The Trials of Radclyffe Hall

by Diana Souhami

  The Unlit Lamp was published to good reviews. The Daily Telegraph called it ‘a novel of uncommon power and fidelity to life’, the Observer said it was ‘strong and quiet – a very moving picture of a character refreshingly fine’. Romeike and Curtice sent five reviews ‘all magnificent’. Ida Wylie praised it in the Queen. Cassell advertised it on the clock tower of St Pancras Station. John and Una drove to admire this, then went on to Harrods and The Times Bookshop to note with pleasure that all copies had been sold. Mr Francis of Cassell’s publicity department had tea with them, stayed to dinner and got drunk. ‘It was awful’, Una wrote.

  In October Una had ‘electricity’ treatment for her nerves, venereal disease or both and John resigned from the Society for Psychical Research. Being a famous author now took all her time. They took a week’s break in the Grand Hotel, Folkestone – they always had room 455. They walked through the town looking in bookshops for The Unlit Lamp. In the evenings Una read aloud The Broken Bow. John began writing The World, a ‘trolley book’ about a dead cat, an asthmatic bank clerk and a German landlady. More happily perhaps, in the general election the Conservatives had a landslide victory and Mrs Leonard, in a now-rare sitting, predicted Twonnie would be great. Newman Flower who was a client of hers had told her so.

  John and Una moved into the Holland Street house. Once again they created the illusion of a settled home. Taylor’s Depository delivered the huge refectory tables, John bought a ‘beautiful sideboard’ from Narramores and a Steinway piano. It took a full day to shelve their 2,000 books and another to supervise the hanging of their pictures, their bewhiskered relatives, Sargent’s portrait of Ladye, the Madonna and Child, the crucifixions, the pastoral landscapes.

  Their maids wore starched aprons and caps; the chauffeur was in livery. Father Hague came to bless the house. He came to lunch and he stayed to tea. John and Una declared themselves enchanted with it all. It was convenient for Brompton Oratory, the parks, the shops. They shared a bedroom because the rooms were disparate sizes and they did not want to be on separate floors. ‘John and I breakfasted in our bedroom’, Una wrote every day until the year’s end.

  Andrea arrived from boarding school on Friday 19 December and was despatched next day to Ida Temple at Datchet with the housekeeper Miss MacLean. John and Una went to Highgate Cemetery to put a wreath on the door of Ladye’s catacomb. They saw Tallulah in Creaking Chair, went on to the Cave of Harmony and down to Teddie Gerrard’s cottage. They joined Andrea at Datchet late on Christmas Eve. ‘John, I and Andrea to Midnight Mass, John’s 10th with me’ was Una’s diary entry, the order of allegiance clear. Her Christmas present from John was the mirror of the gold dressing-table set. On New Year’s Eve, back at Holland Street, Toupie came to dinner with her new lover, Fabienne Lafargue De-Avilla, and Gabrielle Enthoven. They all danced together as the bells of midnight chimed. Vere Hutchinson and Budge Burroughes stayed home. Vere, who was thirty-three, had multiple sclerosis which was paralysing her body and unbalancing her mind.

  16

  Books about ourselves

  ‘If we cannot write books about ourselves then I ask about whom may we write them?’ Radclyffe Hall said in a lecture to the English Club on novel writing. The self about whom she wrote was drawn to the central grief of an unwanted child. Fear of abandonment loomed in her novels as in her life, whatever her fabrications of plot or grandeur of lifestyle. It gave a tension to her work which ameliorated its logical flaws and indulgence. She saw herself as rejected by her father, despised by her mother and answerable only to God.

  She was also rich, theatrical and hugely ambitious. And Una was there to collude with her vanity. Una was a strategist, her objectives clear: Radclyffe Hall was the greatest living English novelist whose reputation must be served. Una’s was not an inflectional love of moods and nuance. Pontifical, doctrinal, it was as absolute and rigid on day one as year twelve. She encouraged Radclyffe Hall’s grandiose fantasies and gave her a safe place to weave her fiction. She allowed her to be a misfit, a man, a genius, martyr and messiah. The price of her indulgence was entrapment within the world they agreed. The trial was in living up to the fantasy. The danger was that life of some other sort might break in.

  John knew the value of Una’s devotion. Her next novel had, before its publisher protested, the unpropitious title Food. Its hero, Gian-Luca, marries a woman he does not love, but sees the benefit of her loving him: ‘It is wiser and it leaves a man more free for his business. When one loves one is all misery, all body and no brain. One becomes a fool, one says and does nothing but foolish things.’

  John’s business was to write books that changed the world. Publication of The Unlit Lamp and its good reviews was proof of her divine gift. Life at Holland Street reflected her importance. She controlled the household. She rang a handbell for service at table. She sacked the chauffeur, Budd, for driving Una too fast to the shops. She employed a secretary, Miss Clark. Miss Shackleton came to draw her, Mr Dywell called to cut her hair, Rebecca West and May Sinclair dined in April 1925. ‘A very successful evening’, Una said. When Alec Waugh came to supper with Leonard Rees, Una read Kept, his recent novel, aloud all afternoon so that John would appear informed.

  Up in her study John now worked long hours.

  If our literary instinct says ‘Work all night’ because by doing so your work will be better, if it tells you that, if you break for your lunch you are going to check a good bit of writing, if it tells you that by going out for a walk your physical condition may be improved but that your mind may well be distracted, then I think that you should sacrifice yourself to art. All art is a hard taskmaster at times, and takes very little account of the body.

  She began Food on Tuesday 14 April 1925. It was long but she wrote it in six months. Its central allegory was of a surfeit of sausages and pasta and a starved soul. The idea came to her lunching with Una at the Pall Mall restaurant. Smart places inspired her with fantasies of deprivation. It was a way of subverting privilege. She could romanticize hardship knowing she was rich. She said she was going to write about a waiter so sickened by food he dies of starvation.

  She took the road to Calvary theme, resonant with Christ’s stations of the cross. Una bought a model of a lamb as an offering for the book’s success. There was a kind of camp melodrama to their religiosity. The story was set in the Italian community in London’s Soho. By way of research for authentic settings, they went to St Peter’s Italian Church in Hatton Garden, to the best Italian restaurants and to a delicatessen called King Bomba in Old Compton Street. Una took notes on the stock: olives, split peas, Orvieto, tagliatelle, cheeses, coffees.

  Una monitored the book’s progress in her diary and took to staying in bed while John worked. Her entry for 22 April read: ‘John had breakfast in bed and then sent me back there while she went to work. I staid in bed all day. Minna came in at tea time. Later I got up for dinner & John and I to first night Haymarket. V. amusing.’

  And two days later: ‘John and I breakfasted in our room & she to work after I had read her Food from the beginning. Minna lunched and staid till 4 oc. then John worked again till past midnight & then I read her work aloud to her.’

  Food became the focus of both their days. There were fewer dog shows now, or visits to Mrs Leonard. Una interviewed men from Barker’s when beetles appeared in Dickie the manservant’s bedroom, she pasted reviews of The Saturday Life from the Queen and Punch into the scrapbooks, shopped at Harrods and Harvey Nichols, rested and saw the doctor, but nothing interested her other than living John’s life. She rescinded any vestigial motherly tasks. Miss MacLean met Andrea from the station, took her to the dentist and despatched her to her father.

  In a display of independence Una read and commented on manuscripts for Audrey Heath, translated Le Grand Eunuque by Charles Pettit and wrote arch autobiographical sketches, unrevealing pieces on pets, clothes and on never settling in any house. ‘John wants me to do a book of them’, she wrote in her diary. ‘J worked till after 2.30 and so
did I!’ John wanted Una, it seemed, to fill her time so as herself to be spared the oppression of constant service, constant scrutiny.

  There was less intimacy between them. John was protective of Una’s health, insistent about standards of service to her in shops and restaurants, generous with presents, deferential to her views, mindful of her loyalty, but there was a sense of obligation about it all, a tightness of response. Gone were Una’s diary entries ‘We talked til late.’ John now worked most nights. Una noted the long hours with implied recrimination.

  The General Strike was an interruption. They saw it as perpetrated by Communists. By way of solidarity with the ruling class, they volunteered to drive casualty patients to Charing Cross Hospital. With Bradley, the current chauffeur, they ferried a boy with a crushed foot to and from Peckham. Like knitting socks for soldiers such gestures of citizenship passed with the day.

  By Sunday 17 May Radclyffe Hall had written 115 pages of Food. She breakfasted in bed then went to mass while Una washed the dogs. Then Audrey called and for hours Una read it all aloud. The story that far was of Gian-Luca’s forlorn childhood – absence of love, loneliness, compensatory desire. His mother dies giving birth to him, he does not know who his father is and his grandmother rejects him for causing her daughter’s death. ‘I have got myself,’ he says. He grows up in his grandfather’s store. There is an abundance of pickles, pasta and pane-tone, but not a book in sight. He joins the Free Library for ‘he loved the sound of words’. He reads Tennyson and Wordsworth and at Hatchards bookshop buys the Italian poetry of someone called Ugo Doria, whose writing gives him an ‘eerie feeling of familiarity’.

  He works as a waiter at the Capo di Monte restaurant, reads Ugo Doria and falls for the Padrona, who has golden hair and blue eyes. She asks him to tea and he kisses the scar on her hand. He is sixteen.

  A boy’s first love is a love apart, and never again may he hope to recapture the glory and the anguish of it. It is heavy with portent and fearful with beauty, terrible as an army with banners; yet withal so tender and selfless a thing as to brush the very hem of the garment of God. Only once in a life comes such loving as this, and now it had come to Gian-Luca.

  Audrey ‘loved it’. It made her weep. ‘After tea we all went for a drive. John v. tired but v. happy,’ Una wrote. A contract was drawn up with Cassell. Newman Flower insisted the title be changed. He said everyone would think Food was a cookbook. Una took over: ‘Firmly rejecting John’s frenzied suggestions, I ransacked the local Smith’s for sources of inspiration and ended by finding what we required in Kipling’s Tomlinson: “I’m all oer sib to Adam’s breed that I should mock your pain.”’ ‘Sib’ is archaic Scottish for ‘related to’. Kipling was nowhere quoted in the book, so the title Adam’s Breed though Newman Flower approved it, remained as mysterious as the dedication ‘To Our Three Selves’.

  John and Una’s only travel that summer was with Gian-Luca. In June Bradley drove them to Lynton in Devon. They stayed in the Valley of the Rocks Hotel. John wrote her book in bed. Una designed the jacket for it and read aloud Dracula and The Crossways of Sex. They visited the Convent of the Poor Clares and made friends with the reverend mother. The weather was sunny and John bought a No. 2 Brownie box camera and photographed the sky and the coastline.

  Andrea was sent to guide camp. Back in London in July Una’s stony regard for her fifteen-year-old daughter grew stonier. Andrea had a boyfriend. Una summoned Dr Thomson. He ‘confirmed her suspicions’. Una ‘lectured’ Andrea, despatched her to Datchet to stay with Ida Temple and then to the Troubridges with whom Una was not on speaking terms.

  By September Adam’s Breed was nearly finished. Audrey cried all the way home after another day of Una reading it to her. She said she could not bear to think how dull she would feel when it was finished. Una’s mother, to whom it was also read hot from the page, called it a great book, ‘finer and more interesting’ than The Unlit Lamp.

  It was an Old Testament saga of suicide. It was all about redemption and suffering and it troubled mothers less than tales of lesbian love. In the second part of the book, Gian-Luca becomes head waiter at the Doric restaurant. (John and Una toured the kitchens of the Berkeley Grill in their quest for authenticity.) A ‘hard master’, ambitious for riches, he ‘carries within him the needs of an unloved child’. He meets Maddalena who wants him to find God. She is ‘tall strong-limbed and full breasted … her face was the face of a mother of men’. To please her, they marry in the Italian Catholic Church in Hatton Gardens. He does not desire her, but she gives him the home he craves: ‘Home is a place in which we are wanted, in which there is someone to whom we matter more than anything else on earth.’ He eats her pasta and tells her, as Radclyffe Hall might have told Una, ‘I love you far more than when I married you sweetheart. It must be because you love me so much; all my life I have wanted someone to love me.’

  Sex is a veiled problem and she does not have the children she wanted. Crisis comes when Gian-Luca’s hero, Ugo Doria, books a table at the Doric. He arrives with a louche woman, is bragging, drunk and insecure. Gian-Luca sees ‘a large, foolish, lovesick viveur of sixty’. Ugo Doria is of course Gian-Luca’s father though neither knows it. There follows from Gian-Luca ‘a tirade on the man who conceived him then abandoned him’. He rails at ‘all the years of his lonely, outraged childhood, of his painful adolescence, his maturity of toil with its bitter will to succeed’.

  Men seldom behave well towards women in Radclyffe Hall’s books. Gian-Luca becomes crazy and unpleasant, hits his wife in the face when she serves him breakfast, gives his customers salmon when they ask for oysters and wants ‘to grasp something that was infinitely stronger than he was’. He gives his money to a blind child beggar and wanders round Italy telling peasants to show mercy to their beasts. ‘On they must stumble to calvary as Another had stumbled before them’, he says of cattle led to the slaughterhouse, ‘… poor, lowly, uncomprehending disciples, following dumbly in the footsteps of God who had surely created all things for joy, yet had died for the blindness of the world.’

  Back in London he tells Maddalena he is going away ‘to find God in great solitude’. She packs his bag. He heads for the New Forest on foot and feels ‘like a lover on the eve of ultimate fulfilment’. (Radclyffe Hall’s father painted landscapes and rode horses in the New Forest.) He lives rough, birds eat out of his hands and he gets followed by a Roan pony. He asks the rabbits, ‘Have you got a God?’ After a year of it he finds God in his heart ‘and in every poor struggling human heart that was capable of one kind impulse’. He dies of starvation blessing God as he does so and his body is laid out in a stable. ‘The path of the world was the path of His sorrow and the sorrow of God was the hope of the world, for to suffer with God was to share in the joy of his ultimate triumph over sorrow.’

  It was all very like the Bible. Given that these were years of literary innovation it was surprising that publishers liked it. James Joyce had published Ulysses in 1922, T. S. Eliot The Waste Land, Virginia Woolf was writing To the Lighthouse in 1925. H. D. and Edith Sitwell, Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein, were all breaking rules of content and form. Radclyffe Hall took no notice of their heresies. Adam’s Breed was for readers resistant to stylistic innovation and modernism. It was all about redemption, suffering and Jesus Christ. The French did not take to it and in the States it sold less than four thousand copies.

  There was hubris in the seeming humility of the story. Una compounded a deception. ‘We followed Gian-Luca step by step to the New Forest,’ she wrote, ‘we trudged and waded in abominable weather.’ It was not at all like that. Bradley, their liveried chauffeur, drove them there. They stayed at Balmer Lawn in the village of Brockenhurst and lunched at Winchester and the White Hart, Whitchurch. Radclyffe Hall wrote the chapters about Gian-Luca’s demise in the Grand Hotel, Brighton. She and Una had breakfast in bed, sat in the sun, had stout and oysters for lunch at Chiesmans and potted meat for tea. It was all very well for her to extol starving to death in the
woods when she was so well off. Her point of interest was herself and her interpretation of her life. She minded very much about cruelty to animals and hated the denial of their rights, but she indulged her pity. It was all very well in the morning to dictate lines like, ‘In as much as your Christ had pity, so must every poor beast be Christian’, then lunch on veal at the Berkeley Grill and in the afternoon buy a tigerskin coat for herself, a leopardskin one for Una and pearl earrings for them both. She gave money to beggars and to the Church but she was not egalitarian. Servants, waiters and tramps had their quarters. She viewed the aristocracy and Christian martyrs as the true elite. But she was also contradictory. She subverted what she had and believed, deconstructed her God and her politics, built up her houses in order to fracture them and in a way did the same with her relationships and work.

  She finished Adam’s Breed at the Grand Hotel at two in the morning on Sunday 8 November. Una prepared one manuscript for Cassell, another for the American publisher Doubleday. It was then parties and shopping, first nights and dog shows. ‘We are hugely enjoying our well earned holiday’, Una wrote. They had dinner with Toupie and Fabienne at the Kit Kat Club. The vet came and clipped the wings of Sappho the parrot, they bought a cockatoo from Gamages, went to a party at Violet Hunt’s and to a matinée of Where the Rainbow Ends. John cried all the way home.

  At Christmas they went as usual to Ida Temple at Datchet. Andrea travelled there by train with Dickie and the maid. John, Una and the dogs went by car. In London on New Year’s Eve, John and Una ‘intercepted’ a letter to Andrea from her boyfriend. She was lectured ‘for a long time’. Minna was told and the doctor was again called. Andrea was sent to her father for a fortnight, then given another lecture before being sent back to her current boarding school, St George’s at Harpenden. James Garvin, Viola’s second husband, tried to intervene on Andrea’s behalf. ‘Don’t repress my little favourite Andrea too much’, he wrote. ‘She’s full of sap and must follow nature. She will follow it more or less reasonably if emancipation comes by rather liberal degrees.’ But Una’s ‘misery’ about sex, her equating of it with infection, made her horrified at the prospect of her daughter’s desires. No friend of Andrea’s was ever invited to the house.