P. L. Travers, author of “Mary Poppins” (post 7): Brief Biographical Notes on Her Name and Sense of Identity

She was born Helen Lyndon Goff in Australia in 1899 of parents originally from England. Her father, Travers Robert Goff, died when she was seven. She later used his first name for her pseudonym.

She changed her name about 1921, when her acting career required a stage name. She thought that “Pamela Travers” was a better name for an actress than “Lyndon Goff.” Thereafter, she almost never referred to herself by her actual birth name (1).

At fifty-one, Pamela “had absorbed all the theories of the pundits on what Mary Poppins actually meant. She began to mix Gurdjieffian ideas [see below] into Poppin’s adventures and personality; the nanny was more than ever a guru, or seer, and seeker of spiritual truths. Pamela thought Mary Poppins in the Park gave ‘certain clues’ that the other books did not. It was her favorite in the Poppins series as the book carried certain ideas she loved. Among them is the nature of identity, our real selves, and other selves. Pamela was fixated on shadows, doppelgangers and duality, partly because of her own complex identity, but also because the truth about her son and his twin was locked stubbornly in her mind. Mary Poppins in the Park is peppered with references to twins, triplets and shadows, and other selves of every kind (2, pp. 236-237).

“Gurdjieff taught that most humans do not possess a unified consciousness and thus live their lives in a state of hypnotic ‘waking sleep,’ but that it is possible to awaken to a higher state of consciousness and achieve full human potential” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Gurdjieff .

1. Paul Brody. The Real Life Mary Poppins: The Life and Times of P. L. Travers. BookCaps Study Guides, 2013.

2. Valerie Lawson. Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P. L. Travers [1999]. New York, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2013.

“Mary Poppins Comes Back” by P. L. Travers (post 6): Mary Poppins has a major memory gap for what has just happened in the chapter “Topsy-Turvy”

“What a funny family you’ve got,” Michael remarked to her [Mary Poppins], trying to make conversation.

Her head went up with a jerk.

“Funny? What do you mean, pray — funny?”

“Well — odd. Mr. Turvy turning Catherine wheels and standing on his head——”

Mary Poppins stared at him as though she could not believe her ears.

“Did I understand you to say that my cousin turned a Catherine wheel? And stood on——”

“But he did,” protested Michael nervously. “We saw him.”

“On his head? A relation of mine on his head? And turning about like a firework display?” Mary Poppins seemed hardly able to repeat the dreadful statement. She glared at Michael…

Michael leant toward Jane.

“But it was true — what I said. Wasn’t it?” he whispered.

“Jane shook her head and put her finger to her lip. She was staring at Mary Poppins’ hat. And presently, when she was sure that Mary Poppins was not looking, she pointed to the brim.

“There, gleaming on black shiny straw, was a scattering of crumbs, yellow crumbs from a sponge-cake, the kind of thing you would expect to find on the hat of a person who had stood on their head to have tea” (1, pp. 114-115).

If any reader had missed it or doubted it from previously noted examples, the author wants to make it very clear that, for Mary Poppins, memory gaps are typical. [Memory gaps are a cardinal symptom of multiple personality.]

But the question remains as to what memory gaps meant to the author. Did the author, herself, have memory gaps, and so saw them either as ordinary psychology or as something found in special people?

1. P. L. Travers. Mary Poppins Comes Back [1935]. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1997.

“Mary Poppins Comes Back” by P. L. Travers (post 5): Jane “felt astonished at the way she was behaving. It was as if there was another person inside her” (pp. 63-64).

“Mary Poppins Comes Back” by P. L. Travers (post 4): In first two chapters, Mary Poppins has two symptoms of multiple personality, Illeism and memory gaps

“…she looked at herself in the window…and she thought…she had never seen Mary Poppins look nicer…” (1, p. 32). This is Illeism (third-person self reference). In multiple personality, it happens when one personality refers to another personality as though they were two different persons. Search “Illeism” for past posts related to other writers.

In the first chapter, “The Kite,” Mary Poppins comes back, literally appearing from behind a cloud in the sky, attached to the string of a kite. However, when the children later ask her about this, she denies it happened, which is a cardinal symptom of multiple personality: a memory gap. Search “memory gaps.”

In the second chapter, there is a visit from the father’s former governess, Miss Andrew. Insulted, Mary Poppins forcefully sends Miss Andrew packing, but when confronted with that fact, which was witnessed, Mary Poppins has no memory of having done it.

In the first book, and continuing in this second book, Mary Poppins is portrayed as a person who usually refuses to explain herself. The reason for this has now become clear. It is not just arrogance, but a typical defense learned by persons with memory gaps, who often can’t explain themselves, because they don’t remember everything they say or do.

1. P. L. Travers. Mary Poppins Comes Back [1935]. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1997.

“Mary Poppins” by P. L. Travers (post 3): Why is “Poppins” plural?

I don’t know what the author said about her choice of the name “Poppins,” but it is rarely used as a family name in the real world. It looks to me like a description of how the character functions. She pops in at the beginning of the story, and if she pops out at the end of this novel, but pops in again for sequels, then she will be someone with a number of pop ins.

But why isn’t her name “Mary Poppin” (singular), and why does she refuse to give character references from previous jobs? Character references might have revealed that there was more than one person (or personality) going around that looks like her, which would be difficult to explain, especially in England, where there is a much greater belief in ghosts than in literary doubles and multiple personality.

Mirrors Containing Multitudes in “Mary Poppins” by P. L. Travers (post 2): “you begin to feel you are not yourself but a whole crowd of somebody else”

As previously discussed in past posts, persons with multiple personality may see more than one person when they look in a mirror. Persons with clinical, multiple personality disorder, may see specific alternate personalities, which may be distressing. In contrast, persons with milder, nonclinical, multiple personality trait, may find what they see in a mirror to be intriguing.

“…they knew that the thing Mary Poppins liked doing best of all was looking in shop windows. They knew, too, that while they saw toys and books and holly-boughs and plum cakes, Mary Poppins saw nothing but herself reflected there…(1, p. 163).

“…if you look long enough…you begin to feel you are not yourself but a whole crowd of somebody else. Mary Poppins sighed with pleasure…when she saw three of herself…She thought it was such a lovely sight that she wished there had been a dozen of her or even thirty. The more Mary Poppins the better” (1, p. 28).

Search “mirrors” and “containing multitudes” for previous discussions related to other writers.

1. P. L. Travers. Mary Poppins [1934]. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1997.

Jodi Picoult (post 4): “Writing is successful schizophrenia because I’m paid to hear voices in my head.” It's multiple personality trait, not schizophrenia

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/567354-writing-is-successful-schizophrenia-because-i-m-paid-to-hear-voices

People with multiple personality trait may hear the voices of one or more of their alternate personalities. When the voices discuss the story or issues of their novel, or speak to each other and provide dialogue, fiction writers call these alternate personalities “characters.”

People with schizophrenia are cognitively impaired. This is not the life of someone who is cognitively impaired: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodi_Picoult.

Nor is this an interview with a person who is cognitively impaired: https://www.c-span.org/video/?452813-1/depth-jodi-picoult.

“I Never Wrote for Children” (New York Times, 1978) by P. L. Travers (Pamela Lyndon Travers, 1899-1996), author of “Mary Poppins” (1934)

“…I hadn't any ideas, general or specific, on literature for children and I did not set out with aims or purposes. I couldn't say that anything I had done was intended or invented. It has simply happened…

“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 well of nothingness as the poetry, myth and legend that had absorbed me all my writing life…

“Moonstruck! One has to be moonstruck, which is to say, absorbed in…and in love with one's own material. Perhaps that is how it is done…

“Who, then, does write for children?…Nothing will persuade me, in spite of all his poetic protestations, that Lewis Carroll wrote his books for Alice, or, indeed, for any child. Alice was the occasion but not the cause of his long, involved, many‐leveled confabulations with the curious inner world of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Of course, when it was all over, when he had safely committed it to paper, he could afford a benignant smile and the assurance that it had been done for children. But do you really believe that?…

“But in the long run truth will out, as did when Beatrix Potter declared, ‘I write to please myself!’ — a statement as grand and absolute, in its own way, as Galileo's legendary ‘It moves, nevertheless.’ There is, if you notice, special flavor, a smack of inner self‐delight, about the things people write to please themselves…”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatrix_Potter 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_yet_it_moves#:~:text=%22And%20yet%20it%20moves%22%20or,the%20Sun%2C%20rather%20than%20the

https://www.nytimes.com/1978/07/02/archives/i-never-wrote-for-children.html.

“Donald Trump Is the Best Ever President in the History of the Cosmos!” by Frank Bruni in today’s New York Times: “His strategy is fiction. His strategy is lies.”

My past posts on President Trump were prompted by his history of using pseudonyms—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudonyms_of_Donald_Trump. Pseudonyms are a recurrent topic in my discussion of the multiple personality trait of fiction writers, because, in multiple personality, the names of alternate personalities are pseudonyms. Search “pseudonyms.”

Another recurrent topic in my discussion of multiple personality in fiction writers is lying, because some people with multiple personality have a history, even since childhood (when multiple personality starts) of being considered liars. Search “lying” to see past posts on fiction writers, multiple personality, and lying.

I liked today’s essay by New York Times columnist, Frank Bruni, because he combines the two issues of fiction and lying: “His strategy is fiction. His strategy is lies.” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/25/opinion/sunday/trump-lies.html.

It is an old joke among fiction writers that they are professional liars. However, for the president of the United States to be a professional liar is no joke. But what is it?

Other than pseudonyms, lying, unpredictability, and self-contradiction, there is Trump’s alternating personal appearance. One day he is gray; the next day he is blond; the next day he is gray; the next day he is blond. You don’t see something like that with most men. Is he bisexual, transgender, or multiple personality? Is it a conscious manipulation of his image for political purposes? Or a quirk of his hair stylist?

Since not all professional liars, people who use pseudonyms, or people who alter their appearance have multiple personality, I am still undecided about Trump, but multiple personality should be in the differential diagnosis (the list of diagnoses under consideration).

Interviewing novelists on the art of fiction: When novelists say they converse with characters, why do interviewers rarely pursue the issue?

In past posts, I have criticized interviewers as having no curiosity or being incompetent. But another possibility is that interviewers are afraid.

There is an old joke that neurotics build castles in the air, while psychotics live in them (and psychiatrists collect the rent). The interviewer may feel that a novelist’s conversing with characters as though they were real people is psychotic. And the interviewer may be afraid to challenge a person who may be psychotic.

Why, then, do novelists volunteer such information about their creative process? Novelists, themselves, may wonder if they are crazy. So if they say such things in published interviews, but nobody accuses them of being crazy, they feel reassured.

Of course, I see the fiction writer’s characters who converse with them as being equivalent to alternate personalities, and I don’t see multiple personality trait as psychotic—besides, most psychotics are not violent—so I would not be afraid of pursuing the issue.

from April 5, 2014

Lewis Carroll, Stephen King, Toni Morrison use Trance, Self-Hypnosis, Altered State of Consciousness to Contact their Characters

In his Preface to Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, Lewis Carroll explains that when he writes, he is able to contact his characters by entering either 1. an “eerie” state “in which, while conscious of actual surroundings, he is also conscious of the presence” of his characters, or 2. “a form of trance, in which, while unconscious of actual surroundings” he is conscious of his characters.

Other fiction writers use other terms. Stephen King calls it “autohypnosis.” Toni Morrison has no particular term for it, but says that all writers have a ritual to alter their consciousness as their first step in getting ready to write. (Search “three things” to find the September 17, 2013 post in this blog, regarding King and Morrison.)

What are Carroll, King, Morrison, and other fiction writers doing? Why are they, by whatever name, using self-hypnosis to contact their characters? The explanation is on page 222 of Frank W. Putnam’s Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder (New York, Guilford Press, 1989):

“The principal advantage of hypnosis in diagnosis is that it diminishes the host personality’s suppression of other [personalities] and thereby allows [other personalities] to emerge who might otherwise be unable to break through the host’s resistance.” [Search “host personality” in this blog for my post on Henry James and the concept of host personality.]

In other words, self-hypnosis is used to access characters in the same way that hypnosis is used to access alternate personalities, because characters are alternate personalities, and novelists have a literary form of multiple personality.

Submit Essays: If your thoughtful response to any post here would require more than a concise question or brief comment, submit an essay for publication

Nobel Prize-winning Novelists' Private Multiple-Personality Thoughts, Unknown to Stockholm

When Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, in her own mind, she thought of herself as Chloe Wofford, the name by which her family knew her (see past post). Is she the only Nobel Prize winner to have such peculiar private thoughts about personal identity? No. John Steinbeck is another example:

from May 22, 2019

John Steinbeck (post 2): “I confuse pretty easily,” he explains in a personal letter, so he had to “split” himself into two or three “entities” or “units”

In the previous post, I quoted Steinbeck from an interview, after he won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, in which he insisted that he was a “writer,” not an “author.” Subsequently, in a personal letter to his book editor, he elaborated on his sense of identity:

“I confuse pretty easily I guess, although the Stockholm experience is capable of confusing anyone…When it comes right down to it, nothing has changed. The English sentence is just as difficult to write as it ever was. I guess a whole lifetime of direction can’t be changed by one experience.

“But I have had to make a couple of drastic changes in the time past. Once I thought I could successfully divorce everything about myself from my work, I mean as far as the reader was concerned. I discovered that this, while it could be done if one had only written under a pseudonym, was impossible. So I had to split in two and establish two entities—one a public property and a trade mark. Behind that I could go on living a private life [see past posts on Henry James’s short story, “The Private Life”] just so long as I didn’t allow the two to mix. Now perhaps there must be three—the Nobel person, the trade mark and the private person. I don’t know how many of these splits are possible. As far as I am concerned the only important unit is the private one because out of that work comes and work is to me still not only the most important thing but the only important thing” (1, p. 922).

Why didn’t he just say that he liked his privacy? Because that wouldn’t convey what he meant, which was that he had more than one personality, and he didn’t want the public (which was to be dealt with by his host personalities) to interfere with his writer personality, which he preferred to keep private.

Why did he talk in terms of “entities” and “units” rather than personalities? Either he didn’t think of it as multiple personality, per se, or he thought it prudent to use euphemisms when discussing this matter with his editor.

1. Jackson J. Benson. John Steinbeck, Writer [1984]. New York, Penguin Books, 1990.

“Multiple personality trait” champions the sanity of fiction writers, even though fiction writers’ private thoughts are weird by the standards of most people

In a post yesterday, I made the point that my literary theory, as expressed in this blog, does not see fiction writers as crazy, but as manifesting “multiple personality trait,” which is found in only a minority of the public, but is normal.

But without my theory, I think that most people would question the sanity of fiction writers, if they knew how fiction writers were actually thinking; for example, as expressed by Toni Morrison in quotations found in past posts, in which she treats her characters as if they were real people—actually, “more real than real”—who allegedly tell her things that she does not know, and says it was Chloe Wofford (the name by which her family knows her), not Toni Morrison (only a nickname), who collected the Nobel Prize in 1993.

from October 26, 2013
Toni Morrison and The Novelist’s Characters

Toni Morrison: Conversations (Edited by Carolyn C. Danard, 2008) was also my source for the post, “Who Wrote Toni Morrison’s Jazz.” Morrison makes various remarks in these interviews that are relevant to this blog, but I prefer to limit myself to passages which lend themselves to quotation—so Morrison can speak for herself—which leaves only the following, from a 1985 interview:

“[Sula] came as many characters do—all of them don’t—rather full-fleshed and complete almost immediately, including her name. I felt this enormous intimacy. I mean I knew exactly who she was, but I had trouble trying to make her…into the kind of person that would upset everybody…And, by the time I finished the book, Sula, I missed her. I know the feeling of missing characters who are in fact, by that time, much more real than real people” (p. 26).

“…the people I would call on to help me to verify some phrase or some word or something would be the people in the book. I mean I would just conjure them up and ask them, you know, about one thing or another. And they are usually very cooperative if they are fully realized and if you know their name. And if you don’t know their names, they don’t talk much” (p. 27).

Thus, for Toni Morrison (and perhaps most other novelists):

1. many characters come rather complete, almost immediately, with a feeling of intimacy,

2. by the time the book ends, characters may be much more real than real people,

3. characters would help Morrison with things that she didn’t know or wasn’t sure about,

4. but if you don’t know their names, characters don’t talk much.

Comments:

1. Novelists don’t consciously construct many of their characters. They spring fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus. 

2. I’m not sure what it means for characters to be “much more real than real people,” perhaps only that while the novelist is immersed in writing the novel, her focus on everything else is reduced, but another possibility is that the world of the novel is absolutely more real to the novelist than real life.

3. To the novelist, characters are like autonomous people, with minds of their own.

4. The fourth point is the same as my clinical experience when I would try to talk to my patients’ alternate personalities. Knowing the name of the personality was often the key.

Who went to Stockholm in 1993 and got the Nobel Prize in Literature?: In a 1994 interview, Toni Morrison says it was Chloe Wofford

Q: It must have been fulfilling, in 1970, to see your name on the cover of “The Bluest Eye.”

A: I was upset. They had the wrong name: Toni Morrison. My name is Chloe Wofford. Toni’s a nickname.

Q: Didn’t you know your publisher, Holt, was going to use the name?

A: Well, I sort of knew it was going to happen. I was in a daze. I sent it in that way because the editor knew me as Toni Morrison.

Q: So you achieved fame misnamed?

A: Tell me about it! I write all the time about being misnamed. How you got your name is very special. My mother, my sister, all my family call me Chloe. It was Chloe, by the way, who went to Stockholm last year to get the Nobel Prize.

https://www.nytimes.com/1994/09/11/magazine/chloe-wofford-talks-about-toni-morrison.html

My concept of “multiple personality trait” expands the boundaries of Normal Psychology

I have wondered why, if what I have been documenting here about fiction writers for the last seven years is true, they have not rushed to my defense? They should.

In my view, my concept of multiple personality trait expands the boundaries of normal psychology. But fiction writers may think, or fear others may think, that I’m calling them crazy, since there is a long tradition of linking creativity with mental illness:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creativity_and_mental_health.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-real-link-between-creativity-and-mental-illness/.

https://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Fink-et-al.-2013.pdf.

I'm not calling fiction writers crazy. Just the opposite.

Search “Aldous Huxley” and “Brave New World” here regarding the multiple-personality issues underlying author, novel, and new 2020 TV series

from April 27, 2016

The title page of “Autobiography of Mark Twain” omits Samuel Clemens, because Twain was an alternate personality and not just a pseudonym

If the name “Samuel Clemens” had been unknown to the public, then it might have made sense to omit it from the title page of his autobiography. But his real name was well known, and he could very easily have used both names, if the title page had said, “Autobiography of Mark Twain by Samuel Clemens.” So why did he omit his real name from the title page of an autobiography, a nonfiction book?

As seen in recent posts on Charles Hamilton’s autobiography, “The Autobiography of Frank Richards,” the use of an author’s pseudonym instead of his real name in the title of his autobiography implies that the pseudonym was the name of an alternate personality.

I would also relate the title page of Clemens’s autobiography to Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “The Purloined Letter” (1844), in which a letter is hidden in plain sight. The title page of Clemens’s autobiography is like a letter to the public about his multiple personality, hidden in plain sight.

Am I the only one to see a connection between Samuel Clemens and Edgar Allan Poe? Apparently not, as Alan Gribben makes clear in an essay, which includes the following:

“Several other parallels link the psychological patterns of Poe and Twain even more closely. As Patrick F. Quinn pointed out thirty years ago, “the phenomenon of the Doppelganger is perhaps the most characteristic and persistent of Poe’s obsessive fantasies,” so much so that, “in a real sense, Poe’s heroes are all doubles, one of another. “Unquestionably Poe’s “William Wilson” (1839), “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), “Ligeia” (1845), and several other tales with double motifs would have appealed to Twain, a tireless chronicler of twins, disguises, exchanged roles, and contrasting personalities. The mistakenly switched Edward Tudor and Tom Canty in The Prince and the Pauper (1881), Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer in Huckleberry Finn, Hank Morgan and the King (sold as slaves) in A Connecticut Yankee, and Thomas a Beckett Driscoll and Valet de Chambre in Pudd‘nhead Wilson (1894) represent only the best known of Twain’s many explorations of alter ego variations. Twain’s modern biographers, like Poe’s, have discovered a divided, tormented personality — in Twain’s case, partly suggested by his adoption of a nom de plume and his affection for pseudonyms (in 1882, for instance, returning to the Mississippi River to gather literary material, he registered at hotels as “Mr. C. L. Samuels”). Mysterious subterfuges involving names and identities had tremendous allure for the imaginations of both writers” (1).

In short, the title page of “Autobiography of Mark Twain” treats Twain like a person in his own right, which is how alternate personalities see themselves. He used that title page to reveal his multiple personality. But his message was hidden in plain sight. Or, as he was wont to say, nobody believed him when he told the truth.

1. Alan Gribben, “ ‘That Pair of Spiritual Derelicts’: The Poe-Twain Relationship,” Poe Studies, December 1985, Vol. XVIII, No. 2, 18:17-20 http://www.eapoe.org/pstudies/ps1980/p1985201.htm

Note: This is my fifteenth post on Samuel Clemens. Search “Mark Twain” to read the previous ones.

“Billy Bunter of Greyfriars School” by Charles Hamilton writing as Frank Richards (post 8): Liars, lying, and double consciousness in multiple personality

Based on his use of twenty-eight pseudonyms, I have previously speculated that Charles Hamilton had multiple personality, but, until now, I had never read any of the stories for which he was most famous, those about Billy Bunter of Greyfriars School.

One of Billy Bunter’s chief characteristics is his “comically transparent untruthfulness” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Bunter. He is seen by his schoolmates as being an habitual liar.

His lying is “comically transparent,” because he will often show knowledge of things about which he claims to have had no involvement. For example, he claims never to have gone to the room of his classmate Coker and stolen food that had been sent to Coker by a relative. “I—I wouldn’t ! [Bunter, who is a fat glutton, obviously would steal food.] You can ask Snoop, sir ! He knows—I gave him some of the apples…It—it’s all a mistake, sir,” groaned Bunter. “If—if you won’t let me be run in this time, sir, I’ll never do it again, and I never did it at all, sir. I—I think very likely Coker ate it and forgot about it” (1, p. 131).

The joke is that Bunter, honestly, both knows and doesn’t know what he did, something that is possible only for a person with multiple personality. A good term for both knowing and not knowing would be “double consciousness,” a nineteenth century synonym for multiple personality.

Double Consciousness: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ug03/souls/brucepg.html

Note: If this is one of those links that seems to expire, search "double consciousness" in this blog for past posts in which I have quoted from it at length.

1. Frank Richards. Billy Bunter of Greyfriars School. London, Hawk Books, 1991.