All We Know: Three Lives

by Lisa Cohen

  As white Australians, the Mc Hargs were British subjects and could enter and leave England with ease. But despite their increasing wealth—there were holidays in Deauville, an expensive automobile, the best clothes for Hettie—they remained outsiders in London. Socially ambitious nevertheless, they made a kind of religion of respectability, and the proper conduct of their daughter was a key article of the faith. They expected Madge to become moderately educated (she wanted more), to socialize conventionally (“I won’t!”), to learn to dance and do needlepoint (these she did with pleasure), and to participate in the rituals that would lead to a good marriage (she refused). They would have nourished a sensitivity to the intricacies of status even if they had stayed in Australia, since their desire for respectability grew as much from the need to distance themselves from the idea of their country’s convict past as it did from a desire to overcome their diminished social position in England.

  Andrew McHarg (Madge Garland Papers)

  Like many women of her generation and income, Hettie McHarg was a kind but remote figure to her children, and Madge was pained by her mother’s inaccessibility even as she appreciated her style. She described Hettie as a wonderful dancer and needlewoman who “always smelled delicious” and was “beautifully dressed, always, always,” never appearing until everything was in place—important, given the many minute fastenings and adornments on Edwardian women’s clothing. Hettie told her daughter, “Never come out of your bedroom unless every button is buttoned.” Madge called her “pretty-mama” and looked forward to wearing “blooms in my hat and feather boas around my neck,” just as she did. Years later, Hettie’s elaborate dresses and cool distance still signified: Madge told a story about being bathed by her nanny one evening when her mother came in to say goodnight before going out. Naked and wet, Madge ran to her, but was rebuffed, pushed away so she would not damage her mother’s lovely clothes.

  When she was not still feeling hurt, she referred to her mother airily and mockingly. “My darling Mama,” she said, was pampered and not inclined to any kind of physical exertion. Cared for by her husband and servants (the household included a cook, a housemaid, and a nanny for the children not yet of school age, although not a separate ladies’ maid), Hettie would not willingly walk farther than the distance between her front door and the Daimler waiting by the curb. Later, Madge understood that the constraints of Edwardian fashion—the close circumference of the dresses, the “many fringes, fish-tails, trailing sleeves, twinkling tassels, and elaborate hats”—required such limits on movement. But remembering her childhood, she was attuned to her difference from her mother and her own sense of confinement. One solution was to accompany her father when he golfed. There, she said, “at least I walked in the open air. Mother could stay home.”

  Henrietta McHarg at home on Fitzjohn’s Avenue, 1919 (MGP)

  Later she also understood how important it had been for her father to have a fashionable wife and the context in which her mother had been striving for clothed perfection. “It is hard for us with our expertly-cut crease-resistant clothes to imagine the amateurish and crumpled appearance most women presented in the past,” she wrote in Fashion, the sophisticated primer on the industry that she published in 1962; “old family photographs give more than a hint.” Between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, the transformation of high fashion and the rise of ready-to-wear clothing meant that the two years it had taken “for a Paris fashion to become universally seen and worn in London gradually shrank to one, and [then to] a matter of weeks.” Her mother was able to circumvent this long cycle and present a more polished appearance than many of her peers because she shopped in Paris while accompanying her husband on his constant business travels. As for Madge’s clothes, she was dressed during what she called “my helpless youth” by “the now extinct species called the ‘visiting dressmaker.’” These clothes were not fashionable, but they did fit, since they took “into consideration the peculiarities of my growing body.”

  If Madge considered her mother sensuously impressive but inadequately loving, she judged her father tyrannical. His crimes were to bring her up in affluence but ignorance, to presume to control her life, and to impede her desire for higher education. She grew up feeling deprived of ideas, of the open expression of emotion, of room for any aspiration other than the one that would have her reproduce her current circumstances. It was the claustrophobia of a conventional girlhood of means, conditions that can be difficult to conceive of now. For that atmosphere of censure and constraint, she also blamed her parents’ faith. “If you want to put anybody off religion bring them up as Scotch Presbyterian,” she said. Most of all, she expressed her deprivation as a question of aesthetics. “Art and literature didn’t exist in our house at all,” she said, offended that her father was concerned with money, not ideas, and describing him as Philistine in the extreme.

  The house, which she described as “Victorian Gothic,” was “entirely furnished by Maples,” an emporium from which the wealthy ordered everything from the furniture to the carpets. “It had wonderful woodwork, and things built in, and Aubusson rugs specially woven for the room—things beyond price today,” she said. “But it was nothing.” She meant that this sort of taste had nothing to do with any real personal knowledge or feeling. The house was crammed, too, with the expensive, overembellished things that Andrew McHarg bought in his quest for status: Stinton porcelain, Sheffield plate, paintings by the “right” artists, the latest American gadgets. Much of his acquisition required visits to the luxurious showrooms of West End shops—the flattering experience of walking on thick pile carpets, being comfortably seated, and being brought wares to consider. The only personal touches in the home came from what Madge called her mother’s “extremely bad copies” of paintings by Edwin Landseer, who specialized in what now look like perversely cruel, exoticized images of animals. Madge reacted against this atmosphere of sheer accumulation, of buying what one has been told is the best and what looks labor-intensive. Lingering, decades later, on her distress at her parents’ environment, she was saying that her eye, both trained and instinctive, was her route to social mobility. Of the 1920s, she said, “the mass of people went on doing the same thing, but the few of us that didn’t, we absolutely rejected everything our parents had and that our parents stood for.” Rejecting their home, she rejected not only a stereotype of colonial crassness but also an older aristocratic model of taste, since what she wanted all her life was what was new and different—even if the new sometimes meant revaluing the old, as when, in the 1950s, she was among the connoisseurs who helped revive interest in the paintings and decorative art of the Victorian age.

  To Andrew and Hettie McHarg, Madge was an awkward, willful, sickly girl who would not do as they asked, could not be appeased by their generosity, and was not frightened by their threats—the architect of her own unhappiness and of too much family conflict. They were often away for weeks and months on end, however, in Europe and Australia, and in her early childhood Madge was cared for by her nursemaid, May, who had come out with the family from Australia. May was a steady source of comfort and affection, and Madge, like many whose first bond was with their parents’ employees, attributed the loss of her self-confidence to May’s departure. In old age, she still longed for May, or for the feeling of having been loved so completely.

  Her mother’s usual response to a question was to say, “You wait till you grow up, then you’ll find out,” so being sent to school, the local kindergarten, was “a delight,” because there the adults encouraged her curiosity. Describing her earliest schooldays, Madge wrote with surprising candor that she had first fallen in love there. The girl’s name was Nina Brown; she was a year older, and Madge was so persistent in her demands to be close to this “idol” that her teachers finally broke the rules and allowed her to be accompanied by Nina at all ritual moments of the day: when they drank hot milk, or took their midday walk. Out one day with her new baby brother, Keith, and his nanny, Madge passed
her friend’s home and was startled to see “a small terraced house and not the palace” in which she “had expected so exquisite a person to exist.” She transmuted her longing and disappointment by fixing on the purple clematis that grew over the porch: It was “like a beautiful star,” she said, and it became one of her favorite flowers.

  Throughout her childhood she suffered from her ailments—allergies, curvature of the spine, susceptibility to illness in the days before antibiotics—and their cures. She understood herself to be a problem in every way and felt as trapped in her body as she did in her family. A solitary, fastidious child in a home that held virtually no books, she escaped however she could and absorbed whatever was at hand. At twelve, she culled hundreds of images of beautiful women from her parents’ magazines and illustrated papers. She lingered over these pictures and mounted them in a huge scrapbook. The only gesture toward learning in the McHarg house was the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, which came with its own special bookcase. She read every volume.

  The 1911 Britannica, advertised as “The Sum of Human Knowledge,” was published at the last moment when it was possible to imagine that such a sum could be contained in twenty-eight volumes. It is a repository of English thought at the height of empire. Many prominent scholars contributed articles. So did, for the first time, a significant number of women. From the entry “Women”:

  Though married life and its duties necessarily form a predominant element in the woman’s sphere, they are not necessarily the whole of it…The whole idea of women’s position in social life, and their ability to take their place, independently of any question of sex, in the work of the world, was radically changed…during the 19th century. This is due primarily to the movement for women’s higher education…[I]n the English-speaking countries at all events the change is so complete that the only curious thing now is, not what spheres women may now enter, more or less equally with men, but the few from which they are still excluded…As the first half of the 19th century drew to a close…the conviction that it was neither good, nor politic, for women to remain intellectually in their former state of ignorance, was gradually accepted by every one.

  The essay reads like the work of someone trying to will his or her hopes into fact. For Madge, it described a change that was by no means complete, presented as self-evident views that were accepted by no one around her. But its emphasis on education seemed to chart her way out.

  And yet, when her parents decided to send her away to school, to Cheltenham Ladies’ College, she refused. Hettie McHarg had become pregnant with a fourth child (“a very much unwanted menopause baby,” Madge recalled), and “the problem” of “what to do with a teenaged daughter” in front of whom one could not “discuss or even admit such a condition” was acute. (Hettie was also forced to cancel a long-hoped-for move to Mayfair; she had even chosen a house in Hanover Square.) Madge had been given some “silly books” about schoolgirls (“illustrated by nauseating pictures of the horrible girls”) and was convinced that she would be miserable at such a school. She objected to the communal living arrangements. She objected to the hearty athletic life. She objected, at least in retrospect, for sartorial reasons: “I discovered that you wore a navy blue, woolen, box pleated tunic over a white woolen flannel tucked blouse,” she said. She told her parents, “I am not going.”

  She miscalculated. It was a badge of honor among the male writers and artists of her generation and beyond to have loathed their school days. Many were homosexual and most, no matter what their desires, affected a principled aestheticism as a way to rebel against the anti-intellectual quality of English public school life. This distaste was a prerogative of all sorts of privilege, which Madge did not have. Despite the dormitories, uniforms, and a residual emphasis on sports, Cheltenham Ladies’ College was one of the few schools in England that took seriously the education, including the higher education, of young women. Whether her parents knew it—and she always described them as “totally unaware of and disapproving of higher education for girls”—this was an institution at which Madge would have been prepared and encouraged to go on to Oxford or Cambridge. But, presumably not knowing this, she continued to refuse and tried to discourage her father by reminding him that it would be very expensive and insisting that she would run away if sent there. And she was forever proud of her defiance. In the midst of this impasse, a friend of Hettie’s remarked that her own “difficult and unruly daughter” had just returned “much improved” from a school in Paris run by a Mademoiselle Lacarrere. To this more romantic exile Madge agreed. She never acknowledged that her parents might have had her interests at heart, or that she could have ended up with no further education at all.

  Like any “well-brought-up” girl in her milieu, Madge never went anywhere alone—she was well over eighteen when she first took a train unchaperoned—and during her year or two in Paris she was supervised carefully. To get to Mademoiselle Lacarrere’s school each term, she traveled with her mother on the boat train to Paris, or her parents brought her to Victoria Station, where one of her teachers met her. At the school, “they always knew where you were, every minute.” The place was nevertheless a revelation, a genuine education in art, architecture, and performance. It was essentially a finishing school, but unlike many, it was not filled with girls speaking English. Madge learned French well; one of her two best friends was Portuguese, the other Romanian Jewish. The students were given a reasonably good general education, and were given their own loge at the Opéra, the Comédie Française, the Opéra Comique, and various concert halls. They toured museums every Thursday and visited cathedrals, Versailles, and the châteaux of the Loire. Madge heard Chaliapin sing Boris Godunov and saw the Ballets Russes, including Nijinsky’s “jump through the window” (his celebrated exit in Michel Fokine’s Le Spectre de la Rose). Sixty years later she could still find her way to “remote churches all over Paris.” When she was required to exercise, she hid a book in her clothing, pleaded illness, lay in the shade of a hedge by the tennis courts, and read.

  She recorded her time at Mademoiselle Lacarrere’s lovingly in photographs of her bedroom, classmates, and teachers, portraits of the couple who took care of the school, and pictures of the places she visited. Later, she sometimes suggested that the school had had the fervid atmosphere of Dorothy Bussy’s novel Olivia, whose English protagonist falls in love with the beautiful teacher who is responsible for her intellectual and sexual awakening. Mostly she made it clear that the place had given her the chance to see things she never would have seen—the built and beautified world; artful thinking about texture, light, and movement—and that she had grabbed it all avidly, understanding for the first time what made her happy. Coming from the insularity and prejudices of England, she also found something as elusive and enduring as this aesthetic awakening: an instinct for the possibilities of friendship and an understanding of the world as her home. She called it “freedom of thought.”

  The start of the First World War in August 1914 interrupted the McHargs’ plans to send her on to a school in Dresden for further refinement. The family had moved to an enormous house in Hampstead, on Fitzjohns Avenue, but Madge found it “prison-like after the freedom, excitement, and stimulation of Paris.” She was now eighteen years old, expected to pay calls with her mother, in a mood of constant defiance, but unable to express her sense of the inanity of her life in anything other than small rebellions. Even what she could wear “was strictly limited.” (Young unmarried women were not supposed to wear furs, for example, or certain jewels.) “You see my father had a right over me,” she recalled; “it really was that you were imprisoned in your home until you were 21.” Looking for ways to experience the pleasure she had known in France, she decided that “the most violent, wicked thing” she could do was visit the Catholic extravagance of Westminster Cathedral, the interior decoration of which was still being completed. She slipped off—“I kept it a deadly secret”—drawn to the vast neo-Byzantine space and the intricate, multihued work of th
e craftsmen and women.

  In a house with servants there was, in fact, little for her to do. She was not permitted to enter the kitchen other than for the annual ritual stirring of the Christmas pudding. She wanted to learn to sew, but after she used the machine once and broke it, her mother forbade her to touch it. She was told to occupy herself with the Kentia palms that sat in huge Japanese pots on the staircase landing. “You may polish their leaves with milk,” she was told, “so that they glisten.” Her brother Gerald had enlisted immediately—he was in one of the first groups of soldiers shipped to France that August—and was writing home about the horror of the battlefields. She knew that people were hungry and dying in London, not just in France and Flanders, and she could not stand to waste milk on plants. If she was aware of the young British women, a number of whom later became her close friends, banding together to nurse or drive ambulances at the front (moved to participate at least as much by the oppressiveness of their lives at home, Virginia Woolf later argued, as by patriotic feeling), she was still too tied to her family and without the money of her own she would have needed to make such a break. She was unsuited to nursing in any case and was still focused on education as the best route to independence. “After some months of sulking,” she took herself to Bedford College, a pioneering women’s college (mentioned in the Encyclopædia Britannica article) that had moved to new buildings in nearby Regent’s Park. She secured the prospectus, “implored” her parents to let her attend, obtained Andrew McHarg’s grudging permission, and enrolled for the following year in a course on English literature, which was then still a curriculum directed at women and colonial subjects.