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In my mind’s eye, I can see George Calderon opening this book and chuckling with delight — not just because it was written (and gorgeously illustrated) by a great-granddaughter of his close friend ‘Evey’ Pym, but because it exemplifies something George believed himself.
Celia Pym is a highly skilled mender of garments, particularly woollen ones, but she does not set out to mend invisibly, quite the contrary:
I like to mend so that you can see what’s missing and what has been lost. To mend with a contrasting colour to highlight the hole is a distinctly confident move. It makes visible the change in the garment, its aging and its life. It makes the thing different and new with a fresh colour. And then when mended again, in the future, with another colour, this will add an additional layer to the story of the garment.
Similarly, George knew that in many cultures, including parts of our own, to wear pin-new clothes was to attract the ‘evil eye’. So he believed you should always distress new clothes in some way first, perhaps even adding a visible patch to them.
Celia Pym explains that her interest in damaged garments began with her great-uncle Roly’s sweater, ‘which I inherited after his death and is the first story in this book’. Roland Pym and his sister Elizabeth (George’s god-daughter) are familiar friends to followers of this blog! Note, however, Celia’s phrase ‘the first story in this book’. For the book is ‘not a guide to mending techniques’, its stories ‘describe the ways in which clothes and cloth become holed, why a damaged sweater or backpack can be emotionally affecting and how mending a garment can unstick a stuck feeling’. Thus, although she was not particularly interested in mending when she inherited Roly’s sweater,
two things moved me about the garment. That the holes and damage were a trace of Roly’s body, evocative of how he moved and wore his sweater, and that the darning marks were evidence of Elizabeth’s care. These two ideas about care and the body written into worn garments have kept me curious for the past fifteen years.
And here are the results of this particular mending:
Left: Roly’s sweater, Right: Elizabeth’s cardigan (photographs by Michele Panzeri)
‘Dear me, what a mess!’ may be your unfiltered reaction, ‘How bizarre! How counter-intuitive! How to ruin the fine work of the original knitters!’ But the more you look at the fresh shapes on these clothes, the more you will change your mind, I guarantee you. I will return to this subject in a moment, because the bulk of this book (pages 19-87) is self-effacingly entitled by Celia ‘Stories’, and these will deeply engage you and move you first.
She briefly relates the lives of Roland and Elizabeth; the life of her grandmother who bought her mother a Fair Isle sweater in 1951 which she has mended; the story of a Norwegian friend’s ‘shoddy factory’ and mind-boggling collection ‘Treasures from a Ragpile’; that of a retired GP who with his pullover mended yellow on deep gold became the star at a V&A exhibition; of a century-old cape from the Monte Carlo Opera House due to be binned, but which set out on an active life round the world once mended with Celia’s participation; of Lara and Lolu’s backpacks, how mending them was important to both, and how Lara, who suffered from cancer, ‘believed in embracing repair’. ‘Mending-language works on the body as well as on garments’, the author has remarked earlier.
So this is above all a book about our humanity, and how our clothes relate to that, the stories that our lives and bodies leave on them for us and others. It is philosophical, in fact — though I would much prefer to say ‘it makes you think’! It will challenge and stimulate you to meditate on areas of life, as the author herself evidently does. In this connection, it is revealing that Celia Pym is a qualified nurse, took part as a garment mender in a project with anatomy students in the dissecting room of a London teaching hospital, and ‘came to see an overlap in the way we use our hands and use observation to understand mending and anatomy’. The book is an act of great physical and psychological sensitivity.
But to come to the finished works themselves. Here is a woollen dress made by the Women’s Home Industries, worn by Vivien Leigh, and resurrected by Celia Pym after it had lain disintegrating from moth in the film director Jim Ivory’s attic for fifty years:
Vivien Leigh’s 1965 dress mended now (photograph by Michele Panzeri)
The dress was once a slinky, homogenous deep purple creation, but now that ‘the moth holes have been mended with warm, white cashmere wool from Japan’ it evokes a constellation in outer space with perhaps a rocket moving down through it. In other words, it is now not just a garment that ‘was’, it is simultaneously a new garment that ‘is’ — it has extension through time, it lives into our present and beyond. Then look more closely at the darning and finely woven-in mends on Roly’s, Elizabeth’s and others’ sweaters. They have an abstract life of their own, and a very detailed one. They remind me of Malevich’s Suprematist shapes, or Piet Mondrian’s compositions, but also of the beautiful ‘chaotic systems’ of the natural world, for instance murmurations of birds, or fields of teazles. I know that I am risking an appearance in Pseuds Corner here, but I think it is time to complete the title of this blog: Celia Pym’s form of mending is mending into art.
A wonderfully warm book for Christmas!
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SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
Wow, what a metaphor for life. How life’s experiences leave their mark, and how damage can sometimes be built upon, creating change that is not imperceptible. Conversely … “what we’ve been through together” is a reason to have a deeper relationship with the patched up items in your life.