She confided to Jerry Griswold (
Paris Review, 1982) that the process of creation is "dark" and "entirely spontaneous, ... not thought out," while during Jonathan Cott's interview, which he included in
Pipers at the Gates of Dawn; The Wisdom of Children's Literature (1983), she doubted "that biographies are of any use at all." This is not coyness on Travers's part, but the result of a fervently held belief in the wholeness and ultimate inscrutability of the human personality: as she put it to Neil Philip in 1982, 11 June 1982), "the ideas I had then move about in me now." Still an active writer in her mid nineties, Travers espouses a "radical innocence" (
New York Times Book Review, 9 May 1956), a term borrowed from William Butler Yeats to convey an adult's linking "by some thin spider thread" to her youth.
The eldest of three children, Travers grew up in a home drenched in the Celtic twilight. Her father, Robert Travers Goff, was a lyrical and melancholy man, amiable and opinionated, who worked as a sugar planter in Australia after he had left Ireland to plant tea in Ceylon.
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