Pamela suffered dreadfully from seasickness. But as the Medic plowed down to Melbourne then around to Cape Town, she scribbled poems, features, fantasies and travel articles to send back to her most faithful newspaper client, the Christchurch Sun. She was too proud by far to rely simply on Aunt Ellie’s generosity. That might be needed eventually, but first she was determined to pay her own rent.
When she allowed herself to dream, the pragmatic Pamela faded behind her fantasy that she was now embarked on a mythical journey. She believed she was sailing to her romantic motherland, to Ireland, a place of poets and druids still living in the Celtic Twilight, the title of a book Yeats wrote in the 1890s. This Pamela she saw as a little brown hen, a plaything of her Irish ancestors, who had called her home with insistent voices.1
She had no way of knowing that Ireland now was far from romantic, deserted by many of its disillusioned writers and brutalized by the Easter 1916 Rising. By the mid 1920s, romantic Ireland had been buried under the realities of Sinn Fein and the Irish Free State.
In those seven weeks to Southampton, Pamela was often burdened by homesickness. She wrote poems for her mother, whom she remembered pottering about her garden, her feet slow and tender, “shadows of silver dappling her hair.”2 But she consoled herself with the knowledge that there could be no other course. Pamela thought she had not so much left Australia, as she had fallen from it, as an apple falls from the tree, and as if at the summons of a bell.3
On her journey around the world, each port offered a chance to make more contacts, essential to a freelance journalist. In Cape Town, she called on friends of Allan Wilkie, who promised her casual work as a publicist. Eventually this led to an assignment in London where she scribbled press releases for the International Variety and Theatrical Agency, which booked shows for South Africa. As Pamela once told a reporter, “I got into publicity writing for the theatres of South Africa. I had to see all the stars of the theatre who were going to South Africa.”4
The Triad, though, remained her best outlet, even publishing travel features such as her article on Tenerife in the Canary Islands. Pamela first saw Tenerife at midnight, when “the moon had trodden a white path across the seas and was standing mature and arrogant upon the highest hill. Her silver train swung in and out of the shadowed valleys; she had dropped a feather from her hair on the sea’s edge, and it bestowed upon the red glow of the little golden town a thousand shimmery and elusive witcheries.”5 Pamela was trying far too hard, burying the lighthearted style of her Sydney pieces under the dead weight of overwrought metaphors.
She had a standard story about arriving in London. It always went like this: “I had £10 in my pocket, £5 of which I promptly lost.” Pamela only once disclosed that the pocket was not really empty. A financial safety net under her London adventure was thrown by rich relatives. “I was allowed to depart Australia on condition that I was met and stayed with specific members of the family. This happened as they had hoped. I was welcomed to a big house with three cars just outside London.”6
These Morehead relatives, nieces and nephews of Aunt Ellie, were about to leave for their spring holiday in Cannes. Pamela must come too, they insisted, return in time for the season, and give up her dreams of art and literature. She begged off Cannes. By the time they returned, she had done the rounds of editors’ offices and found a place to stay. Number 10 Mecklenburgh Square was not the poet’s attic she had imagined, but it was a reasonable little place not far from the heart of Bloomsbury, near London’s publishing heart, Fleet Street. “There, at last, I was where I wanted to be.”7
Before long, she had a card printed with her London business address, care of Australian Cable Service, 19 to 22 Bouverie Street, EC4. She listed herself as a representative of the Sydney Sun, Melbourne Sun, Newcastle Sun, Sydney Bulletin, Sydney Theatre Magazine, Green Room magazine, Sydney Triad, Christchurch Sun and Hobart Mercury. Along with the card, Pamela gave editors a reference from Theatre Magazine: “Miss Pamela Travers, one of our most valued contributors, is going to London to report on theatres and matters theatrical and to interview prominent playwrights and producers.”
At least that was the idea. Instead, she covered the rent by writing for the Christchurch Sun. She scurried around London for material, just as she had scoured Sydney for column fodder. By Christmas 1925 she had visited Paris—“absurd and adorable”—three times. Everything was a source of wonder, from the Sacré Coeur to the London tube.
All the romantic notions gleaned from her parents’ books, then from Allan Wilkie, Lawrence Campbell and Frank Morton, hardly prepared her for England in 1924. The England she had imagined back home was as Edwardian as Disney’s Mary Poppins movie, benevolently ruled by George V and documented by the author–heroes of her youth. This was the England of Kipling, H. G. Wells, Galsworthy and Joseph Conrad. Her father’s old literary heroes, though, were now the ancients in the eyes of writers like Ezra Pound, who saw Yeats as “Uncle William, still dragging some of the reeds of the nineties in his hair.” London was ruled by a new elite, the dandies, in the label given them by historian Martin Green. The dandies loved all things baroque, commedia dell’arte, and Byzantine painting. Among their leaders were Noël Coward, John Gielgud, Cecil Beaton and the Sitwells, all of whom, as D. H. Lawrence said, taught England to be young.
These were the sons who had survived the Great War, not bearded uncles or old literary figureheads but clean-shaven, their hair slicked into Pierrot-like skullcaps. It was all divine and modern and mad and sometimes, as Beaton said, “terribly unfunny, darling.”8
The dandies identified with Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, whose caravan of dancers and artists included such dandies’ heroes as Cocteau, Picasso, Stravinsky, Anton Dolin and Leonide Massine. Diaghilev’s troupe dominated London’s cultural life in the 1920s but the whole stage scene was booming with the Blackbirds’ review, George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, and the comedies of Noël Coward, “the spokesman of modernity,” whose play Vortex, about drug taking and homosexuals, premiered in 1924.9 Pamela, an outsider, knew little of the trailing comet of the Bloomsbury set, or of Pound, James Joyce and T. S. Eliot. While her ideas remained landlocked in the 1890s, London was moving on to The Waste Land, To the Lighthouse, and Ulysses.
The new Labour government, briefly in power when Pamela arrived, was led by Ramsay MacDonald; the mood was one of conciliation, progress and pacification, marred by the general strike in 1926.10 “He wishes to do the right thing,” sighed King George V in his diary the day MacDonald took power. The King stood for old power, MacDonald for progress and the new. (The dandies’ royal hero was George’s son, the Prince of Wales, the Pierrot figure who symbolized new England.)
In 1924, the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley summed up Britain’s sense of pride in progress.11 The Times thought that “many a young man of our cities will find it difficult to walk past the overseas pavilions—with their suggestion of adventure, and space, and a happy life under the open skies of the bush, the prairie and the veld—without feeling that almost irresistible tugging at the heart strings which drew the pioneers of old to cross the oceans and to blaze the trail for those who followed.”
Pamela was not as enchanted by the pavilions as she was by the arrival at the exhibition of the King. As she reported for The Triad, “I was to see the King for the first time…and then he came…the crowd swept into a sobbing paean of welcome…“The King! The King!” went stepping from mouth to mouth as round the green the little happy horses pranced and bore him to the glaring dais…boom, boom, boom went the guns in Royal salute as the King led the Queen up the steps to a pair of gilt thrones…then the King spoke…The deep firm voice spoke to the Empire, and the Empire in the persons of those members of it who listened there, acclaimed him. I had seen the King!”12
In her first year in England she wrote for both The Triad and the Christchurch Sun, admitting in print to feeling like a country bumpkin, overjoyed at the beauty of an English spring, rushing to New Zealand House to read back copies of the papers, buying Canterbury lamb, and all the time tempting her readers with glimpses of life in exotic London.
She wrote verse, too, including a sentimental sonnet to the memory of Frank Morton for The Triad. But her ambitions were greater. She had her eye on the Irish Statesman, a literary magazine published in Dublin and edited by George William Russell. In early 1925, Pamela sent him some poems, with no covering note, just a stamped addressed envelope for their expected return. On March 13, Russell wrote her a brief letter:
Dear Miss Travers,
I like very much some of the verses which you sent me and hope to make use of one or two of them at an early date in the Irish Statesman. I do not remember seeing verse by you before. Have you published anything? I am sure a book of verse equal to the best of those you sent me would find readers.
Yours sincerely,
George Russell.
The hook had been shaped, the bait taken. From now on, Pamela Travers would spend much of her life in an attempt to live out George Russell’s ideas. She did not just love Russell. She felt as if he was her sun. He was Zeus, she once wrote, and Pamela just a page in his court.13
• • •
For all her years as a reporter, Pamela was a girl in love with the idea of being a poetess, so much in love that within one year, she became a pet and protégée not only of Russell but of a circle of men around him: Yeats, James Stephens, Padraic Colum, Oliver St. John Gogarty and Sean O’Faolain. These people “cheerfully licked me into shape like a set of mother cats with a kitten,” which was “a blessing far beyond my deserving.”14
Russell, almost fifty-seven when he met twenty-five-year-old Pamela, was flattered by her adoration. But by his own admission, he did not understand women and, despite a difficult marriage, kept them at emotional arm’s length. He let many opportunities pass by. As Simone Tery, one of his young women friends, wrote to him, he was “a puritan without knowing it.”15 But for all the frustrations in their friendship, he turned out to be a force for good in Pamela’s life. He was, by far, her supreme guru, her ultimate Mr. Banks, generous, big-hearted and selfless.
Until now, Pamela’s world had revolved around poetry and the theatre, which ran through her life like parallel strands of hair. Russell introduced her to the meaning of fairy tales, to myths, the spirit world and Eastern religions. Now the two strands of hair became woven into this third, making a braid of esoteric, interlinked interests.
The joy she felt in reading his first letter was profound. She wrote back next day. It just so happened, she said, that she planned to come to Ireland to visit her relations. Could she meet him?
“Of course,” he wrote, “I would be delighted if you would call to see me whenever you are in Dublin. I am found at the Plunkett House, 84 Merrion Square, any afternoon except Saturday and Sunday when I am at 17 Rathgar Avenue. I showed some of your verses to W. B. Yeats who thought they had poetic merit and that means a good deal from him.”
This was his standard response, almost a form letter to aspiring writers. As Yeats’s biographer, Roy Foster, has written, Russell was “well known for his undiscriminating adoption of young hopefuls.”16 But to Pamela, the invitation was miraculous.17
In the 1920s, Russell was seen as an intellectual colossus in Dublin. His reputation had spread as far as Washington and New York as he transformed himself from artist to visionary, poet to playwright, economist to editor, then charismatic lecturer and later an adviser to the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. Pamela thought his gifts “wheeled about him as a zodiac.” They did not define Russell, who was, she thought, a spirit. “You might as well tie up a lion in a net of silk as try to fit him into a pigeon hole ticketed economist, journalist or artist.”
A recital of his occupations never explained his impact on his contemporaries. Russell was described by the poet and doctor Oliver St John Gogarty as the anarchic angel, a teacher who taught nothing in particular, but who “communicated the best in himself, which consists of poetry, loving kindness and a passion for beauty more than anything else.”18 He was more like Plato, said Gogarty, than Tolstoy or Chekhov, whom he resembled.
Russell did not underestimate his own charisma. He made theatrical entrances, his bulky body draped in tweed, “his flowing tie half seen beneath the rich brown beard.”19 A memoir written by his friend John Eglinton described him as corpulent, moving heavily in his fifties. His brow was “hidden in a tangle of mouse colored hair never trimmed except by himself.” He had a large full face, high cheekbones, round blue eyes behind small circular spectacles and a pugnacious mouth.20 He smoked a pipe, which discolored his large teeth. The composer and novelist Lord Berners once described his kind of face as one that “looked like the pipe had been there first and the face had grown around it.” Russell puffed constantly, packing his pipe with his favorite coltsfoot-and-tobacco mix. He affected the manner of a distracted artist, often slipping his lit pipe into his pants pocket, setting himself on fire. As well, he was careless about food, wasting no time over meals.21
Russell spoke with the mellow, musical accent of his native Ulster. He had worked in Dublin from 1890, as a clerk with the drapery store, Pim Bros., but his talent was for art. At the Metropolitan School of Art he met Yeats, two years older. They became involved in the occult, attending seances. Russell began to paint visionary paintings in the style of Blake and meditated so profoundly that he started to see spirits.
From Russell’s trips into inner space came the idea for his pseudonym, AE. He had conjured up the most primeval thought he could, and the word aon passed into his head. “I was afterwards surprised at finding out that the gnostics of the Christian era called the first created beings aons and that the Indian word for the commencement of all things is aom.”22 His biographer, Henry Summerfield, thinks he embroidered this theory further into a kind of mathematical formula of the letters AEON:
A = Deity
AE = the first emanation from the Deity
O = static continuance for some time
N = change, that is the spirit returns to God
In the late nineteenth century, this was not as lunatic as it now sounds. The fashion of the time was for all things supernatural, for spiritualism, Eastern philosophy, gurus and spiritual experiments. In 1888, Russell attended meetings of the Dublin Theosophical Society and began to use AE, the first sound of AEON, as his pen name. The fashionable new religion of theosophy was based on Buddhistic and Brahmanic ideas, and revolved around the rather sinister figure of Madame Helena Blavatsky, a Russian who resembled an evil crone in a fairy tale. Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society in 1875 and claimed that she was instructed in esoteric wisdom by a brotherhood of masters in the Himalayas. She maintained that “the universe was permeated by a kind of psychic ether called akasa through which clairvoyance and telepathy could operate and in which were preserved Akashic Records of the whole of man’s history.” One could gain access to these records through spiritual perception.23
Madame said the world was a conflict of opposites, that all souls identified with the Universal Oversoul and that every soul passed through the “Cycle of Incarnation in accordance with Cyclic and Karmic Law.” The magic figure seven featured in all this. The soul had seven elements and it passed through seven planets. There were seven races, seven branch races and seven root races. Just to vary the formula, the soul had about eight hundred incarnations.24
Two years after he fell into this supernatural quagmire, Russell delved further into its depths to became a member of the so-called Esoteric Section of the Theosophical Society. He was now a full-scale, full-time mystic, even moving into the society’s Dublin premises for seven years. AE was already fascinated by Eastern and Indian religions and had been studying the ancient sacred Hindu texts, the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita.
Russell studied with James Pryse, a Theosophist who ran Blavatsky’s own press, and had lived with an Indian tribe. Even in old age, AE called Pryse his “guru” and believed him to be the only author to have written on mysticism from real knowledge since the death of Blavatsky.25
Russell already meditated on the chakras, the seven main centers of spiritual power which lie from the base of the spine, through the navel, solar plexus, heart, throat, forehead and crown of the head. Pryse explained that certain visions they both saw were chakras on the face of the earth; Indians, American Indians and Greeks also appeared in their visions.
Russell was also entranced by Irish folklore and believed he could see the little people. He was in the west of Ireland, lying on the sand, when he first heard “the silvery sound of bells.” His vision sounds now like the sincere ravings of a spotter of UFOs. He saw “an intensity of light before my eyes…I saw the light was streaming from the heart of a glowing figure. Its body was pervaded with light as if sunfire rather than blood ran through its limbs. Light streams flowed from it. It moved over me along the winds, carrying a harp and there was a circling of golden hair that swept across the strings. Birds flew about it and over the brows was a fiery plumage as of wings of outspread flame….there were others, a lordly folk, and they passed by on the wind as if they knew me not or the earth I lived in.”26
His poetry at this time dwelt on spiritual journeys and the temptations that lay in store for the mystic. AE liked to linger around twilight and sunrise, explaining that the colors of the sky at these times of day were best for meditation. In this way, and with the emphasis of Yeats’s twilight fantasies, the two poets reinforced in Pamela the significance of the magic of twilight that she had already experienced in Allora.
In 1898, AE married a member of the Theosophical Society, Violet North, who had succeeded Pryse as printer of the Irish Theosophist journal. Violet also saw visions. AE might have gone right over the edge if his common good sense and interest in literature had not acted as a counterbalance. He had joined the Irish Literary Society, which promoted a new Irish school of literature and he helped establish the Irish National Theatre (later the Abbey). Russell’s middle years coincided with those two decades from 1890 to 1910 which saw a blossoming of the arts and literature in Ireland, inspired by the Celtic past. The leaders of the revival formed their versions of European salons, revolving around Lady Augusta Gregory, George Moore and Yeats, all Anglo-Irish and Protestant patriots.27
Before the First World War, his network grew from merely an Irish circle to an international group. Through his promotion by the former Irish politician and social reformer Sir Horace Plunkett he became a cult figure to many, including Henry Wallace, an American preacher and agriculturalist who advised the American president, Theodore Roosevelt. Wallace sent his grandson, Henry Agard Wallace, to Ireland to meet Horace Plunkett and AE. The grandson was most impressed. He shared with AE an interest in theosophy. It turned out to be a useful friendship for AE when Wallace became vice president in the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
AE was not so much the seer that he grew into a downright bore. His friends loved his Sunday night salons, more casual than Yeats’s salons on Monday nights. By the time he settled at 17 Rathgar Avenue in 1906, Sunday with AE was a feature of Dublin social life. He held center stage, explaining and interpreting anything, from dairy farming or the Bhagavad Gita to the Abbey Theatre. He clearly loved the sound of his own voice. Reading from books, or delivering his sonorous monologues, he emphasized the finer points with a flourish of his pipe.
Despite an uneasy tension between AE and Yeats, which lasted all of AE’s life, the two men remained friendly. Yeats recommended to Horace Plunkett that AE become the organizer for a new agricultural banking network within the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society (IAOS), which Plunkett had founded. This was not merely a farming group but the basis for a new utopia, centered on cooperative creameries to be run by Ireland’s poor farmers. Village communities would grow around each creamery. Communal marketing of eggs and butter might then lead to other, domestic and personal ways of sharing. Gymnasiums, libraries and galleries would all serve the people.28 Such visions were shared by Henry Wallace Sr. and later John Collier, who was to become United States Commissioner for Indian Affairs. These men liked to talk of “cooperative life in precapitalist times,” and praise noble savages such as the Eskimos.29 All these connections were to prove important to Pamela.
AE took to the new job like a latter-day brother Grimm, not just talking soil and crops, but collecting folk tales as he went from farm to farm. In 1905, he also became the editor of the IAOS’s magazine, the Irish Homestead, which promoted the cooperative movement’s message, pushed Irish arts and crafts, and published James Joyce.
Two years before Pamela met AE, he had become the editor of the Irish Statesman, which Plunkett published from 1923, and which incorporated the Irish Homestead. Launched with the backing of a group of American Irish investors including the judge Richard Campbell, the group put in enough money for the magazine to last at least five years. The backers did not dictate its politics. It steered “a wide deep middle way, editorially.”30 But it supported the new Irish Free State and it was clear AE had Labour Party sympathies. His columns promoted the need for bigger schools and colleges and less expensive administrations.
AE wrote much of it himself, like Frank Morton inventing pseudonyms “to make the paper look as if it was written by many pens.”31 The magazine included his thoughts on local and international politics, art and literature, and ran contributions by George Bernard Shaw, Gogarty, Padraic Colum and James Stephens. But, always, there was financial stress. The Irish Statesman lost money every week32 and the American guarantors, already edgy, were asked in 1925 to invest even more.
AE’s editorial base was at IOAS headquarters in Plunkett House, at 84 Merrion Square, one door away from Yeats’s home. The door, deep and wide, stood under an elegant semi-circular window set in its Georgian facade. On the second floor, AE sat behind a pile of papers at a mammoth desk. Brown wallpaper was covered by his fantastic murals, among them heroic and supernatural figures, including a woman holding a flaming torch and, over a doorway, a wolf.33
Within this painted gallery of an office, AE offered Pamela some tea in his one unchipped cup. It was lavender. He introduced her to Susan Mitchell, his assistant, and to his deputy editor, Jimmy Good, who sensed the falseness in Pamela’s name. Jimmy insisted she should be Lady Pamela. She liked the sound of that, Lady Pamela Travers. AE told her he would publish all the poems she had offered. He had a few suggestions on her work, of course,34 and asked her to call again on her way back to England.35
In a daze of happiness, she went off to her Goff relatives in County Wexford, bursting to tell them she had met the great AE. They merely lifted their eyebrows. These Goffs had no use for poetry, preferring horses to the Celtic literary renaissance.36 They dismissed Cathleen ni Houlihan as some kind of aberration, regarded twilight as simply a patch of time between night and day, and most definitely did not approve of Pamela’s life in London as a writer. Fleet Street was home to “such frightful people.”37
Pamela did return to Dublin. She walked once more to Merrion Square, AE and the painted room. But, once at the door, she found she could not touch the bell. AE had just been polite, she told herself. AE was a great and busy man. She turned away.38
Three weeks later, answering a knock at her own door in London, she found him there on her doorstep with a great parcel of books under one arm.
“You’re a very faithless girl,” AE told her. “You said you would come on your way back and then you never turned up. I had these books waiting for you.” They were his collected works, each of the books inscribed.
From then on, AE wrote to her at least every month, often in response to her volley of contributions to his magazine. Always he told her his copy box was full or overflowing but that he could not resist one more poem. In May 1925, he had “enough sketches to last me for months but I like the verses so much I must keep them.” In March next year, “the copy box was well brimmed up and running over but I couldn’t resist the temptation of squeezing your last poem into it.”
In 1925 he published three of her poems in the Irish Statesman. The first, called “Christopher,” appeared in April, “The Coming” in July, and “Te Deum of a Lark” in November. Two poems he published in 1927, “The Dark Fortnight” and “Happy Sleeping,” had strong references to the work of Yeats. In the last verse of “The Dark Fortnight” Pamela wrote:
I will go and find me a spear
of wild goose feather wrought
and fashion the ears of a hare
to a parchment of silk
and pray to the ewes of thought
to let down their milk . . .
An obvious inspiration was Yeats’s “The Collarbone of a Hare,” written in 1917, which ends:
I would find by the edge of that water
The collar bone of a hare
Worn thin by the lapping of water,
And pierce it through with a gimlet and stare
At the bitter old world where they marry in churches
And laugh over the untroubled water
At all who marry in churches,
Through the white thin bone of a hare.
In December 1925 AE gave her what he called the best Christmas gift, news that her verses had been “lifted out of the Irish Statesman to the Literary Digest, which has the largest circulation of any literary journal in the USA.” Early the next year, AE was “sorry the box of poems is full but I cannot resist the temptation of keeping your delightful lyric, “Happy Sleeping,” which I am sure will be in The Best Poems of 1926 if such a thing comes out.”
Many of Pamela’s poems in the Irish Statesman are heavy with melancholy, including the rococo “Ghosts of Two Sad Lovers,” published in October 1926, which begins “before we knew of grief we longed for grief” and concludes “no longer shall we pass imprinting warm foot-shapes upon crisp grass, and the sweet broken story of our loves is lost beneath a wind of living words.” This poem had first appeared with a different ending in the Christchurch Sun in June 1926.
AE reassured Pamela he really did love “Ghosts of Two Sad Lovers” and, to emphasize the point, explained in detail how he gave unwanted contributors the cold shoulder. His letters were full of advice and wry hints about Ireland from one who had been through the Celtic twilight and survived. He warned her that her trips to Dublin would become addictive (they did) and that “we have all sorts here, from the most idealistic to a reality more absolute than any in Europe. I think 25 years ago, all the poets were trying to discover the heights in the Irish genius, now our writers are all trying to discover the depths.”
Pamela’s poems of the 1920s are, on the surface, lyrical and pastoral—never colloquial—yet they can be seen as dense with the need for experience in life. The author, the innocent nymph still, begged the muse to come. One poem, “Oh Break Her Heart,” published in June 1926, was a cry to the gods to break her own heart—“from her grief distil loveliness for our need”—so that she might become a better writer. She revealed little of her inner self, and shunned simple words or references to everyday life.
AE not only allayed Pamela’s insecurities about writing, he reassured her about life itself. His letters gradually reveal how concerned Pamela was for herself, not just her work, but her health. Almost all his letters comment on the illnesses Pamela began to suffer from the 1920s. He was sorry to hear about her influenza, bad colds, boils, and lung problems, which hinted at TB.
In early June 1926, Pamela moved to 14 Old Square, a corner of Lincoln’s Inn, in the center of the legal district. It was, she told her Christchurch Sun readers, a cloistered life where porters touched their forelocks as she entered the gates, which closed at midnight. This column, headlined “Grey Towers: Pamela goes to Lincoln’s Inn,”39 ended with a description of her view by night of a carved boy angel. She talked to him, confiding to the stone figure that her new home was a sweet place. Could she want anything more? The angel replied, “Yes, much more.”
In September that year, AE visited Pamela in London on the way to his first Parisian holiday, where he was to meet once again his friend James Stephens and the French writer Simone Tery. He wrote to Pamela, “Can you suggest anything I can do after my train gets in? I really don’t want to do anything except talk to you. I think I would like to ride back and forwards in the top of a bus…and hear you talk about London. But you might get cold in the top of a bus, my precious child.”
He walked with Pamela down the curve of Regent Street. Both felt a kind of nervy excitement, still shy of each other’s gaze. Pamela said how odd it was they had met, “two people from the ends of the earth.” AE stopped in mid stride. She glanced up at him then, to see his round blue eyes growing rounder. AE explained to her that this was not the first time they had met. They had known one another in a different incarnation. He told her of his law of spiritual gravitation which he explained as “your own will come to you.”40
• • •
For all her bravura, Pamela still felt isolated in London. It was all very well to hanker after the life of a poet but poets made no money and she desperately missed her mother. Pamela distracted herself with women’s magazines while she continued to bombard AE with her verses. She paid the rent with the checks from her journalism and in 1926 worked out a way to earn enough to pay her mother’s fare to England.
“And so,” she confided to an interviewer, “having written only for the highbrow magazines, you know the literary magazines, I collected ordinary magazines, the flossies, and read them avidly. I got to see there were only two stories, fundamentally. There was “Get Your Man” and then there was “How to Keep Your Man.” So I embarked on this, writing story after story, under another name, of course, and what do you think? I sent them to my agent and he said “Marvelous, these are certainly going to sell.” And sure enough they did, and in a very short while, I had the necessary money for this big, this biggest expedition so far in my life. I saw my mother…”41
Margaret Goff and Pamela had written regularly. Pamela sent her mother her published stories and poems, and Margaret passed them on to Aunt Ellie, who liked the prose much more than the poems. Margaret wrote of her problems with money and the tension between her and Biddy, and Biddy’s new husband, Boyd Moriarty. She was overjoyed, though, to tell Pamela in November 1926 that she had booked a berth on a ship due to sail in the (Australian) autumn of 1927.
All through 1926 Pamela wrote a different kind of story, not about women but about children and their dreams. These stories became the basis for the Mary Poppins adventures, which Pamela always claimed had suddenly come to her, unbidden, in 1934. Some of the adventures had their beginnings in stories she had written as long ago as December 1924, when The Triad had published her “Story for Children Big and Small.” This told of a king, his chamberlain and a fool. The three characters, and the essence of the fable, were the basis for the chapter “Robertson Ay’s Story” in Mary Poppins Comes Back, published more than a decade later.
For the Christchurch Sun, she wrote of a magical encounter in a Paris bookshop with a Pan-like creature who was reading in the Just So Stories about how the elephant got his trunk. An old man bought the book, to the dismay of the boy-creature. Pamela spoke to him; he ran away. She found him later, on a bronze pedestal in the public gardens. The story was published on March 8, 1926. Almost two decades later, the tale was the basis for a chapter in Mary Poppins Opens the Door, published in 1944. Called “The Marble Boy,” it tells of a marble statue, Neleus, who reads the story about how the elephant got his trunk over the shoulder of an old man in the park.
On March 20, 1926, the Christchurch Sun published “The Strange Story of the Dancing Cow,” accompanied by a panel boasting “Miss Pamela Travers, who writes this story for the Sun, is rapidly winning fame for herself in London. Few writers today can equal her in the realm of whimsical fantasy. Read here the quaint story of the Old Red Cow who awoke to find herself smitten with star fever.” In the first Mary Poppins book, published in 1934, Mary told the same story of the cow and a king within a chapter called “The Dancing Cow.”
In December 1926, again for the Christchurch Sun, Pamela wrote a fanciful piece called “Pamela Publishes—a Newspaper!” which purported to be a special news bulletin with gossip supplied by a cockney maid, “Mary Smithers.” But it was on November 13, 1926, in a short story called “Mary Poppins and the Match Man,” that Pamela really gave birth to her famous nanny. The story told of Mary Poppins’s day out. For the first time, she had written of the Banks household and Mary Poppins, the “underneath nurse,” aged seventeen. (There was no “top nurse” although Mr. and Mrs. Banks liked to pretend there was.) Her charges were Jane, Michael, Barbara and John Banks. Mary Poppins, about to enjoy a day out, puts on white gloves and tucks a parrot-headed umbrella under her arm. Jane asks her where she is going, but Mary refuses to say. On the corner, she meets Bert, a match man and pavement artist. He loves her, and it is clear that she loves him, too. They admire Bert’s pavement paintings and pop right into one showing a pretty scene of the countryside. Suddenly, Bert is wearing a striped coat, straw hat and white flannel trousers. Mary, in turn, is wearing a silken cloak and a hat with a long, curly feather. Mary and Bert take afternoon tea served by a man in a black coat. After the raspberry cakes are eaten, they climb onto the horses of a merry-go-round and ride all the way to Margate. When she returns home, Mary tells the Banks children she has been to fairyland.
As “The Day Out,” this story, with many identical passages but some differences, appeared in Pamela’s first Mary Poppins book published eight years later. It also formed the basis of the “It’s a Jolly Holiday with Mary” song-and-dance sequence from Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins movie. The fact that Disney had chosen this story as such an important scene for the film always irritated Pamela. She later called “The Day Out” chapter “false” and the weakest of all her Mary Poppins adventures, but never explained why. During her lifetime, no one ever discovered exactly when she had created Mary Poppins, and she certainly did not tell, although she did tell her favorite interviewer, Jonathan Cott: “When I was in my teens, I wrote a small story about someone named Mary Poppins putting children to bed. I can’t remember what paper the story appeared in, but the name was a long time a-growing, a long time in existence, perhaps.”42
Real writers, she always believed, did not write for children. And Pamela yearned to be a real writer, or rather a poet who could write of Ireland with the grace and confidence of Yeats. By December 1926, Pamela was confident enough of her relationship with AE to send him a photo of them together, which he found “not nice enough of you, my dear, as it makes you years older than you are. If I was the photographer I would have tossed your hair until it stood up like the mane of a lion in a rage.”43 He had just published her seventh poem in the Irish Statesman, “On Ben Bulben,” another of Pamela’s tributes to Yeats, referring to the mountain near Drumcliff in Yeats’s home territory, near Sligo.
She told students years later that Yeats had a great influence on her,44 but that she was in awe of the Bard, not the man. So much in awe that she adopted not only his writing style but also many of his characteristics. Like Yeats, she continually feared she had TB, studied eastern religions to help her create order from disorder, followed an Indian guru, used the lessons of fairy tales to support her philosophy of life, and embarked on a lecture circuit of the United States. Like Yeats, she adopted a variety of masks, freely admitting to the masks which did not just include pseudonyms, but a certain bluff and false self, in line with Oscar Wilde’s maxim “the first duty in life is to assume a pose; what the second is no one yet has found out.”
Yeats’s biographer, Richard Ellmann, believed that Wilde’s view was duplicated in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in Mallarmé’s poetry and in the pseudonyms and other selves of Yeats’s contemporaries, W. K. Magee, Wilde, William Sharp and AE. Yeats was part of the nineteenth century’s changing ideas on selfhood, and “came to maturity in this atmosphere of doubling and splitting of the self.” AE wrote that by 1884 “Yeats had already developed a theory of the divided consciousness.” Yeats came to see himself as the man who had created the other self—“The Poet.” This was a significant discovery for Pamela, who had already adopted a pseudonym, Pamela Travers, and later obscured her true self further by writing as P. L. Travers, then claiming she would have preferred to be known as Anon, a variation of AEON.
In the late summer of 1926 Pamela again visited Ireland, mainly to enjoy days “full of poets, full of poems, full of talk and argument and legend-telling and delight.”45 She took the train to Athlone, in the Midlands, to met more elderly Goffs, then drove on to Galway, Clifden and Leenane. On the way back to Dublin, Pamela embarked on an adventure that she later remembered as a mythical journey that could have been called “When the Fool met the Sage, and learnt a Lesson.”
Her destination was Lough Gill, made famous by Yeats’s 1890 poem, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” She asked a boatman to take her there. He said he knew of no such place, but Pamela, who knew by heart “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,” insisted there was. “It’s known around these parts,” sneered the boatman, “as Rat Island.” The two of them set out under gray clouds with Pamela in the bow and a young priest with them, sitting in the stern. She found no hive for the honey bee on the island nor a log cabin, but the whole of the island was covered with red-berried rowan trees. She decided suddenly to take some branches back to Yeats. Pamela broke as many branches as she could, then staggered under their weight, in driving rain, to the boat. She could see the priest saying his rosary.
Back on shore, she ran with her burden of rowan to the station. In the stuffy carriage on the train to Dublin her clothes steamed as they slowly dried. Fellow travelers edged away. She arrived at Merrion Square, her hair dripping still, her arms full—still—with bedraggled branches. Pamela rang the bell at number 82. Yeats himself answered the door.
There stood Pamela, her face uplifted and full of yearning for approval, above the bundle of rowan. He called down the dark hallway to the maid, Annie. She took Pamela to the basement kitchen, dried her, gave her cocoa and took away the branches. The upstairs maid came bustling in: “The master will see you now.” There he was in his blue-curtained room.
Yeats told her “my canary has laid an egg,” and took her to the cage. From there, they went on a tour of the room, Yeats indicating which of his books he liked best. He explained that when he got an idea for a poem, he was inspired by reading again one of his own books. She saw on his desk a vase holding just one sprig of rowan. Was he trying to teach her a lesson? Why give armfuls when one sprig will do? But no, she decided, he would never do anything so banal. She knew that this one branch signified the art of simplicity.
The next day, Pamela lunched with AE who told her Yeats was touched by her rowan berry gift. He hoped, though, that when she visited him in Dunfanaghy, she would not cut down the willows. After all, as AE solemnly said, dryads lived in the trees.46
Pamela and AE had been talking for months of Dunfanaghy and Breaghy, in his favorite part of Ireland, County Donegal. By January 1927, she felt sure enough of him to suggest she might spend a summer holiday there, after her mother’s visit.
For twenty years, AE had enjoyed his summer holidays in the northwest county of Donegal. He thought it the “wildest, loneliest and loveliest country I know, a country of hills, and hollows, of lakes and woods, of cliffs, mountains, rivers, inlets of sea, sands, ruined castles and memories from the beginning of the world. From the cottage I stay at, I can see seven seas between hills.”47 He loved the “unearthly beauty of the broken coast, its rocky inlets and silvery beaches” and came to think of this corner of Donegal as “his own peculiar, specialized kingdom.” It was for him the spiritual center of Ireland, where he saw “the silver fires of faeries” and found “psychic population in both the water and the woods.”48
Each summer, he set off by train from Dublin and spent part of the eleven-hour journey playing poker on a makeshift table of suitcases. He arrived at Dunfanaghy Road Station at nightfall, then traveled four miles to the village of Breaghy by jaunting car. Breaghy is close to Killahoey Strand beach which looks over Horn Head, the most beautiful of the Donegal headlands. Here AE stayed at a hillside cottage set behind one of the low stone fences that crisscross the landscape. Near the stone-fenced roadway, black-faced, black-legged sheep that looked like large shaggy calves stared at the horses as AE rounded the bend to the cottage. He rented a room from Janey Stewart, a spinster who filled the whitewashed cottage with her own handicrafts. Janey was a good cook, churning her own butter and baking cake as well as mutton in an iron cauldron slung on a chain over the peat fire. AE loved her dark brown, homemade bread and scoffed it down with pints of buttermilk. He slept in an attic bedroom that stretched the full width of the house. At night, AE could hear the cows moving about in their stalls below. If the weather was bad, he read a good part of the day. He had a weakness for Wild West novelettes and detective yarns. At twilight, he packed his crayons and sketchpad, pulled on his big boots, and strode over the hills.49
A mile away from Janey’s was Marble Hill House, the graceful and perfectly proportioned gray stone home of the Nationalist MP for West Donegal, Hugh Law, who had been one of AE’s closest friends since 1904. When AE tired of Janey’s cottage, Hugh and his wife, Lota, let him stay in their children’s old cubby house, adult sized, that they had built on the grounds.
The fairy house, as it was called, became AE’s studio. He slept in a loft. Lota tried to make it comfy in an artsy-crafty way, embroidering a pattern of fishes and waves into a piece of cloth which she threw over the loft rail. Down in the big studio room below, above the hearth, AE hung one of his own paintings, featuring a sword of light.50
In the early days, AE took his wife to Breaghy. But by the 1920s, Violet preferred to stay home in Dublin. He invited others to share the peace, among them a few of his young women, including Simone Tery and Pamela. His friend John Eglinton knew AE always needed at least one friend to whom to whisper “solitude is sweet.”51 He liked to take the girls to dinner at the Laws or to walk and talk as he painted twilight sketches for canvases he might finish the next day. There were parts of the woodland or Strand which, he said, set up in him the strongest psychic vibrations. AE strode along the Strand in the same clothes he wore in Bloomsbury: a dark suit, broad hat, his trousers rolled up and boots hung around his neck. He talked without pause as he waded among droves of prawns and shrimp.52
The weather for Pamela’s first visit, in June 1927, was atrocious, dark, rainy and threatening every day. She sat inside, at his side, absorbing his ramblings as voraciously as she devoured Janey’s cakes and mutton. He teased her about how much she ate, “for a girl who is not hungry.”53 Once, when they were setting out for a walk, Pamela looked down through a break in the mist and saw a giant outline of a footprint bordered by flowers embedded in the grass. The shape was unmistakable, as though a monster from another planet had landed on earth, taken a step, then risen again. She told him “someone has been here.” AE, of course, was hardly surprised. It often happened, he told his little protégée.54
When they visited the Laws, AE told her she could not walk the mile in her flimsy London shoes. He disappeared to his attic room and came down with the Observer and The Times, a bundle of string, a pile of socks and a pair of his old boots. “Sit down,” he ordered. She was to wear six socks on each leg. Around one leg he wound the Observer, around the other The Times, tying the fatted calves with string before she wriggled into his boots.
Pamela said she bore this in “seething silence,” but that silence was more likely to have been full of intimate unspoken thoughts than hostility. It was possibly the most intimate act AE could dare to perform: Pamela’s bare legs, slipping on the woolly socks, winding string around her calves.
They set off for the Laws, AE in front as usual, chanting Eastern scriptures—again—his feet sure of every step. Pamela, stuck in the bog, cried out to him. He turned and simply laughed. He told her to take off the boots, to go barefoot, he’d enjoy taking a dryad to lunch. She was silent. Just then, AE seemed for a second to understand her. “I’m a fool,” he cried down to her. “You don’t want a philosophy, you want a life!” He knew and she knew that Pamela had heard enough of the Eastern scriptures to last a lifetime. She wanted someone to clear the obscurity away, not add to it, not burden her that day with another theory and another, but simply to live. A young man might have kissed her then. AE let another opportunity go by. He could see, but he could not react to the little signs that say “come forward, don’t retreat.” Pamela wanted AE to tell her who she was. “Acolyte, daughter, apprentice?” she wrote later. “I never knew.”
During these days on the yellow tongue of sand on the back Strand, AE painted and sketched her, once in a tree looking down on him. Once, he had started a landscape when he suddenly looked up at her. “Do you see them?” “No,” she answered, half regretful, half awed. Whatever his vision, she knew he wanted her to see it, too. She had failed him.
AE had felt the old psychic vibrations again. He rapidly sketched a host of fairies. Pamela watched smoke start to emerge from his pocket. “AE, be careful, you’re on fire!” He looked down. The smoke was escaping from the pipe he had slipped into the dark blue serge pocket of his pants. His wife, he told Pamela, would have to reline another pocket. He showed her his fairy canvas. AE had sketched her, too, on the branch, the wild-eyed girl. He was soon to start calling her Pixie.55
AE wrote to her on July 1, “I was very sad that you went away after so many gray days in a beautiful country.” He was sorry he could not amuse her. “My wretched old mind lost its spring. Even ten years ago I had a super-abundance of energy. I was young enough in my mind to make even you feel I was your contemporary. But you were very sweet to your elderly friend.” At the bottom of the letter was his sketch of Pamela in her walking gear with the message, “Do you remember the paper leggings in the boots?”
AE praised her vitality, “so much vitality that I am sure when you are 80 you will be able to dominate your juniors or grandchildren and you may remember through the mists of time that you had an elderly friend who wrote poetry under the name AE who wanted to stroke her fluffy hair as you looked like a poor little duckling in a storm, but refrained lest you might think he did not treat you with sufficient dignity. Do you still have the dreams of the little house in the windy gap?”
He remembered how she dreamed of living up there, on a house on Horn Head, and how from Janey’s he would call her to him by semaphore, for a chat. “You do feel better after your visit, don’t you Pixie dear, I would be terrified if you had gone back from Donegal not feeling better than when you went. With Love, AE.”
Late in 1927, Pamela told him she was tired of making plans and being responsible for herself. He reassured her that the “seer in me sees some very large man swooping down upon you and marrying you in the near future. I hope he will be very benevolent as well as a very large man. I think you deserve a gigantic husband with the powers like Aladdin to build you a tower in which you can write with ease and peace.”
It could not be him, of course. “Dear Pamela,” he wrote in December 1927, “pray for me…curse me for being an idiot going away.” AE was about to leave Ireland for the first of his American lecture tours, sailing from Liverpool on January 14, 1928. He left Jimmy Good in charge of the Irish Statesman. The magazine had continued to bleed and the American friends had suggested a lecture tour organized by Judge Campbell as the only way he could recoup the money quickly.
Pamela asked if he had time to go to London to see her before his three-month trip. No, “I have so many things to do here” before leaving Dublin on the boat to Liverpool. “It was delightful of you to suggest you should come down to see me off but do not go to the expense. Why should you empty your pockets for the sake of a handshake?” But, later, “do let me pay your hotel bill or your railway fare, which ever is largest, I can run to that.”56
On January 13, the night before the Albertic sailed for New York, Pamela met AE in Liverpool. They went to the movies. Before the show, a man played the violin, badly. AE kept talking until he was hushed by the angry patrons. Pamela went to the dock the next day, in the rain. He held both her hands and stroked her wild and springy hair. “My angel,” he said as they parted.57