Mary Poppins:

Healing Inner Personifications As a Spiritual Path

© Richard Bolstad

The real woman behind the Mary Poppins books is vastly more magical than any movie could portray. She studied intimately with spiritual teachers George Gurdjieff, Peter Ouspensky, Zen teacher Ruth Sasaki, and Jiddu Krishnamurti; she did spiritual psychotherapy directly with Carl Jung, and Karlfried von Dürckheim; she was initiated into Australian aboriginal storytelling, Druidic mysteries, and Navajo secret mythologies. And Mary Poppins was, she felt, revealed to her as a deep myth connecting all this to her own life story.

Helen Goff grew up in the Australian outback at the start of the Twentieth Century, and after attending boarding school in Sydney became a professional Shakespearean actor under the name Pamela Lyndon Travers. In 1933, when she was 34 years old, she wrote the first of a series of novels about a magical children’s nanny, Mary Poppins, who saves the Banks family children by touching the heart of their father, Mr Banks (who, obviously enough, works in a Bank). Pamela said that the stories were based on ones she had told her sisters when she was a child, and they collected together stories she had written while living in Christchurch, New Zealand in the 1920s. Boldly travelling through Soviet Russia in 1932, Ms Travers was by then a personal student of both spiritual teachers George Gurdjieff (Гео́ргий Ива́нович Гурджи́ев) and Pyotr Ouspensky (Пётр Демьянович Успенский) and of Psychotherapist Carl Jung, so she already understood deeply the mythic and archetypical power of her books. In 1964, Walt Disney, who did not really understand any of this at first, finally convinced her to allow his movie studio to convert the first book into a movie starring Julie Andrews and Dick van Dyke.

Travers thought of her life as a search for her true self. “She thought ‘we are all looking for magic. We all need to feel we are under a spell and one day a wand will be waved and the princes that we truly feel ourselves to be will start forth at last from the tattered shapeless smocks. But indeed we have to wave the wand for ourself. If only we could refrain from endlessly repairing our defences. To be naked and defenceless. Oh we need it.’” (Lawson, 2010, p 17). “Travers experienced that marvellous transcendence more than most, I believe. It came unexpectedly, as it always does, in the pleasure of her search for a pattern and meaning in her life. As she told one of her favourite writers, Jonathan Cott: ‘There’s a wonderful line in a poem by Theodore Roethke which says “you learn by going where you have to go”. You can’t learn before you set out, can you? You go along the road and learn as you go.’” (Lawson, 2010, p 17).

Helen Goff’s real father was a failed Irish banker named Travers Goff (the name she later took as her own). Goff drank away his money and died in his forties, living a fantasy life in which he was always about to be rich, and bestowing on his daughter a lifetime fear of poverty. Helen spent much of her childhood in her own fantasy world, pretending that she was a mother hen sitting on her eggs. Apparently, when she grew up, they hatched. While a single woman in her forties, she later adopted a baby boy whom she named Camillus. Before adopting, she had the young child’s horoscope drawn up and compared to her own, “to ensure their relationship would be harmonious”. But her own relationship with her father continued to haunt her for many years. As she grew up, she talked to her dead father, finally coming to the resolution that she should comfort him in a way that he had always been unable to comfort either her or himself: “It’s all right, it’s all right, you don’t have to be so unhappy,” (Lawson, 2010, p.58).

Paradoxically, in Pamela Travers’ inner world, the rescuing figure of Mary Poppins is built largely on her real life Aunt Ellie, who took her away from her drunken father and suicidal mother at age twelve, and supported her into a career in acting. While Aunt Ellie was magical in her ability to supercede the disasters of the family, her magic was that she was practical and organised, not overwhelmed by her emotions. Mr Banks, who needs rescuing, is built on her real life father, and he was already a character whose tragedy was his inner conflict. He was a dreamer trying to be a bank manager, a fantasist trying to support a family. This inner conflict was the source of his unhappiness, and thus of his alcoholism. Aunt Ellie believed in little Helen’s dreams, and helped her become “Pamela Travers” – an actor who could take the practical steps to create a life that was true to those dreams. Aunt Ellie (Mary Poppins) helped her become the practical dreamer that her father (Mr Banks) had needed to be, in order to transcend his misery. Walt Disney would have certainly understood that part of the story – the need to combine Dreamer, Realist and even Critic to achieve creative success. NLP trainer Robert Dilts showed that the sequential cycling through these three roles was a key to Disney’s own creative genius (Dilts, 1991). There is no creativity without practical action to express it. That practical action was Mary Poppins’ gift.

Pamela Travers’ own belief was that fantasy was not merely for children, but an essential part of all life. She wrote Mary Poppins most of all to affirm this truth that happiness is a choice. “‘I wouldn’t say Mary Poppins is a children’s book for one moment. It’s certainly not written for children.’” She explained repeatedly later (Lawson, 2010, p 180). Also, “She claimed that fairy tales had ‘great things to teach us.’ They were ‘carriers of a very old teaching, a religion, a way of life, a chart for man’s journey…. Fairy tales, she thought, ‘live in us, endlessly growing, repeating their themes, ringing like great bells. If we forget them, still they are not lost. They go underground, like secret rivers, and emerge the brighter for their dark journey.’” (Lawson, 2010, p 220). She looked for them everywhere, from the Australian outback where she grew up, to the Navajo reservation in Arizona, where she lived in the mid-1940s, being given a secret Navajo name and initiated into various women’s ceremonies there.

In arranging to convert Mary Poppins to a movie format, Travers had long arguments with both Walt Disney and the writers, as the Movie “Saving Mr Banks” demonstrates. “They told her earnestly they understood the meaning of Mary Poppins. It was the miracle that lay behind everyday life. No, she replied crossly, she didn’t agree. There was no miracle behind everyday life. Everyday life was the miracle.”(Lawson, 2010, p 275). A student of Gurdjieff would understand immediately the difference. They did not. Finally, as she almost reluctantly accepted the Disney deal, Travers travelled to Kyoto to explore another layer of her spirituality, spending many months studying Buddhism in Kyoto, under the guidance of Zen teacher Ruth Sasaki, at Ryosen-an, a subtemple in the Zen centre of Daitoku-ji (大徳寺), and at Kōryū-ji (広隆寺), an esoteric Buddhist temple. Here she says she understood that the story of Mary Poppins had been “summoned” by some great need of hers (Lawson, 2010, p 290). “Pamela Travers once said: ‘A Zen priest with whom I studied [probably she means Ruth Sasaki] told me that Mary Poppins was full of Zen, that in every Zen story there is a single object which contains a secret. Sometimes the secret is revealed, sometimes not. It doesn’t matter, but it is always present.’” (Lawson, 2010, p 13).

Her next stop on her journey was training in the Black Forest with “psychoanalyst Professor Karlfried von Dürckheim, a former German professor of psychiatry whose so called ‘initiation therapy’ combined Christianity with Zen Buddhism.” Here she learned breathing exercises and meditation processes, and felt she finally began to understand her life story (Lawson, 2010, p 303). From here, in 1968, she travelled to Saanen in Switzerland, where she studied with the teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti, whom she considered a kind of “reincarnation of Gurdjieff”. He was the last of her famous teachers, and in a way the most profound. She travelled to study with him again at Brockwood Park in England in 1972. Writing at this time an essay about the myth of Sleeping Beauty, she related it to the spiritual search “What was it, she wanted to know, that at a certain moment fell asleep in everyone? Who lay hidden deep within us? Who would come at last to wake us—what aspect of ourselves?” (Lawson, 2010, p 303). For Travers, mythology was telling not just any metaphorical stories, but the most profound stories of all.

Pamela Travers understood that in her writing of Mary Poppins, she was evoking a “personification” of a playful saviour from within her, to heal that other inner personification, her depressed and suffering father. Mary Poppins was the hero that she needed: not an external guru but an internal personification of wise guidance and belief in life. In the 1970s she wrote many articles for the magazine Parabola, published in a book called “What the Bee Knows” – from an old British saying “Ask the wild bee, what the druids knew.” “Pamela wrote for Parabola on being one’s own hero, on the dreamtime, on a Sufi poet, on Zen koans, on going to a druids’ ceremony for All Souls Day, on Stonehenge, Silbury and Avebury, on the great goddess, the simpleton, and the youngest brother. Her densely packed essays, all in mythological code, allowed only glimpses of the intimate, personal life of Pamela. Now and again she talked of her childhood; another time, of her anticipation of death as she walked in the Brompton cemetery thinking of Camillus preparing to be a father.” (Lawson, 2010, p 356-357). She had an extraordinary ability to see the mythic content in the simplest story. One night, she said, she “lay awake thinking how little Bo Beep had lost her sheep, but when she left them alone, they all came home. You must, she thought, leave a problem alone. Don’t even look for its solution, and it will come home.” (Lawson, 2010, p 360). Her final Mary Poppins books, written in the 1980s, and dedicated to her grandson Bruno, are much more explicitly mythical, and focus on the eternal search for reconciliation.

In her book “What the Bee Knows”, Travers says “The Sphinx, the Pyramids, the stone temples are, all of them, ultimately, as flimsy as London Bridge; our cities but tents set up in the cosmos. We pass. But what the bee knows, the wisdom that sustains our passing life—however much we deny or ignore it—that for ever remains.” (Travers, 1989, p 89-90)

I was touched to read Travers’ story, because as a child I was touched by the teachings of Mary Poppins, however channelled through the Hollywood spectacle that Walt Disney created. Ever vivid in my memory is the song of the beggar woman who sits on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral and pleads with the little boy Michael to buy food and feed the wild birds that circle around her. Mary Poppins has told Michael about her previously, and he is moved to spend his money on the bird food.

“[Script writer] Robert Sherman himself once explained, “Songs have been written about a myriad of subjects. ‘Feed the Birds’ is the first song written about the merits of giving charity.” He went on to explain how the song came to be: “We seized on one incident, in Chapter 7 of Mary Poppins … the bird woman. And we realized that was the metaphor for why Mary came, to teach the children – and Mr. Banks – the value of charity. So we wrote the song and took it up to Walt’s office and played it and sang it for him. He leaned back in his chair, looking out the window, and he said: ‘That’s it, isn’t it? That’s what this is all about. This is the metaphor for the whole film.’ And that was the turning point in our lives.” (Jeffrey Sherman, 2012).

It was a turning point in my life too, and now I understand the depth of the inspiration that went into its creation. Pamela Travers liked the song, although the theme of charity in the original Bird Woman story is very understated like all her themes, but she insisted that it must be sung not by Dick van Dyck, who it was written for, but by Julie Andrews, who personifies the healing voice in the story. And so it is.

Bibliography

Early each day to the steps of Saint Paul’s
The little old bird woman comes
In her own special way to the people
She calls, “Come, buy my bags full of crumbs”

“Come feed the little birds, show them you care
And you’ll be glad if you do
Their young ones are hungry, their nests are so bare
All it takes is tuppence from you”

“Feed the birds, tuppence a bag
Tuppence, tuppence, tuppence a bag
Feed the birds”, that’s what she cries
While overhead, her birds fill the skies

All around the cathedral, the saints and apostles
Look down as she sells her wares
Although you can’t see it, you know they are smiling
Each time someone shows that he cares

Though her words are simple and few
“Listen, listen”, she’s calling to you
“Feed the birds, tuppence a bag
Tuppence, tuppence, tuppence a bag”

Though her words are simple and few
“Listen, listen”, she’s calling to you
“Feed the birds, tuppence a bag
Tuppence, tuppence, tuppence a bag”

Songwriters: Richard M. Sherman / Robert B. Sherman. Feed the Birds lyrics © Wonderland Music Co. Inc., Wonderland Music Company Inc.