All We Know: Three Lives

by Lisa Cohen

  Discretion is composed of power and of fear. It is power that masquerades as politeness—what “we” don’t discuss, what “we” don’t believe it suitable to call attention to, what “we” call private: money, and everything to do with the messy thing that is the body. Which means that not everyone can benefit from it. When one is Australian, a woman, desiring other women, and middle-class, and one uses discretion to avert danger or not cause offense, then the tactic is invariably a double bind: an advertisement of vulnerability, an invitation to be “exposed” or “disgraced,” a shabby agreement that will never be honored, a shield that fails at the least insinuation. Less: at the threat of an insinuation. Discretion has been the only way to protect oneself when exposure would lead to social and professional disaster. But since it never delivers what it promises, since it is so easily turned against one, it would seem to take a wild optimism or presumption to depend on it. In fact, the idea of presumptuousness is often invoked against the person who is in jeopardy when discretion fails: What made her think she could keep this from view?

  But discretion is not simply the opposite of the artful, arch, apparently public, fearless stance of camp. Madge was an iconoclast and perfectly correct, at once; she wanted to be seen for who she was and she feared it. Describing the way women like herself and Madge lived, Sybille Bedford said, “It was in one way very open and in one way very discreet.” Both camp and discretion, like fashion, require a strict discipline, rigorous standards imposed on oneself and others. Both stances are a performance, extravagant and invented. Camp is clearly understood as such, but the proprieties of discretion involve a show, too. Both involve the truth of artful lying, whether of exaggeration or omission—those “gestures full of duplicity” observed by Susan Sontag in her essay “Notes on ‘Camp.’” This duplicity affects all concerned: actor and audience. Of course, social life demands practiced prevarication. To be outrageous and to tell a story well you must be convinced that you are fascinating; you must also be selective, must monitor what you show and what you hide. To wit, the fact that Madge was highly eccentric but did much to avoid the appearance of oddness. That she gave “the impression of being extremely fragile,” as one observer put it, and yet it was also clear that “underneath it all she was as tough as old boots.” “She was so typical of her period: terribly thin, frail,” said Patrick Woodcock, “but in fact that was a double act, wasn’t it?” Her thinness was itself double—both natural and produced, a legacy of her illnesses and a way to control her body. To one friend, Madge used to say, “I wish I could take a pill, darling,” instead of eating. Sybille Bedford thought she would have been considered anorexic in another age; she recorded a dinner in the 1950s chez Esther at which Madge “ate next to nothing.” Sybille felt that she “would have preferred one important or chic person to us and all the food.”

  The authoritative verbal and visual pronouncements of the fashion world are a pivot point between flamboyance and discretion. In fashion, the person who feels or is seen to be aberrant may be perfect, even for a moment, with the help of a perfect carapace. Both camp and discretion, in other words, partake of certain paradoxes of visibility. Madge’s flamboyance was inseparable from her discretion, and vice versa. If discretion is a way to remain invisible and inoffensive, its perfect, faithful execution can also produce the effect of camp. If camp is a way of making a scene so as to be seen, it is also a way to remain invisible, a kind of cloak of visibility. Madge’s exaggerated horror at the proximity of another woman’s undeniably female body is a form of camp flamboyance that is also a gesture of discretion: a way of using the extravagance of the former to repudiate her own desires.

  Discussing hairstyles (MGP)

  Camp has been seen as a male preserve, yet one of the untold stories of style has to do with how gay men and women have copied and inspired each other—learned poise and polish and how to pose. How he crosses his legs, how she smokes her cigarette, the way he holds his drink, how she speaks, what he likes to look at, even the contours of one’s body—I can do that. Of the willowy physique shared by many of their friends in the 1920s, Mercedes de Acosta wrote, “It was the vogue for young men of artistic pursuits to appear to be falling apart. And this resemblance to a swaying reed or willow tree gave an impression of fragility, although actually many of them proved unusually durable.” Many of those on whom Madge modeled herself and many of those she inspired were gay men. “It was the era when many young women wanted to look masculine and many young men wanted to look feminine,” wrote de Acosta. Exchanging verbal and visual styles with gay men was also a way for Madge to distinguish herself from women whose butch gender style was, from the 1920s on, increasingly understood to signify their sexual choices—and for her to be attractive to just those women.

  To Patrick Woodcock, Madge “represented…a particular kind of forceful lesbian who had a terrific influence on other people but was a rather wispy figure.” To Madge, Allan Walton “had this flair, this eye…I always wanted everything that Allan had. In fact, if I have any taste at all you could say it was formed by Allan.” When she first visited this young artist’s studio in the 1920s, preparing it to be photographed for Vogue, she was “staggered.” She remembered the space, on Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, as “something completely new”: filled with things that were “quite simple. Some early Staffordshire, a marble-topped table, all things that became the vernacular later,” and nothing was of great value, but Walton had assembled everything with an eye to color, to the point that the place looked “like a painting.” She described Walton as “equally staggered,” because being anxious to arrive early and not empty-handed—“I was a very serious young lady,” she said, laughing at herself—but not thinking it correct to bring a man flowers, she had bought a fruit that was still rare in England, so he woke up to find “a strange girl carrying a grapefruit” in his room. They became close “friends from that day on.”

  Like many of these men, Madge worked herself into more acceptable social standing by becoming knowledgeable about art and design, a kind of literacy that is particularly useful currency in “Society.” Which is to say that if “seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon” is characteristic of camp sensibility, as Sontag observed, it is also a technique of discretion—in part because taste-making has for the past century been viewed as a tolerable form of expression for those seen as sexually aberrant. (As Sontag writes elsewhere, “taste is not free, and its judgments are never merely ‘natural.’”) Madge was proud of having decorated fourteen flats and two country houses—several of which appeared in magazines, either on their own or as the settings for fashion shoots. Her homes were “like stage sets,” said Hilary Spurling—and every time she moved, she created a new one. Her bedroom in the Royal Hospital Road flat was “painted elaborately by Douglas Davidson in Marie Laurencin colours,” observed Beaton, who also thought her bathroom “chic, ingenious, uncommon & daring.” She remembered it “in pink and green, obviously very [influenced by the] Ballets Russes.” A flat of the 1930s, she recalled, “was all white—white curtains and built-in white furniture,” except for the rug, in pale blue, which was designed by Ted McKnight Kauffer. She later donated this rug to the Victoria and Albert Museum. “You had to have things actually made for you,” she said, “because you couldn’t find what you wanted and you wouldn’t have what your mother had.” She wanted to furnish another flat with a glass table on a metal stand, an item uncommon enough then that she had to design it and have it fabricated. She chose the glass—so thick and green that “it looked like a piece of solidified sea”—and designed the base of cast aluminum. “I was very proud of it,” she said, “then I changed and wanted something completely different.”

  Her last flat, on Melbury Road, “was like going into a sort of treasure trove, Aladdin’s cave,” recalled Gina Fratini, because her things “were so beautiful and yet sometimes very strange, not conventionally beautiful.” The accent everywhere was on a duck-egg blue, a pale greenish blue, she had a collection
of Bristol blue glass, and the walls were covered with Victorian paintings of “dead birds, surrounded by flowers, on rocks with water lapping at their feet, in lovely oval frames,” said Chloe Tyner. In fact, Madge was one of the collectors responsible for the revival of interest in Victorian art and design in the second half of the twentieth century; she owned a table that had appeared in the 1851 Great Exhibition, which the V&A bought from her in the 1970s. She recognized an undervalued painting by the eighteenth-century artist Thomas Jones, before his work was rediscovered, and bought it. When Isabelle Anscombe, a young writer on the history of design, interviewed her in the late 1970s, she was struck both by Madge’s connoisseurship and by the inclusiveness of her taste: “She was the first person I met who said, ‘It’s all good; you can mix this with that.’”

  Among her comrades in connoisseurship were George Furlong, who had run the National Gallery of Ireland; the painters Geoffrey Houghton-Brown and Edward Wolfe; the interior decorator Herman Schrijver, who “held that all men were essentially homosexual”; and Neil “Bunny” Roger, who ran his own couture house, then designed for Hardy Amies and for Fortnum and Mason. Roger wore rouge during active service in Italy and North Africa in the Second World War. He dressed in high Edwardian style in the mid-twentieth century, “with a grey top hat, or a bowler, and a stock [a white cravat], and a morning coat, a swallowtail coat.” Or he wore patent-leather hip boots and rode a motorcycle. Or he appeared in full drag at his notorious parties, such as the “Purple Party,” to which he wore a purple sequined gown. (There was also a Fetish Party, scandalous in 1956.) In the 1950s, Madge spent many weekends at the Oxfordshire home of Gavin Henderson, Lord Faringdon, a friend since the 1920s, who had transformed himself from a Bright Young Thing (fictionalized by Evelyn Waugh and Aldous Huxley) into a committed pacifist and progressive politician. He used Buscot Park for political conferences and weekend parties that mixed people in the arts with leading socialist figures, and he and Madge also celebrated “non-Christian Christmases” there. One room at Buscot was devoted to pre-Raphaelite art—Burne Jones’s Briar Rose and paintings by Rossetti and Watts. These had been acquired by his father, but Gavin was a collector, too, and a trustee of the Wallace Collection. He was also known to have—in a moment of camp glee or absentmindedness—begun a speech in the House of Lords by addressing his colleagues as “my dears,” instead of “my Peers.”

  In April 1952, Madge married Leigh Ashton, another queer friend from the 1920s. It was an attempt at discretion that created a spectacle and a scandal instead. Ashton had joined the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1922, working first in the Department of Architecture and Sculpture, then as curator of textiles and of ceramics. He quickly became a “very bright star in the museum world,” noted for “his flair for the aesthetic arrangement of objects,” a reputation cemented by his work on influential shows of Persian art in 1931 and Chinese art in 1935–36. He was appointed director of the V&A in 1945, but by then it was not an enviable job: The collection had been dispersed for safekeeping during the war, and the building was dilapidated. But he reconstituted the museum assertively, reorganizing the holdings to present a view of the development of style. Doing away with the previous divisions according to crafts and materials, he produced a series of “Primary Galleries,” in which the best work in all media from a particular period was shown together—an idea about display that is “now commonplace, but…was quite revolutionary at the time,” notes the art historian Graham Reynolds, who joined the museum in 1937. Ashton’s redesign made the museum’s collections more accessible and was the basis for the V&A’s self-presentation until the 1980s. In the competitive, close-knit London art world, he is still considered one of the most creative curatorial figures of the twentieth century.

  Madge and he were often out together at art openings, the opera, or dinner, and when she joined the Royal College of Art, her professional world overlapped with his even more. Still, “it was a very strange thing,” said Reynolds; “she was fundamentally lesbian and he was fundamentally queer…There was a general cry of mirth and ‘whatever do you think?’ It wasn’t regarded very seriously.” Allanah Harper, herself married, wrote to Sybille Bedford: “Just read the announcement in the Times of the forthcoming marriage of Mrs. Madge Garland to Sir Leigh Ashton…Isn’t it a scream. The papers are full of it.” “Fashion Professor to Marry Museum Director,” read one of these headlines: “London’s most unusual professor is soon to marry Sir Leigh Ashton, director of the Victoria and Albert Museum.” Madge invited her students to the engagement party.

  The marriage was a bid for social and financial safety for both, but most observers focused on Madge’s ulterior motives. The fact that Ashton had been knighted in 1948—the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum was always honored this way within a few years of his appointment—made Madge “Lady Ashton,” an incentive and another element of what was both “a scream” and part of her carefully conceived armamentarium. “A title draws a line in the sand in this country,” notes Isabelle Anscombe. “You can’t even begin to describe England without describing the status fabric,” observes Patrick Woodcock. “She loved to be Lady Ashton,” said Madge’s goddaughter, the French journalist Colombe Pringle. But her title also demonstrates how discretion works as both a cover and a signpost, since the implausibility of the arrangement was evident even to much of its intended audience. Gerald McHarg had met Ashton on a trip to London and, back in Melbourne, made a show of mocking Ashton’s homo sexuality. And when he received Madge’s telegram—“DEAR GERALD MARRIED YESTERDAY NOW LADY ASHTON LOVE MADGE”—he said to his son, “Well, someone’s finally made a lady out of Madge.”

  Few acknowledged how Ashton benefited from the alliance. Madge and he were both in their fifties, imagining a sexless but warm companionship. If the increasingly conservative social atmosphere in the 1950s made it hard for Madge to imagine living with someone with whom she was in love, and if she hoped for greater social success—“an ambition which was apparently not furthered by Leigh,” said Graham Reynolds—Ashton needed protection from the ferocious policing of homosexuality in postwar England, which did not respect status or celebrity. After the relative openness of the interwar period, harassment and prosecution of even accomplished or socially prominent men for homosexual acts was constant. The arrests and convictions of John Gielgud and of the writer Rupert Croft-Cooke in 1953; the arrest of Michael Pitt-Rivers, Edward Montagu, and Peter Wildeblood in 1953, and their very public trials the following year; and the arrest of the mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing for homosexual offences in 1952, his acceptance of a hormonal “therapy” of estrogen injections to avoid a prison sentence, and his suicide in 1954 are just a few examples of the climate for men like Ashton in those years. For Madge, the danger was not criminal prosecution but social ostracism.

  Ashton also imagined “a nice cosy home,” a change from the “austerity” of his bachelor flat, and so they planned to pool their resources and occupy separate rooms in her house in Priory Walk in South Kensington. They envisioned a household like that of many of their friends: Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson, or Willie King of the British Museum and his wife, Viva, whom Ashton had introduced to each other and at whose wedding he had been best man. (Madge and Viva were old friends, and Madge had lodged with them in Chelsea during the war.) Then there were the architectural historian James Lees-Milne and his wife, Alvilde, and the collectors of Victoriana Charles and Lavinia Handley-Read. All were alliances in which one or both parties preferred his or her own sex, needed the protection of marriage, and believed that the institution could be a rational, businesslike “agreement.” “Don’t marry,” Madge told Isabelle Anscombe in the late 1970s. “Or if you do, make very strict rules and regulations.” But none of her own rules and regulations helped her in this case, in part because Ashton’s “drinking career” turned out to be as “spectacular” as his museum career. On one “notorious occasion” he had to be carried from the club White’s, pass
ed out. He also collapsed at a reception at the Polish consulate that marked a collaboration between the V&A and the Polish government.

  Madge had suffered from Dody’s alcoholism, had no understanding of the problem, and could not tolerate it. She saw it as a question of self-control and respect for appearances, and when Ashton fell down drunk next to her in public shortly before the marriage, she sent him a letter calling everything off. “Dear Leigh,” she wrote, “When we became engaged you agreed that you would give up drinking. Last night again you were disgustingly drunk. In view of this I cannot proceed with our agreement.” Ashton’s response was to sit a protégé (the young curator and art historian Peter Ward-Jackson) on his knee, read him the letter, and ask the young man for advice—a scene that is emblematic of the whole arrangement. Madge put away her misgivings, they went ahead with the ceremony, and he moved in, but she threw him out of the house before the end of the year. “So the performance only lasted for about nine months,” Reynolds said. Soon after, when Ashton’s alcoholism became too much of a liability, he was forced to resign from the museum, officially stepping down “for reasons of failing health.” He spent the rest of his life, almost thirty years, at St. Andrew’s Hospital in Northampton, his memory for everything but games of bridge gone.