The Trials of Radclyffe Hall

by Diana Souhami

  In February 1945 Mrs Visetti had a stroke. She was ninety-four. Dr Horsford asked Una for £14 for a radio for her as she was bedridden, and for £50 to pay his fees. ‘The answer of course is in the negative. It is only yet another dodge by the wily old devil to get extra money.’

  The following month Una heard from Harold Rubinstein that the wily old devil was dying. Dr Horsford again asked if Una would give financial help to cover nursing and chemist’s bills:

  I certainly don’t give Mrs Horsford or her offensive husband or anyone a vague permission to spend my money (yours) as they may choose. If they let me know definitely of something she needs I will consider it. If I send money vaguely it will probably be spent on some foolishness & I ain’t doing it. I know they have something in hand and £16 goes to her bank in ten days time anyway.

  Mrs Visetti died three weeks later on 14 April. ‘I have done for your mother exactly what you did yourself,’ Una wrote in a Letter to John, ‘and left her in the circumstances she chose and preferred and that is that.’ Mrs Visetti was, Una said, ‘crudely and terribly unworthy of having given birth to Radclyffe Hall’. She supposed that mother and daughter would not meet again because not even God in His infinite mercy would put them on the same plane.

  The notice of death in The Times described Mrs Visetti only as Alberto’s widow and made no mention of Radclyffe Hall. She was to be buried at Brookwood Cemetery in the same grave as Alberto. Una was now the freeholder of the grave. She supposed they would have to apply to her to open it. Permission would not be forthcoming until she received the portrait of Radclyffe Hall by Katinka Amyat.

  The portrait was sent to her. Una asked Tony Atwood at Smallhythe to paint out the blonde curls so that it looked like ‘a little boy’s face’. It was one more lie. Thus doctored, she intended to include the picture in The Life and Death of Radclyffe Hall when the time came for publication. (The illustrations she chose for her book were only of herself and John. There was none of Mabel Batten or Evguenia. All those of John made her look like a man.)

  Mrs Visetti’s solicitors then sent a letter asking Una to pay what was owing on her estate for funeral expenses and doctors’ fees – nearly £300 – or to return the Amyat portrait. Una thumbed her nose. Mrs Visetti’s debts were nothing to do with her. Surrender of the portrait was a condition of the covenant she had made when granting her an income.

  Una let slip in her diary that John had wanted Evguenia to have an annuity ‘on a larger scale than I intend’. For a while Evguenia worked as a translator with Reuters. Una wanted to know her salary and all expenses. When Evguenia lost the job Una saw it as a ruse to wheedle money. Evguenia, she said, was determined not to take and keep a routine job with decent hours. She pointed out to her how hard Andrea worked and told her it cost a great deal in tax to give her any allowance. Through a solicitor Evguenia forwarded bills from doctors and dentists. Una accused her of crooked accounting. ‘I will not have her getting away with deliberate dishonesty in addition to her chronic moral dishonesty.’ She also accused her of keeping £25 John had loaned her in case of emergencies. She called on her without warning, found her living in one ‘very very dilapidated room’ and thought it significant that there were no photographs of John in sight.

  Evguenia was desolate when at the war’s end she was refused a resident’s visa for Paris. All her furniture was in store there and she could not afford to pay to get it to England. Her ‘nest egg’ of savings – some thousands of pounds – had been taken by the Gestapo. In her Letters to John, Una wrote, ‘That is a result of her putting it in a bank there on her own instead of telling you all about it and letting you bank it safely.’

  Evguenia grew tired of the hoops she had to jump through to get a pittance wage from Una, the way Una cavilled at everything she did, her vitriol and accusations. She wrote to her that none of it was worth the trouble. She got a job as a nurse with the United States Army in Germany. Before she left London, she met Una and had a showdown. She asked for a month’s allowance in advance to help with moving country. Una refused. Evguenia accused her of cheating, of not keeping to the spirit of John’s will and of exerting influence over John when she was dying.

  ‘I hung on to my temper like grim death,’ Una wrote, ‘resisting an almost irresistible impulse to tell her to get out. I told her that it was entirely on my own initiative that I paid her any allowance, that I had no legal obligation of any kind, that she must reflect on this and not make me feel that it was impossible for me to go on helping her.’

  Evguenia left without giving Una an address. The £100 a year covenant was paid into her bank. Una asked the Information Bureau at Selfridges what a foreign nurse employed by the United States Army would earn. She was relieved that she had gone and hoped she had seen the last of her. She found that the best way to deal with her was not to think of her at all. She longed for Italy, cried when the Duce was murdered and turned off the news so as not to hear eyewitness accounts of conditions at Buchenwald concentration camp.

  And then in July 1946 Evguenia sent her a letter saying she was married. Vladimir Makaroff, her husband, was a Russian emigré, a former cavalry officer. She had met him in Paris where he worked for the Russian Red Cross. ‘It was all settled in a moment’, she said. She had been in France once in September 1945 for two days and then for four days in June 1946. He was thin, not tall, and about fifty-five. He had lived for twenty years in Czechoslovakia but moved to France during the war.

  Evguenia had not realized that she needed written authority from the United States Army to marry and so she had been court-martialled. She was going to bring Vladimir to England where at least ‘thanks to Johnnie’ she had resident alien status. Her husband hoped to find work but it would not be easy because he spoke no English at all.

  ‘God knows what she has picked up’, was Una’s reaction. She supposed he was a ‘worthless dud’. But the main thing was that Evguenia was his responsibility now. Una resolved to stop paying her the £24 a year fuel allowance, any medical bills or insurances. ‘This marriage closes the account except for the £100 a year as a purely grace offering’, she wrote. John, she reasoned, would have withheld even that given Evguenia’s behaviour since her death.

  If it was martyrdom Radclyffe Hall sought, she had it now. Her work had been destroyed, her lover whom she had so wanted to protect was punished and the apostle in whom she had placed her absolute trust had betrayed her for thirty pieces of silver and more.

  39

  He is my occupation

  At the war’s end Una’s thoughts turned to Italy ‘& a Christian climate, not this land of swamps and rain and wind and ice’. She figured that every self-respecting bird got out of England for most of the year and so, therefore, would she. People, for which as a species she had never felt warmth, all were fatally flawed. She thought them base and did not court their affection:

  I can’t remember a time when every kind of thing wasn’t said of me. I ill-treated my step-children, I behaved disgracefully to my husband, and of course, since the publication of The Well I have been notorious & always shall be & no doubt when Evguenia came on the scene they all screamed with delight & hoped that it meant shipwreck for me & you and everyone, only it didn’t!

  She wanted Italy ‘where no one talked at all’. After Radclyffe Hall’s death she lodged for a time with John Holroyd-Reece in his house off Chancery Lane. But she suspected him of being after her money and his house got bombed, so she went to stay with Etheline Cripps, who had been Teddie Gerrard’s lover in those far-off twenties days. Then for some months she was a guest with the Smallhythe trio in Rye. None of it was right. John Holroyd-Reece was ‘brutally unfaithful’ to his dying wife Jehanne. Etheline’s brother Roy was intolerable and offensive. When Mrs Urquhart came to lunch wearing fashionable clothes Roy said of her that she was a real woman, ‘not a damned half and half’. Una, in flannel shirt, John’s breeches, collar and tie, went to her room saying ‘Damn and blast your soul to hell’. Your brother, she
told Etheline, is an insolent swine.

  Viola she called a spiteful bore, ‘a hard woman and no kin to us in any way’. Viola asked if Andrea knew she would never inherit Radclyffe Hall’s money and was this punishment for some misdemeanour. Una thought it no business of hers.

  Visiting Minna, Una perceived her as ‘a ghastly wreck, partially toothless, terribly emaciated, her speech almost unintelligible, dressed in a short sleeved low necked nightgown that increases the horror … As usual she begged to know if I loved her and of course I took her in my arms and assured her I did.’

  Audrey Heath was now a ‘poor little ailing mouse’ who meandered in her speech, had walked into a lamppost in the blackout and was taken to hospital unconscious. Olive Rinder had ‘sparse, grey hair, yellowed by repeated curling’ and ‘washed-out, frightened eyes’. Cara Harris, Mabel Batten’s daughter, wrote saying she had been very ill and asking for photographs of her mother. ‘I will not let her have anything of Ladye’s’, was Una’s response. ‘She looked madder than ever with her dyed yellow hair when I saw her recently … I can’t risk resuming relations with her.’

  Toupie Lowther invited Una to stay. Toupie, Una said, was drunk, lonely and dying of tuberculosis. At night she railed at God from her bedroom window for taking her wife Fabienne Lafargue De-Avilla from her. Fabienne was ‘tough, promiscuous, cruel’ and living with her ‘amant de coeur’, Liza, in a nearby cottage owned by Toupie. They were waiting for Toupie to die, so as to scoop her inheritance, Una wrote in Letters to John. ‘They want me, lonely and without your protection and with the money you left me.’ She was not going near. Toupie died on 30 December 1944. Fabienne then married and Liza ‘made a terrible fuss’. Una expressed ‘less than no sympathy’ for them all.

  Before leaving England for what she knew would be for good, Una tried in June 1946 to get published a ‘Collected Memorial Edition’ of the works of Radclyffe Hall. She hoped it would include The Well of Loneliness. The book had sold steadily in America and other countries for eighteen years without confounding the institution of marriage or depraving the young.

  Peter Davies, director of the Windmill Press, thought the post war Labour administration might oppose the suppression of literature and lift the ban. Una wrote to the Home Secretary James Chuter Ede. Davies wrote to a friend, Sir Oscar Dowson, who was legal adviser to the Home Office. Davies asked what would happen if, as requested by Lady Troubridge, he published the book. Unknown to Una, he added a postscript, typical of the awkwardness the book provoked in publishers: ‘I am not really anxious to do The Well of Loneliness and am rather relieved than otherwise by any lack of enthusiasm I may encounter in official circles.’

  Sir Oscar passed this letter to the Home Secretary. Chuter Ede sought advice. He wanted to know ‘the desirability or otherwise’ of publishing The Well of Loneliness, the technical and legal issues this raised, how and by whom a prosecution could be instituted, whether by the Director of Public Prosecutions, the police, or a ‘common informer’ and what his own powers in the matter were. He wondered if more harm than good might be done by continuing to suppress the book though he had, he said, ‘the impression that the perversion which it is supposed to celebrate is more widespread than is commonly thought’.

  His advisor was a senior civil servant, Mr F. H. Logan, in the Dangerous Drugs Branch. Banned books and banned substances perhaps came into the same category. (‘I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel’, James Douglas had written. ‘Poison kills the body, but moral poison kills the soul.’)

  Mr Logan’s advice to the Secretary of State was unequivocal:

  From the Home Office point of view it would be most undesirable to have the question reopened. The 1918 proceedings provide a fixed point in regard to one aspect of sexual morality in a field where it is peculiarly difficult to establish any satisfactory standards. If it were to be thought that the authorities are now inclined to take a more lenient view of The Well of Loneliness, it might well lead other and less scrupulous writers than Miss Radclyffe Hall to make use of the same theme with results that could scarcely fail to be embarrassing to all concerned with the administration of this branch of the law.

  It seems to be very desirable therefore that Lady Troubridge should be discouraged from including The Well of Loneliness in the proposed edition of Miss Radclyffe Hall’s works.

  And discouraged she was. Chuter Ede wrote to her that any publisher reprinting The Well of Loneliness would ‘do so at the risk of proceedings’. The views of a supposedly reforming, egalitarian government were enforced. Lesbianism was obscene. It was a widespread perversion. To write about it was embarrassing. Silence was required.

  Una returned to Florence on 16 November 1946. Initially she found herself disorientated and diffident. ‘Oh it is painful my sweet & sad, sad, sad to be alone here’, she wrote in a Letter to John. But she was excited too and knew she would ‘soon slip into it all’. She was in robust health and had enough acquaintances for life to be social in an undemanding way: May Massola, Maria Corsini, Fonfi Piccone. Romaine invited her to her Villa Gaia high up in Fiesole with views over Florence. She fed her on roast pheasant, baked apples and cream and ‘nasty sweet white wine’. Sandra Tealdi told her about the ‘black lire’ which gave her £2 for every £1 she cashed. ‘It is of course pleasant’, Una told the ghost of John. Funds were ‘prosperous’. Stanley Rubinstein cheered her by telling her she would pay practically no income tax or surtax for the next ten years. Her pension from Troubridge increased. She bought stocks with surplus investment income. ‘Minna’s money when it comes will be in Trustee stocks.’ Six months’ royalties on American sales of The Well of Loneliness in 1946 totalled £353 for 5,300 copies – three and a half times Evguenia’s annual allowance.

  Una was appalled by the war damage to Florence, the bombed bridges, the destroyed houses of the Borgo San Jacopo and by photographs in Life magazine of the Duce, dead and hung upside down by ‘the Communists’. But the shops were full of produce. She was amazed at the variety of food compared to England: chicken, guinea fowl, fresh vegetables, cakes made with real cream, marrons glacés. She found a flat opposite San Jacopo sopr’Arno with ‘the church shining in the moonlight opposite’. A daily communicant at the churches of San Spirito or San Felice, she disliked not being first ‘in case the priest’s fingers are wet from other lips’.

  She retrieved the belongings she and John had abandoned in 1939: linen, furniture, silver, pictures and clothes. There were seals of sequestration on the rooms where it all was stored. For an entire morning she destroyed more of John’s papers. Dressed in John’s silk coat and diamond and onyx cufflinks she indulged again her passion for opera. She went to Lohengrin, The Pearl Fishers and La Bohème.

  Minna, her mother, died in January 1947. Una did not return for the funeral. Nor would she let Andrea’s second husband, Brigadier Turnbull, act as co-trustee of the estate as Harold Rubinstein suggested. ‘If only she didn’t give everything before marriage’, Una said of Andrea and thought both she and this new husband drank too much.

  The sight of Evguenia’s handwriting on an envelope always gave her a thud of anxiety. She dreaded she might come to Florence: ‘I simply can’t face up to her coming here and either telling our friends that you promised to leave her money in equal shares with me & then didn’t do it, or that I am not carrying out your wishes & all the rest of her poor crazy imaginings. From Jack and Marjorie Hancock at the Wayside, she heard that Evguenia had taken her husband to Lynton. They had stayed with Mrs Widden and slept in separate rooms. Una gathered that he was ‘a queer looking man, like a navvy.’ She called him ‘just a boneless Slav, who would never make a prosperous way for her or himself’.

  Vladimir found a factory job ‘packing food parcels’. Evguenia hoped when his English improved he would get something better. In 1948 she worked as a newsreader with the BBC World Service. It had always been her desire to have a home of her own. She had resented being an ap
pendage of John’s life with Una. She leased a house in north London at 33 Lynton Road, Kilburn and let out rooms in the hope of realizing a rental income. But her boarders were Russian refugees and students with no money. The house needed extensive repairs; the bathroom ceiling was falling down and the front path needed laying. She asked Una for £60. ‘I am not rising to the bait. She has her salary, her husband is in a job, she has boarders and she has my allowance. I leave her to it for the present. Luckily I am keeping her allowance on the lower scale. I have sent her £15. I am not a perpetual running fountain of cash. The next costly request will have to be refused in toto.’ Evguenia could not maintain the house and after two years sold the lease for no more than she paid for it.

  In January 1949 Una moved to a smart flat at Palazzo Guicciardini. She put Radclyffe Hall’s name on the front door as well as her own. She bought antiques, had the floors polished and bells installed in all the rooms to summon her maid, Primetta. She adorned the walls with devotional paintings and was adamant that a Madonna and Child she had acquired was by Botticelli. It and Buchel’s portrait of John were floodlit. She filled the rooms with jonquils, freesias and pink blossom in marble vases, and gave her visitors fine wines and lobster for lunch, the table laid with Sienese linen, wrought-iron candleholders and gleaming silver. Primetta wore a uniform and served at table.

  In her vast salone, lying on damask cushions on the sofa and wearing John’s Jaeger dressing gown, Una listened to Parsifal on her ‘mammoth’ radio. ‘How Wagner does iron one out flat’, she said. She heard Manon Lescaut and Otello broadcast live from La Scala and played opera records and Paul Robeson singing The Blind Ploughman. ‘I am deeply grateful to the survival of my love of opera which gives me now the only emotional pleasure I know.’ She slept well and put on weight with Primetta’s home-made pasta. She enjoyed home cooking after ‘years of too much restaurant seasoning’ and developed a taste for whisky, fine wines and cocktails. Her hair was now cut as short as John’s. ‘Once a fortnight now is my rule.’ A barber called, but she insisted he use her scissors, clippers, brush and comb.