The Trials of Radclyffe Hall by Diana Souhami (interesting novels to read txt) 📕

the dachshunds. It was a portrait that belied her view of herself. Here was the master, not the servant. Romaine knew Una’s power, the giving that was really control. Here was Una the Lady Troubridge, her face screwed to one side to keep her monocle in place. She was not to be messed with. Thin as a reed, there was the threat of bondage in the leather stock, the shirt bleached and starched by a servant, the mannish jacket, the chains and collars, restraining hand on the dog. She had a sleek cap of hair, pearls in her ears, a fob in her pocket and heartlessness in her eyes. One dog sat as instructed and stared submissively. The other stared elsewhere, no doubt at the prospect of John whose link was ever there.

Una hated the portrait. She told Toupie so and refused to believe the resemblance. Romaine had reflected her quintessential misanthropy. Una could not again be on friendly terms with her. Romaine exhibited the portrait at her shows at the Jean Charpentier Gallery in Paris and at the Wildenstein Galleries in New York, but not at the L’Alpine Club in London: ‘Yes your portrait had very great success over there,’ she wrote to Una of her American trip, ‘& was reproduced several times. It was not exhibited in London, I had the impression from Toupie that you did not like it & were worried about the resemblance. I’ll send you some photos.’ The portrait prompted Una to change not her character but her hairstyle – to a flicker of a wave and a quiff.

The Saturday Life took Radclyffe Hall nine months to write. The skills of many typists were taxed as they tried to comply with her needs: ‘This involved never “tapping” while she spoke or while she was reflecting. For as she dictated she continued to polish and the typist had always to be prepared to “X” out at demand any word or sentence and continue her script with the substituted amendment.’ None of them lasted. They were serially fired and complaints lodged with the agency that sent them. Only Una brought the necessary homage and application.

Radclyffe Hall dedicated the book to herself. The Forge she had dedicated to Una and The Unlit Lamp to Ladye. Subsequent books were to ‘Our Three Selves’, the homoousian genius of her art. In reality it was one self, her own. Dedicatees were, like Daisy the imaginary friend of her childhood, aspects of her own needs.

The Saturday Life featured reincarnation, Sabbatarianism and her oddball theories of recurring lives. Like most of her books it was burdened with discarded subplots and floating characters. Una called it the Sidonia book. Sidonia, incarnate on earth seven times, replays previous lives. Her problem, like her author’s, is genius. ‘That’s why I’m morbid. Genius is always despondent. You none of you know how to treat a genius.’ Aged three she shows ‘abnormal aptitudes’. She draws, sculpts, writes poetry, plays the piano perfectly, all without lessons. She reads Swinburne, has residual memories of Attic dances under ilex trees and confounds her mother Lady Shore, an Egyptologist who cannot ‘comprehend Sidonia as the outcome of so discreet a mating’ as she had had with ‘frail, small Sir Godfrey’.

Insinuating through the book, as in all Radclyffe Hall’s work, were coded references to subversive sex. Lady Shore’s best friend, Frances Reide, loves a log fire, uncle’s portrait over the mantelpiece and a room that smells of beeswax, cigarette smoke and flowers. Sidonia wants to lure Frances from her mother:

‘I ask you to kiss me and you won’t!’ she said furiously. ‘Oh, you! You’re all Mother’s! Mother this, Mother that! God! I’m sick of it! Don’t I count at all? … Aren’t I younger than Mother? Aren’t I attractive? Don’t I interest you enough? Frances’ – she began to speak softly now – ’Frances look at me! Don’t you love me? Frances, won’t you be my friend? All, all my friend? I don’t want to marry anyone, I tell you; I just want to work and have you, all of you. Frances, mother would never miss you. Listen, I’m not being beastly about mother, but please, please try to love me a little; I need you much more than she does.’ She laid her hand caressingly on Frances’ arm. ‘Frances, why won’t you love me?’

Frances disengaged her arm very gently and left the studio.

It was a startling (if discarded) theme – the seduction of mother’s lesbian partner. But Radclyffe Hall’s writing is littered with such cameos of psychopathology. To manufacture a son (a problematic aspiration of Radclyffe Hall’s), Sidonia marries David Morgan, a sexy lout with a family estate in Essex. He proposes in the zoo by the jackals’ cage and they marry in church. ‘It was all very neat, very British, very proper … It was all very full of time-honoured words, man’s words, that he printed for his own delectation and believed in for his own peace of mind … It was really a great and desperate adventure dressed up in ridiculous clothes.’

It was also all very dissenting and dark, not comic and lighthearted as its publisher J. W. Arrowsmith supposed. Frances visits the newly-weds. ‘Frances sat smiling the vacant smile of the great unwanted Third.’ David calls her an unsexed, middle-aged virgin and fears she will grow hairs on her chin.

‘Why haven’t you married my dear?’ he asks her.

She thought: ‘Supposing I tried to explain?’ and began to laugh softly to herself.

The son John felt she should by rights have been and wanted herself to father is born on Christmas Day, a Saturday, and named Noel, a latter-day saviour with a lesbian mother.

While writing The Saturday Life Radclyffe Hall began another book, The Cunningham Code. It got nowhere and she abandoned it. Una called these aborted projects ‘trolley books’: ‘to carry her from a fallow period to one of renewed production’. She took as a preamble to it a quote from Okofski:

The herd instinct common alike to animals and