6 P. L. Travers Quotes on Literature

P. L. Travers quotes on literature

2. A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.

3. A great friend of mine at the beginning of our friendship (he was himself a poet) said to me very defiantly, 'I have to tell you that I loathe children's books.' And I said to him, 'Well, won't you just read this just for my sake?' And he said grumpily, 'Oh, very well, send it to me.' I did, and I got a letter back saying: 'Why didn't you tell me? Mary Poppins with her cool green core of sex has me enthralled forever.'

24. Mary Poppins arrives with the wind, and intervenes in the lives of ordinary humans, making magic, but never admitting that it has taken place. She understands the language of animals and birds, and between her visits to mortals returns to some secret source. Although the Poppins books have much in common with other works of children's literature - all the way back to the early 19th century and ETA Hoffmann's inspiration of making toys come alive - Travers was adamant that she didn't write specifically for children, and that there was no such thing as children's books. Poppins, she said, 'had come up of the same well of nothingness as the poetry, myths and legends that had absorbed me all my writing life.' This was something else that connected Travers to Disney, who maintained that his films were not directed at children, but at the innocence within us all.

25. Throughout their children's novels, Lewis and Travers bring together heterogeneous collections of characters from all orders of being - humanity, mythology (Greek, Norse, Christian), the animal world (both talking and nontalking beasts), and other fictional sources (for example, nursery rhyme and fairytale figures) - and have them mingle in festival-like gatherings reminiscent of medieval carnival celebrations. ... the interaction among these disparate characters often results in the suspension of hierarchical barriers...

26. Mary Poppins advocates the kind of family life that Walt Disney had spent his career both chronicling and helping to foster on a national level: father at work, mother at home, children flourishing. It is tempting to imagine that in Travers he found a like-minded person, someone who embodied the virtues of conformity and traditionalism. Nothing could be further from the truth. Travers was a woman who never married, wore trousers when she felt like it, had a transformative and emotionally charged relationship with an older married man, and entered into a long-term live-in relationship with another woman. As she approached forty, she decided that she wanted a child. After a bizarre incident in which she attempted to adopt the seventeen-year-old girl who cleaned her house, she travelled to Ireland and adopted an infant, one of a pair of twins, and raised him as a single mother. Her reverence for the delights of family life was perhaps as intense as Disney's, but her opinion about the shape such a life might assume was far more nuanced. Children's authors are not known for their happy childhoods, and Helen Goff - the little girl who at twenty-one changed her name to Pamela Travers and never looked back - endured one that was almost archetypal in its sadness and its privations. She was born in Australia in 1899, the eldest daughter in a household of girls. Her father, Travers Goff, was a bank manager and a drinker, and he died when she was seven.... Her mother, Margaret, who was pretty and feckless, soldiered on for a few years, and then, when Helen was ten, she did what a mother is never supposed to do. She gave up. One night, in the middle of a thunderstorm, Margaret left Helen in charge of the two younger children, telling her that she was going to drown herself in a nearby creek. As an old woman, Travers wrote about the terrifying experience: 'Large-eyed, the little ones looked at me - she and I called them the little ones, both of us aware that an eldest child, no matter how young, can never experience the heart's ease that little ones enjoy.' Helen stirred the fire and then they all lay down on the hearth rug and she told them a story about a magical flying horse, with the small ones asking excited questions ('Could he carry us to the shiny land, all three on his back?'). As she tried to distract her siblings, she worried about the future. ... Margaret came back that night, having been unsuccessful in her suicide attempt, but Helen's mind was made up. She no longer cleaved to her unreliable, dithering mother but, rather, to a formidable maiden great-aunt, Helen Morehead. Aunt Ellie, as she was called, bossed everyone around, but her fierceness disguised a kindness she would have been embarrassed to admit. ... Obviously, Travers did not write her books to commemorate a happy childhood, but she did seem interested in rewriting her bad one. The Banks family is a reformed version of the Goffs, their charming features magnified and their failures burnished away. Father is a banker, although not a drunk; mother is a flibbertigibbet, although not a suicidal one. And Mary Poppins, like Aunt Ellie, is the great deflater, the enemy of any attempt at whimsy or sentiment.

32. I actually believe she liked the film a lot more than she let on publicly ... You have to remember that she was, above all, a great storyteller. And in the long line of storytellers who have faith in an oral tradition, who believe that for a great book or books to survive, they have to be retold or reinvented for each generation