The Life of P.L. Travers

THE AUTHOR, THE STORYTELLER, THE MASTERMIND

Born Helen Lyndon Goff in Australia in 1899, P.L. Travers led a life cloaked in mystery. Even after her death in 1996, the details of her past were unclear. An obituary in the Guardian stated that she was the granddaughter of the premier of Queensland; another in the New York Times described her as the daughter of a sugar planter. While neither of these details are exactly true, you can hardly blame the writers for poor fact checking. Travers had a tendency to bend her life story and make it more attractive, a trait she likely inherited from her father, Travers Robert Goff. He also liked to reinvent his life story; not even his wife was privy to the truth about his past. Goff was a heavy drinker. He spent many evenings spinning stories of a fairytale-like childhood spent in Ireland, though he was actually born in England. Lyndon, as P.L.’s family called her, would spend her life chasing her father’s fantasies. Eventually his myths melded with her own version of the truth to create a personal history that was part reality, part fiction. In her early twenties Lyndon pursued an acting career, changing her name to Pamela and adopting her father’s first name as her last—Pamela Lyndon Travers. It sounded more romantic, more melodic. She later moved to London as a journalist, adopting the pen name P.L. Travers. Further veils were cast, blurring the truth of her history as Pamela invented a new life that seemed much more exciting.

Like the magical nanny she created, P.L. Travers never explained. Throughout her career, people often asked her where the idea for Mary Poppins came from, but she never really told. She believed in mystery, mythology, and folk tales - she believed in questions, not answers. For P.L. Travers, life was a never-ending quest for the truth. One night when Helen was ten, she was left in charge of her two younger siblings during a violent thunderstorm; their mother had walked into the storm, distraught, and they didn't know if she would return. To comfort the younger children, Helen began to weave intricate and magical stories about an enchanted horse, allowing the children to fill in the blanks of the tale.

Although she entered her teens wanting to be an actress and a dancer, Helen soon realized that writing held more power for her. She loved to express herself through storytelling. In February of 1924 she left for London, England, the home of poets, playwrights, and famous storytellers. "There, at last," she said, "I was where I wanted to be" (as quoted in Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P.L. Travers).

While in London, she wrote for Australian newspapers, describing her adventures abroad. She soon met the poet George William Russell, nicknamed AE, who became a close friend and mentor. He told her that she had a "dangerous brilliance." It was Russell who introduced her to the inner meaning of fairy tales and mythology and, in a moment that would change her life, suggested that she write about a witch. Something about a magical teacher - a combination wise old woman and fairy godmother - appealed to Travers. She took all of her experience and imagination and poured then into a solitary figure, blown into London by a mysterious wind.

In 1926, Travers had written the first Mary Poppins story, Mary Poppins and the Match Man, about a young Mary Poppins meeting Bert the Match Man for an afternoon tea in one of his sidewalk chalk drawings. She built on that original story, creating a world around her mysterious nanny that combined magic and ordinary life. Who is Mary Poppins? Travers' biographer Valerie Lawson wrote, "The original Mary Poppins was not cheery at all. She was tart, and sharp, rude, plain, and vain. That was her charm; that - and her mystery." Mary Poppins, published in 1934 was very popular, and Travers began writing a series of books about the family who lived at No. 17, Cherry Tree Lane.
 
The first book became an international phenomenon and eventually found its way into the hands of Walt Disney. Disney himself was delighted by the book and became determined to make it into a movie. This did not prove to be an easy task. After nearly 20 years of persuasion, Travers finally agreed to sign over the rights to the books, and Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke became the Mary Poppins and Bert that so many fell in love with.

The movie became a sensation all its own; it was nominated for 13 academy awards and won 5. The movie cemented Mary's place in the imaginations of countless children and adults. However, P.L. Travers felt that Disney had not stayed true to her books, and walked out of the film premiere in tears. Having been so upset by the film adaptation, Travers was very hesitant when Cameron Mackintosh approached her about turning her books into a musical. She acquiesced on the condition (expressed in her will) that only English-born writers – and no Americans, particularly anyone involved with the film production– were to be directly involved in the creative process of the stage musical. Ultimately, she was again convinced after Mackintosh agreed that no one involved in the creation of the movie would be involved in the making of the stage show. The Mary Poppins musical opened in England in 2004.

Throughout her life, Travers explored the connections between life and storytelling. Fairy tales, she wrote, "live in us, endlessly growing, repeating their themes ringing like great bells. If we forget them, still they are not lost. They go underground, like secret rivers and emerge the brighter for their dark journey." In Mary Poppins Opens the Door, she writes of a mystical crack in the fabric of reality that opens between New Year's Eve and New Year's Day in which all the fairy tale characters come out to play.

"When I sat down to write Mary Poppins or any of the other books, I did not know children would read them. I’m sure there must be a field of 'children’s literature'—I hear about it so often—but sometimes I wonder if it isn’t a label created by publishers and booksellers who also have the impossible presumption to put on books such notes as 'from five to seven' or 'from nine to twelve.' How can they know when a book will appeal to such and such an age?

I certainly had no specific child in mind when I wrote Mary Poppins. […] But I suppose if there is something in my books that appeals to children, it is the result of my not having to go back to my childhood; I can, as it were, turn aside and consult it (James Joyce once wrote, 'My childhood bends beside me'). If we’re completely honest, not sentimental or nostalgic, we have no idea where childhood ends and maturity begins. It is one unending thread, not a life chopped up into sections out of touch with one another.

Once, when Maurice Sendak was being interviewed on television a little after the success of Where the Wild Things Are, he was asked the usual questions: Do you have children? Do you like children? After a pause, he said with simple dignity: 'I was a child.' That says it all.

But don’t let me leave you with the impression that I am ungrateful to children. They have stolen much of the world’s treasure and magic in the literature they have appropriated for themselves. Think, for example, of the myths or Grimm’s fairy tales—none of which were written especially for them—this ancestral literature handed down by the folk. And so despite publishers’ labels and my own protestations about not writing especially for them, I am grateful that children have included my books in their treasure trove."

P.L. Travers dies in 1996 at the age of 96. Her journey was over, but in many ways it had begun. At the first day of rehearsal for Mary Poppins, Cameron Mackintosh said to the company, "I'm sure Pamela Travers is here, today, in spirit! And you can be sure she has plenty of notes for us already!"

"Anything can happen if you let it

Life is out there waiting, So go and get it"

- The Ensemble