On 10 July 1920 Alfred Douglas launched a new weekly, Plain English. Its masthead announced that it incorporated The Academy, the review he had edited from 1907 and in which Olive had printed twenty-three poems. In the second number, dated 17 July, on page 30, there is a poem of hers called “The Call”.
It is not in any of her four collections, and it had not been printed before.
The poem
THE CALL.
By LADY ALFRED DOUGLAS.
Come away!
But not to the secret woods, or the wind-swept fields to-day,
And not to the shining sands with their little waves up-curled. . . .
No! let us be brave at last, and wander out of the world!Come away!
To the other side of the stars, where the Angels are at play!
And our friends shall run to meet us with laughter in their eyes,
From the perfumed gardens of Heaven, and the golden galleries. . . .
Plain English, No. 2, 17 July 1920, p. 30. The byline is “Lady Alfred Douglas”, not “Olive Douglas” as in The Academy.
It is a poem of escape. The woods, the fields and the sands are all places she has written about before, and she turns them down. She asks for something further: to be “brave at last” and go “out of the world”, to where the angels play and friends wait with laughter in their eyes. Nothing in it is about a quarrel. But it is a poem about wanting to be out of one.
What is on the rest of the page
Directly beneath it, on the same page, begins a poem by Douglas called “Eve and the Serpent”. It is a satire on the Chancery Division. A devil dressed as a judge says that the courts run on fees, that “the right side” sometimes wins “but only accidentally”, and that justice is a matter of who can pay. Near the end he says that “Our serpent here puts on Sir George’s mask, / And Eve is very speedily undone.”
That is a joke on a judge’s name, and it plainly means Mr Justice Eve, who on 30 June 1915 dismissed Douglas’s custody application for all of Raymond’s school holidays. The other target is “Sir George”, also called “German George”. That is Sir George Lewis, the solicitor who acted for the Custances and who sat beside Olive at the hearing before Mr Justice Peterson on 3 May 1916. The page prints only “Sir George”. The elder Sir George Lewis died in 1911, so the man meant is his son, the second baronet.
The satire is bitter, and it is also anti-Semitic. A chorus of demons sings: “When Englishmen pay German Jews / To prosecute their ‘son-in-laws’”, and the refrain says that “German George doth grease the wheel”. A Jewish solicitor in 1920 is turned into a German.
Olive on that page
Sarah Parker, in her 2019 article on Olive and “decadent conservatism”, takes the appearance of Olive’s poems in The Academy and Plain English, beside Douglas’s journalism, as “silent assent” to his politics. She says, honestly, that she found no anti-Semitic statement in Olive’s letters. She also reports a letter from Olive to Douglas on 21 July 1920, four days after this issue, praising the appearance of “The Call”. I have not seen the original, but I see no reason to doubt Parker on what it says. Olive was pleased to see the poem in print.
That does not tell us she read the page as a whole, or approved of what was under her poem. By then her view of the court cases had moved on. In 1916 she was contradicting Douglas in open court. By 1920 she was writing to him warmly again.
And I think it is worth saying what kind of anti-Semitism this is. Douglas had a grievance against one man, the lawyer on the other side. When a man is angry with someone, he reaches for whatever insult is nearest to hand, and that is often the person’s race or nationality. It is ugly, and it belongs to its time. But it is a different thing from a programme.
The weekly itself is another matter. Douglas wrote in No. 4, on 31 July 1920, that “Christian Charity forbids us to join in wholesale and indiscriminate abuse and vilification of an entire race.” From August the paper printed a series called “The Jewish Peril”. Years later, in his autobiography, he said that its policy had been “strongly anti-Semitic”, and also that it was “ridiculous to make accusations against the Jews”. So he knew what the paper was, and at times he knew what was wrong with it. The accusation against Plain English was not unfounded. The Academy, on the other hand, had not been charged with it, and the earlier poems of hers there were mostly reprints from her own books.
The other voice on the page
What I find in “The Call” is the other voice. Over ten years she has gone from the beauty of the body (“The Visible God”, 1907), through the hope of spring and her boy (“The Wind in the Boughs”, 1916), to this: a wish to leave the whole business. Under her poem, her husband is paying back the judges and the solicitor who took Raymond from him. Above it, she is asking someone to come away, out of the world. I do not know when she wrote it, but I think it quite likely dates from during or after the years of the custody cases.
Who is she asking? The poem does not say. It could be Douglas, or Raymond, or anyone.
Sources and textual notes
- Plain English, No. 2, 17 July 1920, p. 30. The page image is a Google digitisation from the University of Illinois copy; the masthead of No. 1 (10 July 1920) is from HathiTrust. I have transcribed the poem from the page and kept its spacing, including the space before each exclamation mark and the four points after “up-curled” and “galleries”. The printed lines wrap; I have joined them.
- “The Call” is not in Opals, Rainbows, The Blue Bird or The Inn of Dreams, and had not been printed before.
- Sarah Parker, “Olive Custance, Nostalgia, and Decadent Conservatism”, Volupté 2.1 (2019), pp. 57–81. “Silent assent” is hers. Her note on the 21 July letter cites the British Library, Add MS 81703.
- Mr Justice Eve, 30 June 1915 (Liverpool Echo, 30 June; Daily Telegraph, 1 July), and Mr Justice Peterson, 3 May 1916 (Evening Express, Liverpool). Separate hearings.
- Douglas’s remarks on the paper are quoted from Wikipedia’s account of Plain English, which cites Plain English, No. 4, p. 78, and his Autobiography (1929). I have not yet checked the originals.
