All We Know: Three Lives (35 page)

Madge Garland dressed correctly, beautifully, professionally, and imaginatively for her own pleasure and others’, to set an example, and to achieve a certain social mobility. She did so balancing a deep ambivalence about the way she spent her life. In the process, she became one of the most interesting writers on fashion in the twentieth century. The trained eye, and how she trained it, and how she trained herself to be seen—none of these can be disentangled from the eternal English questions of class and status, and from the ways these impinge on desire. Which is to say that professing fashion for Madge was also about the habit, the advantages, and the costs of discretion.

Madge Garland had a mesmerizing voice, “a vibrant voice, which woke everybody up and held your attention. Her whole personality was very flamboyant.” She camped it up, vocally, while maintaining her carefully wrought appearance of propriety. She leaned into her words: flirtatious and commanding, censorious and self-mocking, confiding and bemused, impatient and languid. When asked how she kept a circular planting of ivy in her garden so perfectly round and neat, she replied, “
Darling
, I get down every morning and trim it with a nail scissors and tuck it with hairpins.” Comparing sexual reproduction to the form of cultural production she knew best, she opined, more than once, “I like my children readymade, and my clothes made to order.” She referred to Ewart Garland’s second wife as her “wife-in-law.” (They had met and liked each other.) Athletic activity, especially anything to do with throwing or hitting a ball, was idiocy she wanted to be spared: “Sport is absolutely—ça n’existe pas. Ça n’existe pas,” she said. “If you want the damn ball, keep it, don’t throw it away.”

Soignée and proper in her continental Britishness, she also used colloquial Americanisms to achieve the campy thrill of contrast. “She used to say—it came from a film—‘You can say that again, honey bun!’” recalled Patrick Woodcock, “and it was so strange coming from this frail little lady, who was a different kind of creature.” David Sassoon’s family connection to Siegfried Sassoon impressed her, and when he entered the Fashion School she asked him if he had read the poet’s
Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man
. “My child, you
should
,” she said, when he told her he had not. “She always said ‘my child,’” he recalled. “And if she looked at a sketch she didn’t like, she’d say, ‘It’s so déjà-vu.’” When Sassoon was in a college production of
Uncle Vanya
, he powdered his hair, then came in the next day still wearing it. Madge sent for him and said, “‘Now, my child, you’re not in a circus.’ And I said, ‘Oh Mrs. Garland I can’t wash my hair every night.’ And she said, ‘Why
not? Stars do!
’ She was divine.”

She also depended, for dramatic and comic effect, on expansive descriptions of her own inadequacies, including her encounters with voluminous female form. When she talked about her travels in Greece between the wars, she described herself becoming “hysterical” when confronted by an infestation of fleas and sleeping buried under every article of her clothing—coat, dress, underclothes, and hat all piled on the bed—in an attempt to keep the bugs away. She told a story about a postwar trip to Constantinople, where she attended a conference on Byzantine art and where, in the spirit of adventure and economy, she rented a room from mutual friends of the writer Theodora Benson, rather than staying with the rest of the group at a hotel: “It was interesting alright,” she said. She woke in the small hours to see

This, too, is camp, a way of creating a scene: the highly competent professional woman making a spectacle of her helplessness—and of the supposed awfulness of another woman’s body.

Insisting that fashion had been nothing more than a way to make a living was another sort of performance. As was her sense of humor about her field: Despite her commitment to its rules, despite her belief in her expertise, despite the fact that it was her armor, livelihood, and pleasure, Madge wanted to send it up. Writing in
Britannia and Eve
about the autumn 1933  Paris showings, she noted, “The atmosphere is suffocating and there is an indescribable babel of noise; dozens of pretty and well-groomed young women are running about, apparently without any reason, and occasionally over the hubbub comes an agonized scream for Marguerite, Hélène or Renée. One never knows whether the cry, obviously that of a person in great distress—and, if you are new to the game, you think of someone about to be murdered—is answered.” In the 1940s, when she made regular appearances on BBC radio and television, she proposed a number of program ideas that were meant to be instructive but that she seemed to enjoy most for their comedy, including one about what it was like to watch Parisian women wearing the New Look, with its volumes of fabric, trying to get into the tiny cars of the postwar period. This distancing irony was another way that her practice was allied to modernist aesthetics.

But along with a flamboyant wit she had a profound commitment to discretion, which made her life a complicated dance of concealment and display, honesty and dissimulation. Her professional and personal being was made of her intimacy with and enjoyment of women, and she spoke fearlessly about her appreciation of female beauty.
Four Thousand Years of Beautiful Women
is the delicious, immodest subtitle of her first book,
The Changing Face of Beauty
. Describing her postwar travels in the United States, she would say that the girls in Texas were the most gorgeous she had ever seen. When Hugo Vickers interviewed her for his biography of Cecil Beaton, when she was in her eighties, this enthusiasm, “the way she spoke of other women—beauty in women and so on”—made him wonder whether she “might be a lesbian.” Having met a frail woman covered in a shawl, about halfway through their conversation he saw her toughness and passion emerge.

Yet Madge said little directly about what it meant to work in fashion and to love her own sex. Her silence is no surprise: “She lived very much in society,” said Francis King, and had to be accepted in that milieu, “so she wouldn’t want to appear to be a rebel, which she was.” This caution was especially necessary for someone who had no money of her own and no family or social position to shelter her from opprobrium. Some complied with her reticence, hoping to protect her. When Anne Olivier Bell was editing Virginia Woolf’s diaries for publication, she deleted the phrase “Going to bed with Garland” from a sentence of Woolf’s about Dorothy Todd, feeling that “revelations or insinuations about her private life could have been both distressing and damaging at that time.” King, a generation younger than Madge, said, “People of that era, they learned discretion. You didn’t talk freely about your private life because it was often dangerous to do so.” Such constraint may seem obvious: Being perceived as a lesbian had damaged her career more than once and was incompatible with the higher echelons of social life, on which the fashion industry depends, so of course it was necessary for Madge to conceal her private life. But discretion depends on the distinction between public and private, a distinction in the name of which much violence is still done. It is a particularly white male vehicle for veiling power: where one’s money comes from, how one happens to have the job one has. Its successful practice requires being in a position to say,
You can’t get to me
.

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.”