All We Know: Three Lives (37 page)

Ivy was established as a brilliant, idiosyncratic writer by the time Madge met her, but her early novels had been dismissed by Jourdain and some reviewers in much the same terms that Madge herself was. These books are populated by languid men and resilient women—characters with a “passion for clothes and parties and gossip,” her biographer Hilary Spurling has noted—and the books themselves were seen as “silly” and trivial, code to some extent for
homosexual
. Most of them describe toxically constricting families. They are set in a moment that is at once modern, Victorian, and indeterminate, and seem to create a new kind of time. They also create their own rhetorical universe, being largely composed of conversation—apparently polite speech that shows off the aggressive behavior of intimates. Compton-Burnett is interested in the emotional heat that rises from the icy surfaces of talk. Her characters utter and ring changes on conventional verbal expressions; they argue about the meaning of idioms to the point that the possibility of meaning is often unhinged. This emphasis on rhetorical surfaces has a corollary in Madge’s attention to sartorial surfaces. The constant analysis of speech and silence—a style that is at once playful and deeply serious, and that stresses implication and deniability—also reads as both campy and discreet.

More Women Than Men
, published in 1933, has been called the most “clothes-conscious” of her novels: Its characters dissect their own and others’ outfits as well as speech. “Oh, pray let us drop this subject of clothes,” says Josephine Napier, the toxically benevolent headmistress of the girls’ school in which the novel is set, interrupting one such discussion. At the end of the book, “as she unfastened her bonnet and cast it on a chair, she saw it with a new sense of its significance.” The novel is equally striking for its description of the sorts of passionate attachments to women—mentors, rivals, colleagues, friends, lovers—and violent reactions against such intimacies, that marked Madge’s life. “Are you interested in different human relationships?” one teacher asks another, with knowing indirection, near the beginning of the book. The pressing analysis of the artifices of language and of dress in
More Women Than Men
is also, pointedly, an inquiry into the idea of “naturalness.” Felix Bacon, the drawing instructor at Josephine Napier’s school, who constantly interprets his clothing to others, says, “It is little, unnatural corners of the world that appeal to me. I am very over-civilised.” And yet there is no fixed identity, sexual or otherwise, in this world: Felix Bacon seems reliably “unnatural,” but turns out to be wedded to convention. He sits happily on the knee of the older man with whom he has lived for years and, equally blithely, gets married. Compton-Burnett’s pleasure is often to show how sibling or same-sex intimacy is sacrificed to make way for a marriageable couple, and that plot is one strain of this novel. But conventional couples are also in danger in
More Women Than Men
as irritating partners of the opposite sex are eliminated by sudden accident or fatal illness.

At the end of the novel, one of the teachers, Miss Rosetti, accepts Josephine Napier’s offer of partnership in her school and life. “I have said that there is nothing to tell of my life,” she says, “but there is one thing that I will tell…I have cared in my way for the women whom one by one I have tried to care for; and I have come without trying and almost without knowing to care the most for you.” This is not euphemism, yet the allusion to not speaking and the circularity of the avowal seem to make it at once more emphatic and less direct. “Miss Rosetti knew that on some things there would be silence,” the narrator tells us. “We begin our new life from this moment,” says Josephine Napier. And Miss Rosetti replies, “It will easily cease to be new to me; it is my natural life; my happiness depends on women.”

“Different” human relationships; autocratic but self-pitying parents; children whose power is tenuous, absent, or emerging; the thorny obliquity of a radically new style—it is clear why Madge would find Ivy’s work meaningful. As for the woman herself: “Ivy educated me,” Madge said. Madge had always been attracted to powerfully intellectual women (Rebecca West was another). She was often a guest at Ivy’s large teas—a kind of exclusive open house and local institution, mostly populated by art historians and writers—and she knew that Ivy was not above terrorizing people socially. (“The whole thing was that you went to tea at Ivy’s and she never introduced anyone,” said Sybille Bedford.) The first time that Madge offered a reciprocal invitation, Ivy listened to the other guest chat about modern literature, then cut her off to ask about her butcher’s bill. When Madge invited Ivy to a Christmas party—“a wildly mixed gathering” to which she had also asked her old friend Nancy Cunard—she found “the sight of Nancy Cunard decked out in all her corals, with spit-curls on her cheeks,” sitting on the sofa next to “Ivy in black velvet,” stunning, but she was made so anxious by the fact that Compton-Burnett and Cunard did not acknowledge each other all evening that “in the end the only thing I could do was go into the kitchen & get drunk.”

Madge herself inspired and valued Ivy’s sympathy and “deep tenderness.” “She might flay an equal—but she would never wound a friend,” Madge wrote. “To be inside her charmed circle was to be safe.” When Madge fell and broke her hip and wrist in June 1968, Ivy arranged for her to be cared for at home by a private nurse and despaired about being too unwell herself to do more to help. “I felt I had had my third accident,” Ivy wrote, “I minded so much…I have never been so angry at my own helplessness.” When Ivy died, at age eighty-five, in 1969, she left Madge a Chinese glass painting that had hung over her desk and a sixth of her estate. Her funeral was so banal, Madge wrote to a mutual friend, “that it prevented my tears, so furious was I that Ivy should be connected with anything so dreary. But as you know she had no belief in an after-world. Nor have I. So there it was.”

Although Madge needed Ivy’s silence, she was distressed when she came up against areas of intentional opacity in Ivy’s life, calling them “submerged stones against which one stubbed one’s toe.” Once, when she mentioned a person from Ivy’s past, “Ivy said nothing. But I knew…I must never, never, mention that name again. The temperature dropped to freezing point.” At other times, Ivy’s conversational style could be hilariously blunt. “He’s getting married,” she said of someone in their milieu, “like so many homos one knows.” The comment could have referred to any number of their friends—perhaps the actor and embroiderer Ernest Thesiger, whose wife, Janette, had been an intimate friend of Margaret Jourdain’s. “Will you come to tea on Saturday?” she once said to Madge, “
my lesbians
are coming.” She was referring to the writers Kay Dick and Kathleen Farrell. Citing this comment to Hilary Spurling as an example of the way Ivy played with her image as a prim governess, Madge took advantage of its apparent exclusion of herself: She was invited, but she was not one of Ivy’s lesbians.

When it came to broaching the silence that Madge herself required, the penalty could be harsh. The decorator Herman Schrijver, also part of Ivy’s circle, was known for the relish, assurance, and only occasional accuracy with which he dispensed wild stories about his friends. One evening, after a small dinner party at his flat, he escorted Madge downstairs in the elevator. “Come on Madge,” he said, pressing her about Ashton, “you know you married him for the title.” Francis King, also at this dinner, waited for him to return: “And then he came upstairs, after putting her in a taxi, and he was very shocked, and he said, ‘Madge spat on me.’ He said that she was absolutely furious and spat, and that was the end of their friendship. Then he laughed and said, ‘For a Lady it’s a very unladylike thing to do!’” King went on: “The extraordinary thing was this very elegant woman—at dinner she looked so beautiful, and behaved impeccably—and then this sort of vulgarity coming out. But I think that was the rather crude Australian side. And that great toughness of hers.”

Schrijver’s story is a foray into the twisted workings of discretion. There was Madge, allegedly infuriated at a statement by someone who knew the compromises and losses in her life and his own: He was a gay man and a Dutch Jew whose family had suffered under the Nazis and who was himself “discreet to the point of obsession.” There he was, betraying her. There it is: the way the story makes the audience visible, too—the question of whom “the whole performance” is for, of why she persisted in what King called “this great façade,” often with people with whom one would think she did not have to. With King, for example, “she never, as it were, came clean. I realized that her interest was not in men but in women. But she would never broach that any more than Ivy Compton-Burnett would. I wouldn’t have dared to say anything to question her about that side of her life.” Yet with women like herself, as Sybille Bedford said, Madge “didn’t make any bones about it.” A visibility so tenuous, so different, or so discomfited that it is easy to miss. A visibility so simple, precise, or extreme that it, too, is obscure. In 1927, Cecil Beaton, perhaps naïve about his new friend Allanah Harper, wrote in his diary that he wanted to warn her, “tell her a few home truths about what people think about her going about with Madge Garland, Dorothy Ireland & other Lesbians.” That the fear of homosexuality that is part of discretion can be mobilized by homosexuals is nothing new, and in fact is part of what Madge internalized and was up against.

Part of the story is simply that, unlike Ashton, Madge lived on in the world, was there to be scrutinized and criticized. It is easier to vilify those who survive than those who fade away. A number of Ashton’s colleagues blamed her for his downfall, saying that the marriage and its demise had made him an alcoholic, although it is clear that drinking was already a way of life for him. “It wasn’t Madge who drove poor Leigh to drinking,” said Peter Ward-Jackson; “he was already drinking badly before they got married.” That great toughness of hers also inspired its share of misogyny. “She was always very nice to me, but you knew that she was a bitch like all women,” said Hardy Amies—who credited her with giving him early confidence in his abilities, described her as “a wonderful bridge between London and Paris,” and saw her as someone who “had no patience with the second-rate.” That Madge spat, and at a friend, was in fact one of the worst things one could say about her: a perfectly condensed yet expansive way to insult her, as Schrijver knew. Spitting was animal, aggressive, inappropriate to her gender, the inverse of discreet—a messy bodily act that sent what was properly inside out. But spitting also has a place in the history of fashion: Rose Bertin, the eighteenth-century couturière known as the Minister of Fashion, was reputed to have done so when her
première
, Mademoiselle Picot, left and set up business on her own. In 1968, Madge published a profile of Bertin in which she wrote that the Minister of Fashion “was so furious [at this betrayal by Picot] that when she met Mademoiselle Picot in the Grande Galerie a very unpleasant incident took place. Mademoiselle Picot asserted that Mademoiselle Bertin had spat in her face. She took the matter to court, where Mademoiselle Bertin was found guilty and made to pay damages, but again the Queen intervened and the decision was quashed.”

To say that Madge spat when confronted with her marriage to Ashton was to say that her manners hid a lack of manners; that her perfect surface at once shielded and indicated class deficiency (it being impossible to imagine anyone not wanting an English title); that her social failure was also attributable to non-Englishness (that difference always being a failure); that her attempt to be something other than what she was born to “be” was a form of effrontery. Madge would have been furious at Schrijver about these messages and more, including the implication by a friend that she was nothing more than a social-climbing female, since if she loved the title, she cared about Ashton and was devastated by his decline. Rebecca West, writing to Janet Flanner in 1958, noted, “Madge came down for the week-end, and I am firmly keeping her an extra day. She has had…bronchitis, and is thin and pale and wheezy, and I wish she had not to cope with a half-finished house. She is deeply distressed by Leigh’s final relegation to a lunatic asylum. I will keep her longer if she will consent to stay, as the house is warm, but I fear she will go off to keep appointments with builders and get on with her work.”

“What Camp taste responds to,” Susan Sontag observes, “is ‘instant character’…and, conversely, what it is not stirred by is the sense of the development of character. Character is understood as a state of continual incandescence—a person being one, very intense thing.” Biographical writing is generally understood to be concerned with the steady development of character rather than incandescent performances of the self. But Madge Garland’s life of progress also depended on moments of theatricality, excess, artifice, and lying, and on the effulgence of fashion. There is the story of self-transformation and struggle, and then there is this woman with her “great amount of dazzling personality” that you felt “as she came into the room,” a continual, perfectly clothed presence.

In a 1932 photograph in
The Bystander
in which she used herself as a model, Madge stands with her back to the camera next to another woman who faces front; both wear “parchment velvet…informal dinner gowns.” A slip of blue typing paper on which she wrote, “Margaret and me” (it was the actress Margaret Rawlings), marks this page in her copy of the magazine. It is the only way to tell that she is there.

Madge was literally, psychologically, and aesthetically both, or all: highly visible and hidden; fearless and terrified; of the colonies and of the metropolis; “terribly tough, with herself and other people” and also “just fantastic fun.” Her charm—mannered, an exaltation of “manners,” and a style that seemed inimical to intimacy—was so successful that it convinced, even alienated, all but what she called “the most percipient of friends.” This was the paradox of the level of polish and chic she achieved: attempting to be seen, she obscured herself; obscuring herself, she made herself visible. Hilary Spurling, who met her when researching her biography of Ivy Compton-Burnett, first assumed that Madge embodied Compton-Burnett’s “smug, self-assured and profoundly conservative South Kensington circle”—then “realized the opposite was true”: Madge was “brave, shrewd,” and “indifferen[t] to received opinion on all fronts. Nothing shocked or startled her. She never passed up an opportunity or turned down a risk, and she felt nothing but contempt for those who did.”