The+Life+and+Death+of+P.L.+Travers

 Author: Margalit Fox Published: Thursday, April 25, 1996**
 * Title: [|P. L. Travers, Creator of the Magical and Beloved Nanny Mary Poppins, Is Dead at 96]

P. L. Travers, who insisted she had never meant to write for children when the magical nanny Mary Poppins leaped from her pen, died on Tuesday at her home in London. She was 96.

Miss Travers, a native of Australia who had lived in England since she was a young woman, had been at various times in her life a poet, journalist, essayist, film and theater critic, dancer, Shakespearean actress and scholar of folklore and myth.

But she became renowned for "Mary Poppins," which, if not consciously intended for children, has been devoured by generations of them since its publication in 1934. The book, which has sold millions of copies and has been translated into more than 20 languages, has inspired critical studies, a string of sequels and the 1964 Walt Disney movie musical, starring Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke. "I think the idea of Mary Poppins has been blowing in and out of me, like a curtain at a window, all my life," Miss Travers said in 1964. The critic Richard Lingeman wrote that Miss Travers "has succeeded in creating a timeless world inhabited by real people and complete unto itself -- an immortal world that is summoned into being, unchanged whenever one opens a book."

A prolific writer who was still publishing well into her 80's, Miss Travers employed a precise, lyrical prose. Her entire body of work, whether for children or adults, is linked by a deep concern with myth and mysticism, a belief in the interconnectedness of human experience, and a ceaseless quest for meaning. "Her great thing was E. M. Forster's wonderful phrase 'Only connect,' " Jenny Koralek, a children's writer and longtime friend, said by telephone from London yesterday. "That is the key to her entirely: a wonderful ranging mind and heart, putting together the pieces of life."

A gracious observer of the English proprieties who at the same time did not suffer fools gladly, Miss Travers had deep blue eyes, high cheekbones and, as a young woman, a cap of curly dark gold hair. Her likeness appears once, hidden in Mary Shepard's illustrations, in each of the many Mary Poppins books.

Miss Travers, who demonstrated the gravest consideration for children but often displayed a tart impatience with her adult interrogators, was taciturn to the point of secrecy about the details of her personal life. Partly to render herself anonymous, she signed her work only with her initials instead of the name -- Pamela Lyndon Travers -- that she adopted when she went on the stage as a young woman.

As a result of her fierce privacy, concrete information about Miss Travers's life is often elusive. She frequently supplied interviewers with different renditions of events large and small, as if these variant accounts had arisen from the oral tradition that so often inspired her writing.

It is known that she was born Helen Lyndon Goff in Maryborough, Queensland, Australia, on Aug. 9, 1899, the eldest of three daughters of Robert and Margaret Goff. Her father was a sugar planter, and Miss Travers recalled growing up near the Great Barrier Reef in a tropical world of sugar cane, shells and mangoes. Miss Travers's Irish father and her mother, an Australian of Scottish and Irish descent, infused the household with the mystery and melancholy of the literary traditions of the British Isles.

"Many a phrase, as ordinary to me then as the daily porridge, began its life, as I later learned, as a quotation from a poem or snatch from a ballad," she once said. A voracious reader, Miss Travers began writing stories as a young child. Her principal influences, she later said, were fairy tales and the Bible. A formative event in Miss Travers's childhood was the death of her father when she was 7. She moved with her mother and sisters to New South Wales to live with a great-aunt, who years later would become the title character in Miss Travers's 1941 book, "Aunt Sass."

Throughout her writing life, Miss Travers retained the extraordinary ability to tap into the private, wistful anguish of childhood, and often said that she viewed the passage from childhood to adulthood as a single unbroken thread. "The ideas I had then move about in me now," she once said, adding elsewhere that "sorrow lies like a heartbeat behind everything I have written."

Miss Travers began her acting career at 10, when she was cast in a professional production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." As a teen-ager, she toured Australia with a Shakespearean company. She also worked as a dancer and journalist, and began publishing poetry. Sometime during this period she adopted the professional name Pamela Travers.

In 1924 Miss Travers left Australia for England, arriving with five pounds in her pocket. She soon began contributing poems to The Irish Statesman, a literary weekly whose editor, George William Russell, was the poet A. E. Through A. E., who became a mentor and lifelong friend, and through W. B. Yeats, to whom he introduced her, Miss Travers began to pursue the deep interest in Celtic folklore and Eastern mysticism that is palpable in all her subsequent work. Miss Travers also contributed film and theater criticism to the weekly The New English.

In 1934 Mary Poppins blew into Miss Travers's life and remained long enough to be captured on paper. Miss Travers was living in Sussex, recuperating from an illness in a 900-year-old thatched cottage mentioned in the Domesday Book. One day she found herself with two bored visiting children to entertain. She came up with a story about a raven-haired, rosy-cheeked governess who arrives with her carpetbag and parrot-headed umbrella at 17 Cherry Tree Lane to care for Jane and Michael Banks and their siblings. When Mary Poppins wasn't busy ruling the nursery with a will of iron, or admiring her own reflection in a shop window, she worked fabulous deeds: sliding up banisters, presiding at tea parties held on the ceiling, pasting gold paper stars in the heavens at night.

Encouraged by friends, Miss Travers published "Mary Poppins," which was an immediate critical success. A sequel, "Mary Poppins Comes Back," appeared the following year. It was followed by "Mary Poppins Opens the Door" (1943), "Mary Poppins in the Park" (1952), "Mary Poppins From A to Z" (1962), "Mary Poppins in Cherry Tree Lane" (1982) and "Mary Poppins and the House Next Door (1988). "Nothing I had written before 'Mary Poppins' had anything to do with children, and I have always assumed, when I thought about it at all, that she had come out of the same wall of nothingness as the poetry, myth and legend that had absorbed me all my writing life," she wrote in 1978.

Although the Mary Poppins books were set permanently in the London of the 1930's, the Disney film was transposed to Edwardian times at Miss Travers's suggestion to give it a period sensibility. But despite her collaboration, Miss Travers expressed dissatisfaction with the finished product."I think I was disturbed at seeing it so externalized, so oversimplified, so generalized," she said in a 1967 interview. "I think that 'Mary Poppins' needs a subtle reader, in many respects, to grasp all its implications, and I understand that these cannot be translated in terms of the film."

After the outbreak of World War II, Miss Travers spent the years from 1940 to 1945 in the United States. Her experience became the basis for her 1941 book "I Go by Sea, I Go by Land," the fictional diary of an 11-year-old girl who, like Miss Travers, was evacuated from England. The author would later return to the United States as a writer in residence at Radcliffe College in 1965 and at Smith College the following year.

In the decades after the war, Miss Travers continued to write. From 1976 on she was a consulting editor of the New York-based journal Parabola, which is devoted to the scholarly exploration of myth and tradition. Ms. Travers's books during these years include "Friend Monkey," a 1971 retelling of the Hindu myth of the monkey lord Hanuman, a 1973 biography of the Russian mystic G. I. Gurdjieff, "About the Sleeping Beauty" (1975), a critical exploration of the fairy tale, and "What the Bee Knows" (1989), a collection of her Parabola pieces.

Miss Travers became the subject of public controversy in the early 1980's after "Mary Poppins" was banned from the San Francisco Public Library because of concerns over its treatment of members of minority groups. Of particular concern was the chapter entitled "Bad Tuesday," in which Mary Poppins and her charges travel to exotic corners of the world, meeting, among other characters, a black woman on a South Sea island who holds a "pickaninny" on her lap, speaks in an American Southern dialect and offers everyone watermelon.

She rewrote the chapter for the 1981 revised edition of the book, substituting exotic animals for the offending ethnic characters. But in her public comments about making the revisions, she adopted a somewhat defensive tone. "I have done so not as an apology for anything I have written," she said. "The reason is much more simple: I do not wish to see Mary Poppins tucked away in a closet."

In recent years, as her health began to decline, Miss Travers was confined increasingly to her home, a white Georgian town house with a bright pink front door in London's Chelsea section. Although she had previously stated that she looked forward to her old age, when she could sit in her rocking chair knowing all the answers, she grew incensed when a reporter for The New York Times asked her about it in a 1994 interview. "But here I am sitting in my chair, and I don't think I'm going to know all the answers," she shouted. "I'm human."

Miss Travers, who never married, is survived by an adopted son, Camillus Travers of London, and three grandchildren