Pearl Craigie

ELT 41 : 2 1998 Those hills of green, those skies of blue? The world is weary, they are gone... . However, Home's most important achievements—as an art historian and a book designer—transcend his poetic muse: his designs of the title page and tail-piece of his own book and of Image's, reproduced in the Woodstock reprint, are a delight to the eye. Olive Custance, whom one encounters in biographies of Lord Alfred Douglas because of her marriage to him in 1902, generally attracts interest as a figure of the 1890s rather than as a poet of that decade. Thornton and Small include her in the reprint series presumably because of several poems that echo fin-de-siècle Decadence. In "The White Statue" (in Opals), for example, the speaker expresses "love" for the "silent statue": ". . .1 yearn / To press warm lips against your cold white mouth!" Though Custance may have drawn upon Wilde's "Charmides " (in his Poems, 1881), in which the eponymous figure makes love to Athena's statue all night long, the tale was first told by Lucian. In "The Music of Dvorak," Custance draws upon the fin-de-siècle obsession with the dance (which Symons called "the living symbol") in her most impressive poem in Opals: "Beneath a golden dome, an emerald floor, / Crowded with dancing girls . . . the flash of feet. . . ." In Rainbows, published in the year of her marriage, Custance dedicates the volume "To the Fairy Prince," Douglas, who is the subject of "Songs of a Fairy Princess." In "The Masquerade," Custance may be drawing upon Wilde again, for the imagery echoes "The Harlot's House." Her poem begins: "Masked dancers in the Dance of life / We move sedately. . .wearily together. . ." Though lacking Wilde's depiction of the harlots' dehumanization in the imagery of the "horrible" marionettes, Custance's images confirm the Woodstock series' focus on fin-de-siècle proto-Modernism. Karl Beckson ________________ Brooklyn College, CUNY Pearl Craigie Mildred Harding Davis. Air-Bird in the Water: The Life and Works of Pearl Craigie (John Oliver Hobbes). Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1996. 535 pp. $65.00 IN 1904, PEARL CRAIGIE (1867-1906), whose writings appeared under the transparent pseudonym of John Oliver Hobbes, confidently informed her publisher, T. Fisher Unwin, that her biggest sales would 216 BOOK REVIEWS take place in the future. At the time, of course, Craigie could not have known that her life and career would end in a bit more than two years, and that the nine decades following her death would cruelly contradict her prediction. Indeed, the current edition of Books in Print offers none of the once-celebrated books and plays published during her short lifetime, and even used copies of her books are a peculiar curse to booksellers and collectors alike, belonging to that unfortunate class of book which is hard to find, but not worth much more than a dollar or two when a good, clean copy does find its way onto the shelves. Still, if Craigie should one day follow the example of Enoch Soames and appear at the desk of the British Museum or (more likely) the London Library in order to learn the verdict of posterity, she would not be entirely disappointed, I think, if the desk clerk placed a copy of this book in her hands. This is a big book, containing much to commend it to our notice. And while some may resent the fact that big books are sometimes devoted to the lives and works of minor authors, the full catalogue of Craigie's accomplishments and the events of her life, once unfolded and understood , make it clear that she was something more than just another mechanical nightingale of the Nineties. After all, Pearl Craigie produced over twenty books in a very few years, her plays were successfully mounted on the stages of two countries, she traveled, lectured, and wrote extensively, helped edit a successful magazine and, as an American woman in London, she occupied an almost Jamesian position in the literary and social circles of her time, achievements which make her, I think, one of the more fascinating characters in...