AE reassured Pamela he really did love “Ghosts of Two Sad Lovers” and, to emphasize the point, explained in detail how he gave unwanted contributors the cold shoulder. His letters were full of advice and wry hints about Ireland from one who had been through the Celtic twilight and survived. He warned her that her trips to Dublin would become addictive (they did) and that “we have all sorts here, from the most idealistic to a reality more absolute than any in Europe. I think 25 years ago, all the poets were trying to discover the heights in the Irish genius, now our writers are all trying to discover the depths.”
Pamela’s poems of the 1920s are, on the surface, lyrical and pastoral—never colloquial—yet they can be seen as dense with the need for experience in life. The author, the innocent nymph still, begged the muse to come. One poem, “Oh Break Her Heart,” published in June 1926, was a cry to the gods to break her own heart—“from her grief distil loveliness for our need”—so that she might become a better writer. She revealed little of her inner self, and shunned simple words or references to everyday life.
AE not only allayed Pamela’s insecurities about writing, he reassured her about life itself. His letters gradually reveal how concerned Pamela was for herself, not just her work, but her health. Almost all his letters comment on the illnesses Pamela began to suffer from the 1920s. He was sorry to hear about her influenza, bad colds, boils, and lung problems, which hinted at TB.
In early June 1926, Pamela moved to 14 Old Square, a corner of Lincoln’s Inn, in the center of the legal district. It was, she told her Christchurch Sun readers, a cloistered life where porters touched their forelocks as she entered the gates, which closed at midnight. This column, headlined “Grey Towers: Pamela goes to Lincoln’s Inn,”39 ended with a description of her view by night of a carved boy angel. She talked to him, confiding to the stone figure that her new home was a sweet place. Could she want anything more? The angel replied, “Yes, much more.”
In September that year, AE visited Pamela in London on the way to his first Parisian holiday, where he was to meet once again his friend James Stephens and the French writer Simone Tery. He wrote to Pamela, “Can you suggest anything I can do after my train gets in? I really don’t want to do anything except talk to you. I think I would like to ride back and forwards in the top of a bus…and hear you talk about London. But you might get cold in the top of a bus, my precious child.”
He walked with Pamela down the curve of Regent Street. Both felt a kind of nervy excitement, still shy of each other’s gaze. Pamela said how odd it was they had met, “two people from the ends of the earth.” AE stopped in mid stride. She glanced up at him then, to see his round blue eyes growing rounder. AE explained to her that this was not the first time they had met. They had known one another in a different incarnation. He told her of his law of spiritual gravitation which he explained as “your own will come to you.”40
• • •
For all her bravura, Pamela still felt isolated in London. It was all very well to hanker after the life of a poet but poets made no money and she desperately missed her mother. Pamela distracted herself with women’s magazines while she continued to bombard AE with her verses. She paid the rent with the checks from her journalism and in 1926 worked out a way to earn enough to pay her mother’s fare to England.
“And so,” she confided to an interviewer, “having written only for the highbrow magazines, you know the literary magazines, I collected ordinary magazines, the flossies, and read them avidly. I got to see there were only two stories, fundamentally. There was “Get Your Man” and then there was “How to Keep Your Man.” So I embarked on this, writing story after story, under another name, of course, and what do you think? I sent them to my agent and he said “Marvelous, these are certainly going to sell.” And sure enough they did, and in a very short while, I had the necessary money for this big, this biggest expedition so far in my life. I saw my mother…”41
Margaret Goff and Pamela had written regularly. Pamela sent her mother her published stories and poems, and Margaret passed them on to Aunt Ellie, who liked the prose much more than the poems. Margaret wrote of her problems with money and the tension between her and Biddy, and Biddy’s new husband, Boyd Moriarty. She was overjoyed, though, to tell Pamela in November 1926 that she had booked a berth on a ship due to sail in the (Australian) autumn of 1927.
All through 1926 Pamela wrote a different kind of story, not about women but about children and their dreams. These stories became the basis for the Mary Poppins adventures, which Pamela always claimed had suddenly come to her, unbidden, in 1934. Some of the adventures had their beginnings in stories she had written as long ago as December 1924, when The Triad had published her “Story for Children Big and Small.” This told of a king, his chamberlain and a fool. The three characters, and the essence of the fable, were the basis for the chapter “Robertson Ay’s Story” in Mary Poppins Comes Back, published more than a decade later.
For the Christchurch Sun, she wrote of a magical encounter in a Paris bookshop with a Pan-like creature who was reading in the Just So Stories about how the elephant got his trunk. An old man bought the book, to the dismay of the boy-creature. Pamela spoke to him; he ran away. She found him later, on a bronze pedestal in the public gardens. The story was published on March 8, 1926. Almost two decades later, the tale was the basis for a chapter in Mary Poppins Opens the Door, published in 1944. Called “The Marble Boy,” it tells of a marble statue, Neleus, who reads the story about how the elephant got his trunk over the shoulder of an old man in the park.
On March 20, 1926, the Christchurch Sun published “The Strange Story of the Dancing Cow,” accompanied by a panel boasting “Miss Pamela Travers, who writes this story for the Sun, is rapidly winning fame for herself in London. Few writers today can equal her in the realm of whimsical fantasy. Read here the quaint story of the Old Red Cow who awoke to find herself smitten with star fever.” In the first Mary Poppins book, published in 1934, Mary told the same story of the cow and a king within a chapter called “The Dancing Cow.”
In December 1926, again for the Christchurch Sun, Pamela wrote a fanciful piece called “Pamela Publishes—a Newspaper!” which purported to be a special news bulletin with gossip supplied by a cockney maid, “Mary Smithers.” But it was on November 13, 1926, in a short story called “Mary Poppins and the Match Man,” that Pamela really gave birth to her famous nanny. The story told of Mary Poppins’s day out. For the first time, she had written of the Banks household and Mary Poppins, the “underneath nurse,” aged seventeen. (There was no “top nurse” although Mr. and Mrs. Banks liked to pretend there was.) Her charges were Jane, Michael, Barbara and John Banks. Mary Poppins, about to enjoy a day out, puts on white gloves and tucks a parrot-headed umbrella under her arm. Jane asks her where she is going, but Mary refuses to say. On the corner, she meets Bert, a match man and pavement artist. He loves her, and it is clear that she loves him, too. They admire Bert’s pavement paintings and pop right into one showing a pretty scene of the countryside. Suddenly, Bert is wearing a striped coat, straw hat and white flannel trousers. Mary, in turn, is wearing a silken cloak and a hat with a long, curly feather. Mary and Bert take afternoon tea served by a man in a black coat. After the raspberry cakes are eaten, they climb onto the horses of a merry-go-round and ride all the way to Margate. When she returns home, Mary tells the Banks children she has been to fairyland.
As “The Day Out,” this story, with many identical passages but some differences, appeared in Pamela’s first Mary Poppins book published eight years later. It also formed the basis of the “It’s a Jolly Holiday with Mary” song-and-dance sequence from Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins movie. The fact that Disney had chosen this story as such an important scene for the film always irritated Pamela. She later called “The Day Out” chapter “false” and the weakest of all her Mary Poppins adventures, but never explained why. During her lifetime, no one ever discovered exactly when she had created Mary Poppins, and she certainly d
id not tell, although she did tell her favorite interviewer, Jonathan Cott: “When I was in my teens, I wrote a small story about someone named Mary Poppins putting children to bed. I can’t remember what paper the story appeared in, but the name was a long time a-growing, a long time in existence, perhaps.”42
Real writers, she always believed, did not write for children. And Pamela yearned to be a real writer, or rather a poet who could write of Ireland with the grace and confidence of Yeats. By December 1926, Pamela was confident enough of her relationship with AE to send him a photo of them together, which he found “not nice enough of you, my dear, as it makes you years older than you are. If I was the photographer I would have tossed your hair until it stood up like the mane of a lion in a rage.”43 He had just published her seventh poem in the Irish Statesman, “On Ben Bulben,” another of Pamela’s tributes to Yeats, referring to the mountain near Drumcliff in Yeats’s home territory, near Sligo.
She told students years later that Yeats had a great influence on her,44 but that she was in awe of the Bard, not the man. So much in awe that she adopted not only his writing style but also many of his characteristics. Like Yeats, she continually feared she had TB, studied eastern religions to help her create order from disorder, followed an Indian guru, used the lessons of fairy tales to support her philosophy of life, and embarked on a lecture circuit of the United States. Like Yeats, she adopted a variety of masks, freely admitting to the masks which did not just include pseudonyms, but a certain bluff and false self, in line with Oscar Wilde’s maxim “the first duty in life is to assume a pose; what the second is no one yet has found out.”
Yeats’s biographer, Richard Ellmann, believed that Wilde’s view was duplicated in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in Mallarmé’s poetry and in the pseudonyms and other selves of Yeats’s contemporaries, W. K. Magee, Wilde, William Sharp and AE. Yeats was part of the nineteenth century’s changing ideas on selfhood, and “came to maturity in this atmosphere of doubling and splitting of the self.” AE wrote that by 1884 “Yeats had already developed a theory of the divided consciousness.” Yeats came to see himself as the man who had created the other self—“The Poet.” This was a significant discovery for Pamela, who had already adopted a pseudonym, Pamela Travers, and later obscured her true self further by writing as P. L. Travers, then claiming she would have preferred to be known as Anon, a variation of AEON.
In the late summer of 1926 Pamela again visited Ireland, mainly to enjoy days “full of poets, full of poems, full of talk and argument and legend-telling and delight.”45 She took the train to Athlone, in the Midlands, to met more elderly Goffs, then drove on to Galway, Clifden and Leenane. On the way back to Dublin, Pamela embarked on an adventure that she later remembered as a mythical journey that could have been called “When the Fool met the Sage, and learnt a Lesson.”
Her destination was Lough Gill, made famous by Yeats’s 1890 poem, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” She asked a boatman to take her there. He said he knew of no such place, but Pamela, who knew by heart “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,” insisted there was. “It’s known around these parts,” sneered the boatman, “as Rat Island.” The two of them set out under gray clouds with Pamela in the bow and a young priest with them, sitting in the stern. She found no hive for the honey bee on the island nor a log cabin, but the whole of the island was covered with red-berried rowan trees. She decided suddenly to take some branches back to Yeats. Pamela broke as many branches as she could, then staggered under their weight, in driving rain, to the boat. She could see the priest saying his rosary.
Back on shore, she ran with her burden of rowan to the station. In the stuffy carriage on the train to Dublin her clothes steamed as they slowly dried. Fellow travelers edged away. She arrived at Merrion Square, her hair dripping still, her arms full—still—with bedraggled branches. Pamela rang the bell at number 82. Yeats himself answered the door.
There stood Pamela, her face uplifted and full of yearning for approval, above the bundle of rowan. He called down the dark hallway to the maid, Annie. She took Pamela to the basement kitchen, dried her, gave her cocoa and took away the branches. The upstairs maid came bustling in: “The master will see you now.” There he was in his blue-curtained room.
Yeats told her “my canary has laid an egg,” and took her to the cage. From there, they went on a tour of the room, Yeats indicating which of his books he liked best. He explained that when he got an idea for a poem, he was inspired by reading again one of his own books. She saw on his desk a vase holding just one sprig of rowan. Was he trying to teach her a lesson? Why give armfuls when one sprig will do? But no, she decided, he would never do anything so banal. She knew that this one branch signified the art of simplicity.
The next day, Pamela lunched with AE who told her Yeats was touched by her rowan berry gift. He hoped, though, that when she visited him in Dunfanaghy, she would not cut down the willows. After all, as AE solemnly said, dryads lived in the trees.46
Pamela and AE had been talking for months of Dunfanaghy and Breaghy, in his favorite part of Ireland, County Donegal. By January 1927, she felt sure enough of him to suggest she might spend a summer holiday there, after her mother’s visit.
For twenty years, AE had enjoyed his summer holidays in the northwest county of Donegal. He thought it the “wildest, loneliest and loveliest country I know, a country of hills, and hollows, of lakes and woods, of cliffs, mountains, rivers, inlets of sea, sands, ruined castles and memories from the beginning of the world. From the cottage I stay at, I can see seven seas between hills.”47 He loved the “unearthly beauty of the broken coast, its rocky inlets and silvery beaches” and came to think of this corner of Donegal as “his own peculiar, specialized kingdom.” It was for him the spiritual center of Ireland, where he saw “the silver fires of faeries” and found “psychic population in both the water and the woods.”48
Each summer, he set off by train from Dublin and spent part of the eleven-hour journey playing poker on a makeshift table of suitcases. He arrived at Dunfanaghy Road Station at nightfall, then traveled four miles to the village of Breaghy by jaunting car. Breaghy is close to Killahoey Strand beach which looks over Horn Head, the most beautiful of the Donegal headlands. Here AE stayed at a hillside cottage set behind one of the low stone fences that crisscross the landscape. Near the stone-fenced roadway, black-faced, black-legged sheep that looked like large shaggy calves stared at the horses as AE rounded the bend to the cottage. He rented a room from Janey Stewart, a spinster who filled the whitewashed cottage with her own handicrafts. Janey was a good cook, churning her own butter and baking cake as well as mutton in an iron cauldron slung on a chain over the peat fire. AE loved her dark brown, homemade bread and scoffed it down with pints of buttermilk. He slept in an attic bedroom that stretched the full width of the house. At night, AE could hear the cows moving about in their stalls below. If the weather was bad, he read a good part of the day. He had a weakness for Wild West novelettes and detective yarns. At twilight, he packed his crayons and sketchpad, pulled on his big boots, and strode over the hills.49
A mile away from Janey’s was Marble Hill House, the graceful and perfectly proportioned gray stone home of the Nationalist MP for West Donegal, Hugh Law, who had been one of AE’s closest friends since 1904. When AE tired of Janey’s cottage, Hugh and his wife, Lota, let him stay in their children’s old cubby house, adult sized, that they had built on the grounds.
The fairy house, as it was called, became AE’s studio. He slept in a loft. Lota tried to make it comfy in an artsy-crafty way, embroidering a pattern of fishes and waves into a piece of cloth which she threw over the loft rail. Down in the big studio room below, above the hearth, AE hung one of his own paintings, featuring a sword of light.50
In the early days, AE took his wife to Breaghy. But by the 1920s, Violet preferred to stay home in Dublin. He invited others to share the peace, among them a few of his young women, including Simone Tery and Pamela.
His friend John Eglinton knew AE always needed at least one friend to whom to whisper “solitude is sweet.”51 He liked to take the girls to dinner at the Laws or to walk and talk as he painted twilight sketches for canvases he might finish the next day. There were parts of the woodland or Strand which, he said, set up in him the strongest psychic vibrations. AE strode along the Strand in the same clothes he wore in Bloomsbury: a dark suit, broad hat, his trousers rolled up and boots hung around his neck. He talked without pause as he waded among droves of prawns and shrimp.52
The weather for Pamela’s first visit, in June 1927, was atrocious, dark, rainy and threatening every day. She sat inside, at his side, absorbing his ramblings as voraciously as she devoured Janey’s cakes and mutton. He teased her about how much she ate, “for a girl who is not hungry.”53 Once, when they were setting out for a walk, Pamela looked down through a break in the mist and saw a giant outline of a footprint bordered by flowers embedded in the grass. The shape was unmistakable, as though a monster from another planet had landed on earth, taken a step, then risen again. She told him “someone has been here.” AE, of course, was hardly surprised. It often happened, he told his little protégée.54
When they visited the Laws, AE told her she could not walk the mile in her flimsy London shoes. He disappeared to his attic room and came down with the Observer and The Times, a bundle of string, a pile of socks and a pair of his old boots. “Sit down,” he ordered. She was to wear six socks on each leg. Around one leg he wound the Observer, around the other The Times, tying the fatted calves with string before she wriggled into his boots.
Mary Poppins, She Wrote Page 10