Recently, I revisited a transcript of a conversation between P.L. Travers and Janet Graham that took place in P.L. Travers’s home on June 23, 1965. I like to do that occasionally. Although I love discovering new information about P.L. Travers and Mary Poppins, and all things related to them, rereading materials I’ve gathered over the years allows me to notice things I did not see the first time. Frequently, and to my enjoyment, the information I glean sends me into another tunnel in the rabbit hole in which I fell nine years ago, and I hope you enjoy being taken along on this exploratory journey.
The title of the interview is “A Conversation About Sorrow,” and it is one of my favorite P.L. Travers interviews. All her interviews are interesting and provide much food for thought, but I notice that their quality depended a lot on the chemistry between her and the interviewer. Luckily for us readers, when she liked the journalist, she was more talkative, and I get the impression from this conversation that she did like Janet Graham.
Today, I want to tell you about “The Three Little Foxes” by Mary Tourtel, a book that P.L. Travers kept with her since she was 7 years old. On the flyleaf of her book someone wrote the name of Mary Poppins, but according to P.L. Travers, it was not she who wrote it.
In the transcript “A Conversation About Sorrow” there is a handwritten note in the margin: “start of Mary Poppins”. It is right next to the passage in the interview where P.L. Travers told Janet Graham that her sister had mentioned that, as a child, P.L Travers told her siblings stories about Mary Poppins. However, P.L. Travers didn’t believe her sister to be right. She said, “I think she is having very clever hindsight”.
We will never know who wrote the name of Mary Poppins on the flyleaf. It is possible that her son Camillus wrote it when he was a young boy. He must have seen the book in his mother’s library and, knowing that she wrote the Mary Poppins stories, could have written it himself. I know I used to scribble things in books as a child, but of course, all this is just a speculation on my part.
P.L. Travers loved the story of “The Three Little Foxes”. She said, “It was a lovely story. Three Foxes called Ringo, Bingo and Lubilee – What beautiful names, Ringo Bingo and Lubilee. They were great family names; my mother was always calling us those names. She had the kind of mind quotations stuck in.”
And that is all she said about the story in the interview. What was it about? What did the little foxes do? Why did she like it so much to keep it with her all this time? Was it because of her fond memories of her mother, or was it something else?
I wanted to find out, and luckily, I managed to find an old (and affordable) copy on the Internet. It did not have ‘Mary Poppins’ written on its flyleaf, (I secretly wished it did!), but at least I now know the story and can speculate about why she might have liked it. I wonder who has her copy of the book now?
“The Three Little Foxes” tells the story of three brothers who decide to leave their cozy home and seek adventure in the world. In fact, it is the two oldest brothers, Ringo and Bingo, who are bored and need a change of scenery. Meanwhile Lubilee, the youngest brother, is quite content at home and doesn’t really have time for boredom. He is busy in the kitchen cooking and taking care of his brothers. But when the older brothers decide to leave their home, he must follow them, albeit unwillingly.
The three brothers meet a frog who tells them that if they are in search of adventure, maybe they could rescue the Fox Princess, who is kept hostage by the Old Bear Ogre. The three little foxes must go see the Queen of the Rabbits, who knows of a secret entrance to the grounds of the Bear Ogre’s castle. The Queen agrees to help them and orders one of her guards to lead the brothers through a secret passage leading to the garden where the Fox Princess likes to spend time.
When the three brothers arrive at the entrance of the passage, which turns out to be a long and winding tunnel, it is only Lubilee who musters enough courage to follow the guard. Scared Ringo and Bingo remain behind.
Lubilee succeeds in finding the garden and meets with the Fox Princess who, at that precise moment, happens to be strolling there. He tells the princess that he and his brothers have come to save her, but she warns him that the task is going to be difficult. The Ogre keeps her locked up in a lonely tower.
It was at this point in the narrative that I failed to follow the logic of the story. It is unclear (and frankly does not make much sense) why the Princess does not run off with Lubilee towards the secret tunnel and out of the garden right there and then. Instead, she tells Lubilee where the Ogre hides the key to her tower. It is in a box he uses as a footstool while sitting on his chair.
Lubilee goes back to his brothers, tells them all about the Princess and the key, and they come up with a plan on how to gain entrance into the Ogre Castle. They present themselves as acrobats who want to perform before the Bear Ogre.
During their performance, which consists of the two older brothers standing on their heads while Lubilee spins plates on sticks, the Bear Ogre sits comfortably in his chair with his feet on the footstool. However, their chance comes when Bear Ogre invites them to stay over for dinner and a little dance.
After dinner, the Bear Ogre wants to show his abilities too and he begins to dance the Keel Row. He is so taken by his dancing that he does not notice little Lubilee taking the key from the box in the footstool.
As soon as the little foxes find themselves outside of the castle, Ringo and Bingo start quarrelling over who should marry the Princess. In the meantime, Lubilee runs towards the tower and frees the Princess.
The Fox King was so glad that he called his Queen, gathered his court together and made Lubilee a Prince on the spot. Lubilee and the Princess become husband and wife.
When Ringo and Bingo finally find their way to the Fox King’s City, they begin to tell everyone who wants to hear that they were the ones who saved the Princess, and that Prince Lubilee is an impostor. Their slander lands them in a dungeon, but then good-hearted Lubilee frees them and appoints Ringo his Prime Minister, and Bingo the Commander-in-Chief of his Army. This decision seems very unwise to me…and could potentially propel Lubilee on another hero’s journey. Maybe I will try my hand at writing a sequel…but who will illustrate it?
P.L. Travers wrote an essay titled “The Youngest Brother”, it was first published in ‘Parabola’ on the theme of the Trickster in 1979 and then in “What the Bee Knows” in 1989. She reflects on the character of the youngest brother in fairy tales, who is often depicted as a simpleton, meaning, as she tells us, innocent and blessed. He is not yet burdened with knowledge and pride. He eagerly offers and accepts help from others, no matter how strange they may appear.
She goes on to explain the usual sequence in these types of stories, which “The Three Little Foxes” follows closely.
The stories always begin with a quest, something that only the three brothers can undertake. However, the usual mistake of the two older brothers is that they believe success in their quest depends solely on themselves. Consequently, they often find themselves imprisoned at the beginning of the story, unable to continue their quest.
In these stories, P.L. Travers tells us, there is also an imprisoned princess who is the youngest brother’s complementary figure. Then, the youngest brother is wronged by the older brothers who are envious and greedy, just like Ringo and Bingo in the story, and things can become quite dangerous; all can be lost.
In the end, the youngest brother forgives his brothers’ sins. P.L. Travers links this pattern of forgiveness to Plato’s myth of the Cave: “... where those who have risen to the light go down again to rescue others who still live with the shadows.”
The third and youngest brother in fairy tales is always in service of something else than himself and does not think he knows it all like his older brothers, who consider themselves to be men of the world who know their way about it.
Knowing tells us P.L. Travers is achieved through unknowing. Learning through experience, the man becomes a child – pure at heart.
She also links the progress of the youngest brother through his quest to Gurdjieff’s Law of Seven and the concept of repairing the past in the present. Although original and interesting, this calls for a separate blog post.
I hope you enjoyed this post and will come back again to read some more about P.L. Travers and Mary Poppins.
As a devoted fan of P.L. Travers, you can only imagine my delight in having the opportunity to learn firsthand about a private conversation she had with bestselling fantasy author Gregory Maguire back in 1995, a year before her passing. I hope that reading this blog post will be as much of a treat for you as it was for me to write it.
As a young boy, Gregory Maguire loved the Disney adaptation of Mary Poppins, but he loved the books more. And I believe that this is the case for most of us who first encountered the magical nanny on the page. It was certainly my own experience, but then I never saw Disney’s Mary Poppins as a child growing up behind the Iron Curtain. My acquaintance with the cinematographic version of Mary Poppins came much later and at a time when my mind had acquired its critical abilities.
“The movie is sunny and as sweet as a spoonful of sugar. The books, though, show glimmers of a far more mysterious and even dangerous world. For thirty years before the nanny began to sing on the screen, she stalked the pages of these books with ferocity and power.” (Foreword by Gregory Maguire, Mary Poppins Collection published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014)
I couldn’t agree more!
At the time of his meeting with P.L. Travers, Gregory Maguire was at a turning point in his writing career as he was just about to publish his bestselling novel “Wicked”. He was living in London, and after discovering that the author of Mary Poppins also lived there, he sent her a note, and in return received an invitation for tea.
He showed up at Number 29, Shawfield Street, London on the appointed day and time with three of P.L. Travers’s books: one of the Mary Poppins books, “The Fox at the Manger” and “Aunt Sass”.
He found P.L. Travers “an old woman slumped in an upholstered chair set back from the window” in a “shadowy parlor that hadn’t been fluffed up recently”.
The meeting lasted for about an hour, but it was long enough for P.L. Travers to plant a seed for a story in her visitor’s fertile imagination. It was a comment she made about a fairy tale character, the youngest brother in the fairy tale “The Six Swans” by the Brothers Grimm. In this story the wicked stepmother turns her stepchildren into swans, and it is their sister who, in the end, breaks the spell by knitting shirts from aster flowers. Only she does not have enough time to finish the last shirt and the youngest brother is left with one swan wing instead of an arm.
P.L. Travers felt, and rightfully so, that there, at the end of one story, was the beginning of another.
Shortly after Gregory Maguire finished writing his book “A Wild Winter Swan” but before its publication in 2020, he came across in his hand-written journals from 1995 something about P.L. Travers having said to him, “There’ a story – the sixth brother. Give him something to do. The boy with a wing. You know the one I mean?”
As the swan boy had been a beloved figure in his psyche ever since reading Hans Christian Andersen’s beautiful retelling of the Grimms’ fairy tale at the age of ten or twelve, her remark had evidently stuck in his subconscious. But that’s where Gregory Maguire tells us, seeds to stories wait.
This is by far the most exciting interview I have had the opportunity to conduct so far, but before we dive into it, and with Mr. Maguire’s permission, I am reproducing a portion of his lecture “The World at Hand, The World Next Door” presented by the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books for the 32nd Annual Helen E. Stubbs Memorial Lecture in November of 2019. Here is his charming recollection of his meeting with P.L. Travers.
I was living in London. Because somehow, I came across her home mailing address—perhaps in the phone book—I’d written to the author of MARY POPPINS, Ms. P. L. Travers, to thank her for her great work. She’d replied in a shaky hand ordering me to come to tea Tuesday week. Perhaps she preferred to receive tribute in person, I thought. (…) It’s nearly time to go—Number 29 Shawfield Street, London. . . .
A Georgian [row] house with a broad single window, behind palings, a small house on the east side of the street, behind a shocking pink door . . . at street level. The doorbell sharp and hard. I thought she might have forgotten, might not be there. A young woman, maybe part Jamaican, came in jeans and answered the door.
P. L. Travers sat in a chair in the corner, angled so she could watch out the window. She looked up when we came in and said to me, “Who are you?” I introduced myself—and she seemed not to hear me, but when I said again, more slowly, “Gregory” she appended “Maguire.” “You invited me to come by, and so I have, for a very short time,” I said. Mostly, in her face, were eyes and smile; she smiled like a small child; she seemed happy at everything, and smiled as a way of conversing. I had heard she was a bitch, a tart and difficult woman, but only at the end of my visit did one small comment erupt.
What follows is a sort of dialogue I devised that day out of notes I scribbled down on the back of a checkbook immediately after I had left Ms. Travers’ home. By this I mean it is more scripted than it may have sounded as it occurred—one can’t help imposing logic on scribbled notes. But the exchanges are verbatim as I could recall them even if they didn’t come out as sequentially as I put them down. Only a few words have been changed, for clarity.
PLT: I’ve been in the hospital and the nursing home for two years. I just got back. I can move very little.
GM: Can you get out at all?
PLT: Up and down the street.
GM: To the end.
PLT: To the second lamp-post. My world has shrunk to the second lamppost. But when I was out the other day, looking down to watch my feet, I found a present—
GM: —?
PLT: A star. A star!—there in the pavement. I’d never seen it there before. There’s a story—the sixth brother. Give him something to do. The boy with a wing. You know the one I mean
GM: Yes (I thought I might but wasn’t certain).
PLT: At the end of the street is a pub called the World’s End.
GM: At the other end, on the King’s Road, is a café called the Picasso Café. I sat there and a storm came up, and a rainbow came over—just ten minutes ago.
PLT: That was for you, to show you that you’re welcome here.
GM: You live between the star and the rainbow.
PLT: Yes! . . . . this is my whole world. There used to be… acres and acres of lavender, and cows mooing.
GM: Where is Cherry Tree Lane?
PLT: What?
GM: Where in London is Cherry Tree Lane supposed to be?
PLT: I don’t know what you mean.
GM: The house that Mary Poppins lived in. Is it in Chelsea? In Kensington?..
PLT: Oh! Well, no. Well, it’s…. it’s…. (she waves her hand)… It’s between here and someplace else.
GM: Do you know, I grew up on Mary Poppins. When I was ten years old, I sat on our front porch and read the books and ate sour-apple hard candy. I never forget it.
PLT: Do you know, when I came home from hospital, I picked up the second Mary Poppins book, and I began to read it. And I didn’t know what was going to happen! I turned the pages—I found it delightful. …. I didn’t know what would come next.
GM: I’m not surprised. She’s a mystery.
PLT: I don’t think we’ve seen the last of her. . . .
GM: Will you sign a few books?
PLT: It is hard to do.
GM: Maybe three? This is MARY POPPINS AND THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR.
PLT: And this is something special for you. (She draws a star). William Butler Yeats told me only to sign my name, but this is for you.
GM: Do you remember this? (A privately printed copy of AUNT SASS, which Travers had once had done up as a Christmas present for close friends.)
PLT: ! (She opens it.) Look! Stars! Nine stars! Who put those there? But where’s myname?
GM: On the front. (She crosses out the printed name and signs her own name.) And this last. MARY POPPINS OPENS THE DOOR. It’s my favorite.
PLT: It’s not for children.
GM: It’s Mystery. Mystery is for children.
PLT: Yes, but also for adults.
GM: Yes. Of course.
PLT: (She signs it.) I found a picture of myself in the chapter called “Balloons and Balloons.” Me and Mary Poppins and Mary Shepherd.
GM: I’ll look for it when I go home. And I should go soon. I’m flying out tonight.
PLT: Where?
GM: Dublin tonight, and Boston tomorrow.
PLT: I was at Radcliffe once, teaching. And at Smith. I loved Radcliffe. I hated Smith.
GM: Why?
PLT: A man from an American magazine called Life came to every lecture, and all the Smith girls threw themselves at him.
GM: This has been an extraordinary afternoon for me. I will never forget it. Thank you. (I kiss her.) Goodbye.
PLT: Goodbye. Write about this.
GM: Pardon—?
PLT: Write about coming here to tea.
Cheryl shows me to the door. I leave PLT sitting in the corner of the room, all eyes and smile, in a blue cardigan, knees together, hands on her knees. The big square window is now dark with dusk.
Something intriguing about the conversation: “Here I divert from my journals to insert a memory that I didn’t write down at the time. Ms. Travers elected to address me as the man who came to read the meters, and kept telling me they were out back, through that door. She seemed entirely unfazed that the meter man would arrive carrying rare copies of her hardcover books and would be conversant in arcane details of her career and work. I’ve often wondered if she wasn’t having me on.”
Reading about the man who came to read the meters made me smile. She was, most probably “having him on”. Her life quest was all about finding the meaning of life and the questions she asked in her essays were “Who are you?” and “What is man a metaphor for?” It is possible then that she was probing her guest in the manner of her spiritual teacher G.I. Gurdjieff, who used to shock and surprise his pupils with strange statements and behaviours in order to break down their habitual thought patterns and thus strip off their masks.
Now, onto my interview with Mr. Maguire and his delightful book “A Wild Winter Swan”.
LS: Is there is a possibility for a sequel of “A Wild Winter Swan”? In the ending Laura explains the swan boy’s arrival into her world in these words: “No, he has flown away from them once because he could not bear to be other than wholly human. Now he has to try the alternative. He really doesn’t have a choice. Do we.” But what if that alternative does not prove to be the solution either?
GM: I have not contemplated writing a sequel to “A Wild Winter Swan” —but I never say never with conviction. I had not contemplated writing a sequel to “Wicked”, and it was ten years before “Son of a Witch” came out. There have been five more books about my take on Oz after that one—so far.
Still, in regard to “A Wild Winter Swan”, I admit there is something both sad and satisfying in the loss of a character whom one has come to love—even one who is ultimately bewildering. Not unlike, come to think of it, a certain Mary Poppins herself. I tried to leave the reader with a sense of insecurity about how and even why this boy, Hans, had landed in Laura’s life.
LS: Yes, I did wonder about that too. Did Laura somehow summon him because she herself was in a liminal state of being; suspended between the dreamland of childhood and the demands of adolescence, all in the background of the dire circumstances of her personal life? Or was it the other way around. Why did the swan boy happen to Laura?
GM: Why does anything happen to anyone? Why did Peter Pan land on the nursery windowsill of the Darling family instead of the family next door named the Oblenskys, with their fat little cousin visiting from Moscow, the one who dangled the family turtle from a third-floor window and nearly decapitated it? It just happened. Wendy’s mother told stories, after all, and Peter wanted to hear the stories.
Hans might just have landed on Laura’s windowsill by chance. Things happen in stories. On the other hand, Laura had just read the Andersen tale to those first-grade students. Then she’d come home and helped rescue a worker about to fall off Laura’s own roof. The conditions of Hans’s arrival were established in her mind by the events of the day. Maybe they helped her recognize him when it happened—or maybe it was happening largely in her mind, a dream and hope of escape and of rescue from her increasingly dire situation. (Of course, no one else saw the visitor except the cat, and there is the matter of the bloody eels, the most proof that someone else is in the house with the Ciardi family. But maybe the cat did get the eel itself, and Laura was inventing what else must have happened in the terms of the story going on in her head.)
This makes a sequel hard to position in my imagination, for in order for there to be more to Hans, I would have to be more definite about how, and what, he actually is—and that he lives outside of the story Laura is busy telling herself in her own head. And I’m not sure of that myself.
The point is, while I think that Hans is real, and so does Laura, others might not be so sure.
LS: I believe Hans to be real too, but maybe other readers will interpret the story differently. P.L. Travers said that a book is only half the writer, the other half being the reader. I wonder if you intentionally made the parallel between Laura’s inner strength and that of Elise in Andersen’s story.
Elise must knit shirts from stinging-nettle without ever saying a single word and at the risk of perishing because of it. Laura does speak in the story, but she is mute about the existence of the swan boy, and she goes about his rescue in the most secretive way despite all the challenges that his presence creates in her already troublesome situation.
I found Laura to be just as self-contained, determined and resilient as Elise in Andersen’s fairy tale. And just like in Andersen’s fairy tale, by saving the swan boy, Laura saves herself. Did you start writing the story with the end in mind, or did the narrative unfold organically in this way?
GM: When I began to write the story, I wanted Laura to be clever imaginatively but not socially—perhaps a bit backward in school. I never know how stories are going to end when I start them—that means I am uncovering the story in an organic way, as I want readers to do, too. I didn’t realize until about 2/3 of the way through the story that as Laura didn’t have the capacity—as Elise in Andersen’s story didn’t, either—to do surgery upon the swan boy and convert his swan wing to an arm, there really was only one other choice: she had to return to him a second wing, and confer upon him agency to fly away. This is also what she has to do for herself, and so I intended that the act of rescue for Hans should be synonymous, or at any rate practice, for the act of rescuing herself.
LS: Why did Laura’s grandparents choose a boarding school in Montreal as an alternative to her education? I live on the south shore of Montreal and work in the city, so naturally, this caught my interest.
GM: There is one main reason for this. As I loved books like “A Wrinkle in Time”, “Mary Poppins”, “The Wizard of Oz” and the Narnia books—among many others—I noted even then that there is a consistency of literary genre in these beloved titles. I didn’t know the word “fantasy” until I was in high school, I mean not as applied to a type of story. I called them “magic books” —books about magic (though they seemed to do magic, too, in how they made me feel!)
But I had one favorite title from childhood that was not a literary fantasy. It was the novel by Louise Fitzhugh called “Harriet the Spy”. You’ve heard of it, and perhaps you’ve read it. Harriet is a sixth-grade girl who spies on her classmates, writes things down in her journal, and intends to become a writer when she grows up. She is wildly curious and, like all children, quite naive, but she is working at increasing her bank of experiences so she can understand the world better.
In writing “A Wild Winter Swan”, I wanted to pay homage to Harriet a little. I set the story in roughly the same patch of neighborhood where Harriet lives, on the Upper East Side of New York—and in very nearly the same couple of years. (“Harriet the Spy” came out in 1964, I think, and my story takes place in 1962.) I imagined Harriet and Laura passing one another on the pavement. I didn’t want Laura to be a writer per se, as that would be too imitative, and besides Laura’s capacity to “see” and experience Hans is predicated on her simplicity, perhaps her simple-mindedness—so working arduously with words the way Harriet does would contradict Laura’s open and believing nature. Her gullibility, perhaps.
Instead, I had Laura “think” stories—narrate her own experiences in her head as she would write them—if she were a writer. She is not shy of imagination and thoughtfulness, after all—or of imaginative sympathy—but she is not academically robust, either. This method allowed me to have Laura comment on her own experiences but only in her head. It’s another proof that she lives in her mind, and therefore another hint that the incidents with Hans may be self-generated. (You might say she is having a schizoidal break, unable to separate between reality and fantasy. I mean some might say that. I wouldn’t.)
In “Harriet the Spy”, the child’s beloved governess leaves the household about halfway through the novel to get married. She tells Harriet she is going to move with her beau to Montreal. To Harriet, Montreal seems as far away as the moon. “Mon-tre-ALLLL?” she wails when she hears the plan. My threat of sending Laura to Montreal was a quiet tip of the hat to Louise Fitzhugh.
I like Montreal, though. My big sister, who was a little like Laura in 1962, grew up and married a Canadian man and spent all her adult life in Montreal, Quebec, and Toronto, and is now retired as a grandmother in Ontario. So, growing up in Albany NY, Montreal was to me a place of warmth and attraction, and I liked, and like, visiting.
LS: In your interview by Kristen McDermott, you say that “Magic helps the young reader skip over some of this as-yet-imponderable mysteries and supplies instead a set of inchoate influences that organize a mystifying world to the young mind.” What role and significance does magic hold in the world of adult readers?
GM: At this point in my life I think fantasy is largely a gift for the young. I don’t seek it out to read as an adult (though I do love to return to books I loved as a child). There are some exceptions. The Philip Pullman novels come close to matching, in moral seriousness, what Ursula Le Guin managed in her Earthsea books. But I think a sort of disservice has been done to the reading of fantasy by the technical marvels of CGI in the film industry. When virtually anything can be pictured, and pictured convincingly, thanks to the wizardry of computer animation etc., then the thrill of reading of something impossible happening on the page is somewhat demoted.
The strength of fantasy in the lives of children is still potent, though. Fantasy still has power to charm because children have not yet finished pacing off the dimensions of the structure of reality. In fantasy, they are playing with “what might be” without being entirely sure. Of course once they get to the age of five, most children realize that humans don’t fly, and can’t fly, and they won’t—and yet they can fly in their dreams! So what’s that all about? And there are other enchantments (the thrill of romance and sex, when they get there) that will seem to open up the world to them in ways they couldn’t have anticipated a year or two earlier.
While adults, having convinced themselves that they’ve (largely) got the measure of reality, must approach fantasy in literature with a different expectation. Indulging in that literary art is a bit nostalgic, perhaps; it can more easily be read as metaphoric; in any case fantasy is at least diverting and a consolation, allowing one to turn away from the vicissitudes of our increasingly hostile and dangerous life on this planet. But as a rule, fantasy literature for adults can no longer tempt as a possible alternative construction to reality that we might someday find our way into embracing—as Laura does, in my story. That magic casement is closed. Peter Pan knows it, and so even does Mary Poppins.
A new biography of P.L. Travers is scheduled for release in 2025 by Pen & Swords, a British publisher specializing in history and true crime. The author of this biography is Elisabeth Galvin, a British journalist and author who currently resides with her family in Brisbane, Australia.
Last year after discovering this blog, Elisabeth reached out to me, sparking a correspondence that eventually, to my delight, culminated in my contribution of a chapter about P.L. Travers’s spiritual beliefs.
Elisabeth Galvin has written two other biographies of famous children’s writers. The first one, “The Extraordinary Life of E. Nesbit”, which will be the subject of this blog post, was published in 2018. The second, “The Real Kenneth Graham”, was published in 2021.
P.L. Travers was in her own words “a tremendous Nesbit fan” and read her books again and again even as an adult.
I think so highly of her, and I’m absolutely sure that such writers as C.S. Lewis, forinstance, good though his books are, could never have existed without Nesbit.”
Transcripts of A Talk About Sorrow, July 1965
P.L. Travers and Janet Rance
Elisabeth Galvin drew some interesting similarities between the two writers during a recent conversation we had, and I’ve decided to share some snippets of it here for the benefit of the readers of this blog. But just before, let me provide a brief note about the life of E. Nesbit for those of you who are not familiar with her work.
E. (Edith) Nesbit was an English author and poet. She was born in 1858 and died in 1924, the year when P. Travers first came to London, so the two women never met. Edith lost her father when she was only four years old and had to change homes and schools often as her mother traveled frequently to France and Spain seeking a cure to the ailments of Edith’s older sister Mary.
Edith married Hubert Bland who later became an influential socialist journalist and with whom she co-founded the Fabian Society, a socialist organization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
She wrote numerous short stories, poems and novels both for children and adults. Her most well-known works for children include “The Railway Children”, “Five Children and It”, “The Story of the Treasure Seekers”, “The Phoenix and the Carpet”, and “The Enchanted Castle”.
Her ability to blend fantasy with everyday experiences resonated with readers and contributed to the evolution of children’s literature and as such had a significant influence on later writers, including C.S. Lewis, J.K. Rowling, and Jacqueline Wilson.
Now to my conversation with Elisabeth Galvin.
LS: Why did you choose to write a biography about E. Nesbit?
EG: Well, I always wanted to be an author, and I became a magazine journalist, and I absolutely loved my job. Then, when the opportunity came to submit some ideas for biographies about children’s authors to a publisher, I knew I had to take that chance. I thought about all the stories that I loved when I was younger, and Railway Children was one of my favorite stories. I still have the book that my parents gave me, a red leather-bound book with a gold spine – it’s such a lovely story, and E. Nesbit led such an interesting life as well, and I believe that is why I chose to write about her.
LS: Yes, she did have a tumultuous life, and I really enjoyed reading your book because you recreate the atmosphere of that period so vividly. I imagine you had to visit some of the places you write about in your book. Could you share some insights into your research process for the book?
EG: Yes, of course. It was an exciting process because as a journalist, I love meeting and talking with people and exploring different places. A notable experience was visiting Well Hall, where E. Nesbit lived with her family for some twenty years. I had the privilege of exploring it in the company of a member of the E. Nesbit Society, which truly brought the whole experience to life. We walked around Well Hall; while the original house was demolished in 1930, parts of the original gardens still remain and I saw the wooden statues portraying characters from E. Nesbit’s books, so yes, her spirit was definitely there.
(Picture taken from “The Extraordinary Life of E. Nesbit” by Elisabeth Galvin. Dame Jacqueline Wilson at Well Hall unveiling the wooden sculpture of the Psammead, commissioned by the E. Nesbit Society in 2013.)
I visited another one of E. Nesbit’s residences, Halstead Hall in Kent (click on the link to see the pictures). It was one of her childhood’s homes. It was lovely, it had the quintessential English garden and that is where she loved to spend time reading during her teenage years. I think she was 13 when she was there. The vicar who lived in the village at that time lent her his books and that is when she first came across Shakespeare. I could imagine this impressionable young girl lying in her garden looking at the apple trees and the roses and get a picture of her character, so it was very helpful going to those places.
Surprisingly, after E. Nesbit’s death, her personal papers were sold to The University of Tulsa in Oklahoma. She never went to America but was published there too, so I had to go there. I spent five intense days reading letters and other materials from the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds and then suddenly came outside to see a Taco Bell and fire engines. It was a funny experience.
LS: Yes, I can imagine, it sounds like a real time travelling experience.Now, what proved to be the most difficult part in writing the book?
EG: The most difficult was knowing that I would never meet her, or talk to her or hear her voice, or ask her questions. A lot of biographies really are speculation, even if it is unintentional, your natural biases do come out. As a journalist you always want to tell the truth and be as fair as you can, and there is a sense of responsibility when delving into someone else’s life.
LS: Definitely, and this also applies to P.L. Travers, especially considering she did not want people to inquire about her private affairs. You mentioned previously that during your research on both women you noticed certain similarities between them. Could you tell us more?
EG: Well, it is amazing, actually. The more you think about it, the more similarities there are – both physically and in terms of their personalities. The way they approach life, the events that unfolded in their early childhood as well as their literary works exhibit striking similarities.
Firstly, both were very tall women with short curly hair. They possessed a somewhat androgynous appearance, attracting men and women. They were both, in a sense, single parents. E. Nesbit was married, but her husband was not particularly supportive.
They both had a “get up and go” attitude toward life. They experienced significant hardships, losing their fathers at a young age, and both had a nomadic childhood—P.L. Travers throughout Australia, and E. Nesbit across Europe, attending school in France and Spain.
Despite the disarray of their early years, they shared a deep love for reading, voraciously consuming any available books. Their affection for Shakespeare and a natural flair for writing emerged early in their lives. Both harbored aspirations to become poets, and perhaps even experienced a tinge of disappointment for not receiving the recognition they desired.
And they both wrote about ordinary children and everyday magic. Their skill was to remember what it was to be a child and to transpose the essence of childhood into their writings. And I don’t know if it is because they had such unusual childhoods, losing a parent at a very young age, but they always had an idealized version of family life.
LS: Do you think they would have gotten along if they had met?
EG: I am sure they would have had a lot in common to talk about. E. Nesbit loved bohemian parties and thrived on that kind of energy. Similarly, P.L. Travers loved to meet new people and make new friends. They were not solo writers, they loved sharing their knowledge and taking part in artistic gatherings.
And I believe they would have connected on the fairy tale aspect as well. P.L. Travers wrote about Sleeping Beauty in the 1970s, and E. Nesbit was also deeply interested in fairy tales, writing her own collection of fairy stories.
LS: I agree, they would have had a lot to talk about. They even shared common acquaintances, George Bernard Shaw for example. Their lives and literary contributions provide an endless well of discussion and we can go on for hours.
I want to thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts with the readers of the Mary Poppins Effect blog, and I hope to share more about our collaboration and your forthcoming biography of P.L. Travers in the coming months.
The idea for this blogpost came to me a few days ago as I was rereading a fairy tale “The Fir Tree” from one of my old childhood books, “Andersen’s Fairy Tales” (Bulgarian translation). Above is a picture of my tattered old book, it is missing some pages and that is not surprising at all because the glue is mostly gone, and the pages no longer hold together.
In fact, this is not the actual copy I had as a child, but it is the exact edition which I found thanks to the Internet and ordered all the way to Canada. This book was published in 1977 and was illustrated by Lyuben Zidarov who, apparently, was the oldest working illustrator in Bulgaria, and who died this year at the venerable age of 100.
In all honesty these were not my favorite illustrations, I have other books in my childhood collection of fairy tales with illustrations which I enjoyed much more as a child. Looking now at Zidarov’s illustrations I can appreciate their beauty and his childlike vision and technique, but as a child I did not want to look at pictures that reminded me of my own drawings which I always found rather disappointing because they never looked like what I had in mind.
Reading Andersen’s fairy tales as a child is something that I share with P.L. Travers. She writes in “The Black Sheep”, an essay first published in The New York Times in 1965 and then republished in her last book “What the Bee Knows”, about enjoying his stories as a child, “I even wallowed in it, yet I never could quite understand why I felt no better for it.” she writes.
As an adult and writer, herself, P.L. Travers did not appreciate the tortures Anderson inflicted on his fictional characters; these torments she perceived to be disguised as piety and to have a demoralizing effect on the reader. The other reproach she made to Andersen was that he never invented a strong villain, that all he wrote about were white sheep, “…some clean, some dirty, but a homogenous flock”. She preferred, she wrote, the strong contrast of the Grimm’s fairy tales.
I tend to agree with P.L Travers on many things and she has been a great posthumous teacher for me. Yet, when it comes to Andersen, we seem to hold different views. Andersen’s fairy tales are undoubtedly heart-wrenching, but there is so much meaning in them, and he possessed such an incredible talent as a storyteller that I find it difficult to conceive that she was oblivious to it all. Sometimes I wonder if she genuinely meant her harsh critique, or if she enjoyed expressing strong opinions to shock the reader and prompt reflection.
And I see a connection here that I would have loved to discuss with P.L. Travers. Andersen seems to teach through pain; his use of emotional torture aims to awaken the reader to a deeper truth. I wish I could ask P.L. Travers how his technique differs from the one used by her beloved spiritual teacher Gurdjieff who said that one can only awaken through conscious suffering?
When I first read “The Fir Tree” as a child, I thought it was a sad and strange New Year’s Eve story about a New Year’s tree abandoned in the attic after the celebrations and later burned outside in the yard. (I say New Year because in the 1980’s we did not celebrate Christmas in Bulgaria; religion was forbidden by the communist regime. Instead, we celebrated the New Year and decorated a fir tree, and Santa Clause was not Santa Clause but Father Frost.) Anyhow, I simply turned the page and conveniently forgot about the story of the fir tree, as I couldn’t fathom a New Year’s Eve without a New Year’s tree in the house. It was that easy.
But it was not that easy the second time around. As I reread the story I almost agreed with P.L. Travers on the subject of Andersen. It made me so very sad, and I wanted to be joyful – it is Christmas after all, the most joyful time of the year. Why take a Christmas tree and use it as a metaphor for our fleeting lives and our inability to appreciate the moment?
For some reason, I couldn’t just forget about it as I closed the pages of the book. I felt really upset, but then, I should have known better than to read a story by Andersen during the Holidays, especially one that I knew had a sad ending. I knew it was not fair for me to be upset with Andersen; it was not like he had forced the book into my hands. There was only one thing I could do to free myself from the strong emotions, and that was to write this post.
I will summarize the story briefly here for those of you who are not familiar with it. It is about a small fir tree so eager to grow up and be like the other tall fir trees in the forest that it does not notice the fresh air and the sunshine, nor the birds and the rabbits playing around it, or the pink clouds in the sky. However, it does notice that sometimes the tall fir trees get cut down and taken away to some mysterious place, and it wants to know where.
One day, the sparrows tell the little fir tree that they had seen the greatest splendor imaginable through the windows in town. They had seen fir trees beautifully decorated with gilded apples, gingerbread, toys and candles standing in the middle of warm rooms. The fir tree begins to long for a warm room in town.
The day comes when the fir-tree is finally cut down and taken to a house. Nets cut out of colored paper and filled with sweets are hung on its branches. Gilded apples and walnuts are fastened to the tree, and many colorful candles are fixed to its branches. The tree begins to anticipate what happens next and longs for the candles to be lit. All the questioning and longing cause the bark of the tree to ache, much like a headache would have done had the tree been human instead.
Then the candles are lit, the children come and take down the sweets and the toys hung on the branches, and the whole thing is over before the tree can even realize it. The next day, the tree is thrown in the attic where it stays for many days. The tree is sad and lonely, but one day, mice come to see it, and it begins to tell them the story of its life – where it came from and how it got to the house. All the while, it realizes that what it had was wonderful; only it did not know it back then. Not long after, the tree is taken outside and is chopped and burned in the fire under a large copper. The End.
There is such a profound truth in this story, yet those who can truly feel the sadness of it are probably those who had gone through enough of life to awaken to the realization that all stories come to an end, and there is nothing else but the present moment. I wonder if those who need the lesson can get it from a story, or is it that we always need to learn from experience? This too is a question that I would have loved to ask P.L. Travers?
I cannot say I was much wiser than the fir tree when I was younger, and it is perhaps my own grief over time wasted in futile projections that made me react so strongly when I read the story. A consolation, at least, is that we do not have a real Christmas tree in our home. I decided many years ago that it was a waste to cut down a living tree just to decorate it for a few days and then discard it without a second thought. I decided to not participate in this trade, and I wonder now, was my decision somehow influenced unconsciously by this story that I had read as a child? I think now that it is possible.
May you all fully enjoy the present moment this Christmas without projecting into the future or into the past. Although, in some cases, as in the case of Scrooge, that may be advisable… After all, what do I know?
One of the many Mary Poppins effects in my personal life was the sudden desire to retrieve the long-lost books from my childhood spent in Bulgaria in the 1980’s. This old pop-up edition of ‘Hansel and Gretel’ (1979) is the newest addition to my reassembled collection.
The gorgeous illustrations are by Vojtěch Kubašta, a Czech architect, graphic artist, children’s book illustrator and master of the pop-up book. He was the illustrator of the unsigned series of pop-up books tied to “Bambi,” “101 Dalmatians” and other Walt Disney films.
Of course, as a child I wasn’t aware of the authors and illustrators of my beloved books. What mattered then were the stories and the pictures. This is still true, but in addition, I am now fascinated by the creative spirit behind the creations.
I loved fairy tales as a child, and the beautiful illustrations that accompanied these stories heightened my earliest reading experiences. In fact, they are probably the reason why I remember how I felt when I first read them. Going back to these stories as an adult however is an entirely different experience.
The story of “Hansel and Gretel” is a perfect example. As a child I simply enjoyed the story for the story. Two children get lost in the forest, find a house made from sweets and candy, they get trapped and are about to be eaten by an evil witch, when one of them plays a trick on her and sends her into the flames of her oven. Good triumphs over evil, and the ending is happy as the two siblings find their way back home.
Rereading the story now reveals a much deeper meaning that I could not have grasped back then for the obvious reason that I lacked both life experience and understanding of symbols and metaphors.
I would have loved to have the opportunity to discuss “Hansel and Gretel” with P.L. Travers. She wrote about it briefly in her essay “The Fairy -Tale as Teacher”:
Hansel and Gretel. How it beguiles the child with its lollipop house and peppermint doorstep! For us, however, this is only the lure. The trap, the real secret, is the journey through the wood. If you want to find your home, it says (back to the beginnings, becoming as little children) you must scatter something less ephemeral than peas or rose-leaves. Birds will eat one, and the wind will blow the other away. Only by making the path with pebbles – enduring, hardly found, indestructible – can you pick up the trail and escape the witch’s oven which is extinction.
I agree with P.L. Travers that the real secret to the story is the journey through the forest. Yet, what saves the children from the witch’s oven are not the pebbles, but their own cunning; and what leads them back home is a white bird…
For me “Hansel and Gretel” is a story about growing up, survival and tapping into one’s own inner resourcefulness. The message for me is that one cannot use cunning (the pebbles, the rose-petals and breadcrumbs) to avoid the adventure of growing up (the forest), but one must use cunning to survive an ordeal.
The children had to get lost and trapped. They had to learn about evil and danger and how to face it all on their own. It is all about seizing the moment and doing what needs to be done – which is to shove the witch into the fires of the oven – all, without any hesitation. After facing something so terrible and surviving it – who needs pebbles to find their way back home?
Now, what does this story have to do with Christmas? Well, actually it is not the story itself that has to do with Christmas, but a prop from it: the house made of sweets.
Gingerbread houses originated in Germany during the 16th century, but their popularity rose when the Brothers Grimm wrote the story of “Hansel and Gretel” in 1812. It is believed that it sparked a creative renaissance amongst German bakers; apparently a house made of cake and candy is not alluring only to children! With time the cookie-walled houses became associated with Christmas and spread throughout Europe and North America.
We did not have gingerbread houses in Bulgaria when I was a child. I got acquainted with them only when we came to Canada in the 1990’s, but now the decorating of a gingerbread house has become a well-established family tradition, and each year it invariably reminds me of the time when I first read the story of “Hansel and Gretel” and gazed at Kubasta’s beautiful illustrations wishing I could too have a taste of the witch’s house.
I wonder, does Christmas bring back warm memories from your childhood too? I sincerely hope that it does!
During her stay as a writer-in-residence at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts in the autumn of 1966, P.L. Travers was invited to give a lecture about myths, fairy tales and their connection to everyday life. The following year the lecture was published in ‘The Quarterly Journal (Library of Congress, USA) and later in 1989 included in P.L. Travers’s compilation of essays published under the title ‘What the Bee Knows’.
Because the lecture happened on Halloween, P.L. Travers concluded with a brief comment on its history, which she told the audience began as a pagan celebration of the dead and later on was integrated into a Christian celebration by one of the Popes, ‘Boniface IV, perhaps, in the seventh century, who decided to do away with all the pagan saturnalia and turn it from what it so significantly was, into a commemoration of the saints and martyrs’.
Normally I should have taken her word on the matter, she knew so much and I so little in comparison, yet for some unknown reason I felt compelled to do a quick factual check. To my surprise I discovered that it was not Pope Boniface IV in the seventh century, but Pope Gregory III, in the eighth who decided to morph the old beliefs into the new Christian religion.
Obviously, her historical reference was wrong but getting the dates right was beside the point she wanted to make, and in all fairness, she did use the word ‘perhaps’, meaning she was not sure of the factual accuracy of her statement. Yet, its truthfulness remains, the old beliefs were indeed transmuted into the new system of beliefs but were unfortunately, in her opinion, deprived of their essential purpose. Luckily, people knew better than Pope Gregory III and a version of this pagan celebration remained to our days.
In ‘Only Connect’ P.L. Travers acknowledged our human need to remember the dead and to come to grips with our own grieving and fears of death and the unknown. These needs, old as humanity, need an outlet, a ritual to allow us to turn our faces back to life.
From time immemorial, stories are what allows us to create meaning out of our human experiences, and fairy tales were for P.L. Travers the guideposts in our personal lives. Then, it is only normal that she had written her own version of this pagan celebration in Hallowe’en a story in Mary Poppins in thePark, where not ghosts but the shadows of characters from fairy tales come to party in the Park under a Blue Full Moon. I have written about this story before, and you can read the blogposts here and here.
Now rereading ‘Only Connect’ leads me to believe that the idea for the story may well have been inspired by her own observations of the modern ritual of trick-or-treating; a night when children in the guise of fairy tales characters, heroes and villains, hand in hand, roam the streets at night in search of treats.
Three years ago, Miranda Middleton, a young writer and theatre director from Australia had the brilliant idea of a theatrical production centered around P.L. Travers and the writing of the Mary Poppins books.
The initial idea has now crystalized into ‘Paper Stars’, a musical first developed by The Hatch Lab Musical Theatre Residency Program at Salty Theatre in 2021. From there ‘Paper Stars’ was further workshopped at the Victorian College of the Arts, and last May a stage reading was presented at the Australian Musical Theatre Festival in Tasmania.
By a fluke of circumstances, I got the chance to meet with Miranda Middleton via Zoom and talk about ‘Paper Stars’ and all things P.L. Travers and Mary Poppins. I am sharing here some snippets from our conversation which begins with a predictable question, and one that was despised by P.L. Travers, but one that honestly, we cannot help but ask creators.
LS: How did you come up with the idea of ‘Paper Stars’?
MM: I was quite a theatrical child with a big imagination, so naturally I adored the ‘Mary Poppins’ film, even though it made me sob at the end! I was totally devastated by the fact that Mary Poppins had to leave, and I think I carried that grief for the character into my adulthood, as I too lost people in my life that I loved. Then I saw the film ‘Saving Mr. Banks’ and I discovered that in fact P.L. Travers – the author of ‘Mary Poppins’- was Australian. I couldn’t believe that I didn’t know she was Australian! And this is basically how the idea for ‘Paper Stars’ was born. From there I recruited my playwright friend Grace Chapple to develop the story with me, and she said, “I think it needs to be a musical.” So, then we asked Luke Byrne to write the music and it has just kind of gone from there.
LS: ‘Paper Stars’ is not a biographical piece, is it?
MM: I guess we set out to write ‘Paper Stars’ to add to the canon of biographical material about P.L. Travers. We wanted to cover the period of her life when she was creating this magical character so that gave us the period between 1925 and 1935, during which there really isn’t much written about what was going on for her internally. But that was also interesting for us as writers because it meant that we could bring out our own imaginations to the table. I think the way that we describe ‘Paper Stars’ is that there is a HUGE spoon full of creative license in there So… it is the somewhat true story of how Mary Poppins came to be, but we are not calling it biographical –it is probably more fictional than biographical.
LS: ‘Paper Stars’ explores the difficult relationship between P.L. Travers and her mother, their painful separation back in Australia, and then also P.L. Travers’s relationship with Madge Burnand.
MM: Yes, we were very interested in this idea that Pamela was living with a woman in the 1920’s which was controversial and unconventional – it is those qualities about her that we loved. We were also interested in her relationship with her mother because ‘Mary Poppins’ (the first book in the series) is dedicated to her, not to her father, who she purportedly adored. We were just so fascinated by that fact. So, I guess we dreamt into that backstory.
LS: Another insight that I gained from ‘Paper Stars’ is that P.L. Travers wanted to be taken seriously as a writer and this is the reason why she kept her Australian origins secret.
MM: Yes – the cultural cringe! It is a big thing for us Australians, we are very cautious and aware of being kind of looked down upon by the mother land or people overseas.
LS: Back then or now?
MM: Even now, I think Australians are kind of still conscious of it.
LS: The songs are quite touching and emotional. I enjoyed all of them, but my favorites are “Great Story” and “Everyday Magic.”
MM: Luke who wrote all the music is so clever! The emotional impact of the songs and the story on the audience (at the staged presentation in Tasmania) was really touching to me. Lots of people were crying and wanted to stay around afterwards to talk about the show. I’ve received a number of messages since saying: “I think this is a really important story to tell.” “It really touched me.” Yes, so I was surprised by how emotionally impactful the story was and so, I am excited to take it to the next stage.
LS: And what happens now, what are the next steps?
MM: We are in an interesting phase now where we are talking to various venues about its eventual premiere. It is not official yet, but we are hoping that something will happen next year, because 2024 is the centenary of P.L. Travers leaving Australia. We’ll see what the stars have in store!
LS: Well, I hope the musical goes into production soon and maybe one day I will get to go to Australia too and see it!
