&
Company
By
Moira Linehan
Dos
Madres Press
www.dosmadres.com
Loveland,
Ohio
ISBN:
978-1-953252-14-2
76
Pages
Review
by Dennis Daly
Elegant
beyond elegance. Moira Linehan stitches together a palimpsest
biography of her mother’s mother, Marie Louise Raimbault Wacha, a
nonpareil seamstress and dress designer. Based on very little hard
information, Linehan conjures up backdrops, insights, and probable
artistic techniques used by her grandmother. She does this by
incorporating period art in an ekphrastic approach that uncovers the
extraordinary will and likely contours of a magnificent lady. Wacha’s
life spanned the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth
century. The urban textile centers of Paris and Boston nurtured her.
In
her well-wrought and telling sonnet, Ars Poetica, Linehan wonderfully
describes the raw labor and hidden subtleties necessary in
constructing a dress and, metaphorically, any serious artwork. Here
she lists some of the basics,
…The
planning
beforehand.
Washing washable textiles
to
shrink them before they’re sewn. Laying out
the
pattern so the design flows, the plaid lines
match,
the dress drapes. Shears sharp so the seams
won’t
pucker, twist, ravel. The seamstress’s stress
Then
the fitting, the pinning and re-pinning
those
seams. Right shade of thread? The sewing,
seemingly
magic, not one stitch visible.
Each
seam, steam-pressed flat till at last the sewn
carries
material and a dressmaker’s vision
out
into the world…
In
the first of three stage-setting poems entitled Addressing the
History Linehan interweaves economic history and art history. For
instance, she details the domino effect of new fashion trends and how
they took her grandmother’s world by storm,
under
it all, the corset. At first, just working
to
narrow the waist, set off by jackets with wide
shoulders,
with bodice seams, darts, braiding, rows
of
buttons, maybe striped textiles, all verging in a V
at
the waist. Not
how tiny.
Then corsets lengthened
to
an hourglass. As that century’s second half starts,
ten
thousand workers in Paris produce those corsets.
The
year the American Civil War begins, over
one
million are sold there. Dressmakers are talking
to
salesmen, salesmen to weavers. Soon bolts of cloth
come
with borders woven in for hemlines, for cuffs.
Soon
the new fashion journals, then department stores
carry
patterns, instructions for assembling skirts
and
dresses…
Mary
Cassatt captures the subtle art of dressmaking in her brilliant
drypoint and aquatint painting The Fitting (circa 1891). Linehan
mines this piece for its historic value in relation to her
grandmother. The image portrayed contrasts a graceful and stylish
standing woman with her attentive, sitting (almost kneeling)
seamstress, who is wearing a simple brown garb. The standing woman is
doubled by a full-length mirror. In her poem of the same name Linehan
draws out, not only some of her grandmother’s essence, but also a
temperament and social position. Here’s part of her description,
… She’s
sitting on a low stool,
her
back to the viewer, seams of her back
bodice
on display. The center seam: pattern placed
so
two strips of those four black lines get stitched
together
at the neckband, leaving three lines
each
side. But not just stitched. Fitted, so narrowing
to
only three lines total at her waist. Likewise,
from
left shoulder and right, strips of black lines,
taken
in by darts. Each side of that center seam,
mirror
of the other.
Another
painting Linehan uses to great effect is Edmund Tarbell’s Girl,
Crocheting (1904). The girl pictured seems content in her work, work
that exists only in shadow. The artist even vanishes the girl’s
face into shadow. A large portrait on the wall, however, leaves no
doubt as to Pope Innocent’s identification and imposing figure.
Linehan employs the grand pope as a figure of contrast with the
contentedness of the crocheter, and both of them as a contrast to a
new century and the impending revolution centering on the modern
woman. The poet’s consideration of Tarbell’s portrait (copied
from Velazquez) of Pope Innocent leads directly to a consideration of
the breakout,
His
waist-length cape, signature vermillion satin,
drapes
in a V over a long surplice, its wide hem
of
fine lace. Some claim it’s the greatest portrait
painter’s
greatest portrait, this pope by Velazquez,
more
or less a contemporary of Vermeer. Tarbell,
suggesting
he has a foot in both those schools.
Tarbell,
of the Boston school. Yet within the world
Of
this art: all the unnamed. Nuns working bobbins
By
window light, making lace for bishops’ vestments.
Women
of Vermeer’s Delft about their daily lives.
This
Girl
in a long dark skirt, seemingly content
to
crochet in shadow. She, a weir for Tarbell,
holding
back the new century, those women marching.
Clues
here and there suggest that Linehan’s grandmother, Maria, did quite
well financially. Her poem, Getting My Grandmother to Boston notes
that Maria’s tailor-husband was offered and accepted a managerial
job with Boston’s largest manufacturing plant of woman’s
fashions. Three years later he opened Jules Wacha & Company on
Boylston Street. With these bare facts the poet’s (now
well-schooled) imagination fills in the blanks,
So
I decide to give her, as the “& Company,” part
of
Jules Wacha & Company, the task
of
overseeing its books as she oversaw
the
finances of their home at 4 Zamora Street
in
Jamaica Plain, my mother having told me
she
grew up with servants—maids, housekeepers, cooks,
and
gardeners—my grandmother keeping
from
her husband (as my mother would) such
bothersome
details…
This
lovely book of artistic investigation concludes, not only with the
reversal of her grandmother’s erasure, but also, revelations of the
poet’s own craft and the intense, unforgotten influence of a
mother’s love.
