The whole combination of things amounted to how Charles Bukowski defined age. Of all the sloppy, unboundaried, drunken poets I never thought I’d have a good word to say about, he nailed it. On the radio one day I heard him wisecrack, “Age is the sum of all we do.” That’s a bit of what happens to a plant, too. It keeps adding up until it blooms, but even after blooming, after mid-life, so to speak, it keeps going, because it has to start withering. Only in drying does the real fertility begin, the seedcase forming, and only then are the seeds available to be blown apart and travel and settle. The fierce winter of dormancy is part of it all – the biennial approach to life.
Some things take living long enough to do, I thought as I punched the boxing guards with our trainer. I never considered that my husband, the jock and serious athlete, and I, the bathrobe diva, would share a trainer at a private gym. But through taking agility training when I was doing some acting, and from dragging my husband with me to the training because I needed a partner, and from the trainer and my husband hitting it off as fellow athletes, and from giving up our car, which freed the cash to pay for it, I’ve ended up being a sparring partner with both of them. Now I pass them the basketballs if they’re shooting baskets and I do all the weight and balance training my husband does. I’d gamble that Mrs. Delany would have had a trainer if she had lived in the twenty-first century. She was a walker; she loved the brace of air. She walked all the way from Delville (in the suburb of Glasnevin) to the center of Dublin, at the Dean’s suggestion, just for the exercise. Side by side, punching away at our trainer Jasen, right foot forward, left foot forward, left jab, right hook, it dawned on me that I was flying. A heavy hyper-vigilance was absent. It has been close to three decades since Mike’s first diagnosis. He has lived with his melanoma, as it turns out some individuals do, as if it were a chronic condition, like diabetes. Here we are, slam! having accumulated, bam! all the strands of whatever it is that will take shape in our lives. Somewhere in the depths of her paper garden, almost in the experience of lost time and lost care that working in a real garden produces, the panic had evaporated.
“Have you started to hate her yet?” lithe Jasen asked. “I hear all biographers come to hate their subjects.” No. I feel an abiding affection for Mrs. Delany, even more so now that she’s stopped her great work, just fifteen mosaicks short of her goal. Human after all.
Some things take living long enough to do. Deep into my investigations of how Mrs. D. managed to make the mosaicks, I discovered I really did want to own the six original Lady Llanover–edited volumes of her correspondence, and Mike found them for me – in an antiquarian bookstore in Dublin. Receiving the package from Dublin in Toronto, I winced at my earlier refusal (now I’d paid twice as much), and at another mistake I’d made when we were last in Ireland. I had decided that it was time to visit Down Cathedral, where Patrick Delany was Dean, and I wheedled Mike into venturing north with me. We arrived in Downpatrick and drove immediately up to the cathedral, on a gorgeous day in July that summoned up Mrs. Delany’s pure delight in her walks around Mount Panther and Mount Holly and the surroundings. I raced into the cathedral and up to the pulpit. “Here’s where he preached!” I shrieked to my husband, who was not behind me. He had stopped in the cathedral gift shop to buy a history of the church.
No guidebooks between me and an experience. I never rent headphones in museums, I buy guidebooks only after the fact so I can recall things, I can’t bear sticking a camera between me and an object, a person, a scene. Freshness of encounter – I insist! I walked back down the nave and found him at the little shop. “Hey, come on! You’ve got to see where Delany preached.” I tugged at his jacket as he was paying for his book.
“He didn’t.” I looked back at him. I had surged ahead again.
“Didn’t what?”
“Preach – here, I mean. The cathedral was in disrepair then, it was a ruin. He couldn’t have said a word in that pulpit. It didn’t exist in his time.” He opened the book to the page that made this fact explicitly vivid – the cathedral was in ruins from the late sixteenth century on and was reopened only in 1818.49 I had dragged us both up there to inspect a place of worship that one check of one reference would have told me not to go near. Well. You have to laugh.
Which he did all the way to the car, parked outside the Down County Museum.
“Want to go in?” he asked. “Consolation prize?” In the very entrance to the museum we found a copy of a drawing by Mrs. Delany.
You have to love a happy coincidence.
Mike gabbed with the guard, who summoned a curator who told me things I already knew, but it’s reassuring when an authority figure confirms the facts, and this curator pointed to where the original of the drawing was. Back in Dublin, in the National Gallery of Ireland, I viewed Mrs. D.’s Irish pencil drawings, the limnings that probably wouldn’t be remembered except that they were done by the woman who had made the mosaicks. She tried to get at the landscape lightly, quickly, modestly.
The natural world is at the cherry heart of Mrs. Delany’s mosaick explosion, and though her cutting style is quick and light, it is not modest. Her collages display the matter-of-fact boldness of the relaxed eye and hand. Obviously there wasn’t the same concept of abstraction in Mrs. Delany’s sphere as there is in ours, but the words of a twentieth-century realist painter explain something of the intensity of her dazzlement with nature. Avigdor Arikha was an Israeli artist and Holocaust survivor who lived in Paris with his wife, the poet Anne Atik. A friend – and illustrator – of Samuel Beckett, he abandoned abstraction for a love affair with the forms of the world right before him. “When I was an abstract painter I thought I was the well … and I thought the well was bottomless. But of course it was all wrong. After seven years I hit rock. I felt that all the forms I was expressing were the same form, my form.… I soon realised that there is only one thing that is not reachable, never knowable, truly infinite, and that is the world around us.”50 When you are young, you often cannot find yourself in the infinite. Where is your own form among the endless varieties of life on earth? Worse, how can you be a mere speck in the universe? And if you are a speck, which speck are you? But when you are old, the infinite is your home. It is comfortable to be a speck among specks.
“What is there / like fortitude!” Marianne Moore exclaimed in her poem “Nevertheless.” “What sap / went through that little thread / to make the cherry red!” Moore’s first name, just a vowel different from the heroine of Mrs. Delany’s novella Marianna, reminds me that Mrs. D. also managed to copy out that work again by hand in 1780, as she was churning out the mosaicks and delivering Georgina back to her parents, who had returned to relative solvency.51 Before she asks about fortitude, Moore says, “The weak overcomes its / menace, the strong over- / comes itself.”52 Mrs. Delany, who had long overcome her menaces, had somehow cut through herself to the world before her, 985 times. Her fortitude has the botanical feel of Moore’s exclamation: it was like the sap osmosing through that little thread connecting the lantern of the Winter Cherry to the stem.
Observation of one thing leads to unobserved revelation of another. That’s how I don’t know exactly when I crossed the line to lose my fear. I was walking along in life like the amateur conchologists I have watched for years on the beaches of Sanibel Island, Florida. They never see the sunsets. They are always looking down to grab their finds, their shells. While I was examining the mosaicks, looking down at my finds, above me another part of my life was standing, unknown to me, looking at what I’m not sure, perhaps a metaphorical sunset. This other part was transforming even as I looked as hard and as closely as I could at papery things all tiny and nearly incomprehensible. Direct examination leads to indirect epiphany. You can overcome yourself. Examine this world, Arikha and Moore say to us in their more elegant ways, as does Mrs. D. in hers: even if that is only the gristle in the drain trap of a sink, or the pearly glue at the tip of a pistil.
Chapter 14.
LEAVES
Painting of Mrs. Delany by John Opie, 1782 (illustration credit 13.2)
Mrs. Delany wouldn’t have dreamed of publicly showing or selling her artwork. Aside from the mosaicks that she gave to Queen Charlotte, Horace Walpole, Lord Bute, and a few others, her Flora Delanica was handed down similarly to her letters, first to her nephew Court Dewes, who made them available by appointment, and then down through his sister Mary Dewes Port’s daughter Georgina Mary Ann Port Waddington, and then to Georgina’s daughter Augusta Waddington Hall (Lady Llanover). I have no idea if Mrs. D. thought that the fame, however minor, of the Flora Delanica would live for centuries. She had no fortune or title, nor did she think of a public as we do. It’s a safe bet that she would have imagined that the Duchess’s legacy would live on. Could she have known that Margaret was manically spending so much on her collecting that she could have bankrupted her children, who had no interest in minerals, plants, and antiquities, and that this was their reason for a fabulous thirty-day auction after she died, dispersing all she had collected to the ends of England and beyond?
For the strange thing happened. The younger Margaret, Duchess of Portland, did die, suddenly. In July 1785, she rushed into Mrs. D.’s apartments at Bulstrode and asked her to look at all the red spots on her arms – just like those on the butler, who had already died. The physician was summoned, she took to her bed, and like that she was gone, dismantled collections in her wake. She left mementos to her older friend but not money, and Mrs. D. never expected money. This is something Lady Llanover can get fairly exercised about, since Fanny Burney, whom Mrs. Delany helped to get a position as dresser to Queen Charlotte, and about whom Queen Charlotte bitterly complained since Burney had no gentleness of hand and always caught the Queen’s hair in her clothing, declared that the Duchess had been a patron of Mrs. D., supporting her. Not so. That relationship was friendship, not patronage. Mary Delany insisted upon it. How else could she have maintained her balance on the seesaw of friendship with a woman of such high rank and fabulous wealth – well, a woman who spent fabulously.
When, after Margaret’s death, Mrs. Delany was helped up into the carriage with all her belongings and the Flora Delanica and her personal maid to jounce down the dirt road to London and St. James’s Place – never to see Bulstrode again, even through her dimming eyesight – the Duke of Portland, the Duchess’s son, sent immediately after her with a question: besides the mementos she had in the carriage with her, wasn’t there something else from the estate’s vast collections that he could send her before the auctioneer’s gavel came down? Shells? China?
The sight-impaired old artist asked for one thing, nothing hard and made and material, but alive: a little bird that had sung in a cage at Bulstrode, like the bird she’d listened to seventeen summers before, when she had entered that house in the bleakest distress of her life. And so the creature was sent, while Mary Delany, at the age of eighty-five, took to her bed in grief and exhaustion again. Queen Charlotte knew that she had asked for the bird and also knew that, unbeknownst to Mrs. D., the animal had died in the journey to her. The Queen ordered a search for another bird to replace the one that had perished without Mrs. Delany’s knowledge, and the duplicate, in whose feathers whatever slight discrepancy the previously fully sighted Mrs. D. would have detected in an instant, arrived, whole and alive, and was added to Mrs. Delany’s household.
One of the people who was shocked to learn that the Duchess hadn’t provided for Mrs. Delany was King George III himself. He queried her directly, and she stoutly responded that she had never asked the Duchess for more than “mementos of herself” which would “testify her regard.”1 Several were paintings that she had once seen clearly – but now, given her sight, more precious were things to touch, including what the Duchess had described as her “fine enamelled snuff-box, the small blew and black enamelled snuff-box.”
The King paid more attention to her situation than his grandfather might have, had she been able to obtain that court appointment she had angled for in her thirties and early forties. George III presented her with a cottage at Windsor Castle, the summer home of the court, and, knowing that she could never afford to keep up her house in London as well, with a three-hundred-pound annual stipend. He and Queen Charlotte ordered Mrs. Delany’s new house cleaned to within an inch of its life for her – right down to the soap to wash the wainscoting. A raft of supplies was ordered and a phalanx of workers readied the place, using up “12 lb of Sope – a Piece of flannel, & Linnen Cloth – a long Scrubbing brush – a hand do. – a Mop – 2 hair brushes – fullers Earth – Sand – Emory Paper – Sweet Oil, & Candles, &c. – for Scowering Wainscot, & Cleaning all ye Apartments, in Mrs. Delanys House St. Albans Street.”2 Fanny Burney, during her days as a less than suitable dresser to the Queen, before she wrote her novel Evelina and became Madame D’Arblay, wrote in her diary that Mrs. Delany’s house was supplied with “plate, china, glass, and linen” as well as “wines, sweetmeats, pickles, etc., etc.”3
When yet another carriage with Mrs. Delany, her clothes, her Flora Delanica, plus, this time, her waiting woman Mrs. Astley, arrived on September 20, 1785, the King stood there expecting her. The following day Queen Charlotte personally delivered the first quarter of the stipend for expenses. The princesses knocked on her door and played there. Mrs. D.’s great-niece Georgina Port came to accompany her, to write letters for her, and to help Mrs. Astley. A souped-up special sedan chair arrived for her – another gift from the King – so that she could ride to morning prayers with the royal family. George and Charlotte adopted her not only into the court but into their own circle. She went to concerts and to royal feasts, where the King helped her from room to room, saying, “Come along, Mrs. Delany,”4 and placing her by Queen Charlotte’s side because, by the age of eighty-seven, she was getting deaf. “My powers are not always equal to my will,” she said, “though, upon the whole, I find myself tolerably well; my days are unequal, and I am subject to a langour at times that makes me unable to dictate.” By the second summer at Windsor, Georgina was taking her dictation, and her correspondence sailed on under the new hand she instructed. The pair were content to visit the royal apartments in the Queen’s Lodge or to welcome the King, Queen, and princesses as they popped in on them. Portrayed by Thomas Lawrence and John Opie, Mary Granville Pendarves Delany became a serene presence. The court she had longed for half her life before had enveloped her.
One night the Queen slipped into Mrs. D.’s house unexpectedly for dinner, surprising her and Georgina at their “veal cutlets and an orange-pudding,” which Georgina served to Charlotte.5 In the homey way of returning to your mother’s for a meal, the exact taste of which you never in your life can replicate, the Queen attempted to have the royal cooks imitate the pudding, but it never worked. At last it was “sent up for the Queen’s dinner by Mrs. Delany from her own house ready made,” becoming known as “Queen Charlotte’s orange-pudding.” In the mid-nineteenth century, Lady Llanover still had this recipe. Oh, to taste it. Or to taste one of the great dinners cooked under Mrs. Delany’s auspices in her kitchen at Delville years and years before, when the Dean was alive and Mrs. D. joked that she had become fat as “a porpuss grown.”6
On a fragment of a letter from those Delville days, her sister Anne saved one of Mrs. D.’s menus, an elaborate meal served to the Lord Primate, his sisters, and the Bishop of Derry. She wrote the name of each dish in the place she intended to set it at the table.
I have scratched it out very awkwardly, and hope the servants will place my dinner and dessert better on the table than I have on paper. I give as little hot meat as possible, but I think there could not be less, considering the grandees that are to be here: the invitation was “to beef stakes,” which we are famous for.7
To think of all the dishes in each course being brought at once, piled on the table and served about room temperature, since keeping things hot between the kitchen and the dining room was a losing battle. To think how, at half her age, the ebullient engine of her digesti
on worked at maximum performance. She would just have taken complete ownership of her role as queen of the deanery at the time she served this meal. To think of the Dean alive, writing a portrait of her, an essay for a journal, The Humanist, which she was too modest to let him publish. “She was bashful to an extreme,” he wrote indignantly, “and if I may use the expression even blameably so.”8 Even in her fifties she was his ruby-lipped beauty, his indelible first impression of her at thirty-one overlaid on this portrait of his flower for the essay: “Her stature was in a middle proportion … fitted alike for activity and strength. Her walk was graceful, beyond anything that ever I saw in woman; … she is almost the only woman I ever saw whose lips were scarlet, and her bloom beyond expression.”
He could never figure out what color her eyes really were. “Her eyes were bright – indeed I never could tell what colour they were of, but to the best of my judgment they were what Solomon called ‘dove’s eyes.’ ”
Now Mrs. D.’s visual and auditory senses had dimmed, but taste and touch and – if craft can be said to be a sixth sense for her – craft persisted. She had enough sight to design furniture cushion covers for the Queen, in “leaves in various shades of brown, cut out in satin, and shaded with embroidery on a dark-blue ground.”9 Although Georgina lived with her and wrote her letters, and although her personal amanuensis Mrs. Astley guided her from room to room, she propelled herself through days of continued encomiums for the mosaicks. The artwork was brought out for scores of visitors, both at St. James’s Place and at Windsor. Sir Joseph Banks attested to their botanical veracity (though botanists today find mistakes here and there). Fanny Burney catalogued her comings and goings. Horace Walpole marked her forever among English women artists when he wrote in his Anecdotes of Painters that she “was a lady of excellent sense and taste, who painted in oil, and who at the age of 74 invented the art of paper mosaic, with which material (coloured) she executed, in eight years, within 20 of 1000 various flowers and flowering shrubs with a precision and truth unparalleled. ”10
The Paper Garden Page 29