All We Know: Three Lives (39 page)

Dody never wrote this book. She remained a teacher, a seductress, and a snob. She “hated the Cockney accent to a degree that was unbelievable,” even phobic, recalled her grandson, Olivier. She peppered her conversation with Greek, Latin, and French and during the evening would read Shakespeare or T. S. Eliot to Olivier, who lived with her after the war. By this time, “she was a frail, scruffy little old lady” who lived in two messy, cat-dominated rooms off the King’s Road and dressed in a motley outfit of floor-length skirt, flat sandals, white blouse, and man’s tweed jacket, with pins holding her clothes together. She dropped names, lied, and drank. “She would say ‘I’ll be right back,’ then go around the corner for a drink,” recalled Olivier. But her generosity was intact: With virtually no money, she made it possible for him to attend Cambridge University. And she retained a sense of dignity: “Condé Nast she hated, but she never complained to me about the not altogether gentlemanly way people had treated her when she stopped being able to have
Vogue
. And she was always full of wild plans.” An encounter with a Sitwell on the King’s Road was the occasion for an awkward dance of pleasantries, prevarication, and avoidance. (“Dody, you must come to Renishaw.” “Yes, of course, how lovely.”)

She held on to the preferences that had served her well and ill: “Art came first, and then religion and philosophy.” Her knowledge was obvious, despite her posturing, but it also seemed to her grandson that “below the varnish of genuine culture there was a terrible intellectual mess: socialism, plus Christian Scientism, plus Anglicanism, plus Cubism.” Olivier, too, urged her to write a memoir. Instead, she worked intermittently on a project that she understood as a history of philosophy and key to all mythologies, and that he described as “merely accumulated quotations on yellowing pages, an incongruous jumble, fragments copied out from St. Theresa of Avila, Martin Buber, Alfred North Whitehead and Ludwig Wittgenstein.” He eventually wrote several vivid, critical, affectionate portraits of her. In 1962, when the first of these, the novel
La Traversée de la Manche
, had been translated, Dody threatened to sue the publisher for libel if it appeared in England. The translation, already in galleys, never came out. She moved to Cambridge and became friendly with Iris Murdoch. She lived on a small government pension and still drew occasional income from her trust, “but was constantly borrowing one pound here, two pounds there.” Her grandson, her daughter, and Madge helped to support her. She died in “extreme poverty” in Cambridge in the mid-1960s. Toward the end, she charmed a young Italian woman who left her husband for her.

Elspeth Champcommunal, Worth of London, with models, British
Vogue
, March 1953 (© Norman Parkinson Archive / courtesy Norman Parkinson Archive)

Tracking discretion, one amasses a curious archive—fleeting details that do not necessarily have a “proper” place in a life story, but are essential to understanding it: the proud statement of one man that he had helped Madge in her old age by complying with her request that he dispose of many of her personal and professional papers; another informant’s observation that homosexuality ran through the lives of Madge and her friends “like a green slime.” There was Madge’s own use, in an essay about the work of Evelyn Wyld and Eyre de Lanux, of the then-common term
nigger brown
to describe part of their palette. There was the disdain in the voices of some, and the intimate, thrilled quality in others’—the ways they radiated pleasure—when they spoke about Madge.

Often what flew up was the question of discretion itself. “We always knew, everybody in the inner circle” knew, said Chloe Tyner of Dorothy Todd. “But it had to be terribly discreetly handled…She couldn’t go anywhere, like everybody can today. The whole situation is so open today. In those days it was still rather discreet. Companies wouldn’t touch you if they had any feeling that—” she broke off. “It was very difficult, that.” She was also speaking of, yet not mentioning, her mother, Elspeth Champcommunal. Discretion expressed itself in euphemism. Madge, describing a friend’s lover of many years, referred to that woman’s “great friend.” In Shoreham, the current owner of Madge’s house told me that Madge had bought the place from “two rather fruity old gentlemen.” The garden was full of espaliered fruit trees, pear and apple, some of which Madge had planted. Discretion expressed itself in fascination. One woman said, “I know nothing,” then went on to relate a great deal. Another suspected that Madge had had an affair with Marie Laurencin. Another was sure that Madge and Ivy Compton-Burnett had been lovers—why else would Ivy have left Madge all that money? Discretion expressed itself in disbelief: Madge’s desire for Dody Todd was intellectual rather than carnal, some insisted, a distinction that would have been irrelevant if Todd had been an influential male magazine editor, the sexual appeal of whose power, intellect, and connections would have needed no explanation. And it expressed itself in flirtation. One observer was certain that Madge and Eyre de Lanux had been lovers. How do you know? I asked. How did she tell you this? Oh, it was the way she said it, this woman replied, lowering her voice, head, and eyelids, and looking up at me suggestively, to show me how Madge—or was it Eyre?—had looked at her and said, “We were
very
close friends.” In her eighties, Madge herself still flirted and used clothes to do so. Discussing the growing use of color photography in art books with a young writer, she slid to a comment on her interviewer’s blouse: “It has entirely changed our approach.
You
have
very
pretty colors on today.”

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:

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.

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 no 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.