fairy tales – The Mary Poppins Effect

Gregory Maguire Remembers P.L. Travers and Talks About His Book “A Wild Winter Swan”

Dear Reader,

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 32^nd 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 my name?

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.

Christmas with P.L. Travers and Andersen

Hello Dear Reader,

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?

Merry Christmas!

Christmas with “Hansel and Gretel”

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 16^th 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!

Halloween with P.L. Travers

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 the Park, 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.

Happy Halloween!

‘Paper Stars’ a Musical About P.L. Travers, the Creator of Mary Poppins

Photo: Cameron Jones

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!

Tarot and Mary Poppins

I read Mary Poppins and Mary Poppins Comes Back by P.L. Travers as a child in the early 1980’s in Bulgaria, but when I reread the stories in their original versions a few years ago, and discovered the other books in the series, I was amazed by P.L.Travers’s imagination. As a child I enjoyed the magic in the stories, but I did not give much thought to the author, although the name was on the cover of my book.

As an adult, however, I wondered where P.L. Travers got her whimsical ideas from. When asked about the origin of her magical nanny, she never gave a straight answer. This may be partially explained by her desire to keep people away from her private life. Afterall, she did say in one interview that Mary Poppins was the story of her life, and that she had taken every precaution to cover her tracks. But then in other interviews she said that no one really knows where ideas come from. Her statement about the mystery of the creative writing process is echoed by other contemporary writers such as Philip Pullman and Elizabeth Guilbert.

In Creativity, the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi brings light to some interesting facts about our human creativity, such as the existence of certain commonalities in the personality traits of creatives.

Csikszentmihalyi explains in his book that the creative process does not occur in a vacuum. Most of the time we build on old ideas by combining and reorganizing them in new ways, or by applying ideas from one domain to another. However, the mystery of creation remains. How exactly we combine ideas and morph them into new ones in our minds and why they take the forms they take is still a conundrum.

All P.L. Travers’s writings are sprinkled with esoteric, mythological and fairy tales’ references, as these were her literary and spiritual pursuits. I love dwelling in the world of Mary Poppins and P.L. Travers, and I find the process of uncovering these references in the stories most enjoyable. Yet, I am fully aware that I can only uncover some of the components of the stories and link them to her personal beliefs and interests, without ever being able to explain how she incorporated and organized them into the whimsical Mary Poppins adventures.

I believe that she herself was not entirely conscious of the creative process. Her writing was, at its core, unconscious writing. Her ideas sprang from deep within and then she polished the form. This is at least how I understand her statement about writing Mary Poppins because she was there to be written about. Besides, the adventures in the books all have a dreamlike quality to them, and I doubt this can be achieved to such an extraordinary level of artistry only by rational thinking.

This blog post is about an esoteric reference in Robertson Ay’s Story, a story from Mary Poppins Comes Back, the second book in the series published in 1935. This esoteric reference is the Tarot card of the Fool. I found a few more Tarot references in the Mary Poppins stories but they will be the subject of other blogposts.

As a young writer P.L. Travers gravitated towards the renowned Irish poet and occultist W.B. Yeats, and her literary mentor, the mystic writer, poet, and painter George W. Russel (AE) who was also one of Yeats’s closest friends. Both men knew Pamela Coleman Smith, the illustrator of the most popular Tarot deck today, the Waite/ Ryder deck which was first published in London in 1909. It is also said that W.B. Yeats was an advisor to Pamela Coleman Smith on the mystic symbolism to be incorporated into Waite’s new deck.

Pamela Coleman Smith was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the secret magical society to which W.B. Yeats also belonged. Between 1903 and 1904 she published, edited, and illustrated the magazine The Green Sheaf which focused on Irish Celtic folklore and mysticism. Both Yeats and AE, who were leading figures of the Celtic Revival, were literary contributors to her magazine.

W.B. Yeats and AE also called Pamela Coleman Smith “Pixie”; a name first given to her by the Victorian actress Ellen Terry. Then some twenty years later, AE began to call P.L. Travers “Pixie” probably because he noticed certain similarities in their personalities and interests. Both women were orphaned at an early age, both loved fairy tales and magic and were interested in theatre, and both displayed a mischievous streak.

The two Pixies were thus connected, although I suspect they never met in person because by the time P.L. Travers entered the artistic/occult scene, Pamela Coleman Smith had abandoned it and converted to Roman Catholicism.

Because of her connections to W.B. Yeats and AE, and her regular attendance at their literary salons, P.L. Travers was familiar with the archetypes of the Tarot. This is what she said about the Tarot card of the Fool to Jonathan Cott during an interview at her house in Chelsea, London.

“Who is Robertson Ay? What is he paid for? He does nothing but sleep? He turns out to be the Fool. Yes, he does, but I didn’t know he was going to turn that way when he cropped up in my mind.

Not unnumbered, but Zero, which is all numbers and no numbers. The Fool is omnipresent, serenely passing through the world – as I said in “The Youngest Brother”- here and there are alike to him.”

The Wisdom of Mary Poppins: Afternoon Tea with P.L. Travers, in Pipers at the Gate of Dawn, The Wisdom of Children’s Literature, Jonathan Cott, 1981

The Tarot is composed of seventy-eight cards, twenty-two Major Arcana cards and fifty-six Minor Arcana cards. The Minor Arcana cards are divided into four suits, each associated with one of the four elements: fire, water, air, and earth. The suit of Pentacles is associated with the earth, the suit of Cups with water, the suit of Wands with fire and the Suit of Swords with air.

The twenty-two Major Arcana cards (meaning Big Secrets) are considered to represent cosmic, energetic patterns that manifest in our human world as opportunities or obstacles to our personal growth, and the Minor Arcana cards (Little Secrets) relate to our individual struggles and challenges in our daily lives. All Major Arcana cards are numbered except for the Fool. The number of the Fool is zero, signifying nothingness, the void from which all things proceed, the field of pure potentiality.

The archetype of the Fool represents pure potential. He lives in the here and now without placing judgments and looks at the world with a childlike innocence and wonder. The Fool in his positive aspect, is the playful, joyful child within us all. When The Fool appears in a reading, he heralds a clearing of the senses and announces a brand-new beginning. His advice is to go with the flow, just go with what is happening and learn from experience.

In the Wait/Ryder deck The Fool is depicted standing on the edge of a precipice or a cliff suggesting that the path regenerates itself with each step; he encourages us to take a leap of faith and trust in life and in ourselves. Notice that the Fool carries a small bundle on a stick as he only takes with him what he needs and nothing more. His advice to us is one of release; to release what no longer serves us. He tells us to keep only the habits and lessons that will help us along our journey.

Mary Poppins tells three fairy tales to the Banks children during her stay with the family. I find it interesting that she does not tell these fairy tales at bedtime as most people do. She only tells a story when the occasion calls for it and as it happens, she tells the story of Robertson Ay in the park during one of their outings.

It is a sunny day in the park and Mary Poppins is sitting on a bench knitting, Anabel and the twins are in the perambulator and Jane and Michael are busy enacting the nursery rhyme I am the King of the Castle and You Are the Dirty Rascal, when out of nowhere a strange figure appears on the path at the edge of the Lake and catches their attention.

“Along the path at the edge of the Lake came a tall, slim figure, curiously dressed. He wore stockings of red striped with yellow, a red-and-yellow tunic scalloped at the edges and on his head was a large-brimmed red-and-yellow hat with a high peaked crown.”

Robertson’s Ay Story, Mary Poppins Comes Back (1935)

The man stops by the bench to greet Mary Poppins, and the children learn that this is the Dirty Rascal, and Robertson Ay, but that is revealed to them only at the end. The children are mystified by the stranger whose face is hidden underneath the large-brimmed hat. When he leaves their company, and to the greatest delight of Jane and Michael, Mary Poppins offers to tell them the story of the Dirty Rascal.

The story is in fact the story of a King who is extremely stupid and uncapable of fulfilling his royal duties. It is the Queen, and the Lord High Chancellor who must step in and do the work. However, they spare no amount of effort to impart some wisdom to the King, alas to no avail. As a last resort, the Queen and the Lord High Chancellor offer a generous reward to whomever succeeds in teaching the King some wisdom.

As is the custom in fairy tales, the reward comes with a steep price for those who fail at the task. The professors who fail to teach the King wisdom are all doomed to have their heads cut off and spiked on the Castle Gates.

All the teachers who come to test their luck lose their heads. The King is crushed by the events and his inability to learn. Then an unexpected visitor arrives, pushes past the sentry at the gate and walks up to the King. The King presents himself as the King of the Castle and the visitor as the Dirty Rascal. They immediately form a strong bond as the Fool shows the King that he does not have to conform to other people’s expectations nor to their understanding of what it means to be intelligent.

In Robertson’s Ay Story, the Fool appears in its positive aspect, a carefree, playful, childlike creature capable of imparting wisdom to the hopelessly stupid King. But he does not teach him in the way all the other teachers tried to. Instead, the Fool incites the King to burn all his books and simply enjoy life. They sing and dance, and laugh to the horror of the Queen and the Lord High Chancellor who see their behavior as being completely foolish and crazy. This highlights another aspect of the Fool archetype. The Fool is the outsider, the one that does not conform to pre-established norms.

At the end of the story, the King is tested by the Chief of all the Professors, the wisest man in the kingdom. The questions asked by the Chief Professor are met with unexpected, but practical answers and the Chief Professor has no other choice but to declare the King to be wise. Wisdom, as P.L. Travers believed, cannot be taught, it can only be acquired through lived experience; a dance through life. To understand something, she said one must stand under it. Factual knowledge can only get us so far, something else is required of us to live an authentic life.

When the Fool appears in a Tarot reading, it often signifies a new journey, a new beginning and this is exactly how the story of Robertson’s Ay ends with the beginning of a new journey for the King. Once the King realizes that what others think about him has no importance whatsoever, he realizes that he has no desire to be King. Together with the Dirty Rascal, the King climbs on a rainbow that has suddenly appeared in the sky and throws down his crown and scepter, thus shedding his old identity.

Interestingly, the rainbow appears on another Tarot Card, the 10 of Cups, and I am thinking that I will have to explore this element of the story in a future blog post. For now, I hope you enjoyed reading this blog post as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Shadow Play

I used to play with my shadow as a kid. I tried to run away from it, but no matter how fast I ran, I could never outrun it. Every time I looked down there it was, glued to my feet, sometimes in front of me, sometimes behind, sometimes on my left side and sometimes on my right. I was never certain of its position, but I was certain of its presence, even on rainy days. I knew that it was there, only, it was invisible for the time being.

Occasionally, my shadow games involved other children in the neighbourhood. We chased after each other’s shadows and screeched with delight as we stepped on them, something that Mrs. Corry teaches the Banks children in Hallowe’en, a story from Mary Poppins in the Park (1952), is not a wise thing to do. I did not know that back then. I had read Mary Poppins (1934), the first book in the series in the early 1980’s in Bulgaria and I did not know about the other books until I read P.L. Travers’s biography in 2015.

I enjoyed my shadow’s shape-shifting tricks, how it changed its size, and how sometimes it climbed on walls and ceilings. One evening, to my enchantment, shadows of animals and birds appeared on the walls in the living room of my grandparents’ apartment. Amazed, I kept shifting my eyes from the lively images on the walls to my mother’s and grandfather’s strangely positioned hands. They looked nothing like the shadows on the wall and I marvelled at this mysterious transformation; it was pure magic.

However, despite my enjoyment of shadow games I doubt that I would have been as courageous as Jane and Michael Banks in Hallowe’en and followed my shadow out in the night should I have seen it run out of the door. Certainly not, if this had happened after I read Andersen’s fairy tale The Shadow and learned that a shadow without a body is the most dangerous thing of all. Suffice it to say that Andersen’s fairy tale put an end to my shadow games.

The shadows in Hallowe’en are friendly. I wrote about P.L. Travers’s concept of the shadow in a previous blog post. If you are interested, you can read it here. In this blog post I want to spend some time exploring a contradiction in the story.

Yes, this is what happens when you read the same story repeatedly; you see things you did not see the first time, or even the second time around.

It is the night of Hallowe’en, and everybody is fast asleep when Jane and Michael Banks wake up and find mysterious messages written on leaves left on their pillows. These are the leaves that the wind blew into their hands on their way back home from a stroll in the park. Mary Poppins had taken the leaves away before they could see the words written on them, but now they can read the messages. One leaf reads “Come” and the other “Tonight.” The children accept the invitation and follow their shadows to the park where other shadows are having a party.

At first, Jane and Michael are a little scared, but the Bird Woman’s shadow reassures them. There is no need to be afraid, a shadow never did any harm to anyone. Then, after Jane and Michael Banks accidentally step on Mrs. Corry’s shadow, she tells them to pay attention, because shadows are extremely sensitive.

Mrs. Corry, an ancient crone and a friend of Mary Poppins, and Mary Poppins herself are the only people at the party with their shadows firmly attached to their feet.

Mrs. Corry advises the children to take good care of their shadows or else their shadows will not take good care of them. This to me sounds much like a warning and reminds me of the perfect example of what happens to someone who does not take care of his shadow.

The Shadow by Hans Christian Andersen begins in a hot country where the sun is very strong. A learned man from the cold regions is trying to acclimate to the heat but it is difficult. He loses weight, and his shadow shrivels to nothing. It is only in the evenings that it comes to life on the walls of the learned man’s room and stretches itself to regain its former strength.

The learned man spends his evenings sitting on his balcony where he can observe the hustle and bustle of the city below, but he is mostly curious about the house across the street. Nobody ever comes out on its balcony, yet it has beautiful flowers that could not survive unless someone waters them regularly.

One night, the learned man awakes and sees a light coming from the mysterious balcony. A beautiful maiden, all aglow, is standing amidst the flowers. The learned man jumps out of bed and creeps behind the curtain to get a better look, but it is too late, the maiden is already gone.

One evening, not long after this brief vision, the learned man notices that his shadow is cast on the maiden’s balcony. Jokingly, he suggests to his shadow to slide through the half-opened door and have a look around and come back to tell him who lives there. The shadow accepts the learned man’s proposal and disappears into the confines of the house but then, it does not return.

Many years pass, the learned man is back to his cold country where he spends his time writing books about what is true, good and beautiful in life. Only, no one cares about such things and the learned man is deeply grieved. Then one evening his shadow, now with a fleshed-out body and wearing lavish clothes, shows up at his door. From this moment on, the story takes a dark turn. The learned man gradually becomes the shadow of his own shadow and then dies by its hand.

However, before this tragic end, the shadow reveals all about his solo journey. The learned man discovers that Poetry lived in the house opposite theirs. It is there that the shadow learns all that there was to be learned, although it had to stay in the twilight of the antechambers, or it would have been consumed by the light.

Despite its human body, the shadow retains its ability to change its shape and size and that is what allows him to peak into other people’s homes and discover their darkest secrets. The knowledge of people’s dirty deeds allows the shadow to manipulate them to give him all he wants in exchange for his silence. Andersen’s story is clearly a metaphor for the dark side of the learned man’s psyche and his refusal to acquaint himself with his own darkness.

I do not know if the contradiction between the words of the Bird’s Woman shadow and Mrs. Corry’s advice in Hallowe’en was intentional on P.L. Travers’s part, but it is possible, she liked indirection and Andersen’s fairy tales were part of her childhood readings. The idea of free roaming shadows, I believe, was inspired, consciously or not, by Andersen’s fairy tale.

I wish I could ask P.L. Travers about all this and more. Are our shadows good or are they bad?

I will never know what P.L. Travers’s answer would have been, but I found mine most unexpectedly one evening after work, as I was walking in the parking lot towards my car. The light from the lamp posts hit my body at a fortuitous angle, and I saw three shadows stretching at my feet in three different directions. I had never noticed this phenomenon before, and I was awestruck by its revelation.

We have more than one shadow! We have them all, the good, the bad and the ugly. Both P.L. Travers and Andersen are right, we better pay attention to them or else…

Happy Halloween!

Midsummer’s Eve with Mary Poppins

Bulgarian Mary Poppins in Cherry Tree Lane

Cover illustration by Piers Stanford, 1994

Yesterday, as a celebration of the summer solstice, I read the Bulgarian translation of the fifth Mary Poppins book, Mary Poppins in Cherry Tree Lane. The Bulgarian edition in my possession was published in 2004 and is translated by Anelia Ianeva.

It is Midsummer’s Eve and Mary Poppins takes the Banks children for an evening picnic in the park.

Mary Poppins in Cherry Tree Lane

Illustration by Mary Shepard

There, in the furthest corner of the park, in the herb garden, they feast and dance with celestial constellations who have taken the shape of their appellations: Orion, Castor and Pollux, the Bear, the Fox (or Vulpecula in Latin) named in the late 17th century by the astronomer Johannes Hevelius, and the Rabbit (or Lepus in Latin), a constellation that was listed in the 2^nd century by Ptolemy. PL Travers was interested in astrology and like a pastry chef fond of sugar, she sprinkled her Mary Poppins books with stars and constellations.

Mary Poppins celebration Midsummers Eve

Illustration by Mary Shepard

Down a lane in the park comes Ellen, the maid, strolling backwards with her eyes closed. She had put herbs under her pillow the night before and now is on her way to meet her true love.

Ellen the maid Mary Poppins

Illustration by Mary Shepard

The lonely Park Keeper decides, rather uncharacteristically, to try his luck. He follows suit only to bump into Mary Poppins. Afterall, opposites attract. What better match for a rigid man overly concerned with rules.

Mary Poppins and the Park Keeper

Illustration by Mary Shepard

The Bulgarian translation of the story, just like the translation of Mary Poppins, is loyal to the original text, but there is one interesting modification. Midsummer’s Eve is translated for the corresponding Bulgarian folk holiday Eniovden.

On Eniovden, according to old Bulgarian beliefs the celestial lights “go crazy”. At midnight, the sky opens and miracles happen. The stars descend on Earth and bathe in the cold waves of the sea. People gather herbs because on this day the herbs’ healing powers are at their peak. Young women perform divination rituals and put herbs under their pillows in the hope that their dreams will reveal their husbands-to-be. On Eniovden there is also a custom of making offerings of fresh cherries to the deceased.

Surprisingly, these old Bulgarian customs are reflected in Mary Poppins in Cherry Tree Lane, first published in 1982. Aren’t these similarities of beliefs between two different cultures fascinating? I am certain P.L. Travers would have been interested to hear about Eniovden. Then, maybe she did.

I have two editions of Mary Poppins in Cherry Tree Lane but none of them contain any illustrations. The Bulgarian one does! What a nice surprise for a Mary Poppins nerd like myself.

Happy Summer Solstice!

Bad Tuesdays with Mary Poppins

Mary Poppins Bad Tuesday compass.jpg

Original illustration by Mary Shepard

“Bad Tuesday” is a story in the first Mary Poppins book published in 1934 in which Mary Poppins, with the help of a compass, takes the Banks children on a trip around the world. In a flash, Jane and Michael experience the vastness and variety of our human world. With a shake of the compass, they are transported to the North Pole where they meet with an Eskimo family. Then, to the South where they encounter a family with a skin much darker than their own. In the East the children are greeted by a Chinese Mandarin, and by a tribe of Indians on their last destination in the West. All the characters in this adventure are friends of Mary Poppins. The different attires, manner of speech and greeting customs are not experienced by the children as something threatening, but on the contrary, as something extremely exciting and enjoyable.

Yet, many years after its first publication the story underwent two alterations for socio-political reasons. The first revision, which left the plot of the story untouched, occurred in 1971. Then, in 1980 the San Francisco Public Library removed Mary Poppins from its shelves because of alleged racist references and derogatory treatment of minorities. Lawson, P.L. Travers’s biographer, reports that P.L. Travers was angry with her publisher at that time for not defending her loudly enough. In fact, P.L. Travers learned about the unfortunate event from her friends.

After pondering whether she should stick to her artistic expression or risk to see her book banished from more shelves, P.L. Travers decided to rewrite the story. With a stroke of her pen, she changed the colorful trip around the world into a wildlife nature expedition. In this last version of the story, which is now in print, the Banks children meet a Polar Bear, a Hyacinth Macaw, a Panda and a Dolphin.

Mary Poppins Bad Tuesday Revised.jpg

Original illustration by Mary Shepard

Now, was the original story racist? This is the question that will be explored in this blogpost.

The major issue with “Bad Tuesday” was brought to P.L. Travers’s attention in 1971 by her friend Dr. Francelia Butler. She told P.L. Travers how embarrassed she felt when reading the story to the black students in her class. Her embarrassment being caused by the words “Negro lady” and “a picaninny baby” as well as the picaninny language used by the characters.

Beneath the palm trees sat a man and a woman, both quite black all over and with a very few clothes on. But to make up for this they wore a great many beads – some hung round their heads just below great crowns of feathers (….). On the knee of the negro lady sat a tiny black picaninny with nothing on at all. It smiled at the children as its Mother spoke.

“Bad Tuesday”, Mary Poppins, P.L. Travers 1934

P.L. Travers decided to alter the descriptions and dialogues in this section of the story because “if even one Black child were troubled, or she (Dr. Francelia Butler) were troubled, I would have to alter it.”

So, the description was redrafted and read:

Under the palm-trees sat a man and a woman as black and shiny and plum as a ripe plum, and wearing very few clothes. But to make up for this they wore a great many beads. (…) And on the knee of the dark lady sat a tiny plum-black baby with nothing on at all. It smiled at the children as its Mother spoke.

“Bad Tuesday”, Mary Poppins, P.L. Travers, redraft published in 1972

This time around the characters expressed themselves in formal English.

P.L Travers accepted to be interviewed about this first revision of “Bad Tuesday”. The interview was published in Interracial Books for Children in Vol.3, 1974. She said:

I have no racism in me. I wasn’t born with it. And it’s never happened inside of me. And therefore, I feel perfectly at ease and at home no matter what color anybody’s skin is. I was brought up in a family and in a world where there was no hint of racism of any kind (…) I was brought up by large minded people who never had any sense of racism at all.

P.L. Travers, Mary Poppins Revised: An Interview with P.L. Travers, Interracial Books for Children, Vol. 3, 1974

P.L. Travers was just like her Mary Poppins, apolitical, a rebel and a freethinker. She was completely engulphed in her imagination and her spiritual explorations which had to do with the much larger universal laws of creation. She was not interested in socio-cultural conventions. Hers was the world of myths and fairy tales, and the human experience of life on a larger scale. Not surprisingly, she said so herself.

Literature and imagination are my world. I don’t like being pulled out from that world and being forced to live in a sociological world of which I am not a native habitant. Imagination is a pure thing. It is envisaging. Imagination does not depend upon the sociology of the time. More functional books do; imagination does not.(…) Mary Poppins is not a contemporary book. It is a timeless book, and probably it goes back a great deal to my own childhood.

P.L. Travers, Mary Poppins Revised: An Interview with P.L. Travers, Interracial Books for Children, Vol. 3, 1974

This is P.L. Travers in a nutshell. This was not a statement made for the occasion. I have spent years reading her writings and interviews and listening to testimonials from people who knew her. This was truly her stance in life. It does not matter if you agree or not with her assertion about imagination not depending on the sociology of the time. What matters here is her subjective truth. What matters is the fact that she had no intention of being disrespectful towards other ethnic groups. Her willingness to alter the story not once, but twice, proves just that.

It is important here to note that the accusations of racism were raised in the socio-cultural context of North America many years after the story was first written. People in North America assumed that the characters in the story were from Africa. However, it is possible that their assumption was wrong. It is possible that these characters were inspired by P.L. Travers’s memories of or ideas about the Australian aboriginal tribes. Maybe this is what she meant when she told the interviewer that the story goes back to her childhood. P.L. Travers was born and raised in the Southern Hemisphere of the Earth. So, when Mary Poppins tells the compass to take her and the children to the South, that probably meant Australia. What’s more, in the early 1900’s, the newspapers in Australia contained Picaninny Pages and “negro” was not considered to be a socially unacceptable word. It was all just part of the reality of her life back then and it was absorbed into her imagination without any negative connotation.

“Bad Tuesday” reflected P.L. Travers’s childhood fascination with people and stories. Encounters with people who were not part of her family, mostly the help, stimulated her imagination. These outsiders made her realize that she was living in a world much vaster than her household. And, let’s not forget another important aspect of her childhood. She was an avid reader. She loved to read fairy tales, fantasy and adventure novels. Her childhood readings included Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and the adventures of Buffalo Bill.

The descriptions of the characters in “Bad Tuesday” may not have been accurate, but factual preciseness is beside the point here. Obvisouly, P.L. Travers did not use researched information for the portrayal of her characters. She simply pulled them out of the mixture of her childhood memories, readings and musings. Facts were never of a great concern for P.L. Travers. She was interested in big ideas. And, the original “Bad Tuesday” was a big idea kind of story. It was a story about the variety of human life on this planet and the possibility for all human beings, despite their socio-cultural differences, to be friends. It was a lesson in openness and willingness to take part in other people’s customs.

Isn’t it a sad paradox that a story about diversity and inclusion was relegated to oblivion by misguided reading and interpretation? The story was not promoting racist ideas or making children believe that other ethnic groups were somehow inferior. It was just a story, an imaginative story, and a humorous one at that.

Mary Poppins Meets Pinocchio

Pinocchio

Illustrated by Gioia Fiammenghi

Today P.L. Travers is mostly remembered for her Mary Poppins books and for the clash between her vision of Mary Poppins and the one that Walt Disney had in mind for his film adaptation. Regrettably, the general public is mostly unaware of P.L. Travers’s extensive writings on the subject of myths and fairy tales.

Recently, I had the chance to read her lovely essay The Footfall of a Cat* and I was reminded of P.L. Travers’s fluency in symbolic language and her ability to discern alternative meanings within a single story. The ideas expressed in The Footfall of a Cat are all interesting and could be the subject of many blogposts, but for the purposes of this particular one, I chose to explore the connection she makes between the theme of the spiritual nature of all craft and The Adventures of Pinocchio, written by Carlo Collodi.

Her comments about Pinocchio’s story are rather brief but, once pointed out, the connection appears evident. This is what I love about P.L. Travers, the originality of her ideas and the assertive ways in which she articulates them.

Unwittingly, seeking only to amuse, Carlo Collodi, the author of Pinocchio, happened upon a theme that he did not clearly understand and one that was older than he knew.

P.L. Travers, The Footfall of a Cat, 1976

She tells us that to see the connection between the theme of the spiritual nature of craft, and the relationship between the craftsman and the material, one must read the story of Pinocchio “on a level other than that on which it is written”.

I have always understood Pinocchio’s story as an allegory of the process of ego-maturation and the relationship between a father and his prodigal son. So, of course, this alternative interpretation tickled my curiosity, and I decided to follow the thread. I reread The Adventures of Pinocchio as the adventures of Geppetto. And, since in this blog post we will examine the story from Geppetto’s standpoint, the focus here will be on his interaction with Pinocchio at the beginning and ending of the story.

The story begins with old Mr. Cherry busying himself in his carpentry workshop. He is making a new table and he finds, among the material lying around in his workshop, what he believes to be the perfect piece of wood for the leg of his table. But when he approaches it with his axe, the piece of wood begins to talk. It beseeches Mr. Cherry not to strike him too hard. The old man, deaf to the call of the material, gives it a blow anyhow. A cry of pain comes out of the piece of wood and frightens Mr. Cherry out of his wits. Just as he is composing himself, old Geppetto knocks on the door of the woodshop.

Mr. Cherry in Workshop.jpg

Geppetto has an ambitious idea of making a fine wooden puppet that would dance, fence, and turn somersaults in the air, and with which he wants to travel the world to win his bread and wine. For that purpose, and because he is extremely poor, he needs to ask Mr. Cherry for a favour. He needs a piece of wood.

When the talking piece of wood hears about Geppetto’s plan, it enthusiastically approves of the project but, and here is the first sign of the misadventures to come, it addresses Geppetto in a very irreverent manner. It calls him by Geppetto’s despised nickname, Polendina, given to him by the boys in the neighbourhood. And, since Geppetto is short-tempered and does not understand that the voice comes out of the piece of wood, a ferocious fight begins between him and Mr. Cherry. In the end the two old men make amends, and Geppetto leaves the workshop with the mischievous piece of wood.

Back in his derelict room, Geppetto begins to shape the piece of wood into a puppet. But to his surprise the crafting process does not go smoothly. The piece of wood is acting out. As soon as Geppetto makes the eyes of the puppet, they start staring at him. Then, after he shapes the nose it begins to grow exponentially no matter how much Geppetto tries to shorten it. After the nose, Geppetto forms the mouth only to hear it laugh and poke fun at him. Then, immediately after Pinocchio’s hands are carved out, Geppetto’s wig is snatched out of his head. At this point of the shaping process, Geppetto is deeply disappointed by his creation. So much, that he blames himself for not knowing better earlier. However, he needs to finish what he has started.

Pinocchio kicks Geppetto.jpg

Right after the puppet gains control of its newly carved legs, Geppetto receives a kick on the nose. The troubles officially begin. Pinocchio runs out in the street where a policeman catches him by his long nose just as Pinocchio tries to slide between his legs. Geppetto is angry and talks about punishment but then he finds himself arrested for mistreating Pinocchio, and sent to jail for the night. Pinocchio, cold and hungry, falls asleep with his feet on the brazier of burning coal in Geppetto’s room. The next day, when he wakes up, he finds out that he no longer has legs. However, his distress does not last long. Geppetto returns back home and repairs Pinocchio’s legs.

Pinocchio caught by the policeman.jpg

Pinocchio wanting to show his gratitude decides that he wants to go to school. The trip around the world is postponed, and Geppetto sells his coat in order to buy Pinocchio a primer. Of course, Pinocchio never makes it to the classroom. On his way to school he hears music, and he is compelled to go to The Great Puppet Show. From that point on in the story, propelled by a series of bad decisions, Pinocchio goes on a long journey away form home. A little later in the story, we encounter Geppetto from afar. We find him in a small boat struggling against the waves of a stormy ocean, and then, we hear no more until the very end of the story. All we know is that Geppetto too has embarked on a journey of his own.

Both Geppetto’s and Pinocchio’s journeys unfold separately, but they both end up at the same place, in the belly of a giant dogfish. The story line is clear, both characters have lost their way in life. And both of them experience a descent into the dark night of the soul. It is their unexpected reunion and the love they have for each other that saves them from annihilation.

Pinocchio escape.jpg

The giant dogfish is sound asleep with its mouth ajar, and Pinocchio seizes the opportunity. With his father on his back he jumps out into the ocean and swims to the shore. Though, the journey back to safety requires an extreme effort on Pinocchio’s part. At the end, he is rewarded for his bravery by the blue-haired fairy, and transformed into a real boy.

Pinocchio transformation.jpg

P.L. Travers understood that talent and skill, although important components of the creative process, are not sufficient. Real craft, she tells us, calls for something more, something mysterious. To manifest an idea from the realm of the invisible into our physical world one needs not only to have an idea, the right material and the skill to execute, but one also needs to listen to what the material has to say.

P.L. Travers understood the role of the craftsman as one who humbly acts as a bridge between the immaterial world of ideas and their physical embodiment in our world. The real craftsman puts his skills at the service of the creative process.

Evidently, from what the story tells us, Geppetto does not have a clear understanding of his role as a craftsman. He may be channeling an idea and he may be shaping skillfully the right material, but he is not possessed by the right attitude, and that is because he is not consciously aware of the deeper meaning and purpose of his idea.

Geppetto does not consciously answer the call of the material and this is the interesting nuance in this story; the craftsman who possesses the necessary skill does not hear the call of the material. He is handed the right material by someone who hears the call but is not up for the task.

The story of Pinocchio is a warning. There is an element of surprise in the creative process. Each creation has a life energy of its own, and if misunderstood, it can disrupt the craftsman’s life. The disturbances that Pinocchio causes in Geppetto’s life are all necessary for Geppetto to understand that what his soul really wants is not a puppet to help him make a living. Geppetto is lonely and longing for a family of his own. This is why he is visited by the idea of a lively puppet. The existence of this unconscious need is hinted at the beginning of the story, when Geppetto chooses Pinocchio’s name. He names him after a loving family of poor but happy Pinocchios. In this light, the transformation of Pinocchio into a real boy at the end of the story can also be seen as Geppetto’s reward for his courage to face the darkness of his unconscious.

And this is what I believe P.L. Travers meant when she wrote:

Geppetto answers the call of the wood and presently there is a puppet. And ultimately, through his own suffering and self-searching – he too goes on a night journey in the belly of the dogfish – his puppet becomes a real boy.

P.L. Travers, The Footfall of a Cat, 1976

I think she meant that Geppetto unconsciously answers the call of the wood. Or else, why would he go on a self-searching journey? I wish I could discuss this further with P.L. Travers. People really did not ask her the right questions. Of course, she was not known for giving straight answers either. Those who knew her sometimes compare her to Mary Poppins, who never ever gives any explanations. But this is not completely accurate. P.L. Travers did not give lengthy explanations but she gave hints. And this can be enough for those who want to find the answers.

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* published in 1976 in The Way of Working, The Spiritual Dimension of Craft