The Paper Garden

by Molly Peacock

  Chapter Two.

  SEEDLING

  A silhouette cut by Mrs. Delany in the late 1760s at Longleat, thought to be the children of the third Viscount Weymouth and his wife Elizabeth, daughter of Mrs. Delany’s friend, the Duchess of Portland (Margaret Cavendish Bentinck) (illustration credit 1.2)

  Twenty little petticoated girls, all of them scissoring, must have made the room of the French refugee Mademoiselle Puelle seem like a cage of hummingbirds. Even under the restraints of the eighteenth century – the mini-corsets and posture boards – the London rooms of Mademoiselle Puelle’s school for girls in 1706 might have been vibrating slightly out of control with the flying intensity of twenty self-possessed tykes from families with elegant histories and distinguished names. Mary, too, had a distinguished name: Granville. She was quite at home in this satin company, the livelier ones looking and leaning to see what the intent ones were cutting out.

  In 1740 Mrs. Delany began the short memoir she drafted at the Duchess of Portland’s urging with a bit of the name’s history: “My father was grandson of Sir Bevil Granville, who was killed on Lansdown, in the year 1643, fighting for his king and country.… At the very moment he was slain, he had the patent for the Earldom of Bath in his pocket, with a letter from King Charles I acknowledging his services. This letter is still in the family.”1 She was descended from a long line of royalist supporters in service to the crown. Sir Bevil’s oldest son was also named Sir Bevil; his middle son, George, was Baron Lansdowne of Bideford and secretary of war to Queen Anne. Sir Bevil’s youngest son, Bernard, was Mary’s grandfather. He was His Majesty’s Groom of the Bedchamber at the onset of the Restoration and “the messenger to Charles II of the joyful tidings that he might return to his kingdom in safety.”

  To imagine Mademoiselle Puelle is all we can do – the brief record of her existence is in the single sentence the grown-up Mary Granville Pendarves (not yet Delany) wrote for the Duchess: “At six years old I was placed under the care of a Madlle. Puelle, a refugee of a very respectable character, and well qualified for her business.” Mrs. D. remembered her as “my good and kind mistress.”2 The sonority of her name might put a reader in mind of Miss Clavelle, Madeline’s teacher, a long, black, scissory-looking figure slicing angularly through the rooms of Ludwig Bemelmans’ twentieth-century children’s books. In 1706 the girls would have perched on footstools or sat primly at tables, each with her silhouette paper.

  Mary cut out birds and flowers. Her classmate, the very young Lady Jane Douglas, plucked one up and stole it for herself. Lucky that she did, too, for this is the only evidence that Mary’s art germinated here at Puelle’s, a slender thread to her great work seven decades later, thin as a child’s eyelash. Lady Jane Douglas, whom, Mary tells us, she never saw again after her two years at the school, “would pick up the little flowers and birds I was fond of cutting out in paper, and pin them carefully to her gown or apron, that she might not tear them by putting them in her pocket.” The classmate, “whose regard for me made her delight in all my little occupations,”3 had valued what Mary Granville did, and Mary knew it and held on to it for a lifetime. Her six-year-old fingers learned a skill in this eighteenth-century playschool that would prove her rescuing when she was more than eleven times her age. It would have taken intense muscle-patterning to keep those fingers in shape to be in readiness all those years later when she embarked on her Flora Delanica.

  One truism about art-making is that we can’t control our subjects: they are given to us unconsciously and by predisposition. But we can control our technique: that is consciously learned. Yet learning how to do something and being appreciated for what you’ve done are often quite separate. Happily they weren’t for Mary Granville as a little girl. Lady Jane was enraptured by those silhouettes. As an adult Mrs. Delany recalled, “I have heard of her preserving them many years after.” Lady Jane “kept a partial remembrance of our early affection to the end of her life, though I never saw her from the moment of leaving school; but I received numberless proofs of her regard by messages and enquiries which were sent to me by every opportunity she could meet with.”4 It was as if Mrs. Delany had pinned her friend Lady Jane’s admiration to some emotional equivalent of a “gown or an apron,” and in private moments, decade after decade, dressed herself in its esteem.

  To have a tactile understanding of just how intricate the cutting of a silhouette can be, you might try it yourself. It’s something like peeling an orange so that the peel comes off in one piece. Careful!

  Many of us get stymied by mistakes and quit right there; in this way are acres, miles, vast continents of childhood concentration on a task disrupted with a single misstep. Integrating frequent failures is part of how one learns a craft. In a poof of patterned fabric (girls wore gowns cut down from their mother’s clothing) the child Mary Granville would have sat in the face of her mess-ups. The stays of a diminutive corset would have kept her impossibly upright by our standards. (Sometimes a particularly slumpy little girl would have a posture board braced to her back.) The girls at Mademoiselle’s school would grow up stem-straight, wing bones back, breasts high. Posture-perfect herself, no doubt, respectable, well-qualified Mademoiselle must have spent at least some of her time bending beautifully forward to pick up the flower stems and leaves that lay on the floor. After all, teachers are there to rectify mistakes – or better yet, show us how to fix them.

  Mademoiselle Puelle’s paste might have been made from egg whites, and the girls would have soiled their smocks with albumen. But another paste could have been made from flour and water. In an age of epoxy cement it is hard to believe in the staying power of flour and water, but the paste is in fact quite potent. (In 1927, when she was eight years old, my mother created a school project using flour, water, and newsprint. In triumphing over her papier mâché, she managed to glue strips of newsprint to an oak dining room table that stuck there for the next fifty-two years. Her own mother embroidered tablecloth after tablecloth to cover it.) Mrs. Delany later used just this sort of homely paste on the flower mosaicks.

  Silhouette of Children, detail (illustration credit 2.1)

  As a grown woman, Mrs. D. entertained herself and her friends and family by cutting out complicated silhouettes. One of them, possibly done in her late sixties, has six children in it, all embroiled in childhood activities. There are four girls, all wearing posture boards, a boy (who gets away with not wearing one), and a toddler of indeterminate sex who sports “leading reins,” a kind of halter for dragging a child quickly back from venturing too near a fireplace or other danger. The silhouette boy rolls a hoop with a stick. The silhouette toddler tries to grab the older boy’s hoop. One girl holds what looks like a ball-and-cup game. The oldest girl writes with a slender quill at a desk, another arranges teeny flowers in a tiny vase, while the littlest girl totes a wee doll.

  Surprisingly, the impossibly thin details are not cut out of black paper and pasted on white, but the reverse. They are hollow cut, a method of making silhouettes (or shades, as they were called before the tyrannical eighteenth-century French finance minister Étienne de Silhouette5 retired and began obsessively cutting out profiles in paper) that is much more rare. Mrs. Delany drew an image on white paper, then probably used a knife to cut the paper away from inside the image. In other words, she ingeniously worked with a kind of negative image. The middle of the white paper contains a detailed but empty space that doesn’t really materialize until it’s mounted on a black background. It’s the background that forms the silhouette – the exact opposite of what you’d conclude by looking at a photograph of it. (If your hand is steady and your knife is sharp, this method yields two silhouettes, one to give away and one to keep.)

  Yet in the midst of this delicious accomplishment is the imperfection of someone who never thought her pastime would be viewed by the public. There are stray pencil marks on the white paper. She left them there, her guidelines, never bothering to erase them. Maybe someone called her to the harpsichord and she aban
doned the silhouette on a table. You can see that she drew outlines, then cut along them, but not entirely. However perfect the silhouette looks now under glass, Mrs. D. wasn’t fastidious about preserving it.

  Great technique means that you have to abandon perfectionism. Perfectionism either stops you cold or slows you down too much. Yet, paradoxically, it’s proficiency that allows a person to make any art at all; you must have technical skill to accomplish anything, but you also must have passion, which, in an odd way, is technique forgotten. The joy of technique is the bulging bag of tricks it gives you to solve your dilemmas. Craft gives you the tools for reparation. And teachers give you craft, for a good teacher urges you beyond your childish perfectionism. From there you proceed into the practice that eventually becomes expertise. In a letter dated December 20, 1729, at the age of twenty-nine, Mary wrote to her younger sister, instructing her about cutting silhouettes: “I am to make my acknowledgments to you for the help of your scissors. The little poppets [puppets, or characters] are very well cut, but you must take more pains about the trees and shrubs, for no white paper must be left, and the leaves must be shaped and cut distinctly round the edges of the trees.”6

  In her own silhouette, Mrs. Delany pays particular attention to the vase of flowers; amazingly, she even cuts a white shadow (or is it sunlight?) onto the vase itself. Or was that a mistake? – Well, if so, it was felicitous, because it looks intentional, and that’s another aspect of error that an artist learns to advantage. Sometimes a blunder shifts the observer into greater tenderness of observation. Mrs. D.’s devotion to detail in the silhouette is so moving because to note with such concentration is to be full of emotion, even if one wears that emotion lightly. In the same letter she told her sister that “most of the [colored] paper I have cut has cost me as much pains as if it was white paper.” When invention fails and you are overcome by what you may have ruined, knowing how to reconstruct releases the energy to fix the flaws and go on. Craft dries your tears.

  Downstairs from the Prints and Drawings Study Room in the British Museum is the Conservation Room, a sunlit dream of a spot to spend one’s working day. On the day I was there, by now obsessed with how this woman could have begun inventing an art at seventy-two, I noticed that someone had stuck a geranium on a sill beneath the tall, north-facing windows. The high-ceilinged room with its light tables seemed like a surgery amphitheatre with operating tables for the bodies of disabled prints. The professional staff were solely women. It occurred to me that I hadn’t spoken to a single man since I’d wormed my way down the stairs, into what seemed like the brain stem of the British Museum, finding myself in the museum’s light-filled cranium, trying to answer my question of just what they do to repair Mrs. Delany’s fragile collages.

  Etherized upon the light tables were some of her damaged works. “Yes,” said the willowy Helen Sharp, straight-haired, makeup-less, slow and graceful, as if a sudden movement might disturb the sleeping ailing prints. “Really, very few men in this area. They tend toward paintings and sculpture.”7 Helen Sharp is a paper conservator, a curator-restorer. She lifted a thin, sharp plastic pick, the size of a ghost of a guitar pick, and gently attempted to raise the edges of the flowers on some of the more fragile Delanys. If the pick could slide between the flower and the background, then Sharp knew she could slip a filmy layer of wheat-based paste beneath that portion of the flower to re-secure it.

  Sharp stood at her light board in her green cardigan, dusting each flower with a soft, dry brush and looking for cracks in the black background. Tests have detected wheat on the mosaicks, and the assumption is that Mrs. D. used flour and water for her glue, but current conservation philosophy sensibly won’t allow the amputation of a mosaick just to get a proper chemical analysis of the exact adherent she used. However, another, less destructive technique uses X-ray fluorescence to reveal the composition of the materials in her dark backgrounds, which vary from shiny (the early ones) to matte (the middle and later ones). Where she used pure black pigment, the backgrounds have stayed relatively unimpaired. But analysis has found that some of the substances contained impurities such as copper. Worse, in hasty moments Mrs. D. may have mixed in iron gall ink (the black ink that degrades with age to brown) to stretch the coverage of the paint. Iron gall ink acidifies paper, cracking and drying it out and ultimately destroying the skin of the collage. If such a background began to disintegrate, Helen Sharp could adhere a support of Japanese tissue paper onto the reverse side, reinforcing it.

  As they lay on their backs, surrounded by light, all kinds of details about the mosaicks vivified, especially their dates, written in Mrs. Delany’s careful loop-filled hand: 1773, 1776, 1781 … Though Mrs. Delany wrote that she began the flowers in 1772, the first one she actually labeled is dated 1773.

  { TIGHTLY FOLDED BUDS }

  My husband Mike and I have been together for so long (he is my second husband, but I first laid eyes on him when we were thirteen) that we each still remember the smells of the kitchens of the suburban houses where we grew up. We recall his finished basement and the basement of my house, with the overfilled laundry baskets. I can still hear how the cutlery drawer clattered as his mother shut it with her hip while she balanced the hot dog buns on a platter for the Groden backyard barbecues. He can still hear the cash register drawer and its bell at Peacock’s Superette.

  After our high school romance, we lost track of each other for nineteen years – married other people in the same year, divorced them in the same year, found each other again. By now we have become the collages that adults become, multiply pieced. His cancer checkups, either two or four times a year depending on whether his melanoma has recurred, remind us that waiting so long to have something doesn’t mean you get to have it forever. On the other hand, he’s lived with this disease for three decades. Although uncertainty pigments our marriage, we are glued, we are happy. We’ve had what by now is seventeen years of overlapping and overlayering that even an Optix magnifying glass might not reveal.

  I wasn’t thinking about Mrs. Delany’s flowers when we traveled to Dublin in 2002. Though I had always wanted to go to Ireland, drawn to the landscape of my great-grandparents, I wasn’t prepared for feeling instantly at home. Connecting with moist weather, filtered light, and hospitable, soft-spoken people, I relaxed as I had as a child with my grandmother Ruth McMann Wright, the fanatic embroiderer. We stayed in Buswell’s Hotel, built in Mrs. Delany’s day, and walked streets that she would have walked, though of course I didn’t know that then.

  I had not completely embraced the flora metaphor as a way of life as I walked down Lower Baggot Street and north to Merrion Square while Mike was busy with his work at the National Library. As I was falling in love with the human-sized architecture of Georgian Dublin, so fully preserved that two centuries of time instantly drop away, my charge of happiness was undercut by a sliver of a feeling that this lovely marriage we had built also could be taken away. Before we’d left, Mike had one of those checkups. He was fine. But as other people seemed to cut out their lives as quickly as little Mary Granville cut out her birds and flowers, the checkup was a reminder that my husband and I have had to use the older Mrs. D.’s hollow-cut silhouette approach. Poise, balance, the art of living is just a little bit harder when you shape your life from the inside of the paper out – but it’s entirely doable if you have the skill set. He seems to have the skill set. (Yes, he’s a role model. The secret of marriage is thinking that your partner is better than yourself.)

  Mrs. Delany’s skill set (her fierce observation and her eye-hand coordination) seems to have held up for a lifetime, its source in her six-year-old hands. If only one could trace how the sharp silhouette of childish intensity turned into the layers of collage, then we’d know how she accomplished it. Such detective work would combine the skill sets of mind-reader, forensic art historian, psychologist, biologist, all with expertise in landscape, in paper-making, in eighteenth-century collecting, in botany, in conchology … Could an amateur ever do
it? An amateur armed only with a poet’s skills: noticing and comparing one thing to another? The very word amateur sends a frisson up our professionalized spines.

  Yet Mrs. D. was an amateur. She belonged to the world of limners. She had a botanist’s bent, but no one would have called her a crack botanist. She had a painter’s bent, but no one would have called her a first-class painter. She had a remarkable fashion design sense and knew how to embroider like a spider, but no one would have called her a couturier. She up and wrote a roman à clef called Marianna at the age of fifty-nine, but no one would have called her a novelist. She wasn’t an expert in anything except observing. And then she did something no one had ever done before.

  To place oneself as an amateur in the twenty-first century invites an extreme vulnerability that would probably have mystified Mrs. Delany. To declare amateur status now means confessing that you’re not serious; if you were, you’d aim to be a professional. Stepping into the position of an amateur, on the other hand – someone who loves something and wants to learn about it – repeats the confusion of youth. The state of not-knowing, especially for a person of age and accomplishment, recaptures youth’s novel excitements. This is a way of keeping young that Mrs. Delany engaged in throughout her widowhood. Not to know is also sometimes the position of the poet, who depends on close observation to magnify a subject, hoping to discover an animating spirit. There’s romance in that forensic impulse, because it yields surprise – an antidote to the jaded mind age has to fend against.