On holidays from the St Leonard’s convent, Andrea was a bewildered guest. Troubridge wrote ‘blustering and offensive’ letters about Una’s treatment of her. She was met from the train by Miss Maclean, the housekeeper. Her treats were visits to Ladye’s mausoleum, mass at Brompton Oratory and shopping at Harrods and Gorringes. When a school report gave her conduct as ‘fairly good’, she was lectured and questioned before breakfast by her mother and John. The qualification had something to do with a girl called Cicely Coventry. John and Una drove to the convent to see Mother Emmanuel and Sister Theodore. Cicely was then expelled.
Una rejected Andrea because she did not please John. Pleasing John was the measure of all that was acceptable. But John wanted Una’s undivided attention. Any mothering was to be for herself. She paid Andrea’s school fees and provided her with a room at Chip Chase, but she had no interest in her and did not want her around. Andrea received no encouragement or affection from her, nor was she allowed to oppose her in the smallest way. As the years passed she disliked the perception of her mother as lesbian. It embarrassed her. She worried that she might herself be perceived as ‘like that’. She said Toupie Lowther ‘gave her the willies’ because she was ‘so obvious’.
Dogs took precedence over daughters. A former drawing-room at Chip Chase, panelled with wood and fitted with linoleum, became a kennels for griffons and dachshunds. Fitz-John Minnehaha was their prime griffon. His relatives were Pipe of Peace, Atthis, Hankie and Gorgo. John and Una were members of the Kennel Club. They reared and judged the best of the breed and accrued prizes and trophies. Their dogs were a quest for genetic perfection. Those with faults went elsewhere. Prudence, a spaniel, they gave away for being unaffectionate. Olaf, a Great Dane, got sores and was shot on the lawn by the vet. ‘Olaf went over’, Una wrote in her diary in February 1920. She assumed the whirring sounds she and John heard in the night came from his journey to the spheres.
Theirs was one of the most successful kennels in the country according to an article in the Queen titled ‘The Fitz-John Dachshunds: The Kennels of Una Lady Troubridge and Miss Radclyffe Hall’. It pictured them, though their names were transposed, with ‘Our Dogs’ Champions Brandesburton Caprice and Champions Fitz-John Wotan and Fitz-John Thorgils of Tredholt. Caprice was ‘the type breeders should aim for’, said the Queen.
Ideas of the best of the breed informed Radclyffe Hall’s political thinking too. She took the package of Conservative politics, allegiance to the ruling class, inherited status, antipathy to communists and Jews (not her ‘one or two really dear Jewish friends’ and her solicitor and doctor, but ‘Jews as a whole’). It also affected her view of feminists and lesbians. Her friends were ones with money and creative ambition.
It was twelve miles to London. They went by car for Una’s daily appointment with Alfred Sachs. They then had lunch with Toupie, tea at the Savoy, or a matinée at the Alhambra. John bought Karma, a parrot, from the Army and Navy Stores and cockatoos from Harrods. She got her pipes and cigarettes from Dunhill and had her hair cropped and waved at Truefitts of Bond Street, hairdresser for gentlemen.
Una bought their books at the Times Bookshop: Peter Pan, Susan Lenox and the ‘shockers’ John particularly liked. Five times Una read aloud John’s favourite novel, Ford Madox Ford’s Ladies Whose Bright Eyes. It featured a shining knight who spanned fourteenth century and modern times, spurned bourgeois comfort and extolled love and great adventure. It appealed to John who thought she remembered her own medieval incarnation. It was dedicated to Ford’s lover, Violet Hunt, for whom she had once so pined.
It was a pattern for Radclyffe Hall to house herself in style, extensively refurbish, purchase antique furnishings, take on all the paraphernalia and responsibilities of domesticity – servants and pets – get the whole place just so, and then sell up. She moved on impulse then rationalized why: the journey to town was tiring, the area suburban, the house too costly to run, she wanted to be nearer to Toupie and the theatres, she needed the social exposure of London.
At root was a subversion, a restlessness. No house was ever right for long and no home was Derwent, the ancestral manor with herself as heir and squire. She wanted always to be somewhere other than where she was. If it was town it should be country, if it was Paris it should be Florence. ‘The minute my house begins to “vamp” me – houses do become vampires – I run from it’, she said. ‘Somehow the household arrangements of a hotel don’t clamour for my attention: that happens only in my own home.’
She had moved into Chip Chase in April 1919. By July 1920 she was wanting to move out. She worried about the cost of running the place and the number of meals the servants ate each day. Hadley Wood, she complained, was no place for a writer to be buried. Above all, she wanted contact with the London lesbian scene. Una, like Mabel Batten, was uprooted whether she wanted to be or not. But she said she did not mind where they went as long as they were together. To prove her point, she wrote for details of a lighthouse for sale off the Cornish coast.
A Mr and Mrs Thomas bought Chip Chase for £5,000 in January 1921. It took a week for all John and Una’s belongings to be moved to Taylor’s Depository in London. Servants were fired and most of the dogs were kennelled. John and Una rented temporarily a flat at 7 Trevor Square, Knightsbridge by Hyde Park, then in May they moved to 10 Sterling Street nearby.
Alfred Sachs was a walk away. He showed Una her streptococci under a microscope. ‘They look rather like inverted commas’, she said. His bills were high. For seven months of visits, vaccines and pathologists’ reports, John paid him £380 – about as much as Troubridge’s annual maintenance.
Now she was writing the novel William Heinemann had urged, Radclyffe Hall wanted a place in London literary life. Her women friends helped forge this. Toupie was a pivotal figure in the London lesbian scene of the twenties. Literary and artistic lesbians gravitated to her house and to another former friend of Mabel Batten’s, Gabrielle Enthoven. She was a playwright and theatre historian and gave, according to Una, ‘faultless dinner parties’.
At Toupie’s salon evenings, Radclyffe Hall talked of her work to the novelists Ida Wylie, May Sinclair and Vere Hutchinson. They were popular writers of the time, independent women who led unconventional lives. Ida Wylie recommended her to the literary agent Audrey Heath, a Cambridge classics graduate who in partnership with a friend, May Drake, had set up in 1919 in an office in Soho. Ida was published by Mills & Boon and wrote novels with titles like Towards Morning and The Silver Virgin. She described herself as ‘violently active in the suffrage movement’. Like Toupie she had done war work in France. When she was ten her father had given her money and encouraged her to travel on her own all over England and the Continent. He married ‘from time to time’, she said, but she had no connection to his wives.
May Sinclair shared John’s belief in psychical phenomena. She too was a feminist and suffragette and served with an ambulance corps in Belgium in the war. She wrote a biography of the Brontës and psychological novels: The Three Sisters, Anne Severn and the Fieldings. Vere Hutchinson, author of Sea Wrack, The Naked Man and Thy Dark Freight, openly dedicated her novels ‘with undying love’ to her partner ‘Budge’, a painter of animal portraits, Dorothy Burroughes-Burroughes.
In St James’s Park one afternoon, walking the dog, John re-met Violet Hunt. Violet came for dinner the following day, gave John several of Ford Madox Ford’s novels and talked of his sexual rejection of her, the money he owed her and the social scandal he had made her endure. She took her and Una to the Orange Tree and the Cave of Harmony, clubs in Soho where lesbians danced together.
They all went to PEN Club meetings, motored to the country, played whist and tennis. At a fancy dress ball of Toupie’s, John was Prince Charles Edward, Una La Bohème. Toupie’s army unit was there: Joan, Liza, Hilary, Susan, Poppy, Honey, Nelly. Una deplored the way they ‘carried on’ sexually with each other. ‘All between members of the same army unit’.
Through Toupie, John also met Rom
aine Brooks. She called her a ‘very great artist’. Romaine was famous for her monotone portraits and sexual affairs. With money inherited from her American mother, she bought the Villa Cercola in Capri and studios and apartments in Paris, London and New York. She had been the lover of the actress Ida Rubinstein, was the partner of Natalie Barney and admired by the fascist poet Gabriele d’Annunzio, who wooed her with jewels. (Gabrielle Enthoven adapted D’Annunzio’s The Honeysuckle for the stage. John called one of her canaries Gabriele d’Annunzio.)
In July 1921 Romaine spent a lot of time with John and Una. They lunched at the Savoy, dined at the Prince’s Grill, drove to the country, went to The Beggar’s Opera and talked until late at night. Toupie was enamoured of Romaine. She misconstrued what Romaine called a ‘fragile commencement’ between them and bombarded her with phone calls and letters. Romaine, for her part, was enamoured of John, who ‘did not respond’. ‘One always feels slightly grateful’, John said of the interest shown. Romaine invited her and Una to stay for the summer in her villa in Capri. John talked over the idea with Una until one-thirty one morning. Una was against it. In previous years John might have pursued such a stylish affair, but Mabel Batten’s death, her own literary ambition and Una’s watchfulness now made her cautious.
14
Octopi and chains
Radclyffe Hall said she had the ‘soul of a solitary’ and that she spoke for misfits. As a Roman Catholic she deferred to the Pope and the gospel of Christ. She also had inchoate theories about predestination, reincarnation and halloaings from the dead. Hers was a deterministic view, however shifting the detail.
In her fiction and fantasy she was drawn to themes of martyrdom and heroic tragedy. In reality she was never alone, indulged all whims of purchase and travel and took the best suite in all the Grand Hotels. Nothing was too good for her and money gave her power. She was served by hired staff, had ninety-four neckties and lodged her jewels at the bank when abroad. Una was her acolyte at her beck and call, often in the room with her while she wrote.
In summer 1921 they decided to go to Italy. John wanted to work on her book and enjoy the sun. Alberto Visetti was ill with gallstones and she and Una worried that if he died it might spoil their plans. Andrea’s vacation was a problem too. Una went to see the Reverend Mother at the convent and Andrea was sent back ‘in floods of tears’ before the new term began. As cold consolation John posted her a photograph album bought from Whiteleys. Una sent cards from distant towns.
They left London on 1 September. Una loved these journeys: ‘the fun of the communicating first class single wagons lits with our dogs and all our impedimenta. Breakfast in the dining car, the galettes, croissants and rusks in a basket, the little pots of honey and jam’.
In Paris they ordered a mass for Ladye at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame and searched the dog shops for a perfect griffon. In Genoa at the Hotel Miramar, Una took to her bed with ‘external piles’. At Levanto they swam in the sea and went to the casino where John gambled while Una watched. Romaine again tried to entice them to Capri. Their apartment would look out over terraced gardens, it was secluded, all the furniture in it was made by local craftsmen, they could breakfast on the lawns, the weather was perfect. ‘My plans depend somewhat on yours’, she said.
John resisted. In Florence Una was triumphant, alone with the only person she cared about, in her favourite city: ‘We had both of us visited Florence and loved it in the past, but that was a very different thing from discovering all its joys and beauties in the company we both liked better than any in the world: that of each other.’
Ladye was usurped and Mrs Leonard’s mediation neither needed nor desired. They stayed at the Hotel Albion by the River Arno and the Ponte Vecchio. John worked at Octopi and Una read each day’s work aloud. They admired the bands of Fascisti ‘swinging along the streets’, went to mass at San Michele, their favourite church, ‘adored the frescoes’, walked by the Arno in moonlight, drove to Bellosguardo for the views. Una’s Italian was fluent, John had with her The Little Help-Mate in Italy with such phrases as ‘I will wear my green coat and my nankeen pantaloons.’ At Christmas they lay in bed listening to the church bells through the open windows. John gave Una a large sapphire ring which from then on she always wore. Una gave John malachite cufflinks.
They were away four months. In a final letter Romaine again regretted that they had not gone to Capri but arranged to fetch them from the Hotel Normande in Paris on 9 January 1922 ‘in open motor’:
We could lunch together chez moi if you don’t mind things done in no usual fashion. I strongly hate servants; see them as little as possible … Such a thing as a well-trained butler would send me mad. After luncheon to the studio, t’other side of river …
I do so want you to meet my great friend here Natalie Barney. René de Gourmont wrote his Lettres à l’Amazone to her and she has written several volumes of aphorisms and poems. She has an unusual mind of the best quality. We have been reading lately a great deal of Freud, Jung and D. H. Lawrence (not his novels), also James Joyce the new literary movement which explains and makes one more tolerant of the new art movement. Lawrence’s Classical American Literature is a philosophical treatise, a chef d’oeuvre and very unlike what the title might lead one to expect, but perhaps you know it.
Natalie Barney was known more for her seductions of women and her flouting of convention than for her aphorisms and poems. She epitomized the sexual candour of Paris between the wars. In her Temple of Friendship in her wild garden at 22 rue Jacob lesbians gathered, ‘Paris ones and those only passing through town’. Like Romaine, she was rich, American and in her mid-forties. She organized the Académie des Femmes as a counterpart to the all-male Académie Française. Friday was her salon day when dazzling people gathered. ‘I have perhaps got more out of life than it contains’, she said of herself when old.
Radclyffe Hall drew courage from women like Romaine Brooks and Natalie Barney with their inherited money, artistic success, intellectual confidence and openness about sex. Through them she moved toward self-expression. But she lacked their ease. In much the same way as she kept a distance from feminism and the suffragette movement, she equated Paris and modernism with gimmick and fashion. Stylistic innovation was not her thing. It was symbolic that she collected old oak even if she did then put it in store. She liked accessible narrative, devotional paintings and portraits of her relatives. The only mould breaker for whom she truly had time was herself. In the Hôtel Normande Una read aloud The Bible and Early Christianity and The Soul of an Animal.
With Una as her wife, Radclyffe Hall took for herself the old patriarchies. She invaded the domain of men. Her clothes, manners and adopted name asserted their power. She hired and more often fired the servants. She sailed the Channel in a first-class cabin. If men crossed her, she sued them in the male courts. Order and control she perceived as masculine. Even her handwriting, formerly rounded and tilting to the left, now sloped to the right in angular script. When her watch gained one and a half minutes in four weeks, it was returned for its imprecision.
This carapace of attitude shielded the persona attacked by her mother, abandoned by her father and violated by Alberto Visetti. Vulnerability and the dreaded name of Marguerite she perceived as female. So were friendship, love, feelings and the tyranny of need. The flip side of ‘masculine’ strength was ‘feminine’ weakness. Una’s sycophancy kept the illusion of control intact, though Una had none of the vulnerability John desired to conceal.
Back in London they moved into 10 Sterling Street. It was a small house and crowded out by the grand piano, eight-foot-long refectory tables, leather Chesterfield and huge bookcases. Neither of them liked the place but it was where throughout 1922 Radclyffe Hall worked daily at Octopi. She dedicated it ‘to Mabel Veronica Batten in deep affection, gratitude and respect’. Una retitled it The Unlit Lamp. Audrey Heath admired it ‘enormously’ but could not think who would publish it. It rippled with disconcerting themes: lesbianism, incest, revulsion a
t sex between men and women. It had a narrative force, emotional tension, curious intimacy, but it was not literary, witty, polished or smart.
The editor at Collins read it ‘with intense interest’ but rejected it. Heinemann were encouraging and regretful, Arrowsmith compared it to Flaubert, Century said No. Una then ‘boiled’ it and read the shortened version to friends. Audrey Heath sent it to ten publishers. They praised it and hoped someone else would take it. The subject matter troubled them all. Radclyffe Hall, it seemed, was imprisoned by her theme. But she was determined to get into print. Audrey advised her to write, as a first novel, something more marketable, less contentious, to light the way for The Unlit Lamp.
Radclyffe Hall came up with Chains, a title as vexing as Octopi. She wrote it in six months. Dedicated ‘To Una, with love’, its theme seemed to be that chains of love bite deep. It featured details of their domestic life. A writer with inherited wealth, Hilary/John, and his artist wife Susan/Una, let work lapse because of their relationship. All their energy gets spent on their dachshunds, cars, oak furniture and the rest. In an effort to break these shackles, they move from their country mansion to a London townhouse. They store their things in Taylor’s Depository. They dance in the Cave of Harmony, take a trip to Italy, then try to part to find their individual worth as artists.
The Trials of Radclyffe Hall Page 14