The Trials of Radclyffe Hall

by Diana Souhami

  She drew no conceptual distinction between belief and knowledge. Her huge archive on Mabel Batten’s posthumous activities was evidence of her tenacity to maintain that what she wanted to be so, was so. Her theories stemmed from her need to control her world, her untutored mind, her attraction to the folklore theories of her time and her religious implacability. She claimed scientific objectivity but it was the world according to Radclyffe Hall.

  Stephen Gordon, like her, was the congenital sexual invert, the true invert. Her attributes: small hips and breasts, broad shoulders, large feet, short hair, the look in her eye, ‘the terrible nerves of the invert’ were defining characteristics like the beak, plumage and mating habits of the crested grebe. Those who did not have these attributes belonged to a different genus.

  Congenital inversion is not unnatural. These congenital inverts are born not made. They are put into the world by God’s will alone – the God of infinite understanding, compassion and wisdom. Whether you like the fact or not it is one which must be accepted by all who value truth and justice …

  Congenital inversion is caused by an actual deviation from the usual in the glandular secretions of the invert’s body. Those glandular secretions influence the cells, & thus the whole human structure, physical, mental & spiritual. You can kill all the inverts but while they live you cannot make them other than inverted. They are and will always remain as God made them, and their sexual attractions will be therefore inverted as they were in the girl of whom I wrote – the unfortunate girl Stephen Gordon.

  It was all rather resistant to scrutiny. At one moment God was thoughtless, the next He was infinitely wise. It was not clear what these secretions were doing or whether they were happening to less than ‘true inverts’ like Mabel Batten and Agnes Nicholls, whose bottoms and breasts were far from small. There was a curious hierarchy, a dangerous genetic model. ‘Real’ inverts were like Radclyffe Hall. Ersatz ones were like Una or Tallulah Bankhead.

  Stephen Gordon is a third sex, an indeterminate sex, a ‘man trapped in a woman’s body’, ‘a blemished, unworthy, marred reproduction’ of her father Sir Philip Gordon, who lives in Morton, a manor house in Malvern. His fixation on having a son, the way he calls her Stephen before she is born, teaches her to bat, hunt, drive and be a chap, is not presented as contributing to her dislocation over gender.

  Stephen is born ‘a narrow hipped, wide shouldered little tadpole of a baby’. Though destined to suffer, she is superior to the rest of the world. She is a martyr, not a victim. There was a distinction in Radclyffe Hall’s view. Martyrs were on a theological par with the peerage. Victims were of a lower order and had no status or reward.

  As a child, Stephen, ‘bearing some unmerited burden’, identifies with Nelson and Jesus Christ. ‘She studied the picture of the Lord on His Cross and she felt that she understood Him.’ She hates dresses, likes breeches, masochism and the housemaid. ‘I’d like to be awfully hurt for you, the way Jesus was hurt for sinners’, she says to her and wants housemaid’s knee instead of her enduring it. The footman kisses the housemaid and Stephen is ‘filled with a blind uncomprehending rage’ and throws a broken flowerpot at him. Such kissing, she feels, should come from her.

  She is tall, poised, purposeful, physically and mentally splendid, the fitness ideal of a later decade. She fences, lifts weights, wins horseriding trophies. ‘There was a kind of large splendour about her … grotesque and splendid, like some primitive thing conceived in a turbulent age of transition.’ She speaks fluent French, appreciates ‘all literary beauty’, has impeccable artistic judgement, ‘a great feeling for balance in sentences and words’ and ‘the intuition of those who stand mid way between the sexes, so ruthless, so poignant, so accurate, so deadly’.

  Sir Philip hires a governess for her, Miss Puddleton, square shouldered and flat chested, who in her time has dallied with the ladies ‘in accordance with the dictates of her nature’. Puddle, as Stephen calls her, knows Stephen has ‘real red hot talent’ and will be a great writer. ‘Face yourself calmly and bravely, do the best with your burden,’ she tells her charge.

  ‘The invert’s most deadly enemies are not infrequently his or her parents’, Radclyffe Hall wrote in notes for an unpublished article about her book. Lady Anna loathes her daughter Stephen with a quintessential recoil. ‘All your life I’ve felt a kind of physical repulsion, a desire not to touch or be touched by you’, she tells her. Stephen is ‘ill at ease and ungracious’ at garden parties. She shakes hands too strongly and has nothing in common with other girls. She prefers men ‘because of their blunt, open outlook’, but they find her too clever, too like themselves: ‘They were oak trees preferring the feminine ivy. It might cling rather close, it might finally strangle, it frequently did, and yet they preferred it, and this being so, they resented Stephen, suspecting something of the acorn about her.’

  Stephen meets Martin Hallam, who owns farms in British Columbia. They are ‘perfect companions’. He rides, hunts, fences and touches trees ‘with gentle pitying fingers’. In Stephen’s view they are like brothers, but he ‘trembles before his own passion’ for her. When he tells her he loves her ‘over her colourless face there was spreading an expression of the deepest repulsion – terror and repulsion and something else too, a look as of outrage’. She feels that ‘the loneliest place in this world is the no-man’s land of sex’ and that she has more in common with her horse, Raftery.

  Why a man should desire a woman who finds him sexually repulsive is an unexplored theme. ‘Is there anything strange about me Father that I should have felt as I did about Martin?’ Stephen asks poor Sir Philip, who shuts himself in his study making marginal notes about her in Psychopathia Sexualis and Sexual Anomalies and Perversities. ‘It had come. It fell on his heart like a blow.’ He knows that his daughter is a Congenital Sexual Invert. ‘His loins ached with pity for this fruit of his loins … You have maimed my Stephen’, he wants to say to God.

  He and Lady Anna quarrel about the fruit of their loins. It would be a disaster if Stephen were to marry, he tells her. Anna is jealous of Stephen’s closeness to him; ‘she has taken you from me, my own child, the unspeakable cruelty of it’, she says. Then Sir Philip gets killed by a falling tree. His dying words are: ‘“Anna – it’s Stephen – listen. It’s Stephen – our child – she’s, she’s – it’s Stephen – not like –” … His head fell back rather sharply then lay very still upon Anna’s bosom.’

  He might have been going to say she’s not like other girls, but mother knew that already.

  18

  She kissed her full on the lips

  Radclyffe Hall had no abiding interest in the psychopathology of sex. Congenital inversion was not the stuff of daily life or popular fiction. She and Una were soon back to their normal reading matter – Crazy Pavements, A Misjudged Monarch, Mother’s Axe – and to first nights in the West End: Noël Coward’s ‘awful play’ Sirocco Days and Thunder in the Air at the Duke of York’s.

  She wanted authority of a clinical sort to get her book about the unfortunate Stephen Gordon past the censor and to hush cries of ‘filth’. From Fox-Pitt, the Troubridges and her mother, she knew the force of homophobia. Her book was a protest against what she called ‘the deadly campaign of silence’:

  Not only has this constituted a grave danger to the inverts themselves who, in addition to all else have not hitherto dared to proclaim their existence, (a most undesirable state of affairs and one likely to render them morbid,) but this campaign of silence has been a grave danger to a hetero-sexual society, that has resolutely refused to face a problem which was and is above all things social.

  As each chapter was typed, a ‘special copy’ was put aside marked ‘for the attention of Dr Havelock Ellis’. She wrote and told him he was ‘the greatest living authority on the tragical problem of sexual inversion’ and asked him if he would write a preface. He said he always refused such requests but that he was deeply interested in the subject, ‘having had many friends, both men and wom
en, who were, as they sometimes say, “so”’, and he would like to read her book when it was finished. Radclyffe Hall persisted. A preface from him would give gravitas to her story. She called at his house uninvited and left a sycophantic letter. Her tenacity was rewarded. Havelock Ellis agreed that if the book appealed to him, he would ‘express an opinion that might be used’.

  By November 1927 Radclyffe Hall was on page 780 of Stephen. She was more ambitious for this than for any other of her books. Another literary award for Adam’s Breed – the James Tait Black Prize – made her certain her new book would cause a stir. Una did a word count and came up with the title The Well of Loneliness. She read chunks of it aloud to Audrey and they all talked of how later chapters should develop.

  Radclyffe Hall prepared for fame. Charles Buchel did a drawing of her, which she wanted used for publicity. She ordered new uniforms for the servants and two fur coats for Una – a Persian lamb and a mink. She had the house redecorated and recarpeted, bought leather chairs and more oak furniture. And she socialized with the lesbian haut monde, all of whom anticipated publication of her book. At dinner at Gabrielle Enthoven’s she met Mercedes de Acosta, who was in love with Greta Garbo. Evelyn Irons, the Women’s Page editor of the Daily Mail, who was in her twenties and lived in Chelsea with her partner Olive Rinder, interviewed her for a satirical article on ‘How Other Women Run Their Homes’. ‘If I spy specks of dust I have to control my itch to remove them, for I have the housewife’s seeing eye’, Radclyffe Hall was supposed to have said. Irons and Rinder, as Una called them, joined their set. Violet Hunt, who had so helped Radclyffe Hall win the Prix Femina, wrote, ‘I want to see your new novel. I believe I shall like it better than Adam’s Breed.’ Toupie heard screeds of it read aloud.

  Radclyffe Hall’s assertion that The Well of Loneliness was fictional over details of place and people was not true. She did not invent in her novels. They were storehouses of her experiences and preoccupations. Her settings for the book were Malvern, the lesbian salons of Paris after the First World War, the Canary Islands where she went with Mabel Batten, the ambulance unit in occupied France as described by Toupie. Friends were in the narrative undisguised. The ‘brilliant’ playwright Jonathan Brockett, tall, sardonic, thin, was Noël Coward even to the bags under his eyes and ‘feminine’ white hands. The dilettantish writer, Valerie Seymour, with ‘very blue, very lustrous eyes’ and ‘masses of thick fair hair’, who rules the lesbian salon life of Paris, was Natalie Barney. ‘Her love affairs would fill quite three volumes, even after they had been expurgated’, Radclyffe Hall wrote. The swipe was pure Una about Natalie.

  The Well of Loneliness had bits of pathological case history, religious parable, propaganda tract and Mills & Boon romance. From Havelock Ellis she took the idea of the ‘congenital invert’. From the church she said God the Father created all things. To justify desire, she invoked sexology and the Lord. Her prose style was lofty, with words like betoken and hath. Stephen Gordon makes biblical utterances: ‘How long O Lord, how long!’ and ‘I have the mark of Cain upon me.’ But friends, everyday life and different constructions of lesbianism kept sneaking in to make the book more interesting: Natalie Barney’s soirées, the suffragettes’ revolt against patriarchy, Toupie and her ambulance unit.

  Radclyffe Hall was too troubled a person to write an untroubled book, but she might have acknowledged the privilege, seductions, freedom and fun that graced her daily life. She indicted the ‘ruthless pursuing millions, bent upon the destruction of her and her kind’, but seemed to endorse the value system that saw marital, reproductive sex as best. Her model of ‘the finest type of the inverted woman’ was scary and doomed. Stephen Gordon was a transsexual, ill at ease with herself and her body, ‘her strangely ardent yet sterile body … she longed to maim it, for it made her feel cruel’.

  Nothing overly sexy goes on in The Well of Loneliness. ‘She kissed her full on the lips like a lover’ is the subversive depth of the book. Lovers do spend the night in bed with each other, but they are ‘in the grip of Creation, of Creation’s terrific urge to create; the urge that will sometimes sweep forward blindly alike into fruitful and sterile channels’. (From time to time Radclyffe Hall said she wanted to father a child.)

  When she is twenty-one, Stephen Gordon inherits a whack of money, like her author. She starts an affair with Angela Crossby, an American wife of the disaffected sort Radclyffe Hall liked to seduce. ‘As their eyes met and held each other something vaguely disturbing stirred in Stephen.’ Angela has a homophobic toad of a husband, Ralph, who, like Oliver Hoare, forbids his wife to see ‘this freak’. ‘That sort of thing wants putting down at birth’, he says. Ralph gives Angela ‘flaccid embraces’, has a ‘sly pornographic expression’, is given to ‘arrogant masculine bragging’ and goes to bed in pink silk pyjamas. Stephen, by contrast, ‘would sacrifice her life for the sake of this woman’, gives her pearls, wears white crêpe-de-Chine pyjamas and drives a red ‘long bodied sixty horse power Metallurgique’.

  ‘Can you marry me?’ Angela asks her. Marriage was an issue for Radclyffe Hall. She believed it should be an entitlement for lesbians. She described Una as her mate and said were she herself a man in the biological sense they would have married. But Una might not have wanted to marry such a man of a man, feeling as she did about sex. Nor, because of the Catholic Church, had she divorced Troubridge. In the religion they chose for the signposts it gave, homosexuality and adultery were sins.

  It was all morally and semantically awkward. ‘I cannot keep the fifth commandment’, Radclyffe Hall wrote of her dishonourable parents. It was not the only commandment she could not keep. And yet, in her fiction and in her life, she kept pitting herself against manmade edicts, patriarchal values, in order to be martyred the more. In The Well of Loneliness Stephen writes a love letter to Angela, ‘page after page … What a letter!’

  You know how I love you, with my soul and my body; if it’s wrong, grotesque, unholy – have pity … I’m some awful mistake – God’s mistake – I don’t know if there are any more like me, I pray not, for their sakes, because it’s pure hell.

  Ralph shows the letter to Stephen’s mother, Lady Anna, who banishes Stephen from Morton. ‘I would rather see you dead at my feet’, she says and calls her a scourge, vile, filthy, corrupt, against nature and against God. ‘As a man loves a woman that was how I loved – protectively like my father’, Stephen declaims. ‘In my hour of great need you utterly failed me; you turned me away like some unclean thing … If my father had lived he would have shown pity, whereas you showed me none.’

  So much for mother; no vestigial maternal understanding, incapable of a hug for her daughter or a word of care. Work is Stephen’s palliative. She is a great writer, a jeaneous, no less. Her novels of ‘outstanding literary merit’ have titles like The Furrow. She is ‘true genius in chains, in the chains of the flesh’. Valerie Seymour finds her a house in Paris in the rue Jacob. In its grounds is a derelict temple, which Stephen renovates. (Radclyffe Hall filled her book with such allusions for the delectation of friends.)

  In the 1914 war, instead of knitting socks in Malvern with Mabel Batten, Stephen, like Toupie Lowther, drives an ambulance in occupied France. She meets in her unit ‘many a one who was even as herself’, CSIs who have ‘crept out of their holes’ and ‘found themselves’ in the ‘whirligig of war’. She gets her face lacerated by flying shrapnel, ‘an honourable scar as a mark of her courage’. Like Toupie she is awarded the Croix de Guerre. She falls for Mary Llewellyn, who was orphaned as a child, is little, obedient, young and uneducated. ‘She knew nothing of life, or of men and women and even less did she know of herself.’ The head of the unit, Mrs Breakspeare, disapproves of the relationship and discourages it. She says ‘it savours a little too much of the schoolroom’.

  But Mary is besotted with Stephen. All her life she has been waiting for her. She wants to kiss her ‘more than anything in the world’. Stephen warns her of the price she will pay:

  If y
ou come to me, Mary, the world will abhor you, will persecute you, will call you unclean. Our love may be faithful even unto death and beyond – yet the world will call it unclean. We may harm no living creature by our love; we may grow more perfect in understanding and in charity because of our loving; but all this will not save you from the scourge of a world that will turn away its eyes from your noblest action, finding only corruption and vileness in you. You will see men and women defiling each other, laying the burden of their sins upon their children. You’ll see unfaithfulness, lies and deceit among those whom the world views with approbation. You will find that many have grown hard of heart, have grown greedy, selfish, cruel and lustful; and then you will turn to me and will say: ‘You and I are more worthy of respect than these people. Why does the world persecute us, Stephen?’ And I shall answer; ‘Because in this world there is only toleration for the so called normal!’ And when you come to me for protection I shall say: ‘I cannot protect you, Mary, the world has deprived me of my right to protect; I am utterly helpless, I can only love you.’

  Mary is not put off. None of that matters at all. ‘Can’t you understand that all that I am belongs to you, Stephen?’ she says. Like Radclyffe Hall and Mabel Batten, they go to Tenerife and Santa Cruz. They stay in the same hotels and villas as they did. In Paris they set up home with a dog called David in the house with the temple in the garden. Stephen pays the bills and writes sensationally successful books. Mary does wifely things like shopping, marvelling at Stephen’s prose and lunching with her at Pruniers.

  ‘Being a woman’, she wants ordinary things like friendly neighbours and weekend visits to in-laws. Stephen has ‘county instincts’. She is law-abiding and wears berets and double-breasted suits. As a couple, they are devoted and respectable. But they are ostracized. Lady Anna, beastly as ever, will not let Mary near Morton. And Lady Massey who was once a friend cancels an invitation for Stephen and Mary to spend Christmas at Branscombe Court: ‘Of course a woman in my position with all eyes upon her has to be extra careful’, she says.