The Trials of Radclyffe Hall

by Diana Souhami

  When proofs of The Master of the House arrived, Una read them aloud for twelve consecutive hours. John paid for full-page advertisements in the Publisher and the Bookseller. She refused to have it mentioned that it was by the author of The Well of Loneliness. She went to London by Daimler for publication, stayed at the Grand Central Hotel and had publicity photographs taken by Howard Coster, in Essex Street. She was guest of honour at a Foyle’s Literary lunch on 17 March. Seven hundred people came to hear her speak and she signed books for nearly an hour. The Smallhythe trio and many friends were there. Francis Yeats-Brown said she looked, as she lectured, like an ecumenical saint.

  The book was published to bad reviews in the Telegraph, The Times and the Times Literary Supplement. The Spectator accused her of sentimentality and the Saturday Review of Literature called it a bad novel written to take cover after The Well of Loneliness. Much of the criticism was personal. Audrey sent red tulips and a card on which she wrote, ‘they thought they were doing in Our Lord when they spat upon him’. Una’s research on the Palestinian battle scenes in the book was criticized by The Times. She winged in a letter in her own defence.

  There was some enthusiasm about the book’s mystical religious fervour and praise in Time and Tide and the Aberdeen Press. A woman staying in a convent wrote that it was the most beautiful book she had ever read. Perhaps the worst indictment was that James Douglas commended it in print. Miss Lugsch, a fan from Chicago, sent hagiographical screeds and photographs of herself. Una termed her a ‘raving nymphomaniac with delusions’ and passed her missives to Rubinstein. The Literary Guild did not want to take copies, Gallimard did not want to translate it, it did not take off in the States. When it seemed that it would not go into a second impression, Una asked St Anthony to help. ‘I cannot endure my beloved to be unhappy’, she told him.

  Radclyffe Hall, ‘utterly cast down’, talked of enemies, of people hating her, of not being recognized in literature. Sheila Kaye-Smith called at the Black Boy after mass but made no comment on her complimentary copy.

  Then Cape’s American company went bankrupt. The news sparked Radclyffe Hall’s rage. She called him a dirty blackguard and a skunk. She told him he had ruined The Well of Loneliness in England and now The Master of the House in America. She said she would make his name stink for what he had done to her. He ‘went the colour of weak lemonade’ and murmured ‘don’t threaten me’.

  John went home and went to bed. Snow blizzards shrouded Rye and nine cases of smallpox were confirmed. She read books about chiromancy, necromancy and black magic and tried to read the future in her coffee grounds. When she dropped a log on her toe Dr Hartley called to take an X-ray. Life was not how she wanted it. The church did little to console her. Father Bonaventura had, she felt sure, gone mad. He made obscene remarks and bothered the nuns. She suspected him of stealing the money she gave to the church. The paintings of the stations of the cross for which she gave £225 only cost £160. He refused to heat the church and ‘spoiled’ mass for her by racing through it in twenty minutes. She did not want to have communion with him. He got Mabel Batten’s name wrong and would give no date for when the church would be consecrated. Moreover, he omitted to feed the church dog, Rodney. John and Una instructed the vet to take the dog away and organized meetings to oust Bonaventura. As John saw it, he was an unsatisfactory servant who ought be sacked.

  Worn out and thin, in June 1932 she and Una went to Bath to take a cure. They travelled with the dogs Mitsie and Jane, Gabriele the canary and Bertha the maid. Their rooms in the Empire Hotel looked out over the weir. They walked in the botanical gardens and in the evenings Una read aloud The House by the Bay and Parsons Nine. They had pine baths, diathermy and sunlight treatment.

  They went on by train to Brighton and the Grand Hotel. Una saw Dr Conran because of her heavy periods. He prescribed iron injections and referred her to Dr Seymour, a gynaecologist. He advised a hysterectomy to remove fibroids. Una and John hurried to London to Alfred Sachs and a surgeon, Mr Prescott Hedley, who both confirmed the diagnosis and treatment. Sachs said had it not been for her ‘married history’ of venereal disease he would have recommended ‘radium treatment’.

  After much packing and praying she was admitted to a private hospital in Welbeck Street. Andrea visited, looking distressed. Una was touched by her concern. Minna, aged seventy-three but dressed like a girl, brought flowers. Una was taken to the operating theatre on 6 July 1932. She had her relic of Saint Celine sewn to her nightdress. Prescott Hedley took out her uterus, cervix and appendix. He left her ovaries and fallopian tubes. John, in a room at the Welbeck Palace Hotel opposite, had acute indigestion from worry.

  28

  Give us a kiss

  It was births in the back rooms of the clinic, hysterectomies in the front. The contrast imprinted on John’s mind. Una, centre stage, made all she could of her illness. Her focus was her own pulse, temperature and urinary habits. John’s affairs faded into the shade. Two nurses attended day and night, friends sent flowers – three bunches from Audrey, three from Andrea, two from Ida Wylie, one from Sheila Kaye-Smith (‘2 dead sweet peas and a withered rose’) and countless of course from John, who ‘went through days and nights of terror and anguish. What she has been in this illness no words even of her own living pen could describe. My whole soul rises up to bless her in a love which seems incredibly increased a thousandfold.’

  John saw virtually no one but Una for three weeks. She regretted missing the Smallhythe show and feared she would never work again. She scrutinized Una’s stitches, commiserated with her pain, knelt with Father Collingwood beside her bed and thanked God for sparing her from death. She took in her bed jackets, peaches and lemon-yellow carnations and sat with her day after day. It was reminiscent of Ladye’s demise.

  After a month they left for a fortnight’s convalescence in Brighton. They travelled by Daimler with Sister Richardson, whom Una called ‘nanny’. At the Royal Crescent Hotel another nurse and a Dr Cummings were waiting to minister. Una got a vaginal abscess, infected gums, haemorrhoids then shingles.

  John pushed her in a bathchair along the seafront and spent long hours sitting in deckchairs. She hated the constraints of invalidity and the Brighton crowds or, as Una called them, ‘the subhuman, seething mass of weekend tripper Jews’. Herself menopausal, John was having hot flushes and not sleeping at night. She mourned the poor reception of her book, feared her talent had left her and worried about what to write next. Cape was now a blackguard, Jew, and unscrupulous villain. His autumn list trailed a book he was publishing by Chartres Biron.

  It was a relief to return to Rye. Not that all was well there. Bertha swore at Mabel Bourne, was fired and out of the house by noon. Jane the spaniel was on heat. Una’s mother came to lunch which she refused to eat because she had had a rock cake at the station. They took her to see Dodo’s garden and the church. Bonaventura, unshaven, red and dishevelled, leered at her and kept saying ‘put me among the girls’.

  Minna told John that Andrea was hard up, had a cough and could not afford to see a doctor. She asked her to pay for her to see Montague Curtis. Una, furious with her mother for ‘trying to make John responsible for a woman of 22 who had consistently rejected her wishes and advice’, packed her off home in a crowded third-class compartment.

  Theodore Goddard then wrote that Mrs Visetti was ill. She had gone to Monte Carlo for the summer. Standing on a chair in her hotel room to reach the top shelf of her wardrobe she had overbalanced, brought the wardrobe down on top of herself, and broken three ribs. She needed money for a nurse, daily visits from a doctor, hotel bills and incidental expenses.

  John wrote that she could not and would not afford more than seven guineas a week. Mrs Visetti’s doctor replied that she was depriving her mother of medical care and perhaps wished her to end her days in a charitable institution. John summoned Rubinstein, who came to Rye for the day. He told her to ignore her mother’s upheavals and not to be drawn. Una hoped Mrs Visetti would die. ‘John
is genuinely broken-nerved where she is concerned and always has been’, she wrote.

  Such requests for money unnerved John whose income was halved. Her stockbroker told her the country was in for a difficult ten years. To save on chauffeur’s fees, she bought a Harley Saloon 12 Deluxe. Dark brown and black with hide upholstery, she called it the Squirrel, or Squiggie, Una’s nickname, took driving lessons and seemed to want a journey, an essential change of scene.

  Friends changed partners or had affairs. Ida Wylie visited with Joe Baker, an American with whom she was in love. Joe Baker was sixty, wore pince-nez, had gallstones and had left her partner of twenty-five years to live with Ida. Evelyn Irons had parted from Olive Rinder and was now with someone called Joy McSweeney. Christopher St John, who was in her late fifties and odd in manner and looks, was besotted with Vita Sackville-West. Friends were embarrassed and thought her unhinged. Ethel Smyth called Vita a rotter for leading Christopher on. At a Smallhythe barn show John talked to Vita, who sympathized over the banning of The Well of Loneliness.

  Una deplored these infidelities and spoke of her own model partnership. But three months after her operation she seldom got up before noon, she laboured up the stairs and was absorbed in her digestive troubles, nausea and headaches. She ate runny boiled eggs, junkets and milk with Bovril in it and could do no chores. John had to walk the dogs and see to the stove.

  John said the Church now held the only romance left in her life. She spent long hours in her study. She reworked short stories written when she lived in the White Cottage, Malvern, with Ladye, added new ones and hoped they would be published as a single volume.

  The lead story was ‘Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself’. She had written it in 1926 ‘shortly before I definitely decided to write my serious study of congenital sexual inversion The Well of Loneliness’. In a preface that hit back at Chartres Biron, she said readers would find the nucleus of Stephen Gordon’s girlhood and ‘the noble and selfless work done by hundreds of sexually inverted women during the Great War’.

  Miss Ogilvy has thin lips, an awkward body, flat bosom, thick legs and ankles and rocks back and forward on her feet when agitated. She only takes her hands out of her pockets to light cigarettes and drive her battered war ambulance in France. As a child she loathed ‘sisters and dolls’, liked the stable boy, catapults, ‘lifting weights, swinging clubs and developing muscles’ and insists her name is William. Her mother calls her ‘a very odd creature’. Her relationship to men is ‘unusual’. Three of them want to marry her – attracted to her strangeness. Her two sisters fail to find husbands, are neurotic and sexually frustrated and look on her as their brother. She provides for them on inherited money, they live in Surrey, she gardens and, at the age of fifty-five has no friends.

  Then comes the Great War: ‘“My God! If only I were a man!” she burst out, as she glared at Sarah and Fanny, “if only I had been born a man!” Something in her was feeling deeply defrauded.’ While her sisters knit socks, Miss Ogilvy struggles with officials because she wants to go to the front-line trenches and ‘be actually under fire’. She crops her hair and loves the uniform and her trench boots. She becomes a lieutenant and is ‘competent, fearless, devoted and untiring’.

  Back home she refuses to grow her hair and snaps all the time. Her sisters think it is shell-shock. And then one day she packs her kitbag and goes to a small island off the south coast of Devon owned by a hotelier, Mrs Nanceskivel. It is a time-warp journey to an erotic past. Mrs Nanceskivel shows her some old bones of a man shot in the Bronze Age. Miss Ogilvy has a moment of awakening and that night dreams she is covered in zigzag tattoos and body hair and is wearing a fur pelt round her loins. By her side is a virgin with brown skin, black eyes and short sturdy limbs. ‘Miss Ogilvy marvelled because of her beauty’, then takes her off to the cave where bracken is piled up for a bed. The girl

  knew that the days of her innocence were over. And she thought of the anxious virgin soil that was rent and sown to bring forth fruit in season, and she gave a quick little gasp of fear:

  ‘No … no …’ she gasped. For divining his need, she was weak with the longing to be possessed, yet the terror of love lay heavy upon her. ‘No … no …’ she gasped. But he caught her wrist and she felt the strength of his rough, gnarled fingers, the great strength of the urge that leapt in his loins, and again she must give that quick gasp of fear, the while she clung close to him lest he should spare her.

  Outside the cave throughout the night big winged birds swirl around and ‘wild aurochs stamped as they bellowed their love songs’. In the morning fishermen find Miss Ogilvy sitting at the mouth of the cave, dead with her hands in her pockets.

  Even within the tolerance world of whatever gets you through the night, it was a disconcerting tale. It was not every lesbian’s dream of a sexy time, what with the bracken and the bellowing aurochs and Miss Ogilvy’s startling change of appearance.

  In Rye, as ever, Radclyffe Hall became embroiled in a trial. The essence of these trials was that she was right and the world was wrong. Through them she asserted her will. They were always a quest for control, for justice of a cosmic sort. If she lost she felt martyred and closer to God.

  This time her quarrel was with the Church. She wanted Bonaventura replaced by ‘a decently behaved parish priest’ who would ‘minister to our spiritual needs with sympathy, calm, and due order’. She prepared a formal complaint to be sent to the Bishop of Southwark. It detailed Bonaventura’s rages, persecution mania and delusions about being in the secret service, his squalor and unseemly behaviour, failure to visit the poor, sick or dying, his indecent remarks, the women he had had (three of them Spanish), his confusion when giving holy communion, his swearing, raging and starving of Rodney the dog.

  At St Anthony’s Church, Bonaventura preached a sermon saying that those who spoke against him should be excommunicated. He then had a depressive episode, left Rye suddenly and went on leave to Malta. Radclyffe Hall wanted to ensure that he never came back. She got Harold Rubinstein to check that her complaint was not libellous and then sent it to the Bishop of Southwark with a request that the matter be reported to Rome.

  She did not get the reply she desired. Father Thomas Grassman, Provincial of the Friars, would hold no enquiry in Bonaventura’s absence. And Radclyffe Hall came up against another side of Rye that had no sympathy with the trials of genius, congenital sexual inversion or the fight for right. When she asked the Reverend Barnet to move his car from outside the Black Boy, he shouted and asked if she owned the whole street. There was a scene. An educated curate, she told him, does not start a brawl in the public high street with gentry from the parish. The police called to say she had been reported for non-payment of licences for her manservant and two dogs. A neighbour, Mrs Ross, was snide about her tailor-made clothes. Mr Cheyney defended Bonaventura. Radclyffe Hall cancelled his invitation to tea. Una called him a tradesman, rooted in his own class.

  They suspected a conspiracy among the Rye Catholics. At a meeting Una reminded them that Radclyffe Hall was an eminent writer and she herself of a social position quite other than theirs. She let them know that they both acceded to acquaintance only because they were co-religionists, and she accused Mr Paterson and Mrs Sykes of slander and defamatory attacks. ‘They would rather the rubric was mauled, the poor and sick neglected and the blessed sacrament in unsuitable hands than follow our lead. And then such people think The Well of Loneliness was not a necessary book to write!’

  Molly Bullock called at the Black Boy and tried to conciliate. But John and Una found they now had enemies. They could not see how insulated they had become, how sustained by fantasy, how arrogant they appeared. In their hermetic world strange codes applied. Una lived vicariously through an aggrandized version of Radclyffe Hall. But Radclyffe Hall now described herself as dry, as dry as bones, as not alive. She began to hate Rye. She talked of it as a place of dreary solitude and the Black Boy as a dark and airless prison. She said the house was infested with mice, she deplo
red the lack of garden, the noise, traffic dust and trippers.

  She took a lease in February 1933 on 17 Talbot Mansions, a top-floor flat in St Martin’s Lane in London. As always a new address gave the illusion of a fresh start. She had the flat rewired, the walls painted yellow, a marble bath installed. Father Arbuthnot blessed the place. Minna when she saw it said, ‘How are the mighty fallen.’

  John and Una divided their time between London and Rye. Mabel Bourne who had won their friendship travelled with them. Jane the spaniel was given to kennels because of her sharp bark and scrambling ways. From Chapmans in Tottenham Court Road they bought Harry, an Amazonian blue-fronted parrot. They renamed him Cynara. He cost £15 and said ‘Hello Polly’ in the shop. Back home he bit John, took food from her plate and strewed it round. He was returned. A hostile assistant said they had judged him too soon. Radclyffe Hall asked if he knew the name of the customer he was bullying, that she was a well-known author whose pets were frequently mentioned in the press.

  Mr Chapman offered them Charlotte for £33. She nestled her head in their bosoms, loved grapes, barked like a dog, sang along with Una, belched, had a vulgar laugh and shouted bow-wow at mealtimes. Her vocabulary was wide: ‘Give us a scratch’, ‘What about a scratch then?’, ‘Ta ta’, ‘Oh, dear’, ‘Hello father’, ‘Father’s in love with his goose’, and ‘Give us a kiss.’ They filed her nails, bought her two cages and taught her to say ‘Goodnight’. Una took her for walks round Covent Garden secured on her hand with a cord and ring.

  Soon Charlotte was saying, ‘Mabel Bourne! Mabel Bourne come on there!’ And soon John and Una were again in the swing. ‘The cameras flashed for us’, Una said. They were guests at Ernest Thesiger’s cocktail party, they went to the first nights of C. B. Cochran’s show, Escape Me Never, at the Apollo, to When Ladies Meet at the Lyric, and to see John Gielgud in Richard of Bordeaux. Radclyffe Hall sent a note: ‘I salute your greatness’, then went backstage to meet him. He invited them to supper. It was a long climb up to his attic flat where he lived with his friend John Perry.