A Nature Lover’s Diary, 1913–1915
By Edwin King
Among Olive Custance’s papers in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library is a particularly ladylike little volume: The Nature Lover’s Diary. It is not one of the grand leather-bound journals in which posterity rather likes to imagine poets recording their inmost thoughts. It is an off-the-shelf diary, the dates already printed, the pages ornamented with seasonal flowers and foliage and supplied with improving scraps of verse. January has sprays of holly, glossy leaves and bright red berries. It may very well have come to Olive as a Christmas present, although we do not know that. In any case, it was designed to make the orderly passage of the year look attractive. And its title was not altogether accidental in Olive’s hands. She really was a lover of nature. The countryside, woods, flowers and the changing appearance of the natural world recur naturally in her private writing as they do in her poetry. That did not make her a recluse: she also loved London, friends and company, and could dread the prospect of being stranded in the country away from them. Nature delighted her; solitude did not necessarily do so. A Nature Lover’s Diary was therefore, in its rather genteel way, an appropriate book for her.
Olive did not, however, always oblige with happy seasonal thoughts. On one of those pretty January pages, surrounded by holly, she writes that “Daddy is furious with me”. Nearby come the terse entries: “I am utterly desolate”; “My friends are kind but they cannot help me”; “I feel there is no hope for me. My life is ruined.” Bosie is going to take Raymond away from Daddy; Olive fears that her allowance will be stopped; and finally the little space has to contain the plea: “God help us!”1
There is something almost unbearably characteristic about the contrast: the publishers have provided the holly, while Olive supplies the anguish.
The volume begins, however, with something more deliberate. In her own hand Olive has added: “Opal Douglas Jan 1915”, and then Isaiah 54:11–12:2
“O thou afflicted, tossed with tempest, and not comforted, behold, I will lay thy stones with fair colours, and lay thy foundations with sapphires.
And I will make thy windows of agates, and thy gates of carbuncles, and all thy borders of pleasant stones.”
The name deserves a word of explanation. “Opal” was not merely a playful signature. Olive’s first collection, published in 1897, had been called Opals,3 and the stone had long belonged to her imaginative vocabulary. An opal does not possess one fixed colour: it changes as it catches the light, now green, now blue, now rose or fire. Shakespeare had made precisely this association in Twelfth Night, where Feste tells the changeable Orsino that the tailor should make his doublet of “changeable taffeta, for thy mind is a very opal”.4 The opal, moreover, had acquired an ambiguous reputation: beautiful and mysterious, but traditionally associated in popular superstition with ill luck. For Olive its mutability seems to have been part of its fascination: many-coloured, elusive, never quite the same thing twice. So “Opal Douglas” carries rather more meaning than an affectionate nickname. It recalls the young poet of Opals, and perhaps something of Olive’s sense of herself.
One hesitates to make too much of a private jotting. Yet it is difficult to believe that Olive cited these verses of Isaiah merely because she liked the sound of them. A poet is serious about words. She had evidently encountered them in her Bible and wanted to remember and treasure them. Written neatly at the threshold of this very personal little book, the passage has something of the character of a prayer. Before the complaints, quarrels, appointments, sudden happinesses and little pleas for help which she knew might find their way into its pages, she placed words which were not her own.
In that sense the quotation almost consecrates the diary; and what words for Olive Custance to choose. The afflicted city, battered by the tempest, is not merely repaired: God promises to rebuild it beautifully, with foundations of sapphire, windows of agate, gates of carbuncle and borders of pleasant stones.
Precious Stones
Olive had always thought in colour. Jewels, flowers, birds, water, silk, moonlight and the changing colours of the sky belong to the natural vocabulary of her poetry. This is sometimes dismissed as the decorative apparatus of the fin de siècle, but in Olive decoration is seldom merely decoration. Beauty carries meaning. A jewel is small, polished and luminous; it catches light and holds it. Her best poems often attempt something similar.
Isaiah therefore speaks to her in a language she already understands. Yet there is an important difference. These precious stones are not ornaments placed over suffering to disguise it. The city has first been afflicted, tossed with tempest and not comforted. Beauty comes afterwards, as rebuilding.
It would be much too neat to turn this into the key to Olive’s religious life. Olive was never neat. She could call herself pagan; she loved the sensuous world with an enthusiasm which could itself become almost religious; and her spiritual history cannot be reduced to a tidy progress from Decadence to conventional piety. But neither should we assume that beauty and religion occupied opposite compartments in her mind. The beautiful thing could itself become a vehicle of prayer.
That is what makes the little diary so touching: it is already full of flowers and poetic quotations supplied by the publisher; Olive adds Isaiah’s jewels, and then begins to write what is actually happening.
On New Year’s Day the printed diary offers Christina Rossetti’s promise that tomorrow will be sweeter. Olive answers, unintentionally but with brutal effectiveness: “I am very unhappy … B. is angry and cruel to me … I have done nothing … Everything is black …”
On 2 January the printed extract is from Elizabeth Barrett Browning:5
“Weep as if you thought of laughter!
Smile as tears were coming after!”
Below it Olive writes: “My heart is breaking … I do not feel as if I should ever be happy again. B. is going to take R. away from Daddy.” Then, almost as though correcting herself: “But at least I have good friends … Must be brave …”
Two days later she is still miserable. Friends come to tea and assure her that everything will come right. Then a letter arrives from Bosie and suddenly: “They were right … A letter has come from B. that has made me so happy…”
This is one of the peculiar pleasures and pains of reading Olive’s private papers. Her emotional weather changes with extraordinary speed. A cruel letter can make the world black; a kind one restores it. It would be easy to smile at this if the suffering were not so plainly real.
The Tempest
The immediate crisis had not begun in 1915. The Berg papers take us back into the extraordinarily painful years around 1913, when the marriage of Olive and Lord Alfred Douglas had effectively ceased to function as a shared domestic life but had by no means ceased to be an emotional attachment.
At the centre of the struggle was their son Raymond.
Colonel Custance adored his grandson and wanted to provide for him. He could offer Raymond security, education and a future which Olive and Bosie, perpetually troubled by money, could not easily match. But the Colonel’s generosity also gave him formidable power over his daughter. Olive’s allowance mattered. Her debts mattered. Her father could threaten to stop one and insist upon the payment of the other. Bosie, for his part, understandably resented what he regarded as his father-in-law’s attempt to take control of his son.
Olive stood between them, and her notes from this period are sometimes painful precisely because they are so small: “I am worried to death about money.” “What have I done to suffer so much?” “I am just utterly worn-out with crying and misery.”
Her father tells her that she must get Raymond for him. Olive records his argument: “It would be wrong and wicked not to think of the welfare of the child. He wants to give him a really good education – and he adores the boy.”
There, in one sentence, is the trap. Colonel Custance can plausibly say that he acts from love. Bosie can say the same. Olive loves her father, her husband and her son. Any decision in favour of one can be represented by another as betrayal.
Bosie’s letters were often the sharpest instrument in this unhappy contest. Olive and Bosie had fallen in love through words. Their courtship was intensely epistolary. The same medium which had once allowed them to create a private kingdom of poetry could now inflict remarkable pain.
After one letter Olive writes that Bosie believes she has betrayed him. “It is not true,” she protests; this “hell and misery” is not of her making. Yet she ends: “God protect him.”
After another cruel letter comes the simple remark, “My heart bleeds for him.” During the Ransome case she sees Bosie in the witness box: “O, poor Bosie.” During another legal proceeding she spends the morning alone in Sir George Lewis’s room, “crying … and praying for Bosie”; she dreams that Bosie has killed himself and wakes crying bitterly.
And amid all this comes perhaps the simplest summary of the marriage:
“We were not made to live together … But I still love him.”6
Loyal to Everyone
It would be a mistake to make Olive a plaster saint. She could be impulsive, evasive and contradictory. She could change her mind. She sometimes wanted arrangements which were simply incompatible. But one moral instinct recurs with remarkable persistence: she wants peace, and she wants to remain loyal to people who are themselves at war with one another.
“I want Daddy to be happy too,” she writes. “I want to be loyal to everyone…”
That phrase may explain more of Olive’s apparent indecision than any diagnosis imposed upon her afterwards. To a more decisive temperament, loyalty means choosing the person to whom one owes the greatest duty. Olive seems often to have experienced loyalty as the refusal to stop loving any of them.
Her father does not understand that she still loves Bosie. Bosie does not believe that her dealings with her father can be compatible with loyalty to him. Olive cannot persuade either man that her affection for the other is not treachery.
Yet the record is not unrelieved misery. There are moments when everything suddenly brightens. She speaks to Bosie on the telephone and the day becomes happy. In October she records: “All is well again … Bosie has written me a kind letter … I sent him some roses …”
The roses are wonderfully Olive: after lawyers, threats, allowances and arguments over Raymond, roses. A lawyer subsequently arrives with papers which would remove £500 a year from Bosie. Olive refuses to sign them; her father is furious. “But I know I have done right,” she writes.7
The marriage had broken down as a household, but it had not broken down as love.
1914: The Dark Hour
The surviving notes are less continuous for 1914, and we should not manufacture a diary where none survives in this material. What we do have, however, is revealing.
On 6 April “Wommy”, Bosie’s sister, writes wanting to meet Olive because otherwise “the letters will begin again” and something must be done. The old quarrels are plainly still alive.8
By September the whole country is living in a different world. Olive writes from 39 Emperor’s Gate to Wommy on 5 September 1914:
“I cannot now hope that Dame and Bosie will ever understand me, or that we shall ever come to an agreement about Raymond … But it may be some comfort for her in this dark hour to know that I still care for Bosie even though he has made me so unhappy. I think the enclosed little prayer written on the 7th of August proves this?”
That “dark hour” naturally belongs to the opening weeks of the Great War, but Olive’s sentence carries its private history with it. The European catastrophe does not erase the domestic one. Instead, amid a larger fear, she wants Dame Douglas to know something quite simple: she still cares for Bosie.
As evidence, she offers a prayer. The prayer itself is not transcribed in these working notes, so we should not pretend to know its words; but its existence matters. Olive had written it on 7 August, within days of Britain’s entry into the war, and a month later she sends or refers to it as proof of continuing love for her estranged husband.9
This makes the Isaiah inscription at the beginning of 1915 less isolated than it might otherwise appear. Scripture and prayer are not decorative religious touches imposed retrospectively upon Olive’s story. In the surviving private material they appear at moments when she is trying to understand suffering and, especially, to resist bitterness.
January 1915
On 9 January 1915 Olive wrote to Bosie:
“My darling Bosie,
Your letter has made me miserable…”
The old subjects immediately return: Daddy, Raymond, letters, money, quarrels. But Olive’s purpose is reconciliation. She begs Bosie not to fight Colonel Custance, and she insists that she asks this not for herself but for Raymond. The boy is happy at Weston; her father can give him things which neither she nor Bosie can give him; Raymond will still go to the school Bosie has chosen and spend part of his holidays with him.
Then she thinks of Dame Douglas. Litigation is expensive. Dame has told Olive that she is nearly ruined and looks ill and unhappy. “all this is enough to kill her … I know how ill it makes me …”
And then comes the sentence which deserves to stand beside Isaiah:
“we are told to put bitterness out of our hearts – and leave things to God and I am sure it is best in the end …”
“I am longing for peace …
God bless you,
Your darling
Olive”10
There is nothing elaborate here; this is not theology written for publication. Olive does not claim that she understands Providence or that suffering has been good for her. She does not deny injustice. She asks that bitterness be put away and things left to God.
“I am longing for peace” is a simple sentence. In January 1915 it cannot help sounding in two registers. Europe is at war. Olive’s own little world has been at war for years.
Love After Anger
Another letter preserved in the Berg material, probably from this period, begins:11
“Oh Bosie … why will you always misunderstand me? All my motives … all my intentions … everything I try to do?”
Then comes one of the saddest compliments a wife can have paid her husband:
“Certainly you have written me the most beautiful sonnets in the world, because you are a great poet … but you have never really loved me as I loved you …”
Even in accusation, Olive cannot resist telling Bosie that he is a great poet; she continues: “I did not expect … I only hoped you to be kind to me … but you have been very cruel to me … and your letters are the worst of all…”
This is not the language of indifference. Nor, for that matter, is Bosie’s continuing engagement with Olive the behaviour of a man for whom she had simply ceased to matter. Their relationship could be destructive, exasperating and cruel. But it retained an extraordinary emotional vitality.
The Little Book
The Nature Lover’s Diary matters because of what it is not.
It is not a spiritual journal. It is not a carefully composed autobiography. It was made for appointments and brief notes, decorated by somebody else with flowers and seasonal sentiments. Its little spaces impose brevity upon whatever Olive wants to say.
Yet precisely because of that, some of the entries acquire the quality of prayers. There is no room for analysis. “God help us!” will have to do.
The physical object therefore tells us something which a clean transcription loses. On the page decorated with bright holly, Daddy is furious. On another page a cheerful literary quotation rubs shoulders with a breaking heart. The printed book goes on serenely insisting upon nature, poetry, flowers and the turning seasons while Olive records fear, money, Raymond, Bosie and the possibility that everything is ruined.
Over the whole thing, however, she has placed Isaiah. Perhaps she simply wanted to remember a verse which had struck her. We cannot know more than the evidence allows, but it is difficult not to feel that she was doing something slightly more intimate. She knew this little book would receive her thoughts during the coming year; before she poured them into it, she placed at its beginning the words which she hoped might contain them.
“O thou afflicted, tossed with tempest, and not comforted…”
There is no embarrassment in Isaiah about naming misery, and that must have mattered to Olive: faith does not require her to pretend that she is not afflicted. Neither, however, does affliction receive the last word.
The foundations will be sapphires, the windows agates, the gates carbuncles, and the borders pleasant stones.
For the author of Opals, there could scarcely have been a more congenial image of hope.
Pleasant Stones
What emerges from these Berg papers is not a newly discovered saint, and Olive would probably have been the first to find such a transformation tiresome. She remains herself: charming, difficult, affectionate, frightened, extravagant, sometimes exasperating, deeply susceptible to beauty and extraordinarily vulnerable to the people she loves.
But there is faith here, and it appears not chiefly in declarations of doctrine but in habits of heart.
After Bosie wounds her: “God protect him.” When she watches him suffer: “My heart bleeds for him.” When she is divided between father and husband: “I want to be loyal to everyone.” In the dark hour of 1914 she sends a prayer as proof that she still cares for Bosie. In January 1915 she tells him that bitterness must be put away and things left to God.
Again and again she wants peace; perhaps this is why the little Nature Lover’s Diary deserves attention. It preserves no grand conversion scene and no carefully polished spiritual testament. It gives us something smaller and, in its way, more convincing: a woman trying to remain loving while she is unhappy.
The spaces are small, as are the entries and, for that matter, the precious stones.
Olive had spent her youth making jewels out of words. In these difficult years she seems increasingly to have needed the possibility that suffering itself might somehow be worked upon: not denied, not explained away, but gathered up and transformed.
Isaiah offered her that possibility: the city has been battered, the woman is afflicted and tossed with tempest, she is not yet comforted … and nevertheless the stones are waiting: sapphire, agate, carbuncle, opal in everything but name; fair colours laid upon the ruins. It is a modest hope to place at the beginning of a modest diary, but it may have been exactly the hope Olive needed.
Notes
- Custance, diary entries, January, Berg Collection. My archival notes record in sequence: “I am utterly desolate”; “My friends are kind but they cannot help me”; “Daddy is furious with me … and my debts”; “I feel there is no hope for me. My life is ruined. Bosie is going to take away Raymond”; and the subsequent fear that her allowance will be stopped, ending “God help us!” The original page bearing the entry concerning “Daddy” is decorated with holly leaves and red berries. ↩
- Olive Custance papers, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library. References to The Nature Lover’s Diary, the private diary material and correspondence in this article are based principally upon my notes and transcriptions made while working through the Custance material in the Berg Collection. The diary bears Olive’s added inscription, “Opal Douglas Jan 1915”, followed by Isaiah 54:11–12. ↩
- Olive Custance, Opals (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1897). ↩
- William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, II.iv: Feste to Orsino, “the tailor make thy doublet of changeable taffeta, for thy mind is a very opal.” ↩
- Custance, diary entries, Berg Collection. The printed matter in The Nature Lover’s Diary includes extracts from Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Philip Bourke Marston, distinguished in my archival notes from Olive’s handwritten entries. ↩
- Custance, diary entries, 1913, Berg Collection. These include Olive’s records of the dispute over Raymond, Bosie’s letters, the Ransome proceedings, her prayer for Bosie, and the entry: “We were not made to live together … But I still love him.” ↩
- Custance, diary entries, May and October 1913, Berg Collection. In May Olive writes, “I want Daddy to be happy too … I want to be loyal to everyone”; in October, after receiving a kind letter from Bosie, “I sent him some roses”. Later that month she records refusing to sign papers financially damaging to Bosie despite her father’s anger: “but I know I have done right”. ↩
- The identification of “Wommy” as Bosie’s sister was confirmed to me by Caspar Wintermans in correspondence of 9 March 2018: “Wommy was not a servant, but Bosie’s sister (see my edition of Olive’s diary).” See also Caspar Wintermans, I Desire the Moon: The Diary of Lady Alfred Douglas (Olive Custance), 1905–1910 (Woubrugge: The Avalon Press, 2004). ↩
- Olive Custance to “Wommy”, 5 September 1914, Berg Collection. Olive refers to “the enclosed little prayer written on the 7th of August”. The prayer itself is not transcribed in my surviving archival notes, and I have therefore made no attempt to reconstruct its contents. ↩
- Olive Custance to Lord Alfred Douglas, 9 January 1915, Berg Collection. The letter discusses Colonel Custance, Raymond, Dame Douglas and the continuing family dispute, and concludes with Olive’s appeal to “put bitterness out of our hearts – and leave things to God”, followed by “I am longing for peace … God bless you, Your darling Olive.” ↩
- Undated Olive Custance letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, Berg Collection; my archival notes tentatively date it to 1915. Since the dating is uncertain, it is described in the text only as “probably from this period”. ↩
Quotations from the unpublished diaries and correspondence of Olive Custance (Lady Alfred Douglas) are reproduced by courtesy of the Executors of the Literary Estate of Lord and Lady Alfred Douglas, John Rubinstein and John Stratford, and with their permission.
Olive Custance (Lady Alfred Douglas) 