A House of Air

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  STW was a Georgian poet, and my only complaint against Claire Harman’s excellent introduction is that it takes the word ‘Georgian’ as an insult, and I had hoped that it no longer was. She was Georgian in her subject matter and also in her professional skill, composing, as she said, ‘with piteous human care.’ Here she can bear comparison with Walter de la Mare, the master of the two-stress line:

  Winter is fallen early

  On the house of Stare…

  STW almost always succeeds with this precarious metre, which sounds nostalgic in ‘The Repose,’ mysterious in ‘Nelly Trim,’ and in ‘Blue Eyes’ exactly suggests Betsy’s disappointment:

  Down the green lane

  She watched him come,

  But all he did

  Was to pinch her bum.

  With half-rhymes and unstressed rhyme she made a number of delicate experiments, letting the meaning control them, so that in ‘Anne Donne Undone’ the rhyme gradually disintegrates as Anne struggles with weakness and fever, while in the triplets of ‘Journey by Night’ it almost disappears. In one of her New Yorker pieces, ‘Interval for Metaphysics,’ STW remembers what it was like, as a small child, to relate the world of words to the world of things, and stand looking at a wooden paling ‘which had suddenly developed its attaching gravity, and had gathered to itself the pale primrose that forsaken dies, and a certain expression that the sky puts on at dusk, and that I had rarely seen, since I was supposed to be in bed by then.’ Yet she was surprised, twenty years later, to find she was a poet. ‘I haven’t yet got over my surprise that I should be doing it at all.’

  Her sharp-wittedness had always made her more, rather than less, sympathetic to other lives, past or present, birds and animals as well. In a tiny lyric, Winter is an old beggar standing motionless in the fields:

  All day he will linger

  Watching with mild blue eyes

  The birds die of hunger.

  Loneliness, I think, she considered, after mature reflection, the worst suffering of all. It is at the heart of her finest poem, ‘Ballad Story,’ and her novel set in a medieval convent, and dedicated to Valentine Ackland, has the epigraph: ‘For neither might the corner that held them keep them from fear.’ But, in the end, what is most striking about this civilized poet is her affinity with whatever it is that defies control. By this I don’t mean either sin or magic, for she regarded both of these as perfectly amenable, but what she liked to call ‘the undesigned.’ Against Nature we oppose human order—the lawn must be mowed and appointments must be kept, even though ‘the clock with its rat’s tooth gnaws away delight.’ But, conversely, we can accept the threat of disorder, even if it is never let loose, as the most precious thing we have. ‘I have tamed two birds,’ she wrote in ‘The Decoy,’ ‘called Metre and Rhyme’

  At whose sweet calling

  All thoughts may be beguiled

  To my prepared place;

  And yet by blood they are wild.

  London Review of Books, 1982

  The Real Johnny Hall

  Our Three Selves: A Life of Radclyffe Hall, by Michael Baker

  When The Well of Loneliness came out in July 1928 the reviewers were not astonished. Both Leonard Woolf and L. P. Hartley thought the book sincere, but overemphatic. The Times Literary Supplement also called it sincere, and Vera Brittain said it was ‘admirably restrained.’ It sold quite well, going into a second impression, and Radclyffe Hall, with her lover Una Troubridge, thought of taking a cottage in Rye. She may have felt some disappointment, having planned her novel in a crusader’s spirit. She claimed to have written the first full-length treatment in English of women who loved women. In Rosamond Lehmann’s Dusty Answer, she said, ‘the subject was only introduced as an episode.’ (She seems not to have known Dickens’s Tattycoram and Miss Wade.) She wanted to ‘smash the conspiracy of silence,’ but found herself instead mildly successful at W. H. Smith and the Times Bookshop.

  The case was altered only by James Douglas, the editor (also in a crusader’s spirit) of the Sunday Express. Douglas decided, a month later, to feature the book and its photogenic author, in her ‘severe’ smoking jacket, as evidence of ‘the plague stalking shamelessly through public life and corrupting the healthy youth of the nation.’ The rest of the popular press divided up for or against the Express’s stunt, The Well sold out, the Home Secretary gave his opinion against the novel and Cape was summoned to Bow Street to show cause why it should not be destroyed in the public interest. John Hall (to give her the name she preferred) was not called upon to give evidence, and was silenced, when she tried to interrupt, by the magistrate. In this way the Beaverbrook press started The Well on its career as the best-known lesbian novel in the English language.

  At heart, The Well is a nice long solid Great War period romantic novel. The ethos is that of If Winter Comes, or The Forsyte Saga. Stephen, the hero/heroine, driven out of her grand ancestral home, joins an ambulance unit, is wounded and gets the Croix de Guerre, and won’t declare her compromising love until she is sure it’s returned. When Mary succumbs she supports her by writing, but has to work such long hours that Mary, left on her own, takes to drink. To save her from degradation and childlessness Stephen, in a great act of self-sacrifice, drives her into the arms of a man, who marries her. Those were the days of Boots Circulating Libraries, and The Well only needs one adjustment, though an important one, to make it a first-class Boots book. This, in fact, has always been the objection of its most serious readers. Stephen’s final plea, ‘Acknowledge us, oh God, before the whole world,’ doesn’t mean ‘I am different, let us be different in peace’ but ‘I am the same, why can’t you admit it?’ Stephen is a transsexual, but the suggestion is that she wants to conform to society and can’t, just as Peter Pan, as Barrie finally admitted to himself, wanted to grow up, but couldn’t. Women are treated in The Well without much sympathy, and almost always as empty-headed. The whole book supports the view that men are naturally superior, which is why Stephen would prefer to be one. Another drawback to its defence of lesbians (‘my people,’ as John called them) is the frightful gloom and ill-fortune attending on the minor characters, who grow consumptive or deranged, or commit suicide in garrets. Stephen’s circle of friends, it seems, is doomed. Whatever else the novel does, it doesn’t show the lesbian life as recommendable.

  Michael Baker has taken on the task of relating The Well to John’s own life. ‘It is arguable,’ he writes, ‘that had John drawn more on her own personal knowledge, a better novel would have resulted.’ But she would have had, of course, to romanticize herself less. Her other novels, in particular Adam’s Breed and the touching Unlit Lamp, speak for the victimized and repressed. The life of Radclyffe Hall herself was not tragic, not sacrificial, not self-denying. Writers are not obliged to be like their books. But there is something disconcerting, which Baker evidently feels, about the discrepancy here.

  John was born as Marguerite Antonia Radclyffe-Hall in a house in Bournemouth called Sunny Lawn. She was not a masculine-looking child; Sir Arthur Sullivan called her ‘Toddles.’ But Toddles suffered deeply from the division between her rarely seen father and her violent, hysterical mother. (The bewilderment of children growing up without love was what she was to do best in fiction.) In 1901, with not much in the way of education, she came of age and inherited her grandfather’s fortune. This meant freedom to travel, and in 1907, at Homburg, she met Mabel Batten, a dashing, well-connected older woman who was there to take the waters and play roulette. Mabel had a warm mezzo-soprano voice; she was the kind of woman Sargent painted, and he did paint her. She was thought to have been one of Edward VII’s mistresses.

  By 1907 Mabel was fifty, had spread emotionally and physically, and was known as ‘Ladye.’ Ladye’s hot-water bottles were called Jones and Charlie, and she petted and spoiled them. As John’s first lover, she did duty, too, for the unsatisfactory mother. Together they began to cruise to ‘dear abroad,’ leaving Ladye’s complaisant husband to spend his time at his clubs.
There was no scandal, Ladye having a truly Edwardian adroitness in managing the pleasures of the flesh. She was a Catholic convert, and John, too, was received by the Jesuits at Farm Street. Both of them were convinced that they must have met in some previous existence. But in a few years’ time Ladye’s forces had begun to wane. John became first impatient, then unfaithful. In 1915 she met Una Troubridge, who wrote in her Day Book that ‘our friendship, which was to last through life and after it, dated from that meeting.’

  Baker’s title (unlike, for instance, I. A. R. Wylie’s Life with George) doesn’t refer to the homosexual’s divided nature. ‘Our Three Selves’ were Ladye, John, and Una. During the war there was a tormenting ménage à trois at the Vernon Court Hotel, which made Ladye (she too kept a diary) ‘sick at heart. Atmosphere sad beyond words.’ In 1916 she died of a heart attack. She had been at a tea party, singing one of her own patriotic compositions, and came back, tired out, to find that John was not there. The resultant guilt and self-reproach, John found, could only be absolved by communication with the spirit world. With the help of Mrs Leonard, who was undoubtedly a powerful medium but sometimes, perhaps, resorted to likely guesses, Ladye was heard to forgive. ‘She says…“I understand you and know you never hurt me intentionally…I say most emphatically nothing could or shall prevent our meeting or my coming to you as long as God permits.”’ Subsequently Ladye gave John permission to cut her hair short. The son/daughter was recognized as Una’s husband. Admiral Trou-bridge returned from action to find himself unwanted and his little daughter neglected. He was obliged, under protest, to apply for a legal separation. ‘A great peace and relief upon me,’ Una noted. ‘Deo Gratias.’

  The Twenties were John and Una’s heyday, a period of what Baker calls ‘hectic socializing.’ The two of them were instantly recognizable figures at first nights and private views, and were, of course, well-heeled travellers. ‘We stopped where we felt inclined,’ Una wrote, ‘and allowed the ex-chefs of royalty to feed us.’ Life was kept at fever pitch by quarrels and reconciliations, illnesses real or imaginary, and the false exhilaration of moving house. If all else failed, they could call in doctors and solicitors, or buy more and more pet dogs, or sack the servants. In politics they supported ‘our class’ and Mussolini’s Italy. Through all this Una remained John’s faithful wife, providing the reassurance that writers need. ‘After a day and a night spent like Jacob, wrestling with the angel of her own uninspired obstinacy, [John] would hand me the resulting manuscript…and command me to read aloud…having been asked if I was tired and told I was reading abominably and sometimes informed that I was ruining the beauty of what I read, the manuscript would be snatched from my hands and torn to shreds.’ But no price was too high to pay. If the marriage was necessarily sterile, at least the books had been born. All Una’s emotional capital was invested in John’s genius.

  Michael Baker doesn’t claim to be a critic and therefore makes no attempt to decide whether her faith was justified. In any case, to Una, as to Ladye, John was unfaithful. During the hot summer of 1934, when they were in France, they had to call in a nurse from the American hospital in Paris. She was a White Russian, Mongolian or ‘Chinky-looking,’ and, Una thought, ‘quite unmistakably of our own class.’ John, at fifty-four, fell insanely in love with Evgenia Souline. She was restrained, but only for a short time, by the thought of the example of infidelity that she would give to ‘my people’ (Havelock Ellis had claimed that lesbian relationships were by their nature unstable). But Souline, who treated John as a source of easy money, was unpredictable and hard to get, and John, perhaps because of this, couldn’t exist without her. In her many hundreds of letters to her ‘sweet torment’ she began to refer to Una as a ‘terrible obligation’ and a load that might be beyond bearing. Only the Second World War separated these later Three Selves.

  At intervals throughout the long story a curious heart-lessness appears. Ladye stands deserted in the darkening hotel room. Admiral Troubridge is left astounded and embittered when Una hints to her friends that he has infected her with syphilis. Una’s small daughter is found wandering in the street with no one to care for her. As an adolescent, she is asked to call John ‘Uncle.’ Una, after twenty years of loyalty, is left hanging about, recovering from a hysterectomy, while out at Passy John is in bed with Souline. In the words of The Well of Loneliness, ‘God alone knows who shall judge of such matters.’

  Michael Baker has written this biography with a calm, flat-footed perseverance that contrasts effectively with the agonies of his subject. He has turned up a considerable amount of new material. In addition to Una’s Day Book, which was also used by Richard Ormrod in his Una Troubridge (1984), he has had access to Mabel Batten’s diaries and to the letters to Souline. But while Ormrod declared ‘a measure of personal empathy’ with Una, Baker doesn’t precisely explain what led him to write such a long book about Radclyffe Hall. Perhaps what attracted him, in the end, was her courage. Courage is not the same thing for the well-off as for the poor. John thought of herself as a martyr, but it was a martyrdom de luxe. I’m not thinking, however, of her defiance of the law or even of her fortitude in her last illness, but of her experience, through so many years, of being treated as somewhat ridiculous. Rupert Hart-Davis’s remark ‘It was always said that at a dinner-party, when the women left the table, Johnny Hall found it hard to make up her mind whether to go with the women or remain with the men’ says it all. But Radclyffe Hall was never deflected, either by friends or by enemies. She never wavered in her immense seriousness. She continued to hold her head high, even in the face of English jokiness.

  London Review of Books, 1985

  An All Right Girl

  An afterword to Thank Heaven Fasting, by E. M. Delafield

  ‘Thank Heaven, fasting, for a good man’s love’ is Rosalind’s sharp rejoinder, in As You Like It, to the proud shepherdess. As advice it is ambiguous, because Rosalind can only give it while she is passing herself off as a man. And E. M. Delafield’s book, delightful (like everything she wrote) to read, is not as straightforward as it looks at first.

  Most recollections of E. M. Delafield are of the handsome countrywoman and J.P., organizing and well organized, the competent mother, the successful public speaker, a director of Time and Tide. ‘A witty, extremely soignée person’ an American interviewer found her in 1942. One might not have guessed that her sympathies were with the Labour Party, and there are other unexpected glimpses of her, for example on her visits to Russia where she had arranged to meet the young journalist Peter Stucley. ‘With a hat,’ he wrote, ‘from Marshall & Snelgrove on her head, and in her hand a bag which always contained, at moments of exhaustion, a supply of ginger biscuits’ they toured Moscow together, although their last outing, to a reformatory for prostitutes, was cancelled. In her own account she describes how she washed his handkerchiefs and saw him off ‘in deepest dejection’, feeling like l’orpheline de Moscou. The total impression—and this, I believe, accounts for the comic and pathetic tension of her books—is of a woman who would like to free herself and understands how it is to be done but can never quite bring herself to the point of doing it. ‘Realize, not for the first time,’ writes the Provincial Lady, ‘that intelligent women can perhaps best perform their duty towards their own sex by devastating process of telling them the truth about themselves. At the same time, cannot feel that I shall really enjoy hearing it.’ What held her back—and she knew this, of course, better than anyone—was partly inborn, partly imposed. At convent school, she said, she had been taught for life that ‘a good reason for doing something was that I knew I should hate it.’ An even stronger influence was her mother.

  This mother was also a novelist. Mrs Henry de la Pasture had a great popular following, and when Elizabeth began to publish she called herself Delafield (a translation of sorts), apparently to keep clear of her mother’s success. Why not, however, a different name altogether? Mrs de la Pasture’s books went into many editions, including Newnes’ Sixpenny Novels
and Hodder & Stoughton’s Sevenpenny Library. Among her titles are The Grey Knight: An Autumn Love Story (1908) and The Lonely Lady of Grosvenor Square (1907). Her advice to her daughter was to write about something of which she had personal experience, but in her own novels this experience is certainly heightened. You get dash and spirit from Mrs de la Pasture, and generous wish-fulfilment. Her heroines are the middle-aged enchantresses dear to middle-aged women authors. Take Lady Mary in Peter’s Mother (1905). She is a widow, pale, sad, but still beautiful, and free at last to marry her first love. But her son comes back wounded from the Boer War and expects her to make a home for him. When she asks, in a sudden outburst, whether she doesn’t deserve a life of her own, she meets total incomprehension. What is disconcerting is to find that in E. M. Delafield’s last novel, Late and Soon (1943), the same situation appears, though in more painful terms. The Provincial Lady notes ‘Mem: a mother’s influence, if any, almost always entirely disastrous.’ The struggle to escape from it, however, greatly strengthens the critical faculty.

  Thank Heaven Fasting was published in 1932, when E. M. Delafield had been writing for twelve years. The period of the story is not precisely given (the First World War is never mentioned), but in Eaton Square the power of money, parental authority, and social status is still absolute. Power needs force to support it, and it is the overwhelming force of received opinion which divides the All Right from the Not Quite and makes the unmarried woman something worse than odd—a failure, a disgrace to herself and to what in racing would be called her ‘connections.’ The term is the right one, because the young women are bred and trained entirely with the object of getting them successfully married within three years, after which they are regarded, and regard themselves, as leftovers. Grotesquely artificial as the system is, it is biologically predictable. The All Right—even if some of them are Only Just—must reproduce themselves with the All Right to maintain the species. In itself this is a bizarre spectacle, one of nature’s processes gone hopelessly astray, which must lead eventually to extinction.