All We Know: Three Lives (22 page)

At age two, Madge Alma McHarg moved with her family from Melbourne to London. She moved from the colonies to the metropolis, from a place of self-invention to a country obsessed with lineage. She attempted to discard her national and family origins as soon as she became conscious of them. Trying to make herself at home in her body, she cast off her orthopedic boots and the “horrid, thick…woolen dresses” and woolen underclothes she wore in winter. She thought of her life as a long struggle against the limitations of illness and of her family. She never entirely discarded her sense of imperfection.

“My family didn’t enter into my life really at all,” she said in old age. Alienated from her parents and siblings and desperate to erase her Australian middle-class antecedents, she was never nostalgic about her past. Refusal was the keynote when she described her childhood and adolescence. “I told them, ‘No, no,
no
,’” she said; and: “I thought, ‘No, I won’t, I won’t, and I won’t!’” Refusal, and an inchoate but overwhelming desire for independence. Yet her father’s business involved the stuff with which she composed her career: His company traded in “Millinery, Straws, Ready-to-Wears, Felts, Flowers, Ornaments, Paris Novelties, Ribbons, Neckwear, Veilings, Laces, Embroideries, Handkerchiefs, Silks, Velvets, Mantles, Blouses, Hosiery, Underwear, Gloves,” and she remembered him as “very, very fond of clothes.” If she gave him no positive credit for having influenced her professional life, it is not surprising, since he had done everything he could to keep her from having a profession.

For the record, she considered only three things about her coming-of-age significant: the brief but idyllic aesthetic education she received at a finishing school in Paris before the First World War, the time she spent in the United States just after the war, and the extent to which her parents thwarted her and she rebelled against them. The rejection and refusal to conform were real, but the way she recalled them hid a story more complicated than she was able to tell.

She was born in Melbourne on June 12, 1896. Both of her parents were first-generation Australians, the children of Scottish immigrants who had been part of the wave of voluntary migration from England, Ireland, Scotland, and Canada during the boom created by the discovery of gold in 1851 in the newly founded state of Victoria. In southeastern Australia, Victoria is roughly the size of England, and its capital, Melbourne, has been the Australian city most identified with England, especially with upper-class English customs and assumptions. As people and capital poured into Victoria during the gold rush and through the second half of the nineteenth century, Melbourne became the financial and manufacturing center of the country. By the mid-1890s, it was a busy city that had already weathered a depression, the scene of enormous wealth and poverty, and still a raw and sprawling frontier town.

Most of Madge’s forebears were enterprising men of the type referred to in Australian newspapers of the time as “just the stamp of man to develop into a successful colonist.” Coming from next to nothing in Scotland, they did not doubt their right to remake themselves in Australia. There is almost no record of the women of those generations. Her maternal grandfather, Thomas Aitken, immigrated in 1842 and eventually founded the Victoria Brewery. Her mother, Henrietta (Hettie) Maria Aitken, was raised in the mansion adjoining the brewery, on Victoria Parade in fashionable East Melbourne. Her paternal grandfather immigrated the following decade and became an official in the colonial government. Her father, Andrew Creighton McHarg, left school to work as a clerk in the garment business, a trade his older brother James had already entered; a few years later he joined James and two partners, who had founded Brooks, McGlashan, and McHarg. They were “warehousemen” and wholesalers of ladies’ clothing and accessories who imported raw and manufactured goods from Europe for distribution around Australia, catering to the growing colonial population and the Edwardian vogue for elaborate, feminine trimmings. Brooks, McGlashan, and McHarg’s warehouses were devastated by fires twice in the 1890s, but by the turn of the century the firm was one of the most successful businesses of its kind in Australia.

The business of fashion sent the McHarg brothers back in the direction from which the family had emigrated: They are said to have pioneered constant commercial travel between Australia and Europe in 1894, when Andrew McHarg first went to England and Europe for the firm; until then, Australian wholesalers had depended on supplies from English dealers. Andrew McHarg had married Hettie Aitken in 1892, and in 1898 he moved to London to position Brooks, McGlashan, and McHarg at the source, bringing with him Hettie and their two young children, Madge and her older brother, Gerald. The family settled first in Sydenham, in South London, and then in northwest London, in what Madge—alluding ironically to her mother’s distress at its distance from the fashionable center of town—described as “the
wilds
of Hampstead.” In the first part of the twentieth century, Hampstead was significantly Jewish, suburban in feeling, inhabited by businessmen and their families. In fact, it was fifteen years before the Mc Hargs reached it; they lived first in even more remote areas of North London. If it was possible for Madge to allude to Hampstead as a disappointment to her mother’s social aspirations (her longing for a good address in the West End, the apex of London social life and the place for pleasurable public consumptions such as shopping and the theater), the earlier addresses were so far out of the swim that Madge was careful never to mention them at all.

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.