P L Travers

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Disc's Archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen seventy seven, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:32

Our Castaway this week is a writer.

Presenter0:35

The author of one of the biggest selling books in the world, it's PL Travers. Now, Miss Travers, it'll probably be news to many of your readers that you are in fact female because you shelter behind the unisex cover of just using your initials. Did you have a a purpose in this ambiguity?

P L Travers0:53

Yes, you're right to say shelter, because at the time when I first started writing.

P L Travers1:01

The particular kind of book we're talking about now. It it so often they were sentimentally written by women.

P L Travers1:09

And I didn't want to be just another woman thrown into the trash heap, as it were. No criticism or anything. Anyway, I'm a private sort of person. I thought I'd like to be as anonymous as possible. And that's not humility.

Presenter1:26

In fact, you are Miss Pamela Travers.

P L Travers1:28

Yeah.

Presenter1:29

And you're accustomed to a a tropic clime because you come from a tropical part of Australia.

P L Travers1:34

Yes, I was born there, and lived my early years.

Presenter1:38

Could you face the solitude?

Presenter1:41

Of a desert island?

P L Travers1:42

Hm, it would be difficult.

P L Travers1:45

I like solitude, but I

P L Travers1:48

Don't like loneliness. I think I would find that hard to bear.

Presenter1:54

You have eight records. Is music important to you?

P L Travers1:59

Yes, music is important to me, but if you put me on a desert island I would want, I think, above all things to hear the human voice. I would want to hear the voices of my friends and if I can't, then the nearest thing I could come to would be poetry.

Presenter2:18

What is the first that you would like to hear?

P L Travers2:21

Well

P L Travers2:22

After all, my mother bore me in the southern wild.

P L Travers2:27

So I would like to have Blake's little black boy.

Presenter2:31

My mother bore me in the southern wild

Presenter2:35

And I am black.

Presenter2:37

But oh, my soul is white.

Presenter2:41

White as an angel is the English child

Presenter2:45

But I am black.

Presenter2:47

as if bereaved of life.

Presenter2:50

My mother taught me underneath a tree

Presenter2:54

and sitting down before the heat of day,

Presenter2:58

She took me on her lap and kissed me, and pointing to the east

Presenter3:03

Began to say

Presenter3:06

Look on the rising sun

Presenter3:09

There God does live.

Presenter3:11

And gives his light and gives his heat away And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive Comfort in morning, joy in the noonday.

Presenter3:23

Sir RAFE Richardson reading William Blake's The Little Black Boy

Presenter3:27

Now before Australia, your family come from Ireland.

P L Travers3:31

My father from Ireland, and my mother a long time in Australia, but of Scottish parentage, so in a way I'm Celtic on both sides.

Presenter3:40

When you were very young you used to make up stories to tell your sister.

P L Travers3:45

GISH

P L Travers3:46

So my sister tells me. I don't remember this very clearly. I remember certain things that I made up but both my sisters remember a great deal more than I do.

Presenter3:56

I believe there's some evidence that one of your make-believe characters as a child was a Miss Poppins.

P L Travers4:04

Yes.

P L Travers4:06

Well, my sister says it happened as a child. One of my childhood books

P L Travers4:12

um which I still have, has the name M. Poppins written in the fly leaf. Who wrote it there? I don't know.

P L Travers4:23

Somebody from a fairy tale, I suppose. I can't think that I wrote it myself, because she didn't come into my life seriously until very much later.

Presenter4:32

You liked writing verse.

P L Travers4:34

Yes.

Presenter4:34

In fact, you'll

P L Travers4:35

I remember my my um mother showing a poem to my father and he looking at it and saying, Well.

P L Travers4:44

Harley W. B. H.

P L Travers4:47

But then I don't suppose WBH would have been WBH at that age, either.

Presenter4:52

You showed all the signs of of wanting to be a writer very early.

P L Travers4:55

Yes, but not in a public sense. I never looked upon the idea as a career.

Presenter5:01

But you began to send pieces and poems to magazines and newspapers.

P L Travers5:06

Yes. Later on in my teens.

Presenter5:09

And with a very modest capital, you you decided to come to Britain.

P L Travers5:13

Yes, I saved up my fare and arrived

P L Travers5:17

with ten pounds, five of which I immediately lost.

Presenter5:21

Did you know any one here?

P L Travers5:23

Yes. I I had my mother's family here, and my father's family in Ireland.

Presenter5:27

Of course you had to go to Al.

P L Travers5:29

Well, I did have to go to Ireland, and the way I did was this. I sent a poem with a stamped addressed envelope to AE, who was then editing The Irish Statesman.

P L Travers5:44

And very haughtily I didn't put in a covering letter to explain myself or anything. I just wanted to go to him as it were naked.

P L Travers5:53

And of course the stamped addressed envelope came back, but to my surprise it had two guineas in it.

P L Travers5:59

And a letter from AE saying nobody but an Irish person could have written this poem.

P L Travers6:06

And if you're coming to Dublin, will you come and see me?

P L Travers6:09

So of course I was coming to Dublin, and I was coming to see my father's people, but primarily I was coming to see AE.

Presenter6:18

Now I know you've chosen one of A. E. s. poems.

P L Travers6:22

Well, I'd like one called The Outcast, which appeared in his very first book of poems called Homeward Songs, by the way.

Presenter6:31

Sometimes when alone, at the dark close of day,

Presenter6:36

Men meet an outlawed magistrate

Presenter6:39

And hurry away.

Presenter6:42

They come to the lighted house, They talk to their dear, They crucify the mystery With words of good cheer.

Presenter6:53

When love and life are over, And flight's at an end, On the outcast majesty they lean as a friend.

Presenter7:06

THE OUTCAST BY AE GEORGE W. RUSSEL READ BY JOHN HeWET. WAS AE a member of a group of poets and writers? Was he a gregarious man?

P L Travers7:16

Oh, Will he was the father of all the young writers in Ireland and the great contemporary Viats, whom I knew through him, and James Stevens and all that lot. It was a wonderful world. to be young in and

P L Travers7:33

to be a writer in.

Presenter7:35

You in fact visited the Isle of Innesfree as a tribute to Yeats, didn't you?

P L Travers7:38

I did. I stopped at Loch Gill and got a boatman.

P L Travers7:45

and I said, take me to the lake isle of Innishfrie.

P L Travers7:49

And he said never heard of it.

P L Travers7:52

So I said, Oh, you must have. WB Yeats has written a very famous poem about it. And um who would WB Yeats be? I said, Well, he's a great poet. I was astonished and he said, Ah, he said, these poets always inventing things with their stravague minds He said, That's not the Lake Island Industry, that's what we call Rat Island.

P L Travers8:19

So I went to Rat Island and I'd cut down branch after branch of of rans to take back to Yeats in Dublin.

P L Travers8:29

End. I arrived in pouring rain at Yeatstor.

P L Travers8:34

And already sick of my adventure, I felt that I shouldn't have done this. It was a mistake from the beginning, and I hoped that Yeats wouldn't open the door. But Yeats did. He gave a horrified look at me, and said, Go to the kitchen and get dried.

P L Travers8:50

And so I went to the kitchen, was given a cup of cocoa.

P L Travers8:53

ashamed of myself, and hoping to disappear and never be heard of more.

P L Travers8:58

But then the maid said the master wants you.

P L Travers9:02

So I was taken up, wondering what on earth I could have to say to him after having made this terrible blunder.

P L Travers9:10

and all he did was say to me,

P L Travers9:13

Come and see my canary. She's laid an egg.

P L Travers9:18

And then he became the bard, and he put his arm round my shoulders, and walked round his library with me, and he said,'Do you know how I wrote my poems?

P L Travers9:29

I chew.

P L Travers9:30

One of my own.

P L Travers9:33

And I read that.

P L Travers9:35

And that inspires me to go on.

P L Travers9:38

Well, think of having Yeats tell you how he wrote his poems. It was intoxicating.

Presenter9:45

And did he decorate his library with your branches of rowan?

P L Travers9:48

No but I saw

P L Travers9:52

Just as I was leaving, a little branch of rowins on the table in a glass, and I thought, Ah, he's taught me a lesson.

P L Travers10:01

And at first I didn't want to be taught a lesson you don't when you're so young. But then I saw that a little sprig was enough. I needn't have brought the whole of Rat Island.

Presenter10:11

Yeah.

Presenter10:14

And now I believe we're going to hear the voice of Yeats.

P L Travers10:17

Yes.

P L Travers10:19

I will arise and go now.

Presenter10:21

Uh And go to innets free, And a small cabin build there Of clay and wattles made

Presenter10:31

Nine Bean Roll Yeah. There you go.

P L Travers10:34

Ahay for the honey bee.

P L Travers10:38

And live

P L Travers10:39

Alone in the beetle I would play

P L Travers10:43

and I shall have some peace there.

P L Travers10:46

For peace comes the rotting slow

Presenter10:50

William Butler Yates reading his own poem The Lake Isle of Innes Free

Presenter10:55

In nineteen thirty four, after an illness, you wrote a book.

Presenter11:00

A magical book about a a magical person. Now you've always been interested in magic and fairy tales and folklore, haven't you?

P L Travers11:07

Yeah.

Presenter11:09

But this book has brought delight to millions of children all over the world.

Presenter11:14

What to you?

Presenter11:15

thinking of when you started it, were you picking something up from the stories that you'd told as a child?

P L Travers11:22

It came out of a well of something in me. It's very hard. You know, the great characteristic of Mary Poppins is that she never explains.

P L Travers11:34

And I find myself, and I think this is true of all writers, if they're honest, they don't know how to explain what happens. And I, in a way, don't want to. I don't want to bring it into the front of my mind and saying, oh, this is the mechanism of it. This is how it was. I'd rather.

P L Travers11:55

Leave it in the unknown.

Presenter11:57

You had no real intention of

P L Travers11:59

Expending It will

Presenter11:59

Power

P L Travers11:59

I wish I had.

Presenter12:00

Yeah.

P L Travers12:00

Uh

P L Travers12:01

Oh, none at all It never occurred to me that anybody would want to publish it was writing it.

P L Travers12:07

Really for myself.

P L Travers12:10

And then a friend saw it half written and said, Well, I'll take this to a publisher, and I had no agent or anything like that, and I thought, Well, a publisher won't want this. But apparently he did.

Presenter12:24

Mary Poppins was set in Edwardian days in a polite English suburb, which was not your own background at all.

Presenter12:32

It it's a it's a very London book, isn't it?

P L Travers12:35

Well, but you know, we lived in Australia. Our life was lived always reverting back to London and Ireland, England and Ireland. That was home.

P L Travers12:47

Everything that we really needed came from there. So, in a way, we live.

P L Travers12:54

In those far off.

P L Travers12:56

imaginary places to me.

Presenter12:58

It's also a very personal book because you incorporated personal

Presenter13:03

possessions of your own, and animals that you knew.

P L Travers13:07

Yes, that's that's perfectly true. I don't know that it's based on my personal life. I never had an umbrella in a carpet bag, and took off for unknown destination.

P L Travers13:18

I think I think Mr Banks is a little bit like my father, and misses Banks in her most flustered, is perhaps a little bit like my mother, but really I don't think it's based on my childhood.

Presenter13:31

What's your next record?

P L Travers13:32

Gerald Manley Hopkins is really one of my favourite poets. I could have all of him if I had the chance, but I chose God's grandeur.

P L Travers13:43

Because it's it's one of those without sprung rhythm. And

P L Travers13:48

Easy to say.

P L Travers13:51

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

P L Travers13:55

It will flame out like shining from shook foil.

P L Travers13:58

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Presenter14:02

Uh

Presenter14:03

Yeah.

P L Travers14:03

Yeah.

Presenter14:03

Why Do men then now not wreck his rod?

Presenter14:07

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod, And all is seared with trade, blear'd, smeared with toil, and wears man's smile.

Presenter14:21

Man's God's Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins, read by Cyril Kusack.

Presenter14:27

Mary Poppins became in 1964, I think it was, in the hands of Walt Disney, a very successful film.

Presenter14:35

Did you approve of the cast?

P L Travers14:37

Oh yes, I well, I approved awfully of uh the chief character Julie Anders.

Presenter14:42

Julianne.

Presenter14:44

Well, it's still being shown all over the world.

P L Travers14:47

Yes, so they tell me. I've seen it once or twice, and I've learned to live with it. It's glamorous, and it's a good film on its own level, but I don't think it's very like my book.

Presenter14:59

How many sequels to Mary Poppins have you written?

P L Travers15:02

The sixth has just come out. It's been written over a long period of years. Sequels have come out. And the sixth is just um a Mary Poppins story with a cookery book attached.

Presenter15:16

Published at long intervals, you've resisted any temptation to to keep up the formula and and write more.

P L Travers15:22

Yes, because I felt it would become mechanical. I've been asked by the Americans to bring Mary Poppies to America and see, but that would be quite out of her world. And I don't want to.

P L Travers15:36

Degrade this character. I've been lent it, and I don't want to overuse it.

Presenter15:42

Of course.

Presenter15:43

We've now got to your fifth record. Watch that.

P L Travers15:46

Well, it's one of my favorite poems. It's Robert Louis Stevenson, The Cow. And cows are my favorite animals.

Speaker 215:53

Minimals.

Speaker 215:54

The friendly cow all red and white I love with all my heart.

Speaker 216:00

She gives me cream with all her might To eat with apple tart.

Speaker 216:05

She wanders lowing here and there

Speaker 216:08

And yet she cannot stray.

Speaker 216:10

all in the pleasant open air.

Speaker 216:13

The Pleasant Light of Day

Speaker 216:16

And blown by all the winds that pass, And wet with all the showers, She walks among the meadow grass, And eats the meadow flowers.

Presenter16:30

The Cow by Robert Louis Stevenson, read by Mario Farrell.

Presenter16:35

When you were with Disney in Hollywood, this wasn't new territory for you. You had lived in the United States for some years.

P L Travers16:41

Yes, I went there uh during the war and um

P L Travers16:45

Then later I came back and was writer in residence at three r universities, Radcliffe, Smith and Claremont.

Presenter16:54

What's your next record? Another poem?

P L Travers16:57

Oh.

P L Travers16:58

Robotros

P L Travers16:59

Because it will remind me

P L Travers17:02

Of my time in America, and I love him as a poet, and I knew him as a man.

Presenter17:08

Which of his poems are you going to play?

P L Travers17:10

Well, I would like choose something like a star because of its wonderful last line. I think that would comfort me on my desert island.

Presenter17:20

O star

Presenter17:22

The fairest one in sight.

Presenter17:24

We grant your loftiness the right to some obscurity of cloud.

Presenter17:30

It will not do to say of night, Since dark is what brings out your light.

Presenter17:35

Some mystery becomes the proud, But to be wholly taciturn In your reserve is not allowed. Say something to us we can learn By heart, and when alone repeat Say something. Robert Frost, reading his own poem, Choose something like a star.

Presenter17:55

Now your other books. There was a recent one based on the adventures of the Indian Monkey Lord.

P L Travers18:01

Oh, Hanuman

P L Travers18:04

A great Hindu myth which has absorbed me all my life, ever since I knew of the myths, is the myth of the monkey god who

P L Travers18:13

loves his lord, the god Rama, so much that he he overdoes things. And the idea of the one who loves and does too much and can't help it

P L Travers18:25

has always intrigued me, so I built up a modern

P L Travers18:29

Myth of Henneman

Presenter18:32

Despite your great love of words, you're not really a compulsive writer. You don't go from one book to another. It's just when the spirit moves you.

P L Travers18:40

Yes. And I pray for the Spirit to move me, of course.

Presenter18:44

Has it moved you again? Have you another one on the stocks?

P L Travers18:48

Well, I I have in a way I'm collecting a series of things, but I don't like to talk about it. It's like

P L Travers18:57

You can't know anything about the child until it's born. I have a feeling it's unlucky.

Presenter19:03

Then let's go back to poetry. What?

P L Travers19:05

Nice.

Presenter19:05

Yeah.

P L Travers19:06

This is the end of Little Gidding.

P L Travers19:10

I knew T. S. Elliot.

P L Travers19:12

He's one of my favorite players.

P L Travers19:15

And um

P L Travers19:17

When I was going to America during the war, he said, I don't think it's right that you should do this. I think.

P L Travers19:25

Perhaps you should not go, but I felt that I should go.

P L Travers19:30

And

P L Travers19:31

When I came back and went to see him, I found that he'd saved up his ration of biscuits so that we could have he could give me a good tea.

Presenter19:43

Blend it.

Presenter19:45

And this has a vague desert island connotation, the end of Little Gidding, isn't it?

P L Travers19:48

Again.

P L Travers19:49

It comes at the end of exploration.

P L Travers19:53

You come back to the place where

P L Travers19:56

You began, and know it for the first time.

P L Travers19:59

It's full of overtones and it would be just right for the desert island.

Presenter20:06

We shall not cease from exploration.

Presenter20:10

and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started,

Presenter20:15

and know the place for the first time.

Speaker 120:15

No.

Presenter20:19

Through the unknown remembered gate

Presenter20:23

When the last of earth left to discover Is that which was the beginning, At the source of the longest river, The voice of the hidden waterfall, And the children in the apple-tree, Not known because not looked for, but heard, half-heard, in the stillness between two waves of the sea.

Presenter20:45

Quick now, here, now.

Presenter20:48

Alway.

Presenter20:51

a condition of complete simplicity.

Presenter20:54

costing not less than everything.

Presenter20:57

and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.

Presenter21:03

Alec Guinness reading the closing passage of TS Eliot's Little Gidding.

Presenter21:09

Are you a practical person, Miss Travers? Could you look after yourself on this island?

P L Travers21:14

The first thing I would do would be to look along the sand for footprints.

P L Travers21:21

And

P L Travers21:22

My instinct tells me that eventually those footprints would lead me.

P L Travers21:28

To Man Fr a Man Friday.

P L Travers21:31

And yes, I'm practical, but he could be more practical.

Presenter21:36

Your last record.

P L Travers21:37

William Shakespeare

P L Travers21:39

with my favourite poem of his.

P L Travers21:42

Fear no more the heat of the sun.

Presenter21:45

Fear no more the heat o' the sun, Nor the furious winter's rages Thou thy worldly task hast done Home art gone, and tame thy wages.

Presenter21:58

Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney sweepers, come to dust.

Presenter22:04

Fear no more the frown of the great.

Presenter22:07

Thou art past the tyrant's stroke

Presenter22:11

Care no more to clothe and eat.

Presenter22:14

To thee the reed is as the oak.

Presenter22:17

The sceptre, learning, physic, must All follow this, and come to dust.

Presenter22:24

Fear no more the lightning flash, Nor the old dreaded thunderstone Fear not slander, censure, rash Thou hast finished joy and moan.

Presenter22:34

All lovers young, all lovers must Consign to thee and come to dust.

Speaker 122:34

All lovers young.

Speaker 122:36

Oh no.

Presenter22:42

Fear No More the Heat of the Sun, read by John Stride and Alan Bates. If you could take only one record of the eight.

P L Travers22:50

Oh, at the last.

Presenter22:51

The last Shakespeare. And one luxury to take with you?

P L Travers22:57

Well, I thought that I would take the little marble Buddha that's on my terrace. I found him leaning up against a a lamp post in the King's Road.

P L Travers23:09

And the antique

P L Travers23:11

Dealer said to me,'Oh, you can have him for very little, his top knot's gone.

P L Travers23:15

But he's really a very valuable little Buddha and I would like to have him because he would help me to be still and to bear my loneliness.

P L Travers23:26

And

P L Travers23:27

To keep my mind very quiet, like Robert Frost's poem, to stay my mind on and be stayed. I would like him.

Presenter23:35

And you're allowed to take one book apart from the obvious choices of the Bible and Shakespeare, and we don't allow big encyclopedias.

P L Travers23:44

I don't want an encyclopedia.

P L Travers23:46

I want a

P L Travers23:49

with plenty of pages in it and a pen so that I can write a book while I'm there.

Presenter23:54

Right.

Presenter23:55

And thank you, Miss P. L. Travers, for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. Thank you.

Presenter24:01

Goodbye everyone.

Speaker 124:11

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.