Ten days later, on 29 January 1926, Minna phoned early in the morning to say that Troubridge had died at a tea dance at Biarritz the previous day. Una made no pretence of sorrow. But she went into a scud of activity about money. She spent the morning on the phone to the Admiralty and in the afternoon saw the Accountant General there. Troubridge’s total estate was £452 18s 11d. Her annual pension was to be £225 a year, Andrea’s £25. ‘To mother’s’, Una wrote in her diary that night. ‘Viola very nice, Minna intolerable. John and I home to a quiet evening.’
Advised by John’s solicitor, Theodore Goddard, Una appealed to the Admiralty for this pension to be increased. She presented herself as a penniless widow with a child to support. She checked on life insurance policies, put in a claim with the Officers’ Families Fund, wrote to her stepson Tom Troubridge about Andrea’s school fees and ‘wrote her mind’ to her mother who was ‘more damnable than ever’ when Una called at her house to retrieve her marriage certificate.
A requiem mass was held for Troubridge at Westminster Cathedral. Andrea had leave from school. Una braved the Troubridge congregation while John walked the dog. There was no hint of acceptance of her by them. ‘She was waiting for me when I got home’, Una wrote in her diary. Troubridge’s obituary in The Times spoke of his distinguished prewar career and of the escape of the Goeben. ‘His subsequent employment was not of a kind to afford him much opportunity of distinction. Personally he was well known and highly popular in many cities in Europe.’
As if to assert paternal authority John took Andrea to mass at Brompton Oratory then drove with her back to Harpenden. For Una, Troubridge’s death added to the burden of what to do with his child, the unwelcome reminder of a former life, the parcel to be passed. ‘She cld stay away 2nd part of hols’, she wrote in her diary about Andrea’s Easter break.
Una’s appeal for an increased pension went before an Admiralty tribunal and was successful. ‘Much rejoicing, hurrah’, she wrote. John ordered her a new hat from Maud Moore’s and they saw Noël Coward’s Hay Fever for the second time and ‘howled with laughter’. There was greater rejoicing when Adam’s Breed was published in March. Una sent out more than 200 postcards by way of publicity. They drove to the bookshop Miller & Gill in the Charing Cross Road to see the window banner advertising it. Within a week Hatchards and The Times Bookshop were reordering. Within three weeks it was on its fourth reprint.
Mindful perhaps of the pearls and purple coat she had once been given, the passion she once inspired, Violet Hunt wrote to say that she was nominating it for the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize. Two Femina prizes were awarded annually, for an English and a French novel.
Newman Flower had expected more modest sales and was surprised by the book’s popularity. Radclyffe Hall took courage from this success. She resolved now to speak out and put her name to a novel that told, she said, ‘the truth about one of the greatest tragidees that exists in the scheme of nature’.
I wished to offer my name and my literary reputation in support of the cause of the inverted. I knew that I was running the risk of injuring my career as a writer by rousing up a storm of antagonism; but I was prepared to face this possibility because, being myself a congenital invert, I understood the subject from the inside as well as from medical and psychological text books. I felt therefore that no one was better qualified to write the subject in fiction than an experienced novelist like myself who was actually one of the people about whom she was writing and was thus in a position to understand their spiritual, mental and physical reactions, their joys and their sorrows, and above all their unceasing battle against a frequently cruel and nearly always thoughtless and ignorant world.
She used the term congenital invert as if it was a category with specific attributes. It was true that the company she kept was lesbian (upper class, cultured, moneyed lesbians between the wars). She knew their dress codes, mores, love affairs and news. And Una had read aloud germane passages from works of contemporary sexology. But Radclyffe Hall embraced contentious theories with disconcerting ease. Her true courage was to speak out, to break silence, declare her sexual orientation, use pronouns truthfully and write ‘she kissed her on the mouth’. Other lesbian writers shielded themselves behind allusion and romans-à-clef, where only the in-crowd knew the hes to be really shes.
In daily life Radclyffe Hall was an invert with standards to maintain and pleasures to procure. She fired the cook and employed a new one, Miss McDonnell. The secretary, Miss Clark, was replaced by Miss Ward, then Miss Ward by Miss Whibley. Bradley went and Una refused to be driven by his replacement Birdkin who she said was rude. His successor, Kayberry, crashed the car and was ‘discharged’. John then hired a chauffeured Daimler from Harrods for £800 a year plus a shilling a mile, ‘livery supplied’.
Again the house began to ‘vamp’ her. Sappho the parrot bit her and was despatched to the zoo. Una endured more injections and vaccines for her vaginal problems. Dr Curtis said ‘there was no real means of getting her right except by an operation. ‘Damn him to hell!!!’ John wrote when his treatment hurt Una. She bought her peaches and sweets.
In the summer she left ‘board and wages for six weeks’ for Miss Mclean, McDonnell and Dickie and set off with Una for France, thermal baths, Paris bars and the casinos of the Riviera. In Paris they hired a car to take them shopping. They bought a dog called Tyke. They lunched at the Champs-Elysées Grill, then had tea with Colette and took her chocolates. At night with Natalie Barney and her current lover, Mimi Franchetti, they toured the lesbian clubs, the Select, the Regina, the Dingo. ‘Home abut 2.30’, Una wrote. At Natalie’s Temple of Love they met her former lover the Duchess of Clermont Tonnerre and the Broadway actress Eva Le Gallienne, whose affair with Mercedes de Acosta had come to an end. They had dinner with Toupie and Fabienne and saw at the Théâtre Femina La Prisonnière by Edouard Bourdet, based on the love affair of Violet Trefusis and the Princesse de Polignac. ‘Awful rot, but fun’, Una said of it. They drove to the cemetery at Passy to put artificial violets on the grave of Renée Vivien, another of Natalie’s erstwhile lovers. She wrote poems about ‘nights of savage desire’, drank alcohol and eau de cologne and died when she was thirty-one. In their twenties, she and Natalie had travelled to Lesbos together to revive ‘the golden age of Sappho’.
At Bagnoles John and Una took the thermal baths, were massaged and manicured and had their hearts and blood pressure checked. Then they went on to the Riviera, to the casinos of Cannes and Nice and to the Grand Hotel, Monte Carlo.
Radclyffe Hall returned home a best-selling author. Mr Gentry, publicity manager at Cassell, said Adam’s Breed was going so well no extra advertising was needed. G. K. Chesterton’s latest novel had had to wait while they printed three thousand more. Radclyffe Hall talked to the Writers’ Club about why she had written the book, to the Writers’ Circle on the ‘genesis and craftsmanship’ of it and to the Bookman’s Circle about ‘true realism’ in fiction. She was ‘lionised’ at a PEN Club dinner, a Women Writers lunch and a dinner at the Society of Authors, ‘decorations worn’. She was caricatured by ‘Tom Titt’, ‘Pax’ and ‘Matt’ and photographed with bow tie, cape and monocle.
In November Violet Hunt phoned to say Adam’s Breed had been shortlisted for the Femina Prize. Writing to her cousin Winifred, Jane Caruth’s daughter, Radclyffe Hall said:
it is far and away the best thing I have ever written. I shall not give it you, you must buy it yourself in America for the good of the author.
Isn’t it amusing that I should have become quite a well known writer? I sometimes cannot understand it myself. But there it is, it has certainly come to pass … Lady Troubridge asks to be remembered to you.
She won the prize. Messages and letters of congratulation poured in. Photographers and interviewers called from the Sphere, the Sketch and Mirror. Photographs of Miss Radclyffe Hall and Colette were printed side by side. Mr Gentry told her the book was on display in every London bookshop. The prizegiving was held at the Institut Fran
çais. The novelist John Galsworthy presented the award. Writers and friends gave praise, including Sheila Kaye-Smith, Beatrice Harraden, May Sinclair.
At high mass John and Una gave thanks, then went to Ladye’s grave and to seven churches. At Holland Street they then hosted a party for seventy. It went on until two-thirty in the morning. Ernest Thesiger, Helen Beauclerc, Lewis Casson, Sybil Thorndike and lots of famous people were there. ‘Half the ladies present favoured masculine mode and half the latest Victorian effect’, the papers said. J. Rosamund Johnson, Taylor Gordon and Florence Mills sang negro spirituals: ‘Deep river, my home is over Jordan’ and ‘Oh what a shame I ain’t nobody’s baby’. Una called it all ‘a huge success’. And even while enjoying this success Radclyffe Hall was halfway through her most important book which began as Stephen and became The Well of Loneliness and in which she knew she was laying her now glittering career on the line.
STEPHEN GORDON
17
Something of the acorn about her
The Well of Loneliness is a cautionary saga about the fate of a ‘congenital sexual invert’. Dubbed ‘the Bible of lesbianism’, in the telling there is no irony and few moments of fun. Radclyffe Hall described its hero, Stephen Gordon, as ‘the finest type of the inverted woman’. She intended it to be a pioneer work and said it had a social duty, a threefold purpose:
To encourage inverts to face up to a hostile world in their true colours, and this with dignity and courage. To spur all classes of inverts to make good through hard work, faithful and loyal attachments and sober and useful living. To bring normal men and women of good will to a fuller and more tolerant understanding of the inverted.
She wanted it read by schoolteachers, welfare workers, doctors, psychologists and parents so that they might ‘cease tormenting and condemning their offspring and thus doing irreparable harm to the highly sensitized nervous system that is characteristic of inversion.’ Here, she seemed to suggest, was a manual for the world on what not to do to these weird ones in their midst.
‘You can’t touch filth without getting filthy’, her mother said to her when the book caused a stir. While Radclyffe Hall was writing it, she and her mother had a series of violent rows. Their only contact seemed to be when Mrs Visetti wanted money. In December 1926 in one of her rages she fired the cook who, she said, drank, was a thief, and filthy dirty. There was a scene, she called the police and accused the cook of hitting her. All servants in her London house including the daily cleaner then left or were fired.
The Visettis went to the Metropole Hotel, Brighton for Christmas as guests of a friend. On 2 January 1927 Radclyffe Hall, working twelve hours a day on Stephen, as her Well of Loneliness was still then called, received a call from the hotel to come at once – her mother had pneumonia and her life was at risk. ‘I arrived and saw the doctor, only to be told that her lungs were in no way affected. However, their hostess had to return to London the next day and mother could not remain behind at the Metropole which is quite the most expensive hotel in all England. What to do?’
Her mother could not return to a house without servants. She asked to go into a nursing home in Brighton. Radclyffe Hall insisted on one near Holland Street and hired an ambulance to get her there. She put Stephen aside and went through the Visettis’ finances to see if they would be better off in a service flat.
‘I can only say my God! I found chaos beyond my worst nightmares and debts everywhere.’ The lease on their house had expired and under the terms of it they had a liability for repairs of £300. They owed rent and rates, had overdrafts at their banks and had spent their capital inherited from Grandmother Diehl. Mrs Visetti was entertaining extravagantly and ‘spending God knows what on clothes, sometimes £60 to £70 at one go’. Alberto had retired in 1926. He had no income or savings and had not insured his life. He had given someone a piano as a wedding present which was not paid for and, he said, ‘never would be’. ‘In his old age he has come down on me his step-daughter is what it boils down to’, Radclyffe Hall wrote to her cousin Winifred.
Mother just sits back and either is, or pretends to be helpless when I urge any practical steps. Every suggestion I make she opposes in fury and her scenes and her tempers have completely worn me out so that I am unable to work and earn money. This I point out from time to time but I can make no impression on her. She only abuses me the more loudly. To nothing will she listen and frankly my mother acts as though she were deranged at times. She appears to literally hate me.
Nothing softens her in spite of the fact that I have taken on my shoulders the whole burden of paying their rent, rates and taxes and all the expenses of her illness (I have paid for all her illnesses for many years past, as well as meeting constant demands for sums of money) and have put all work aside to go into their affairs and am still hard at it. I have no idea when I shall be able to get on with my book & earn more money to augment an income which was OK before the war, but is now reduced owing to terrific taxation and trade depression.
Meanwhile I am devilled by my publishers and no wonder – I am so fearfully behind hand. Last evening I went to bed early because I was so worn out only to get a message to the effect that Albert was dangerously ill and mother spitting blood! Calling up their doctor I find that mother has a throat cough and that what she spat up was slightly streaked with blood from nose or throat and that Albert has a feverish bronchial cold and should be all right in a few days.
The whole business has shocked me beyond words. Albert is just frankly dishonest and as far as I can see always has been, making no provision and never attempting to pay his debts – my mother has developed into a worse fury than she used to be and that is saying a good deal I can assure you. Are they both mad? I dont know, I only know that their house has such a dreadful name that no decent servant will go near it and that this greatly shames me, who am living in the same neighbourhood and who am now very well known owing to my books. There are moments when I literally feel in despair … My mother screamed at me so loudly in the nursing home that the doctor said that they would probably ask her to leave.
It was intolerable for Maria Visetti to have her daughter preaching to her about money. It rankled with her not to have benefited from her first husband’s estate. She now had the prospect of rented rooms while her daughter lived like a lord in a palatial house. It made her hate her. The hatred was reciprocated. ‘I have so often felt the bitterness of having no mother’, Radclyffe Hall wrote. Her mother’s tempers were, she said, a thousand times worse than in the past. She talked to Alfred Sachs about sending her to a ‘nerve specialist’.
He assured me that in his opinion no nerve specialist could say more than that she is a woman of violent and uncontrolled temper and also extremely hysterical. He says that she is terribly jealous of me! Can you beat that? Moreover as I only seem to excite her every time she sees me, he advises my keeping away. The whole thing has made me rather ill myself.
Maria refused to look after Alberto while he was ill. She said to do so gave her vertigo. She refused to apply powder prescribed for sores on his body, and brought in two nurses at her daughter’s expense. Radclyffe Hall decided to allocate her mother a monthly allowance on the understanding that ‘all communication between us ceases and that she leaves me unmolested and in peace so that I can get on with my work.
What have I ever done to have such a mother, God knows! It’s money they’re both after – they always have been – well they will get my money but not me any more. I don’t see why I should be expected to support my disgusting old Step Father, or why I should have to support Mother because she has run through her capital and does nothing but abuse me for all I have done already, but there it is!
… It has been a great drawback to me in every way that she ever married him, & now I have to pay for the privilege of having sustained that drawback … Anyone to see & hear my mother in one of her rages would think that she was mad.
Against the background of such feuding she worked at her groundbreaking n
ovel. She wrote into the small hours of the night at an American rolltop oak desk. She said her book was fictional over details of place and people and only autobiographical on the ‘fundamental emotions that are characteristic of the inverted’. ‘Then, I admit, I did draw upon myself, I drew very ruthlessly upon myself, hoping that by telling my readers the truth, The Well of Loneliness would carry conviction.’
She might have viewed bitterness towards her mother, anger at desertion by her father, disgust at Visetti as a stepfather, and dependency on the devotion of lovers, as emotions fundamental to herself, and explored such deep if troubled waters. She might have told of her loathing of her mother’s instability, of fears of abandonment, of her need for control and sexual conquest. Instead, she took the nature not nurture line. If she was martyred, it was by God not Mother. Any physical resemblance to Maria Visetti or admission of her power was intolerable. Better to be a freak, misfit, changeling or man, than her daughter. God, the architect of all things, alone had parented Radclyffe Hall. He, ‘in a thoughtless moment had created those pitiful thousands who must stand forever outside His blessing’.
Una read aloud about congenital sexual inverts, from Studies in the Psychology of Sex by Havelock Ellis, A Manual of Sexual Science by Magnus Hirschfield and Psychopathia Sexualis by Richard Krafft-Ebing. Radclyffe Hall took the bits that suited her, mixed them with Catholicism, spiritualism and her own ideas on endocrinology and came up with a theory of lesbian identity about as empirically reliable as the paternity of Jesus Christ or Mabel Batten’s whereabouts on sphere three.
The Trials of Radclyffe Hall Page 17
