The Mary Poppins books were part of my childhood. I didn't actually like Mary Poppins herself – she was scary and mean – but I liked the adventures she took the Banks children on. Their combination of magic with ordinary life is the kind of fantasy I like. It turns out my mother grew up with Mary Poppins, too. One night her father was listening to Alexander Woollcott's "Town Crier" radio show and he reviewed this new kid's book. My grandfather bought it and read a bit to my mother every night. She knew how to read, and one day she was curious about the rest of the story and finished the book. She says she realized later it kind of hurt her dad's feelings, and she felt bad. Anyway, my mom still says "She's perfect, perfect in every way" and other lines from the book.
So I eagerly looked for this biography. It covers the main facts of P. L. Travers' life pretty well, but lacks insight in a lot of areas.
Pamela Travers, born Helen Lyndon Goff, grew up in Australia where her father was a failed bank manager. She began publishing poems as a young woman and had a fairly successful acting career. Then she moved to England and continued to write professionally. She met the poet George William Russell who published some of her poems and through him, other Irish poets. A lifelong seeker, she was a student of the mystic mystic George Gurdjieff for a while. In 1934 she published the first Mary Poppins book. She continued to write for the rest of her life. I rediscovered her in the 80s when her essays about mythology appeared in Parabola magazine.
In her later years she was a writer in residence at several colleges, with varied success. She tended to view herself as a great writer the students should approach, and waited for them to come pay homage. Students were intimidated and annoyed by her imperious manner and stayed away.
Lawson refers to Travers' relationships with older male mentor figures as her "search for Mr. Banks." This doesn’t make sense, as Mr. Banks in the books seems to me to be an in-significant character, always absent minded and dreaming.
Lawson is openly scornful of Gurdjieff and seems to think he was some kind of charlatan. I can't vouch for his character but I've read a fair amount about him and his students, and that's not my impression of him. Lawson’s also somewhat dismissive about Travers’ essays for Parabola magazine, saying their references to myths and world religions were obscure. I didn’t find them so, and they were suited to a journal about mysticism and world religion.
The biggest omission is that she doesn't talk about the kind of mother Travers was. At age 40 she adopted an Irish baby boy, separating him from his twin. The boys met by chance when they were teenagers, and her son was furious that she'd never told him he had a twin. That appeared to cause a break between them, but a few chapters later Lawson mentions the son doing things with her as though nothing happened. Maybe there was no dramatic reconciliation, but it could have been described better.
More than that, there's nothing about her as a mother. Was she strict like Mary Poppins? “Snip snap, off to bed.” Did she tell stories? I assumed this omission must be because the son hadn't cooperated with the biography. But in the acknowledgments he's listed as the per-son who gave the most help.
I was pleased that Travers hated the Disney Mary Poppins movie as much as I did. I distinctly remember leaving Grauman's Chinese Theater feeling very annoyed that they'd gotten it wrong, because Mary Poppins is strict and mean, not cheery and smiling. There's a lot of interesting stuff about how the movie came to be made and the process of making it into a film.