She and Una returned to London. They stayed in the Grand Central Hotel and looked at houses and flats for sale in Kensington but liked none of them. John felt unwell. She had a rash, a racing pulse and giddy spells. Una gave her usual diagnosis of ‘heart attack’ and put her to bed. Dr Sachs diagnosed indigestion. Dr Curtis and Dr Scott Pinchen said ‘her nerves were worn out’ and she should rest. The savagery of the obscenity trial, the way she had been vilified, months of floating in Europe, Wilette Kershaw’s disrespect, had left her brittle and depressed. Relationships with friends, with other writers, with Audrey, Cape and now her lawyers, all seemed spoiled.
Wanting peace she went to Rye. She stayed at the Mermaid Inn, hunted for a house to buy and chose one of the oldest in the town. Timber framed and in the high street, Una called it the Black Boy (the sobriquet attached to Charles II, who was swarthy and who was said to have stayed in it). It had once been part of a monastery. It had oak rafters, open grates and a priest’s cell. John bought it for Una, the one person she trusted, in gratitude for all her years of devotion, love and unswerving support.
The builders moved in. While they worked she rented 8 Watchbell Street, a terraced house opposite Rye’s small unfinished Catholic church of St Anthony of Padua. From the drawing-room she could see the nave of the church and votive candles. She poured money into this church. If the Black Boy was Una’s, the church of St Anthony was hers. She paid for its roof, pews, paintings of the Stations of the Cross and a rood screen of Christ the King. A tribute to Ladye was engraved on a brass plaque set into the floor:
Of your charity
pray for the soul of Mabel Veronica Batten
in memory of whom this rood was given.
She paid off all the outstanding debts of the church. It was as if she was buying her way to the right hand of God. Masses, benedictions, processions and venerations stemmed from her beneficence. The church’s priest, Father Bonaventura, was indebted to her. Out of gratitude he gave her an oak chair for her new house.
As Radclyffe Hall worked at The Carpenter’s Son she thought herself alone with God. At his communion Christophe Bénédit hallucinates a crucified man. He has searing pains in his hands when he tries to embrace a woman and his arms go rigidly cruciform. While writing, Radclyffe Hall felt itching and stabbing pains in her palms. Red stains appeared on them. A Dr Dowling X-rayed them which made them worse. She then wrote with her hands bandaged.
She ‘felt like hell’. Una worried about the long hours she worked. ‘At 12.30 I got up & went down to find as I suspected – fire out – bitter cold & she had made no effort to light the electric stove.’ Una, neglected, chose decorations for the Black Boy – wood panelling, door fittings and fire guards – and did an adaptation of Chéri by Colette for the stage. Andrea visited. She missed the train. Una ‘lectured her all afternoon and she left after tea’.
Radclyffe Hall wrote The Carpenter’s Son to take refuge after the indictment of The Well. Maligned by Beresford Egan, the Conservative government, the Daily Express, her mother, called obscene and disgusting, humiliated and reviled, she responded by showing them all how high-minded she was. She, not they, was close to God. Una chose a new title, The Master of the House, from Mark chapter 13 verse 35: ‘for ye know not when the master of the house cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the cockcrowing, or in the morning …’
At the book’s end Christophe Bénédit enlists in the war, is sent to Palestine, ‘stares into the eyes of the Indestructible Compassion’, exhorts the Infidels to lay down their arms in the name of Jesus Christ, gets crucified and tells God to abandon him: ‘Lord if You are with me still do not stay … do not suffer … But the words sank down and were lost in a bottomless pit of physical anguish.’
September 1930 brought bottomless pits from Wilette Kershaw. The Well of Loneliness was staged in Paris at the Théâtre de la Potinière. Janet Flanner, who as Gênet wrote a fortnightly ‘Letter from Paris’ for the New Yorker, said the first night was something of a riot. The theatre filled with large ladies who would not sit where directed by the ushers. Wilette Kershaw’s show was three acts containing eleven scenes of tableaux vivants. At the end she made a curtain speech
in which she begged humanity, ‘already used to earthquakes and murderers’, to try to put up with a minor calamity like the play’s and the book’s Lesbian protagonist, Stephen Gordon. However, she made up in costume what she lacked in psychology: dressing gown by Sulka, riding breeches by Hoare, boots by Bunting, crop by Briggs, briquet by Dunhill and British accent – as the program did not bother to state – by Broadway.
Holroyd-Reece called the production ‘backboneless, sugary and unclean’. Posters advertised it as from the novel by Radclyffe Hall and gave quotes from Havelock Ellis and Bernard Shaw. Radclyffe Hall and Audrey published complaints in the press. Rubinstein’s Paris agents served a lengthy ‘protestation’ on Wilette Kershaw, her solicitor and the theatre. The fuss was disproportionate. ‘Miss Radclyffe Hall’s press statement,’ Janet Flanner wrote, ‘that she knew nothing about the adaptation of her novel, and as soon as she did would go to law, made the public fear that her – well, loneliness was greater than had been supposed.’
Morris Ernst advised Rubinstein that any attempt to injunct a New York production would fail. The only course would be to ‘use the censorship arm of the government’ and invoke a criminal statute known as the Wales Law, levelled against obscene plays. It was, he said, an arm which long ago should have atrophied; it raised ‘various spiritual objections’ and he warned against calling ‘more attention to the situation than the situation warrants’. It was a contradiction of principle, an hypocrisy and he did not want to get involved.
It was an irony that Radclyffe Hall emulated her opponents. Despite her rhetoric about free speech, she fought to censor what went against her interests. The New York Times reported the dispute, printed excerpts from Wilette Kershaw’s contract and said she had sent Radclyffe Hall a ‘substantial check’ for royalties. Radclyffe Hall wanted to sue for libel. But after the large ladies departed, Kershaw played to empty houses, she and her production fizzled into oblivion, the dispute was only a codicil to a keener injustice.
John and Una moved to their Rye house, Father Bonaventura called to bless it and Maples called to fit the carpets, curtains and bedspreads. Miss McEwan was hired as a housemaid and Mabel Bourne as housekeeper. Una’s Chéri opened at the Prince of Wales Theatre on 26 October 1930 with Gabrielle Enthoven in the lead. Edy Craig who lived at Smallhythe near Rye went to the first night. For good luck she took along a medal awarded to her mother Ellen Terry. It worked no magic. All the reviews were ‘unspeakable’.
Dismissive of her own efforts, Una lived through John. Her failure was lost in preparations for Christmas: presents and tree trimmings bought in Hastings, a hamper for the Sisters of the Poor Clares at Lynton, mass at St Anthony’s Church in Rye. For Christmas dinner at the Mermaid, John dressed as a French porter, Una wore velveteen. On 28 December Noël Coward and his lover Jeffery Amherst called for tea at the Black Boy. Coward ‘adored’ the house and there were ‘howls of laughter’ from them all. On New Year’s Eve John and Una heard the bells of Rye at midnight and saw in their seventeenth new year together.
27
Just Rye
In Rye, as in Paris and London, Radclyffe Hall was drawn to the artistic lesbian and gay coterie that gathered there. Edy Craig, whom she had met at school, had inherited a sixteenth-century farmhouse, at Smallhythe near Tenterden, from her mother. She lived there with Christopher St John her partner of thirty years, and Tony (Claire) Atwood. Una called them Edy and the boys. Edy Craig staged monthly barn shows, with soliloquies and sandwiches, in her mother’s memory. Christopher’s real name was Christabel Marshall. A devout Catholic convert, like John and Una, the St John was out of affinity with St John the Baptist. Tony Atwood painted flowers, marsh scenes with sheep, and portraits of friends. She gave John and Una a relic of the true cross acquired by her ancestors from a
pope. Una put it with candles and flowers in the shrine in her bedroom.
E. F. Benson, ‘Dodo’, the author of camp novels featuring Miss Mapp and Lucia, lived in Henry James’s former home, Lamb House, down the high street from the Black Boy. He served John and Una awful lunches, regaled them with gossip and let them read the manuscripts of his novels. They savoured these for details of Rye. Una thought he had never been in love with anyone but was ‘just fond of people’. His brother, Monsignor Hugh Benson, he told them, had been a Catholic convert and died leaving a box containing a ‘discipline’ – a scourge with small spikes clotted with blood.
Other friends were Francis Yeats-Brown, author of The Bengal Lancer, the painter Paul Nash, who was the stepson of Una’s great aunt and whose work Una called ‘chaotic compounds of disassociated fragments’, Lady Maud Warrender, once mayor of Rye, who lived at Leasam with a singer Marcia van Dresser, Sheila Kaye-Smith, whose novels Noël Coward ‘passionately admired’ and who lived with her husband Penrose Fry in nearby Northiam at ‘Little Doucegrove’, a sprawling oast house.
Rye was accepting, English and eccentric. These friends wrote books, painted pictures, worshipped the Lord and pottered in their gardens. John and Una fitted in and vowed they would never leave. They were perceived as a respectable married couple. ‘We desire order and fidelity and the privilege of a religious and legal bond’, Una wrote. Horrified by an article in the Twentieth Century advocating sexual freedom, she burned the magazine before the servants saw it.
‘Isn’t Rye heavenly’, E. F. Benson said. ‘Long may the grass flourish between her holy cobbles.’ Help was there for John and Una when Tulip haemorrhaged and died in May 1931. John wept all day, buried her in the garden and had a marble headstone made. Christopher St John said her heart ached in sympathy. She gave John and Una a key to the Smallhythe garden so that they might freely visit. E. F. Benson hoped there would be a future life for dogs. Mrs Leonard confirmed that Tulip had gone straight to Ladye. (A discarnate influence was helping her write her autobiography, My Life in Two Worlds.)
New friends replaced the old. Toupie Lowther fell from grace for claiming to be the inspiration for The Well of Loneliness. Gabrielle Enthoven was dropped for ‘repudiating her own kind when opportune to do so’. She had urged discretion and camouflage from her new friend Wilma. ‘She’s a rat and we have no use for her,’ Una wrote and blamed her for the failure of Chéri. John wanted to drop Audrey as her agent, but did not know who else to trust.
Radclyffe Hall’s enthusiasm for socialism was brief. She despised Ramsay MacDonald, the Labour Prime Minister. In a broadcast to the nation he called for sacrifices. Income tax was at five shillings in the pound in 1931, the bank rate went to six per cent and Britain left the gold standard. Radclyffe Hall’s investment income was halved. She worried about her gilt-edged securities, her failed shares in American Railroads and her mother who would not economize. To save money, she used coke mixed with anthracite in the boiler and to make money she bought another house, the Santa Maria in Rye, supervised its refurbishment, put stored furniture in it and rented it out.
Una described Rye as haunted by peace. She loved the rainbows over the marsh, the blossom, the primroses. The focus of her days was buying the marmalade and a book on pewter and reading aloud The Ladies of Llangollen, which had just been published. Radclyffe Hall was again the master. Children were not sure if she was a man. She worked long hours at her book about martyrdom. A ship’s bell hung above her chair in the dining room and she rang it to summon the servants. A tailor from Brighton called to measure her for her smoking suits and breeches.
There were flowers in the vases, fires in the hearths and the oak furniture gleamed. But all was not right. John was a bundle of nerves. She felt exhausted and faint, had frequent colds and headaches and her eyes hurt. When her throat was sore, Una touched it with a relic of St Blaise, the patron saint of throats, which did not make it better. She was prescribed bromides, told to get fresh air, to rest and to cut down on cigarettes. Una ordered fourteen pipes and a long cigarette holder from Dunhill for her.
John’s troubles seemed deep and Una could not allay them. The house stifled her. Chapter 39 of The Master of the House would not materialize. A blowfly buzzed in her room; the church bells pealed; the Salvation Army banged tambourines. She was disturbed by the chatter of the servants in the kitchen, the stoking of the stove, Una’s wireless, sounds of music from the monastery. Trippers looked in at the window and parked their cars too close to the house. Una printed a card in large letters: ‘Please do not park in front of my house. Una the Lady Troubridge.’ John stuck it on windscreens.
Una asked herself whether any book in the world was worth what John was going through. She thought her nervous state was because Ladye was coadjutor, so John was in constant physical proximity with a ghost. Everything made her anxious. She found endless fault with Mr Breeds, the builder working on the Santa Maria. He sent ‘a very insolent letter’ saying he could waste no more time or trouble over the place. She worried about her mother. Audrey checked in the phone book that she was still at her address in Phillimore Terrace, Kensington.
As ever there were problems with the servants. Winifred Hales, the secretary, was railed at for leaving her key in the front door, then fired for wanting a holiday. ‘Poor old Mary’ the parlour maid, found talking to herself in the kitchen late one night, was dismissed in the morning. Her replacement, Violet Evans, was three-quarters of an hour late coming down. She had been sick. Una diagnosed pregnancy. Violet was despatched and replaced by Bertha and by Quilter, a parlour man.
Una fussed about her own health, her periods and piles. A letter from Andrea in June 1931, saying she was in love with an actor and wanted to have his children, sparked a pathological response. ‘I long to own some bit of immature childhood’, Una wrote in her diary. ‘I loathe the swelling breasts and calves, the incipient moustache of adolescence.’ Now forty-five, dressed, like Radclyffe Hall, in mannish clothes, when she overdid the blue rinse on her cropped grey hair it turned a rich purple. Una commended the respectability of their long marriage. She and John grumbled about small matters, held hands and admired the marsh and the sunset.
Andrea was told to explain herself by return of post or Una would send Harold Rubinstein to investigate and would encourage Tom Troubridge to decrease her allowance. Andrea was nearly twenty-one. Una thought her unattractive and without talent. ‘Lord how I wish she would marry and some man assume responsibility for her.’
When I look back on my hopes when I was expecting her, on my immense care, spiritual and material, throughout her childhood, and upon the relentlessness with which she has grown up idle, deceitful, untruthful and quite without any moral pride or independence, grown up to avoid work and to sponge upon her father’s relations, who she well knows hate and traduce her mother. It is not a cheering picture. However, I think I have done my best in the circumstances all along, and more than that no one can do.
Andrea had a thin twenty-first birthday. Summoned to Rye on 11 December, she arrived on the 11.17 train. John and Una waited for her in their library. Una scrutinized her. Her dark hair was waved and shoulder length, she wore lipstick and mascara, a little hat, imitation pearl earrings, a brown three-piece costume, a long coat with a fur collar, tight suede gloves, sheer silk stockings, high heeled court shoes, a fur muff with a zip fastening. She had, said Una, the ‘pose of head and general movement of a rather weary vamp, the sidling, inviting walk of a professional whore, the indescribable look of sullen, brooding, determined sexuality rampant’.
She was living alone in a bedsitter in Shaftesbury Avenue, two doors away from the Palace Theatre where she had a part in a play. The young man she loved did not want to marry her, but they spent time together in each other’s rooms. She had not been to confession or communion since Easter but went occasionally to church. Una interpreted her ‘entire look, bearing, circumstances and attitude of mind’ as ‘indescribably disreputable’.
‘Desperate with anxiety and disgust’, she urged Andrea to move from Shaftesbury Avenue, not to entertain or visit men in a ‘manner that must ruin her reputation’ and to find reputable, well-paid work. ‘Even better class theatrical managers would fight shy of any girl who suggested obvious immorality.’ She called her ‘a born degenerate’ and reminded her of ‘scandals at convent and college’.
Andrea left at three-thirty in the afternoon. ‘As she left the house she wrapped her coat closely round her, so that her figure was clearly defined, placed her hands in her muff and glided down Rye High Street as though she were doing her beat at midnight on Piccadilly or, as she seems to prefer it, on Shaftesbury Avenue.’
The obscenity trial made Una more respectable. She extolled her own abstinence and fidelity. She saw herself as a good mother. Her daughter was born bad and she said she ‘washed her hands of her’. To Andrea it might have seemed as if she had done that long ago. Una hired a private detective. She satisfied herself that Andrea was living in a brothel and that her landlady was ‘an elderly foreign jewess’.
Radclyffe Hall finished The Master of the House in November. Una touched each manuscript copy with her relic of the true cross then cabled the news to Jonathan Cape, Audrey Heath and the Smallhythe crew. She and John went to mass and benediction to light candles and to pray for the book’s success. Audrey came down to Rye, had the last eight chapters read to her and said it was by far the biggest book John had ever written. Cape was to publish it in America too. He had set up an imprint there in partnership with Robert Ballou.
At Christmas John and Una sent a hamper with turkey sausages, plum pudding and brandy butter to the nuns at Lynton. The Black Boy was decorated with shrines, a creche, holly and mistletoe and ‘the darlings’ from Smallhythe came to stay. They walked on the marshes, went to midnight mass and exchanged presents – an etching of Smallhythe and an illuminated Benedictine prayer on goatskin.
The Trials of Radclyffe Hall Page 27