The bite gave her a fever.
The fever kept her further immobilized.
The bite of the gnat (I rather think it must have been something more venemous), was a very troublesome affair, and came at an unlucky time, for I was not able to walk at Wroxton, and in so much pain (which made me very feverish), that I could not enjoy the place.40
Mrs. D. went back to Bulstrode but was hardly able to ride very long in a chaise and couldn’t wear a shoe for some time. “It is now pretty well again, though not yet able to wear my shoe, but a large slipper.” It seemed that just as soon as she had gotten mobilized from mourning, just as her life-saving busy habits had been able to return, as all her friend’s ministrations had paid off, as she’d thwarted her brother, as she took up her embroidery needle, as she walked, and walked, and walked, she was stopped. By a fever and a “gnat.”
Now she was mandated to be off her feet. Just as she had revved up into her former self, she was obligated to take a pose of meditation, to sit still, obliged to keep her swollen foot raised and in its slipper.
It was at this moment, retrained in her calligraphy, awakened to the world but required to be motionless, that she noticed something. Immobilized at a table in her apartment at Bulstrode, she inspected the air as a scarlet petal from a geranium (Lobelia cardinalis) dropped to a dark surface below. Assembled around her were the tools of her entertainment while she was off her feet: wallpaper, paints, inks, thread, scissors. At that moment, the lifelong habit of simile dropped into place just as that petal descended. Nearby lay a piece of paper nearly the identical color.
As Ehret drew and painted, as Lightfoot classified, as the Duchess received yet another shipment of porcelain or bugs or roots or shells, Mary, alone at her table, took up her scissors, having been told like a child that she must sit still. When the Duchess came in to check on her friend, shocked that she had taken apart her new scarlet geranium, then delighted that what Mary had composed were the petals in paper replication, the first of the great work had begun.
“I have invented a new way of imitating flowers.”41
Right then Mary Delany’s friend of more than forty years supplied exactly what was necessary: applause.
Portlandia grandiflora, detail (illustration credit 12.2)
A magnification of the sepals at the base of the pink buds of the Portlandia grandiflora shows the abstraction beneath its realism. With a palette of eight types of green, two ochres, and a yellow, Mrs. Delany demonstrates theoretically how a flower grows. Out of the pointed chaos of the confusion of green vectors comes a fireworks of pink and lighter pink, directed upward as bloom. What’s fun about this detail is that you can actually see the jagged edges of the cut marks. Although scholars have speculated about the many types of implements that Mrs. D. would have relied on, and though we have the embroidery tool kit that Queen Charlotte gave her, the one item that Lady Llanover emphasizes in her descriptions of Mrs. Delany’s technique (and Lady Llanover probably based her descriptions on her mother Georgina Port’s direct observations), is a pair of scissors.42 Magnification of the Portlandia, finished when Mrs. Delany’s eyesight was at an ebb, reveals the rough edges of paper cut by scissors, not sliced by scalpel.
Portlandia grandiflora is one of the very last flowers that Mrs. Delany’s fading eyesight allowed her to complete. It was good to save it for among the last, since the type of eyesight she still had left enabled her to see both the huge, pink-tinged white flowers, gardenia-like but also a bit like Moonflowers, and the large, shiny, stiffish leaves, and to cut them out in large swaths. It is one of her simpler mosaicks, Portlandia being a flower designed for simplicity. But she did not forget to cut out the sepals, to feature them almost as bows at the necks of the big blooms. When she fashioned the collage, she commented on it in writing, copying its description from Browne’s History of Jamaica and noting that “This plant is called by the name of ‘Portlandia,’ after the present Duchess of Portland, who is a great lover of botany, and well acquainted with the English plants.”43
Below her description, Mrs. Delany wrote a poem, not directly to her friend but to the flower that emblemized her.
Fair flower! that bears the honoured name
Of HER whose fair and spotless fame
Thy purity displays.
Emblem of Friendship’s sacred tie,
Thy form is graced with dignity
Superior to all praise.
At the time of her most intense mourning, more than a decade earlier, Mary had turned to another friend, Lady Andover, to describe Margaret, not with the formality of her poem but with the force of her daily expression. “She ever forgets her own sufferings when a friend wants her to sooth her grief, or support her under any tryal.… She is wise without insolence, and entertaining without a grain of conceit! I could say a thousand things more, but to crown all, and what I feel with the most affectionate gratitude, she is the best and steadiest of friends.”44
Margaret began applauding Mary in 1772 and continued non-stop for ten years. Her delight, her approbation, her support, her enthusiasm, and the weight of her opinion because of her enormous wealth carried the word of her friend’s innovations throughout the botanical, artistic, and aristocratic worlds. Horace Walpole, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Hannah More, and Sir Joseph Banks talked about Mrs. Delany, evaluating what she did, because her friend the powerful Duchess brought her work to their attention. The provenance of this mosaick is Kew. The flowering plant was sent to Bulstrode from Kew Gardens at the request of the King and Queen just so Mrs. Delany could see the specimen and make her botanical art from it. The fantasy kingdom of Portlandia allowed a real King to notice the flowering of one of his oldest subjects.
{ SEPALS }
The exterior of Bulstrode today bears little resemblance to the stately, Dutch-gabled Bentinck house. For one thing, it received a Victorian facelift in the nineteenth century; for another, it was, like Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead, commandeered by the army during World War II, in this case the British Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. Its great rooms became huge institutional kitchens and mess halls. After the war it fell into disuse and is now used by an evangelical Christian organization as its headquarters and to bivouac missionaries between assignments.45 A long private drive winds up a hill toward it, surrounded by acres and acres of rolling lawns and woods and grazing horses. The private drive does not replicate the direction that the Duchess’s carriage would have taken Mrs. Delany, that stout Anglican. Mrs. D. took her Christianity straight up: she certainly felt she would meet the Dean in Heaven; nowhere does she fear that they might roast in Hell.
In an atmosphere creepy with the cordiality of evangelism, I crossed Bulstrode’s great hall, the walls swaddled with coats of institutional beige, the floor swathed in ancient, trod-on brown carpeting exuding a perfume of mold and institutional food. Up the grand staircase the rooms were broken up into warrens of apartments by makeshift fake-wood walls. No Polish princes, no jonquil parrots, no letters anyone could write about “an imperial ambassador” dressed in “blue velvet, the buttons and buttonholes set with diamonds.”46
An angle of an approximate view from the direction of Mrs. Delany’s windows still exists, down toward the allée of lime trees the Duchess planted, a vague trace of some garden beds, and the water where Bulstrode goldfish must have swum. I was invited to look out of those windows with a similar view, and I did. It was hard to get a Margaret-and-Mary feel, though. Because the missionaries were anxious for me to surrender my coat (I was doing anything to avoid being sat down and given a sermon), I excused myself to walk through that allée, to see and touch some of the lime trees, not to be confused with lime fruit trees, that Mrs. Delany must have seen. Outdoors in frigid, damp late-November 2008, even a poet’s imagination had a hard time conjuring the glorious summers of the mid-1770s. No hares nibbled on the lawn. Eventually I fled to the warm taxi I had paid to wait in rescue.
I wished I had a friend waiting for me. I was traveling and researching all alone; Mike was back
in Canada teaching. In the taxi, as I totaled up the reasons why a woman could start a great work of art in her seventies, all the way from the training she’d received at the age of six to the retraining of her hand in copying at seventy, and from the intense observing and envisioning she’d done her whole life to the mood of reflection and remembering she had entered just because a bug took her off her feet, I wished I had a friend to tell. Approbation. The recognition and praise of the Duchess for Mrs. Delany’s imaginative act triggered more acts.
How many times in the back seat of a taxi had I jabbered on about my poems to my friend the poet Phillis Levin, and she to me? We have each seen every single poem that the other one has written for almost thirty-five years. If I total the dinners, lunches, breakfasts, and teas minimally at every other month, it’s well over two hundred meals lazily, dreamily, talkily, intensely shared over poetry. I really mean sharing, since we order a little banquet and divide each dish, passing copies of our poems back and forth over our lamb shanks, basil eggplant, and sole almandine, and over endive, frisée, potato pancakes, sesame noodles, espresso, jasmine tea, sake, Burgundy, Soave, biscotti, fortune cookies, crème brûlée, and all the other dishes we have eaten together from 1976 to the present.
We have never critiqued one another. That’s not our point. What we do is read and spin off from lines as we think out loud, in a whirl, an atmosphere of mutual adventure, although we are quite different from one another aesthetically. Because the point is exploration, we’ve never made any attempt to change each other. Our poems stimulate our talk, whether the talk is of technique (we could easily do a complete appetizer course on the uses of the semicolon) or attitude (the loneliness of an acorn) or idea (how does a gap resound?). Phillis is more of an intellectual than I am, more of a brown-eyed beauty with her Pre-Raphaelite dark hair; I’m the fair-haired one who cradles the idea. In terms of our poems, I’m the sensualist; she can live on air. Somehow, probably because I am seven years older and started my literary life earlier, we’ve never really competed, though we’re both ambitious and both, miraculously, have had our share of success.
Where would the ten volumes of poetry we’ve written between us be without our mutual excitement, exploration, and talk? From the moment we met in a graduate poetry workshop on a humid September afternoon in the echoing basement of Gilman Hall at The Johns Hopkins University, we instantly liked – and now that I look back, I would say we loved – each other’s metaphors, stanzas, lines, vocabulary, punctuation, each sourced in a separate wellspring of creativity. We don’t feel we have to adore everything the other does; I write about some things I know Phillis won’t connect to (plants, for one thing), and she writes about some things that dumbfound me (Zeno’s paradox, for instance).
We are part of the same literary family. You don’t get to choose the members of your biological family, but you do get to pick your literary sister. Your chosen literary family can extend over thousands of years and beyond the borders of empires, poet connecting to poet, sharing the mitochondria of imagination. Neither Phillis nor I can conceive of how a person can process the material of a life, and by that I mean love and death and every insect bite in between, without practicing an art. The creativity of everyday existence, the balance and poise of being able to ride it all out, the flash of connection, the image that reveals and tells all, sways back and forth between us like an aerialist’s swing that we catch and fly from. Though Mary Delany sat in her solid body, anchored by its swollen foot, her imaginative leap was light and aerial, and her friend Margaret caught her in midair.
Chapter Thirteen.
WINTER CHERRY
Physalis, Winter Cherry (Berry), Bulstrode, November [year not specified] (illustration credit 12.3)
The Physalis alkekengi is among the paperiest of plants. The lanterns, which are the seedcases, start drying so early on the stem that all you have to do is harvest the stalks and lay them on their sides for a few days, and you have one of the most brilliant dried autumn bouquets a person could want – except for the fact that the orange lanterns are attached to the main stalk by stems so brittle that half the damn things break off. Mrs. Delany was all too aware of this when she left one of the little prongs without its lantern. A ghost of one hangs there in the middle of the mosaick of the plant she called Winter Cherry but which many of us know as Chinese Lantern or Bladder Cherry.
Encased in each lantern is a tiny red fruit which is supposed to be edible – I’ve never tried one. As the fruit matures, the lantern around it becomes like vermilion wrapping paper, but then that wastes away to a net-like skeleton, leaving the cherry at the center visible. Mrs. Delany pasted the desiccated netting of the real plant into two of the Winter Cherry lanterns. The astounding fact that this most fragile, web-like material has stayed put for these last – well, we don’t quite know how many years, since this particular collage isn’t dated – gives the mosaick a feel of a page of an artfully arranged floral scrapbook. The use of the dry material is so sensational that anyone with experience of this plant can’t believe it has held up, and anyone without experience can’t assimilate how Mrs. D. managed to glue something so brittle and make it stay. Winter Cherry is an analogous name for Mrs. D.’s whole enterprise. It was the winter of her life when she began them, and any woman by that time of her existence probably feels very dry indeed.
It’s a reminder that the Latin hortus siccus – used since the 1530s, according to Mark Laird, to denote “albums of dried and labeled specimens”1 – means “dry garden.” All Mrs. Delany meant to be doing at first was to concoct something like a book of pressed flowers. She had crossed her plain of mourning, and a scrapbook suited her launch into remembering. “The paper Mosaic work was begun in the 74th year of my age (which I at first only meant as an imitation of an hortus siccus).”2 But over ten years her idea would become an analog to experience, a memoir in paper flowers, an autobiography in botany.
On the stalk she placed four lanterns in four stages of life, letting the mosaick work as a portrait of the whole enterprise of 985 flowers. (And let’s not quibble over whether she was seventy-two, the date of her first mention of the mosaicks, or seventy-three, as she suggests by “in the 74th year of my age” when she started them.) The Winter Cherry is also an emblem of the woman who executed them, a self-portrait of the artist as a single stalk of a plant, showing her at four of life’s stages: the green lantern of childhood; the fully dressed, bright orange one with slight hip hoops – young womanhood; the lower lantern with part of the dress removed to show the interior of the plant – increasing maturity; and the last lantern, the heart of the aged woman. The fine ribs of the plant material make the skeleton of the former lantern into something like a rib cage, with the cherry beating inside.
In some ways the Physalis answers the question of why it took her so long to make the leap from limner (as she would have known herself) to artist (as we know her). The Winter Cherry is a biennial. Though there are some common biennials (parsley and Sweet William, for instance), they’re not that big a plant group. Biennials take two years to complete their cycle, usually growing only leaves in the first year, then in the second year bolting up to produce flowers (little white ones in the Winter Cherry’s case) and fruit. Physalis alkekengi is a plant of withheld growth. The biennial is an obvious analogy to Mrs. D.’s life: her two marriages, two widowhoods, and artistic dormancy. Some of us flash into floral peak like prom queens, but others of us have to dry like the Winter Cherry in order to unfold into productivity.
With her foot in a slipper, with her friend in her Hive, with a lifetime of craft skills and seven decades of sheer noticing, Mrs. D. at last had become a virtuoso. Her earlier drawings, for instance, were charming – charm is entrancing, but it is not requisite for art. Mere self-expression is not art. Nor is excellent technique on its own. But the art that Mrs. Delany’s life bolted up into, as the biennial bolts, came with all the mesmerizing boldness of confident expression molded by technique. Both passion and virtuosit
y are required for this leap, and at last she had attained equal levels of them. The combination brought the flower mosaicks out of the category of curiosity and into one of enduring vision.
After that insect bite tossed Mrs. Delany to the breast of memory and then to the breast of inspiration, she proceeded to experience the best decade of her artistic life. The letters of the next ten years display the amount of activity this woman engaged in, and it is staggering. The letters are not a journal of how she made her hortus siccus. To find out about her materials, her order of making, her enterprise requires digging through mounds of socializing, philosophizing, servant worries, opinions on education, remedies, maladies, and royals. Here and there in the leafy glade of her letters a ripe berry of information gleams. These letters are not boring. They’re never quite as intimate as the letters to her sister Anne, but they zip. They career. They carom. And they yield a handful of modest clues.
Because she was making the mosaicks at Bulstrode, and because of the sheer foot traffic through the place, not to mention the horticultural and botanical talent, a wide number of people began to know – and discuss the fact – that Mrs. Delany had embarked on this enterprise, even though she had a slow start, only a smattering in the first couple of years. Yet on July 11, 1774, Samuel Johnson stopped to visit her niece and nephew-in-law, John and Mary Port, at their house at Ilam, in Derbyshire, about 170 miles from London. Someone, probably Mary Port, wrote in a notebook, “Dr. Johnson at Ilam.” Dr. Johnson quoted Edmund Burke’s breathtakingly hyperbolic statement about their aunt which was already circulating: “She was a truly great woman of fashion, that she was not only the woman of fashion of the present age, but she was the highest bred woman in the world, and the woman of fashion of all ages; that she was high bred, great in every instance, and would continue fashionable in all ages.”3
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