The Trials of Radclyffe Hall

by Diana Souhami

  John and Una went to the French bulldog club show at Tattersall. ‘There is always something in us that wakes up at the sight of thoroughbred stock in the breeds that we love’, Una wrote. Travelling home through the park, they were held up by an unloved breed, ‘a demonstration of 60,000 anti-Hitler jews’.

  Exposure to West End society now seemed mechanical. In her work, Radclyffe Hall had lost her way. Such fame as she had achieved turned to infamy with The Well of Loneliness. She gave a lecture to the English Club on ‘Novel Writing’ on 27 February 1933. ‘The propaganda novel must be entirely fearless,’ she told her audience of five hundred:

  If propaganda is to be the theme of a novel, then the novel should always be written for a cause in which the author has implicit belief, for a cause which he feels in his very soul has need of someone to rise up and defend it. Such an author will at least have something fine to live with; he will always know that he has given of his strength in order to fortify and help others. If he adds but one stone, however small, to the building of a better civilisation then that in itself is a glorious thing.

  She was right. But it seemed she had no more stones to add. The spite of the law had broken her nerve. In Rye she searched for a different house. She hoped for one at Smallhythe. She found some acres for sale, called a water diviner, talked of bore holes. But Edy Craig got into a state and said no house could be built if visible from the farm. Which meant John could not build. Tony Atwood kept saying, ‘We can’t possibly have a house out here.’

  Journey’s End, the house John had rented in Hucksteps Row, came up for sale. She offered £750 for it, renamed it the Forecastle and loved its sunny secluded garden, the view of France on a clear day, the adjacent river. A German barque, Elsa Kuhlke, sailed by, swastika flying. John had no regret at leaving the Black Boy but it proved difficult to sell. At auction it failed to reach her reserve price of £1,800. She had spent £3,000 on it. Many properties were for sale in Rye.

  She had the freedom of town and country living and a new house, but old preoccupations. The church of St Anthony of Padua was consecrated on 28 September 1933. John was ‘in a towering rage’. No special invitation had been accorded to her, though she had bought the roof, the stations of the cross, the rood and all of it. The Bishop of Southwark sprinkled the walls with holy water. Seventy priests, students, and all the Rye Catholics attended. John and Una sat on camp stools. The Bishop spoke of Father Bonaventura’s labours, the sacrifices he had made, the congregation’s good fortune in having such a priest.

  In November the Provincial came to Rye and took mass. From the pulpit he denounced those parishioners who had criticized Bonaventura. He told them to scrutinize their own lives to see whether their calumnies against the priest of God were born of malice. He spoke of libel, quoted Ecclesiastes and the gospels about backbiters and slanderers and compared Bonaventura to Christ who was given gifts of gold, then crucified.

  Radclyffe Hall took the reservation card that marked her seat, tore it up, tossed the pieces on to the pew, stared the Provincial in the face, genuflected to the cross and left the church. She vowed never again to go in it while this order controlled it, and she threatened to secede. She sent back the oak chair Bonaventura gave her when she first moved to Rye.

  She was beleaguered and locked in with Una. As they both hit out at the world, it seemed to recede. And Una hit out at her daughter. Andrea now wanted to marry a man called Toby Warren who had no clear profession. His mother, Lady Warren, who was divorced, had tea with Una and John and told them she ‘expected the young people to make their way economically’. Andrea turned to Tom Troubridge, her half-brother, to help with her wedding. He offered his house for the reception, to ‘give her away’ and continue her allowance until her husband was better off. Una saw this as Andrea siding against her and offering her stepson ‘another occasion for venting his spleen against me’.

  Una vented her spleen too. The prospect of Andrea’s wedding dredged up sexual disgust. The infection from Troubridge, the obscenity trial, her hysterectomy, her piety and high-handedness spilled into undermining her daughter. In August Andrea went on holiday with Toby Warren and Harry Wilcox – a former boyfriend of hers – and his current girlfriend Carol Goodner, ‘a notorious whore’ Una called her. None of them had any money. They stayed in a caravan in Dorking. ‘I am disgusted with Andrea for making herself cheap and with Toby for having no respect for her reputation’, Una wrote in her diary.

  I can do nothing except ensure that Lady Warren also knows of this escapade and that I am not the confidante upon the assumption that I am less likely to disapprove. Toby is bringing his mother to luncheon next Saturday and I am not showing any discretion for anybody’s sake. No man worth his salt would take his fiancee to stay in a caravan with a man, on whom she has long had a physical obsession, and his kept woman. I am now wondering if they do marry how long the marriage will last. I am afraid they have anticipated it in more respects than buying the car, the three dogs, and hiring the house. I did not notice any alacrity in respect of calling the date.

  It was, Una recorded, an odious lunch. No doubt Andrea agreed. John kept quiet. She had no interest in Andrea, no intention of going near the Troubridges even if invited, which she was not. She offered no present, no involvement, no practical help.

  Andrea sent a twenty-five-page letter to her mother. She would like her to be at her wedding but she asked her to retract her insults. She had heard said some pretty awful things about her and John, but wanted not to believe them. Una burned her letter and did not reply. She referred to her as the ‘grim outcome of an old and diseased father and a young and diseased mother. It would have mattered less somehow if a really nice personality had been born of the union. This affair has been the last illusion and the last disillusion I shall endure on her behalf.’

  Andrea wrote again. She did not want to arrange her wedding over her mother’s head but she needed to make plans. Una replied with a copy to Tom Troubridge: she withdrew none of her criticisms, she would not be attending, not least because Andrea had made a disgraceful scene in her house.

  Minna intervened for Andrea. Una told her that she too should not attend the wedding. Minna replied that it was a duty to be there. Una hung up on her whenever she phoned. ‘She was my mother before she was Andrea’s grandmother’, she wrote. ‘It is her duty to support me in a moral issue. She must of course as always for her own satisfaction, dress her inclinations in trappings of high moral colour.’ Which was what Una for her own satisfaction always did.

  Una ‘retired from the whole affair’. At a first night of Finished Abroad, Andrea and Toby Warren were standing at the back of the stalls. Neither Una nor John greeted them. Una commented on how fat and plain her daughter’s face was, and how ‘slatternly and unwashed’ the man she was going to marry.

  Spite was provoked by her daughter’s marriage, and a loathed reminder of past life. Andrea sent her a printed invitation. Her wedding would be on 15 November at St Mary’s Church in Cadogan Gardens and afterwards at Tom Troubridge’s house in Egerton Gardens. ‘I shall merely ignore the communication’, Una wrote. She instructed her bank to pay over £267 held in trust for Andrea and she sent a diamond ring given by Minna for her long ago.

  I shall not be present as she has deliberately made it impossible for me to be so. And John, who has kept a roof over her head since she was five, has not been invited. Sufficient reason were there no other to preclude my attendance. The reception will be given by Tom Troubridge, my stepson, who, for six years, ever since he learned that his father had infected me with a venereal disease, has never missed an opportunity of insulting me. Well, Andrea is 23, a grown woman, and I have done my utmost for her ever since her birth and now is the end. She will go her, way and I will go mine. She becomes, if anyone’s, her husband’s responsibility and I do not expect to have any further contact with her.

  Una was like steel. Life ricocheted off her. Old resentments found new targets. Bonaventura did not return
to Rye, for which she gave thanks in Brompton Oratory to Sir Thomas More. Father Wendelin Braun was assigned to fill his place in January 1934. Radclyffe Hall went to see him about getting back her special pew. He was in his slippers by a blazing fire, taking snuff and eating sweets. He said he was glad if she and Una were resuming attendance at the church but that he had been instructed to refuse them reserved seats.

  Radclyffe Hall told him that he was excluding the principal benefactor of the church. The matter would not rest. She would go to the Bishop, the Archbishop, the Pope. She would speak to the press, sue for defamation of character. Father Braun forwarded a letter from her to the Provincial, who did not reply.

  John became ill. Preoccupied about who was sitting in her seat at church, she seemed defined by abandonment: no mother, no father, no gender, no book and now no pew at St Anthony’s. The slightest obstacle made her cry. Her skin was grey, her eyes tired, she looked emaciated and her pulse raced. Dr Montague Curtis warned her that she would have a breakdown if she did not take care. She got a boil on her nose and Una feared this would lead to blood clots on the brain. Her volume of short stories was published by Heinemann to faint praise and no real interest. The American fan Miss Lugsch sent a bioscope of Chicago views that broke in the post. John put the package, unopened, into a bucket of water supposing it to be a bomb.

  Una pleaded that they get away for the summer, that they have a complete rest. She reserved rooms in the Hotel des Thermes in Bagnoles-de-l’Orne for 25 July. They would travel via Paris, have their thermal baths then go on to Sirmione in Italy, to the lake and mountains where their friend the novelist Naomi (‘Micki’) Jacob had a villa. Mabel Bourne was to care for the Forecastle while they were away. Charlotte was given to Lord Tavistock who had an aviary. John now found her intolerable. She shrieked and whistled, moulted everywhere and made a loud pinging sound when she ate.

  SAME HEART

  29

  The intolerable load

  They left London on 21 June 1934 with their paraphernalia of trunks, Mitsie the dog and Gabriele the canary. Paris was hot and airless. At the Sacré Coeur they lit candles by the memorial stone John had bought for Ladye and bought pious bibelots for the success of their cure – a faun drinking holy water, a sacred heart blessed by a priest.

  They had a ‘marvellous lunch’ with Romaine who now had an apartment in rue Raynouard with views over the roofs of Paris. She arranged to join them in Sirmione. They saw Natalie and her current lover, a sales assistant at Schiaparelli. Natalie told John to write to d’Annunzio when she got to Lake Garda, send him a copy of The Well of Loneliness and he would meet her. They called on Colette in her eighth-floor apartment in rue Marignan, saw her bulldog Souci and met her pécheur de perle, Maurice Goudeket. Una thought him ‘amiable if dull’. Colette wore St Tropez sandals, a blue sarong and her hair was dyed red. She was writing a novel, a film scenario and articles for magazines.

  ‘And here we are at Bagnoles once more after five years’, Una wrote on 26 June. They had their usual rooms on the fourth floor of the Hotel des Thermes. French windows opened to a wide balcony and a view of a valley of pine woods. They began their regime of steam baths and doctors’ checks. John’s blood pressure was high and she was advised, yet again, to ease up on smoking.

  Una got gastroenteritis and went to bed. She thought it was from drinking iced water in the Paris heat. John, at her wits’ end, coped for a week ‘bullying the dilatory hotel staff’. She then phoned the American Hospital in Paris’ and instructed them to send out a nurse. ‘This they did and on the following day Evguenia Souline arrived.’

  She came like a saviour. In her white uniform she seemed pale and calm, young and healthy, her English fractured, her manner shy. Una thought her ‘a treasure and charming, unmistakeably of our own class, an extremely nice woman’. John was inordinately pleased with the help she gave, the errands she ran. And she was intrigued by her. She wanted to hear about her past.

  A victim of the Russian Revolution Evguenia had no country, emotional ties or money. She was thirty and had had typhoid and tuberculosis. She hated nursing and dreamed of being a ballerina, an actress, a doctor. Her parents were dead. Her father had been a major-general in the Imperial Cossack army. She had seen people shot at random, deserters hung from trees and had herself been sentenced to death. She had lived with her family in tents on the Greek island of Lemnos and they had moved to Yugoslavia, America and then France.

  ‘John was obviously ready to fall in love,’ Evguenia wrote, ‘she was waiting for her ideal. I was unprotected, a lonely pathetic figure, a refugee on whom she could bestow her reserve of deep affection and love, whom she could treat a little like a child. Yes, very much like a child, as the time went on it proved itself to be so.’

  John went for walks with her. She gave her a signed copy of The Master of the House. ‘I can see how you flushed to the eyes with pleasure that I wrote your name in it.’ At dinner she insisted Evguenia be served first and given the best pieces of food. One morning, when John was late coming down for breakfast, Evguenia went to her room to check she was all right. ‘“I have come on my own initiative,” you said. I loved you for it Evguenia though I laughed because the words sounded so pompus.’ In the car one day Evguenia said, ‘“May I take off my cap please?” And all that you were then, or that I thought you were, seemed to me intensely appealing, and I felt the whole of me reaching out to you, crying out that I must and would protect you.’

  Must and would were significant words for Radclyffe Hall, and the protection was to be of a sexual sort. She saw herself as Evguenia’s saviour. She would defend her ferociously from the brutal world. She told Evguenia she thought her afraid of life and afraid of love. ‘There was something definitely not quite ordinary and normal,’ Evguenia wrote, ‘all was not altogether right. She roused my instinct in some perturbing way. I decided that I must go as soon as I could so as not to be engulfed in this contradictory mass of feelings. The matter only grew worse when I said I had to go now that the patient was so much better.’ But John insisted she stay though Una was recovered and the hospital charging 175 francs a day.

  After two weeks John saw her off on the evening train. Evguenia went back to her Paris room in rue Francisque-Sarcey. She talked to her friend Lysa Nicolsky about her feelings of unease. Next day there was a telephone call from John –

  … that is how she wanted me to call her. I fought like anything within myself not to fall under her spell and repeated to myself over and over again: no, no, I do not wish to … I must not let myself be carried away by this undetermined emotion. But John was obviously very determined. Her letters became at once very strong and emotional. She just would not hear of any reason on my part not to accept her affection, not to write to her or to see her.

  Evguenia was bombarded with phone calls and letters. Una wanted to get John to Sirmione. They were to travel there via Paris, where they would spend two nights in the Hôtel Pont Royale. Paris for John now meant Evguenia. Her instructions to her were precise. Evguenia was not to worry about living in one small room – ‘I am really a very humble person.’ John did not want to meet any of her friends – ‘You know by now I am shy of people.’ She wanted to say things but not ‘frightening’ things – ‘I always have a feeling that you are scared of me.’ From Evguenia came a stiff note addressed to Miss Hall – ‘never again can I be Miss Hall to you’, John replied.

  Meet me at La Pérousse (you know Quai des Grands Augustins) at 12.30 and we will lunch there alone together, just you and I. After lunch we will go back to my hotel where I shall have a sitting room and there (if you are willing) we will spend the afternoon. We shall be quite alone … Take care of yourself and know that I am counting on this meeting in Paris as I have counted on few things in my life.

  John booked in at the Pont Royale on 24 July. Evguenia sent a note of welcome. ‘Darling Yes I am here in Paris,’ John replied, ‘and it seems so strange that only a few weeks ago I did not know that Paris meant
you. I want to come to you. It’s red hell to be here and not to be able to see you until the day after tomorrow and then only for a few hours.’

  Within days it was red hell to be with Una. ‘John gave my ex-nurse lunch at La Perousse’, she wrote in her diary on 26 July. ‘I am sorry for the poor child who is lonely and not happy.’ Soon she was lonely, not happy and sorry for herself. All afternoon John stayed closeted in an adjacent room. Evguenia, terrified, ate nothing at lunch. At some point she said, ‘Do you want to kiss my mouth?’

  And your darling lips were so firm and protective, so chaste and so competent to protect, so unwilling to give, so unwilling to respond. Why you kissed me like a sister or a child – or were you really experienced and not intending to do otherwise? Once, just once your lips gave way a little, a very little.

  Darling lips and chaste kisses were a start. When they parted, Evguenia said, ‘I can’t believe that this is the last time I shall see you.’ Even before leaving for Sirmione John’s letters gushed out:

  I am tormented because of you, and this torment is now only partly of the senses – but is now an even more enduring thing and more impossible to ease – my sweet, because it is a torment of tenderness, of yearning over you, of longing to help you – of longing to take you into my arms and comfort you innocently and most gently as I would comfort a little child, whispering to you all sorts of foolish words of love that has nothing to do with the body. And then I would want you to fall asleep with your head on my breast for a while, Soulina, and then I would want you to wake up again and feel glad because I was lying beside you, and because you were touching this flesh of mine that is so consumed by reason of your flesh, yet so subjugated and crushed by my pity, that the whole of me would gladly melt into tears, becoming as a cup of cold water for your drinking. And if this is wrong then there is no God, but only some cruel and hateful fiend who creates such an one as I am for the pleasure that he will gain from my ultimate destruction. But there is a God, make no mistake, and I have a rightful place in His creation, and if you are as I am you share that place, and our God is more merciful than the world, and since He made us, is understanding and He knows very well what the end will be, seeing what you & I cannot see, knowing why you & I have been forced to meet, and why this great trouble has come upon us. Soulina I implore you to cling to this belief, because without faith our souls will be undone at this time of all but unendurable suffering …