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shewhomust) wrote2014-01-01 12:12 pm
shewhomust) wrote2014-01-01 12:12 pm
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Something completely different
Chapter One of Mary Poppins ends with the household's reactions to the arrival of Mary Poppins: each for their own reason is glad of it. The last words of the chapter express a recurring theme: "But nobody ever knew what Mary Poppins felt about it, for Mary Poppins never told anybody anything..."
So I was surprised at the extent to which Chapter Two is told from Mary's point of view; inevitably, since the children are completely absent from this chapter, but that too was a surprise. I was surprised, too, that it is permissible to speak simply of 'Mary', this being how she is addressed by her friends. Clearly I had forgotten much about Mary Poppins's Day Out (every second Thursday, one till six, as given by the best people). My clearest memories of it, before this re-read, came from the film, and while those memories too may be inaccurate (is it as large a part of the film as I think?) they are vivid. I wonder whether they have blotted out the written version?
Like the most clichéd depiction of a domestic servant, Mary Poppins spends her afternoon off with her gentleman friend, the Match Man. His name is Bert (Herbert Alfred for Sundays: I was about to say that these are now irredeemably comic names, but fashions change - perhaps they are due for a come back?) but the narrative always refers to him as 'the Match Man'. He is also a pavement artist, and in fact only sells matches when it is too wet for his pictures. Am I right in seeing both of these occupations as barely a step above begging, the equivalent of selling The Big Issue? It wouldn't be hard to construct a narrative in which Bert is a shell-shocked veteran of the war, one of those who never quite managed the return to civilian life, and who is treated more gently on account of it; but Travers doesn't do it. Mary is socially inferior to the Banks family, and Bert in turn is Mary's social inferior; referring to him by his profession ensures we don't forget it.
What's more, on this particular Day Out, he has only earned two pennies, which is not enough to take his girlfriend out to tea (with raspberry-jam-cakes, which sound good, whatever they are). But it is Bert, not Mary, who comes up with a solution, that they should spend their afternoon in his picture, and he, not Mary, who makes it work, who takes her hands and draws her into the picture (yes, the verb used is 'drew' - is the pun deliberate?). I was going to argue that the man in the relationship must be allowed to take the lead, but on reflection, there may be a larger pattern: magical things happen wherever Mary goes, but she doesn't initiate them, and often seems quite put out by them ("Oh, Uncle Albert - not again? It's not your birthday, is it?" But I anticipate).
Reading the descriptions of Bert's pictures, I feel some sympathy for Walt Disney. With the exception of the "picture of two Bananas, an Apple and a head of Queen Elizabeth" (the first Queen Elizabeth, of course, though I have to pummel my mental image every time) on which Bert is working when Mary arrives, they are highly coloured landscapes which must have seemed overdue for the Disney treatment: "a mountain covered with snow and its slopes simply littered with grasshopers sitting on gigantic roses" is just waiting for the grasshoppers to go into their cheerful song and dance routine. How was Walt to know that this wasn't actually what Miss Travers wanted?
She may satirise the social pretensions of Mrs Banks, boasting of her children's nurse who is so fashionable that she doesn't believe in giving references, and of those like her who go to the Royal Academy, look at the pictures for a very long time and then say: "The idea - my dear!" But she is no gentler with the lower class pretensions of their employees: Mary Poppins is not just vain and smug, she is vain, smug and common. She would probably have loved the Walt Disney version. Her magical afternoon out is a visit to countryside, but "something that looked like Margate" is not far away. The Match Man's clothing has been transformed into bright colours (a green-and-red striped coat, a new straw hat) and even Mary, whose appearance is always practically perfect, has been improved by "a cloak of lovely articial silk", a hat with a long curly feather and big diamond buckles on her shoes. As well as the raspberry-jam-cakes, they eat whelks, with a pin, handed to them by a Waiter - whom Mary invites to sit down, because she is not accustomed to being waited on (the Waiter declines, but seems pleased to be asked). And so on.
For someone of my age and background, this profound class-consciousness is difficult to write about: I am aware of it but keep stumbling over taboos when I try to express it. I don't think I noticed it as a child - I would, I think, have read this chapter as wish-fulfilment, though the wishes being fulfilled were so much not mine (perhaps this, too, is why it washed over me leaving so little trace). I wonder how it played in 1934, when the book was first published? Would middle-class children then have been more aware of what P.L. Travers was up to? She apparently said that the books were for adults as much as for children: maybe this chapter (which is, remember, only the second chapter in the whole story of Mary Poppins) is evidence of that - or perhaps she is still feeling her way into the balance between the two.
So I was surprised at the extent to which Chapter Two is told from Mary's point of view; inevitably, since the children are completely absent from this chapter, but that too was a surprise. I was surprised, too, that it is permissible to speak simply of 'Mary', this being how she is addressed by her friends. Clearly I had forgotten much about Mary Poppins's Day Out (every second Thursday, one till six, as given by the best people). My clearest memories of it, before this re-read, came from the film, and while those memories too may be inaccurate (is it as large a part of the film as I think?) they are vivid. I wonder whether they have blotted out the written version?
Like the most clichéd depiction of a domestic servant, Mary Poppins spends her afternoon off with her gentleman friend, the Match Man. His name is Bert (Herbert Alfred for Sundays: I was about to say that these are now irredeemably comic names, but fashions change - perhaps they are due for a come back?) but the narrative always refers to him as 'the Match Man'. He is also a pavement artist, and in fact only sells matches when it is too wet for his pictures. Am I right in seeing both of these occupations as barely a step above begging, the equivalent of selling The Big Issue? It wouldn't be hard to construct a narrative in which Bert is a shell-shocked veteran of the war, one of those who never quite managed the return to civilian life, and who is treated more gently on account of it; but Travers doesn't do it. Mary is socially inferior to the Banks family, and Bert in turn is Mary's social inferior; referring to him by his profession ensures we don't forget it.
What's more, on this particular Day Out, he has only earned two pennies, which is not enough to take his girlfriend out to tea (with raspberry-jam-cakes, which sound good, whatever they are). But it is Bert, not Mary, who comes up with a solution, that they should spend their afternoon in his picture, and he, not Mary, who makes it work, who takes her hands and draws her into the picture (yes, the verb used is 'drew' - is the pun deliberate?). I was going to argue that the man in the relationship must be allowed to take the lead, but on reflection, there may be a larger pattern: magical things happen wherever Mary goes, but she doesn't initiate them, and often seems quite put out by them ("Oh, Uncle Albert - not again? It's not your birthday, is it?" But I anticipate).
Reading the descriptions of Bert's pictures, I feel some sympathy for Walt Disney. With the exception of the "picture of two Bananas, an Apple and a head of Queen Elizabeth" (the first Queen Elizabeth, of course, though I have to pummel my mental image every time) on which Bert is working when Mary arrives, they are highly coloured landscapes which must have seemed overdue for the Disney treatment: "a mountain covered with snow and its slopes simply littered with grasshopers sitting on gigantic roses" is just waiting for the grasshoppers to go into their cheerful song and dance routine. How was Walt to know that this wasn't actually what Miss Travers wanted?
She may satirise the social pretensions of Mrs Banks, boasting of her children's nurse who is so fashionable that she doesn't believe in giving references, and of those like her who go to the Royal Academy, look at the pictures for a very long time and then say: "The idea - my dear!" But she is no gentler with the lower class pretensions of their employees: Mary Poppins is not just vain and smug, she is vain, smug and common. She would probably have loved the Walt Disney version. Her magical afternoon out is a visit to countryside, but "something that looked like Margate" is not far away. The Match Man's clothing has been transformed into bright colours (a green-and-red striped coat, a new straw hat) and even Mary, whose appearance is always practically perfect, has been improved by "a cloak of lovely articial silk", a hat with a long curly feather and big diamond buckles on her shoes. As well as the raspberry-jam-cakes, they eat whelks, with a pin, handed to them by a Waiter - whom Mary invites to sit down, because she is not accustomed to being waited on (the Waiter declines, but seems pleased to be asked). And so on.
For someone of my age and background, this profound class-consciousness is difficult to write about: I am aware of it but keep stumbling over taboos when I try to express it. I don't think I noticed it as a child - I would, I think, have read this chapter as wish-fulfilment, though the wishes being fulfilled were so much not mine (perhaps this, too, is why it washed over me leaving so little trace). I wonder how it played in 1934, when the book was first published? Would middle-class children then have been more aware of what P.L. Travers was up to? She apparently said that the books were for adults as much as for children: maybe this chapter (which is, remember, only the second chapter in the whole story of Mary Poppins) is evidence of that - or perhaps she is still feeling her way into the balance between the two.
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This is not a trenchant insight, but I just liked it.
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Y'know, if you wanted to join in the readalong, you would be ever so welcome...
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Even in the 1930s Australians in England crossed class boundaries more easily than most visitors and the current call-by-first-name that's typical of Australia (which I always have to explain to help desks, for they're always in more polite countries and want to call me Miss, Mrs or Dr Polack, when the correct thing to call me is almost always Gillian - the formal name is only for very formal circumstances or when people are very, very, very rude and need to be put in their place) was happening for goodly sections of society back then. This means that it's natural for me to call Mary Mary and for her to invisibly to cross class boundaries because both of those fit my personal experience of the UK. And because class is/was a temporary personal position here, the apparently natural shifts between a match person and a pavement artist and a secret great magic artist is far more credible than in a society with more rigid class structures.
One thing I love about travelling in England is that people instantly identify me as from Australia and treat me as the same class as themselves, so since the 1980s (which is as far back as me visiting England has gone) England has validated what I'm thinking here, at least for me. In 2011 a bloke at Petticoat Lane said "You're one of us" in an almost-a-cousin way when I explained where my great-great-great-grandfather died, and when I was a student in the 80s I was taken to lunch in one of the Temple buildings. I was assessed quite differently as an Australian to the way my US friends were assessed - I was not judged on class.
I'm pretty sure that this is an older phenomenon, and I know that in the 20s and 30s here a lot of books referred to visiting the UK as 'going Home' and that people undertaking the trip expected to be treated as cousins or connections. When I read Mary Poppins as a child, it was, like Streatfield's work, stories about Home. I think we were the last generation to think this (other parts of the country didn't have this same attitude even when I was young), but I'm honestly not sure.
The simple summary is my memory and your report suggests that this chapter is informed by Mary's Australian experience of England more than a profound understanding of the British class system.
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And it may well be that P.L. Travers was more aware of Britain's class obsession because it was foreign to her. How much does the difference apply in the 1930s? Was Australian informality as marked then?
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Australia was more formal in the 30s, but it was way less so than Britain, and Travers would have been called by her first name right up to when she left (and introduced by first name and surname, not by "Miss" in the same way Mary is introduced). Some people were given more formal treatment than others, but there was still enough difference between Australia's minimal class culture and its expression through manners and Britain's and it's very different expression so that Travers must have experienced it.
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It's from 1915 and is Australia's version of Romeo and Juliet and it totally sets the scene for later Australian culture. There's also a really good silent movie of it.
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This is very English, too. To the extent that expressed sentiment is somewhat suspect. I'm coming to this point in a subsequent post (I hope).
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Nine
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