The Paper Garden

by Molly Peacock

  Happy in her mourning clothes, she saw her friends, she went to concerts, she shopped. By November 8, 1726, eleven months after Pendarves’s death, she buoyantly records her afternoon schedule: “at four o’the clock in the afternoon comes my lawyer and my taylor, two necessary animals. Next morning I send for Mrs. Woodfelds to alter my white tabby and my new clothes, and to take my black velvet to make; then comes Mrs. Boreau to clip my locks, then I dress to visit Lady Carteret, then come home to dinner, then I drink coffee after dinner, then I go to see” other family members, as well as “all the fops and fopperies” in London. (“Tabby” is a kind of fine basketweave cloth, sometimes linen, sometimes silk, used for the white scarves that were tucked into the necklines of the gowns she would have worn. It is not a cat, though she acquired a kitten, too: “white, with a black nose and a black chin.”)8

  Her letters to her sister popped with fresh, brightly expressed opinions. “I was yesterday at the rehearsal of Mr. Handel’s new opera called King Richard the First – ’tis delightful,” and in the same letter she goes on to tell Anne just what she thinks of marriage: “But to speak seriously, matrimony is no way in my favour – far from it.”9 Aunt Stanley entirely disagreed. Mr. Henry Monck, the son of her husband’s sister Sarah and part of a branch of the family of the wife of Sir Bevil Granville, was available.10 If Mary agreed to have him, Uncle John would settle his whole estate on the couple.

  Lord Baltimore could easily best the nephew. “A young man in great esteem and fashion at that time,” Mary described him, “very handsome, genteel, polite and unaffected. He was born to a very considerable fortune, and was possest of it as soon as he came of age.” Neither Henry Monck nor Charles Calvert (Baltimore) was a thinker, much less a reader, as Mary was. She sized up Baltimore as having “the education bestowed on men of his rank, where generally speaking the embellishing the person and polishing the manners is thought more material than cultivating the understanding, and the pretty gentleman was preferred to the fine gentleman.”11

  On a hot day Baltimore invited her to a party on a barge on the cool Thames, and Mary almost said yes – except that she remembered that she could also say no. In that continuing invention of a life, saying no and turning away from what you may not want, or at least stopping before you act immediately, is a great source of personal wealth. It can position your few hundred pounds a year against someone else’s thousands. And so she refused “all his entreaties, at which he left me disappointed and chagrined.”12 Baltimore was so disgruntled that he gave up the barge party and stalked off to the tennis court, where, in a freak accident, he was hit “between the eyes” with a ball, knocked to the ground (some thought he was dead), and brought, bloody, to his sister Charlotte’s house. The next day, weakened from the loss of blood, he begged the enticing, reluctant Mary to go to him.

  She did not.

  “I could not bring myself to do it,” she said, “as he had never positively made any declaration that could warrant my granting him such an indulgence.” The charmer who depended on his fortune and position and likeability would have to make good on a marriage proposal before she would come to him. Her friend, his sister Charlotte, considered her “inhuman,” and she relented by half, agreeing that if he were still as ill the next day, she would go to see him.

  But the next day, and the day after that, and after that, Mary herself became “ill and not able to go.” She somaticized her dilemma with insouciant pre-Freudian liberty. What did the owner of the entire future state of Maryland want? Some commitment from her before he himself gave one? (Or so that he didn’t have to give one?) And she, shying away, unwilling to be teased forward, held him suspect. He wrote to her. She did not answer. Charlotte continued to press her brother’s case with Mary. Was her rejection a cold calculation, as her friend suggested, or was it more like being frozen in the lights of oncoming carriage lamps behind a team of galloping horses?

  Baltimore decided to console himself with three months abroad and told Mary that he “had fitted up a little vessel for that purpose; that he had great lowness of spirits, partly occasioned by his late accident at tennis.”13 In the moves of their uneasy dance, he backed away, in a parallel move with her retreat. Then he came forward – unable to resist trying her again. Wouldn’t she give him her picture to take with him? A painted miniature that he might hold? “I told him it could not be.… I did not think it right.… he protested solemnly … but I absolutely refused him.”

  “Vexed and disappointed,” having made her “a thousand professions of love and esteem,” he left. “So we parted,” Mary wrote in her lucid, upright, curled hand, “neither of us pleased with each other.” She called him “a flutterer.” Lord Baltimore, she confessed to her sister, “is really a pretty boy, but I fear he is not so bright within as without, but traveling will improve his judgment and fancy.”14 Is this noteworthy ability to hold a line against such persuasion part of what would allow her to cut those lines in her collages decades later? Is the coldness her strict adherence to convention? Or did she really think he was a superficial romancer, just the sort of narcissist who would go get himself boinked on the head to elicit attention after she had rejected him? Or had she simply had enough of any thought of another commitment after her harrowing marriage to Pendarves? The power of a no is also the power to create – and be comfortable with – negative space in a life.

  Or in a collage. There is negative space in Mrs. Delany’s Papaver, both in its matte, midnight background and also inside the elongated black triangles between the flower and the leaf and between the leaf and the stem of the seed pod. To assemble bright, organic shapes that create these negative pockets requires an infatuation with sharp lines, a love of clear distinctions. There is nothing blurry or graded about what Mrs. Delany cut in outline. Her over-defined background acts just like a resolute NO.

  Mary seemed to be growing as fast as a poppy does. (Seeds flower in two to three months, depending on the climate.) She seemed to leave the injustice of her small widow’s inheritance behind her, and even, in the wake of relief’s forgetfulness, to have forgiven guilty old Uncle George, Lord Lansdowne, who wrote to her from Paris on January 19, 1725, “I am thankful to my niece Pendarves for the justice she has done me.”15

  Music Lesson:

  On a wintry afternoon in late January 1727, Mary nestled her skirts into a chair at her aunt and uncle’s table to dine with “the charming Faustina, who is the most agreeable creature in the world … and we are to have our senses ravished by her melodious voice.”16 She was enamored of the great Italian sopranos of her day, Faustina Bordoni (1697–1791), known to her dinner partners and her audiences simply as Faustina, and the tempestuous Francesca Cuzzoni (1696–1778), both of whom were lured to London to sing “Mr. Handel’s opera” (probably Admeto). In moving to the Stanleys’ Mary had put herself back into social circulation and back into proximity with her friend and role model Handel, who was by this time a cultural institution in England. (Alain Kerhervé, a meticulous French scholar, has surveyed Mrs. D.’s letters to find that she mentions twenty-eight of Handel’s compositions in sixty-eight of them, beginning with Handel’s 1713 Te Deum and ending with his Theodora in 1750.)17

  The talented Italian opera divas Handel employed to perform his works and bolster his fame commanded extravagant fees. The long-lived Francesca Cuzzoni at the height of her career pulled down a salary of 1,500 guineas a year. (It’s very hard to get an exact equivalency in today’s pounds or dollars. A guinea was a gold coin equivalent to a pound sterling or, in negotiating sales, a pound plus a shilling. In sheer comparative earning power this salary represented over two million of today’s pounds. But a better way to compare it might be with the way it dwarfed Mary’s £300 annual income.)18 Reverend John Mainwaring, the first biographer of Handel, tells a story about Handel managing the stormy Cuzzoni. When she refused to sing an aria that was not written originally for her, Handel replied (in French), “Oh! Madame, I know well that you are a real she-devil, but I
hereby give you notice, me, that I am Beelzebub, the Chief of Devils.”19 According to Mainwaring, Handel then grabbed Cuzzoni by the waist and threatened to throw her out the window. There is something of a she-devil in Mrs. Delany’s Opium Poppy. The extremely well-behaved Mary Granville Pendarves was a great fan of Cuzzoni’s rival, the even longer-lived Faustina. Watching them sing together also meant waiting for a possible outburst of Mediterranean emotion that was not part of Handel’s composition.

  She heard them just at the moment when she herself was acting like a much more subdued Anglo diva. She was refusing to sing for her supper with her family. Instead of complying with her aunt’s plan that she wed a Stanley relative to secure her family’s fortunes, she fiercely rejected it, finding him “uncultivated, trifling, without knowledge of the world.”20 “I was struck with astonishment at my aunt’s recommending a person to me that I was sure must appear very insignificant to her.… I told her sincerely I never could give my consent; that I had no inclination to marry, and less to the person proposed …” Unlike Cuzzoni, who capitulated and sang the aria, Mary did not reverse her decision. She risked offending the very people whom she most trusted, even at the cost of a possible family rift. But old Aunt Stanley did not defenestrate her, even figuratively; Mary’s objection did not seem to strain her relations with her aunt and uncle. There must have been some tacit acknowledgment that she had paid her dues – even though they would flaunt the names of other suitors periodically, and even though they may have preferred her in a tidy married state rather than stepping out on her own. Mary politely made it clear that no amount of money could be exchanged for her self-possession. She had cut her line.

  A year later she pranced off to watch the preparations for another of Handel’s concerts on New Year’s Eve, 1728. Throughout this period she attended numerous rehearsals of Handel’s works, listening to the way her friend and mentor drew his musical lines – the formality of his structures containing their ebullience. On New Year’s Day, she delivered this piece of music criticism to her sister: “Yesterday I was at the rehearsal of the new opera composed by Handel [probably Ricardo Primo]: I like it extremely, but the taste of the town is so depraved, that nothing will be approved of but the burlesque. The Beggars’ Opera entirely triumphs over the Italian one; I have not seen it yet, but everybody that has seen it, says it is very comical and full of humour; the songs will soon be published, and I will send them to you.”21 It turned out that she loved John Gay’s ballad opera, even though it satirized Italian operas (including Handel’s) as well as the aristocracy who revered them. After she saw it at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, she amplified her opinion in a communiqué to Anne: “I desire you will introduce the Beggar’s Opera at Gloucester; you must sing it everywhere but at church.”22 She winks her eye at her sister at the thought of the risqué performance in church, delighting in the satirical mode even as it mocked her own interests and her own friend. (Gay spun out his popular creation from an idea Jonathan Swift had sparked in a letter to their mutual friend Alexander Pope.)23 Mary, full of her opinions, makes her critiques as crisp and fearless as if she were a reviewer delivering to a deadline. To be intimate enough with the composer to attend the rehearsal, to hear the performers as they practiced and revised, allowed her to observe the way a musical composition is brought to peak performance. This exposure to Handel reinforced the high demands of ambitious creation that he had initially inspired in her childhood.

  The Papaver somniferum leaf is cut from a single green piece of paper. The green is as matte and flat as if it had been painted with gouache, yet there’s activity in that leaf: its many points seem to be in sunlit motion. Mrs. D. ingeniously drew three lines with black ink at parts of the edges of the lower half of the leaf, making it look three-dimensional, raised from the page, as if it were casting shadows. The whole effect is of a kimono-like gown billowed back by a breeze, like the robe of a star soloist falling down from her shoulders. The poppy seems almost to have a voice, full-throated. By the second year after Pendarves died, Mary had come into that voice; she had entered the stage from the darkened wings, as her Papaver steps out from its ground.

  As Baltimore consoled himself on his winter sea travels, it was rumored that his ship had capsized and that he had drowned. When he returned and appeared at court, Mary was flummoxed at the sight of him – she had thought him dead. To meet him as she might have met a ghost stirred up the contradictory mixture of her previous feelings for him – the ambivalence of being drawn to a nobleman and the simultaneous desire to flee.

  Dressing Lesson:

  In the wee hours of October 11, 1727, Mary got dressed to attend the processional and dinner for the coronation of George II and Queen Caroline at Westminster Hall. Just before his death in June of that year, George I had signed an act making Handel a naturalized British citizen, and the composer’s first commission was to write the anthems for the coronation, including the tour de force Zadok the Priest, which has been played at every coronation since. But Mary was not going to hear the anthems in Westminster Abbey; instead she would position herself at Westminster Hall, where her mind was not so much on hearing as on seeing and being seen.

  It would have taken so many hours to put herself together that she might have had to stay up all night to be ready at 4:30 a.m. to leave for the day’s festivities. Gussying up meant at least a two-person construction job, by candlelight. Layer after thin layer of clothing was applied to her body, a bit like building up the strata of paper pieces in the center of the Papaver. First came her chemise. It was like a fine linen or cotton lawn half-slip. Next came a full slip, its lace-edged drawstring neckline scooped low. (There was no bra. No panties. The idea of structured underwear, protecting the body, would wait a whole century after this, until women abandoned these types of stays.) There would be only the thinnest cloth draping over the breasts. This scant layer didn’t protect the skin so much as the clothes from the perspiration of the skin.24 After all, these gowns weren’t going to be thoroughly cleaned. Food stains would be picked off, disastrous wine stains blotted as best the servant could, and grease would be spot-cleaned with fuller’s earth, a kind of clay which absorbs oil like talcum.25

  Now the embroidered (“clocked”) silk stockings were rolled and her toes dipped into them. Then she pointed each leg as the stocking was drawn over her feet and up to just below her knee, or just past. The garter of ribbon and lace or silk or velvet (there was a jungle of colors and varieties)26 was then tied into place by her personal maid.

  Next, her stays. Stays were a kind of stiff, three-dimensional form beneath which the body was obscured. They were not like a corset; they did not go around the abdomen and were never laced too tight. Stays were measured precisely to the waist, making it easy to bend. To create them, a seamstress would stitch whalebone into vertical slots in heavy linen, and sometimes horizontal rows as well. The cloth itself was sometimes stiffened with paste – as Mary’s collage flowers would be stiffened decades later – or made rigid with fabric layers. Stays functioned like a bustier, laced at the front or at the back. They lifted up the bosom, still only covered with one layer, and kept a woman’s spine upright in a posture that was ready for the minuet at any moment. “Most of the postures of the ballet are predicated on wearing stays,” graceful Alicia Weisberg-Roberts told me, adding with a laugh that when she herself tried them on, “they weren’t that uncomfortable.”

  Mary Granville Pendarves was not nearly done getting dressed. Now for the pockets in which to keep a few personal items (no evening bag swinging from her hand); they were tied around the stays. Then a hoop, which her maid would tie around her waist. At this time, court gowns had a bell-like look, obscuring the lower body and giving the fabric almost the feel of a lowered curtain-shade. Later on, in the 1740s, the hoops would widen and flatten. All this is a bit like wearing several belly packs. Though at the age of fifty Mrs. Delany wrote that she avoided the extremes of hoops (“I am glad you detest the tubs of hoops, – I keep within bounds,
endeavouring to avoid all particularities of being too much in or out of fashion; youth and liveliness never prompted me to break through that rule …”),27 we can gamble that she wore some sort of hoops for the coronation. She was absolutely tuned in to fashion, she minutely described dresses in all her letters from her twenties to her eighties, and there’s no doubt that she would have conformed to the rules for court dress.

  Finally, the opium dream of the actual clothes. The petticoat (an underskirt, but one that was meant to be seen) was slipped over the hoops. Penultimately came the donning of her mantua. Katherine Cahill, to whom I am also indebted for my understanding of how these garments were worn, calls a mantua (the name for a gown at this time) “a kimono-like construction,”28 just as the main leaf of the Opium Poppy seems to suggest. The mantua is like an open robe that hangs from the shoulders. It has a back and sleeves, but it doesn’t quite reach around the whole body, leaving room to display the petticoat in front. Mary would have stuck her arms behind her to receive the gown, which would have been slipped on as she pulled her arms forward, very much the way the poppy slips on its green leaf.

  At last the finishing element, her stomacher, was tied into place by her personal maid. The stomacher was a triangle-shaped, paste-stiffened whalebone shield, covered with the same fabric as the petticoat and mantua, or sometimes contrasting fabric. It was meant to connect the front and the back of the gown, covering the stays. Attached by ribbons and bows to the upper part of the mantua, the triangle of the stomacher would point to her groin, or, as it had been known since the late seventeenth century, her Honour.29

  By this time Mary’s breasts and belly were flattened so that she would have looked like an upside-down flower: her head, neck, and torso the stem; her arms the leaves; and her skirt the flowerhead.