In December 1905, in the first entry of the diary now published as I Desire the Moon, Olive Custance stopped to explain something about herself. She was thirty-one, living in Walpole Street with her husband and her three-year-old son, and she had just published her third volume of poems, The Blue Bird. She wrote:
I always ‘acted’ since I was six years old. I change from day to day and back again, like an opal (my friends call me Opal) in different lights…
I must explain my ‘acting’—it is like telling a story—only instead of describing the people of my history—I become them—and all alone—with one friend or my maid for audience—I ‘act’ a play in which with changing voice I personate each individual… Sometimes I invent a story—but more often I act the lives of real people—my favourite ‘act’ being the life of Lord Byron… My words I invent as I go on, and indeed I often feel that they are spoken against my will—that I am in fact possessed by these people of my imagination. My plays often last for days—and I can ‘act’ for two or three hours on end. It is my greatest pleasure… and a delightful way of forgetting the sordid disappointments of life…
A way of making
This is not a confession about dressing up. It is a description of how she made things, and it has the stages of composition in it. She starts from a person, real or invented. She does not describe that person but becomes them. She invents the words as she goes, without a script. And the words come, as she says, against her will, from somewhere she does not control. That is her account of improvising, and it is very close to how poets talk about inspiration.
It was also her way out of an unsatisfying life. Real life, she says, is “less lovely than it should be,” and so she rewrites it, as Wilde said one should. “Pure fiction,” she adds, “is hopelessly unsatisfying.” She wanted neither the plain life nor the plain invention. She wanted the lives of real people, shaped by her.
A practice, not a phase
She did it from the age of six, and she was still doing it at thirty-two. On 27 January 1906 she “acted” Byron after tea and again after dinner, and in the diary for 28 January she copies out some lines headed “A Portrait of Lord Byron”: “Oh, to have been a woman that he loved!” Later that year she “acted” Byron again after dinner, and on 19 September she “acted” St Clare. In the same autumn she wrote that she thought she would “make a poem soon,” because she was “just in that melancholy mood that brings dreams.” The acting and the poems were not separate activities. They fed one another.
Byron was the centre of it. Caspar Wintermans says that Byron “was her idol” and that she was “a perfect encyclopaedia about him.” As a girl she and her sister had played scenes from Childe Harold, with Cecile as Ianthe. The woman who wrote “Oh, to have been a woman that he loved!” had spent hours in the character of the man she imagined loving her.
And the Decadent pose?
Father Brocard Sewell wrote in 1975 that Olive “never did more than strike a decadent pose.” The diary shows why that is the wrong way round. A pose is put on for others. This was done alone, for hours, from childhood, long before she knew Le Gallienne, John Gray or Bosie, and she says it happened to her as much as she did it. Wilde and the Nineties gave her a vocabulary for what she was already doing. They did not give her the thing itself.
Sources and textual notes
- Olive Custance, diary, opening entry headed 1905, [December], 31 Walpole Street, S.W., in I Desire the Moon, ed. Caspar Wintermans. Further entries: 27 and 28 January 1906; an early-1906 entry; 19 September 1906 (“St Clare” is the reading in the edition).
- Wintermans, introduction: Byron “was her idol”; she was “a perfect encyclopaedia about him”.
- Brocard Sewell, Olive Custance: Her Life and Work (1975), p. [page].
- Childe Harold and Ianthe: earlier post on Parker’s work, 2017.
