The Trials of Radclyffe Hall

by Diana Souhami

  She went often to the cinema and translated Don Camillo for Gollancz, and Colette’s Maison de Claudine. Young gay men, Newell and Merf and Dick and Marshall, befriended her. Together they went to operas and concerts with Una dressed in John’s black pinstripe suit and black bow tie. They called to listen to the music channel on her special radio, went to antique auctions with her and gave lavish dinners of sole with spinach, stuffed pigeon and angel cake soaked in rum.

  Evguenia did not reconcile herself to the discrepancy between John’s promises and the way Una treated her. In letters to her, year after year, she returned to the injustice. After John’s death she found it hard to do better than get by. Because of her marriage she did not achieve naturalization, or hold a British passport, or merit a state pension. In April 1950 she asked Una to invest £3,000 to provide her with a pensionable income when she was sixty. ‘I beg of you to help me in the name of this Holy Year, in the name of all that is sacred to you, in the name of your friendship with John, who seemed to be so fond of me when she was alive.’

  Una sent her £5, told her she was not yet fifty, had a husband and a job and that she, Una, was doing exactly what John had considered adequate. If she could afford it she would go on sending her £100 a year for the next seven years, but this was simply out of generosity. ‘She can’t be trusted,’ Una wrote in a Letter to John. ‘If she were certain of a guarantee for the future she is free of the only curb possible upon her venomous tongue and there is no limit to what she is capable of saying or doing … so long as she is uncertain of my payments or ultimate intentions, there is some measure of wholesome restraint.’ Una worried about Evguenia’s simmering resentment and what she might say publicly about promises made. She wondered whether to tell her that if she found her ‘failing in loyalty’ to Radclyffe Hall, no further money would be forthcoming.

  On 29 July 1950 Evguenia, in a detailed and passionate letter, reminded Una that John on her deathbed had said she wished ‘us both to be comfortably off if not living in luxury’. She accused Una of disregarding both John’s inordinate attachment to her and her promise to provide for her after her death. ‘How often she used to say to me: “Evguenia, you can put your Piggie hands in your pig-pockets and whistle, your future is well taken care of.”’

  John had insisted that she could not live without her and had told her again and again she was sure they were related. She, Evguenia, had for nine years struggled to make a life for herself but John ‘made me take part in your life, even while I was trying to get away in order to work & to be independent’. And now life with her husband was far from harmonious. They got on each other’s nerves in one small room with no privacy or comforts. She had to provide for him. He could only find menial work because his English was so bad. He had worked in Walls’s Sausage factory and then on night shifts packing Peak Frean’s Biscuits. It was not like being with John, who had spoiled her immensely. John, she said, were she alive, would come to her rescue. She asked Una to help her buy a house.

  ‘My dear Evguenia’, Una replied:

  I shall not attempt to deal with the entirely fictitious and imaginary deathbed scene which you have evolved, or with your enumeration of promises that John never made. You have doubtless brooded over this matter until you can no longer distinguish the false from the true. But as regards your renewed request that I should enable you with use of my capital to buy a house and launch a boarding establishment …

  John, she said, would not had she lived have continued helping Evguenia. Evguenia’s atrocious behaviour and ingratitude would have precluded such help. But she, Una, would probably go on giving her £100 a year and Evguenia should count herself lucky.

  Evguenia remained resentful at how different life would have been had she received her inheritance. She repeatedly tried to winkle out of Una some of what she felt was due. The prospect of Una’s derision and high moral tone did not deter her. In 1951 she asked her to help pay off an overdraft of £475 she had incurred to buy a house at 35 Russell Road W14. To deflect trouble, Una wrote to Evguenia’s bank manager and paid £300 of the debt. She told him she had no legal obligation to Mrs Makaroff and that this payment did not mean she should be regarded as a guarantor. She wrote one of her cutting letters to Evguenia telling her not to apply to her for payments of debts that were not her concern.

  Evguenia’s affairs and even thoughts of Radclyffe Hall were now of distant interest to Una. She had become absorbed in the life of an opera singer, Nicola Rossi-Lemeni. ‘To hear him is one of the greatest pleasures I can have.’ His, she said, was ‘the greatest voice of the age, greater than Chaliapin’.

  She met his wife Vittoria Serafin on Sunday 25 March 1951 at a cocktail party she had gone to with her gay men friends. It was given by an American music agent, Rock Ferris. Una had arranged to go to Milan at Easter to hear Parsifal at La Scala and Vittoria and Rossi-Lemeni would be there too. Vittoria said she would take Una to her husband’s rehearsals of Lucrezia Borgia. ‘It looks as if I should make my way a bit into the coulisses of La Scala,’ Una wrote in Letters to John, ‘& meet some of the singers, which will be as interesting as anything can be to me nowadays.’

  She stayed in the same hotel as the Rossi-Lemenis, the Regina, and sent them a note inviting them to dinner at Giovannino’s restaurant. She went to his rehearsals, he gave her two of his records, they lunched together and he asked her to help with the translation into Italian of Emperor Jones in which he was to play the lead in Rome the following January. Una was flattered. ‘I am having a small but real part in a production of great interest.’

  She stayed on in Milan weeks longer than she had intended, worked at the translation and helped choose his press photographs. At the first night of his Lucrezia Borgia, she shared a box with Vittoria and had supper with them both after the performance. She acquired all his records, read his poems and went to seven operas at La Scala but paid for only two. By the time she returned to Florence, it was agreed she would help with his next production too.

  Bit by bit she immersed into his world. At Bologna she heard him singing Mefistofele and stayed at the Baglioni Hotel with him and Vittoria. She dealt with his fan mail, helped him with publicity and followed him to opera houses in Ravenna, Rome, Milan, Genova, London. She heard him sing Don Giovanni, Boris Godunov, Bloch’s Macbeth. She wrote of his peerless art and said she listened to him singing ‘with her very soul skinned’.

  She became his confidante over his emotional problems with his Russian mother Xenia Makedon and with Vittoria, whom he was to divorce. ‘It is a blessed thing that he wants and depends on me’, Una wrote in Letters to John. ‘He loves me more than his mother.’ She called him Nika and was part mother and part flirt. She viewed herself as the stable influence in his life. ‘Nika could not do without me, would never be able to do without me.’ She gave him John’s cufflinks of cabochon sapphires, went to cowboy films with him, went to rehearsals, told him he was always right. He gave her a gold and coral charm of a hand. He became her point of fixation and worship. She sat with him until he slept, spoiled him, slavishly served him, rubbed his feet and massaged his head and back with an electric vibrator:

  When we were alone in the two big armchairs he suddenly thrust his feet into my lap & when I smiled and rubbed them and kissed one of them, he did a lovely thing. He showed me his heart with both hands & threw it to me three times then said, ‘Ma tu sai che lo faccio solo per scherzo [but you know I am only joking].’

  Like opera, like the ceremonies of the church, her devotions were performance, ritual and display. Una was in service again on terms singular to herself.

  In March 1952 Evguenia lost her job at the BBC. She asked Una to increase her allowance to £250 a year. What about income from boarders, Una wanted to know. She declined the request and wrote a letter of reproof at Evguenia’s less than grateful response to her Christmas present of £5.

  Una liked to buy Nika costumes for his operatic roles: silk shirts for Boris Godunov, a crown that she said looked
as if it was from Cartiers, an orb, a cloth of gold with mock sapphires, emeralds, diamonds and pearls. ‘He looks so beautiful in it all. There is no doubt that Nika transfigures on the stage as Nijinsky did and becomes from a fine-looking young man inclined to be fat, something so beautiful that one is spellbound.’

  In 1956 he married Virginia Zeani. She was Cleopatra and he the title role in Handel’s Julius Caesar at La Scala. Una absorbed into their family and was godmother to their child. ‘Nika asked me what I did with my life when he was away and I told him generally – of reading & seeing Florentine friends – but he does realise that he is my occupation and I can feel is glad of it.’

  ‘She lived my life,’ Rossi-Lemeni said of her. Only Evguenia intruded on this transference of devotion. In October 1956 a letter came from her saying she had cancer. A colostomy had been performed. She could not hope fully to recover. She would welcome financial help from Una for medical and living expenses.

  ‘There is the usual appeal to sentiment’, Una wrote in what she still called Letters to John. ‘Of course she may die “and go straight to dear Johnnie”. After nine years of abominable cruelty she left you even when you were in extremis and came to me directly after your death to see what she could get.’ Una said she would ‘detest’ going to England about this matter. She wrote to Armando Child and asked him to obtain a full medical report from Evguenia’s surgeon and doctor. She wanted to know her health prospects, what state assistance she could get and what her husband earned.

  Her decision that she will be an invalid or a semi invalid for the rest of her life requires investigation, as she would be the last to inform me of any total recovery. If, as I hope and suspect, a very small tumour has been removed with assistance of a temporary colostomy she may recover entirely and never look back. I pray God and Our Lady it may be so for my sake as well as hers.

  Armando Child wrote back that Evguenia’s colostomy was permanent and that she could not be expected to work. Una gave her what she called ‘the unemployment allowance’ of £250 a year. This was £74 a year less than John’s basic allowance of twenty years previously.

  On 9 January 1957 Una wrote to Stanley Rubinstein. She asked him to ascertain Evguenia’s state benefit entitlements. Ten days later she loaned Nicola Rossi-Lemeni three million lire (£1,800) for the down payment on an apartment in Rome in the Piazza di Novella. Una took an adjacent apartment for she now did not countenance life apart from him. Nika would pay her back as he could afford to, or as she wanted him to. ‘After all, the money lies idle anyway’, she wrote in her Letter to John. She made a codicil to her will leaving her effects to him though not her capital (that was to go to the Sisters of the Poor Clares in Lynton). She left her burial arrangements to him and was ‘pleased that he wants me near him after death’. Ladye, John, Our Three Selves and the Highgate catacomb were all forgotten now.

  In the summer Evguenia became ill again. She was seen, she wrote to Una, by ‘a young and bumptious internee’ who told her there was nothing wrong with her. She then went to a private physician and asked Una to pay his bill. Una wrote one of her startling letters of refusal. Evguenia replied to it on 8 July:

  Please forgive me for having ‘sprung’ on you as you say in your letter these additional expenses but I was always under the impression that John wanted me to turn to you if I were in distress especially if I were ill. Had she been alive she would have done everything to alleviate my pain. Please forgive me and forget I have asked for help. I shall pay my physician somehow.

  Una might persist with her Letters to John. Evguenia had kept every one of her Letters from John. Wronged by Una one time too many, she now wanted these published. They were her side of the story. Though mortally ill she began to type them out. To do so made her ‘terribly sad’. It was, she said, ‘a torment, a gruesome task, to relive those past years again’.

  On 6 September 1957 Una received a letter from a lawyer representing Vladimir Makaroff. He understood Radclyffe Hall had made provision for Evguenia in her will. Evguenia was now critically ill and required medical treatment, convalescence and nursing care. Una saw the letter as attempted blackmail. She passed it to Stanley Rubinstein and stopped all correspondence and all contact with her. ‘I am willing to make her presents of money but not to recognise any obligation’, she wrote to John. ‘She must have recourse to National Health which I feel she is determined not to do. Also one doctor said she was being hysterical and we know she can be.’

  A month later another letter came from Stanley Rubinstein. Makaroff had called to see him with a copy of Radclyffe Hall’s will and some of the letters Evguenia was now typing for posterity. He told Rubinstein that Evguenia was very sick, needed care and believed Una had not observed the spirit of Radclyffe Hall’s will. The letters spoke most clearly of Radclyffe Hall’s ‘wishes for the welfare of the said Evguenie Souline’. They made promises of inheritance and declarations of love. One of those he showed Rubinstein was written when John was in Sirmione and Evguenia in Paris in 1934. It was the start of the nine years:

  I think that being deeply in love is the greatest pain & the greatest joy. I have no real life at all except the life I am living through you, and now all that I see I seem to see through you – its difficult to put this into words, I can only say that you’re everywhere, that apart from you nothing has any meaning.

  ‘My poor sweet,’ Una wrote to the memory of John, ‘you sure did tomber mal when you conceived an affection for that woman. The only hold I have on her conduct is the ability to reduce or cancel the allowance if she gives trouble.’ Rubinstein again repeated that Una had no legal obligation to Evguenia under the terms of John’s will. Una paid the £20 a month, maintained her silence, kept her distance, put the matter from her mind and left all dealings to him.

  On 25 July 1958 she received a note from Armando Child. He enclosed a cutting from The Times. Evguenia had died on 16 July. She is beyond suffering now, Child said. She had died aged fifty-three of carcinoma of the rectum with secondary deposits in her spine and abdomen. Her funeral had been on 21 July with Russian orthodox rites. Her will was a meticulous document of small bequests to her many friends. She was buried in Mill Hill Cemetery. ‘I do not feel that I can blame myself where she was concerned’, Una wrote. ‘For nearly fifteen years I have given her the same as John allowed her. Ever since her illness she has had full “unemployed” allowance even though I sometimes felt it might be interpreted as yielding to threats of scandal.’

  By the same post came Una’s visa for America. Nika was to sing the role of Archbishop Thomas Becket in Ildebrando Pizzetti’s Murder in the Cathedral at Carnegie Hall, New York in August. Una was to go with him for a six-week trip. There were itineraries to be checked, aeroplane reservations to be made, rooms to be booked at the Hotel Meurice on 58th Street, interviews, press photographs and recording sessions to be arranged. That afternoon she booked two seats with Pan American then went to the sale-rooms with Nika. They bought blue and gold Bohemian glass, a walnut bookcase, a mahogany couch carved with rams’ heads. Una then walked a while in the cool breeze of the Roman evening and took a taxi home.

  ‘I cannot pretend that I feel any sorrow at her death’, she wrote that night of Evguenia.

  She has always been disastrous in both our lives. I imagine the husband did not notify me as he hoped to get a couple of extra instalments of the allowance. I have of course written today to stop its payment.

  Her death of course clears the way for publication of my book. Strange that having treated you so cruelly throughout your last illness she should herself die in exactly the same manner! Perhaps it was her purgatory?

  Or perhaps Una had forgotten what she wrote of herself fifteen years previously after Radclyffe Hall died: ‘It would not even be strange to me if my flesh took on the stigmata of your suffering and I went to my death by the same road. I should be afraid perhaps but glad.’ But Evguenia’s purgatory, John’s Calvary and Una’s possession were trials of the past. Una was cast in
a different part and served another master now.

  Image Gallery

  ‘Would I have loved my father if I had known him?’ Radclyffe Radclyffe-Hall, circa 1880 and Marguerite, age five. Oil painting by Katinka Amyat, 1885

  ‘My true unfailing inspiration, my reason for all things’. ‘Ladye’, Mabel Batten, circa 1900

  ‘I should not have been sidetracked into marrying at all’. Una Vincenzo Troubridge with her daughter, Andrea, circa 1912

  ‘Troubridge brought me no spiritual development, no evolution, no kindness.’ Admiral Sir Ernest Troubridge, circa 1919

  ‘Had I been a man I should have married Una.’ Una Troubridge, circa 1916

  ‘No face seems beautiful to me but yours—your queer little ugley alian Chink Face.’ Evguenia Souline, circa 1934

  BOOKS AND NOTES

  PUBLISHED WORKS BY RADCLYFFE HALL

  POETRY

  1894 Reverie and other poems (untitled and privately printed)

  1906 Twixt Earth and Stars (Bumpus)

  1908 A Sheaf of Verses (Bumpus)

  1910 Poems of the Past & Present (Chapman Hall)

  1913 Songs of Three Counties (Chapman Hall)

  1915 The Forgotten Island (Chapman Hall)

  1948 Rhymes and Rhythms. Rime e Ritmi (Orsa maggiore, Milan)