All We Know: Three Lives (24 page)

She and her father left London on the long trip west in February 1917, weathering a treacherous Atlantic crossing on a ship under blackout to avoid German U-boat attacks. They arrived in New York in a bitter winter that Madge met “clad in silken underwear and a light woolen dress and coat,” because on board she had handed “the astonished stewardess” her woolen long underwear, “a garment I had always wanted to eliminate from my wardrobe.” The visual drama of New York City and then of the transcontinental train trip—the urban skyline, the vastness of the plains—bewildered but excited her. In California, they boarded another ship to cross the Pacific. There they met the Queeny family: John Francis Queeny; his wife, Olga Mendez Monsanto Queeny, of Spanish-German descent; and their daughter, Olguita. Queeny was the Irish American founder of the Monsanto Chemical Works, an upstart entrepreneur in the same mold as Andrew McHarg, on his way to spectacular success. Olga Queeny was decidedly not in the same mold as Hettie McHarg, and Madge was drawn to her warmth. She fell in love with Olguita.

Angular and beautiful, with long, dark, curly hair, Olguita had grown up a doted-on child in a newly prosperous St. Louis. Madge spent all her time with her, doing things she had spurned before (taking part in shipboard games, making costumes, dressing up) and again, as she had in Paris, finding a closeness with someone who seemed so different. The two families vacationed together in Hawaii, en route, and when they reached Australia, Andrew McHarg acted as host. In Sydney, they spent a day at Bondi Beach. In and around Melbourne, they met Madge’s relatives, visited Ewart Garland’s mother, took long walks through the Royal Botanical Gardens, and toured the surrounding country in open cars, the women in long veils to protect them from the dust. Writing and talking later about her life, Madge seldom mentioned this friendship. Instead, she talked about “American girls” in general—their independence, openness, and sophistication—calling them “girls with just what I wanted.” But her photo albums are full of images of Olguita. And when Olguita and her family returned to the United States, in the spring of 1917, Madge’s sense of loss was acute. In her memoir, she expressed her unhappiness as aesthetic alienation. “I wanted to go to Italy to see the paintings,” she wrote; “I wanted to see the cathedrals of Europe.” From the moment the boat pulled into Sydney Harbor, she averred, “it was a disaster.” The once-beautiful bay was “entirely encircled and overgrown with mediocre houses with no distinction whatsoever and its beautiful outline blurred with a suburban” ugliness. Melbourne “was worse. Trams clattered up and down the main streets where the buildings seemed to me mere shantytowns. Corrugated iron, surely the most hideous material yet invented by man, was everywhere.” The land and vegetation were “alien and horrifying.” The city was also full of impressive Victorian piles of brick and bluestone, but all she recalled or admitted seeing was that “there were no palaces, no great garden squares, no great cathedrals. There was nothing.”

In “fancy dress on board in the Pacific. Made hat out of cardboard!” (MGP)

Olguita Queeny, 1928, photographed by Madge (MGP)

This idea of nothing was one part the emptiness perceived by the Europeans who had arrived on the continent and assumed the right to occupy it, one part distress transmuted and projected outward: disavowal, identification, frustration, and disgust in a complicated embrace. Invited to a hunting party in the country, Madge was sickened. She knew that this sort of sport took place in England and Scotland, but had not seen it there, so she held the brutality—“the piles of dead birds”—against the country of her birth. Writing about this time for a potential British reading public, years later, undoubtedly made her dramatize her revulsion at the expense of a more nuanced reality. But a young journalist she befriended late in life recalled her abiding racism about Australia and Australians: “She would talk to anybody about anything, whether it was about Jack the Ripper or fashion or politics, and she was fantastically uncensorious—you could have lived with six men and three dogs for all that she cared—but she would say the most shocking things about aborigines.” In the 1950s, having survived the Second World War and looking for ways to escape winter in England, Madge toyed with the idea of spending time in Australia, but she never returned.

In 1920, in a letter to the
New Statesman
headlined, “The Intellectual Status of Women,” Virginia Woolf argued that the resistance to women having professional lives was still so general and extreme that those who want such a thing “must make a dash for it and disregard a species of torture more exquisitely painful, I believe, than any that man can imagine. And this is in the twentieth century.” Make a dash for it is what Madge did, but it took her several more years. After the Armistice was announced in November 1918, she and her father began the long return trip to London. There was a moment when they planned to travel by way of China, which Madge felt might have made up for “all the miseries and deprivations I had suffered,” but her father changed his mind. The consolation was that in early December they reached St. Louis and Olguita, and when Andrew McHarg returned to England, Madge stayed on. “One of the prettiest affairs of the past week was the luncheon on Monday which Miss Olguita Queeny of Hawthorne boulevard gave in honor of Miss Madge McHarg,” noted a newspaper social page. Such were the mannered conventions of society journalism. Then there was the way these women described their intimacy. Olguita later called it “rather special rather important and lacking in all artificiality. You were my dearest friend. I need say no more.” Madge described “a relationship so precious, so unique.”

The slaughter of Madge’s generation of young men in the war suspended and changed some of the pressure of the marriage market, and in the postwar years many women set up households together, some out of economic necessity and some for companionship. For a few, sexual partnerships could be veiled by such arrangements. Madge and Olguita did not live together, independent of their families, but each was now the most important person in the other’s life. In early February 1919 they sailed to London and found it in shock. Streetlights were on again, after four years of blackout, and food was less scarce, but the devastation of the war continued. There had been catastrophic casualties—from Britain alone, almost a million dead—and the flu pandemic of 1918–19 killed more people around the world than the war. Everyone knew someone who had died. Madge’s generation in particular suffered from the feeling that they had been betrayed by a government that had orchestrated, prolonged, and lied about the conflict.

Olguita, Mrs. Queeny, and Madge in St. Louis, circa 1918 (MGP); Madge (right) with Olguita, Richmond Hill Hotel, May 1919 (MGP)

“Olguita, Ewart & I,” London, 1919 (MGP)

Against all odds, the two young men to whom she was closest had survived. Gerald had been wounded and returned to active duty several times. Ewart Garland had been sent to France and stationed near the Belgian border in July 1916, after only five hours of solo flight experience. As part of a reconnaissance squadron, he was immediately sent on photographic and observation sorties; soon he was going out on bombing raids. His bravery was mentioned in dispatches, and by the end of the war he was a commanding officer, publicized in a newspaper article as “the youngest Flight Commander in the whole Flying Corps.” During the last several months of fighting, he was flying “to the limit of endurance, and beyond,” being shot at and shot down, and engaging in dangerous reprisal bombing raids into Germany. “I can’t shake off the feeling of being condemned to death or imprisonment,” he wrote of these last assignments in his wartime diary; “it’s not cowardice, only that…I know the danger only too well.” He was unique in his cohort: Most of his squadron was killed, and every one of his classmates in Australia died at the Battle of Lone Pine, Gallipoli, in August 1915. He visited battlefields after the Armistice—“a nightmare of mud and unmentionable visions”—then returned to England in December 1918, fresh from the “general horror.” He was appalled at the recklessness of what he had been told to do and had done, and he never again piloted a plane.

In the spring of 1919, Madge and Olguita visited Ewart, not yet demobilized, at the Hendon Aerodrome, in North London. They were rowed out on the Thames by Ewart and a fellow officer and had tea on Eel Pie Island. That June, on a boatful of North American soldiers going home, Madge returned to the United States with Olguita. When she returned to London by herself six months later, her old conflicts with her family intensified. Her parents sent her to cooking classes. She resisted by cooking badly and inviting them to sample her work. She took herself to a series of lectures on architecture at the Victoria and Albert Museum. At some point, Ewart proposed to her, and she turned him down. She was in a holding pattern, outraged by demands that were not seen as outrageous at the time, frantic to find a way to begin her own life, unsure of how to proceed. As a young woman of a “good family,” she not only did not need to work to help support her family but also was part of a class and a culture in which the visible leisure of some women and the invisible labor of others was at once a fetish and accepted to the point of being common sense. Even if a young woman from such a family had parents who supported her choices, it was difficult for her to do what she wanted. One measure of Ewart’s understanding of Madge’s predicament was his alarm at Hettie McHarg’s dedication to being waited on. He always remembered Hettie having stopped him when he tried to add a piece of coal to the fire in her drawing room—“Oh no, Ewart, we have servants to do that”—whereupon a young girl had walked up three flights of stairs to tend the fire.

Andrew McHarg’s next move made Madge’s choice clear: After more than twenty years in London, he decided to reestablish himself in Melbourne. Gerald would stay behind to run the London office of Brooks, McGlashan and McHarg; the rest of the family would return to Australia. This prospect, Madge felt, was “not a matter for discussion or rebellion. It was a question of life or death, and I said nothing.” Sometimes, when she told this story—when she had lived long enough to see her part of the world change to the point that her choices were no longer startling—she diminished the leap she made: “Well, it was really an awfully boring story. It was the usual thing in my time. I ran away from home, and I had no qualifications at all.” Playing it down, she identified herself with a larger history. Talking to friends and acquaintances too young to have known her in the teens and twenties, many of them women beginning careers in journalism in the 1970s and ’80s, she described herself as of “the suffragette generation, with Rebecca [West] of course as my idol.” She said, “It was
quite
the usual thing, like in the sixties boys became hippies with long hair…there were many, many girls of my generation who did that.” At other times, she told a story that had the archetypal quality of a fairy tale, but one in which she was both the heroine and the hero, saving herself from her own life.

Madge and Ewart at 71 Fitzjohn’s Avenue (MGP)

She accepted that she would not go to a university and decided to find a job. She loved reading, “wanted somehow to be connected with literature,” felt “vaguely” that she wanted to write, knew she didn’t know how, and concluded that journalism seemed the place to start. When her father left on his next long business trip, on which Hettie McHarg once more accompanied him, there was no one at home to monitor her. She took the Underground from Hampstead to Chancery Lane every day and walked up and down Fleet Street, through buildings of newspaper and publishers’ offices, stopping at each one and asking to see the editor. She was sent away from each office, having no experience. Finally, she presented herself at an organization called Rolls House Publishing, run by a man named William Wood. He knew that she had never worked in her life, but saw that she had good manners and dressed well. She was wearing the spoils of shopping excursions with Olguita and Mrs. Queeny in St. Louis and at Marshall Field’s, Chicago, where she had had found ready-to-wear fashions of higher quality and better fit than what was available in England. She knew that she “had nothing to offer,” but she was persistent. She said that she petitioned Wood three days in a row, and that at length he offered her a position at three pounds a week: “First of all he refused to consider my application,” she said. “But I returned the next day. He refused to see me, so I returned the next day and sat on the stairs. And he stumbled over me as he came down the stairs. I stood up and said ‘Mr. Wood you need never see me again, if only you will give me four pounds a week. I cannot manage on three.’ He gave way and I had a job.”

She had landed at the offices of the man who was editing
The Architect and Building News
and overseeing the English publication of British
Vogue
. Sometimes when she told this story it was an accident, as in this version. Sometimes she said that after visiting scores of offices, she finally remembered having confided her ambitions to Olga Queeny, who had introduced her to her friend Mrs. Nast, also of St. Louis, whose son Condé was in New York putting out a small society paper called
Vogue
. By 1916, when Nast had started to have some success selling his magazine in England, wartime shipping restrictions and paper shortages had made it difficult to export it across the Atlantic. His distributor, William Wood, persuaded him to publish an English edition, arguing that it would more easily get English advertising. Wood, wrote Edna Woolman Chase, the longtime editor of American
Vogue
and Condé Nast’s right-hand woman, “became an organization in himself, for Nast appointed him his publisher, manager, and managing editor” in England. In 1920, when Madge met Wood, British
Vogue
(called “Brogue” by insiders) was a small, unglamorous business occupying four rooms “in a very dingy little office” off Chancery Lane. The entire staff consisted of seven people. Madge was the seventh.

The morning after her parents’ return from Melbourne, she staged a cool exit, gathering her gloves after breakfast, saying, “I must go at once, because I have to be at my office at nine o’clock,” and leaving before her father could stop her. When she returned that evening, he ordered her to behave, to stay home and help her mother prepare for their move. She went to work again the next day. Andrew McHarg then wrote to William Wood, man to man, explaining that he was capable of supporting his daughter and demanding that she be sent home. “You see, I wasn’t yet 21,” she recalled sixty years later; “legally until I was 21 the editor would have had to send me home, if Father had pressed.” The truth was that she had long since come of age: She was almost twenty-four years old. When Wood showed her the letter, she asked him if she had let him down in any way, and he “replied that he had no reason for sacking me.” She held her ground with her father, and he responded that he would no longer give her any money. “And that,” she said, “was that.”