All We Know: Three Lives

by Lisa Cohen

  Looking Is Not Vanishing

  She was inevitably a magnet for admiration and disdain. “She was intelligent and read everything,” observed the writer and editor Francis Wyndham, but she was “rather too interested in what people looked like and what they were wearing.” Her prose was “too frilly and feminine,” wrote the New Yorker editor Katharine White, when Janet Flanner tried to get Madge work writing for the magazine in the late 1920s. And as Peter Ward-Jackson put it, “She has left no monument.”

  Madge Garland herself felt that she had left no monument and she wanted no memorial of any kind. She insisted to her friends that they hold no service in her honor. More disavowal, handwritten in old age on a scrap of paper:

  NO HYMNS

  NONE

  I detest (church)

  (religious)

  music

  AND WORDS

  Her ambivalence came to a head in old age, in part because she continued to be well-known, into the 1980s, to curators, collectors, historians of design, and people in the fashion industry, as well as to ordinary women who had read her columns or seen her on television. Living in a country and traveling in circles where producing a written document about oneself—diary, letters, memoir—was common, she “never vaunted or validated what she did.” A biographer who tried to tell her story was unable to interest a publisher in the project. When she died, in July 1990, age ninety-four (but admitting to ninety), one obituary referred to her as “a key figure in the history of British fashion journalism, the British fashion industry, and the training of fashion designers” who “neither exacted nor received the credit she deserved for her achievements.”

  In the 1960s, as the fashion world changed and designers’ shows became “explosive, fast,” said one fashion journalist, “there was Madge still impeccable in hat and gloves.” She was of the past and of the present—an anachronism to some and an inspiration to others. As interest in the 1920s grew and as Art Deco and modern design were reevaluated in the 1970s, writers came to interview her about celebrated friends such as Nancy Cunard, Cecil Beaton, and Frederick Ashton, as well as about more neglected figures (Marion Dorn, Eve Wyld). Most of these writers were looking not at but through Madge, an approach that may have been easier for her. Yet she was also profiled in the newspaper, and pleased to be, as a new generation of fashion journalists discovered her. She wrote and co-hosted Seven Ages of Fashion, a television series broadcast in 1975. She continued to publish into old age and, like any committed writer, corrected her work even after it was in print; her own copies of her articles and books are covered with revisions.

  The Changing Face of Beauty, published in 1957, is a kind of updated version of her childhood scrapbook-keeping—a collection of images and commentary that she described as “not a reading book at all, [but] a looking book.” Like much of her journalism, the brilliant, short volume Fashion, published by Penguin in 1962, analyzes and pays tribute to the industry and is full of telling detail. The showings in the 1920s of the couturier Jean Patou were galas where “only a few of the most important journalists were admitted,” she writes, “but at the little tables, with champagne sparkling in the glasses before them, sat the smartest and prettiest women in the rich international set, complete with rows of diamond ‘service stripe’ bracelets on their arms, surrounded by their gigolos and titled husbands.” Madge believed that The Indecisive Decade: The World of Fashion and Entertainment in the Thirties, which appeared in 1968, was “valuable insofar as it doesn’t deal with the major figures…Who would have heard of Allan Walton if I hadn’t put him in there?” she asked. “And [yet] he had a great influence, in his time.” (The strongest chapters of this book are those on fashion and decoration. The others are more enumerative than analytical.) She published The Changing Form of Fashion in 1970; The Small Garden in the City in 1973; A History of Fashion (co-written); and a catalogue essay for a major museum exhibit on prewar fashion in 1975. She continued to publish book reviews into the 1980s.

  She spent much of the last thirty years of her life, and increasingly after Ivy Compton-Burnett’s death, away from England, looking for new visual excitement, further education, and warm weather. She traveled—by cargo boat, not in luxury, and always with her typewriter—to Spain, the Azores, Singapore, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Macao, Manila, Sri Lanka, Penang, Kuala Lumpur, Malacca, Israel, Egypt, Tangiers, Ghana (where she lectured at the university), the Gambia, Nairobi and the interior of Kenya, Madagascar, and South Africa. She lived in Marrakech for several winters. She wrote most of her books on these travels. She kept small notebooks in which she recorded impressions of what she had seen, proper spellings of place names, books to read, people to contact, friends to whom to send cards, shopping lists, and reminders (“look up Cicilia [sic] Vinitiana of Rome courtesan & lesbian 16th cent”). “She had a ferocious hunger for adventure and experience,” said a friend, and “put herself through degrees of discomfort which we would wonder about now.” She found pleasure in most of what she saw. The architecture of the public buildings in Kuala Lumpur, such as the railway station and the post office, made “even buying a stamp great fun,” she wrote in 1962. In an essay on travel by cargo boat for the Spectator, she wrote, “Unexpected oddities of no special importance, a remote port, a native village, a small dusty museum, a temple of no aesthetic value are collector’s items to the truly curious,” as are “the loading and unloading of the various cargoes.” The travel articles she wrote for British Vogue in the 1960s are full of admiration for the beauty of the textiles and the women in these locales: “the panache of a race which goes shopping in ankle-length gowns, draped over-skirts, low-necked bodices and two-foot high headdresses—plus all their glittering jewellery.”

  On the set for Seven Ages of Fashion with co-presenter Allan Hargreaves, circa 1975 (MGP)

  She admired, wryly, the women adventurers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One of the last books she planned to write was a series of profiles of these figures, travelers in North and South America, Asia, North Africa, Russia, Eastern Europe, and Nepal. When it became clear that she would not carry out this project, she gave her notes to a young friend and urged her to write the book. Her “real love was travel,” she wrote of the voyager Isabella Bird, in a dazzling essay about four of these women.

  She had found the panacea which was to solve her problems for the rest of her adventurous life: to be in the centre of the stage, spot-lit by distance and danger, to describe at length to an admiring circle at home the appalling situations and discomforts which she surmounted with such remarkable poise; to remove herself from all domestic ties, yet cling to them with all the strength of her stubborn nature; to remain “a lady” but live the life of an adventurer—such contrasts almost completely obliterated from Isabella’s mind the “spinal complaint” from which she suffered in the captivity of home-life. The cosy comfort of Victorian England must have been stifling to a woman who could with equanimity share a log-cabin with two male students, camp out in the mountains with a known murderer, and sleep soundly in a hut with “hairy Ainos.”

  These insights into “Isabella’s mind” are also self-knowledge. Here is Madge describing her own back pain in 1970, after her return to England from a winter in North Africa: “It is lovely to be home and see friends and pictures and theatres but, alas, already I have begun to ache again and the sciatic nerve to become inflamed. It had quite vanished from my consciousness.”

  Over the next decade she became increasingly frail, but continued to travel. She made an excursion to the Indian subcontinent that would have been complicated for someone half her age, took a ride on an elephant, fell off, broke bones, and ended up in a clinic, in a room with a dirt floor, for weeks. She wanted to die far away from England, said Hilary Spurling, convinced that these later trips were suicide missions. “I’ve been in more hospitals than I have fingers on my hands,” Madge said to friends in the 1980s, “including in Africa and America.” When she could no longer travel—could n
o longer even leave home—she would sit for hours studying atlases.

  With the Marie Laurencin portrait, 1986, photographed by Sue Adler (Courtesy Camera Press)

  At some point in the 1960s or ’70s she began going to the Raja Yoga Center in northwest London to study meditation—Mercedes de Acosta had earlier introduced her to Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi—and after a fall in her garden she had an out-of-body, near-death experience that she was moved to write about, “but despite this energetic adventuring to the Sufis, to the ashram, she still couldn’t come to believe in any form of eternity,” said a friend. When she talked about what might happen after death, she would say, “Darling, it’s a huge, great abyss.” She took herself to a convent nursing home, anticipating her imminent demise, then “spent five or six or seven years dying,” said Peter Ward-Jackson, whom she asked to be her executor and next of kin. Still, “ill and bedridden and half-blind and miserable, she would pull herself together and talk, and talk in a very interesting way,” for visitors. “I think that she felt if you were giving friendship to her she was very determined to be a friend back,” said one young friend of her old age. “You came in the door and it didn’t matter what sort of pain you could see on her face. Once you said hello, she rallied and put herself into a mode where she was delighted and interested.” “She died in 1951,” Madge wrote of Daisy Bates, another of those intrepid travelers, who spent most of her life in the Australian outback, “aged ninety-two, poor and alone, but believing that nothing is ever lost.”

  “Fashion is like air,” Madge said. Many dresses, like those of the 1920s, depend “for their charm on the graceful movements of a supple body beneath.” “I wish I had them now!”—that scarf, that skirt, that dress—she said. But she was devoid of nostalgia, and was never “not excited about the new season, and the new hat, and the new this, and the new that.” She loved modern music and was thrilled when she discovered the work of Philip Glass. She illustrated an essay on men’s beauty with a photograph of Mick Jagger. She was still attending fashion shows in the 1980s. Thinking through clothes was how she lived, and in extreme old age she still made it her business to be flawlessly put together: clothes, coiffure, the arrangement of her hands and feet, and makeup, although her poor eyesight meant that she made up her face (blue eye shadow, some rouge) not with the mirror but from memory. She sat on her sofa, her gray-and-white hair perfectly coiffed, the rest a confection of bows, ruffles, and shawls, more pale blues and pinks.

  “What is there that can be both said and repeated about fashion?” Madge asked in her lecture to the Royal Society of Arts in 1951. “Even the most fragile soufflé leaves behind it a recipe, so that given the same ingredients we can make and enjoy it another day, but fashions once past can only be dowdy or amusing—it can never be fashionable again.” Wear it now. “Whether we like it or not,” she said, “we are given the possibility to live in only one age.” In the 1970s, she said, “I don’t like old costume, I like new clothes.” She was referring to the academic study of fashion, which focused on the history of costume. The idea that “the ‘Good Old Days’ were somehow preferable to present ones” made no sense to her. “This nostalgia thing depresses me,” she said of the vintage revival in the mid-seventies. “In the past fashion didn’t look back.” “I am incapable of living in other than the present tense (with occasional curious and anticipatory glances toward the future),” she wrote in Britannia and Eve in 1930. But “how miraculous it is,” she said to an interviewer in 1979, “when you hear voices from the past.” Over her lifetime, many of her dresses that did not wear out or were not superseded by new fashions were lost in catastrophic events: the sudden presence of bailiffs in the Royal Hospital Road flat; the bombing of her house and constant dislocations of the Second World War. In the 1970s and ’80s, she patronized a high-end consignment shop in Sloane Square, placing old frocks there to raise funds for new ones. Out shopping, “bent as she was, blind as she was, she could just pick up from the hanger some limp-looking rag and drape it round herself and make it look as if it came out of Balenciaga.” Suffused with light—like Woolf’s Mabel Waring—she sprang into existence.

  What remains is not an article of clothing. When the fashion school at the Royal College of Art marked its fiftieth anniversary, it commissioned a scent in her honor. Described as “feminine and sensual, with white hyacinth and lily of the valley, and bright top notes of tangerine and rhubarb to bring it into the 21st Century,” this evanescent memorial was distributed to guests at the student fashion show in 2000. Teddy Wolfe’s painting of Madge hangs in the Geffrye Museum in London, to which Madge donated it in the 1970s. Marie Laurencin’s portrait of her belongs to Colombe Pringle.

  What remains is writing that describes a commercial arena but is often saturated with such feeling and vision that it conjures her presence and experience. The postwar fashion shows in Italy, she wrote, used

  the [Palazzo] Pitti as a showroom and the Strozzi as a meeting-place where the actual selling was done, while the Boboli gardens were the scene of flood-lit fêtes for the buyers. Rarely have clothes been seen in more palatial surroundings than in the vast ballroom of the Pitti, air-conditioned against the summer’s heat, its huge chandeliers winking in the lights, white-gloved attendants handing around iced drinks, a bar (free) in another room, the commentary spoken in four different languages, magnificent guards in the full panoply of Renaissance costumes to herald the lovely Italian model girls.

  A monument sits solidly, referring to the past but defying time. But velvet is very important, and Madge Garland’s life attests to something as powerful as monumentality. In their materiality and their ephemerality, their capacity to make history present and to index the passage of time, a dress and her story offer something that a monument cannot: some mixture of the texture of daily life and of the vertigo of history, with all of their immediacy and loss, and all of their distortions.

  Even in her eighties, loss and distortion still marked her relationship with Dody, any mention of whom would make Madge blanch, snap at her interlocutor, and change the subject. When Olivier Todd was writing about his grandmother and inquired about speaking with Madge, “she said, ‘No, under no circumstances.’” The refusal is even more striking, since she sought out Ewart Garland’s son, Patrick, around the same time, wanting to know him—but of course she had wounded Ewart, not been hurt by him. Dody appears and recedes in the attempts at autobiographical writing that Madge imagined might be read by a public: missing, incompletely named (as “my friend” or “the English editor of Vogue”), or present only as a sort of implication. At no point in the drafts of her memoir does Madge indicate that the “friend” with whom she “shared a house” and “the English editor of Vogue” were the same person. In the 1950s, visiting the novelist Anthony Powell, she listened to him criticize the characterization of Pierre in War and Peace as implausible. She replied that Pierre—intelligent but highly irrational, and always searching for meaning—made sense to her; she had once known someone just like him. She did not go on, but Powell knew that she was referring to Dody. She spoke about Dody directly once, in the last year of her life, to Hilary Spurling, who insisted that she unburden herself and leave a record of that relationship and its rupture. “She was a brilliant woman, absolutely brilliant,” Madge said. “But erratic. She was a very strange character, and she had a fearful end. She was so gifted. She had the best and kindest of hearts. But she was a woman who ruined herself.”

  She was able to speak publicly about that part of her life through clothes and the business of fashion journalism. Reviewing Caroline Seebohm’s biography of Condé Nast in 1982, she commented on Nast’s “less-than-always-honorable methods of dealing with staff” and described him as “a man whose whole life was based on pursuing an absolute balance of perfection: his own blinkered vision of what women should wear, what a page of the magazine should look like, the exact relation of illustration to text.” In this book review, she was able to say that the magazine “smelled o
f snobbery so extreme that it [now] seems sometimes obnoxious, sometimes hilarious.” In the process, she turned again to the question of importance and suggested what she considered the proper material and scope of a biography. This portrait was disappointing, she wrote, because the real substance of Nast’s character—including threatening staff with “disclosure to avoid paying up for a broken contract”—was “glossed over here in two or three lines,” whereas “trivia—the number of bottles of drink consumed at a party, or a three-line, conventional letter of thanks—are given in full.”

  Writing in the early 1960s, Madge had described Edna Woolman Chase as “the first journalist to foresee the influential rôle a fashion paper could play in commerce”; later she acknowledged all that she had learned from Chase. Reviewing Nast’s biography, she did not say that he and Chase had broken her more than once. But she did write that it was a “relief” to emerge back into the present moment after having read at length about those potentates who had exercised such control over not just the fashion world but the lives of their employees, even to the point of dictating in which neighborhood they could reside. “One emerges from this world of false values, of rooms furnished by Elsie de Wolfe in false Louis XV style, into a world where young people today go about their business with carrier bags, wear no hats—and live where they like.” Chase, she explained, used to insist that every woman working on the magazine wear a hat and clean white gloves, and Madge wrote that she regretted the disappearance of both. “But,” she concluded, “one can pay too high a price for anything—even for clean white gloves.”