The Trials of Radclyffe Hall

by Diana Souhami

  Romaine was a pivotal character in the story. Even the title came from the artist’s mark she used on her drawings – a wing held down by a chain. John resisted any romantic involvement with her in life. In her book she flirted freely. Romaine was Venetia Ford, ‘the strange erratic brilliant genius of whom Susan had heard so much in the old days at the Slade’. She paints monotone portraits, has a dominating personality, studios in London and in the rue Bonaparte in Paris and a villa in Capri. She appears at a party:

  One of the women was beautiful with an elusive, inward kind of beauty. Her immense black eyes were set in a face that was technically too long … Her queer little straight nose was too short to be classical … But her mouth was the most perfect thing … the lips folded together in a soft, strong curve, with deep-set shadowy corners. Her skin was brown. She looked sun-tanned and her coal black hair, bobbed very short, was uncompromisingly straight. The face was full of curious defects, defects which seemed to combine together to make a noble and perfect whole; under it and through it and over it there was a veiled persistent glow.

  Susan is wooed by Venetia Ford. Hilary goes to Canada to try to write. He is away for thirty pages. Susan knows he is insufferable and egomaniacal but she wants him back: ‘His nerves! His pictures! His books! His priceless old oak! His work! His freedom!’ They reunite in platitudes: ‘The stark femininity of all the ages looked out of her eyes into his.’ He tells her, ‘of all the chains in the world the heaviest chain is love. If we weren’t chained we’d just float about like toy balloons. The whole world’s a forge. Look at all your painters and writers and clever people. They’re all chained up as tight as you please to their talents and struggles to be famous.’

  Una corrected and transcribed each day’s work. Her tone was there in the occasionally acerbic prose. She read it to Toupie who ‘howled with laughter’ at recognition of incidents in it. Una delivered the completed manuscript to Audrey Heath in June 1923. By July it was renamed The Forge and its thin later chapters padded out. By September John had signed a contract with the publisher J. W. Arrowsmith.

  She hoped it would lead the way for her better book, her innovative theme. But she was over the main hurdle. She had an accepted novel, an agent and a publisher who wanted her work. An advance copy of The Forge arrived in January 1924. Una read it aloud in bed until two-thirty in the morning. Her occupation now was to build the career and reputation of Radclyffe Hall. She registered with Romeike and Curtice press cutting agency and pasted reviews into an album.

  Grief for Ladye had had its day. Una was tirelessly obliging and unstinting in her praise. ‘Long hours of my reading, perpetual assurances that what she was writing surpassed all that had preceded it. Reading, correcting, typing and retyping.’

  Both talked of the ‘Holy Spirit of inspiration’ and of Radclyffe Hall as a vessel through whom God was pouring His message. Una shored up her ego against any whiff of criticism, indulged her tendentious narrative and gave her a compensatory place of safety where she was always right, invincible, handsome, immortal, and first. She was a formidable acolyte, an indispensable servant, even if there was the grip of tentacles about her and the clink of chains.

  15

  How to treat a genius

  The Forge was published on 25 January 1924. John and Una spent the day being driven in Phillida, their Buick, to London bookshops to check it was stocked and prominently displayed. For four consecutive days Una then sent postcards advertising its publication.

  Tireless for publicity, they too were prominently displayed. They took first-night tickets – centre stalls – for all the West End shows. In a week they went to Sport of Kings at the Savoy, The Claimant at the Queens, Morals at the Little Theatre, The Way Things Happen, The Fairy Tale. Photographs of ‘the noted author Miss Radclyffe Hall’ appeared in TP’s Weekly and Popular Pictures. Assiduous of her image, she wore a black sombrero, a black cape, and diamonds in her cuffs and ears. Una was in the frame in a leopardskin coat, her hair shingled, her nails painted, a monocle screwed in her eye. ‘It is pleasant to feel oneself distinguished’, Radclyffe Hall wrote in an article ‘First-Nighters’. ‘Childish perhaps; but we are nearly all children at the bottom of our hearts.’ ‘First nights,’ she said, were ‘like the best kind of club.’ She was a member, along with Noël Coward, Somerset Maugham, Arnold Bennett, C. B. Cochran, Ivor Novello, defined as successful by the company she kept.

  Una called many of these shows ‘awful tosh’. They did not now go to classical concerts or to the opera which she had once so loved. Both abhorred the avant-garde. Una described a reading by Edith Sitwell at the Poetry Bookshop as ‘a bedlam afternoon of Miss Sitwell shouting down a megaphone’. And John ‘barred the reading of good English novels, lest they might affect her own style’. She preferred Jeremy and Hamlet and The Flaming Jewel.

  To spread her name she wrote magazine articles about dogs and old oak furniture, first nights and games of golf. Copy was sent off with publicity photographs by Lafayette and Howard Coster, ‘photographer of men’. She took her editor, Newman Flower, to lunch at the Savoy, her agent to lunch at the Berkeley and she and Una dined at the Ivy, the Monte Carlo and the Eiffel Tower. She went to PEN Club meetings and to literary lunches. Audrey drew up the contract for her next novel, A Saturday Life, and said an American colleague, a Mr Washburn, would find a New York publisher for The Unlit Lamp.

  Radclyffe Hall had a profession now. Socially she was a society lesbian for whom these were party days. She and Una gave a fancy dress ball for Romaine at Guy Allan’s Studio, their wigs and costumes made at Nathan’s. Una went as Harlequin, John as an Indian chief. In The Forge she described such a ball:

  A tall oriental, naked to the waist, was followed by a harem of six veiled women … A youth dressed as a peacock gyrated, his magnificent tail furled and unfurled … An elderly lady in short skirt and yellow wig bowled a hoop in and out among the dancers … A man completely covered in silver paint danced gravely with a woman in crinolines … A couple of Grey Friars shouted disrespectful compliments to a Cleopatra whose breastplate had become displaced. Two women passed, dancing together. One of them wore the clothes of a Paris workman, corduroy trousers and jacket and soft peaked cap. Around her heavy handsome throat she had knotted a red bandanna … Then linking arms they wandered off in the direction of the garden.

  American and Parisian lesbians knew the cues and joined the scene. Through Gabrielle Enthoven and Toupie, John and Una met Teddie Gerrard, Tallulah Bankhead and her lover Gwen Farrar. Teddie Gerrard wore backless dresses, had her black hair cut into a bob and liked women, drink and drugs. Noël Coward was her friend and she was in his revue London Calling. (Edith Sitwell was parodied in it as Hernia Whittlebot.) John and Una went to parties at Teddie Gerrard’s flat in Sackville Street and at her weekend house, Orchard Cottage in the Cotswolds. Una made a note in her diary of a night in January 1924 when Teddie and her lover, Etheline Cripps, took them to a Chinese restaurant ‘and then we toured London till 12 seeking vainly for someone to devil’. On 7 February they all went to Violette Murat’s party until four-thirty in the morning. Next day there was a tea dance at Augustus John’s (Tallulah paid him £1,000 to paint her portrait) then a party at Gwen Farrar’s until dawn. John and Una were special guests at Tallulah’s first night of The Green Hat at the Comedy. They sent flowers to her backstage then went on with her to the Cave of Harmony in Charlotte Street in Soho.

  Una tolerated this social whirl. It was not the image of John she wanted to promote. Una liked West End style, but she neither drank nor smoked. She had headaches if she went to bed late and she disapproved of demands on John’s time. Una was the brake on excess. She promulgated a myth of austere respectability:

  the life that proudly and joyfully was mine: a life of watching, serving and subordinating everything in existence to the requirements of an overwhelming literary inspiration and industry, guarding and sustaining a physique that was never equal to John’s relentless perseverance or to the
strain she compelled it to bear.

  Una exaggerated the pain. John’s irascibility and bad temper were a problem, but there was nothing arduous about either of their lives. They were entirely indulgent. Both enjoyed great privilege and ‘orgies’ of shopping, travel and parties. They demanded high standards of service. Lyon the cook was out at a moment’s notice ‘for insolence and drinking our brandy’. They pandered to their ailments. Two doctors and a nurse, Miss Bruce, attended for a fortnight when John had a feverish cold. And they indulged their hobbies. They celebrated with champagne at the Eiffel Tower when Wotan won all the prizes at the Richmond Dachshund Show and was voted Champion. Una then mated him with Hexel and Pickles in the bathroom while John wrote The Saturday Life. By Una’s birthday in March 1924 The Forge had reprinted. John gave her another gold-backed brush for her dressing table. Next month the sale of the Sterling Street house was completed, their furniture went again into store and their jewels to the bank. They rented a flat at Kensington Palace Mansions, planned a holiday and searched for the perfect house.

  At her Chelsea studio at 15 Cromwell Road, Romaine painted Una’s portrait. Una had nine sittings and posed with two of the dachshunds. It was a portrait that belied her view of herself. Here was the master, not the servant. Romaine knew Una’s power, the giving that was really control. Here was Una the Lady Troubridge, her face screwed to one side to keep her monocle in place. She was not to be messed with. Thin as a reed, there was the threat of bondage in the leather stock, the shirt bleached and starched by a servant, the mannish jacket, the chains and collars, restraining hand on the dog. She had a sleek cap of hair, pearls in her ears, a fob in her pocket and heartlessness in her eyes. One dog sat as instructed and stared submissively. The other stared elsewhere, no doubt at the prospect of John whose link was ever there.

  Una hated the portrait. She told Toupie so and refused to believe the resemblance. Romaine had reflected her quintessential misanthropy. Una could not again be on friendly terms with her. Romaine exhibited the portrait at her shows at the Jean Charpentier Gallery in Paris and at the Wildenstein Galleries in New York, but not at the L’Alpine Club in London: ‘Yes your portrait had very great success over there,’ she wrote to Una of her American trip, ‘& was reproduced several times. It was not exhibited in London, I had the impression from Toupie that you did not like it & were worried about the resemblance. I’ll send you some photos.’ The portrait prompted Una to change not her character but her hairstyle – to a flicker of a wave and a quiff.

  The Saturday Life took Radclyffe Hall nine months to write. The skills of many typists were taxed as they tried to comply with her needs: ‘This involved never “tapping” while she spoke or while she was reflecting. For as she dictated she continued to polish and the typist had always to be prepared to “X” out at demand any word or sentence and continue her script with the substituted amendment.’ None of them lasted. They were serially fired and complaints lodged with the agency that sent them. Only Una brought the necessary homage and application.

  Radclyffe Hall dedicated the book to herself. The Forge she had dedicated to Una and The Unlit Lamp to Ladye. Subsequent books were to ‘Our Three Selves’, the homoousian genius of her art. In reality it was one self, her own. Dedicatees were, like Daisy the imaginary friend of her childhood, aspects of her own needs.

  The Saturday Life featured reincarnation, Sabbatarianism and her oddball theories of recurring lives. Like most of her books it was burdened with discarded subplots and floating characters. Una called it the Sidonia book. Sidonia, incarnate on earth seven times, replays previous lives. Her problem, like her author’s, is genius. ‘That’s why I’m morbid. Genius is always despondent. You none of you know how to treat a genius.’ Aged three she shows ‘abnormal aptitudes’. She draws, sculpts, writes poetry, plays the piano perfectly, all without lessons. She reads Swinburne, has residual memories of Attic dances under ilex trees and confounds her mother Lady Shore, an Egyptologist who cannot ‘comprehend Sidonia as the outcome of so discreet a mating’ as she had had with ‘frail, small Sir Godfrey’.

  Insinuating through the book, as in all Radclyffe Hall’s work, were coded references to subversive sex. Lady Shore’s best friend, Frances Reide, loves a log fire, uncle’s portrait over the mantelpiece and a room that smells of beeswax, cigarette smoke and flowers. Sidonia wants to lure Frances from her mother:

  ‘I ask you to kiss me and you won’t!’ she said furiously. ‘Oh, you! You’re all Mother’s! Mother this, Mother that! God! I’m sick of it! Don’t I count at all? … Aren’t I younger than Mother? Aren’t I attractive? Don’t I interest you enough? Frances’ – she began to speak softly now – ’Frances look at me! Don’t you love me? Frances, won’t you be my friend? All, all my friend? I don’t want to marry anyone, I tell you; I just want to work and have you, all of you. Frances, mother would never miss you. Listen, I’m not being beastly about mother, but please, please try to love me a little; I need you much more than she does.’ She laid her hand caressingly on Frances’ arm. ‘Frances, why won’t you love me?’

  Frances disengaged her arm very gently and left the studio.

  It was a startling (if discarded) theme – the seduction of mother’s lesbian partner. But Radclyffe Hall’s writing is littered with such cameos of psychopathology. To manufacture a son (a problematic aspiration of Radclyffe Hall’s), Sidonia marries David Morgan, a sexy lout with a family estate in Essex. He proposes in the zoo by the jackals’ cage and they marry in church. ‘It was all very neat, very British, very proper … It was all very full of time-honoured words, man’s words, that he printed for his own delectation and believed in for his own peace of mind … It was really a great and desperate adventure dressed up in ridiculous clothes.’

  It was also all very dissenting and dark, not comic and lighthearted as its publisher J. W. Arrowsmith supposed. Frances visits the newly-weds. ‘Frances sat smiling the vacant smile of the great unwanted Third.’ David calls her an unsexed, middle-aged virgin and fears she will grow hairs on her chin.

  ‘Why haven’t you married my dear?’ he asks her.

  She thought: ‘Supposing I tried to explain?’ and began to laugh softly to herself.

  The son John felt she should by rights have been and wanted herself to father is born on Christmas Day, a Saturday, and named Noel, a latter-day saviour with a lesbian mother.

  While writing The Saturday Life Radclyffe Hall began another book, The Cunningham Code. It got nowhere and she abandoned it. Una called these aborted projects ‘trolley books’: ‘to carry her from a fallow period to one of renewed production’. She took as a preamble to it a quote from Okofski:

  The herd instinct common alike to animals and to primitive peoples, while strengthening the whole, must of necessity weaken the individual. What must be called, for want of a better term, the Family instinct, is but another and more specialised phase of the herd instinct, and as such must operate strongly against both mental and spiritual growth.

  At heart Radclyffe Hall rejected the defining rules of society: family, parental authority, gender. She wove her fiction round her like a cocoon, a safe place where her fantasy self grew. The Cunningham fragment aired her preoccupations: a titled landowner in a baronial hall sires daughters though he wanted sons. The mother cannot love these daughters that disappoint her husband. One of the daughters feels like a boy trapped in a girl’s body.

  Four days after she finished The Saturday Life – on 29 May 1924 – Radclyffe Hall bought 37 Holland Street. It was a grand residence for a writer of standing. It was like a country house with large rooms and casement windows. As ever, there was much to be done to bring it to standard – parquet floors to be laid, gas fires installed.

  John and Una planned to travel all summer while the builders worked. They left for Paris in June. John said she felt exhausted and drained. A varicose vein in her leg hurt. At the Hôtel Normande were two telegrams from Audrey Heath. Newman Flower of Cassell, much impressed by The Unlit Lamp,
offered autumn publication, a £50 advance, fifteen per cent royalties on the first 3,000 copies, twenty per cent after that and the first option on her next two novels.

  This was the great event of the year for John and Una. They had a joyful tea with Natalie Barney, hurried to London next day and booked in at the Grand Central Hotel. John signed Cassell’s contract over lunch at the Berkeley with Audrey. She and Una then worked into the night and cut The Unlit Lamp to 108,000 words.

  Back in Paris they again visited Natalie. Una read aloud from The Forge the passages based on Romaine – about beauty, riches and Bohemian ways. Romaine came in and according to Una ‘made a hideous scene abusing The Forge, John, & Natalie like a fishwife!’ She thought the writing trite and superficial and the portrait of herself ridiculous. She was vexed at their coolness over her portrait of Una and irritated by their impenetrable double act of aggrandizement.

  John and Una moved on to Bagnoles-de-l’Orne in Normandy. For a month they ‘took the waters’, lazed on the hotel terrace and went to the casino. Audrey sent out proofs of The Unlit Lamp, Una corrected them in a day and sent them back by the evening post. In gratitude John bought her an ivory and gold bracelet. Una viewed it as a trophy of love.

  ‘Great fuss made of John’, Una wrote in her diary about the party given for them by their friends Vere Hutchinson and Budge Burroughes when they got back to London at the end of July. Violet Hunt was there, Leonard Rees, editor of the Sunday Times, Michael Arlen, best-selling author of The Green Hat and Margaret Irwin, author of Still She Wished for Company. John invited Leonard Rees to lunch at the Savoy. He then invited her to his party where she met E. V. Lucas the Chairman of Methuen, St John Adcock editor of the Bookman, the writer Rebecca West, the publisher John Murray, Alec Waugh literary critic of the Sunday Times. It was the way to get famous, the way to get known. ‘Nine years’, Una wrote in her diary on 1 August. She circled the date, went to mass and gave thanks.