Happy Birthday to Pamela L. Travers (b. 1899, d. 1996), author of the Mary Poppins series
Some people don’t care for Mary Poppins for the same reason some people don’t like Harry Potter. Mary Poppins uses magic to both entertain and teach her young charges, and her creator, P.L. Travers, was in fact a disciple of several New Age mystics, including two guys named Gurdjieff and Krishnamurti. Some of this pagan nonsense did creep into the Mary Poppins books, but I think it’s easy to ignore. And I have a soft spot for Mary Poppins, a no-nonsense sort of nanny with a sort of prickly personality. Julie Andrews was much too twinkly and loveable in the movie to actually personify the Mary Poppins in the books. (I like the movie, too, though.) Anyway, for those who are still with me, here’s the transcript of a 2003 interview with Travers’ biographer, Valerie Lawson. I’ll bet you didn’t know that:
* Pamela Travers’ real name was Helen Lyndon Goff.
* P.L. Travers was born in Australia and grew up there; she died in London.
* In between, Travers lived for quite a while in Taos, New Mexico, of all places.
* She was a friend of the poet, W.B. Yeats.
* She never married, but in her late 30’s she adopted a baby and raised him as her child. Strange story:
Camillus was his name, and he had a twin. She consulted an astrologer about which twin she should adopt. If she’d take the other one, Anthony was his name, he was the sweet, non-crying one, so she was quite perverse in that way and she said, “No, I’ll take the noisy crying one.” And she actually went to Dublin on the ferry from England, brought him home, raised him, and it wasn’t until he was 17 that he found out he was a twin and he was adopted, and he found out not from his adopted mother, but from his own twin. They met in London because the twin knew, and he’d gone searching for his brother, but Camillus did not know, and really never forgave his mother for that.
And what do you think about that?
Camillus–never heard that variation before. I always liked the Poppins books. I read and re-read all of them. The Disney Poppins arrived on her umbrella floating down in perfect form. In the book she is blown down from the sky. Travers’s Poppins is so snarky.
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