Here was the essential theme of Radclyffe Hall’s ambition. The truth must be told and she was there to tell it. She was a genius with a gift from God. Her writing would be disseminated throughout the world. Like Christ, she needed the selfless devotion of a woman to further her martyred art. The conundrum of her chauvinism was that she herself was a woman who cast herself in the male hero’s part.
Betty Carstairs stayed at the White Cottage early in 1915. She had tea with Ladye, they did psychical things with swinging amber beads to communicate with dead relatives, then Ladye read her ‘The Recording Angel’ (‘The Rechording Angle’) and ‘The Career of Mark Anthony Brakes’. Set in a venue favoured by Radclyffe Hall – the gates of paradise – the Recording Angel weighs his clients in the balance and administers capricious justice. A vain woman, uneasily resembling Mrs Visetti, gets pain, poverty and old age as a lesson in compassion. ‘Tears will wash her soul.’ A dissolute young man with the attributes of Radclyffe Radclyffe-Hall gets absolution because he once saved a boy from drowning and once set a blackbird free. ‘Kindnesses are priceless jems in the site of God’, the angel, or angle, reminds.
‘I always write about misfits’, Radclyffe Hall said, the inference being that she always wrote about herself. In ‘Mark Anthony Brakes’ she intended to write a pioneer piece on race, though the only black people she had come across were servants in her grandmother’s Philadelphia house. Brakes acts white ‘though in his soul he knew that he sprang from a race of born slaves’. Radclyffe Hall had a parallel predicament with gender. ‘Dat chile of ours am destined to be a great man’, Brakes’s father says. Dat chile ‘devours’ books, pomades his hair, talks without accent and excels at segregated college. He works as a lawyer. But ‘his was a low-class practice entirely among negroes and his heart began to sicken at the futility of his work’.
A white actress, who can afford no better, lets him represent her. Emboldened when he wins her case, he declares his love, asks her to be his wife and says he will give her a cleaner life. ‘A cleaner life with a nigger?’ she alarmingly responds. ‘You just get right out of this – get out will you, you black nigger get out!’ Something then ‘surges up to his reeling brain and down to his feet’. He rapes her – ‘gloated over her like a beast over its prey’ – then shoots himself.
Radclyffe Hall was no stylist. It was a stark theme for her clumsy prose. It turned into a jumble of unhelpful views on race caught by the assumptions of her time and class. Her interest in Mark Anthony Brakes was sentimental. He, like her, was a misfit, goaded for what he was. And behind this was a raw view of sex that equated with compulsion, rejection and sin.
In ‘The Modern Miss Thompson’ she was pontifical about women’s suffrage (spelled sufferidge). John wanted the vote for herself if not for her servants. As she pointed out, she paid taxes. Her views were from the standpoint of the monied gentry. She and Ladye thought militancy vulgar and a path to civil war. Ladye noted the transgressions of the suffragettes in her diary. She wished, she wrote, they would set fire to each other rather than to churches.
Mrs Visetti had this story read to her. She visited the White Cottage, wanting help with doctors’ bills. Miss Thompson, Oxford educated, handsome and severe, shocks her conventional parents with her feminist views. She calls mother ‘little mumsy’, smokes papa’s cigarettes and reads German philosophy in their chintzy rooms. They urge her to marry William Dryden, who earns £10,000 a year. Miss Thompson finds him repulsive. He has fat hands splotched with yellow freckles and is diffident and bald (differdint and balled). At her suffrage meeting ‘all eyes are fixed on her’. She aspires to emancipate the human race. The narrator knows ‘she is going to lead the movement into a calldrern of seething sex hatred and risentment which will submurge it altogether.’
Ladye edited the stories, had them typed and John sent them off to literary magazines. ‘They always came back in my own stamped envelope – I grew to dread my own handwriting’, John wrote. These rejections increased her frustration at being marooned in Malvern without diversion. Ladye knew the publisher William Heinemann and asked him to help. They lunched with him on 1 June 1915 at 32 Lower Belgrave Street. John was too shy to talk or even eat: ‘But he seemed quite willing to do all the talking and I heard such words of praise that I could scarcely believe my ears.’ He commended her narrative skill and original tone and advised her to write a full-length novel. His encouragement gave her focus, though he died in 1920 and it took her a decade to get a novel into print.
She began an autobiography, Michael West, a roman-à-clef. She changed her own gender, or in her view revealed her true gender, and changed the names of family and lovers, but it was her life, from birth on, that she described and explained. Michael West was the unloved, abused, dyslexic, romantic boy she supposed herself to be. The book was an indictment of her mother and an exercise in self-examination. She took it to the point of meeting Ladye in Homburg, then it petered out unfinished. Ladye complained at the long hours she worked at it and feared she would make herself ill.
Ladye interspersed her diary entries about her aches and pains and John’s literary progress with details of the war: Kitchener’s appeals for armaments, the deaths of the sons of friends, the Lusitania torpedoed off the Irish coast with 1,350 passengers dead. Believing John to be gifted and knowing her to be vulnerable, she tolerated her moods. But she suffered their rows. John’s affection for her was not revived by separation from Phoebe Hoare. Ladye was ‘too upset to go out’ on 20 March 1915 after an argument about the rambling style of her will. She got the cook and the gardener to witness the document and could not sleep at night.
The war put a stop to shopping treats and sunshine holidays. Both missed metropolitan life. Ladye tried to make light of how seedy she felt, her high blood pressure, angina attacks, wounds, abscesses in her gums and aching teeth – in spring she had seven out under gas. Her ill-health consumed John with anxiety, but made her tetchy too.
On 8 June they motored to Oxford for the court hearing against Mrs Lakin. At the Randolph Hotel John prepared papers until midnight with the solicitor, Theodore Goddard. Next day they hung about the courts, their case delayed by a murder trial. Chance events now gave her ideas for fiction. She began a parable about prejudice called ‘Woman in a Crêpe Bonnet’. A man is condemned to death for killing his pregnant girlfriend. A woman waits outside the court wanting a prurient glimpse of the murderer, wanting him to hang. The doors open, he emerges handcuffed, he is her estranged son.
Cross-examined by Mrs Lakin’s counsel, John gave clear replies and a consistent version of events. She refuted, with reference to witnesses and photographs, accusations that her car was going at forty-five miles an hour on the wrong side of the road, that it was out of control because of the quantities of luggage on its roof and that she had been abusive to Mrs Lakin. The jury found in her favour and Ladye was awarded unspecified damages. She ‘nearly fainted’ with relief. With John, she gave thanks in a Jesuit church, went to the cinema, then home and early to bed. For John the courtroom process went beyond the specific case. She sought justice in a quintessential sense. Right, honour and truth must be declared to be on her side. She settled the amount of damages through solicitors, then fired Serpell the chauffeur.
London became safer and she and Ladye reclaimed the flat in Cadogan Square. They shopped at Selfridges, dined at the deserted Carlton Grill, saw an exhibition of war paintings at the Royal Academy and played poker with Ernest Thesiger. Dolly Clarke, back at Swan Walk, was pregnant with her second child. John viewed her, like Mrs Visetti, as a dependant. She feared that the allowance she gave her would prove inadequate, but felt she could not afford more.
At heart John wanted more than this life of teas and trips. Toupie Lowther managed an all-women ambulance unit in France. With the Red Cross she drove wounded soldiers to safety from within 350 yards of German guns. Excitement, fame and romance were elsewhere. John’s stories were returned with standard rejection slips – ‘the editor re
grets …’ – her poems were little volumes on library shelves; she was thirty-five; the affair with Phoebe Hoare was over.
1 August 1915 came to feature as an anniversary. The day was sunny. She and Ladye went to midday mass at Westminster Cathedral, then lunched at the Berkeley with Ladye’s sister whose husband, Lord Clarendon, had died the previous year. In the afternoon they all went off to the zoo then back for tea at Emmie Clarendon’s house in Cambridge Square.
Una Troubridge, Ladye’s cousin, was there. ‘For very good reasons I was deeply depressed and very lonely’, she said of herself. She thought John good-looking with beautiful eyes and a raffish smile. ‘It was not the countenance of a young woman but of a very handsome young man.’ John was dressed in white, with a small hat with white feathers that fanned back. She was holding a miniature fox terrier she had bought the previous week. (It was returned to the breeders when it developed eczema.) In the evening she and Ladye drove Una home to her rented flat in Bryanston Street, Marble Arch. They stopped for supper with her and her mother, Minna Taylor. They talked about Annie Besant, Christianity and life in other worlds. Una approved of John’s prejudices and religious fervour, ‘I had met for the first time in my life a born fanatic’, she later said.
She then began to ‘drop in’ on John. She was twenty-eight, John thirty-five, Ladye fifty-eight. They talked of sculpture, literature, religion, life. Una came for coffee and stayed for lunch, to tea and stayed for dinner, to breakfast and stayed the night. She described Ladye as her friend as well as cousin. ‘I had always liked and admired her’, she wrote. None the less she had, she said, ‘as much consideration for her or for anyone else as a child of six’. Ladye’s chances of a workable life with the woman she loved ended with the arrival of Una. Her diary became a catalogue of her own discomforts, Una’s intrusion, John’s betrayal.
Una’s plight was desperate when she encouraged John’s raffish smile and beautiful eyes. She had venereal disease and an unwanted daughter from a husband twenty-five years older than herself whom she neither loved nor liked and whose court martial by the navy the previous November had been front-page news in the papers.
She had married Captain Ernest Troubridge in 1908 when she was twenty-one. Her father, Harry Taylor, had died the previous year, leaving her without money or a home. His estate of under £700 was willed to her mother and scarcely covered his debts. There had been ‘great mutual devotion and affinity’ between Una and her father. She competed with her mother and elder sister Viola for his affection. She said they were ‘like devoted brother and sister’, that he was the one in the family who loved her. He called her his ‘own sweet little Una’ and fretted when she was ill. She called him Harry, admired his height – he was six foot two – his snowy white hair, civility, culture and charm.
In fact, he was improvident with money, away half the year and intellectually unremarkable. For twenty-two years he worked as a Queen’s (then King’s) Foreign Service messenger. His job was to carry despatches in a bag from the Foreign Office in London to ambassadors in embassies in Teheran, Madrid, Rome, Paris, Berlin, Constantinople and St Petersburg. His annual pay was £300 and he travelled fifty thousand miles a year.
It was a sinecure but nothing more. Una in childhood saw her parents struggle to keep their heads ‘just above the waters of really grim privation … Every unforeseen expense involved days and weeks of anxiety, pinching, scheming and going without necessities.’
Both her parents had aristocratic antecedents and a sense of privileges lost. Minna Taylor was ruled by propriety. She liked to remind the world that the second Baron Castlemaine of Westmeath was her grandfather, that the Florentine families of Tealdi and Vincenzo were cousins, if much removed. She would hire a private carriage while stinting on food. Una despised her for being vain and self-centred and accused her of favouring Viola. John said ‘there was no affinity or bond between Una and her mother’. They shared though a desire for money, a ruthless vanity, a concern for status.
From childhood Una remembered rented rooms, her parents’ ‘unceasing’ quarrels, landladies, lamb chops with greasy gravy and then ‘a dingy London house with two rooms on each floor and steep stairs in between’. It was the family home at 23 Montpelier Square in Knightsbridge. Summer holidays were spent with an aunt who bred chickens in Hertfordshire or an uncle who owned a dairy farm in Essex. Only when ill was Una indulged. Instead of the grease and shepherd’s pie, there was chicken broth and calves’ foot jelly, the attentions of a doctor and nurse, a hired carriage and convalescence by the sea. This equating of illness with privilege gave her a lifelong passion for minor ailments and their use to gain attention.
Her father, despite his modest income, financed her artistic ambitions. He was the son of Sir Henry Taylor, diplomat, poet and essayist, and a friend of the painters G. F. Watts, Edward Poynter and Edward Burne-Jones. Una remembered sitting, aged five, on Edward Poynter’s knee while he drew pigs and narrated their adventures. She was taught to dance by Mrs Wordsworth at the Portman Rooms and had private piano and singing lessons, though her voice ‘had a tendency to wobble and quiver’. When she was thirteen her father paid for her to study at the Royal College of Art. Sculpture was her special subject and she did much-praised statues and busts. She dressed in theatrical clothes, aspired to be a famous sculptor or singer, dropped her given name, Margot Elena Gertrude, and chose Una Vincenzo for its imposing ring.
When he was forty, her father got tuberculosis. He was sent to sanatoriums in Sussex and at Pau in France for the last four months of his life. He died on 5 March 1907, three days before Una’s twentieth birthday. She went to Florence to stay with her mother’s wealthy relatives, the Tealdis, in their villa Sant Agostino. Like Radclyffe Hall she felt an affinity to the city, to Italy, the Pope and God. She converted to Catholicism to give meaning to her life. ‘I came to believe in the survival of the spirit’, she said. ‘I think I was getting old enough to realise that roads with no signposts sometimes lead nowhere.’
Ernest Troubridge had signposts she recognized: he had white hair, height, age. His forebears were admirals and army men. ‘Yield to no difficulties’ was the family motto. He had joined the navy and accrued promotions and honours: Captain and Chief of Staff Mediterranean 1907–8; Chief of the War Staff, Admiralty 1911–12.; Grand Order of the Rising Sun; Officer of Legion of Honour; Gold Medal of Order of Imtiaz … His first marriage was to a Canadian, Edith Duffus, in 1891. She died nine years later after the stillborn birth of their fourth child.
Una hoped for a surrogate father. ‘Young men failed to interest me which was sad.’ What she got was a husband aged forty-six, syphilis, three teenage stepchildren who loathed her, and the blighting of her artistic hopes. Troubridge met her ‘by appointment’ in London, proposed, then married her in Venice in October 1908. On her marriage certificate, Una gave as her occupation Sculptor. She had a honeymoon in Paris. They stayed at the Hôtel Normande, where Una was ‘grievously ill’. Troubridge then sailed to Malta for two years.
In a stark outburst in her diary some twenty-four years later, she wrote of how, had he thought about it, knowing he had syphilis, he would not have deceived a ‘pure’ girl, and blighted her life with an incurable disease. ‘He had no right to marry. Especially to marry a healthy girl young enough to be his daughter. And I should have escaped 14 years of invalidism and its after effects.’
For years she monitored her treatments for this infection: daily visits to doctors, referral to gynaecologists, injections, vaccines and analyses of smears. It made her disgusted with him and herself, hypochondriacal about every symptom of ill-health, rejecting of her daughter, whom she considered tainted like herself, and disdainful of everything to do with sex. ‘The physical never mattered to me anyway after the first misery’, she wrote when she was fifty-seven.
It was her disposition to do battle and to seem to succeed. She took on the role of marriage as if playing a part. ‘Having chosen for my husband a man old enough to be my father I set to w
ork to try to look his age. I shiver when I look back and remember the sweeping black velvets and purple facecloths of that period of altruistic effort.’
Troubridge, a stickler for the proprieties of his position, wanted her compliance. She was the naval officer’s wife. She called him Zip and ‘my man’, lunched on board ship, was a spectator at polo matches between the army and navy and endured tea dances, cricket matches and dull dinners. It was all a charade. ‘Troubridge brought me no spiritual development,’ she wrote, ‘no evolution, no kindness … I should not have been sidetracked into marrying at all.’
She had an ectopic pregnancy in 1909 then, a year later, after forty-eight hours’ labour, gave birth to her only daughter, Andrea. She desperately wanted her to be healthy, but apart from a preoccupation with symptoms of illness and an assiduous watch on the servants, had no desire for relationship with her child. ‘Gradually and infallibly, bit by bit, she brought me to the realisation that there was nothing in her whole make-up that was not alien to mine.’
Una spent days in bed with nervous headaches and ‘heart attacks’. Nor could she get on with Troubridge’s relatives. She wrote of the ‘tyranny of kinship’. He housed her, Andrea and his stepchildren at 107 St George’s Square in London. The arrangement lasted a hellish year. He then, in November 1912, asked his sister Laura if she would take in his daughter Mary because ‘she and Una are like oil and vinegar’.
Laura wrote novels and books on etiquette and thought the modern girl had lost a sense of values. She had kept a family diary of childhood, adored her brother and deplored his domestic problems, but did not feel able to foster his child. Troubridge took a separate house in Durham Place, near St George’s Square, for his adolescent daughters and unmarried sisters. His son, Thomas, joined the navy in the Troubridge tradition and Una was isolated in a house on her own with Cub, as she called her daughter.
The Trials of Radclyffe Hall Page 8