Tag: books

An Attempt at Time Travel: The Author of Mary Poppins, Gurdjieff, and a Paris Apartment

Dear Reader,

Have you ever wished you could time travel? I have, many times, since I first began my journey into the world of P. L. Travers and her Mary Poppins. At first, I dreamed of having tea with P. L. Travers in her townhouse in Chelsea, London, and talking about all things Mary Poppins. But as time went on and I delved deeper into her universe, I began to dream of a particular kind of time travel; time travel under a cloak of invisibility.

I would love to witness the events of her life firsthand instead of relying on the filtered perceptions of those who knew (or thought they knew) her. Just think how enlightening it would be, for example, to observe her interactions with her spiritual teacher, G. I. Gurdjieff, who, by the way, was a fascinating figure in his own right. Imagine what it would be like if I could see his apartment in Paris, hear the voices, see who sat where, notice what nobody back then thought important enough to record, and then come back to tell the tale.

Since I have no supernatural powers, all I could do to come somewhat closer to realising my impossible wish was to travel, in real time, to Paris and visit number 6, rue des Colonels-Renard, where Gurdjieff dispensed his wisdom while entertaining his pupils with exotic dishes he cooked himself, Armagnac toasts, readings from his manuscripts, and music played on his harmonium.

(Gurdjieff’s harmonium. Image reproduced from Jessmin and Dushka Howarth, It’s Up to Ourselves: A Mother, a Daughter, and Gurdjieff, via The Gurdjieff International Review.)

Rue des Colonels-Renard is a quiet street in Paris’s 17th arrondissement, close to the Arc de Triomphe and just a short walk from the bustle of the Champs-Élysées. Number 6 is an elegant five-story limestone building with an ornamented stone facade, tall windows, and wrought-iron balconies adorned with flower boxes.

The building was constructed in 1911, and the name of its architect, Henri Preslier, is immortalised on its facade.

My daughter and I arrived there a little after lunch on a hot and sunny day in early June. The absence of other pedestrians on the street made it easy for me to pretend that we were stepping back in time. All I had to do was ignore the cars parked along the sidewalk and focus on the building.

I knew that I would not be able to see the actual apartment, but I was hoping to get inside the building, feel the atmosphere of the vestibule, and climb the staircase. Alas, to my great disappointment, it was not meant to be. The wrought-iron entrance gate was locked.

There was, however, a small consolation. The entrance gate was not a conventional solid door, but a combination of glass and elaborate black wrought iron, which allowed me to catch a glimpse of the vestibule beyond. After first pressing my nose between the ornamental ironwork and peering through the glass portion of the door, I pulled out my cell phone and pressed the camera lens against the glass.

I don’t know whether the entrance gate is the original one from 1911. The building must have undergone some changes over the years, but the vestibule, with its patterned mosaic floor and tall, glazed wooden inner door, certainly retains the appearance of an early-twentieth-century Parisian apartment building. It is possible, then, that the space looks much as it did when Gurdjieff lived here, and P. L. Travers came to visit.

Still hoping to somehow get inside the building, we sat on the sidewalk across the street and waited to see if someone would come in or out. No one did. As we sat there, I wondered whether the entrance gate had been locked back then too, or whether that was a consequence of modern-day security concerns. Somehow, I had a feeling that things had been a little different in Gurdjieff’s time.

I imagined P. L. Travers walking along the sidewalk with her adopted son Camillus, who was around ten years old when he first met Gurdjieff. They came to visit him in September 1949, just a few weeks before his death the following month. I wondered, did P. L. Travers scold Camillus in the manner of Mary Poppins and instruct him to be on his best behaviour? And did Camillus display the same sense of excitement and anticipation as Jane and Michael Banks when Mary Poppins took them to visit her relatives?

My reverie was suddenly interrupted by the chiming of a church bell. You can hear it in the video below.

The solemnity of the moment did not last long. My daughter, who, quite understandably, was beginning to lose patience with my facade-gazing decided to ask me a perfectly ordinary question and catapulted me back right into ordinary reality. You can hear her talking in the background and me insistently shushing her.

Then, as if to confirm my sense of reverence, a pigeon flew overhead and circled the balconies on the top floor of the building before continuing its way. Somehow, the sight of it, combined with the chiming of the bell, made me feel at peace with the fact that I could not get inside the building.

And as I am writing this and looking again at the picture of the vestibule, I notice something that I had not noticed before. If you look closely, you can see my reflection in one of the glass panes of the inner wooden door. In a way, I was inside the building, albeit not in the manner I had expected. Maybe, even though I could not physically cross that threshold, I was allowed to see enough.

Descriptions of the interior of Gurdjieff’s apartment can be found in the written accounts of his pupils. I have not read them all, of course, but last year I discovered Margaret Anderson’s The Unknowable Gurdjieff and was thrilled to find brief descriptions of what his home looked and felt like.

Margaret Anderson was an American writer and editor of the influential avant-garde literary magazine The Little Review and one of Gurdjieff’s pupils. She later became a member of the Rope, a small group of lesbian women whom Gurdjieff brought together for special work. Her account in The Unknowable Gurdjieff includes recollections from the period after the Second World War, when Gurdjieff’s American pupils began returning to Paris, along with others, like P. L. Travers, who had spent the war years in the United States.

It was in May 1948 that Anderson returned to Gurdjieff’s apartment in Paris.

“It was May in Paris, but for us there was no spring. There was no time to notice the horse-chestnut trees blossoming in the Bois, or the illuminated fountains sparkling in the Place de la Concorde in the soft sweet light. There was time only to drive as fast as possible by the shortest route to Gurdjieff’s flat in the rue Colonel Renard – a street with as little French distinction as a page in a dictionary; a flat without sunlight or a single flower, where the motionless air reeked of Asiatic cooking and the heat was almost unbearable.”

“Gurdjieff’s small dingy familiar apartement in the rue Colonels Renard had not changed – details of destruction only emphasized its changelessness: the colours had faded, the furniture was shabbier, the dining-room carpet had worn through and now had big patches on it. (…) The pictures on the walls were new, but they had the same quality as the old ones – ‘everything but art’ as Jane had said long ago.”

Jane was Jane Heap, Anderson’s co-editor of The Little Review and her partner for many years. Heap became particularly devoted to Gurdjieff’s teaching and eventually taught his work herself, leading Gurdjieff groups in London. P. L. Travers belonged to one of these groups.

I found this observation about the pictures on his walls particularly interesting because Gurdjieff had strong opinions about art. He taught that true art must be objective, transmit spiritual truths, and cosmological laws. He disliked what he called subjective art which arose largely from the artist’s personality, emotions, associations, and unconscious impulses. And, yet he covered his walls with art that his pupils, many of whom were artistically sophisticated, considered dreadful.

The kitchen was a central room in Gurdjieff’s apartment, as food played an important role in his teaching. He used different teaching methods at different periods of his life, but during his final years, meals became an essential ritual for the transmission of his ideas.

Gurdjieff concocted exotic dishes and turned his table into a dramatic stage where he acted as a master tamer of egos, administering the external shocks he believed were necessary to awaken his pupils from their identification with their thoughts and emotions. His provocative remarks, the famous ritual of the Armagnac Toasts to the Idiots, readings from his manuscripts, and the music he played on his harmonium after meals all served to open his pupils to new “impressions.”

Beyond the kitchen, there was also a storeroom in the apartment where Gurdjieff kept his victuals and the spices he used in his cooking. On occasion, he also took pupils there for private conversations. Here is a description from Margaret Anderson’s book:

“There, in the midst of fruits and sweets and wines, with slender sausages of camel’s meat, bunches of scarlet peppers and sprays of rosemary and mint suspended like canopy above, as I watched him pouring coffee out of the old battered old thermos (…)”

I found this photograph of his storeroom in It’s Up to Ourselves: A Mother, a Daughter, and Gurdjieff, by Jessmin and Dushka Howarth. The photograph, however, is black and white, and the resolution is poor, so I find it a little difficult to mentally project myself into the room.

I used AI to reconstruct the photograph. The result is not entirely accurate. There are labels, objects, decorative items, and other details that cannot be established from the original photograph, while the sausages and herbs suspended from above are missing. Overall, however, the picture remains reasonably close to the original and, for me at least, the colours add liveliness and make it easier to get a sense of the place.

And with that, my attempt to step inside Gurdjieff’s apartment comes to an end.

This is all for now. Next time, I will take you to Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Paris, where we will attempt to go back in time to 1949 and witness the day of Gurdjieff’s funeral, at which, of course, P. L. Travers was present.

Until then, be well.

Lina

Mary Poppins in Paris: Where P. L. Travers Met G. I. Gurdjieff

Dear Reader,

When I first began reading and studying the life and writings of P. L. Travers, the author of Mary Poppins, I didn’t expect the journey to last as long as it has, or to carry me beyond the page. And yet it has led me all the way from Canada across London and Paris, where traces of her life still linger, and the list of places connected to her and Mary Poppins that I dream of visiting continues to grow.

In the first biography of P. L. Travers, Mary Poppins, She Wrote, Valerie Lawson reveals that Travers was one of G. I. Gurdjieff’s pupils and a lifelong follower of his spiritual teachings. At the time, I had never heard of Gurdjieff. In fact, I have no spiritual or religious background.

I spent my early childhood in Bulgaria in the 1980s, and the communist regime rejected any religious practice. The doors of the church next to my grandparents’ apartment were always locked, and I remember being told by my parents to stay away from it, lest someone see me and something bad happens. What exactly that would have been, nobody told me.

I had read Mary Poppins as a child in Bulgaria (the first two books in the series), and when I read in P. L. Travers’s biography that these stories contained elements and references to Gurdjieff’s teachings, the fires of curiosity were lit and I became compelled to find them. I can confidently say that I did find some of these references, along with other interesting connections. I am now writing a book about them, because posts cannot do justice to the subject. A deep dive is what is needed to truly appreciate the creative genius of P. L. Travers and the depth of her writing, and I sincerely hope that one day my book will be out in the world and that it will revive readers’ interest in the original Mary Poppins stories, and in the larger body of work of P. L. Travers.

Today’s post is the first in a series of three articles in which I want to share with you my experience of Paris in the footsteps of P. L. Travers. It was in Paris that she first met Gurdjieff in the late 1930s, and it was also there that she returned to visit him after the end of World War II.

Paris today is, of course, not the Paris of the 1930s and 1940s. Yet the buildings where their meetings took place still stand, quietly bearing witness to those encounters. The first meeting happened at Café de la Paix, and this is what P. L. Travers later wrote about it:

“It was a day I shall always remember for not merely did I learn things that only later I came to understand, but it pointed me in the direction my life was to take. On leaving my vital and benevolent host, he declined to say goodbye, “You will be back,” he said, and I agreed, not knowing that it would be several years before the prediction came true. War intervened, also the Atlantic Ocean, and it was not until peace broke out and I returned to London that the Golden Arrow, and I in it, could speed from its bow to Paris. ”

Café de la Paix, first inaugurated in 1862, is located near the Palais Garnier (the Paris Opera House) and is still open and bustling with life.

(I wish that big advertisement hadn’t been there when I took the picture…)

Walking in, I tried to imagine what it must have felt like for Travers to step through those same doors for the first time, and the trepidation of meeting someone who had acquired a mythical stature in her imagination, someone she had only heard about, yet whose teachings she had already begun to study.

Gurdjieff had a halo of mystery; he seemed almost like a character from a fairy tale. He spoke with a heavy accent and in parables, and his teachings can be described as a strange mixture of esoteric Christianity and Gnosticism, with echoes of Theosophy. He spoke of the inner friction of opposites, and of the need to suffer consciously, if one wanted to transcend them and awaken. His ideas were original and unique, and yet they also echoed ideas P. L. Travers had been introduced to by her literary mentor and Theosophist, George W. Russell (AE).

On the website of Café de la Paix, you can read that past regulars included Guy de Maupassant, Victor Hugo, Ernest Hemingway, and Émile Zola. I am tempted to suggest they add Gurdjieff to the list, even if he was, and still remains, a controversial figure.

Café de la Paix was one of Gurdjieff’s favorite cafes, where he liked to spend time drinking coffee, writing his books, and meeting with his pupils. Louise Goepfert, a devoted pupil and translator of the German edition of Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, remembers him telling her that he always worked in cafes and dance halls because they were places where he could see people as they are, and where he could see those who were most drunk and most abnormal (Note to the reader: he was not politically correct in his formulations, but you must put this in the context of the times). Seeing them, he said, could produce an impulse of love in him, and from that, he said, he wrote his books.

I was eager to see Café de la Paix, but at the same time I felt a little sad, because I knew the visit would not satisfy my desire to meet P. L. Travers. The only connection is through books, through accounts, and through the experience of places she once visited. That is all I can use to travel back in time. Imperfect as this connection may be, my visit to Café de la Paix will remain a favourite memory of my first trip to Paris.

The interior of the Café de la Paix has a hushed richness. Carpets, drapery, and upholstered seating absorb the sounds and create a sense of luxurious intimacy. Gilded moldings catch the light from crystal chandeliers, and mirrors stretching along the walls give the space an impression of expansiveness and movement. Above, a blue sky with white clouds is painted on the ornamented ceilings, adding an airy elegance and an overall feeling of sophistication. But above all, what stands out is the atmosphere of a place that has absorbed decades of conversations. If only its walls could talk.

As I took my seat, I tried to imagine P. L. Travers seated at a table in conversation with Gurdjieff, and then an amusing thought crossed my mind. What if I were sitting in that exact same place? What would such a temporal overlay look like? Our faces and gestures would pass through one another without resistance, our conversations mingling without interruption. A density of lived moments, layered one upon the other like an overexposed film, would leave a faint, ghost-like trace, as if the past had never fully withdrawn.

Then the waiter came to our table and I was pulled back into the present. And yet something of that brief reverie stayed with me. Whatever has changed in Paris, the rooms remain, and they still invite us to listen for the faintest echo of a life passing through.

Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this article, I invite you to subscribe to The Mary Poppins Effect, where I explore the work of P.L. Travers, the world of Mary Poppins, its connections to other literary worlds, and the symbolic imagination at the heart of classic children’s literature.

Until next time, be well.

Lina

Where Mary Poppins Meets Alice: Hidden Threads Between Two Literary Worlds

Dear Reader,

One of the things I enjoy most is uncovering subtle connections that link different literary worlds, and today, I invite you to explore the connections between the Mary Poppins stories and the adventures of Alice as imagined by Lewis Carroll.

The creation of Alice’s world precedes that of Mary Poppins, and it is therefore no surprise that P.L. Travers, consciously or unconsciously, drew on elements from the Alice stories. Not in the sense of direct borrowing, but rather that certain moments in Mary Poppins seem clearly inspired by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass were among P. L. Travers’s favourite childhood books. She later remarked that while she revered Alice, she harbored a “lurking, sneakish lack of liking” for Lewis Carroll. She did not elaborate further on her dislike, but it may have been related to his unusual attraction to young children. I must admit that I, too, felt deeply uncomfortable reading the sections of Carroll’s biography by Morton N. Cohen that address his relationships with children, even though Cohen clearly admired Carroll’s mind and imagination and attempted to approach this aspect of his personality with empathy for the suffering it caused him.

P. L. Travers repeatedly told interviewers that she did not write Mary Poppins with children in mind. To illustrate her point that books are not necessarily written for children, she referred to the creation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In her interview with Edwina Burness and Jerry Griswold for The Paris Review (The Art of Fiction No. 63), she said:

“If you look at other so-called children’s authors, you’ll see they never wrote directly for children. Though Lewis Carroll dedicated his book to Alice, I feel it was an afterthought, once the whole was already committed to paper.”

This, however, is not entirely accurate. Carroll did write the first version of the story, Alice’s Adventures Underground, at the request of Alice Liddell, and it was later revised and expanded. This is Carroll’s own account of the creation of Alice in Wonderland:

“The germ of Alice was an extempore story, told in a boat to the three children of Dean Liddell: it was afterwards, at the request of Miss Alice Liddell, written out for her… without the least idea, at the time, that it would ever be published. But friends urged me to print it, so it was re-written, enlarged, and published.”

This is how Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland came to be. And even though it began as a story told for the amusement of children, it is undoubtedly much more than that. As with Mary Poppins and many other enduring works of children’s literature, these stories contain deeper layers of meaning that are accessible only to adult readers who bring the necessary depth of experience.

But for now, let us consider how the imagination of one writer may have quietly nourished the imagination of another. For no human creation, however original it may appear, emerges in isolation. It grows from what has come before.

Scholar Julia Kunts, in Intertextuality and Psychology in P. L. Travers’s Mary Poppins Books, draws a number of perceptive connections between Alice and the Mary Poppins stories. She identifies the first echo in the opening chapter, “East Wind,” when Mary Poppins arrives at 17 Cherry Tree Lane.

As Mary Poppins unpacks her carpet bag in the nursery, Jane and Michael watch with great curiosity. Among the items she produces is a bottle labelled “One Tea-Spoon to be taken at Bed-Time,” recalling the bottle marked “Drink Me” that Alice finds on the glass table in the long hall she finds herself in once down the rabbit hole. And just as Alice discovers a liquid with a curious “mixture of flavours, cherry-tart, custard, pineapple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered toast’, the contents of Mary Poppins’s bottle transform according to each child’s taste: strawberry ice for Michael, lime-juice cordial for Jane, milk for the twins John and Barbara, and rum punch for Mary Poppins herself.

Kunts also observes that, much like the characters in Alice who subvert and mock the logic of the ordinary world, Mary Poppins repeatedly unsettles the expected order of things, much to the distress of the Park Keeper, who is determined to keep everything properly arranged.

Another obvious parallel between the two fictional worlds is the use of characters from nursery rhymes. Just as Lewis Carroll incorporates nursery rhyme figures in Through the Looking-Glass, P. L. Travers introduces similar characters in the story “Happy Ever After” from Mary Poppins Opens the Door. Among them are Humpty Dumpty and the Lion and the Unicorn, who appear in both worlds.

When Alice meets Humpty Dumpty, he is perched on a high wall so narrow that she wonders how he manages to keep his balance. He, however, is entirely unconcerned. Having secured the King’s promise that all his men will put him back together again should he fall, he speaks with great confidence. Yet, in the end, there is a great crash that echoes through the forest.

When Michael Banks encounters Humpty Dumpty in “Happy Ever After,” he is surprised to find him in one piece. Humpty Dumpty replies: “Pooh — horses! What do they know about it? And as for the King’s men — stupid creatures! — they only know about horses! And because they couldn’t put me together, it doesn’t say no one else could, does it?”

In Through the Looking-Glass, Alice witnesses the battle for the crown between the Lion and the Unicorn, interrupted by a pause for refreshments of white and brown bread. In Mary Poppins’s story, however, the Unicorn and the Lion dance instead of fighting, as they find themselves in the Crack, the moment between the first and last stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, a brief interval in which all opposites are harmonised and held in balance.

But beyond the parallels noted by Julia Kunts, one detail struck me in particular. I believe the origin of Mary Poppins’s bottomless carpet bag to lie in Haigha’s bag in the chapter “The Lion and the Unicorn” in Through the Looking-Glass:

“Haigha took a large cake out of the bag and gave it to Alice to hold, while he got out a dish and carving knife. How they all came out of it Alice couldn’t guess. It was just like a conjuring trick, she thought.”

The resemblance is difficult to dismiss. What appears in Carroll as a conjuring trick re-emerges in Travers as a defining attribute of Mary Poppins: a magic bag that appears empty but contains a surprising number of items.

Building on these parallels, I would argue that P.L. Travers’s imagination does not merely echo Carroll’s but transforms it in a distinctly original way and what matters is that, despite these subtle echoes of another enchanted world, her imagination remains entirely her own. She does not imitate. She transforms.

Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this article, I invite you to subscribe to The Mary Poppins Effect, where I explore the work of P.L. Travers, the world of Mary Poppins, its connections to other literary worlds, and the symbolic imagination at the heart of classic children’s literature.

Until next time, be well.

Lina

Making Mary Poppins, Unmaking P. L. Travers

Dear Reader,

Did you know that a new book about Mary Poppins was released last October, titled Making Mary Poppins: The Sherman Brothers, Walt Disney, and the Creation of the Classic Film by Todd James Pierce? The book explores the making of the 1964 film starring Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins. While documentaries and other accounts of the making of the film already exist, this book shifts the focus to the personal and professional lives of the Sherman brothers. Rather than centring solely on the movie, the first part of the book traces their family background, beginning with their father and early childhoods, and follows their long struggle to succeed in the musical industry, culminating in their breakthrough as the songwriters behind Mary Poppins.

I am a fan of the Mary Poppins books by P. L. Travers, as they are where I first encountered Mary Poppins as a child. I only discovered the existence of the film in 2015, after reading Mary Poppins She Wrote by Valerie Lawson, the first written biography of P. L. Travers. This may sound strange, but the fact is that I spent my early childhood in Bulgaria during the Cold War. Disney films were viewed as products of American capitalist culture and, as such, did not make it behind the Iron Curtain.

The political regime of that period viewed Disney as promoting bourgeois values and glorifying individualism and consumerism. Because the state conceived of itself as the guardian of children’s impressionable minds, it sought not only to shield them from harmful bourgeois influence but also to guide them toward socialist values, shaping them into future workers and citizens bound by a moral duty to serve society.

How, then, you may ask, was it possible for the Mary Poppins books to be translated into Bulgarian and made available to children? One plausible explanation is that reading was regarded primarily as an educational practice rather than a form of mass entertainment. Furthermore, the books may also have appeared less overtly Western or glamorous in tone.

In the literary version, Mary Poppins is markedly stricter, colder, and more ambiguous than the character portrayed by Julie Andrews. The original Mary Poppins is authoritarian, ironic, and emotionally distant. In addition, the stories can readily be interpreted as conveying lessons in discipline, hierarchy, and moral correction, all qualities that stand in sharp contrast to the film’s lavish spectacle.

Luckily for my childhood self, and for other young readers of that time, Western children’s literature appears to have been tolerated so long as the stories lacked explicit political content and were not oriented toward consumption. Other children’s classics, such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Peter Rabbit, and Winnie-the-Pooh, similarly slipped past communist censorship and quietly beguiled our imaginations. At the time, I was, of course, entirely oblivious to the broader social and political context in which I encountered these books.

I liked the Mary Poppins film. I admit that it is difficult not to like it. It is a visual and auditory delight, a feast for the senses. Still, it is not the Mary Poppins of my childhood, nor the one I rediscovered as an adult. It is an entirely different artistic creation. The screen version, entertaining as it may be, lacks the depth and mystery of the Mary Poppins found in the books. I am always struck by the comments of adult readers who, as children, first encountered the character through the film. They often express the opposite reaction, largely because they are surprised by the stark difference in the personality of the literary Mary Poppins.

In the books, Mary Poppins is harsh, cold, and not given to explanation. This never troubled me as a child. From the very first chapter, I was convinced that her severity was a kind of pretence, that she only appeared strict. The contrast between her outward demeanour and the inner self I sensed made her all the more compelling and rendered the magical adventures she led the Banks children on even more wondrous. I suspect that other children reading the books felt much the same.

Her contrariness does not trouble me now either. Instead, it makes her more human, precisely because of her ambiguity. She may possess magic, she may be the Great Oddity or the Great Exception, she may even have reached a higher level of consciousness, for all we know, yet she remains unmistakably human. Are we not all a little more ambiguous than we care to admit?

Despite my allegiance to the original Mary Poppins, I felt compelled to read Making Mary Poppins, if only to see whether the incident involving P. L. Travers, Walt Disney, and the Sherman Brothers might be portrayed with greater nuance. The title of the chapter devoted to this encounter, “The Trouble with Travers,” quickly dispelled that hope. A look at the Notes section at the end of the book suggests that Pierce relies heavily on Valerie Lawson’s biography of P. L. Travers and on the Sherman brothers’ own testimonies, while demonstrating limited engagement with P. L. Travers as a writer and spiritual thinker.

I would have welcomed a discussion of the cultural differences between P. L. Travers and Disney, or an exploration of the inner conflict she most likely experienced in the process of relinquishing control over her creative vision of Mary Poppins. Instead, the reader is once again invited to pick sides in a simplified clash of two creative visions. Worse still, the narrative encourages us to commiserate with the hardworking Sherman brothers, finally given their chance, while casting P. L. Travers as the obstructive and unreasonable figure standing in the way of their great success.

But why pick sides in this artistic conflict? Why not simply observe it in all its complexity? Yes, P. L. Travers did not follow the same logic as the Sherman brothers or Disney, but there was still logic behind her actions and her words. She was not as irrational or contrary as the cultural establishment has long been inclined to portray her.

Let us turn the tables here. The prevailing story has long favoured Disney’s version as generous, creative, and life affirming, while casting P. L. Travers as obstructive, eccentric, or emotionally difficult. When someone’s behaviour is labelled this way, it becomes easy to dismiss. It suggests that there is nothing to engage with intellectually, only a difficult personality to endure. More disheartening still is that women are often, even today, dismissed as overly emotional and difficult in situations where they are simply affirming their opinions and values.

How about we question those assumptions? We must recognise how power, gender, and cultural authority shape which voices are celebrated and which are marginalised. The loudest voice is not always the truest. We need to restore intellectual and moral complexity to a figure whose resistance was grounded not in whim, but in a coherent artistic vision and a deep sense of responsibility toward her work.

P. L. Travers was shaped by a cultural background that valued myth, folklore, and symbolic meaning. Her imagination was steeped in fairy tales, Celtic myth, and archetypal storytelling, where ambiguity is not a flaw but a feature. She wrote, “Fairy tale is at once the pattern of man and the chart for his journey.”

Through her engagement with esoteric traditions and thinkers such as George W. Russell, W. B. Yeats, and Gurdjieff, she believed stories could transmit moral and spiritual truths indirectly. For her, meaning was not something that needed to be explained but something to be experienced, because real wisdom is achieved through lived experience.

The Sherman Brothers, on the other hand, emerged from an American popular entertainment background. Their songs express feelings directly. Joy is declared, not hinted at. There is little mystery, because the goal is inclusion rather than initiation. Their background aligned naturally with Disney’s vision of family friendly, emotionally transparent storytelling.

The artistic conflict, then, was not merely about temperamental differences. It was a clash of cultural assumptions. P. L. Travers believed stories should challenge and unsettle. The Sherman brothers and Disney believed stories should reassure and delight.

Because of these differing assumptions, interpretations of the character of Mary Poppins diverged. P. L. Travers openly articulated her belief that the true magic in her books lay in the ability to engage successfully with ordinary life. To grasp her position, one must approach the stories as allegories. The Sherman Brothers, by contrast, understood Mary Poppins as a figure who brings magic into ordinary life, which implicitly assumes that ordinary life itself lacks magic. For P. L. Travers, the opposite was true. Ordinary life already contained magic. It was the springboard from which magic emerged.

Even before she met Disney, she disagreed with the way he altered beloved fairy tales, which helps explain why she refused to sell the rights to Mary Poppins for nearly twenty years. Interestingly, her views on Disney’s work were also shared by two other British writers. J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis likewise believed that fairy tales and fantastical stories carry meaning and convey truths about life. Both disliked Disney’s animated film Snow White, and so did P. L. Travers. It becomes easier, then, to understand why it was extremely difficult for her to see her own creation as merely a vessel for entertainment, no matter how enticing and successful that vessel might be.

Beyond cultural differences and divergent views on the purpose of storytelling, another important distinction separated the Disney team from P. L. Travers. The Disney team operated comfortably within the world of entertainment and the logic of commercial success. Creating for money was not only acceptable; it was the point. The more successful the production, the better.

P. L. Travers approached money differently. She was not indifferent to it, but she did not see it as the primary measure of value. For her, money always carried a spiritual dimension. When she was young, her literary mentor George William Russell, known as AE, introduced her to the idea of the poet’s vow of poverty. This did not mean literal destitution. As she later explained to Brian Sibley, “It didn’t mean that if you were offered $100,000 you would refuse it. But it meant that you would not be attached to it. You didn’t even need to give it away but you wouldn’t live by it.” The principle was inner detachment. Money must not become the master of the work.

Years later, her spiritual teacher George Gurdjieff articulated a related but more demanding position. The material question was not whether one should have money, but whether one could earn, manage, and use it without guilt, vanity, or self deception, and without allowing it to define one’s inner work. Money, in this view, was a force that revealed character.

By the early 1960s, P. L. Travers was facing practical pressures. Sales of the Mary Poppins books had slowed. She was ageing. Her adoptive son, Camillus, had discovered that she was not his biological mother, a revelation that strained their relationship. It is not unreasonable to assume that financial security, and what she might eventually leave behind, weighed on her mind.

At the same time, she felt the adaptation threatened her artistic vision. In a conversation with Janet Graham shortly after the film’s release, she explained: “You must remember that an author’s idea is very precious to him, it’s like a child to a mother. So that if somebody comes along and turns it into a fair haired child when it is dark, or gives it four legs instead of two, he can’t be utterly pleased, even though the effect is something very gorgeous and splendid.”

This statement clarifies much of her resistance. From the outside, her behaviour appeared obstinate, even irrational. According to accounts reported by Pierce in Making Mary Poppins, many people working at the studio found it strange that she would stand in the way of a lavish film adaptation. Yet from her perspective, taking the money while her creation was altered beyond recognition carried a far greater cost, the quiet betrayal of her own artistic vision.

In the end, practical considerations prevailed. But her ambivalence never disappeared. When asked about Logan Pearsall Smith’s assertion that “There are few sorrows, however poignant, in which a good income is of no avail,” she replied with her usual wit, “I should think that that was true, at any rate externally; at least you could go to the movies and forget it for a time.” Her remark acknowledges money’s utility while quietly denying its power to resolve deeper conflicts.

The encounter between the Disney team and P. L. Travers is compelling precisely because neither position is illegitimate. They were operating from fundamentally different premises. One measured success in entertainment, originality, and revenue. The other measured it in loyalty to an inner vision.

We are often tempted to reduce complex conflicts to a clash between heroes and villains because it simplifies uncertainty and soothes our anxiety. Yet adult life, and especially artistic life, rarely conforms to such black and white thinking. Two positions can be internally coherent and still irreconcilable, as in the making of Mary Poppins.

Thank you for reading. If this story resonated with you, I invite you to subscribe to The Mary Poppins Effect, where I share reflections on Mary Poppins, her connections to other literary worlds, and my musings on books and the quiet magic of childhood.

Until next time, be well.

Lina

Inside the New Biography of P. L. Travers by Elisabeth Galvin

I am very excited to share my conversation with Elisabeth Galvin about her upcoming biography of P. L. Travers, the creator of Mary Poppins. This time, our conversation takes place in video form, a medium I avoided for a long time but have now come to accept as one I need to embrace. 

In this interview, which I am sharing below, Elisabeth and I explore what first drew her to Travers, her research process, and the unexpected material she uncovered while tracing the life of a writer who has fascinated readers for generations. 

We also talk about the people she met along the way who knew Travers personally, and how their memories and stories brought new texture and meaning to this biography. Travers’s complexity is portrayed in a gentle and respectful way, as Elisabeth is keenly aware of the responsibility that comes with writing a biography and of the difficulty of portraying with care and honesty a person one has never met. Elisabeth’s writing is also deeply atmospheric, carrying the reader through an almost visual experience of time and place. It is a delightful read, and I sincerely hope this book finds its way into the hands of many readers. 

There is an additional reason for my excitement. I had the honor of writing the introduction to this biography, as well as an entire chapter on Travers’s spiritual beliefs, a subject very dear to my heart. I have been immersed in the world of Travers and Mary Poppins for over ten years, and I am convinced there is still much left to uncover. Travers lived a long and productive creative life, yet today she is often remembered only for Mary Poppins. I believe she is an author worth rediscovering. I also believe she was truthful when she said she did not write Mary Poppins with children in mind, and that these stories continue to hold important lessons for adult readers. 

I hope you enjoy my conversation with Elisabeth Galvin, and that you will consider subscribing to The Mary Poppins Effect for more reflections and stories exploring the world of Mary Poppins and its connections to other literary worlds.

When Fiction Feels Real: Sherlock Holmes, Mary Poppins, and the Strange Afterlife of Literary Creations

Dear Reader,

This weekend I visited an immersive exhibition in Montreal devoted to the world of Sherlock Holmes, the legendary detective created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It was both fun and educational, but as any bookworm would probably agree, there is something almost transcendental about seeing in real life the desk at which Conan Doyle wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories. I only wish I could have touched it. There was also his richly ornate inkwell set, along with many other interesting objects.

Beyond the objects themselves, the exhibition led me to reflect on an unexpected connection between Sherlock Holmes and Mary Poppins. One section included a video recording of Conan Doyle speaking about his creation and about the correspondence he received from readers. He explained that he was surprised by the number of people who were convinced that Sherlock Holmes was a real, living human being. He received letters addressed directly to Holmes, letters requesting his autograph, letters written to his friend Dr. Watson, and even letters from women offering to become his housekeepers.

This immediately reminded me of an interview with P. L. Travers in which she said that people wrote to her asking whether Mary Poppins could be sent to their home to help with the raising of their young children. When I first read this, I assumed that people were simply being whimsical and indulging in wishful thinking, but were still aware that Mary Poppins is a fictional character. Surely they could not truly believe that Mary Poppins was a living, breathing being in our world, even though I was convinced of it myself as a child.

Now, hearing that readers reacted in the same way to another fictional character, I have come to a different conclusion. This longing to meet such characters in person may be the strongest proof of a truly successful literary creation, one that feels original and extraordinary. It makes me wonder whether P. L. Travers was aware of this striking similarity between her experience as an author and that of Conan Doyle.

There are other curious parallels as well. Both writers were interested in the occult, though in different forms, and both shared a belief in an invisible dimension beyond ordinary perception. Both authors refused to treat imagination as mere fantasy. They seemed to believe that imagined figures could carry truth, presence, and meaning that felt real to readers. That kind of openness allows characters to feel alive rather than invented, which may explain why readers wrote letters as if Sherlock Holmes and Mary Poppins actually existed.

And lastly, Sherlock Holmes’s creator wanted recognition for his historical novels and did not want to write as many Sherlock stories as he did. Similarly, P. L. Travers wrote other books and essays on myth and fairy tales and complained that people only wanted Mary Poppins stories from her. Both fictional characters became larger than their creators, and the relationship between creator and creation was riddled with ambiguous feelings. Isn’t it funny how what brings outer success does not always equate to inner fulfilment?

I hope you enjoyed reading this post and will consider subscribing to The Mary Poppins Effect for more stories exploring the world of Mary Poppins and its connections to other literary worlds.

Until next time, be well.

Lina

Revisiting Happy Ever After

Dear Reader,

I wish I were as talented a storyteller as P. L. Travers, able to gift you a magical story this holiday season, but my brain is analytical and reflective. So instead of enchantment, what I am offering is a comparative analysis of the first version of “Happy Ever After,” a Mary Poppins story by P. L. Travers first published privately for friends in 1940 and later included in Mary Poppins Opens the Door, the third book in the series, published in 1943.

The first edition of “Happy Ever After” was limited to one thousand copies privately published by the author for her friends and her publishers as a New Year’s greeting. What a lovely idea, and how lucky were those who received it!

When I first sat down to read the original version, I did not know what to expect, though I suspected there would be some differences from the story I had read in Mary Poppins Opens the Door. Naturally, I was curious to see what had changed and perhaps even to investigate the differences and what they might reveal.

It turned out that the original story is very similar, with most of the differences being largely stylistic. That will likely come as no surprise to any writer. Editing, polishing, and improving a text can be a never-ending process, especially when one struggles with perfectionism or insecurity, which may simply be two sides of the same coin. However, I noticed two significant discrepancies between the two versions of the story and these are the ones that I want to tell you about.

Nowhere in the Mary Poppins books is the exact age of the Banks children stated. The reader understands that Jane and Michael are preschoolers, since they spend most of their time with Mary Poppins in the nursery or in the park. John and Barbara grow from babies to toddlers, and the youngest Banks child, Annabel, appears in the second book, Mary Poppins Comes Back (1935).

But in the 1940 edition of “Happy Ever After,” P. L. Travers reveals how she imagines the ages of the children, and interestingly she seems to forget about Annabel. Or perhaps she intended the story to take place between Mary Poppins’s first visit to the Banks family in Mary Poppins (1934) and her second visit in Mary Poppins Comes Back (1935).

“It was the latest day of the Old Year. Upstairs in the nursery of Number Seventeen Cherry Tree Lane, Jane Banks who was seven, Michael Banks who was five and John and Barabra Banks who were twins and two-and-a-half, were being undressed.”

This is certainly the kind of detail only a Mary Poppins enthusiast like me would notice, but I take enormous pleasure in diving deeply into these stories and sharing my findings with you. I hope you enjoy reading about them as much as I enjoy discovering them.

Another interesting difference between the two versions is that in the 1940 edition, P. L. Travers describes at length how the children perceive Mary Poppins. In the later version, which I find more successful, she conveys the same idea more succinctly and in a way that feels more revealing. Here are the two passages in order.

“She moved about the nursery, folding up the scattered clothes and tidying away the toys. To look at her – with her coal-black hair, her china-blue eyes, her bright pink cheeks and her turned-up nose that was like the nose for a Dutch Doll – you would never imagine that she was anything but a perfectly ordinary person. But Jane and Michael and John and Barbara knew better. For had she not, when she first arrived at Number Seventeen, mounted the stairs by sliding up the banisters? And was it not certain that on her second visit she had appeared from Nowhere on the end of a string, looking more like a kite than a human being? How could a perfectly normal ordinary person be capable of such extraordinary behaviour? Impossible. Jane and Michael and John and Barbara knew very well how extraordinary she was but they did not speak of it for there were things about Mary Poppins that could never be explained. And it was no use talking to her about it for Mary Poppins, as everybody knows, never told anybody anything.”

The passage comes across as clunky and overly explained, and P. L. Travers may have added extra detail for friends unfamiliar with Mary Poppins, but she later trimmed it from 182 words to 94 in the second version of the story.

“She moved about the Nursery, folding up the scattered clothes and tidying the toys. The children lay cosily in their beds, watching the crackling wing of her apron as it whisked about the room. Her eyes were blue and her cheeks were pink and her nose turned up with a perky air like the nose of a Dutch Doll. To look at her, they thought to themselves, you would never imagine she was anything but a person. But, as you know and I know, they had every reason to believe that Appearances are Deceptive.”

What a valuable lesson for children and one that resonates deeply, yet is often forgotten as we grow older. The importance of looking beyond outward appearances and not relying solely on what meets the eye is especially relevant in today’s world, where social media shapes so much of our perception. We are constantly exposed to carefully curated images and stories that can distort what is real and influence how we view ourselves and others.

It’s all too easy to fall into the trap of comparing and judging based on these surface impressions. Many of us have likely experienced firsthand how the tendency to compare ourselves with others can disrupt our relationships and undermine genuine connections. Although it is natural to observe and compare, I find that the rise of social media has intensified these impulses, often resulting in feelings of envy, dissatisfaction, and a sense of inadequacy. Ultimately, the gentle reminder from Mary Poppins to look deeper and not be deceived by appearances is a lesson we would all do well to remember, especially in our modern, image-driven world.

I often wonder what would P.L. Travers think of the world we now live in.

Now I would like to share some examples of the stylistic changes made in the story, even though I cannot fully explain the reasons behind these edits:

In the 1940 version, the nursery characters that come to life on New Year’s Eve are drawn from Nursery Rhymes Old and New, a Victorian era edition of classic English nursery rhymes. In the 1943 version, however, the characters come from Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes, which refers not to a single book but a long-standing tradition of collections featuring familiar English rhymes and characters.

In the 1940 version Admiral Boom blows a trumpet in the frosty air while in the 1943 story he clangs a ship bell.

In the 1940 version, Barbara’s monkey toy is called Sissie, while in the later version the toy is renamed Pinnie.

In the first version, when the children follow their toys to the park where characters from fairy tales and nursery rhymes have gathered to celebrate a magical moment of happy ever after, the brief crack between the first and last stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, they are greeted by the Frog Who Would a-Wooing Go. In the second version, however, they are welcomed instead by the Three Blind Mice and the Farmer’s Wife.

There are several similar small changes in the second version of the story, although the reasons for them are not entirely clear. Even so, the heart of the narrative remains unchanged, reminding us that we each must work to reconcile the opposing forces within our inner and outer lives.

Wishing you all a happy ending of the old year and an even happier start of the new year.

Warmly,

Lina

The Hidden Connection Between Mary Poppins and a 17th-Century French Fairy Tale 

Dear Reader,  

I feel like “Lucky Thursday,” one of the stories in Mary Poppins in the Park (the fourth book in the series) published in 1952, is the perfect story to revisit during this misty time of year. Hopefully you will find my musings entertaining enough to forget the grey hues of November at least for a little while.  

“Lucky Thursday,” is one of four stories in the Mary Poppins books in which P.L. Travers explores the tricky nature of wishes and the unsettling truth that they sometimes come true in ways we never intended. However, as much as this theme deserves a deeper dive and one that I will certainly take on another occasion, in this post I want to show you something a bit different. I want to tell you about a curious connection between the eerie elements in this Mary Poppins story and a French fairy tale written by Madame d’Aulnoy in the late seventeenth century.  

In “Lucky Thursday,” Michael Banks, who has been stuck alone all day with a cold in the nursery, makes three wishes on the first star in the night sky. The next day, strange events begin to unfold, but he does not realize the connection between them and the wishes he made the night before in a moment of frustration until it is almost too late. One of his three wishes is to be far away from his siblings. That wish is granted, and he soon finds himself in a very strange place, as you will see. 

I did not have the chance to read Mary Poppins in the Park as a child. My copy of Mary Poppins included only the first two books in the series, so I cannot compare my reading experiences, but the strong uncanny elements in “Lucky Thursday” impressed me even as an adult reader. I couldn’t stop wondering how on earth P. L. Travers dreamed up the idea of an alien abduction of Michael Banks who lands on a planet ruled by cats. (You see, practical questions like this often pop into my head while I’m stuck in traffic on my daily commute.) For a long time, and until quite recently, I had no answer to this question as P. L. Travers was famously private about the inspiration behind her stories. 

Let me give you a little bit of context. After a day stuck in the nursery, Michael Banks is feeling better and joins Mary Poppins and his siblings on their usual visit to the Park. There, while Mary Poppins sits quietly reading What a Lady Should Know, he takes a silver whistle from her open handbag without asking permission and strolls farther into the park, where he can enjoy playing with it undisturbed. 

A cat with a “black and yellow coat” that “shone in the sunny mist, more like dapples of light and shadow than ordinary fur,” which Michael had noticed on the windowsill the night before, guides him farther into the Park. A steaming vapor rises from the earth and envelops them both. Prompted by the cat, Michael jumps into the air and suddenly feels himself lifted upward into empty space. Moments later, he lands on the steps of a golden palace on the Cat Planet, which turns out to be the very first star on which he had made his three wishes the night before. 

The golden castle is inhabited by the Cat King, the Cat Queen, their three daughters, and many cat courtiers. At first, everything seems amusing to Michael until he is offered a meal of a dead mouse, a bat, and small raw fish, all served on golden plates, along with milk in a saucer. It is then that he realizes the cats are far from friendly. Soon after, he discovers the horrifying truth about his position at their court: all the cats’ food is prepared by enslaved children who, like him, had wished upon a star to be away from their families. 

Michael is offered a chance to escape his predicament, but only if he can solve three riddles. Should he succeed, he is told, he must marry one of the King’s daughters. Michael finds the answers to the riddles easily enough, but he has no desire at all to marry a cat. His refusal is not well received by his hosts. The offended cats begin to hiss and close in on him, and they might have torn him to pieces had he not blown the silver whistle to summon Mary Poppins to his aid. 

“Lucky Thursday” is a strange and uncanny story, and it is not impossible that P. L. Travers came up with the idea of a royal court of cats on her own. However, when I recently read Madame d’Aulnoy’s fairy tale The White Cat, the similarity of the setting made me wonder: could P. L. Travers, who was deeply immersed in fairy tale lore, have borrowed this motif from Madame d’Aulnoy’s tale?  Writers often draw inspiration from one another. Human creativity does not exist in a vacuum, for ideas, like bees, cross-pollinate among our minds.  

The fairy tale The White Cat unfolds in a distant kingdom where a prince, sent on a quest by his father, meets the White Cat, a princess presiding over a court of cats and bodiless hands serving as attendants. Unlike Michael, the prince is offered human food while the cats dine on dead mice and the White Cat helps the prince in his quest. He eventually falls in love with her and when he declares his love, she asks him to cut off her head and tail. He initially refuses to do so, but at last he complies, and by doing so, he breaks the spell that bound her, revealing that the White Cat is, in fact, a princess.  

The similarities between the settings in these two stories, a golden palace in one and a castle of gleaming gemstones in the other, each with a royal court of cats and both situated in distant locations, are too striking in my opinion to be mere coincidence.  

As is often the case with P. L. Travers, one question leads to another. If she knew about the fairy tales of Madame d’Aulnoy, why didn’t she mention her in her writings? She often spoke of the Brothers Grimm. A possible explanation might be that she dismissed Madame d’Aulnoy because she was inventing her stories rather than retelling old tales from anonymous sources, as the Brothers Grimm did. 

But little did she know that even the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault had taken inspiration from Madame d’Aulnoy and her circle of women writers, who called themselves “the fairies” and were, in fact, the first to coin the term fairy tales. 

I learned about Madame D’Aulnoy and the other fairies, Henriette-Julie Murat, Charlotte-Rose La Force, Marie-Jeanne L’Heriter, Catherine Bernard, Catherine Duran and Louise D’Auneil from Jane Harrington’s wonderful new book Women of the Fairy Tale Resistence, The Forgotten Founding Mothers of the Fairy Tale and the Stories That They Spun. 

Harrington’s book is a must-read for any fairy tale aficionado. I was deeply fascinated to discover the lives of these women writers in Paris who challenged social norms during the reign of Louis XIV, the Sun King. Their lives were far from easy, yet despite the many obstacles they faced, their voices sustained them. Although men tried to erase their names from history, their writings have endured, offering a vivid glimpse into their struggles to find true love and live happily ever after. 

The research conducted by Harrington is truly remarkable. I was astonished to learn that Charles Perrault, whose fairy tales I devoured as a child (I still have my old Bulgarian editions), borrowed from her stories without giving her any credit. According to Harrington, L’Héritier often remarked that Perrault had plundered her work. One of the tales I loved as a child, “Diamonds and Toads,” is in fact a simplified retelling of “Blanche,” a story written by Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier, who, incidentally, was also his relative. 

I wonder what P. L. Travers would have thought of Harrington’s book and of the lives of these women writers. If she dismissed Madame d’Aulnoy because she was a writer of fairy tales rather than a “reteller,” that only adds to the paradoxes in Travers’s thinking. After all, she herself was a writer of fairy tales. Of course, she would have argued that the Mary Poppins stories are not fairy tales, and perhaps from an academic standpoint they do not fit the definition, not even as literary fairy tales, which are often written adaptations of stories from oral traditions.  

P.L. Travers was influenced by myth, mysticism, and Gurdjieff’s spiritual teachings. She thought in mythic rather than folkloric terms, but her stories are an original combination of fairy-tale motifs with mythic cosmology and spiritual allegory. 

In conclusion, the Mary Poppins stories are not traditional fairy tales but rather hybrid modern literary wonder tales that adapt the structure and spirit of fairy tales to explore mythic and metaphysical themes within a domestic setting. And this is why they are so fascinating to explore.  

I wish I could talk about all this with P. L. Travers, but even if that were possible, there is no guarantee she would answer my questions.  

After all, she was known for avoiding direct answers. 

That’s it for now—thanks so much for reading! If this post brought you a little joy, go ahead and click the subscribe button in the bottom-right corner of your screen so you don’t miss any future posts. You can also follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and Substack for more peeks into the magical world of Mary Poppins, P. L. Travers, and other enchanting literary adventures.  

Until next time, take care and be well! 

A Mary Poppins Effect

Dear Reader, 

This blog post is going to be slightly more personal than usual as I want to share with you one of the many Mary Poppins effects in my personal life. These, for me magical, effects are incontestably transformative and have greatly enriched my inner life and personal happiness. That said, I am not suggesting that all personal challenges have vanished, but my ability to sustain and show resilience comes directly from these various effects.   

First and foremost, reconnecting with my childhood reading of “Mary Poppins” reminded me of my deep love for magic and fairy tales. It also made me realize that my daily life had, sadly, become quite dull and ordinary. It’s not that I wasn’t surrounded by people and events—my life was filled with all the things that keep us busy and distracted. Of course, my family is a great source of love and support, and I am forever grateful to them, but there was an emptiness within me that couldn’t be filled by anyone, no matter how loving they were. It just dawned on me (and perhaps this realization had been building up inside of me for some time) that I felt constrained. Faced with this moment of recognition I had to acknowledge the need for more joy and wonder in my life.  

But where to find them? 

I decided to go search for them in the places where I had found them as a child. The day had come when I was finally old enough to start reading fairy tales again, to paraphrase a quote by C.S. Lewis. I felt goosebumps when I first read this quote by C.S. Lewis because the truth of his words resonated so deeply with my own experience.  

Then, organically, one thing led to another, and I found myself collecting old books of fairy tales and fantastical adventures, something that I would never have thought I would be doing a few years ago, as it was so remote from the spheres in which I operated.

The moments I spend reading fairy tales and fantasy novels, or treasure hunting for old books, are pure bliss—a breath of fresh air in my daily life. It’s not just an escape from the ordinary; these activities also allow me to see the world in a new light. Looking at my bookshelves fills me not only with joy but with a sense of groundedness—a feeling of coming home. And I owe it all to P.L. Travers and her Mary Poppins. 

Here, I’m sharing some pictures of the books in my modest collection, which I hope will expand over time. 

The Brown Fairy Book by Andrew Lang. Illustration below is by H.J. Ford.

Below is a picture of the cover of Princes and Princesses by Andrew Lang.

Illustration below by H.J. Ford.

Below is the cover of Myths & Legends of Japan by F. Hadland Davis.

Illustration below by Evelyn Paul.

While reading interviews given by P.L. Travers, I discovered that our childhood readings intersected, despite our cultural and generational differences. We both read Beatrix Potter, the Brothers Grimm, and Andersen’s fairy tales, to name a few, only I read them translated in Bulgarian. This realization brought back memories of the fairy tales from my own childhood, with their beautiful illustrations, and I felt a deep grief for having left behind the most cherished treasure of all—my books.  

My initial response to counter this grief was to dismiss it as childish. I told myself I had to accept certain losses in life. On a practical level, I also thought it unrealistic to expect I could find copies of these books now that I live so far from my birthplace. But was I being childish? Was this a loss that needed to be accepted, or was it the kind of loss that could be retrieved? P.L. Travers herself pondered the theme of loss often, and in her later years, she would say that all that is lost is somewhere. 

I decided to give it a try, and with the help of the internet, I’m happy to report that, after a couple of years, I was able to reconstruct most of my childhood fairy tale book collection. I successfully found old copies of the editions I had as a child, as well as some new reprints of those same editions. 

These were the books my mother read to me at bedtime and the ones I learned to read with, before I got acquainted with Mary Poppins.

Below are pictures of the illustrations in my copy of Sleeping Beauty. The illustrator is Italian artist Gianni Benvenuti. This was P.L. Travers’s favourite fairy tale. She even wrote her own retelling of it and I wrote two blog posts about it back in 2017; you can read one of them here, and if you’re interested, the other is easily found on the website of this blog. 

Cinderella was my personal favourite fairy tale as a child, followed closely by Snow White, mostly because Snow White had dark hair like mine. The illustrations below are also by Benvenuti.

The illustrations of Snow White below are by Sandro Nardini.

And these are my two books of Andersen’s fairy tales. One is quite tattered, and the illustrations aren’t as beautiful as in the other, but I still enjoyed the stories. P.L. Travers loved Andersen’s fairy tales as a child, but as an adult, she had a different view. She believed Andersen undermined the vitality of his stories through his constant appeal for pity. It’s an interesting perspective, but one I don’t share. 

The illustrations above are by Lyuben Zidarov. And the illustrations below are by Libico Maraja.

Here is now Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter. I must have been around three years old when my mother read Beatrix Potter’s stories to me, and I remember the illustrations captivated me with such magnetic force. I wish I had P.L. Travers’s lyrical talent to describe the experience. It’s hard to put emotional states and impressions into words, but it truly felt as if I was part of the picture. It’s a strange feeling to remember the state yet not be able to recreate the experience. I still enjoy the illustrations, but our perceptions do grow duller as we age. 

P.L. Travers adored Beatrix Potter and wrote a review of The Tale of Beatrix Potter by Margaret Lane. I wrote a blog post about it some time ago, you can read it here. 

This is all for now. I’ll share more of my childhood book collection in a future post. In the meantime, take care, and I hope you’ll return to read more about Mary Poppins, P.L. Travers, and my adventures as I continue to explore their world.

About P.L. Travers’s Visit to Montreal  

Dear Reader, 

I am thrilled to share with you some biographical facts hidden in P.L. Travers’s book ‘I Go by Sea, I Go by Land’.  I first read this fictionalized account of her evacuation from the UK to the United States during WWII in 2018.

Briefly, for those who are unfamiliar with the book, it is written in the form of diary entries from 11-year-old Sabrina who recounts her and her brothers’ evacuation to the United States during the Second World War. Sabrina and her brother are accompanied on their journey by Pel, a family friend who is a writer and the mother of a baby named Romulus. As revealed by Valerie Lawson in her biography of P.L. Travers, ‘Mary Poppins She Wrote’ Pel stands for P.L. and Romulus for P.L. Travers’s adopted son Camilus.   

My second reading of ‘I Go by Sea, I Go by Land’ proved more fruitful than my first one. (This tends to happen when revisiting books.) At the very beginning of the book P.L. Travers writes that ‘the experiences recorded in the book are authentic’ and as the story is ‘a personal record (…) certain names have necessarily been altered.’ Taking P.L. Travers’s statement to the letter, I approached the story with the mindset of a detective, meticulously following every clue and detail. What follows is what I discovered about P.L. Travers’s visit to Montreal in the autumn of 1940.  

Montreal is where my parents and I settled after leaving Bulgaria in the early 1990s, and although I no longer live in the city, it is where I work during the week and where I often spend time with friends. You can imagine the excitement I felt when I connected the dots between the hints in the book about the locations P.L. Travers visited and the people she encountered during her stay.   

During her visit to Montreal, P.L. Travers stayed at the Windsor Hotel, where other famous authors, such as Charles Dickens and Mark Twain, had sojourned before her, although the story doesn’t say if she was aware of it. This is how she described the lobby of the hotel in ‘I Go by Sea, I Go by Land’ in the words of Sabrina who writes in her diary that the Hotel ‘is just like a Cathedral inside’.  

Below is a picture of the lobby of the Windsor Hotel in 1878 taken by William Notmam and you can see why Sabrina (P.L. Travers) compares it to a Cathedral.  

The Windsor Hotel was one of Canada’s most impressive buildings of the Second Empire style and was considered the best hotel in all the Dominion. It was a magnificent nine-story structure of sandstone and granite which span along the entire block of René-Lévesque (then Dorchester) Boulevard and Cypress Street, between Stanley and Peel (then Windsor) streets. To its guests it offered “palatial splendor with its gold-embossed lobby, six restaurants, two ballrooms, concert hall and 382 luxurious guest-rooms”.

Unfortunately, a fire devastated the hotel in 1957 and “the damages caused to the South wing were so great that the structure had to be demolished on August 12, 1959. All that remained was its 1908 North Annex – this portion of the former hotel still stands today.” 

Below is a picture I took of it for this blog post.

 

Now, let’s turn to another revealing entry in Sabrina’s diary. She writes about how, upon their arrival at the hotel, they are greeted by the Red Cross. When Pel signs her name, a Red Cross representative named Letty recognizes her, suggesting that Pel is a famous author, and invites her to lunch at her home. Then the reader learns that Letty has four children, all boys and that her husband is ‘a famous doctor’ called Kent.  

When Dr. Kent comes home, he offers the guests “cocktails of lemonade and coco-cola” and then takes Pel and the children for a drive to show them the river (Saint Lawrence River). At the end of the drive, at Pel’s request, he drops them off at the Cathedral. This is what Sabrina writes in her diary: ‘So she and James and I went in and there was water in two enormous sea-shells, very beautiful and fluted.’ 

The Cathedral in question is Mary Queen of the World Cathedral, which stands diagonally opposite form the Windsor building.

At its entrance stand two seashells filled with holy water. Below are the pictures I took for this blog:   

Who was Dr. Kent?  

Well, in my opinion, he could only have been Dr. Wilder Penfield, a neurosurgeon who revolutionized brain treatment. He became famous for his epilepsy operation, which came to be known as the “Montreal Procedure”. 

I find his physical description in the book quite perceptive; it is exactly the impression Dr. Penfield gave me when I watched a documentary about him.  

“He has the kind of face that makes you want to keep on looking at him. Very kind and twinkly and it seems to say to you ‘There now. Everything is all right. Don’t worry.’” 

Dr. Penfield was born in 1891 in a middle-class family in Wisconsin, United States. He studied at Princeton and Oxford. He initially sought to establish his career in the United States, but it was not easy for a junior surgeon in an emerging medical field. At that time Montreal was a city with an internationally famous medical community but with no full-time brain surgeon. The only full-time brain surgeon in Canada had set up in Toronto.  

The Royal Victoria Hospital went shopping for a brain surgeon in New York and in 1928 Dr. Penfield came to Montreal. In 1934, with the combined help of the Rockefeller Foundation, the City of Montreal and the Quebec government, he founded the Montreal Neurological Institute which is still in existence today.

Dr. Penfield had four children, two boys and two girls, who in 1940 were aged 22, 21, 14 and 13. In my opinion, P.L. Travers tried to keep Dr. Penfield’s identity anonymous by changing the genders of two of his children in the story.  

But, there is another clue in “I Go by Sea, I Go by Land” that points in the direction of Dr. Penfield.  During WWII his wife, Helen Kermott Penfield, was deeply engaged with a volunteer group helping émigrés from war-stricken Europe. She had joined the circle of the bourgeois Christian women of the United Church on February 20, 1940. In affiliation with St. James Church this group started a refugee committee which met on regular basis and Mrs. Penfield became very active from 1940 until 1943. On a pragmatic level she liaised with the Canadian Red Cross and arranged for collections of clothes and groceries. It seems more than likely that Letty was, in fact, Mrs. Penfield. 

When considered together, these elements make a compelling case for a meeting between P.L. Travers and Dr. Penfield. Unfortunately, Dr. Penfield’s children have all passed away, so I couldn’t validate my theory. However, the coincidences are too significant to dismiss. 

I hope you enjoyed reading this blogpost as much as I enjoyed writing it, and that you will come back to read more about P.L. Travers and Mary Poppins.