The thing that Travers would never, ever explain was who exactly Mary
Poppins is. And Mary Poppins, as Jane and Michael Banks often lament in the
stories, “never explains anything.” Rewatching the film recently, I was pleased
to see that she states this herself, when confronted by Mr. Banks; the movie is
truer to Travers’ vision that I’d remembered, for if Julie Andrews’ Mary
Poppins smiles a lot more than the character in the books, she is almost as
strict and no-nonsense. Travers’ Mary Poppins refuses to acknowledge the
magical adventures that the children share with her, waxing indignant when they
mention having taken tea upside down or floated through the park by the strings
of balloons, exploits Mary Poppins seems to regard as undignified. “On his
head? A relation of mine on his head? And turning about like a firework
display?” she asks wrathfully as they return from one outing on the bus.
This attitude seems to bother some contemporary readers. I’ve seen them
complain that the Mary Poppins of the books is “mean.” Yet Jane and Michael
adore her, and so did I; her tartness only made her more alluring, perhaps
because I mistrusted adults who pandered to me in gooey, ingratiating tones
like the ladies of “Romper Room.” In her way, Mary Poppins embodied the enigma
of adulthood, all the things grown-ups knew that I didn’t and all things they
could do that I couldn’t. And if she was always scolding the Banks children for
dragging their feet or whining or behaving like the inmates of a “Bear Garden,”
well, it was usually a fair cop. Besides, what good is a mystery whose
initiation rites come too easily?
For mystery is what Mary Poppins embodied, and what has piqued
imaginations since her creation.
. . .
Travers Goff is depicted accurately in “Saving Mr. Banks” as a failed,
alcoholic banker with frustrated mystical yearnings, but inaccurately as a
doting, attentive father. Instead, Travers described both her parents as almost
neglectful and as wrapped up in themselves: “I was allowed to grow in the
darkness, unknown, unnoticed, under the earth like a seed.”
The dubious notion that Mr. Banks in the Mary Poppins stories was based
on Goff comes largely from “Mary Poppins, She
Wrote,” by Valerie Lawson. This biography, the source of “Saving Mr.
Banks,” is worth reading because it’s the only life of Travers we’ve got, but
it’s also badly marred by a forced, lumbering whimsy that is at best irritating
and at worst confusing. According to Lawson, Travers’ life consisted of one
long quest for a father figure, but “Mary Poppins, She Wrote” doesn’t inspire
the sort of confidence required to sell such a reductive summary of what was in
truth a complex and contradictory life.
Even so, Lawson’s biography does not portray Travers as
two-dimensionally as the film does. You would never know, for example, from
“Saving Mr. Banks” that Travers was a worldly, well-traveled woman who had been
an actress in a touring troupe before turning to writing. Or that she wrote
frankly erotic poetry for newspapers and that after she left Australia and was
living a flapperish life in London during the 1920s, she became a protegé to
the circle of Irish writers that included William Butler Yeats, Sean O’Faolain
and George Russell (“AE”), all of whom admired her work. These writers, she
once wrote, “cheerfully licked me into shape like a set of mother cats with a
kitten.” Probably bisexual, Travers never married but lived with a woman for a
decade and adopted a boy from an impoverished Irish family. She lived on a
Navajo reservation for two years during World War II.
What this cosmopolitan figure found most unfathomable about the Disney
version of her book was the way it treats the Banks family as a problem that
Mary Poppins has arrived to solve. Travers thought the Banks family as she
wrote them were just fine, perfectly normal. But among other things, the Disney
team felt they needed to explain why someone like Mrs. Banks was hiring a
stranger to take care of her own children. (It was common practice for a member
of her class.)
Having the film hinge on the saving of Mr. Banks was DaGradi’s solution
to the narrative problem presented by the book, which is really a collection of
tales, not a single plot. In fact, most of the stories in any given Mary
Poppins book could be easily transplanted to one of the others without creating
much of a problem, although new Banks children do get added along the way.
Travers viewed the individual chapters as fairy tales, timeless narratives set
in a world that never changes much. Instead of forests, castles or cottages
inhabited by woodsmen, kings or tailors, the Mary Poppins tales take place in
the perpetual childhood of Jane and Michael, in which they never get older and
the adults around them — the other household servants and neighbors like
Admiral Boom and Mrs. Lark — are as iconic as the gods in the Greek pantheon.
Anxiety and reassurance about the integrity of the family is central to
American family films, and to a lot of American children’s fiction, too.
Dorothy is always trying to get back to Aunty Em. British children’s fiction
tends to get caught up in the romance of adventure for its own sake. (“Doctor
Who” is part of this tradition.) In the American-made film version of “The
Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” for example, the Pevensie children are
portrayed as worried about their soldier father and eager to reunite with their
mother, while in C.S. Lewis’ novel, they don’t give their parents a second
thought and end up spending upward of a decade in Narnia without a qualm.
Making “Mary Poppins” a story about how Mr. Banks learns to appreciate his
children and to spend more time playing with them is probably the most
significant and most Americanizing change the Disney team made.
As Travers saw it, the Mary Poppins books (in which the parents are
decidedly minor characters) were not about magic suddenly intervening to fix a
crisis that disrupts everyday life. Rather, they reveal the wonder that resides
within every ordinary thing. The little old lady who runs the candy story down
the block also hangs the stars in the sky. There’s a whole world inside that
decorative plate. Your nanny goes to a celestial circus on her evening out and
her mother was a great friend of the cow who jumped over the moon (“… very
respectable, she always behaved like a perfect lady and she knew What was
What.”)
While some of this surely comes from Travers’ spiritual interests, you
could never tell as much just from reading the books. They are perfectly
translated to the language of childhood, suffused with an enchantment at
discovering the world and its endless surprises. Here is the fanciful longing
that makes kids talk to their stuffed animals and tell themselves that
miniature people live in the backyard. Central to that enchantment is not knowing. There is far more power
in whoever you imagine Mary Poppins to be than there could ever be in an
explanation. And that’s why Travers never explained her.
We live in a disenchanted world, especially when it comes to pop culture
narratives. Today, it’s nothing but endless and idiotic explanations. Every
character must come supplied with a suitable back story and plausible if not
outright redundant motives to justify everything they do. No one can become a
crime fighter simply because they hate crime and injustice. The real reason has
to be a murdered nuclear family member — spouse, parent, child or sibling —
whose death must be (yet can never truly be!) redeemed.
And so, according to “Saving Mr. Banks,” P.L.
Travers could not have written “Mary Poppins” because she felt like telling a
modern-day fairy tale and maybe needed the money, or let alone because she was
summarily seized by the muse. No, she had to be nursing an unresolved trauma —
daddy issues, of course — all of which can be laid to rest by handing over her
baby to that ultimate daddy figure, Walt Disney. Those lingering emotional
issues also explain why Travers gave the Disney team such a hard time during
the production of the film, why she so perversely resisted their idea of fun
and their vision of what “Mary Poppins” really meant. It wasn’t that she
resented their attempts to drain the wilder magic out of her creation. It was
that she just needed a good session of pop culture therapy, and to have herself
completely and conclusively explained. (“SavingMary Poppins: As if the sugary 1964 film weren’t enough, Disney has put P.L.Travers dark, magical heroine into therapy,” Laura Miller, Salon.com)
- - - - -
Emporium
But among other
things, the Disney team felt they needed to explain why someone like Mrs. Banks
was hiring a stranger to take care of her own children. (It was common practice
for a member of her class.
Sensible of them. What
exactly does it mean for something to be a common social practice? Seems like
it almost puts it beyond further analysis, even perhaps sanctifying it. If a
whole bunch of people want to reject their children, sacrificing them to some
delegate of the destructive grandmother, is this common practice? Or
just impossible, you silly! of course?
while in C.S. Lewis’
novel, they don’t give their parents a second thought and end up spending
upward of a decade in Narnia without a qualm.
Brutal. It's like what
immature parents are capable of who only have kids for the light and attention
kids put to them, and then abandon them for Paris or chocolate or
fantasy/romance novels or whatever when they're out of cute infancy and onto
pleasure-complicating late childhood and adolescence. It's only great because
if you identify with it, you imagine the abandoned hoping the whole time you
might be thinking of them, which you hope they one day discover, you weren't;
not at all.
No, she had to be
nursing an unresolved trauma — daddy issues, of course — all of which can be
laid to rest by handing over her baby to that ultimate daddy figure, Walt
Disney.
Now you're concerned over the handing over of babies? She
should have coddled it and kept it to herself, to ensure it had the legacy it
deserved? But at least the people she had wet-nurse it in some respects did a
better job of raising the righteousness of this concern.
These writers, she
once wrote, “cheerfully licked me into shape like a set of mother cats with a
kitten.
Wonderful. I have
nothing but fond memories of those intent to lick me into shape as well.
Actually, that's not quite right. I used to complain that their always scolding
me for dragging my feet or whining or behaving like the inmates of a "Bear
Garden" suggested there was something rather perversely wrong with them,
like they were projecting onto me, and possessed were spanking
some ghost of their bad selves rather than me for whatever awful I just did.
But I came to
appreciate it was actually all a fair cop. Every once in awhile I still think
it maybe a bit awry that they felt the need for me to take off my pants and
fondle my privates, but that too I understand now as just common practice — every
school master once did this, as Richard Dawkins recently reflected. Just common
social practice for a particular time and place, so it couldn't have done much
harm.
With this piece,
you've complicated our appreciation of the enchantment of not knowing — exactly
what gives birth to those terrors in non-Disney fairy tales that so appeal to
children anyway? The universal? Or particularly dreadful experiences particular
to each one of them that fortunately are being winnowed out through time
(though maybe not so much with this “Go the f*ck to sleep” fad).
And how again is
everyone moving on to the syrup of Disney just our dumb American hatred of the
cosmopolitan? Sounds convincing, but maybe it should be tested. The movie was
uplifting and an awful lot of fun — one further magnificent bravado show that
post-war wasn't going to be anything like the Depression period before it. And
from what all you’ve told me, I’m almost afraid to read the book — it'd be like
letting hooks onto me that post-war Disney magic had spared me ever having
had to really know.
Serai1
@Emporium
If a whole bunch of people want to reject their children, sacrificing them to
some delegate of the destructive grandmother, is this common practice?
Good gods, what
an ignorant and bigoted assumption to make.
You seem awfully wedded to your
coddling, cooing version of childhood - no child must ever experience an
uncomfortable moment, and OF COURSE every child wants to spend every minute
with their parents and never EVER leave them even for a second, or else they're
"brutal" and somehow not human. You must have had a very
stifling and fear-filled childhood.
Emporium
@Serai1 I said nothing of the kind. Being handed over to strangers
to be raised, is worth a raised eyebrow.
Disney's people raised theirs, which strikes me as commendable compared to
Laura's "it's just what people do," and your "what are you,
someone who believes children need to be coddled all the time rather than learn
the world for themselves"? "What of it if there are predators and
dangers — without them kids stay soft and unprepared for the harsh adult
world."
Progressives have
historically insisted on the more kind approach, and if lucky, changed everyone
else's opinions eventually; or if unlucky, weren't a match for those invested
in harboring and sanctifying barbaric customs, and shipped themselves off
elsewhere.
mamalicious
@Emporium @Serai1 Being
handed over to strangers to be raised,
A truly idiotic
statement. It sounds as though they hand over the baby, never to see it again.
But I must ask,
exactly how long is a hired caregiver a stranger? For example, Princess
Diana's nanny (the one who took care of Will and Harry for 15 years) - do you
think they would consider her a stranger?
Operation Enduring Boredom
@Emporium— "Sensible of them. What exactly does it mean for
something to be a common social practice?"
I agree, and I
don't understand Laura Miller's objection to this alteration. Disney was making
the film for an American middle-class audience, wasn't it?
Graham Clark
Sensible of them. What exactly does it mean for
something to be a common social practice? Seems like it almost puts it beyond
further analysis...
No, but it does
have implications for what needs to be analyzed.
For example, a
film that portrayed the Banks parents' turning over their children to a nanny
as part of a general social dysfunction in Edwardian England might or might not
be fair, but would at least be an engagement with a society that existed. To
portray the same thing as merely personal neurosis is to assume your own
assumptions about how the world should work are more universally shared than
they actually are.
Likewise, I
know better than to think of your writing about child abuse in a manner
flaunting your own self pity - even though it's not clear whether you have
actually experienced such abuse or not - as a purely personal vice.
- - - - -
Emporium-Patrick McEvoy-Halston
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