The Trials of Radclyffe Hall

by Diana Souhami

  Jonathan Brockett warns Stephen that Mary has become socially isolated. Stephen takes her to Valerie Seymour’s salon. They befriend Pat whose ankles ‘were too strong and too heavy for those of a female’; Jamie from the Highlands who is a ‘trifle unhinged’ and whose friend Barbara gives her awful haircuts; Wanda, a struggling transsexual Polish painter; Hortense, Comtesse de Kerguelen, ‘a very great lady’ and Margaret Roland, Valerie Seymour’s current partner, a poetess with a voice ‘like a boy’s on the verge of breaking’.

  Stephen and Mary dance together in clubs like Le Narcisse and Alec’s, ‘to which flocked the battered remnants of men whom their fellow men had at last stamped under’. Like Brockett these men have soft white hands and ‘the terrible eyes of the invert’. Stephen fears Mary will herself become a battered remnant unless she has a husband, children, and normal friends. She speaks of prejudiced people who are ‘socially murdering’ them. In an unlikely denouement she pushes Mary into the arms of her own old admirer Martin Hallam. To make Mary feel betrayed and therefore able to leave, Stephen feigns spending the night with Valerie Seymour.

  Stephen then falls ever deeper into The Wells of Martyrdom. Her purpose in life is to fight the cause of inverts. ‘In their madness to become articulate through her, they were tearing her to pieces’:

  They possessed her. Her barren womb became fruitful – it ached with the fierce yet helpless children who would clamour in vain for their right to salvation. They would turn first to God, and then to the world, and then to her. They would cry out accusing: ‘We have asked for bread; will you give us a stone? Answer us: will you give us a stone? You, God, in Whom we, the outcast, believe; you, world, into which we are pitilessly born; you, Stephen, who have drained our cup to the dregs – we have asked for bread; will you give us a stone? … Stephen, Stephen, speak with your God and ask Him why He has left us forsaken.’

  And now there was only one voice, one demand; her own voice into which those millions had entered. A voice like the awful, deep rolling of thunder; a demand like the gathering together of great waters. A terrifying voice that made her ears throb, that made her brain throb, that shook her very entrails, until she must stagger and all but fall beneath this appalling burden of sound that strangled her in its will to be uttered.

  ‘God,’ she gasped, ‘we believe; we have told You we believe … We have not denied You, then rise up and defend us. Acknowledge us, oh God, before the whole world. Give us also the right to our existence!’*

  THE END

  * Richard von Krafft-Ebing in Psychopathia Sexualis, in the case study of ‘S’, quotes from her diary:

  I relied on God, that one day my emancipation would come … O God, Thou Allpitying, Almighty One! Thou seest my distress; Thou knowest how I suffer. Incline Thyself to me; extend Thy helping hand to me, deserted by all the world.

  S was a Hungarian countess who ‘knew how to imitate a scrotum with handkerchiefs or gloves stuffed in the trousers’ and who to the chambermaids explained menstrual blood on her sheets as ‘haemorrhoidal’.

  THE TRIAL OF RADCLYFFE HALL

  19

  Aspects of sexual inversion

  Newman Flower at Cassell had first option on The Well of Loneliness. His hopes were high for a new novel by Radclyffe Hall after the success of Adam’s Breed. A pious man, a devout Christian and a keen gardener, he had a precious manner and was the author of sentimental essays and poems. On 10 April 1928 Radclyffe Hall penned him a letter he must have sweated to receive. Were he to publish, she ‘could not consent to one word being modified or changed’. His was to be a disciple’s role. He must ‘stand behind this book to the last ditch,’ she told him, ‘go all out on it for the sakes of those for whom I have written’.

  Having attained literary success I have put my pen at the service of some of the most persecuted and misunderstood people in the world. In a word I have written a long and very serious novel entirely upon the subject of sexual inversion … So far as I know nothing of the kind has ever been attempted before in fiction.

  It is doubtful whether Radclyffe Hall and Una, Natalie Barney, Romaine Brooks, Winnaretta Singer, Toupie Lowther, Colette, Evelyn Irons, Gabrielle Enthoven, Teddie Gerrard, Tallulah Bankhead and the rest, with their fine houses, stylish lovers, inherited incomes, sparkling careers and villas in the sun, were among the most persecuted and misunderstood people in the world. Nor did they need an apologist for their affairs, loves and sexual escapades.

  Newman Flower replied to Audrey Heath within days. Radclyffe Hall was a great artist, he took his hat off to her, it was a fine book, but not one he could publish. It would harm his list. William Heinemann’s director, Charles Evans, then said no. He viewed the book as propaganda, ‘and inevitably the publishers of it will have to meet not only severe criticism but a chorus of fanatical abuse which although unjustifiable may nevertheless do them considerable damage. That consequence we are not prepared to face.’ Martin Secker returned the typescript a week later. It was not a commercial proposition, he said, but he would happily give Radclyffe Hall a contract for whatever she wrote next.

  Audrey Heath then offered the book to Jonathan Cape. Cape knew his fellow publishers had backed off because of its lesbian theme. He did not rate Radclyffe Hall’s literary style, nor did he want ‘to strike an attitude – portrait of a publisher doing something daring and heroic’, but he respected her sincerity and sales figures and he liked innovative work. By 1927 his list included Ernest Hemingway, T. E. Lawrence, Sinclair Lewis, Edna St Vincent Millay and Mary Webb.

  ‘I wrote the book from a deep sense of duty’, Radclyffe Hall told him. ‘I am proud indeed to have taken up my pen in defence of those who are utterly defenceless, who being from birth a people set apart in accordance with some hidden scheme of Nature, need all the help that society can give them.’ Cape lunched with her, Una and Audrey on 8 May at the Berkeley. He outlined his plan to publish The Well of Loneliness in a sober manner that suggested a serious subject, of no interest to the prurient. The book would have a black binding and plain jacket and be priced at twenty-five shillings – about four times more than the average novel. He proposed a cautious print run of 1,250 copies to test public response. He offered Radclyffe Hall an advance of £500 against royalties and encouraged her to pursue a preface from Havelock Ellis.

  A hitch about liability for legal costs in case of trouble gave her ‘an agitated & worried evening and night’. It was then agreed that she and Cape would share any such liability. She signed the contract at his office at midday on Friday 11 May. She then drove with Una to Brixton to chivvy Havelock Ellis. He had only read part of the manuscript, but said he was confident the rest would please him equally. He would give a short appraisal for Cape to use.

  John and Una went back to Holland Street to ‘a peaceful and happy evening’. A nightingale sang in the garden opposite their house. They went to mass and visited Ladye’s catacomb. John bought four hats for Una from Adèle’s and was herself fitted for new suits at Weatherills. Ellis’s 150-word appreciation, when it came, she thought ‘perfect’. ‘So far as I know,’ he wrote of The Well of Loneliness,

  it is the first English novel which presents, in a completely faithful and uncompromising form, various aspects of sexual inversion as it exists among us today. The relation of certain people – who, while different from their fellow human beings, are sometimes of the highest character and the finest aptitudes – to the often hostile society in which they move, presents difficult and still unsolved problems. The poignant situations which thus arise are here set forth so vividly and yet with such complete absence of offence, that we must place Radclyffe Hall’s book on a high level of distinction.

  John and Una went to Turandot at Covent Garden, which neither of them enjoyed. Poucette was sick in the car en route to the Windsor Dog Show where she came only third in her class. Men from Maples came to fit new carpets and curtains and a sunny room at the back of the house was fitted out as a sitting-room for Una who had shingl
es, thrush and an everlasting cold.

  An American publisher for The Well of Loneliness proved hard to find. Doubleday, Houghton Mifflin and Harpers all turned it down. Then, at a literary party on 23 May, Radclyffe Hall talked to Blanche Knopf, wife and business partner of Alfred Knopf. She liked the avant-garde and had flirted with the idea of publishing Gertrude Stein. She evinced great interest. A copy of the manuscript was delivered to her at the Carlton Hotel that night. Six days later Radclyffe Hall dined alone with her. Una spent the evening with Minna. Blanche Knopf asked for an option on the book until the middle of June. She wanted to take legal advice in New York. Radclyffe Hall wanted unequivocal and immediate acceptance. She discussed strategy with Audrey, gave Mrs Knopf a grand dinner at the Savoy and tried to fathom her intentions at a session with Mrs Leonard.

  Three weeks later Una wrote in her diary of a ‘thousand alarms & excursions anent Knopf & book’. (Both Una and Radclyffe Hall favoured the Old English ‘anent’ instead of ‘about’ or ‘in reference to’.) The contract Knopf offered had a clause that made Radclyffe Hall financially responsible for any action taken against the book under Manhattan law. Advised by Theodore Goddard, she instructed her American agent, Carl Brandt, to give Mrs Knopf a week to withdraw the offending clause. If she refused, he should offer the book to Harcourt Brace.

  Proofs arrived from Cape and John and Una checked that not a word had been changed or deleted. They put their furs into store for the summer and Una ordered a divan and cushions for her new room. Cape intended to use Havelock Ellis’s piece as a foreword, but wanted to change the phrase ‘various aspects of sexual inversion’, to ‘one particular aspect of sexual life’. Sexual inversion, he felt, might offend sensitive minds.

  Havelock Ellis agreed the change, but was uncomfortable at being dragooned into seeming so intimately to support this particular book. Radclyffe Hall was determined to blaze his endorsement. ‘The thought of your appreciation of The Well of Loneliness sustains me perpetually’, she wrote to him on 4 June. ‘I say to myself, “What need you care what the fools of this world say, think or do, since one of the wise and great has set his seal on your work.”’

  She sent him handkerchiefs, regretted his reluctance to be her guest at supper and let him know that equal deference came for him from Una, ‘the friend who has shared my home for thirteen years and who is prepared to stand shoulder to shoulder with me.’ ‘The mate of the invert must be strong unto death and not everyone can stay the course’, she told him. (She was an invert, Una was an invert’s mate.)

  No such solidarity was accorded Blanche Knopf, whose equivocation tried John’s nerves. ‘My patience is completely at an end’, she wrote to Brandt as the Knopf deadline drew near:

  It is not that I do not like Mrs Knopf personally, I do; but I am accustomed to dealing with men in business, to going perfectly straight for a point, and above all to sticking to essentials. I find it both difficult and tedious to deal with a woman and this I have several times told her quite frankly, asking her to settle all business details with my agents … it is better for women to keep out of business negotiations.

  Perhaps neither she, Audrey or Una came into the disparaging category of women. Inverts and inverts’ mates were men enough to stick to essentials and get to the point.

  Blanche Knopf amended the contract and on 26 June Radclyffe Hall signed it at Audrey’s office with Una as witness. She then went into action. No detail of publication was to be left unsupervised. Knopf were to typeset from Cape’s proofs. She had ticked each page in red and if any word was altered or omitted she would ‘consider it a breach of contract’. Blanche Knopf was on no account to use the publicity photograph Doubleday chose when promoting Adam’s Breed. It made Radclyffe Hall look, she said, like ‘a middle-age gent given to imbibing, or worse still a stout old lady masquerading’.

  Proofs were corrected, copies collated, prelims prepared. At the end of June, Cape decided to bring forward publication to 24 July. Compton Mackenzie’s novel Extraordinary Women was to be published by Martin Seeker in September. It was a spoof on society lesbians, set on Capri during the 1914–18 war. In it he mocked the clothes, monocles, affairs and lives of Radclyffe Hall, Una, Romaine Brooks and Natalie Barney. He compared them to ‘peculiar Aeolian fauna’ and made them farcical in appearance and behaviour. They would, he said, make ‘Freud blush, Adler blench, Jung lower his eyes and Dr Ernest Jones write his next book in Latin.’

  His book was humorously malicious and designed to entrench prejudice, not dispel it. Cape and Radclyffe Hall saw it as competition and in the time-honoured publishing panic of which book the world will want, they aimed to get there first. Radclyffe Hall added £150 to Cape’s £300 advertising budget and, in a metaphor as mixed as her depiction of gender, told him to use the money in ‘the best and wisest way to defeat our rivals and steer The Well of Loneliness to success’.

  She aspired to moral, financial and literary success. In the evenings Una read aloud Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol, his De Profundis and a biography of him by Frank Harris. Radclyffe Hall identified with Wilde’s trials. If God willed she too would be spat at on Clapham Junction station, imprisoned, vilified, crucified. A generation after Wilde her cause was to rid lesbianism of the stigma of moral degradation. In her book she articulated a female homosexual identity. That, she knew, would incur the scrutiny of the law. ‘Hitherto the subject has either been treated as pornography, or introduced as an episode, or veiled’, she wrote. ‘I have treated it as a fact of nature – a simple, though at present tragic fact.’

  She prepared herself for fame or infamy. Nothing was left to the discretion of the publisher who might show concern for other books too. She and Una discussed every detail with Audrey over dinners at Boulestins and the Ritz. Large advertisements were booked in the Yorkshire Post, the Spectator, the Sunday Times, the Observer, the Times Literary Supplement and, for publication day, in seven daily papers.

  Day after day it was eighty degrees in the shade. Day after day Una endured Alfred Sachs’s interminable gynaecological treatments. Two of the dogs, Dickie and Baloo, lodged in kennels, got run over and, on TO July, amid early morning preparations to exhibit Mitsie and Poucette at the Richmond Dog Show, Maria Visetti’s solicitor phoned with the news that Alberto had died.

  His death was an irrelevancy to Radclyffe Hall and led to no repair of the broken relationship with her mother. It took her a day to sort out funeral arrangements, see her solicitor, arrange the moving of Visetti’s corpse from his house at Phillimore Terrace to the undertaker’s. John was ‘abominably received’ by her mother, Una remarked in her diary. Visetti had died insolvent so John paid all burial costs and for his grave at Brookwood Cemetery. None of it deflected from the true crusade. She attended mass with vespers, benediction and the procession of Our Lady of Mount Carmel but her prayers were more for The Well of Loneliness than for her ‘disgusting old stepfather’s’ journey to the damned.

  Press copies were ready by 15 July. Cape hiked the print run to 5,200 copies, ordered paper for a 5,000 run-on, and now pitched the selling price at fifteen shillings. Radclyffe Hall rallied support. She sought allegiance to The Cause rather than disinterested appraisal for a piece of fiction. She was the vessel through which God’s truth was poured. Criticism of The Well of Loneliness was sacrilege and silence cowardice. ‘I know you will believe me,’ she wrote to Una’s brother-in-law James Garvin, who happened also to be editor of the Observer,

  when I tell you that I wrote this book from a sense of duty, a sense of duty which I dared not disobey … I have tried to bring the thing out into God’s air and light – for the Truth must never be feared, since it is the truth … It would be childish for me to pretend that I do not know how much your support in the Observer would contribute from the first appearance of my book on July 24th towards its success – above all towards its reception in the proper spirit, the spirit of desire for impartial justice and understanding towards an unhappy and very important sectio
n of the community.

  Garvin’s support was not forthcoming. The Observer was one of the few national papers not to review the book. Both Una’s sister and mother disliked her relationship with Radclyffe Hall and the subject of lesbianism in general. They chose silence not justice and understanding. Their disassociation widened the gulf between them and Una.

  More loyally, Ida Wylie was encouraged to give a glowing review for the Sunday Times. Vera Brittain was to review the book for Time and Tide, Arnold Bennett for the Evening Standard, Leonard Woolf for the Nation. Jonathan Cape phoned to say Havelock Ellis was annoyed to see his opinion piece used as an intrinsic preface when he had intended it as no more than a publicity puff. Radclyffe Hall and Una drove to Brixton to explain themselves but Ellis was out. They talked to Cape, lunched at the Ritz Grill, then drove again to Ellis, had tea with him ‘and made all well’, so Una said.

  They had done all that they could and more to launch the book into life. They went again to mass to pray for it and to Mrs Leonard to see what Ladye knew. ‘P of W of L’, Una wrote in her diary on Friday 27 July. ‘Dinner Here Everyone’. There were telegrams of congratulation, flowers, champagne. Andrea was packed off to guide camp. John and Una toured the bookshops. Wells of Loneliness were everywhere, row after row in W. H. Smith’s window, in the Times Bookshop, in Trueloves and Harrods.

  Next day, John had earache and the first of the reviews appeared. L. P. Hartley in the Saturday Review wrote of the book’s force and sincerity, its powerful appeal, its passages of great beauty, but criticized its polemical stance. Ida Wylie in the Sunday Times wrote of Radclyffe Hall’s courage, honesty and ‘lively sense of characterisation’. Con O’Leary in T. P.’s Weekly said readers would agree with Havelock Ellis that ‘poignant situations are set forth with a complete absence of offence’. Vera Brittain thought the book important, sincere, passionate, never offensive, but was confused as to whether Stephen Gordon’s gender bend was because of nature or upbringing. Reviewers with sophisticated attitudes to homosexuality and exacting standards for literature were critical. Leonard Woolf in the Nation called the book a failure, lacking form, discursive, tendentious. Cyril Connolly in the New Statesman said it was ‘long, tedious, absolutely humourless and a melodramatic description of a subject which has nothing melodramatic about it: