In her old age, Pamela gravitated to the gurus of the New Age. As the new hippies reveled in the Age of Aquarius, she became their spiritual sister. Rather than settle into the soothing tick tock of the rocking chair, Pamela traveled restlessly from guru to guru, seeking cure after cure, from the Black Forest to Rome, from Switzerland to Ireland, California to New York—still in search of herself, even in her seventies.
Euripides said that “the wisest men follow their own direction and listen to no prophet guiding them.” But Pamela could never quite discard her prophets. While she stayed faithful to von Dürckheim, she also fell under the spell of the charismatic Indian guru, Krishnamurti. The late 1960s and the 1970s went by in a daze of meditation as she gazed at Buddhas and dabbled with Sufism.
Three demons drove Pamela now. The first was a fear of her own death. Although she had consistently lied about her age, she knew of course that she would soon be seventy. In an effort to preserve and glorify the public P. L. Travers—soon to be further elevated with an OBE and doctorate—she planned to sell her literary papers to a university and to donate a collection of Mary Poppins mementos to the New York Public Library. The second demon drove the private Pamela to sum up her life through spiritual disciplines. She hoped each of her gurus held the key to her secret self, the one that had fallen asleep in her childhood. As she wrote in About the Sleeping Beauty, if you don’t waken it, life is meaningless. The theory that adult sleepers must wake to enlightenment was underlined by Ouspensky’s and Gurdjieff’s teaching, one she herself passed on to a Gurdjieff group which gathered in her home in the 1970s. Pamela once told the group the story of an angel who comes to all babies at birth and tells them the meaning of life. But sshhhh! they mustn’t tell. The angel places a finger on the babies’ mouths, which is why we all have that distinctive curve of the upper lip—what’s left from the gentle pressure of the angel’s finger. Most people forget the angel’s message, but through diligent seeking, the meaning of life might be recalled.
None of this was much help in dealing with the third demon, physical distress, which attacked her in the abdomen, the very area she thought was her spiritual center. The pain was always compounded by worry over Camillus. It had been almost a decade since he learned of his adoption, yet Camillus had not rejected Pamela and had never gone looking for his family, unlike his sister Sheila, who went on a search for her real family and found them in 1964 by ringing all the Hones in the Dublin telephone directory. Camillus, whose real mother had died in 1963, retained the name Travers, and stayed on more or less friendly terms with Pamela. But his life, like that of his own father, was badly affected by drinking. It affected whatever job he turned to, from broking to working in a fashion business with a friend, Martin Harris.
Pamela tried to surrender herself to the idea that she had done everything possible for her son, and would hand him over to God. She never could. In March 1967, Pamela returned to the Salvadore Mundi Hospital where she wrote to a friend that she hoped the treatment would help. But, as this was a chronic condition, much of the cure was a case of mind over matter.1 After Rome, she planned to go on to Todtmoos to see von Dürckheim for another week.
Pamela’s old journalistic bogeyman—you are nothing without something in preparation or in print at all times—could not let her abandon her Shawfield Street studio. Several projects were on the boil. Still aiming for a posthumous halo, she offered her literary papers and AE’s letters to Texas University (the asking price was $15,000). As well, there was the outline for a possible Broadway play of Mary Poppins, the final proofs to check for a Latin edition of Mary Poppins from A to Z, and, finally, a Mary Poppins Story for Coloring in 1968.2
There was something rather shameful about a children’s coloring book. All along, she was thinking of something much more profound, the tale of an heroic, godlike monkey. During 1966, she had started work on a project which would be published five years later as Friend Monkey. At first glance, the novel is an overblown imitation of Mary Poppins, but it was designed to be a statement of her religious faith, a summing up of her childhood, and a symbol of her fascination with the legends of India, the birthplace of many fairy tales and myths.
Set in London in 1897, Friend Monkey tells how a little monkey travels on board a ship to London. There, he is taken in by the family of poor-but-honest Alfred Linnet, a shipping company clerk at the Port of London. Linnet makes lists of goods as they’re unloaded, the crates of tea, bags of sugar and spices and rolls of silk. This monkey is not just a piece of animal cargo, but a servant with a human soul who is so eager to help that wherever he goes he creates chaos from order—the reverse of Mary Poppins. The Linnet household has much in common with 17 Cherry Tree Lane. Mrs. Linnet, like Mrs. Banks, is vague and flustered. The Linnets have two children, with the boy, Edward, being the sensitive equivalent of Jane Banks. But while the Banks are reasonably well off, the Linnets are poor. Their benefactress is their elderly neighbor, Miss Brown Potter. The villain of the story appears to be Professor McWhirter, an animal fancier and collector, to whom Pamela gave a dreadful Scottish brogue—“Nay, he’s a puir, low spirited creature more frightened ah don’t doot than yersel.”
Pamela admitted to the similarity of themes in Friend Monkey and Mary Poppins—“perhaps I am not very inventive.” She conceded that Miss Brown Potter contained elements of Mary Poppins as well as the explorer Mary Kingsley, and Beatrix Potter, with whom she shared both her name and sheltered upbringing.3
Pamela never confessed that Miss Brown Potter was in fact another version of Aunt Ellie. While Ellie owned two dogs, Badger and Tinker, Miss Brown Potter has a badger called Tinker and a dog, Badger. Both Ellie and Miss Brown Potter wore black bonnets with flowers, velvet capes studded with jet and elastic-sided boots. They were both shy and lonely girls brought up by governesses. Both remembered watching their parents’ parties, the swish of taffeta, and the tinkle of silver on china and glass against the background of a quartet playing The Blue Danube. Like Aunt Ellie, and Pamela herself, Miss Brown Potter was an inveterate traveler, and in her youth had dreamed of faraway places. She had even considered Australia. And while Aunt Ellie sheltered the Goff girls and Pamela adopted a little boy, Miss Brown Potter took into her household a deaf and dumb African boy called Stanley Livingston Fan. The whole of Friend Monkey is redolent with Pamela’s past in Allora and Bowral and even acknowledges her true beginnings: Mr. Linnet is the alter ego of Pamela’s grandfather, Henry Lyndon Bradish Goff, a London shipping agent.
As Pamela told the writer Shusha Guppy, “Friend Monkey is really the favorite of all my books because it is based on a Hindu myth of the monkey lord who loved so much that he created chaos wherever he went. If you read the Ramayana you will come across the story of Hanuman on which I built my version of that ancient myth.”
In Ramayana, Hanuman was the servant of the high king, Rama, whom he helped in a battle with the demon king of Ceylon. When Rama was wounded, Hanuman knew that the only herb to heal the wounds was far away, in the Himalayas. He took one leap from Ceylon to the Himalayas, where he seized not just one herb but a whole mountain top of herbs. Hanuman was enshrined in India as a god of the people. Worshiped in his own temples, he was supposed to bestow the gift of long life.
Pamela had thought of the meaning of the Ramayana since AE had told her of the myths of India when they walked on the sand in Donegal. Now that she knew much more, from Zen Buddhism to the origins of the fairy tales, the monkey god meant even more. She had traced the fairy tales of Russia, Europe and Scandinavia back to their origins in India and Persia, and she wondered if the Brothers Grimm knew that all their princes had Rama as their “hidden name.” Pamela knew also that the Indian god Vishnu had sent to earth nine avatars (a god in visible form), one being Rama, another Buddha, but that Vishnu had yet to send the tenth avatar, who would usher in a new world. This avatar would be a white horse, like the white horse who inspired Mary Poppins when Pamela told the story to her sisters by the fire in Bowral.
Ever since she looked for salvation in Dürckheim’s prescription of Christianity and Buddhism, Hanuman had been her own personal myth. She was thrilled by his excessive love, the kind that “cannot wait to serve.” There was something magical in the fact that he had no half measures, always overdoing things in his selflessness. But above all, Hanuman was for her the loving servant of God, just as she began to insist that Mary Poppins was, above all, a servant.4
Pamela had started to write Friend Monkey in her Chelsea studio when Gurdjieff friends asked her to look after a family of three Tibetans visiting London. Yes, they could stay in her studio, she said, privately irritated that her sanctuary would be occupied for weeks. Not only that, but she had to make them special meals complete with extra chilies, do their washing and even find an appropriate doctor when one became ill. When they left at last, she went back to her desk as a thirsty woman goes to water, to find her two-hundred-page Friend Monkey manuscript had disappeared. In line with her New Age beliefs, Pamela called in two dowsers, who went over the house with pendulums. They searched everywhere, even in hat-boxes and luggage, in the bathroom, the garden, under the sofa. Nothing. Resigned at last to the possibility of it having been tossed out in the garbage, Pamela tried to forget the story of the monkey who came to serve.
• • •
In 1968 she returned to von Dürckheim’s care in Todtmoos, this time working with him on a translation of his book The Way of Transformation: Daily Life as a Spiritual Exercise. She took notes of her dreams, her fears and resolutions, how she was rich but felt poor, how she might be a good mother to herself, how to build courage, confidence and patience, how to do something different each day, and get rid of “all that blocks inner life.” Slowly Pamela began to rewrite Friend Monkey. The meditation had helped it return. By the time she moved on to Switzerland the same summer, a third draft came to her word for word as it was in the original.
She had taken a chalet for a month in the village of Saanen, near Gstaad, where every summer the Jesus-like figure of Krishnamurti enthralled his disciples at mass meetings. They gathered under the shelter of a big tent, these hundreds, their sad or anxious faces raised to the guru on high. Among them that year were Pamela, accompanied by Jessmin Howarth and her daughter Dushka, and another Gurdjieff friend from New York, Dorothea Dorling. The women saw in his face and bearing a god, with more gravitas than the Beatles’ guru, the Maharishi, or the guru of the orange people, the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh—altogether the perfect avatar of both Buddha and Jesus Christ.
With his fine, Roman nose, flowing aura of white hair, and his body wrapped in a red-bordered dhoti, Krishnamurti walked to his dais “surrounded by people but untouched by them.” Then, as he sat on the platform, his presence reached out and drew his listeners in close. He imparted simple yet memorable messages—“Life is so rich, yet we go to it with empty hearts,” “Life is strange, one needs infinite pliability,” “Be supple mentally,” “Be absolutely alert, make no effort.”5 For Pamela, Krishnamurti was a reincarnation of Gurdjieff. Each summer, she became part of his Saanen court.
He was four years older than Pamela, born in 1895 in south India. In labor, his mother uttered the words, “Rama, Rama, Anjaneya”—Anjaneya being another word for Hanuman. He was inducted into the Theosophical Society while still a boy. One of the society’s leaders, the pederast Charles Webster Leadbetter, took a particular fancy to him, and began to investigate Krishnamurti’s former lives, publishing the work as The Lives of Alcyone, a variation on Halcyon, the brightest star in the Pleiades. By the time he was eighteen, Krishnamurti had developed his own following. Like von Dürckheim and Pamela, he practiced yoga, meditating on an image of the Buddha known as Maitreya. He lived partly in the Californian haven Ojai, and relied on patronage of wealthy Europeans. Like Gurdjieff, he attracted artistic women—including Frieda Lawrence, who thought “the things Krishnamurti says are much like [D. H.] Lawrence.”6 Most of all, he appealed to rich women, many of them widowed, single or divorced and looking for a purpose in life. Krishnamurti, they understood, was celibate, which made him all the more attractive.
Krishnamurti showed no apparent signs of being a charlatan. Charming, gentle, courageous and compassionate, he gave all his attention to each disciple. He could be convincing publicly and privately that he wanted to help, to alleviate suffering, to heal. Yet, after he spoke at mass meetings, no one was quite clear about what he said. As the American writer Peter Washington wrote in Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon, a book about gurus, this confusion could be a definition of charisma. Each person had used Krishnamurti as a mirror, to reflect his or her own inner state.
His friends and adherents included some of the best known writers, musicians and actors of the time. Among those who came to sit at his knee were Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, Luise Rainer, Anita Loos, Greta Garbo, Bertolt Brecht, Igor Stravinsky and Charlie Chaplin. His European patrons were Signora Vanda Scaravelli and his English representative, Miss Doris Pratt. From 1961, the year he first called the faithful to him at Saanen, until 1983, Krishnamurti stayed every July and part of August with Signora Scaravelli at her Chalet Tannegg in Gstaad. There, he was given a Mercedes, which he drove with skill around the mountainous roads. (He also loved to have his hair cut in Bond Street, and to wear custom-made suits from Huntsman at Savile Row.)
Two of his closest associates were his business manager, Desikacharya Rajagopal, and Rajagopal’s American wife, Rosalind Williams. Rajagopal ran Krishnamurti Writings Inc., the organization responsible for the copyright, editing and publication of the guru’s work. He also oversaw Krishnamurti’s properties and doled out money, or withheld it, when Krishnamurti wanted land in Saanen and the United Kingdom. The relationship between these three represented a giant hypocrisy in Krishnamurti’s life. From 1932, he had conducted a secret affair with Rosalind. When this was revealed to Rajagopal, the fallout led to painful legal battles between the two men. Krishnamurti accused his old friend of mismanaging funds and the feud finally led to a public denunciation by Krishnamurti of Rajagopal in Saanen in 1968 and the establishment of a new organization, the Krishnamurti Foundation, based at Brockwood Park in England. After years of litigation and cross claims, the legal cases were eventually settled. Krishnamurti died in 1986, with his official biographers skating over the truth about his life. The daughter of the Rajagopals revealed the details of the love affair in her book Lives in the Shadow, published in 1991.
If she had known that the messianic Krishnamurti hid an affair with his close friend’s wife while he preached goodness, honesty and simplicity, Pamela might not have cared. After all, she had glossed over the shallowness in Gurdjieff. She came to him for his blessings and promises of insight and peace. His philosophical unguents counted far more than any weakness of character.
• • •
No stranger who saw Pamela in her last public appearances knew anything other than a sharpish, domineering woman, utterly confident and sure of her place. Yet all through the 1970s, the righteous, bumptious, public P. L. Travers masked an uncertain private woman still searching for reassurance. Age did not temper the search, which became even more intense when her brief decade of Disney fame almost faded away.
In 1970 she visited her friend Bettina Hurlimann in her country home at Uerikon in Switzerland, where she worked on a fourth draft of Friend Monkey. One night she pressed the manuscript into the hands of Hurlimann and went to bed at nine. Pamela was so desperate for approval, yet so self-involved, that she asked Hurlimann and her husband Martin to give their opinion next morning.7
Late in 1969, she had sent out a one-page prospectus promoting herself as “the author of Mary Poppins etc.,” and a potential writer in residence at any university on the West Coast of America. Money was not an issue. She merely wanted to be comfortable on a campus where students could come and go and where she could work on her next book. Among those who received the prospectus was the administrator of the Blaisdell Institute for Advanced Study in World Cultures and Religions in Claremont, California, who passed it on to Scripps College, also in Claremont. (Scripps, a women’s university, was named after its founder, Ellen B. Scripps, the half sister of newspaper chain proprietor Edward Wyllis Scripps.)
The president of Scripps, Mark Curtis, wrote to Pamela, offering her two months of the spring semester as writer in residence and lecturer in creative writing. He could also offer her the Clark lectureship, given each year to a distinguished woman, usually a writer. Pamela readily accepted, although she told Curtis her kind of writing could not be taught, as it had to “rise from the unconscious.” She would be happy to give the Clark lecture, but wanted an audience far beyond just the Scripps girls, suggesting young, old, male, female—a “melange.” In a letter to the college’s dean, Marjorie Downing, Pamela said she was thrilled to be coming to California. She had visited the state only twice, once to talk over her film script, and again for the first night of Mary Poppins, an occasion when “only a hero could refrain from weeping.” She had once been told by a “necromancer” that California was the luckiest place in the world for her.
She arrived at Scripps on February 10, 1970, and two days later delivered a lecture called “In Search of the Hero—the continuing relevance of myth and fairy tale.” Pamela spoke to the Scripps students as little as she could, leaving few memories behind when she left in early April. She told the dean in a letter she had been happy at Claremont, walking among camellias and magnolias, “pregnant with a book, and time in which to write it.” The students, she assured Downing, would be good mothers and good women, not good women but good women. In the Scripps gardens she left cuttings of three roses: the Pamela Travers, the Sleeping Beauty and the Mary Poppins.8
During her weeks at Scripps, Pamela had finished Friend Monkey. When it was published the following year she was astonished to find her beloved monkey god torn to pieces by the critics. The New York Times sneered at Friend Monkey’s “tiresome stock characters, overdone writing, full of ‘would be poetic’ adjectives, and strained metaphors.”9 In February 1972, the Horn Book Review noted the “plethora of characters…of the flat comic variety” and the plot boiling over with incidents that were “ludicrous without being funny.” Pamela sighed in a letter she wrote a few years later that “it was not accepted, alas—everyone wanted another Mary Poppins.”10 In fact, she told interviewers, the book was hardly on the shelves before the retailers sent the unsold stock back to the publishers. Pamela never accepted the rejection. She absolutely knew it was her best book, so proud of her work that near the end of 1972 she sent a copy to the Queen.11
• • •
New York remained her spiritual home. She decided to rent an apartment in a towering, anonymous block overlooking the East River at 1385 York Avenue. Here, in New York, the Welches once more enfolded her within their Gurdjieff group. Now enshrined as a crone who had once sat at the feet of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, she lectured on the meaning of myth to men and women who had never met the two masters. Late in the spring of 1972, Pamela decided to donate some mementoes to the children’s room of the New York Public Library. She collected all the little treasures—a Doulton plate, a toy horse, a doll, a hen—and a handful of other modest trinkets that had inspired chapters in the Mary Poppins books. The library, keen for publicity, announced that Pamela herself would be handing over the trinkets and speaking publicly at the ceremony. The media were invited. Feenie Ziner, writer and teacher, described the scene for The New York Times under the headline “Mary Poppins as a Zen Monk.”
Pamela was “sixtyish and square, with a quantity of silver bracelets and a beautiful necklace of jade.” No one approached. Ziner herself made a tentative opening gambit. “One of my students,” she said, “has written a paper in which she describes Mary Poppins as a Zen monk. Would you care to comment?” “The gray head reared, the eyes narrowed. ‘That is a very interesting idea. I should very much like to read the paper. Of course I shall not comment upon it or return it. Would you send it care of my publisher.’ ” Ziner was dismissed. The donation ceremony began. With formidable detachment, Pamela spoke of how, when she was dead, this humble collection would remain for children at the great library.
She looked down at the treasures of her lifetime, a plastic Pegasus, a jointed wooden doll, quite without clothing, a flowered ceramic cat, a setting hen of translucent blue glass, and a Staffordshire lion. She glared at the librarian: “You had him listed as a dog!” The audience settled in when she spoke of her father, “whose prerogative it had been to bestow a name to each of her dolls.” Later, she remembered how “when I was doing the film with George Disney—that is his name isn’t it, George?—he kept insisting on a love affair between Mary Poppins and Bert. I had a terrible time with him.” Once again, she explained that Mr. Banks was Mary’s real opposite number. Pamela picked up a small glass paperweight enclosing the words “Home Sweet Home.” “Some day,” she said, “I might write a story about this paperweight because nowadays there are so few people—so few—who have that sense of home, a safe place, eternal, hidden in their hearts.” She gazed deeply into the glass, “long enough for people to begin to wonder if she had come to the end of her speech, standing in front of the room, she was sinking out of sight. Could she not go on? Was she about to cry?” She seemed poised “on that tenth of an inch difference by which heaven and earth are set apart. Then slowly, her face lifted toward the light, as if an arrow had been released from deep within her. Transfigured with joy, she said, ‘Maybe I’m writing it right now.’ ”12 The actress in Pamela had emerged once again, the timing she knew so well, the thrill of holding the audience just one moment more.
Back in Switzerland in July, this time at the Hotel Olden Gstaad, the words of Krishnamurti were balm enough for her mind but her body was still in its same old knotted state. Her London doctor, Bernard Courtenay Mayers, said he would try to help, prescribing a mixture of phenobarbitone, bismuth subsitrate, kaolin and oil of peppermint.
All these years, the checks from Disney’s Burbank studios kept rolling in, not just for the film but for spinoffs such as Disney arena productions in which Mary Poppins characters appeared. In 1970, Pamela and her lawyers had established the Cherry Tree Trust, a foundation that gave grants to children, using some of the profits from the movie. But the trust funds represented just a slice of the Disney money; the more the money flowed, the greater the tax burden became. Pamela’s advisers knew that in Ireland writers lived virtually tax free, and suggested she might take up residence there. It seemed a brilliant idea, to maintain the apartment in New York but to live for a large part of the year in the country she had loved as a young woman. Pamela bought a house at 69 Upper Leeson Street, Dublin. But the promised land of her twenties—the city where she had fallen in love with AE and Yeats almost fifty years earlier—had vanished. It was a disaster, according to her friend Jenny Koralek, “because of course Ireland had changed. She used to ring me and say ‘Find me some interesting people here or I’ll die.’ ”13
In September 1972, she escaped to Brockwood Park, the Krishnamurti Foundation’s center near Alresford in England, where she could talk to others in the same need of help or simply meditate in her own room. She tried to focus her mind, to “narrow down” her wishes and desires to one of two things. This, she told an interviewer, made “the channel deeper and gives more strength to it.” All her writing effort, though, was placed in About the Sleeping Beauty, still unwritten, though brooding in her since Radcliffe College. In 1975, when the book was finally published by McGraw-Hill, Pamela began writing to the last of her Mr. Banks figures, a professor in Sweden.
Their long and intimate correspondence represented a kind of love affair—on paper alone. For three years, Pamela told her secrets to this Mr. Banks, as if dropping one veil after another. He was Staffan Bergsten, from the University of Uppsala, who, like many supplicants before him, begged Pamela for information on the meaning of Mary Poppins. He planned to write a thesis about “Poppins and myth.” She was entranced. Bergsten had thought much more deeply than any other man on the nanny and all her meanings. He had seen all the associations with Zen, Blake, Yeats and AE, as if he had read her mind. It was all immensely flattering, reassuring too. Pamela wrote to him first in February 1975. The aerograms that flew between Sweden and London over three years included ten long letters from her, followed by two final letters in the 1980s. In these, she asked Bergsten if he would send her copies of the original letters—not for her to destroy, but to form part of a collection of her personal papers that she sold eventually to the Mitchell Library in Sydney, Australia. The inclusion of these letters in the collection—freely available to any member of the public to read—appears to be irrefutable proof that she wanted her personal life revealed, despite many protestations that she was Anon personified and wanted to remain so.
In the first letter, she adopted her usual flattering tone, telling Bergsten that men and boys always asked her the best questions. She started with some standard responses, that she had not thought of Poppins as part of the Christian tradition but was always thinking of what children know and later forget. Bergsten’s next move was to send her his book on the Swedish poet Osten Sjostrand. Pamela told him she would send him Friend Monkey, a book “very dear to my heart.” But as much as she clung to Hanuman, her opus Sleeping Beauty was to be her ultimate statement, as she explained to the professor. Although she knew McGraw-Hill was keen on the manuscript, Pamela also modestly explained it away as a very small book which would cause not much of a stir.
The most revealing letters from Pamela followed the publication of About the Sleeping Beauty in 1975. The whole of the previous year had been spent in perfecting this book about the sleeper, her court and her fate. Nobody knew, not Bergsten certainly, or any reviewer, just how many ways the Sleeping Beauty appealed to her, how she had thought for years of this woman who waits to be remembered. Repeating the lessons she had taken to heart from Ouspensky and Gurdjieff, she speculated on the drive in men and women to shake off their waking sleep, to see a higher reality, and to gain esoteric knowledge. What was it, she wanted to know, that at a certain moment fell asleep in everyone? Who lay hidden deep within us? Who would come at last to wake us—what aspect of ourselves?
Her book told five versions of the Sleeping Beauty story, including Grimms’ and Perrault’s, as well as her own version of the tale and an afterword. Pamela’s tale, set in the court of a sultan, was heavy with symbolism, or what one academic later called “Jungian blather.” When the prince stared at the princess, he knew himself to be at the center of the world and that in him, all men stood there, gazing at their heart’s desire, or perhaps their innermost selves. The kiss was an earth-moving experience when the lovers “plumbed all height, all depth, and rose up strongly to the surface, back to the shores of time.”14 Yes, she told Bergsten in March 1976, “The Sleeping Beauty” was certainly erotic, like many of the fairy tales. That’s why she placed in her version of the story a dove and a cat, the most strongly sexed bird and animal, and a lizard, which was a phallic symbol, like the spindle.
In her afterword to the book, she linked the sleeping princess with other famous sleepers in literature: Snow White, Brynhild, Charlemagne, King Arthur, Holga the Dane, Oisin of Ireland and a Hindu king. The sleep of the princess was a symbolic death of her entire court. When she woke, everyone else woke too, which reminded Pamela of the Grail Legend, where the whole court is out of sorts when the Fisher King is ill. (This prompted Bergsten to tell her that a book about the Grail Legend formed the kernel of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.)
The American reaction to About the Sleeping Beauty was mostly negative, with the Kirkus Reviews attacking the afterword as “repetitious and windy…buried in self-infatuated blah.”15
But when the book was published by Collins in England in 1977, the Times Literary Supplement praised it as a “brilliant success.”16 In both countries, the everyday reader who had been captured by the simple magic of Mary Poppins was lost in the maze. Who had the time or inclination now to follow these intricacies? This book had been one for the insiders. Or perhaps for Pamela alone, a woman talking to herself.
• • •
Early in 1976 Pamela decided to return to London, not just as a homing pigeon returning to the city she felt was her birthplace, but for practical reasons. She owned two houses, one in Shawfield Street in London and one in Upper Leeson Street in Dublin, but was paying rent in New York. As a British citizen, though a rich one, she lived in New York on an allowance of U.S. dollars. She worried that the dollars never went far enough. By summer, the York Avenue apartment was packed, Pamela ready to go, her coffee tables strewn with books, the living room stacked with cases. She confided in interviewers and friends alike of her nervousness, even timidity about this “great move” home.
In a letter to Bergsten, Pamela said she belonged in the United States, a nation that was always in renewal. Yet London would be a new beginning too, she told him, not really convinced. There might be another Mary Poppins in the wind, but she was not sure if such a story was “needed.” Pamela felt she might have nothing left to say. In a desultory way, she had edited her essays and lectures, to make a book out of them. Two American publishers wanted that, she told Bergsten. She had taken to heart someone’s flippant comment that she was not fulfilling her destiny if she was not writing. This had upset her. She denied it. No, one’s destiny must be in something deeper than that. Destiny meant allowing oneself to dwell in what Keats called the “vale of soul making.” She told Bergsten everyone wanted her to stay in the United States to lecture, but she had to go, even though, unlike Mary Poppins, parting was always to die a little. Pamela told him she must “hold hard to the parrot-head of my inner umbrella and go.”17
• • •
At the end of June, Pamela flew to Ireland and then on to Scotland for a holiday before settling back into Shawfield Street in September. Though she had dismissed the thought with Bergsten, death really did seem close, so close she told Jenny Koralek she had come home to die. Later in the year, she began thinking just where she might die.
Camillus, now in his mid-thirties, had decided to marry. The days of raucous drinking and partying with his friend Martin Harris, with whom he worked at Martinique Fashions, were over. In June, he had written to his mother in New York about his plans. There would be no church wedding, he had booked the Chelsea Registry Office for his marriage to Frances on July 30 at 11 A.M., then on to lunch. This might be all he needed, at last, to stop the drinking which had led to so much heartache, including his treatment at the private hospital Ticehurst, in East Sussex. Pamela must have prayed, too, that this was the end of the agony.
Soon after she arrived back in England, she was captivated by an article in the Listener. Its message was religious, suggesting that a sin truly repented is “unhappened.” The promise filled her with sudden light. Pamela knew now, that was it, a thing or event could be unhappened! Not just in the head but in the whole person. This was quite in keeping with Gurdjieff’s idea, which he had discussed with her, that one could “repair” the past. She gave Camillus a present, the bronze head sculpted of him as a boy by Gertrude Hermes. After a honeymoon in Ireland, Camillus and Frances moved into a house in Ifield Road, Fulham, next to Brompton cemetery, where Pamela liked to walk, thinking of her son, dreaming of the churchyard in Allora where she had read the gravestones for all the lost children.
By the end of the year, Pamela was certain that she had no life left in her, nor any will to live. She wrote to the deputy medical director of St. Christopher’s Hospice, in Sydenham, asking for advice. He suggested they get in touch the following year. There was clearly no urgency as far as he was concerned.
Only one thing remained. She went up to the studio and started writing again. Up there, she found comfort in her touchstones. On one wall was a copy of a nineteenth-century Indian painting showing Hanuman carrying Shiva in his heart. On another wall, her Sengai scroll paintings depicted a willow almost breaking in the wind, six persimmons, a cock crowing to the morning and a little hen nearby. She gazed again on her ox-herding pictures, an allegorical series of paintings meant as a training guide for Chinese Buddhist monks. Alongside were her photos of Buddhas, including Maitreya. She liked the way the Buddha’s raised hand said, “Silence, don’t explain, it cannot be explained.” On the terrace sat her small marble Buddha in the midst of camellias and a bay tree. In the kitchen, her collection of hens sat brooding on the dresser, and at the back door she lovingly tended her twenty varieties of herbs.18
One day, the postman brought a letter from her friend in New York, Dorothea Dorling. Would she write for Dorling’s new magazine? In the winter of 1976, Dorling had begun a brave new venture, a quarterly journal she called Parabola, “The Magazine of Myth and Traditions.” For Dorling and Pamela, the word parabola meant “getting back to the beginning.” A parabola curved and came back to rest. In the same way, they thought, all the myths and fairy tales went back to the beginning; you could search as much as you liked, but you couldn’t find where they started. Dorling had talked to Pamela about the project in New York, persuading her to become a founding editor. Many threads linked Dorling back to Gurdjieff. Her sister had been one of Gurdjieff’s original disciples in Fontainebleau and she herself had met Gurdjieff in the United States in 1948. In the 1950s, Dorling left her husband, a rancher in Montana, and moved to New York, where she met Pamela. The two women collaborated on a book, A Way of Working: The Spiritual Dimension of Craft, which was partly a model for Parabola magazine.
When she started the magazine, Dorling was sixty-six. She had been convinced years earlier that the wisdom in traditional myths enlightened her own search for meaning. In her prospectus for Parabola, Dorling explained to potential advertisers and readers that each issue of the magazine would be devoted to one theme. Parabola was not an official organ of the Gurdjieff Foundation nor was it “limited, as to readers or writers, to members of our groups, but it must have a point of view and this must be consonant with Gurdjieff’s teaching, not in order to give answers, but to orient a search for man’s place in his world.” The aim was to bring together “the greatest formulations we can find…of the ideas in the fourth way as it appears in all traditions.” Was there a way, the prospectus wanted to know, of recovering the “sense of a sacred dimension in our existence”? The editors felt sure that sacred tradition could still speak to “the present need.” Parabola would include articles on legends, myths and folk tales, on Sufi and Zen stories, by some of the best writers it could find.
The theme of the first issue was The Hero. The byline of P. L. Travers appeared in this winter 1976 number and for most subsequent issues. Good writers and wealthy women’s money kept the whole risky venture afloat. Over the years, Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote on death, the Dalai Lama on obstacles, and Pamela spoke with Laurens van der Post on “dreams and seeing.” Many others sympathetic to the fourth way were writers whose names could help sell subscriptions—Joseph Campbell, Italo Calvino, John Updike, Peter Brook, Robert Bly, Lincoln Kirstein, Dag Hammarskjold, Krishnamurti, Karlfried von Dürckheim, David Malouf and Prince Charles. Their subjects ranged from addiction to death, to healing, sacred dance, the sun and moon, theft, sadness, mask and metaphor, and ceremonies.
Pamela wrote for Parabola on being one’s own hero, on the dreamtime, on a Sufi poet, on Zen koans, on going to a druids’ ceremony for All Souls Day, on Stonehenge, Silbury and Avebury, on the great goddess, the simpleton, and the youngest brother. Her densely packed essays, all in mythological code, allowed only glimpses of the intimate, personal life of Pamela. Now and again she talked of her childhood; another time, of her anticipation of death as she walked in the Brompton cemetery thinking of Camillus preparing to be a father.19
Parabola’s circulation was never high, but the magazine was still alive in 1999, its advertisements symbolizing the nervous nineties with offers of a bachelor’s degree in “transpersonal psychology,” books on the sexuality of the soul, catalogues from the Krishnamurti Foundation and fourth way books by Ouspensky, Bennett and Gurdjieff. For the truly diligent seeker, one company advertised “wilderness in the Rocky Mountains for the re-enchantment of ourselves, fathers and adult sons—therapists’ journey.”
Despite the Buddha on the Shawfield Street terrace and the philosophy of Zen in her spirit, Pamela had taken to heart von Dürckheim’s advice, that the sure way to peace came with a balancing dose of Christianity. She took communion at the nearby Christ Church, an Anglican church in Chelsea, and, as she knelt on the pew, she told herself she was not merely kneeling before the cross, but offering herself up as an empty vessel, in a gesture of submission. To the parishioners of Chelsea she no doubt seemed a traditional upper-middle-class elderly lady, with a cut-glass accent, her clothes suitably conservative, despite the Navajo bangles and a tendency to wear slightly eccentric tent-shaped dresses ending with a flounce. The neighbors and fellow members of the congregation kept their distance at first—she had retained, even increased, her superior manner and the air of a snob, bred from an outsider’s insecurity.
Pamela was overjoyed to learn she was to receive an OBE in the New Year’s honors list of 1977, asking the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Martin Charteris, whether she should wear a hat for the investiture. In a letter to Charteris, she explained that when she once met President Roosevelt, she had bought a hat for the occasion, but, Pamela knew, times had changed. Would a hat still be proper? She also wanted the Queen to know how moved she was by her Christmas speech, so regal and yet so full of feeling.20
Early in 1977, she returned to New York to lecture at the Cosmopolitan Club, the Jung Foundation and the St. John the Divine church, where she read from The Fox at the Manger. To her audience at the church, she seemed an eccentric figure in her gray lambskin coat and brown galoshes. From under her pink-toned plaid suit peeked a shimmer of silver, her arms still laden with the work of the Navajo.21
Back in London, a letter was waiting from Professor Bergsten, who had now moved in closer to his thesis subject. Would she tell him something more of herself, not just of Mary Poppins? In her longest and most emotional letter to Bergsten, in February 1977, she wrote of her father’s drinking and her sense of shame about his death. She knew he was an alcoholic although her sisters denied it. What’s more, she had always suffered from the drinking of men who were close to her.
In the next letter, the following month, she told Bergsten she had no regrets about revealing so much. She still longed for the United States. Her hopes for a new beginning in England had come to nothing. In fact she was not even sure why she had come back at all.22
Pamela collected her OBE at Buckingham Palace late in March—not from the Queen, but from the less grand Duke of Kent. To the media, she solemnly declared “I have accepted it for Mary Poppins,” but to Bergsten she confessed she was still an ignoramus. The letters after her name could have been given to an idiot.
In April 1977, Frances Travers gave birth to Katherine Lyndon Travers. About six months later, Camillus’s drinking problem returned. Pamela’s friends tried to console her, but she seemed, now, more dogged and resigned than before, steadfastly keeping to her schedule of talks, including a regular reading in New York each Christmas from The Fox at the Manger. Pamela also maintained her own Gurdjieff group at Shawfield Street, trying to impart her guru’s principles to shy and much younger adherents than herself.
The Bergsten connection was about to end, with the professor’s publication in Stockholm in 1978 of his thesis, Mary Poppins and Myth.23 He sent Pamela a copy, inscribed to “the mysterious P. L. Travers.” Pamela was unhappy, she told him, to see her name given in the first chapter as Pamela and not P. L., but not annoyed enough to cut off communication. She planned to send him a thesis by an American woman on the Mary Poppins books which compared them with the work of E. Nesbit, “an honor for me.” The student had insisted that all the books were about growing up, losing all the things one knew early in childhood, with Mary Poppins being the only one who does not forget. Pamela saw this as a valid point of view.24
At last, she was to be given the prize she had yearned for since her first books were published forty-five years before. Not a literary acknowledgment, but a validation of her intellect, at least. In May 1978, Chatham College in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, gave her an honorary doctorate degree in humane letters. Chatham was a small women’s college with fewer than eight hundred students, itself seeking publicity by conferring honorary degrees. But Pamela seized on the doctorate with great pride, forever after insisting that she be called Doctor. Now that she had shed the honorific Miss (never Ms.), she dreamed again of her old love, Francis Macnamara. In the dream, he spoke to a circle of men around him: “That’s Pamela, we must call her Doctor now.” She wondered if doctor was a metaphor for some new feeling of his. In the dream, she met Francis’s wife. This was the moment, she knew, to reveal their love. In other, more turbulent dreams, she had seen AE ill, in a swimming pool, and Gurdjieff, sad, dispirited. Pamela wrote a note to herself, almost a postscript to her life, that “all our days are as grass.”
In July 1979 Jonathan Cott, a consulting editor of Parabola, came to her in a depressed state. She called him “my dear,” this other young man in search of help. In a long interview for a book, Pipers at the Gates of Dawn, Cott drew out of Pamela the way in which she now dealt with her own inner turbulence. She told him to “accept everything that comes and make jewels of it.” She did not mean to sound pious but “I feel like that, and that’s what I call the hero nature, you can only be the hero of your own story if you accept it totally.”
She played with the idea of Sufism, absorbed the poems of the Sufi poet Jalalu’ddin Rumi, meditated on “the great bowl of the abdomen,” and lay awake thinking how Little Bo Peep had lost her sheep, but when she left them alone, they all came home. You must, she thought, leave a problem alone. Don’t even look for its solution, and it will come home. “I know where I leave it alone, right in here two inches below the navel, the vital center, that’s where everything goes and is allowed to simmer.”
She took Cott on a tour of her home, noting AE’s portrait of her reclining in the tree (she said AE was the “tutelary deity of the house”), the Japanese scrolls, and, in the hallway, a rocking horse that she had bought for the grandchildren but loved too much to give away. Here, in the rocking horse, were all the things she loved in one, the merry-go-round, the rocking chair, the Pegasus.
Early that year her sister Barbara Moriarty had died in Sydney, the little sister who had been so much prettier and had life so much easier, the sister who had hardly journeyed beyond one suburb for decades. Pamela left no record—in a poem, letter, or note of any kind—of her feelings about the death. Moya stayed on alone, in Mosman, turning to a neighbor for friendship and support.25
• • •
By now, Pamela had become more of a guru herself than a disciple. As Dr. Travers, the great lady who once knew Ouspensky and Gurdjieff, she was in demand as a counselor for the third-and fourth-generation Gurdjieffians. In May 1979, she spoke to a gathering on “Gurdjieff: a Universal Man.” Her voice was deep but muffled, slightly slurred with age, breathless, in contrast to the cool, clear and crisp younger voices of her audience. She told them of her friendship with Ouspensky who advised her to “speak in other categories, think in other categories,” and how she remembered thinking, “How could I think, with no scientific mind, of the fourth dimension?”
Dr. Travers asked for questions. There were none. After a long silence she said, “I was thinking, at least let me do no harm.” Another long silence. Then, “We have talked a lot about Mr. Gurdjieff as man and teacher, not so much about his ideas, I wonder if anyone has anything to say?” Silence. She told them that in Paris, he sometimes gave talks but more often would call for questions. Deathly silence. At last, a woman asked meekly whether Gurdjieff spoke about reincarnation. Pamela crossly replied that she never heard him do so. She could only point to Ouspensky’s book, In Search of the Miraculous, in which he talked of recurrence, that our lives go around and around on the same old track. Pamela explained that she did not want to be specific or absolute about anything. As she grew older, she knew less. In fact, if they knew Henry Moore’s reclining women, studded with holes, she was very like that and getting “holier” every day. But she, too, found the idea of repairing the past essential.
The session ended with one of Pamela’s favorite quotations from Ecclesiastes:
or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken…then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.
Tiring, she told them that was that. “If things go too long, things devolve and people chatter and it’s lost.”
It was extraordinary that, at eighty, she kept up the pace. As she wrote to Jessmin Howarth in November 1979, she had lost her housekeeper of the last six years, had found no replacement and grew more exhausted every day trying to run the house, cook and work. A lecture the previous month had been a great success but a drain on her energy. Things were, in fact, ghastly. Even writing a letter in her studio, with her ear cocked for the doorbell, was a chore. She was struggling constantly to retreat to the “green pastures” of her mind.
Pamela kept the pressure on herself. Her only relief seemed to come from the support of younger members in her group, and the love she felt for her granddaughters. (Frances and Camillus had another baby in November 1979. She was given the Christian names of girls in the Goff and Morehead families, Cicely Jane.)
At Christmas 1980, her Gurdjieff group gathered to pray, and to sing the old English songs she remembered from her childhood: “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes,” “Greensleeves,” “A Frog He Would a Wooing Go,” “Green Grow the Rushes, oh.” Shawfield Street rang with their true, solemn voices, as they ended with the Twenty-third Psalm, followed by “God Be in My Head” and “Lord of the Dance.”
I am the lord of the dance said he,
Dance, then, wherever you may be.
That year, Pamela rested at Chandenon, in Switzerland. She could not let go of the idea that Mary Poppins must come back, one more time.