies flee away
I’ll fear not what men say,
I’ll labor night and day
To be a pilgrim.
Lyndon’s eyes closed.
14
A Crone among the Sleeping Beauties
In 1966, Pamela told a journalist from The New York Times that crone was “such a beautiful word, like dove—quiet and full of overtones. I would like to live so that I could become one of those old crones in the fairy tales, the last stage in the business of living as a woman.” Still an actress at heart, Pamela was ready to play the role of the wise woman for the last third of her life. In theory, she knew that a crone was not a pitiful old dear, but an admirable woman combining all the qualities of Mother Goose, a prophetess and a nurse, who could transmit her old wives’ tales to the young, in the manner of Juliet’s nurse. This archetypal crone went back to the Queen of Sheba. She was both fairy godmother and fool, enchantress and houri.1 Perhaps, in becoming such a crone, Pamela could abandon her lifelong search for a male guru and become her own guide.
In reality, though, Pamela fought cronedom, as every woman does. After all, who would want to listen to the seer she planned to become? With no little boy of her own to hover by her rocking chair she had to turn elsewhere, and in the 1960s found a willing audience in the undergraduates who literally sat at her feet in a university dormitory. Pamela spent the autumn semesters of 1965 and 1966 as a writer in residence at two women’s colleges in Massachusetts, first at Radcliffe College, part of the Harvard University campus at Cambridge, then at Smith College in Northampton.
The invitation to Radcliffe came early in 1965 from Barbara Solomon, the dean of Radcliffe’s East House. In February, Pamela wrote back to say she had a warm feeling for the college because she had once met a special Radcliffe graduate, Helen Keller. Pamela thought no fairy tale heroine was ever more heroic than the deaf, blind and dumb Keller. As for the details, Pamela told Solomon not to worry about paying her, that she needed no facilities and that just breathing American air was “a delight” to her.
Defensive about her simple education at Allora Public School and Normanhurst, she also felt bound to tell Solomon that she could not come to Radcliffe “trailing any noble letters” after her name. She had been educated “by governesses” and at private schools. They never gave her enough of what she wanted—myth, legend, fairy tale, poetry.2
In late summer, she flew to New York. From the Cosmopolitan women’s club on East 66th Street she wrote apprehensively to Mrs. Deane Lord, the director of Radcliffe’s news office, that nobody had told her what they wanted her to do. “Never mind, I am a bit Poppinsish myself and will just let that work itself out.” As for the press, she warned, she had two strict requirements. Reporters must have read her books, and they could not ask personal questions. She told Lord that ideas were much more important than “gossip.” In any case, if these requirements were set, the papers would send their more intelligent reporters. Lord must not have journalists waiting for her arrival at the college, as they would ask foolish questions, such as “What do you think of Cambridge?”3
At Radcliffe, the staff and students were expecting a cross between the spirit of the East Wind and Julie Andrews. This was their first encounter with the strange new breed, a writer in residence, and preparations went by in a flurry of nervous anticipation. Miss Travers was to stay at East House, the grand name for a ragtag collection of old-fashioned women’s dorms on the eastern side of the Radcliffe quadrangle. She would live in the East House dorm Whitman Hall. But where could such a celebrity sleep? Barbara Solomon hijacked two rooms occupied by the secretary to the master of East House, Tony Oettinger, who moved his files to Harvard. The newly named “guest suite” was plain and simple. They tried to make it look snug, installed a kitchenette without a stove, pushed in the most basic furniture.
Whitman was ruled by a house mother, senior resident Ethel Desborough. She was the last of her breed, a remnant of the mistresses who guarded the ten Radcliffe dorms from 1901. Five years after Pamela’s time at the college, the administration allowed men from Harvard to take up residence in the Radcliffe dorms. But for now Harvard and Radcliffe were far from fully integrated.
Before the campus revolutions of the late 1960s, both Harvard and Radcliffe were still trying to emulate the British models of Oxford and Cambridge. There were indications of ferment, some beginnings of liberated thought that led on to the politicization of students within a few years. Oettinger was friendly with Daniel Ellsberg, who later leaked to the press Pentagon papers outlining the secret history of the Vietnam War. Oettinger asked Ellsberg to speak to the Radcliffe women and invited intellectual friends from Boston to call at the college.4 Some Radcliffe students even marched against the Vietnam war, which was to become such a focus for student revolt—the “stain” on LBJ’s Great Society. But Radcliffe was, on the whole, dominated by a masculine ethos. The acting president, Helen Gilbert, signed herself by her husband’s name, Mrs. Carl Gilbert, while the dean of East House designated herself Mrs. Peter Solomon.
When Linda McVeigh broke a ninety-three-year masculine tradition and became the first female managing editor of the university daily, the Harvard Crimson, in1966, the Harvard Lampoon printed a special commemorative edition in bubble-gum pink and saturated with cheap scent. The Lampoon claimed the male staff on the Crimson had staged a walkout, and that McVeigh planned to paint the Crimson newspaper walls pastel pink and issue “princess phones.”
This Radcliffe world of “slender pretty girls who laughed as they ate big slices of cake, who filled lecture halls with bright balloons and looked at the world through magical colored glasses” was one which Mary Poppins would “thoroughly approve,” wrote Boston’s Sunday Globe in an article celebrating Pamela’s move to the campus.5
All the local media knew the author of Mary Poppins was coming to Radcliffe, of course. The news office had made sure of that, des
pite Pamela’s instructions. She arrived at Whitman Hall on October 5. Linda McVeigh was waiting with another reporter from The Harvard Crimson to interview her in front of an audience of students. Oettinger was surprised by this “gray nondescript lady—our first impression—like a World War II British movie character. Ordinary, very nice but ordinary.” McVeigh didn’t see the niceness in Pamela. “Now what did you put down?” she asked the reporter. “You must quote me precisely, you know, you must put it down exactly as I say, otherwise it won’t be me, it will be you. Reporting must have the same precision as poetry. I ask this not for myself, but out of a respect for writing.” She discussed rocking chairs—“I like rocking because you can go anywhere, they are like merry-go-rounds”—said she had never been to university as she was privately tutored and, to a question on the Disney movie, instructed, “Don’t ask about something you already know.”
Pamela was happy here, though, in her hastily converted suite. She unpacked her Japanese paintings, scattered jars of candy on the shelves, just as she remembered from the apartment of Monsieur Bon Bon, and lined up her books, among them African Genesis, and six volumes of Stith Thompson’s Motif Index of Folk Literature.6
• • •
Outside, she found the golds and auburns of the Massachusetts fall too bright, sometimes wishing for the lavender and pearly gray of England. To Oettinger, she made it clear she wanted seclusion. They all left her alone. In the Widener Library, she reveled in that heady mixture of tranquility and the excitement of discovery. She felt free there, looking up mythological references, filling in all the associations. It didn’t smell of old men and socks, like the library at the British Museum, where she felt drowned by the sheer volume of books and guilty she had added to their number. Sometimes she thought she was lazy, remembering a poem by Randall Jarrell called “The Girl in the Library”: “the soul has no assignments, it wastes time, it wastes time.” (She said later unless you know how to waste time you don’t know anything about time at all.)
Because her own fairy tale of Mary Poppins had been cheapened by Walt Disney, Pamela was more intent than ever on recapturing fairy tales for herself, on affirming the power of allusive storytelling, not spelling everything out as Disney thought necessary. For her next book she was tracing “The Sleeping Beauty” back to “unsuspected beginnings.” The heroine’s sleep might represent our sleeping souls, in need of awakening, like the lines from a Scottish poet, “wings folded within a heart.” She also lay in bed thinking of the great Indian epics she discovered through AE, the Mahabharata and Ramayana, and especially the monkey in the Ramayana, Hanuman. She could not talk of this with the staff or students because “once you speak the words they are lost and will never come again.”7
Through the autumn months, she sat with her head bowed over reference books in the library, drawing out the many versions of the sleeping princess, from Giambattista Basile’s Sole, Luna e Talia, with its twin babies, to the interpretation of the Brothers Grimm, Dornroschen. In the erotic tale about femininity, she could see the elements of her own sixty-five years. “The Sleeping Beauty” was, she thought, a fairy tale fundamental to herself, one she had always loved above all others.8
As autumn grew into winter, Pamela saw the symbolism of the nature myth in “The Sleeping Beauty,” how the earth in spring, personified by a nymph, woke from the long sleep of winter. She left the library bleary-eyed, surprised by the lateness of the hour. She walked through the dusk to her dormitory. Tucked into their rooms, their own heads bent over Eng Lit texts, the women of Radcliffe were yet to unravel into anger or subside into resentment as housewives. Before the revolution of the late 1960s, when they woke to the words of Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and Germaine Greer, these women expected to graduate onto the marriage market. Docile, long-haired, self-consciously academic, they seldom asked questions.
It was one of the last ironies of Pamela’s life that, while she was acting out her role as a crone, one who respected and made sense of the lives of women, she was agitated by her isolation within women’s colleges. “I am always happier,” she told the Radcliffe Quarterly, “when there are men as well as girls who come to my evenings…the questions are better then, when men are around.” She wondered whether “Radcliffe girls haven’t got too big a feast spread before them, how can they choose between all these splendors, because after college, what do they have before them but babies and the washtub? Still, how good to have plenty to think about when one is busy at the kitchen sink.”9
She confided in Barbara Solomon that she was quite unsure what a writer in residence should do. Solomon said “Nothing, my dear, just be here, that’s what we want.” Yet somehow it didn’t feel right. Perhaps, Solomon added shyly, she could receive students? Slowly, the Radcliffe women and some Harvard men made appointments to talk of their poetry. One Harvard undergraduate asked how to make sense of an interview he had done with Auden. She advised “write the whole piece about his face.” Pamela agreed to a regular open house at the suite. Each Thursday evening the students filed in at about eight o’clock, taking their place at her feet. She reclined on the sofa, in a kimono, her bangles glinting, her glasses on and off like a stage prop.
Like Gurdjieff before her, she did, at first, try to draw them out, told them her role was not to talk and teach, but to hear, elicit questions. She ended her own sentences with a question mark, her voice lilting upwards in the Irish way. Now you tell me? Or, what do you think, Robert? It was the men she loved, and patted, a hand on the shoulder, a reassuring “go on.” Some of the Harvard boys brought her a frisbee painted “P. L. Travers.” The talk was good, she remembered, the students open to ideas, and “so ready to fight me for them. I liked that.”10
In fact, only one person fought for her ideas, one person dominated the conversation, which might stretch to midnight, sustained by cups of instant coffee. Recordings of the open house evenings feature the voice of Pamela overriding all others, driving out the questions which got too close to the personal for her comfort.
“Where were you born?”
“Oh, we’re on that kind of question are we?”
“You wouldn’t believe in writing an autobiography?”
“No, being born, going to school, having measles, being married or not wouldn’t really be an autobiography for me. An autobiography would be an inner statement, how one grew within, the hopes, the difficulties, the aims. But as I never do want to write anything about myself, no autobiography.” Robert obligingly chipped in, “You wouldn’t read a biography of a writer, you would read the work?” “Yes,” she sighed, “that’s a beautiful question Robert, because the work is the biography.”
Though Pamela insisted she could not talk about her writing as it was a very secret process, a few personal details escaped. No one had educated her, she became a journalist because it was “close at hand,” she wrote very little, very slowly, had to grapple with the text, wanted to “bring much to little. I whittle and whittle…until there is only a spindle, a sliver.” The first draft was torture, the second not so easy but the third “a wonderful experience.” Her kind of writing was “done between the lines.”
They could ask all they liked about other writers, about Yeats, and Wordsworth, Tolkien and Auden. She told them she loved The Hobbit and the Narnia chronicles, but felt C. S. Lewis was “looking over E. Nesbit’s shoulder…Nesbit is purer.” You could not help but love Alice, although she harbored “a lurking, sneaking lack of liking for Lewis Carroll himself…Wind in the Willows, certainly, Charlotte’s Web, and Pooh.”
And again, she insisted Mary Poppins is not for children. When one timid student said every child in America read the Mary Poppins books she slapped him down. They were very often read by “grown men,” attorneys, doctors, all sorts of people. They might be going to university, “and they write ‘ah, now we see what you mean.’ ” But her great interest, she told them, was the small perfection of the fairy tales which had been ground down by the centuries until only the essen
tial remained. These were not entertainments for children, but the last remnants of myths. Until a hundred years ago they were told orally to adults. The material in them was for grown-ups, “a way of facing up to life.”
Once in a while, the lecture would become a free exchange of ideas. When she offered her favorite phrase that “thinking is linking,” one student saw the point immediately: “Yes, only connect!” and began searching for pencil and paper but Pamela begged her not to write it down. E. M. Forster had already made the connection. But in any case, “once you write things down you’ve lost them.”11
From time to time the press came to see her, often to be sent away empty-handed. The Boston Globe found out almost nothing from the famed author but a false date of birth, 1906. When they asked what she thought of the state of American letters, she shot back, “That would be far too pompous, too bombastic for me to answer…too broad…what I care about is the intimate, local.”12 Paula Cronin from the Radcliffe Quarterly was apprehensive about her interview before she opened the door to the suite. “I was about thirty, she jumped on me. I felt quite unable to carry on as I would have liked. She was legendary for being that kind of person.”13
Pamela asked Nora E. Taylor from The Christian Science Monitor, “Did you prepare questions?” She insisted on “exact quotation, no paraphrasing.” Asked about the origins of Mary Poppins, she strode about her room and said, “You’re trying to find out my secrets. A secret is something that must not be told. Nevertheless I will tell you a secret, and that is, that I don’t really know.” With that she sat down, ankles crossed, wrists bangled and jangling in silver and turquoise. She waited serenely. Nora asked, “What type of adult is it that retains the childlike quality of regarding fantasy and actuality as equally real?” But “up comes the doubled fist and she disappears behind it. ‘No type of adult.’ ‘Okay,’ said Nora, ‘how long was Mary Poppins aborning?’ ” Oh, she liked that, “what a beautiful phrase,” just as she liked Nora’s “big and beautiful” question: “Since Mary Poppins arrived, has she altered your life?” The film had, she admitted, “rather pulled me out of my socket.” Her main aim at Radcliffe? “To arouse questions.”14
Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P. L. Travers Page 28