The Trials of Radclyffe Hall

by Diana Souhami

  As for John’s absolute trust in Una’s absolute discretion over provision for their mutual friend Evguenia, that was no problem. Una knew just what John wanted: to give Evguenia minimal funds with a great deal of goading and humiliation. She said she knew John’s wishes because she had discussed them with her ‘exhaustively’ before her death. She told Evguenia she had no legal obligation to give her anything. Before John’s body had left the embalmers, Garstin’s of Baker Street, for Westminster Cathedral, Una could not resist telling Evguenia the terms of the will. Evguenia told her it was John’s money, not hers, and it was always John’s intention that she, Evguenia, should have a share of it. Una’s sentiments to Evguenia were: ‘Cards on the table, Evguenia & no more pretence: you never after a first physical flare loved John. Even her terrible suffering never moved you. You were and are infuriated that you did not make a bigger financial haul from her will.’

  Evguenia lost her job with the Foreign Office the day after John died. She had taken too many days off while John was ill. She told Una she hoped to get a flat in London. Una made it clear no funds were available for such projects. She said she intended to continue to pay Evguenia’s medical expenses and the basic allowance John had given her: £100 a year plus £24 for fuel if she was working, £250 a year if she was unemployed. Evguenia protested that John had given her a basic £324 a year when she was out of a job.

  She went to see John Holroyd-Reece. She showed him John’s letters that said she was well provided for and would have a substantial income. She told him of the ten years of their life together, of John’s demands and expectations and the promises of inheritance she had made. She said it was intolerable to be dependent on Una for her allowance. She could not bear the prospect of deferring endlessly to her. It was not fair that Una should have so much and she so little or that Una should benefit if she, Evguenia, worked. She could not believe John would have changed her will in this way when so near death, unless Una had urged her to do so.

  She had gone to the wrong man. Holroyd-Reece managed Una’s money and benefited financially from her. He warned Una that Evguenia could say a lot about her relationship with Radclyffe Hall. He advised her only to make payments erratically to emphasize their voluntary nature. He asked her if it would be worth her while to give Evguenia £5,000 to buy her off to prevent publicity. Una withheld all payments while matters were sorted out: ‘after all my precious, all your dispositions were made in the belief not only that she was not as bad as she seemed, but that your illness had shocked her into penitence and reform, which I knew within a few hours of your death was not (how far from it!) the case.’ John had wanted Evguenia to have an emerald ring of hers. Holroyd-Reece delayed giving her this in case she sold it to finance legal action.

  Evguenia saw a solicitor, a Mr Judge. She tried to contest the will on the grounds that Radclyffe Hall changed it in the last week of her life, when she was not rational, and because of undue pressure and influence exercised by Una. ‘It’s all horrible & incredibly vile my darling’, Una wrote to Dear John. She feared ‘yet another court case with implications’, like the Fox-Pitt trial and the two Well of Loneliness trials. ‘I don’t mind a hoot for myself, what can it do to me, for if the world boycotted me I could hardly be more alone in it than I am, but I want universal respect and veneration for you, my beloved in heaven.’

  She also wanted all John’s money for herself on earth. She turned to Harold Rubinstein for help. He passed the case over to his partner and brother Stanley. Perhaps he felt he had witnessed too much. He had drawn up the original will in 1938. He knew how protective John was of Evguenia, her concern that she should always be provided for, her desire to adopt her, her anxiety for her naturalization. He must have known that morally Evguenia had a case. But Una, not Evguenia, was his client. He advised her to prepare a statement giving her version of why John changed her will.

  Una drew up a curious document which implied more than it answered. Radclyffe Hall, Una wrote, had for nine years and three months done everything, despite ‘grave provocation’, to benefit Evguenia Souline ‘morally and materially’. But her ‘steadfast loyalty’ was to Una to whom during her final illness she had said, ‘It’s entirely for your sake I’m sticking this, darling; I’m not sticking it for Evguenia of whom I’m intensely fond, but who is on the very outskirts of my existence … I want you, you, you,… I want only you in all the world.’

  Some thirty years later, long after the principal players in the drama were dead, Una’s literary executor, Horatio Lovat Dickson, asked Harold Rubinstein about the earlier will. Rubinstein replied:

  Your letter enquiring about John’s earlier Will could have embarrassed me if I had not been able to tell you that none of the files relating to these matters are now extant, and that my memory is exceedingly tricky … It would be unethical for a solicitor to disclose contents of documents prepared for a client, dead or alive.

  What Radclyffe Hall had meant or wanted quickly became irrelevant. What signified was the document she signed in her sloping regressive hand seven days before she died.

  Evguenia’s attempts to challenge the will on the grounds of ‘undue influence’ came to nothing. Una, she was told, could give her as little or as much as she liked. Evguenia would have been hard put to find a lawyer to help her with a palimony suit. The Well of Loneliness was still banned as obscene because of its lesbian theme. In 1940 and 1941 convictions had been obtained against booksellers who stocked it. To be lesbian was to be obscene according to the government and the judiciary. Joynson-Hicks and his repressive regime left women like Evguenia stigmatized and unprotected by the law.

  Her position was invidious. She was not litigious, she had no money and she was stateless. She did not want to harm Radclyffe Hall’s reputation or for that matter her own. Reticent about having had a lesbian relationship, she thought it in some sense wrong. Dr Armando Child informed Evguenia’s solicitor that in his opinion Radclyffe Hall was rational when she changed her will. Armando Child and Una were on good terms. She paid his bills, bought him dinner, gave him an emerald tie pin of John’s. He gave her a letter for the priest asking that for health reasons she be allowed breakfast before early morning mass.

  Stanley Rubinstein advised Una not to write to Evguenia, entertain her, give her presents or have anything to do with her. ‘I would only be misunderstood and I should expose myself to its being said either that I feared her or that I was “fond of her” & I have no doubt of what he meant by that latter implication!’

  Through Rubinstein Una arranged a seven-year covenant to pay Evguenia £100 a year. This, Evguenia was told, might be renewed but only if Una wished to do so or felt she could afford it. At Christmas, also via Rubinstein, Una sent her £1 and a ‘little non committal note’ on a card of Millais’ Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop. For John’s sake, she said she ‘must try to help the poor demented creature’.

  Una rejoiced in the revised terms of her relationship with John. With her death ‘the focus changed completely’. In life she had controlled her career, now she planned to control her legend. Evguenia of course had the bombshell of her letters. She owned them but copyright over publication rested with Una. Una intended to use money as a lever ‘to make Evguenia remain quiet and behave herself’.

  Una, in posthumous possession, adopted the appearance of the woman through whom she had for so long lived. She wore John’s clothes. She had her jodhpurs and cavalry cord breeches altered to fit. ‘I wear your poplin shirts and ties, your stockings, your shoes, your Jaeger dressing gown, your cardigans, your berets.’ For everyday she wore John’s grey tweeds, for best her blue tweeds altered by Aquascutum, her blue poplin shirt, her blue Ugolini tie, her cufflinks, her emerald and diamond tie pin, her key chain. Like John she developed a callous on her finger from wielding a pen. Like her she kept everything exceedingly tidy. In bed she covered herself with the patchwork blankets John had knitted and sewn.

  At Communion the priest put either two wafers or one very t
hick one on Una’s tongue. She took it as ‘a sign of grace’. ‘It was the story of the two palms over again.’ Visiting Highgate Cemetery, she noticed with approval that the floor of the catacomb was clean, the altar crucifix and candlesticks dusted, the ceiling blue. But a bunch of immortelles had been laid on the altar at the foot of the crucifix and a holly wreath left there with ‘an absurd card’. Una threw it all out and told the porter that no one was to have the key to the vault and no offerings but hers were to be allowed. Her marriage was inviolable now.

  Nor were flowers to be laid any more on anniversaries of Mabel Batten’s death. Ladye’s grave was, Una thought, ‘merely a necessary repository and had nothing emotionally to do with either of us’. If in life John’s affections had been equivocal in death she belonged to Una:

  nothing ever for a moment succeeded in dividing us from one another, nothing ever was able to come between us even in the flesh and how much more so is that true now that there is only my negligible flesh in the way and how gloriously more so when as the angels we shall be free of all flesh & know ourselves into one for ever.

  Fusion through love and sex might have eluded Una but she would achieve it through death. Death was her element. Life’s temptations and griefs were beyond Radclyffe Hall’s reach. ‘Thank God you are safe, safe, safe,’ Una wrote of her, ‘nothing can hurt you, neither rumbling doodlebugs, nor unseen & unheard terrors from the stratosphere, you cannot be killed or much worse maimed or blinded, so I can’t fear for you, and you, now knowing all of God’s will & purpose can’t fear or grieve for me.’

  It was the ultimate release from responsibility. The words of William Penn held resonance for her: ‘They that love beyond the world cannot be separated by it. Death cannot kill what never dies.’ Una had great recompense – worldly wealth and the sanctuary of heaven. Off she went to lunch at Pruniers with Andrea – oysters and scrambled eggs, but the oysters were tasteless so she complained to the manager.

  Maria Visetti, who was ninety-one, heard of the death of her daughter when a resident at the Viennese Hotel in Hove, where she now resided, asked her if she had seen the Telegraph. ‘She showed me the Deaths and wondered if it was a relation of mine, of course when I saw “author” I knew. I told the woman I did not think so.’ Una had not told her that John was ill. ‘How she dared to show me such disrespect I cannot think’, Mrs Visetti wrote to her niece, Jane Caruth. In an obituary she saw that Marguerite had suffered for six months with cancer. ‘It has upset me more than I like to think. The Troubridge woman told me nothing and to the last ignored me.’

  Mrs Visetti’s anxieties then focused on money. She was appalled that Una was the sole executor of the will and she herself not named in it. Decades of bitterness over her divorce settlement and at what she saw as her daughter’s profit at her expense spilled out:

  all these years she has been using money which really belonged to me. This was her last chance to give it back. Marguerite had such power and from a money point of view treated me so badly. All along the line I was cheated. It was all wrong. She had not an ounce of my blood in her. She was Radclyffe through and through, morally and mentally.

  Through her solicitor, Mr Woodbridge, Mrs Visetti, like Evguenia, challenged the will. Her doctor, Dr Horsford, phoned Armando Child. He too asked if Radclyffe Hall was compos mentis that week before she died. Armando Child again said that in his view she was.

  Mrs Visetti then tried ‘the human touch’. In December 1944 she wrote to Una regretting negotiations had ‘got into the hands of lawyers who only see facts’. She said Marguerite had always promised her £300 a year. Una considered the letter blackmail. She told Rubinstein ‘to keep her in order for me’. At Una’s instruction John Holroyd-Reece drew up a covenant which Rubinstein sent to Mrs Visetti’s lawyer. It granted her £200 a year on condition she gave no interviews about her daughter, said nothing detrimental, provided no publicity and surrendered to Una all biographical material connected with her, all childhood photographs and the portrait by Katinka Amyat of Marguerite aged five with blonde curls.

  ‘If I comply with all this, I may get a hundred or two a year out of £118,500 all left to the Troubridge woman’, Mrs Visetti wrote to Jane Caruth.

  When you realize the £2000 a year I gave up to ensure her inheritance, thousands of capital legally belongs to me. The Troubridge woman seemed to control Marguerite. What can I do? accept all insults, all unfair pressure and bow my head in gratitude to this woman who has allowed all this evil to be done to me? Pity me and pray that I may be given control not to act in any way aggressively and so lose the assistance to live. My grief, my rage, are both telling on my nerves. I am not well.

  For two months Mrs Visetti delayed signing this covenant. Una therefore delayed paying her any money at all. Una assured Dear John that she was doing her utmost to act fairly and justly but she was not going to pander to extortion and threats. Mrs Visetti’s prevarications, she complained, cost her an extra £36 in tax.

  Una intended to write a hagiographical memoir of Radclyffe Hall. Its aim was to eulogize and sanctify both their lives. She did not want Evguenia or Maria Visetti telling the world they had been swindled and deceived. If they made any public utterance, financial penalties would follow.

  Una had a psychopath’s skill to convince herself of the truth of her lies. She called her book The Life and Death of Radclyffe Hall. Death was the lever of her control. Her book was to be ‘sincere and truthful’ a record of ‘lasting & fulfilling devotion’, of perfect lesbian love that nothing could blemish. The world was to learn how Radclyffe Hall’s genius had found expression in her literary masterpieces, her ‘fight for the persecuted of her own kind’ and of course her love for Una.

  It took Una a month to write – from 19 February to 18 March 1945. She could not then remember a word she had written. It was, she maintained, the most surprising experience of her whole life. She supposed this was because a higher power was guiding her hand. The way round her problems of vanity, falsification and omission was to abnegate all responsibility. She claimed that Radclyffe Hall authored it and that she was only the amanuensis, the guided hand. ‘Truly your mantle descended upon me!… quite suddenly I suppose you began to write it and it fell into its place. Not an account that would satisfy Evguenia’s illusions about herself for that is impossible.’ Radclyffe Hall, Una said in a foreword, ‘always dwelt of choice in the palace of truth where I dwelt with her, and I have decided, so far as in me lies, to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.’

  She used the courtroom oath and let slip a telling pun. She wrote of Radclyffe Hall’s unhappy, bullied childhood, her mother’s ‘lunatic rages’ and brutality and of how despite ‘such cruelly uncongenial soil’ she grew up to have a profound personality and be a great artist. Enduring love of Una was the guiding light of her life. Evguenia tried to intrude into their love and blemish their lives. Radclyffe Hall yielded against her better judgement to conciliate her. She showed ‘marvellous patience and charity’ and through all the stress and anguish never stopped loving Una with ‘indestructible devotion’.

  Una read again John’s

  darling little notes of love & missing me when you were away with Evguenia for only a few days. How desperately hard you tried, even under the stress of an intense attraction & infatuation not to hurt me, to spare me all you could, how faithful you really were to me even in the first flare of your surface infidelity; how your generous, pitiful, loyal nature kept you so good, so deeply devoted & loving all through.

  ‘Evguenia’, she said, ‘will never in this world be able to wash out the fact that you treated her well, and she treated you badly and she may think herself fortunate that she and the record are in my merciful hands.’

  Una was well pleased with her book. She called it a monument and thought it conveyed Radclyffe Hall’s creative genius, simplicity, humility, piety, courage and passion. She trusted she had not appeared ‘spiteful or unjust’ to Evguenia. (She described her as ‘v
iolent and uncontrolled as a savage … a bucking bronco, headstrong, wild and inconsistent, with alternating moods of incoherent rage, of abysmal gloom and crazy optimism’). She figured that Evguenia had ‘got all the advantages of the situation’ and continued to do so, so must ‘take the implications and be courageous about it’.

  Una wanted her memoir published so that ‘honour be done to John’. She showed the manuscript to Horatio Lovat Dickson, a director with the publishing house of Macmillan, and to Harold Rubinstein. Lovat Dickson thought it ‘beautifully written’ but not documented or substantial enough. ‘I think such solemn documented biographies are seldom readable and seldom read’, Una said. Lovat Dickson asked a reader at Macmillan to give an appraisal.

  The reader damned the book. Lovat Dickson showed the report to Una. It made her tremble and feel sick. It called her work sketchy and no more than notes for a book. It said there was not enough about the trial of The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall’s lesbianism or Evguenia and the sexual triangle. Most cutting of all, it said Una’s eulogizing accorded Radclyffe Hall an unjustified literary eminence.

  Harold Rubinstein, whom Una called ‘the most Christian of Jews’, wrote a ‘paean of praise’ after reading the manuscript but said that it libelled Evguenia. Una would either have to omit all references to her or contrive to get her consent. He advised her to put the manuscript aside while Evguenia was alive. Una wondered whether to withhold Evguenia’s allowance unless she agreed to publication.

  Lovat Dickson told her that the right biographer would be found. He suggested A. L. Rowse. Una bought a volume of his poems wanting ‘to judge of his mind by the quality of his verse’. The idea was not pursued. She asked Lovat Dickson to write it himself and offered to give him all her papers. He said he was too busy to consider it for some years. Una accepted this as Radclyffe Hall’s and Saint Thomas’s will.