Mary Poppins, She Wrote

by Valerie Lawson

  In the way of almost every columnist desperate for material, her life was presented as a whirlwind of opening nights and intellectual stimulation. She found Peter Pan “a play so extraordinarily naive and engaging it would take a stonier heart than mine to let loose upon it the demons of criticism,” she ogled at the circus at the Crystal Palace, saw Macbeth in modern dress, went to the opera at Covent Garden, read a new biography of Emily Brontë, danced the new craze, the Heebie Jeebie, far more fashionable than the Black Bottom and the Yale Blues, but “went to bed with Plato.”19

  After her mother’s visit, Pamela continued to send money to her in Sydney. It was clear that Margaret needed help. When she moved, with Moya, to Devonshire Flats in East Esplanade, Manly, the two women were forced to take in boarders. Margaret’s last letters to Pamela fussed over her health, her job, her happiness. In early October 1928, she was worried that Pamela’s back was still giving her trouble. “God bless you and make you well and strong.”

  There were no more letters. Margaret Goff died at the Crescent Private Hospital, Manly, on November 6, 1928, of a heart attack. She was fifty-four. Her estate, like her life, was modest. She left £4,836. On her death certificate, the name of the first of her three daughters was given as Lyndon. For Margaret, her eldest girl never became Pamela Travers.

  Pamela felt the loss of her mother “like a wound constantly bleeding.” Friends spouted cliches but nobody offered genuine comfort except Gogarty, who wrote, “It is a sorrow that never ends…[but] the way-springs of life are not cut off. You have to be the way-spring.” At last she felt someone understood the depth of her sorrow, its meaning and necessity. “I began at once to get over it,” she claimed20—but her constant search for gurus suggests otherwise.

  AE was too distracted to be of much help. He wrote from Dublin in November 1928 that “I wish I could be with you to say comforting things” but “this abominable case” had lasted ten days and “is not yet ended.” (The Irish Statesman was fighting a defamation action in a Dublin court.) Pamela wanted to know if he could help her with the names of American editors, but AE replied, “I know none. Would it do if I wrote a statement about your talent as a writer that you could use?” He wrote her a testimonial: “In the hope that my sincere judgment of the literary talents of Miss Pamela Travers may incline editors who do not know her work to read with care any manuscript she may send, I would like to say that I believe her verse at its best is as beautiful as that written by any living poetess of whom I have knowledge, either in America or Great Britain, and my friend William Butler Yeats has also expressed to me his admiration of her poetry. She is also an admirable and picturesque journalist especially qualified to write on drama and literature as well as on current affairs and politics…I think if any American paper desired to have a readable London letter it could with confidence be entrusted to her.”

  By now, Pamela and Madge had moved to a cheaper flat at the Woburn Buildings, 38 Woburn Square, near Euston Station. Here Pamela completed a book of poems and told AE she would dedicate it to him. He urged her to begin some new enterprise. Had she thought any more about “the story of Keats? If you don’t do it, someone else will.” He told her how to start the biography—“swallow the whole, letters, poems, life, digest it for two to three months.”21

  AE’s last years were marked by a physical restlessness as he acquired new friends, moved from place to place, rented a succession of homes and failed to dedicate himself to anything at all. He had become close to Kingsley Porter, an archaeologist, who had lectured in art history at Yale University but who spent much of his time in Ireland. Porter had rented the Laws’ old home at Marble Hill, then moved to a lakeside mansion, Glenveagh Castle, fifteen miles inland. The castle was near Tory Island, a windy island separated from the mainland of Donegal by a rough stretch of sea. At his newly restored summer home, Porter, his wife Lucy and their guests became a new audience for AE. He talked all night, to whoever stayed awake, then finally retired to his room to read The Arabian Nights which he liked to analyze out loud over breakfast.

  AE’s son, Diarmuid, was about to leave his job at the Irish Statesman to marry and live in Chicago. The new editorial assistant was to be a twenty-one-year-old poet, Irene Haugh, another acolyte for AE to impress. He cooked for her, sketched her, and when she traveled abroad, wrote her letters wondering if she might come back “with a new continental way of arranging your hair. Why not let it stream behind you like a meteor on the wind?”22

  Pamela’s fragile health, meanwhile, had become steadily worse; she now suffered from bouts of pleurisy and was afraid of Gogarty’s theory that “blonde hair and blue eyes are the favorite resting place for TB.”23 In the summer of 1929 Pamela, with Madge, tried a holiday cure in Ilnacullin, near Glengariff in County Cork, where Madge’s sister Eileen lived. AE had told her of the island which had been turned into a neoclassical folly with Italianate gardens.

  But by January 1930, AE was sorry to hear she had ptomaine poisoning and “had to survive on a diet of brandy and milk.” She sent him a lucid review of an Italian art exhibition for the Irish Statesman but complained she was in a state of “muddledom” and might now need an operation for appendicitis. AE recommended coueism, a fashionable idea of the 1920s, based on the positive self-talk theories of a Monsieur Coue. “Imagine yourself the gayest and healthiest of women. It will do you a lot of good.”24

  AE had told the remaining American friends he wanted to close the Irish Statesman, retire, and perhaps return to the United States. For its last issue, in April 1930, Pamela wrote an essay called “A Brand for the Critic,” in which she dismissed most critics as superficial and slick. The true critic, she believed, must love and fully interpret her art form, and forgive the failures of artists. This ideal formula did not always tally with her own sharp asides as a critic. Pamela remained proud of her acting experience, firmly believing that it was a genuine schooling for her criticism. She would have blushed, though, if the actors she reviewed on the London stage knew the truth of that experience—small Shakespearean roles, on the road in rural New South Wales and New Zealand, and the pantomime chorus line.

  In the final issue of the magazine, Horace Plunkett suggested that a decision to set the Irish Statesman’s cover price at threepence instead of sixpence meant it could never have covered costs. Irene Haugh helped AE clean up the detritus of twenty-five years. As they worked, the old editor brushed the dust of books long forgotten, stopped, read bits aloud to her, made piles of things to throw away, then changed his mind. That book could never go. And this one, save that, too! As AE retired to Donegal, Pamela and Madge cleaned out their own flat, moving around the corner to 13 Theobald’s Road. But their new home was soon abandoned for Pound Cottage in Mayfield, near Tunbridge Wells. AE wrote that he hoped the move would be for her “what Donegal is to me, the fountain of youth.”25

  In the summer of 1930, AE was invited on another lecture tour of the United States by the philanthropist and patron of the arts Mrs. Mary Rumsey, the sister of Averell Harriman and a friend of the coming Roosevelt administration. “Rums,” as she was known, financed the tour. He wrote to Pamela, “I leave Liverpool on 12 September and will be away for five or six months. This is to say good-bye.” He did not really want to go, but, “I must make money somehow and it is the quickest way I know. I wouldn’t go but that I have an invalid wife. Myself, I would live in a cottage in the country.”

  Despite his fears, AE soon became totally absorbed by the United States, remaining there for eight months, until May 1931. Once again he met his old guru James Pryse, his friend Henry Wallace, and stayed for a while with his son, Diarmuid. When his talks were broadcast, he was feted as a seer, an agricultural genius and a brilliant poet. People stopped him in the street to ask, “Are you AE?” They had recognized the face from the movie news.26 The fame was splendid, but AE was more entranced by “magical Arizona with its rose-amethyst mountains” which he thought resembled “the mountains in a fairy book.”27 Pamela was exc
ited by his description of Arizona and New Mexico, by his great enthusiasm for the cactus-covered desert. “If ever I was to leave Ireland,” he had told her, “it would be to live in the desert under the rule of the rattlesnake and coyote.”28

  AE continued to respond to Pamela’s expanding list of worries about her health and abilities. He boosted her flagging confidence with a description that she never forgot—who could?—that she had “a dangerous brilliance.” He advised her to “indulge her fantasies.” He meant literary fantasies, of course, which were “the record of spiritual experience.” She should get a tan, as “doctors tell me when the skin is brown the blood changes and becomes electrified.” But it was not just her body that worried Pamela, but a vague sense of anxiety that was to grow into feelings of dread. She told AE in 1930 that she was considering some form of psychology, which he told her was “rather dangerous in practice.”

  When he returned, they met for tea at the Euston Hotel near the station. Nothing had cured Pamela. She coughed and shivered and checked every little pain until her doctor suspected it really must be TB. In the summer of 1931, the doctor suggested a sanitarium—just in case—and urged her to live outside London permanently. Pamela decided to make Mayfield her home.

  While she was in the sanitarium, she wrote to AE that her mind had become full of fantastic tales, of a witch whose broomstick would fly just as well by white magic as by black magic. AE was a willing, enthusiastic audience. After all, he said, Yeats “seemed to imply there were such witches.” That summer, AE urged Pamela to “think over a tale which would use all your powers of fantasy.” He thought she should call it “The Adventures of a Witch.” It could be “the idea in letting you say all you want to say.”29 Pamela brooded on AE’s suggestion. She had the time. The Triad was dead. The Irish Statesman was dead. She had the basis for a book in the stories she had written for children over the years. And she was about to go into the equivalent of a writer’s retreat, the Sussex cottage.

  • • •

  Pound Cottage, just out of Mayfield, might have been the home of the wicked witch in “Hansel and Gretel,” or Farmer Hoggett and his sweet pig, Babe. More like a stage set than a real house, the cottage looked as though a romantic heroine like Giselle might step through its rustic door to dance among the roses in the garden, except Giselle’s home was in Germany and this cottage was deep in the heart of southern England.

  Pamela heard from the locals it was mentioned in the Doomsday book but in any case, it could be dated as far back as 1632, the date carved on an oak beam over a cavernous fireplace. The cottage walls, between their skeleton of old beams, were so ancient they were made of wattle and daub. Pamela and Madge had to duck their heads when they walked in the front door, straight into the kitchen, then through to the living room. From there, a toy-sized door opened to a narrow stairway leading to three bedrooms above. The first floor was so cozily neat and compact, they thought it seemed just right for Goldilocks and the three bears. Pamela settled into the largest room, closest to the stairs; Madge took the middle room. The third room lay in wait, filled with junk, until house guests came down from London. Madge—who did all the cooking—wasn’t too impressed with the kitchen. There was no fridge, of course, indeed no electricity. She cooked on oil heaters. Birds nested in the thatched roof, which drooped over the eaves like a wide-brimmed hat. Archaeologists came to gaze at Pound Cottage and ask if they might buy it. One wanted to export it, lock, stock and thatch, to Detroit.30

  The Pound, once the stockman’s cottage of the nearby Forge Farm, was one of many properties rented to farmers by the Glynne Estates, which owned four thousand acres in the south of England. When Pamela and Madge first took the cottage in 1930 it was surrounded by fields stretching far into the distance, all with a blanketing of white sheep. One could imagine Piglet and Pooh cavorting on their way to Eeyore’s gloomy place, or Mole down by the riverbank. This was a perfect place for a writer, isolated, serene, except for the nightingales, which, Pamela complained, sang all night. Pound Cottage was at least a fifteen-minute drive from Mayfield, more if snow lined the narrow road where one car had to stop to let another pass, even one as compact as Pamela’s black, canvas-topped, low-slung BSA sports car.

  Pamela and Madge took day trips to Hastings, tended the vegetables, herbs and fruit trees, posed for the camera in the garden with flowers in their arms. Pamela thought they should keep a dog to scare away tramps, so along came the white bulldog Cu, whose name was Gaelic for “dog.” He snuffled and snorted and farted as he slept in his wicker basket in the kitchen.31

  Pamela loved it here, among the soft green fields. She watched them change color in the afternoon through the little windowpanes in a studio she added to the cottage. It was here, in the studio, that Pamela stored her scrapbooks. In one, she had pasted her tale of Mary Poppins and the Match Man.

  • • •

  AE was now approaching the end of his life. The death of his wife, Violet, and his friend, Kingsley Porter, signposted the way to his own passing. He was saddened and depressed by Violet’s serious illness when a tumor “turned itself around too many organs to make recovery possible.” He told Pamela, “The doctors tell me nothing can be done.”32

  Despite his depression, AE still wrote long, compassionate letters to Pamela. He hoped she was drinking milk by the gallon, eating eggs, and sleeping with windows “open to the infinite.”33 She was, but she was also far too wired up to simply relax into the country life. She had sent him two poems which AE thought “well phrased but a little artificial in comparison with others of yours. You say they are simple. Yes, simple in expression but I feel they are artificial beneath that. You seem to have a hankering for Biblical symbolism which I doubt is natural. Quality my dear is the thing, not quantity.” He did think, however, that his judgment might be affected by the headaches from which he now suffered almost half the week. And no, he did not know anyone who was of “interviewing importance.”34

  Her move to the country made no difference to Pamela’s health, and in January 1932 AE was very sorry to hear she had been so ill. He was only pleased she had Madge to look after her. “I think the best thing I ever did was bringing you and her together.”35

  Violet Russell died on February 3, 1932; after the funeral AE arranged to meet Pamela at the Euston Hotel in London where he was to stay a week. Once again, they simply talked, rode the buses, walked the London streets, held hands. At home in Dublin he wrote to Sean O’Faolain: “I would like to have seen you while I was in London…Pamela Travers is back in London but is ordered by her doctor to live out of it, and she will shortly leave. I don’t know what she will do. I hope she will escape the tuberculosis which the doctors suspect. She has a touch of genius and should do good things and lead a rich life if her health keeps good.”36

  AE then began to slice away at his old attachments to Ireland. He wrote to Yeats that he was now completely disillusioned with his homeland, which seemed “like a lout I knew in boyhood, who had become a hero, and then subsided into a lout again.”37 He told O’Faolain that he had no further interest in Ireland, “indeed I have no further interest in nations at all.” His friend, John Eglinton, thought the only thing that now kept AE in Ireland at all was Kingsley Porter. That summer he stayed once more with Porter at Glenveagh Castle.

  By March 1932 Pamela was back in the sanitarium, where she heard from AE that “Lady Gregory died at midnight. All my generation are dropping fast.” When Pamela returned to Pound Cottage in July, AE urged her to continue with the fresh air day and night, with sunlight and lots of milk and eggs. This time the cure worked, and by autumn she not only felt stronger, but brave enough to travel to Russia, a plan that amazed AE. He asked, “Why are you a moth seeking flames to dash itself against?”38

  The idea of a woman traveling alone to Soviet Russia in 1932 astounded not only AE but all Pamela’s friends, who saw it as either the chance of a lifetime or utter recklessness. The journey was in fact a carefully packaged experience with lit
tle risk. Pamela traveled with a party of English tourists herded about in boats, trains and museums by a guide following a strict schedule. Through AE’s salon, she had spoken to other writers who had taken such a tour. One may have been the writer Hubert Butler, who had worked with AE and Sir Horace Plunkett. Butler sailed to Leningrad on the tourist ship the Alexei Rykov in 1931. With his wife and a friend, he had traveled down the Volga then on to Moscow and Rostov. Butler wrote a book about the adventure, Russian Roundabout.39

  Pamela’s letters home from Russia later became a series of magazine articles and were then collected for her first book, Moscow Excursion. Published in 1934 by the Soho publisher Gerard Howe, Moscow Excursion hid the identity of almost everyone involved, including the author. The men and women she met in Russia were identified, in the style of a nineteenth century novel, as T—or M—or Z—. The author was simply known as P. T. Most mysterious of all was the dedication to HLG, which could well have been a joke of the author’s, Pamela dedicating the book to her true self, Helen Lyndon Goff.

  Her journey to Stalinist Russia—she called it “Red Russia”—was to include Leningrad, Moscow and Nizhny-Novgorod. Her companions were deadly serious academics, whom she referred to as the First Professor, the Second Professor, the School Teacher, and so on, and a couple of hangers-on—the Business Man and the Poultry Farmer. She portrayed herself, still, as a carefree young girl, a cigarette-smoking, modern young thing among a group of old fathers.

  She realized, of course, that she was not going to see the truth about Russia, which she knew was “carefully concealed from the vulgar eye of the tourist,” but rather a propaganda poster of Soviet Russia with its factories, crêches, museums and power stations. Across the Baltic Sea the party journeyed to Leningrad. The professors and teacher and businessman and Pamela were taken to the theatre, the Winter Palace, the Smolny Institute, the study of the last Czar, cathedrals, the cemetery in the grounds of the Alexander Nevsky monastery and the Rembrandts in the Hermitage, the whole an exhausting sightseeing marathon from breakfast until 4 P.M. each day. The increasingly grumpy group took the train to Moscow where they sat in a loge to see Swan Lake and caught a glimpse of Stalin. The party called at a crêche. Pamela was heartbroken to find babies propped up at a table, barely able to sit, expected to eat with a spoon when they were too little to even manipulate one.