The Paper Garden

by Molly Peacock

  “As I grow older, though I feel as much warmth as ever, I have not so lively a way of shewing it. I attribute it a great deal to the fear I have always had of appearing too gay; a wrong notion I am now convinced, and it hurts the temper,” she wrote to her sister. “Our spirits ought to have their full career when our inclinations are innocent, and should not be checked but where they would exceed the bounds of prudence.”11 But how does a person reclaim a full career for her spirits? Had that girl who was going to burn her harpsichord if she couldn’t play as well as Handel become so unrecognizable? In the swept-mind sensation that travel gives, the late-summer wind of the Irish Sea blew away disappointment and confusion and the aftermath of death to a clean and genuine relief. By leaving England behind, by being with a new friend and in the embrace of the friend’s family, but also simply by being in Ireland, a set of oppressing hierarchies fell away from Mary. If she were in a fairy tale, she would have walked through a mirror. “There is a heartiness among them [the Irish] …, and great sociableness.… Wherever I go I meet with great civilities.”

  The minute Mary entered the Clayton mansion, she began recording her visual impressions. It was one way to orient herself, and a way to preserve a travel memory, and simply a result of what travel does: sharpens our capacities to describe things to ourselves, to prepare a running narrative of what we’ve done and what we’ll do next:

  First there is a very good hall well filled with servants, then a room of eighteen foot square, wainscoated with oak, the panels all carved, and the doors and chimney finished with very fine high carving, the ceiling stucco, the window-curtains and chairs yellow Genoa damask, portraits and landscapes, very well done, round the room, marble tables between the windows, and looking-glasses with gilt frames. The next room is twenty-eight foot long and twenty-two broad, and is as finely adorned as damask, pictures, and busts can make it, besides the floor being entirely covered with the finest Persian carpet that ever was seen. The bedchamber is large and handsome, all furnished with the same damask.12

  The mansion on the edge of St. Stephen’s Green was grand, and it still exists as an Irish government building. It was Mary’s home base, and the letters she wrote back to her sister and mother from her damask-bedecked chamber nearly scamper with delight. She gorged on Ireland and the Irish, eating, dancing, picnicking, exploring, talking, snorting the scent of the wildflowers and garden flowers, listening to music, and designing new clothes. She danced at Dublin Castle on the King’s birthday in 1731, where she wore “a blue and white satin … and a new laced head” while Ann Donnellan sported “her green satin that is embroidered with gold and silver.”13

  She romped till she dropped at all kinds of balls. “I was almost dead yesterday, I never was so much fatigued with dancing in my life,” she wrote to her sister on December 4, 1731. “I had Captain Folliat, a man six foot odd inches high, black, awkward, ramping, roaring, &c. I thought he would have shook my arms off, and crushed my toes to atoms.” Almost immediately she started to concoct her clothes of Irish poplin. “Mrs. Donellan and I have each of us made a brown stuff manteau and petticoat, and have worn them twice at the assemblies.”14

  She played quadrille (cards) and made a new Irish friend, Letitia Bushe, a former beauty whose face had been disfigured by smallpox. Letty Bushe’s father had recently died, leaving her without much money but with her independence, like Ann Donnellan and Mary. “She paints delightfully,” Mary exclaimed to her sister.15 “She is hard at work for me, she paints both in oil and watercolours. I have enclosed you a little scrap of her drawing, which she scratched out by candlelight in a minute.”16 This letter urged Anne to draw, Mary giving this pedantic older-sister artistic advice: “I hope you draw sometimes. I fancy if you copied some landscapes, and did them in Indian ink, you would like it better than faces. I am sure, with very little application, you would do them very well; but copy only from the best prints.” (Long before the ease of digital printing, when Vermeer images can be had as you step up onto a bus or Van Gogh as you drink a cup of coffee, one of the ways people saw images of paintings was through prints of them or, to a lesser degree, through painted copies. Our contemporary disparagement of copying, our training of children not to be copycats, our critiques of poems that merely imitate other poems did not exist in the same way for Mrs. D., nor did the value we place on originality, which took hold only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Someone who was able to copy a painting, imitating a style – and thereby learning that style – did a valuable service in getting the image out into the world.)

  The pure physical freedom of Ireland gave Mary a boost of well-being. She got plenty of exercise as she visited the countryside, and the harder she danced the heartier she ate. The Claytons “keep a very handsome table, six dishes of meat are constantly at dinner and six plates at supper.”17 She describes many meals such as this repast that she ate around 2:00 p.m. as a midday meal at a little house in the countryside: “cold fowl, lamb, pigeon pye, Dutch beef, tongue, cockells, sallad, much variety of liquors, and the finest syllabub that ever was tasted.”18 (Syllabub is a whipped concoction of egg, cream, and liquor, such as brandy or sherry, like a light custard.) Her letters ripened with lists of all she devoured: “all sorts of cold meat neatly cut, and sweetmeats wet and dry, with chocolate, sago, jelly, and salvers of all sorts of wine. While we were eating, fiddles were sent for, (a sudden thought). We began before eleven [p.m.] and held briskly to it till half an hour after two.” She stayed up late and got up late. Visiting the Wesley family at Dangan in May 1732, she declared, “We live magnificently, and at the same time without ceremony.… Our hours for eating are ten, three, and ten again.”19 She had once before made a retreat to the country (and that was half her life before), when she was fourteen, fleeing London for Buckland. She arrived there in the snow, but in Ireland it always felt like summer, full of idyllic picnics she described to her sister.

  [W]e went a-fishing to the most beautiful river that ever was seen, full of islands delightfully wooded. We landed on one of the islands.… A cloth was immediately spread on the grass under the shade of the trees.… We sat ourselves down … our sweet [Ann Donnellan sang] …. We staid on the water till eight … then went to a cabin …20

  To lie on the grass and listen to song was a fresh experience for Mary – and she was old enough to appreciate it, and to appreciate what she saw as the shabby largess that reflected a reordering of all she’d had to submit to for her first three decades, and all she was freed from just by taking the Pretty Betty across the Irish Sea.

  [T]he situation is pretty … but the house is worse than I have represented.… The people of this country don’t seem solicitous of having good dwellings or more furniture than is absolutely necessary … but they make it up in eating and drinking! I have not seen less than fourteen dishes of meat for dinner, and seven for supper … no people can be more hospitable or obliging, and there is not only great abundance but great order and neatness.

  Abundance, yet with order, and neatness. This paradox of riches arranged beats at the heart of Mrs. D.’s work – though the Canada Lily is one of her messier efforts. It has all sorts of extra glue marks on it, recalling a comfortable, littered living room.

  Back in Dublin, Mary and Ann Donnellan walked St. Stephen’s Green, just outside the doorstep of the Clayton household.

  As for Stephen’s Green, I think it may be preferred justly to any square in London, and it is a great deal larger than Lincoln’s Inn Fields. A handsome broad gravel walk and another of grass, railed in round the square, planted with trees, that in the summer give a very good shade; and every morning Miss Donnellan and I walk there.21

  St. Stephen’s Green, a large, verdant square made all the more green by the fact that it is outlined in a wrought-iron fence, is much the same today as Mrs. Delany described it. Below the gray sky, the vertical black iron posts cut the light just enough so that the leaves gleam, making a person almost feel inside her paper garden.

/>   When Mary went to Killalla (where Ann Donnellan’s brother-in-law was Bishop), she described a typical day that also replicated the regularity of the hours her father created for her at Buckland: “rise at eight … breakfast at ten … sit to work … dine at three, set to work again between five and six, walk out at eight, and come home time enough to sit down to supper by ten, very pretty chat goes round till eleven, then prayers, and so to bed.”22 The work she is describing is embroidery, crewel, sewing, handiwork. It was in this stable atmosphere, built on a foundation of intimacy, food, and exercise, that she and her Philomela, Ann Donnellan, began a craft project together – a shell grotto. It wasn’t a simple endeavor; the shell grotto was highly engineered.

  About half-a-mile from hence there is a very pretty green hill, one side of it covered with nut wood; on the summit of the hill there is a natural grotto, with seats in it that will hold four people. We go every morn[ing] at seven o’clock to that place to adorn it with shells – the Bishop has a large collection of very fine ones; [Ann Donnellan] and I are the engineers, the men fetch and carry for us what we want, and think themselves highly honoured.… [F]rom the grotto we have an extensive view of the sea and several islands.… [T]his affair yields us great diversion, and I believe will make us very strong and healthy, if rising early, exercise and mirth have any virtue.23

  The sheer demands of the project – making an intricate geometrical ceiling and walls of shells, lined up by size, shape, and kind, then set in plaster, then all of it plastered over – required a special discipline, not to mention access to thousands of shells. For an artist it defined well-being: getting up early to be at work, losing oneself in the hugeness and complexity of the planned adventure, losing track of time, and reaching and bending, dragging and placing the shells, making mistakes and rectifying errors – a blissful, repetitive practice. Yet it wasn’t only “rising early” and “exercise” that made her “strong and healthy,” it was “mirth.” They were laughing and teasing, these two engineers of the grotto, enjoying their male escorts as they fetched and carried. This was not art made alone; it was craft in company.

  Shell decoration within grottoes was a popular aristocratic fascination, and Mary, with the obsessive nature that would let her later compose 985 paper mosaicks, embraced all aspects of it, the shell collecting and classifying, the creation of the ceiling inside the grotto, and the plastering of the ceiling and walls. Like her flowers, the shells required a knowledge of biology and the absorption with classification and order that would put Mary in the vanguard of botanical classifiers. Like the construction of a court gown, this time-consuming process was accomplished in layers. Part of the glory of Ann and Mary’s friendship was being busy together, syncing the rhythms of two minds in the dreamy boredom of these repetitive acts. It was a way of being lost together – lost in time and lost from the demands of London – as they lined up all the tiny funnel-shaped seashells in one direction, then moved the scallop shapes into another pattern. The grotto was like a secret garden. It was shadowy, moist, and close: sexy. (Their shellwork has been lost, as have many of the fragile, easily damaged shell ceilings and mantels of the eighteenth century.)

  Mrs. Delany composed the center of the Lilium Canadense, also called a Meadow Lily, with both dull and bright green, but it is the petals that burst with color. The left-hand lily flourishes with peach, salmon, vermilion, pink, ochre yellow, warm red, cool red, coral red, rusty orange, melon orange, burnt orange, and, at the end of the long stamens, purple. She cut the flower heads to give them a sense of both front and back. Like some drawings in anatomy books, she lets you feel that you know how each surface is attached to the next.

  The right lily has pink tones that she painted with gray shadows. It is fire red, muted orange-pink, magenta red, light and dark pink, brownish pink, and brown. The petal that comes out of the center at about eight o’clock is composed of six pieces; the petal that comes out at about three o’clock is composed of seven pieces. She built up the surface by pasting red pieces on top of red pieces. The lily petals have a bumpy, labial look to them. And the colors are of excited female sexual organs.

  Paul Valéry’s Shell Lesson:

  What does a coiled shell have to do with a flower? The twentieth-century French poet Paul Valéry, in his essay “Les Coquillages” (“Shells”), says that “A crystal, a flower or a shell stands out from the usual disorder that characterizes most perceptible things. They are privileged forms that are more intelligible for the eye, even though more mysterious for the mind, than all the others we see indistinctly.”24 It was not only clarity that Mrs. Delany was looking for, as Valéry understood so well about both shell and flower: it was mystery. A shell, like a flower, can be something to meditate on. There is a certain aloneness to a shell. Mary was both coming out of her shell and withdrawing into a shell of her own solitude, away from family and court. Both hiding and surfacing.

  One of the things Mary and Ann Donnellan did in Ireland was to visit gardens. It’s not that she didn’t visit gardens in England; she certainly did, but here the gardens made her lust to have her own – and spend money on it. When she visited Ann’s father’s gardens at Nenagh in County Tipperary in late October, 1732, she wrote to her sister, “I almost envy him the pleasure his improvements will give him every hour: for next to being with the friend one loves best, I have no notion of a higher happiness, in respect to one’s fortune, that that of planting and improving a country, I prefer it to all other expenses.”25

  Lilium canadense, detail (illustration credit 7.1)

  The previous spring, she had directly identified herself with flowers. “This has been a week of great mirth and jollity.” Drunk on her senses, bursting with well-being, she had identified with something shyer, “The lily of the valley, which I would rather be than any flower that grows – ’tis retired, lives in shade, wraps up itself in its mantle, and gently reclines its head as if ashamed to be looked at, not conscious how much it deserves it. How pretty it is! Who would not be that flower?”26 Although she now plunged through the countryside laughing and dancing, linking arms with Ann Donnellan, and although as the compleat sensualist she described the details of the world that she imbibed through her senses – especially those things that require at least two senses simultaneously, like eating, or wearing silky clothes, or making music – she also withdrew beneath her mantle. This paradox operates as thoroughly as the two sides of a Lily of the Valley leaf, the open, waxier side and the slightly silver underbelly. The lily was something both to emerge from and hide in.

  As Mary Granville Pendarves devoted herself to her own needs, her first reference to the needs of others emerges in her letters. Until this time she rarely looked beyond the confines of her own world, but in the June letter describing the Irish picnic, just at the point of her deepest relaxation into who she was, she did exactly that: “The poverty of the people as I have passed through the country has made my heart ache, I never saw greater appearance of misery, they live in great extremes, either profusely or wretchedly.”27 With the loosening of the constraints of constant self-definition, self-restraint, and self-effacement, she became aware of others, and empathy bloomed. Away from the court, away from all that drew her to perform again and again for others, she was able to emerge – and to look out at the greater world around her.

  There was a garden more important than the Donnellan garden at Nenagh. It was the lush land that belonged to an open-faced Church of Ireland cleric named Dr. Patrick Delany. He was forty-eight years old. He had never been married. In January 1733, he invited Ann Donnellan and Mary to visit his small estate, called Delville, or Hel-Del-Ville, as it was once dubbed, for it had belonged at first to two men, Dr. Richard Helsham as well as Dr. Delany. They had leased the land jointly, lived there together, and they both had designed its garden.

  (More than a century later, Mrs. Delany’s great-great-niece Lady Llanover commented in one of her juicy footnotes to the letters that “It was laid out in a style then new in Ire
land.” She quoted Irish country gentleman Cowper Walker as saying that “the obdurate and straight line of the Dutch was softened into a curve, the terrace melted into a swelling bank, and the walks opened to catch the vicinal country.”28 It’s unclear whether Lady Llanover is describing their original garden or the one modified by Mrs. Delany many years later. Possibly when Mary first saw it, Delville had straighter paths and the more tightly turned corners of an earlier garden style.)

  By the time that Mary and Ann and Ann’s brother Kit arrived, Delville was occupied exclusively by Delany, an immensely sociable bachelor who was about to begin a new phase of his life: he was engaged to marry the wealthy widow Margaret Tennison. However, in that winter he was still entertaining his friends Jonathan Swift and Lord Orrery, and Dr. Helsham, too. To his bright young female guests Mary Pendarves and Ann Donnellan, he added an electric nymphette named Kitty Kelly, knowing that the fifty-something Jonathan Swift would be enamored of her. It turned out that more of the dinner company than Swift would be taken with Kelly. Mary’s friend Ann Donnellan would be captivated by her, too.