The Paper Garden

by Molly Peacock

  Patrick Delany knew the value of friendship and expressed it over and over again in all the ways he related to others. He played the linchpin role of host, dropping back to accommodate the ego and fame of Swift. There is an aspect to Delville that is like the shell, a place both to hide and to emerge from. And there is an aspect of Delany’s personality that matched Mary’s love of that little floral icon the Lily of the Valley. Both Patrick Delany and Mary Pendarves quite independently valued the beauty of reticence, knowing that it can preserve necessary solitude. Compared to Swift, Delany kept his light cloaked. Compared to Kelly, Mary did likewise. She liked this rector instantly, and wrote later that

  His wit and learning were to me his meanest praise; the excellence of his heart, his humanity, benevolence, charity and generosity, his tenderness, affection, and friendly zeal, gave me a higher opinion of him than of any other man I had ever conversed with, and made me take every opportunity of conversing and corresponding with one from whom I expected so much improvement.29

  However much she meant that statement (writing by then as a married woman about her husband), at the moment she met him she was diverted by something else: the social drama enfolding before her as Jonathan Swift and Ann Donnellan vied for Kitty Kelly. At first, Mary herself competed for the attention of Swift, contending with the adorable flirt Kitty to get the attention of the venerated satirist. She found Swift “a very odd companion (if that expression is not too familiar for so extraordinary a genius); he talks a great deal and does not require many answers.”30 But soon Mary began losing the cranky, difficult, talented old man to the younger woman. “Miss Kelly’s beauty and good-humour have gained an entire conquest over him, and I come in only a little by the by.”

  Just as Mary was opposing Kitty for Swift, Ann was challenging Swift – for Kitty. Ann was infatuated by this petite coquette, who also flirted with her. The drama of their triangle began on this January day; but then, as Mary and Ann were swept into a Thursday intellectual group at Delville, a “witty club” hosted by the amiable Patrick, it intensified. Mary confided it all to her sister. She was losing her closest friend – not to a man’s attentions, but to the dazzlement of another woman. Swift’s capriciousness she took in stride, but Kitty Kelly “has touched me in a tenderer part, for she has so entirely gained Mrs. Donellan, that without joking she has made me uneasy, but what does all this serve to show? why to show me my dear sister’s love in all its value, that never has been turned from me by anybody.”31

  Donnellan’s fickleness provoked Mary to think uneasily about who she really was. “How uncertain is happyness in this world!” she wrote at the end of that February. “That which we generally look upon as the life of most misery, in the end proves our greatest advantage, it detaches us from the world.”32 The “mirror Ann,” whom, by this time, she no longer confused with her sister, presented Mary with problems throughout the years of their relationship. Ann Donnellan was flirtatious and tempestuous, and demanding of Mary’s sole attentions. Now she was proving too much for her. Donnellan came with complications of betrayal – and Mary had suffered betrayals of a magnitude that made her shy away, back toward the original, mild Anne, who had never “turned from” her.

  Despite Kitty Kelly, Mary didn’t give up playing with Swift. She wrote him a number of letters after she returned to England, and these letters are so wholly different from those to her sister that one would barely recognize them as from the same individual. Her tone is arch, brittle, falsely dulcet, a B-movie version of eighteenth-century repartee. These letters open up a camera eye on the social self she constructed – the very opposite of the relaxed inner core she found in Ireland. She banters valiantly but breathlessly – as if she can’t quite keep up. These utterances are an elaborately public construction, as layered as mantua, petticoat, stays, and stomacher; as encrusted as greased and powdered hair.

  “Sir,” she wrote him from London on May 29, 1733, “You will find to your cost that a woman’s pen, when encouraged, is as bad as a woman’s tongue; blame yourself, not me.”33 Two months later, as she spent the summer with her sister and mother in Gloucester, she addressed him, “Sir, … I am resolved to be even with you for what you say about my writing, and will write henceforward to you as carelessly as I can; and if it is not legible thank yourself.”34 She flirted her quill like a fan. “I protest I am not afraid of you,” she continued with lighthearted masochism, “and would appear quite natural to you in hopes of your rewarding my openness and sincerity, by correcting what you disapprove of; and since I have not now an opportunity of receiving your favours of pinching and beating.” But since he wasn’t about to pinch or beat her from so far away, she demanded instead that he take on the task of “chiding me for every word that is false spelt, and for my bad English.…” Slapped though she might be for her spelling and grammar, she became in their brief correspondence his temptress and his witch, and tried to lure him across the sea. “I wish you could make your words good, and that I was a ‘sorceress:’ I should then set all my charms to work to bring you to England …”

  It didn’t happen. He was more than three decades older than Mary, his health was in ruins, and he stayed home. “Sir,” she wrote him from the house she had taken on Little Brook Street in London on September 9, 1734, “I find your correspondence is like the singing of the nightingale – no bird sings so sweetly, but the pleasure is quickly past; a month or two of harmony, and then we lose it till next spring.” She couldn’t quite leave the charismatic, cleft-chinned old man alone. Swift knew her family: old Countess Granville, Lord Carteret (and his mother-in-law Lady Worsley), as well as Sir John and Aunt Stanley. He was a member of the literary circles of her uncle Lord Lansdowne. Swift embodied all these connections, and Ireland, too. She insisted on their duet.

  Botany Lesson:

  John Bartram (1699–1777), the long-lived Quaker botanist, doubled as both America’s premier Colonial-era horticulturalist (and friend of Benjamin Franklin) and George III’s official “King’s Botanist” for North America – for the meager sum of fifty pounds per year, a pittance that Bartram resented.35 (You can still visit Bartram’s Garden, tucked into an industrial area of Philadelphia.) Bartram knew, identified, and collected the tall Canada Lily, which a person can find in marshy areas today – though, like most wildflowers, it is threatened by encroaching civilization. The Canada Lily reproduces by seed, or by offshoots from the corm whose fibrous roots form its anchor in the earth. The designation “canadense” doesn’t always mean that the specimen grew or was collected in Canada, however; many flowers were identified as “canadense” in the eighteenth century, roughly signifying that they grew from what is now Canada south to Maryland or Virginia.

  Bartram had a like-minded relationship with a horticultural friend in England, a London draper, Peter Collinson (1694–1768), who was one of the premier horticulturists of his day,36 and with whom Bartram traded specimens. It is delicious to think of Collinson, a textile merchant dealing in floral patterns, proceeding to cultivate an interest in honest-to-God flowers, then sending and receiving actual floral material. It brings a viewer one step closer to Mrs. D.’s flower mosaicks, she who was obsessed with fabric and floral design, then with gardens, finally in her seventy-ninth year bringing all of her floral focus to bear on a specimen of Lilium canadense, the seeds of which Bartram in the new world traded to Collinson between 1738 and 1740 for cultivation in England.37

  Mrs. Delany, who kept exceptional records, wrote that this specimen came from Mr. Lee. Scottish James Lee (1715–95), a translator of Linnaeus’s Philosophia Botanica, co-founded the Vineyard nursery in Hammersmith, Middlesex. He specialized in exotic plants from around the world, including North America. (Thomas Jefferson subscribed to the Vineyard catalog.)38 In a curious way, the Canada Lily is a bridge between the new world and the old. As relations between the crown and the colonies became increasingly strained, bonds strengthened among the plantsmen. If there was something on which both colonists and aristocrats
could agree, it was the value of a wildflower.

  John Bartram traveled extensively (north to Lake Ontario and south to Florida) in search of new specimens, not outfitted royally with three horses, one for himself, one for his servant, and one to be a packhorse with supplies, as Collinson suggested, but all alone with a single horse and a saddlebag for cramming in what he collected.39 Sometimes he traveled with his son, sometimes solo, except for the spirit of Collinson, whom he never saw – neither man ever crossed the ocean – but to whom he poured out his floraphiliac thoughts in a decades-long exchange that also included the sometimes irritable mercantile side of their relationship. Bartram, a Quaker businessman as well as a horticultural genius, was a plain speaker about his expenses, annoying Collinson. Collinson often commissioned Bartram on behalf of others, such as Lord Petre, an avid plant collector. As with all colonists, Bartram needed someone in England to send him goods like glass and nails, which he could not always get in Philadelphia, and Collinson sometimes went to great lengths to obtain them.40 Through Collinson, who was invited to dinner at Bulstrode in July 1767, Bartram’s son William eventually would be commissioned by Mrs. Delany’s friend the Duchess Dowager of Portland to draw shells. There are almost as many interconnections in their horticultural circles as freckles on the faces of the Meadow Lilies.

  Or on the freckled hands of the round-faced, bright-eyed Patrick Delany, who surfaces in Mary’s arch-toned correspondence with Jonathan Swift as a sweet, serious, persistent note, unfettered by the conventions of flirtation. Even as she hankered after the admiration of a genius, she recognized the “more desirable” Patrick Delany.41 In late winter 1732, she confided to her sister Anne the finale of her envious episode with Kitty Kelly. “I have given up the trial with Kelly, her beauty and assiduity has distanced me, and I will not attempt a second heat.” Kelly had become ill. “At present she is disabled … confined to her bed with a pleuratic disorder, but the Dean [Swift] attends her bedside.” A mere sentence later, she balanced her disappointment with something better. “But Dr. Delany will make a more desirable friend, for he has all the qualities requisite for friendship – zeal, tenderness, and application; I know you would like him,” she wrote to her sister, the true Anne whom she felt would never betray her, “because he is worthy.”

  Kitty Kelly died of this illness the “last week in October, 1733.”42

  Swift returned news of his friend Delany to Mary in his clear, small, neat hand. “Dr. Delany hath long ago given up his house in town,” he wrote in January 1736. “His Dublin friends seldom visit him till the swallows come in. He is too far from town for a winter visit, and too near for staying a night in the country manner; neither is his house large enough.”43 The following April she responded with a newsy letter about how she had seen Henry Fielding’s play Pasquin and judged it not as good as The Beggar’s Opera, her elegant lily-like loops swooping down to her postscript: “I beg my compliments to all friends that remember me, but particularly to Dr. Delany.”44

  { ORANGES, A LEAF, & A DREAM }

  In a market in Baltimore, Maryland, an elderly man stood in front of me in the cash-out line. We each had a basket of groceries. When it came time for the man to put his onto the conveyor belt, he acted quickly, efficiently, but with a sublimely conscious intent. He arranged his food on the moving belt, the oranges in a Cézanne still life, the cereal box as a Mondrian square against the black rubber, the yogurt containers as round, white, Miró-like punctuation marks on the damp background. In the space of seconds he had made an entrancing composition, a pleasant sense of order to reflect the house of his mind. In a few minutes the items were plopped in bags and he was off. I never saw him again, but because of those oranges on the thick black rubber, I tried to stop myself before I tumbled my groceries, bruising the fruit, denting the cereal box, onto the belt in my usual haphazard externalization of my internal associative jumble.

  In a manner of speaking, I had watched a poet of the everyday. One could be a poet of the everyday, and not even have to write that poem down, or worry about whether it was good, or try to publish it. I had witnessed a span of seconds of someone else’s art of living, in a supermarket in Baltimore where only now does the street name Calvert resonate as Charles Calvert, a.k.a. Lord Baltimore, the fellow who confused and jilted Mary, causing her to take a chance on a trip to Ireland, where she would both lose and discover herself, a shy, leggy lily of the meadow. She tucked away the seeds of her late-life creativity the way John Bartram tucked seeds into compartmented wooden trays to send to his friend Peter Collinson, and which later found their way to the Duchess of Portland’s greenhouse, even as the Duchess’s cash found its way into the hands of Bartram’s son William, who rolled and sent his drawings of shells back to her.

  Not long before I first saw the Delanys, after my father died and my sonnets were published, around the time Mike sat watching my seventh-graders make their projects, I took my first and last botanical drawing class. It was a disaster. The instructor at the New York Horticultural Society, whose name I have gratefully forgotten, gave me a dull, half-dead, spear-shaped leaf to draw. Then she asked me to draw it again. And again. I drew the leaf half a dozen times, and each time it was more frozen: smaller, deader, harder. The sixth time it looked like a rabbit turd.

  I left the botanical drawing class with the turd-leaf trophy under my arm and returned home reminded of a facetious definition of the poet: a poet is a failed painter. In disappointment and exhaustion, I fell asleep, but was visited with a poet’s compensation: a dream. It was a botanical dream in which I climbed a pyramid of stone steps to view a special flower – not a Canada Lily, but one that bloomed only once every hundred years. As I reached the top, surprising myself because I was not out of breath, I saw a marble pot with a plant inside it on a plinth under a blue sky. The plant that would bear the bloom was, in fact, a strong vine wound round and round into a great mound of green. There, in the foliage, was the bud, pulsating with growth. I stood alone, having arrived on the dot: one hundred years from the last blooming. Before me the unknown flower unfolded as in time-lapse photography, revealing wavy stamens in purplish white: yes, it was the most beautiful flower of the century. Suddenly, other people were climbing up the steps to join me.

  The flower I failed to recognize was the Passiflora laurifolia. I finally learned its name after I spied it on the wall of the Morgan Library, chosen to be included in the show of Mrs. Delany’s flower mosaicks by Ruth Hayden, positioned against its black background as if cut from a dream. And in the gallery, of course, other people began to join me.

  Chapter Eight.

  PASSION FLOWER

  Passiflora laurifolia, Bay Leaved, Luton, August 1777, Prov. Lord Bute (illustration credit 7.2)

  The main flower head of Mrs. Delany’s Passiflora laurifolia, Bay Leaved is so intensely pubic that it’s as if you’ve come upon a nude study. She splays out approximately 230 shockingly vulvular purplish pink petals in the bloom,1 and inside the leaves she places the slenderest of ivory veins, also cut separately from paper, with vine tendrils finer than a girl’s hair. It is so fresh that it looks wet and full of desire, yet the Passiflora is dry and matte. Laid out diagonally on the page, with its clitoral bump of white and yellow stamens whorled into the central mob of its pistils, it lolls on one side of the stem, balanced by a large bud and two smaller ones with tendrils and leaves. Mrs. Delany often made up her colored papers in advance, washing whole sheets of paper in the endlessly varying green-browns of late summer – olives, lodens, beige-ivories – and this is the palette for the vines and leaves of her Passion Flower.

  One day I decided to count all the 230 petals in the main blossom of the Passiflora (as totaled by Ruth Hayden), but I kept getting lost. It certainly feels as though there are more than two hundred, but the petals are not all separate from each other. They are cut like little grass skirts, where the strands of grass are attached to a belt. The color, which looks purple in any reproduction, is underpinned by the layers of
these grass skirts: first rust, then red, then a dark purple, then a deep pink, then a lighter pink, then a lavender. The red, which you scarcely notice without a magnifying glass, is actually the foundation. It goes all the way around the main flower. The white ring shape that defines the flower’s center is one whole piece of ivory paper with twenty-something teeny white cut parts. It is watercolored with tiny maroon dots. Under the magnifying lens the petals pulsate with a little bit of the movement of a hula dancer. Even though they are firmly pasted, you can almost see every grass frond waving. Mrs. D. didn’t know about hula, but she knew about dancing, she knew about skirts, and she certainly knew about complexity. And passion, too – of many kinds.

  Taking in her Passiflora laurifolia is half like reading an immensely challenging book, where each sentence shoots you off into a different thought or dilemma or daydream, and half like a sexual experience where the lovers lose track of each other’s bodies to such a degree that neither can figure out whose arms and legs belong to whose torso – and neither of them care. Staring at the purplish pinks, one constantly loses one’s place.

  Mary Pendarves, after her return to England from Ireland in 1732, didn’t exactly lose her place, but she had quite a bit of trouble finding one. During the next decade she followed two opposite but intertwining vines of energy. One vine attached her to groups of friends, including Ann Donnellan (who lived peripatetically between England and Ireland, sometimes with Mary, sometimes not), to a closer relationship with her lifelong-bachelor older brother Bernard and summer visits to her mother and sister at the house they shared in Gloucester. It also attached her to her friend Margaret, who had married the Duke of Portland and moved to Bulstrode. This vine shot off into times for shared handiwork, designing and executing needlework patterns for both herself and others, playing the harpsichord, and living life by touch: the cool sliver of a needle, the wood frame for the stretched linen that would become chair covers or bed curtains, the long, smooth bodkin to pierce holes in the linen, the wool thread, as well as the spinet keys beneath her fingers. Here she would live in circles of people – women, largely – all of whom were occupying their hands usefully or fancifully, with exotic crafts such as the craze for japanning in which black varnish was applied to wooden boxes and frames to imitate lacquerware from Japan.