Talking to the animals
Jan. 9th, 2014 10:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustWriting about Miss Lark's Andrew, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sartorias says "I loved the 'Andrew' chapter because any story in which a rejected dog gets a home was good for me". I start from the opposite standpoint; by and large I am not interested in stories about animals. Yet I have no problems with the next two chapters of Mary Poppins, both of which centre on animals.
Andrew is the pampered little dog of Miss Lark, who lives next door to the Banks family. In the magical world of Cherry Tree Lane, the smallest and shabbiest house in the Lane is next door to the grandest - grander even than Admiral Boom's house, which has ship's funnels instead of chimneys, and a flagstaff in the garden - because it has two gates, one for visitors and one for tradesmen. From this opening, it is clear that Miss Lark's Andrew is not so much an animal story as a comedy of manners. We start with Miss Lark's problems with the baker (who once accidentally used the wrong gate, but cannot be entirely snubbed because he is the only source of "those little flat rolls with the curly twists of crust on the top" - P.L. Travers has a keen eye for baked goods) and move on to the insubordination of Andrew.
Andrew is generally disliked locally, and Mary Poppins takes his side, but without explanation: "He is not a nincompoop ... and that is that." It is the omniscient narrator who fills in the background from Andrew's point of view: he is mildly fond of Miss Lark, but bored to distraction by his luxurious lifestyle. He longs to be "a common dog" and have common dogs for his friends.nineweaving says that Andrew and his friend Willoughby are a gay couple: "the not-so delicate resentful mother's boy, standing up to her at last; his insouciant but no less devoted rough-trade partner..." Given the ambiguities of Travers's own life, this is not just a pretty idea, it could also be true at some level.
As in the previous chapter, Mary Poppins doesn't initiate the events of the story, she just walks into them, and by doing so enables the children to share them. It is she who interprets Andrew's demands to Miss Lark, for she understands his yapping - though when Mary Poppins talks to the animals, she does nothing so undignified as grunt and squeak and squawk to the animals: he barks his questions and she replies in her standard, if brusque, English. The successful outcome of this bargaining is then incorporated into the worldbuilding: thereafter, Miss Lark appears in the company of her two dogs.
Just as the previous chapter was the first of a pattern repeated in subsequent books, so Miss Lark's Andrew has its counterpart in the next book, Mary Poppins Comes Back, whose second chapter is Miss Andrew's Lark. Again, Mary Poppins demonstrates the ability to converse with an animal, this time a caged lark belonging to the terrifying Miss Andrew. It's a conventional enough tale with a moral, and I suspect that the wordplay came first and the story was produced to support it.
Like Miss Lark's Andrew, The Dancing Cow is firmly set in Cherry Tree Lane. Jane is in bed with toothache, and Michael offers to entertain her by telling her what he can see through the window: Admiral Boom, Miss Lark's second housemaid, Robertson Ay and then - great excitement, for the Lane is very much in town - a cow. Naturally, the Cow is well known to Mary Poppins and this leads into the first of another type of episode, those in which Mary Poppins acts as storyteller. When she does this, she becomes quite unlike herself, speaking "in a brooding story-telling voice", gazing into an unseen distance, entering a kind of trance state in which her sharp, hard-edged everyday persona can give way to the magical figure we know her to be.
Read whatsartorias says about the content of the story, because I think she completely nails it: the narrative line makes a swerve from deadpan irony at the expense of the Very Respectable Red Cow and the music of the spheres. Indeed, as I commented there, there are layers of irony in that the description of the cow as "very respectable, she always behaved like a perfect lady and she knew What was What" could easily apply to Mary Poppins herself. No wonder the Cow was so great a friend of Mary's Mother. There's a nursery rhyme flavour, too: the animal who goes to see the king, the cow encouraged to jump over the moon. Yet alongside this, that wonderful description of the experience of jumping over the moon, hurtling through the heavens "with the stars spinning around her like great golden plates..."
The Cow's dilemma is that she cannot live with the fallen star caught on her horn; it compels her to dance, so that she cannot rest or eat. But having dislodged it, she cannot live with the loss of that joyful dancing. She cannot connect the passion and the prose. But Mary Poppins can.
sartorias says "I loved the 'Andrew' chapter because any story in which a rejected dog gets a home was good for me". I start from the opposite standpoint; by and large I am not interested in stories about animals. Yet I have no problems with the next two chapters of Mary Poppins, both of which centre on animals.Andrew is the pampered little dog of Miss Lark, who lives next door to the Banks family. In the magical world of Cherry Tree Lane, the smallest and shabbiest house in the Lane is next door to the grandest - grander even than Admiral Boom's house, which has ship's funnels instead of chimneys, and a flagstaff in the garden - because it has two gates, one for visitors and one for tradesmen. From this opening, it is clear that Miss Lark's Andrew is not so much an animal story as a comedy of manners. We start with Miss Lark's problems with the baker (who once accidentally used the wrong gate, but cannot be entirely snubbed because he is the only source of "those little flat rolls with the curly twists of crust on the top" - P.L. Travers has a keen eye for baked goods) and move on to the insubordination of Andrew.
Andrew is generally disliked locally, and Mary Poppins takes his side, but without explanation: "He is not a nincompoop ... and that is that." It is the omniscient narrator who fills in the background from Andrew's point of view: he is mildly fond of Miss Lark, but bored to distraction by his luxurious lifestyle. He longs to be "a common dog" and have common dogs for his friends.
nineweaving says that Andrew and his friend Willoughby are a gay couple: "the not-so delicate resentful mother's boy, standing up to her at last; his insouciant but no less devoted rough-trade partner..." Given the ambiguities of Travers's own life, this is not just a pretty idea, it could also be true at some level. As in the previous chapter, Mary Poppins doesn't initiate the events of the story, she just walks into them, and by doing so enables the children to share them. It is she who interprets Andrew's demands to Miss Lark, for she understands his yapping - though when Mary Poppins talks to the animals, she does nothing so undignified as grunt and squeak and squawk to the animals: he barks his questions and she replies in her standard, if brusque, English. The successful outcome of this bargaining is then incorporated into the worldbuilding: thereafter, Miss Lark appears in the company of her two dogs.
Just as the previous chapter was the first of a pattern repeated in subsequent books, so Miss Lark's Andrew has its counterpart in the next book, Mary Poppins Comes Back, whose second chapter is Miss Andrew's Lark. Again, Mary Poppins demonstrates the ability to converse with an animal, this time a caged lark belonging to the terrifying Miss Andrew. It's a conventional enough tale with a moral, and I suspect that the wordplay came first and the story was produced to support it.
Like Miss Lark's Andrew, The Dancing Cow is firmly set in Cherry Tree Lane. Jane is in bed with toothache, and Michael offers to entertain her by telling her what he can see through the window: Admiral Boom, Miss Lark's second housemaid, Robertson Ay and then - great excitement, for the Lane is very much in town - a cow. Naturally, the Cow is well known to Mary Poppins and this leads into the first of another type of episode, those in which Mary Poppins acts as storyteller. When she does this, she becomes quite unlike herself, speaking "in a brooding story-telling voice", gazing into an unseen distance, entering a kind of trance state in which her sharp, hard-edged everyday persona can give way to the magical figure we know her to be.
Read what
sartorias says about the content of the story, because I think she completely nails it: the narrative line makes a swerve from deadpan irony at the expense of the Very Respectable Red Cow and the music of the spheres. Indeed, as I commented there, there are layers of irony in that the description of the cow as "very respectable, she always behaved like a perfect lady and she knew What was What" could easily apply to Mary Poppins herself. No wonder the Cow was so great a friend of Mary's Mother. There's a nursery rhyme flavour, too: the animal who goes to see the king, the cow encouraged to jump over the moon. Yet alongside this, that wonderful description of the experience of jumping over the moon, hurtling through the heavens "with the stars spinning around her like great golden plates..."The Cow's dilemma is that she cannot live with the fallen star caught on her horn; it compels her to dance, so that she cannot rest or eat. But having dislodged it, she cannot live with the loss of that joyful dancing. She cannot connect the passion and the prose. But Mary Poppins can.
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no subject
Date: 2014-01-09 10:44 pm (UTC)Perfect!
As I wrote for
For the Red Cow, the star is an unbearable gift, and then, when lost, an almost irretrievable longing. But the Very Respectable Mary Poppins has an instrinsic star, which she controls, disclosing it at will, and then denying it. She is an Apollonian figure who leads others into Bacchic ecstasies--and stands, a still point at the center of the revels, perhaps rocking slightly as they whirl. The Perfect Lady of the Dance.
"Dance, then, wherever you may be...". Then button your coat straight, tie your shoelace, and go home.
Nine
no subject
Date: 2014-01-10 05:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-10 11:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-10 05:52 am (UTC)The later stories are glossed with shallow smugness. We even learn where Mary Poppins goes when she's not with the children. Jane and Barbara are good and sweet and Michael gets to be much naughtier and the songs are all songs I know. I sing along with the story, because they're still special, but they're churned-out copies of something that was originally unique.
no subject
Date: 2014-01-10 11:11 am (UTC)I have reached the end of book three, which I thought had a wonderful finality. I'm enjoying book four, but I do see what you mean.
Looks as if I shall have to get hold of the omnibus edition - there's a six-book collection, is that what you're reading? And if it is as you say, I shan't mind owning it as an e-book.
no subject
Date: 2014-01-10 11:19 am (UTC)I was enjoying book four until I was enjoying it less. I didn't actually *not* enjoy any of it, but the first three volumes were so much more enjoyable...