Valerie Lawson (1)

This book is the story of the life of Pamela Travers, the lady who wrote Mary Poppins and who is featured in the movie, Saving Mr. Banks.

That being said, I haven't yet seen Saving Mr. Banks. After having read this book, I'm not sure I like Pamela Travers and I don't know if that is because Pamela Travers was unlikable or the author presented her as unlikable.

I still don't feel like I know very much about Pamela. She was into Gurdjieff and Zen. She sounded like a very interesting woman. She went to Taos and met Mabel Lujan and D.H. Lawrence's widow, Frieda Lawrence. She loved to wear Navajo jewelry. She seemed to always be searching for herself and she had the money to be able to devote her life to that mission. She also had a rich fantasy life.

She was, apparently, very self-centered and rude to others. She thought very highly of herself and did not consider Mary Poppins her best work and she did not consider herself a children's author. By the way she is presented in this book, I doubt that I would have enjoyed meeting her; however, I still do not feel I have a grasp on this woman's personality even though I have now read her biography. Of course, P.L. Travers was always making stuff up, so it was at times hard for the author to distinguish what really happened and what only happened in Pamela's vivid imagination.

So - a three star review due to the fact I still couldn't really explain Pamela Travers very well to anyone else. Perhaps that is what she intended all along.… (més)

I adore the Mary Poppins film by Walt Disney Studios. The film is one of few that I feel is better than the source material. I sawthe film about PL Travers and Walt Disney's long-time negotiations for making the film, a few years ago.

I was looking forward to reading this book. Aaron bought it for me for Christmas, as I had it on my list.

I struggled to read the book, though. I do not feel that it was engaging, though I continued to hope.

PL Travers' name at birth was Helen Lyndon Goff. Perhaps it was the age into which she was born, or the cultural influences combined with the times. She seemed very selfish and I do not have a sense that she was ever truly happy.

Her children's writing evokes a playful imagination that seems unlikely when compared to the way she lived life. She seems to have sought out something that was missing (religion, love) and never seems to have found it.

She did eventually adopt a son but in doing so, attempted to live out some Mary Poppins-esque fantasy by which she saved the baby Camillus. At age 17 he learned that his life was built on lies and his relationship with his mother was never the same. Family's was a twin. He and his many siblings were being raised by grandparents who had fallen on hard times and offered some of the children out for adoption. Camillus was chosen because the famiky was Irish and Travers' father had idolized Ireland to her. Travers was offered both twins but vehemently chose the more beautiful of the children; the one who appeared to be healthier.

All in all, Travers was a woman who would lie in order to create a more romantic version of her reality. She went from father figure to father figure in search of elusive love and fulfillment. Some wonder if she was physically and romantically entangled with a woman with whom she lived for a decade. She never found the happiness she sought. She seems to have died as a lonely woman whose truest success came from Mr Disney choosing to improve her book, in film.

I would honestly rate the book lower; I didn't enjoy it, likely because Travers does not seem to be a person I would enjoy. The book did eventually improve when the author began telling about the "Mary Poppins" years, and then the events surrounding Camillus. That poor man. He died heartbroken.… (més)

I received Mary Poppins, She Wrote as part of a Goodreads giveaway.

I'm not familiar with P.L. Travers or Mary Poppins. Growing up, I knew of the latter, but never read the books and only saw bits and pieces of the Disney film. For whatever reason, it wasn't one that grabbed me. Now with a resurgence of interest in Travers, due in large part to the recent film Saving Mr. Banks, this

The book moves along at a good pace, from Travers' childhood in Australia--the father and aunt that provided inspiration for Mr. Banks and Mary Poppins respectively--and her early career as a writer in England and Ireland, to the creation of the series whose legacy was both a great triumph and a great disappointment to its author. She's a truly fascinating figure, someone whose personality challenged conceptions of what an early 20th century woman "should be."

That said, this strength is also a weakness. Travers is a difficult subject for a biography--she's enigmatic and not particularly warm and fuzzy. Her life story is interesting, but not particularly happy, and I think that some readers may have difficult connecting with that.

Nearly 20 years after her death, though, I'm glad her story is finally being told. It's always a good thing to see a strong woman profiled who breaks the mold of convention.… (més)

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