The Trials of Radclyffe Hall

by Diana Souhami

  Something tells me that all this was meant to happen, that we shall meet again, that our love will last, that our mutual desire the one for the other is only the physical expression of a thing that is infinately more enduring than our bodies. Surely Soulina, you must feel this too? Otherwise why did I let you go from me even as you came – I, who needed you so and who could have made you incapable of resisting, could have made you no longer want to resist? For you are not a woman of ice and this I well know, my little virgin, and I agonized to take your virginity and to bind you to me with the Chains of the flesh, because I had & have so vast a need that my wretched body has become my torment – but through it all my spirit cries out to you, Soulina, and it tells you that love is never a sin, that the flesh may be weak but the spirit is strong – yesterday it was my spirit that saved you. Must I always save you? I do not know. I cannot see far beyond this pain.

  John told Evguenia to lock up this and all such letters. She told her that Lady Troubridge had been very wonderful, sent her love and would write to her from Sirmione.

  Lady Troubridge was not very wonderful for long. By the time they arrived in Sirmione she was sweating in her sleep, thin as a grass blade and praying for help to Our Lady of Victories. When John announced she was going to see Soulina in Paris in October on their way back to Rye she went haywire. She forbade it. She reminded her of her hysterectomy, of every illness she had ever had, of Dr Fouts’ warning that she must avoid all emotion. She told her she had been married to her for eighteen years, had stood by her through the obscenity trial, given her all of her interest, all of her love, all of her life and now she was going to die. ‘After a scene which lasted all night, she suddenly hurled herself onto the floor and looked as though she were going demented. I think that it may very well be that her operation has made her more excitable – women are like that after that operation.’

  Una reminded her, until John felt she was going mad, of her obligation as the leader of inverts, of how she ‘stood for fidelity in the case of inverted unions’, of how ‘the eyes of the inverted all over the world were on her’, revering her, respecting her open and faithful relationship.

  And when she says this I can find no answer, because she is only telling the truth. I have tried to help my poor kind by setting an example, especially of courage, and thousands have turned to me for help and found it, if I may believe their letters, and she says that I want to betray my inverts who look upon me almost as their leader. Oh, but what’s the use of telling you any more of the hell I went through last night & this morning – I have a debt of honour to pay, I am under a terrific obligation, and can I shirk the intolerable load? It is less whether I can shirk my load than whether I have the strength to bear it.

  ‘Nineteen years together’, Una wrote in her diary on 1 August. Only twice had they spent a day apart or slept under separate roofs. She prayed to God, the Virgin Mary, St Anthony, Celine and Mabel Batten. She asked them to steady her health and nerves, put her mind at peace and sort this mess out. In church John whispered she would never leave her, they would remain together for ever and ever throughout eternity, Amen.

  Una softened when John pleaded that without Evguenia she was too desolate to go on living, could neither eat nor sleep and would never write another book. Una permitted letters and a meeting in Paris provided John gave her ‘word of honour not to be unfaithful in the fullest and ultimate meaning of the word’.

  The holiday in Italy was not a success. John called it ‘my terrible summer in Sermione’. They stayed at the Albergo Catullo near Micki Jacob’s villa. Romaine joined them but found her room too primitive and left after a couple of days. Una got bitten by mosquitoes and stung on the ankle by a horsefly. John spent long hours locked in her room pouring out love letters to Evguenia or waiting in agitation for the post.

  Distractions were fleeting. Una was delighted when the hotel proprietor gave her the framed photograph of the Duce that hung in the foyer. And she was thrilled when d’Annunzio agreed to see John, sent an armoured Alfa Romeo to collect her and gifts for them both of flowers, and bracelets with rubies and cabochon sapphires. He offered his villa in the garden of the Vittoriale for John to write her next book and said he would send his private plane to collect a first edition of The Well of Loneliness.

  But John was no longer interested in her literary career. She could only have one obsession at a time and now it was Evguenia. She sent her forty-one letters in the six weeks she was in Sirmione. They were letters about herself, though God’s will and destiny were categorically invoked. Love was to do with money, sex and coercion. It was locked in the time warp of Sunny Lawn. Long years with Una had not led to subtleties of expression. ‘She would not give allowance for my own feelings’, Evguenia was to write. ‘John was very shy, but nevertheless it was she, her personality that dominated.’

  On 31 July John arranged a bank transfer of £100 for Evguenia – a significant sum in 1934. In many letters she enclosed a hundred-franc or two-hundred-franc note. ‘I want you to have everything on this earth that I can possibly afford to buy you’, she told her. She promised coats with high collars, an apartment with a nice bathroom and a large sunny bedroom, holidays by the sea. ‘I resented it at first but really who could resent it for long,’ Evguenia said, ‘when one is in dire need of everything, starting with a pair of pyjamas … and she fretted that I was not eating well, had no money to buy shoes and dresses with. She could not bear the idea of my wanting anything. Besides I had to have something decent on when she would come back.’ Evguenia protested that she felt uncomfortable about taking the money, had ‘no right’ to it, had done nothing to deserve it and could not repay it except with love and devotion.

  Love and devotion suited John. And sex. John would ‘make a woman of her’ so Evguenia ‘would know the meaning of passion’. She would protect her ‘as if she were a baby’. She would like her to have her child. Evguenia, she said, was probably bisexual whereas she, John, was a ‘congenital invert’ who could never have sex with a man. What if, John asked, she were released from her promise to Una, would Evguenia then be her lover?

  I asked if you would give yourself to me. You say that you are not yet sure. Sweetheart were I in very truth your lover in the ultimate sense of the word – I might not always be very gentle. I might try to be so but I might not succeed, because the sex impulse is a violent impulse – I can’t explain this to you very well because you know so little about it beloved. But this I tell you, were we lovers in deed you would not want me to be very gentle – not if you feel for me even the half of what I feel for you.

  Evguenia was bombarded with such warnings of sexual intent. They invoked uncertain desire and terror. Apprehensive about their next tryst, her letters became stiff and formal. She was disturbed, attracted, interested, frightened silly. Once she wrote, ‘I love you too much. When shall I see you?’ In another letter she wrote that John was the biggest love in her life. More often she voiced worry that it was all somehow wrong.

  She said she would prefer their love to be ‘pure and vital’ and ‘only spiritual’. John asked if this was because some man had given her an emotional shock, ‘even if this falling in love with me has been your first deep experience of love’. She told her to have the courage to accept her fate, view John as the Giver and the Master, do what she said and hold her head high.

  John would be in Paris on Sunday 30 September on her way back to England. She would take Evguenia to lunch at twelve-fifteen on 1 October. They would then go back to Evguenia’s apartment at rue Sarcey. ‘You shall tremble in my arms which even you, even you must admit does not constitute either a rape or a “seduction”.’ Evguenia was to keep free all afternoons and evenings throughout John’s ten-day stay. She was to say how much money she needed so as not to have to work for the hospital at this time. ‘Money there is and money I will send if only you will tell me how much you need.’

  Evguenia panicked. At the end of August she wrote that she might have to go to Americ
a two days after John arrived. A rich elderly patient, Mrs Baker, ill with all sorts of things, always asked particularly for her to nurse her when she travelled.

  John responded with rage. She instructed Una to write to Evguenia. She arranged to go to Paris earlier. Mrs Baker ‘appears to have more claim upon you than I have’, she wrote. Evguenia was not to run about for Mrs Baker – doing her shopping, cashing her cheques, holding her hand. ‘If you’re anyone’s slave you’re going to be mine.’ She warned her to keep to their schedule and to keep her diary entirely free for those days in Paris:

  Now listen Souline – do you know who I am? I am really a very well known author whose career is watched by a very large public, and as such I am naturally a busy woman … I think it essential that I should remind you. You have fallen in love with Radclyffe Hall, not with Mary Jones or anyone like her, and Radclyffe Hall has a standard to uphold. I am so madly in love with you that you can force me to lower that standard by worrying me the way you have done, by making me utterly unfit to work by your own inability to stop being vague. Are you going to make me lower my standard, or are you going to help on my work by giving me a minimum of peace and comfort? By giving me those ten days I ask for?

  She could not concentrate on her new novel. Evguenia must do better. She would have to learn to love. ‘I shall have to teach you.’

  I haven’t deserved this at your hands – to be pushed aside for someone else, to be treated as less than this other person when I have given you all I have to give of love, and you saying that you love me – that I am the biggest love in your life. What in God’s name does it mean, beloved?

  In Paris on 23 September Una noted in her diary that John went out at eleven-thirty in the morning and returned just before midnight. In subsequent letters John made clear what went on. They spent the afternoon in Evguenia’s room. She was in a state of terror. ‘I found you a virgin and I made you a lover. I have made a new discovery through you. I find that to take an innocent woman is quite unlike anything else in life.’ She called it ‘perhaps the most perfect experience’. She wondered at Evguenia’s ‘ignorance of physical passion’, told her the ‘trouble’ she showed was entirely nerves and that she did not ‘get a normal reaction’ because she was ‘desperately nervous’ – ‘remember how you fought me, my darling!’

  At supper Evguenia ‘sat all crumpled up and in despair’. John fed her, ‘as though you were a child and consoled you and reassured you as though you were a child … I was your first lover. Through me you are now no longer a child. Wonderful yes but terrible also – terrible because so achingly sweet.’ At midnight John went back to Una. She felt bad about leaving Evguenia but next day she was again in her room and for each of the ten days of her stay. ‘Step by step – very quietly, I led you towards fulfillment. And this has made you doubly mine.’ John told Evguenia the facts of life as she saw them. ‘All the facts of life I believe I have told you.’ She omitted one or two things about how to get pleasure but would make those clear in time.

  ‘Very often I would do something which was not what I wanted but I knew John liked me to do it and I usually gave in’, was Evguenia’s view of the exchange. It was an uneasy seduction. There was a touch of the Miss Ogilvies about it. It seemed to have echoes of the unwanted advances of Alberto Visetti, the misery of Marguerite as a child. It was enough to make the grand old men of England get out their gallows and gibbets.

  ‘You woke me up,’ John wrote to Evguenia, ‘you little stray dog who had no collar, you little white Russian who had no home … let me be your love, your home and your country. Beloved – please adopt my heart as your country.’ This heart was feudal territory and desperate with need. ‘Same Heart’, John called Evguenia. ‘You are not your own any more, you are mine.’ The three selves had become four. Evguenia received quantities of cash, an emerald ring, clothes, a Kodak camera.

  The promise to Una had not meant much. ‘Inversion alas what things are done in thy name that would be perversion a hundred times over were they heterosexual’, Una wrote in her diary. She was glad to get back to Rye. The garden was lovelier than she had remembered it, a mass of zinnias and dahlias. The house was welcoming and smelled of wood fires.

  Distance and home did nothing to lessen John’s obsession. ‘You alone seem real – all the rest are dreams’, she wrote to Evguenia. Round her neck she now wore a Russian cross, on her desk were two photos of Evguenia, in a locked box her letters. All her plans were to do with the logistics of their next meeting.

  Evguenia had a nursing assignment in Zurich in October. She was to look after a Russian princess who had a new baby. She would then come to England in November, second class on the train, first class on the boat. John would meet her at Folkestone. They would stay three nights at the Grand Hotel then go alone to the Talbot Street flat in London. ‘The hotel is so nice and we shall have peace,’ John wrote to her, ‘no servant, no telephone, no nothing but ourselves. Darling that does seem to me like Heaven.’ Una was to stay in Rye. John wanted to show Evguenia the Forecastle, so they would join Una there just for a night: ‘I do wish she’d lend it to us as I love it so much – but this she won’t do I’m sure and neither would I in her place.’

  John described herself as excited as a schoolboy. Una, she felt, was being remarkably compliant. Evguenia needed appropriate clothes, so she sent her money. She also needed a visa for the visit as she had no citizenship. Una wrote to the Home Office and was despatched to the Passport Office to give the necessary guarantees. ‘As I have some standing as the widow of an admiral,’ she wrote to Evguenia, ‘I have stepped in and taken a hand.’

  In London John sent the curtains in the Talbot Street flat to be cleaned, ordered wine, a new suit and shirts, found out what plays were on and slept with Evguenia’s letters under her pillow. But for Evguenia the more the build-up of tension, the phone calls from Una about her visa and the exigency of the arrangements, the more she pulled back. Perhaps the Russian princess would need her to stay in Zurich, perhaps the baby would get ill. John lost her temper. She ‘raved about the flat like someone demented’. ‘Soulina I need you more than these lesser people’, she wrote with her startling self-importance. The Russian princess was a drunkard, she pitied her husband and child.

  John wooed Evguenia with money. She wanted to know how much she needed a week. ‘It is natural and right that I should keep you. We have just got to talk finances when we meet.’ She sent travel instructions for the umpteenth time and enclosed a £20 banknote. Una, she told her, was being ‘a perfect brick’, though who knows what Evguenia made of the cliché.

  She might have made it such red hot hell but instead she is doing her best to be friendly. She sees that the thing is too deep to be broken … She has accepted the situation and really I think she has all but stopped fretting. She is ever so much happier now that she has made up her wise & clever mind to accept the inevitable.

  For which seeming sagacity, John said she thanked the Lord on her knees.

  30

  A trois

  John was waiting on the pier’s edge at Folkestone. ‘She would have come nearer were it at all possible’, Evguenia said. Three glasses of champagne on an empty stomach in the Grand Hotel and John was drunk. ‘I feel crazy sometimes remembering our days and nights at Folkestone’, she later wrote. She declared herself madly in love, reborn, revitalized. This was like first love. ‘No face seems beautiful to me but yours, no voice seems beautiful to me but yours. I am only half alive when we are apart.’ She would do anything for Evguenia, her Royal Chinkie Pig, her Darling most Chink Faced Little Tartar. She wanted this love to last for ever and beyond: ‘I feel an overwhelming desire to be with you day and night, both in moments of passion and in moments of rest that come after passion, and in moments of that simple companionship that we two are able to enjoy so much together.’

  As for the wife back home in Rye: ‘I am not and I have not been for years the least in love with Una. I feel a deep gratitude towards her, a deep
respect and a very strong sense of duty.’ But now she belonged to Chinkie Pig. ‘Only you can make me feel alive. You are my rest, my joy and my ultimate justification.’

  ‘We were both mad happy’, Evguenia said of their early months together. Materially it was agreeable to be so treated, adored and indulged. Suddenly there was money for everything: clothes, first-class travel, taxis, any luxury she desired. There was even money for her friend Lysa when she became ill. But John wanted a lot in return. ‘John was very impatient. If she wrote a letter she wanted the answer to her questions before the letter could even reach the addressee.’ These questions were possessive, dictatorial, anxious. ‘I must be all to you or nothing’, she told her Chinkie Pig.

  Alone in Rye Una prayed a great deal. She said the Angelus two or three times a day, and thought of Mabel Batten and the symmetry of their plight:

  All that I did to hurt her she has repaid in almost exactly similar circumstances. I was utterly selfish and cruel to her, partly it is true in ignorance but partly in the crude egotism of youth and personal desire. May being hurt at least teach me never again carelessly or deliberately to hurt anyone else. I would like to spare so far as is humanly possible even those who are not sparing me. But first and foremost I want the best, morally, spiritually and in all ways for my only beloved, and Ladye wants it too and for our Threeship. All other persons whatever their part in our existence and however much interest and affection they may evoke are outside and my John knows it as well as I do.