The New One

 

My well-worn copy of Mary Poppins and
Mary Poppins Comes Back

I’d better hurry up and write about my granddaughter before she forgets her story!

Since she was a few weeks old, C. has been whispering to the world as if she were confiding great wisdom. Speaking sotto voce in a just-between-us manner, C. seems to be sharing the secrets of the universe with anyone who will listen. She reminds me of Annabel.

Annabel was the youngest of the Banks children in the “Mary Poppins” books. Readers will have known her only as a baby. She has been mentioned in a few scholarly essays. Some critics have noted that her character is profound while others consider her trite. I don’t care either way.

From the first time I read about Annabel, I was hooked.   

Inside cover of Mary Poppins

The 1964 Disney film is familiar to millions who may not realize that it is based on a book by an English writer named P. L. Travers. Onscreen, the main characters are Jane and Michael Banks, their parents, and Mary Poppins.

If you’ve watched the film but never read the book, you would not know about the twins, John and Barbara. The truth is that they are rather colorless and it is understandable that Disney did not include them.

Annabel is different. She came along in Travers’ sequel, Mary Poppins Comes Back, published in 1935. This book opens with the unsupervised Banks children flying a kite in the park. The kite becomes lost in a cloud and won’t let itself be reeled in until bystanders gather to pull as hard as they can on the string. 

Suddenly, an object bursts from the cloud and slowly descends to earth as the children make out a familiar shape. 

“Ah!” Jane gave a shout of triumph. “It is she!”

And so it is. Mary Poppins has returned and will stay till the chain on her necklace breaks, she says.

Halfway through her second stay, Mary Poppins is handed an infant, Annabel, immediately after she is born to Mrs. Banks.

Presiding over Annabel in the children’s nursery, Mary Poppins is joined periodically by an impertinent starling who lives on top of the chimney and joyfully regards the infant as one of his own fledglings. One day the starling brings along a young bird, who asks where Annabel came from.

 

First pages of "The New One," chapter about Annabel

In response, Annabel gestures with her hands—just like my granddaughter—and explains to the starlings: 

"I came from the Dark where all things have their beginning . . . I come from     the sea and its tides . . . I come from the sun and its brightness . . . Slowly I moved at first . . . always sleeping and dreaming. I remembered all I had been and I thought of all I shall be."

Later, when Jane and Michael and the twins crowd around Annabel, they ask where she came from. Happily, Annabel embarks on her story: “I came from the Dark—” But Jane interrupts.

“Such funny little sounds! I wish she could talk and tell us.” Annabel kicks her legs and starts to cry. After all, she is telling them where she came from. 

My granddaughter manages to captivate every person who leans over and smiles at her. We listen raptly although we—grown, fumbling humans—do not understand what she is telling us. Whatever it may be, she expresses a certain urgency in sharing her thoughts. 

Perhaps, like Annabel, she is saying: “I heard the stars singing as I came and felt warm wings about me.” But she will not recall her journey forever, as the starling realizes one day. With a tear in his eye, he exclaims to Mary Poppins:

“She’s forgotten it all. I knew she would. But, ah, my dear, what a pity!”

P. L. Travers' 1996 obituary, New York Times

            During the 1980s, as she entered her own 80s, the famously private Travers sat down to discuss the origin of Mary Poppins. The nanny was not a character she invented, Travers insisted; Mary Poppins grew out of the author’s longstanding interest in myths, fables, and rites of passage. 

“I think if she comes from anywhere that has a name, it is out of myth,” she told the Paris Review in 1982.

And myth has been my study and joy ever since—oh, the age, I would think, of three. I’ve studied it all my life. No culture can satisfactorily move along its forward course without its myths, which are its teachings, its fundamental dealing with the truth of things, and the one reality that underlies everything.   

In a 1988 essay, Travers described Annabel’s story perfectly: “There are worlds beyond worlds and times beyond times, all of them true, all of them real, and all of them (as children know) penetrating each other.”     

Indeed, the “Mary Poppins” books delve deep into symbols, mysticism, and transcendence. We just don’t realize it because Travers was such a good storyteller. I hope my granddaughter will be one, too.

Many dissertations and books offer
analyses of the Mary Poppins books.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2023/01/the-new-one.html?m=1

The Little House at Melrose

Wedged between two buildings at the Melrose station
along the Metro North line to North White Plains

I have traveled along this train route thousands of times and never noticed this little pink house.  It reminded me, of course, of the book called The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton, published in 1942.  

The Little House is a beloved children's classic.  The story goes that the house was built around 1900 far out in the countryside.  Over the years, however, the city encroached with roads, shops, and skyscrapers. 

By 1940, the house was stuck between two tall buildings and coated with soot.  One day, the great-great-granddaughter of the original owner of the house spotted it and decided to move it back where it came from. 

The house was loaded onto a flatbed and driven far from the city.  It ended up perched happily on a hill in the country.

Now, once more it was surrounded by grass and trees, with no noise except for the birds singing.  Once again, the little house could see the stars shining at night.

Who knows the story of the little house at the Melrose station?

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2019/06/the-little-house-at-melrose.html?m=1

Jane Langton in Time & Place

The Diamond in the Window by Jane Langton
Original cover; drawing by Erik Blegvad
(1962)

My mother told me that it wasn’t fair to other children to withdraw the same two library books again and again.  Since I couldn’t kick the habit, they were finally given to me as a birthday present. 

The Diamond in the Window was published in 1962 and The Swing in the Summerhouse in 1967.  I discovered them in 1970.  Across five decades, I can easily recall entire paragraphs; descriptions, dialogue, and detailed drawings. 

The author, Jane Langton, had studied astronomy at Wellesley and the University of Michigan, and held a master’s degree in art history.  She lived in Lincoln, Mass., with her husband and three sons, according to the dust jacket. 

Her books evoked the way that kids can’t wait to grow up, their impatience with unreasonable adults, the pain of unrequited crushes, and the desire to be popular.  But she stayed away from the trite formulas of adolescent fiction.

Instead, Langton wrote beautiful sentences that captured time and place and the feelings that went with them:  Eleanor suddenly felt overcome by the melancholy of the late summer day and the dusty untidy woods.  

Ingeniously, she wove those feelings together with grand ideas about love, truth, good and evil.  The books contained these and many similar quotations:

·       Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul!  (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.)

·       Lives of great men all remind us, we can make our lives sublime . . . (R.W. Emerson)

·       Behold a universe in which man is but a grain of sand . . . (Henry David Thoreau)

Eleanor and Edward Hall in the
front hall of their house in Concord, Mass.
(drawing by Erik Blegvad)

As The Diamond in the Window opens, young Edward and Eleanor Hall are living in a dilapidated Victorian house in Concord, Mass., with their Aunt Lily and Uncle Freddy.  The children’s parents died years earlier in a car accident.  Aunt Lily is scrambling to make money to pay off the mortgage.  Uncle Freddy, once a world renowned scholar of Emerson and Thoreau, is now daft and unhelpful. 

One day, standing at the edge of a brook in a field across from their house, Eleanor and Edward spot a keyhole window that they’ve never noticed before.  When they finally locate it, in a secret room at the very top of the house, they are shocked to find twin beds, children’s toys, and a poem that has been etched into the window with a large piece of glass which now forms its centerpiece.     

The children demand answers, so Aunt Lily sits down with them on a faded velvet sofa and opens an old photograph album.  She sighs and tells them about their “Aunt Nora” and “Uncle Ned,” Lily’s youngest siblings; lost children who once slept in the attic room.

Then she tells them about Prince Krishna, a royal but humble man, who came from India to Concord to study with then-brilliant Uncle Freddy.  From the way Aunt Lily tells the story, it is clear that she and Krishna were in love.

Krishna loved Ned and Nora, too, and he created a series of dream adventures for them on which they embarked each night.  The dreams took shape as a hunt for treasures that ranged from diamonds and pearls to a beloved, if neglected, rag doll.  The poem etched on the window, cryptic and full of philosophical references, contained clues. 

Life went along happily until suddenly, one night, the children disappeared.  A nationwide hunt ensued, but they could not be found.  Eventually Prince Krishna disappeared, too.  Still, as the money dwindled and Uncle Freddy deteriorated, Aunt Lily held out hope that Krishna and the children would someday reappear.

 In one dream adventure, Eleanor and Edward find themselves
trapped inside a Chambered Nautilus shell. 
(Illustration by Erik Blegvad)

The Diamond in the Window and The Swing in the Summerhouse belong to a literary genre called “magical realism,” which blends realistic narrative elements with magic and fantasy.  As Eleanor and Edward set forth after Ned and Nora, and Aunt Lily schemes to save the house while Uncle Freddy blithely decides to move into a hollow tree in the front yard, the ordinary meets the extraordinary.  

That is because the books are infused with Transcendentalism, a philosophy embraced by Emerson, Thoreau and other New England intellectuals.  Transcendental is defined as “beyond ordinary experience, thought or belief.”  The Transcendentalists sought to understand themselves through the Oversoul, a force that connects all living things.

Connectivity between humans and nature echoes through Langton’s writing.

Several years ago I emailed the author, just to tell her how much I loved her books.  She was then about 90 years old, and replied that she was working on a picture book about Charles Darwin and earthworms.  

Evidently the worms fascinated Darwin.  He could not bear to dissect them, but conducted hundreds of experiments testing their intelligence, orderliness, sensitivity to noise, and food preferences. 

“His experiments with worms will be a chance for someone, perhaps me, to draw lots of wriggly pictures,” Langton explained.

I must have told her about living in different parts of the country and having recently made the leap to Atlanta after three years in rural Virginia.

“Good for getting out of Virginia,” she wrote.  “I escaped from Delaware.  I guess we all have to bust out of some sort of cocoon.”

Jane Langton (1922-2018)

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2019/02/remembering-jane-langton.html?m=1