Literascape - The Children's Reader: Winter 1997/98

P.L. Travers
In Memoriam
by J. Kieran Kealy

In april of last year, at the age of 96, rather quietly and unobtrusively, P.L. Travers died. At one time her creation of Mary Poppins seemed to have assured her of her place in the twentieth century's pantheon of children's fantasists. But today the original Mary has been all but forgotten, pushed aside by Disney's glittering Julie Andrews and her supercalifragilisticexpialidocious world. And that is a genuine pity, for the true magic of Travers's prim English nanny can never really be translated to another media, for Mary Poppins is not, as Disney suggests, about the social education of the Banks family, nor is it even about Mary Poppins, ultimately. Rather, it is about the imagination.

As we enter the world of the enigmatic Miss Poppins, we quickly realize that our brief journey will not be an epic quest but a series of little "outings". And all of these little walks will share the same basic assumption: there is magic everywhere. Or, rather, every place is enchanted, if you simply allow yourself to be swept away by the miraculous Mary.

Ms. Travers's unique approach to the creation of fantasy is documented in both the afterword to her 1975 collection of "Sleeping Beauty" variants, titled About the Sleeping Beauty (McGraw-Hill), and in her famous 1967 address to the Library of Congress titled "Only Connect". In both, she considers the remarkable creative powers of children. They don't need to turn to myth or fairy tales for their stories, she argues, for they have a far more mysterious and complex source of myths within immediate reach, the world of their parents, the world of the adult.

Travers calls this form of creation "linking", the ability to explain all the mysteries of this universe by simply making up your own stories about them, by linking them to the world as you know it. And this concept of connecting permeates all of the adventures of Mary Poppins and her wards.

Let's say, for example, that a child hears her mother say that she's so happy she's floating on air. But how could that be, and what could possibly make anyone that happy, the child asks. A birthday party, of course! And so Travers introduces us to Mr. Wigg and we have tea and cakes with him on his birthday -- floating on air with joy. But did it all actually happen?

Such is the dilemma raised throughout the entire book: events occur that are obviously magical, but even the children are never quite sure whether they actually occurred. One of their more exotic adventures with Mary, for example, culminates in a visit to the London zoo during a full moon where the children fall asleep listening to the hissing of a giant snake. Or could it simply have been, Travers tantalizingly suggests, "their mother's voice as she tucked them in, on her nightly round of the nursery"?

Ultimately, of course, it doesn't matter, for, whatever Mary's actual powers are, she is the source of the magic, either as the actual creator of these magical worlds or as the inspiration for the children's creations. In some mysterious catalytic way, either knowingly or unknowingly, she has taught them to connect, to become myth-makers. Thus, when they look at a common fishmonger, they see not just a man but a story. Such is the case with Jane's story of the Bird Woman. And, for Jane and Michael, the story is not a fiction, but truth. Thus all the wonders of Mary's world may then be nothing more than the myths of two extremely imaginative children, myths evoked by this possibly quite boring English nanny.

It is precisely this phenomenon that Travers investigates when, in the chapter titled "John and Barbara", she describes a world in which children lose their power to communicate with all creatures on this earth when they learn human speech. Here, Travers seems to be suggesting that certain imaginative powers are lost when children learn more about the world in which they exist. And of course, this makes perfect sense: as we learn more about our world, there are fewer mysteries and thus we have less need to resort to private myths.

But this may not necessarily mean that we must leave all our fantasies behind at this transitional age. Perhaps a precious few retain these imaginative powers -- magicians, poets, and tellers of children's stories. Such individuals bring with them to adulthood the powers to make even the dullest of English stereotypes, the prissy proper nanny, into what the Starling calls "the Great Exception".

And in a world where the imaginative power that P.L. Travers so valued is threatened daily by the onslaught of an ever more mechanized existence, Travers's simple message is ever more important. She will be missed.

Dr. Kieran Kealy teaches children's literature in the
English department at the University of British Columbia.