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

to primitive peoples, while strengthening the whole, must of necessity weaken the individual. What must be called, for want of a better term, the Family instinct, is but another and more specialised phase of the herd instinct, and as such must operate strongly against both mental and spiritual growth.

At heart Radclyffe Hall rejected the defining rules of society: family, parental authority, gender. She wove her fiction round her like a cocoon, a safe place where her fantasy self grew. The Cunningham fragment aired her preoccupations: a titled landowner in a baronial hall sires daughters though he wanted sons. The mother cannot love these daughters that disappoint her husband. One of the daughters feels like a boy trapped in a girl’s body.

Four days after she finished The Saturday Life – on 29 May 1924 – Radclyffe Hall bought 37 Holland Street. It was a grand residence for a writer of standing. It was like a country house with large rooms and casement windows. As ever, there was much to be done to bring it to standard – parquet floors to be laid, gas fires installed.

John and Una planned to travel all summer while the builders worked. They left for Paris in June. John said she felt exhausted and drained. A varicose vein in her leg hurt. At the Hôtel Normande were two telegrams from Audrey Heath. Newman Flower of Cassell, much impressed by The Unlit Lamp, offered autumn publication, a £50 advance, fifteen per cent royalties on the first 3,000 copies, twenty per cent after that and the first option on her next two novels.

This was the great event of the year for John and Una. They had a joyful tea with Natalie Barney, hurried to London next day and booked in at the Grand Central Hotel. John signed Cassell’s contract over lunch at the Berkeley with Audrey. She and Una then worked into the night and cut The Unlit Lamp to 108,000 words.

Back in Paris they again visited Natalie. Una read aloud from The Forge the passages based on Romaine – about beauty, riches and Bohemian ways. Romaine came in and according to Una ‘made a hideous scene abusing The Forge, John, & Natalie like a fishwife!’ She thought the writing trite and superficial and the portrait of herself ridiculous. She was vexed at their coolness over her portrait of Una and irritated by their impenetrable double act of aggrandizement.

John and Una moved on to Bagnoles-de-l’Orne in Normandy. For a month they ‘took the waters’, lazed on the hotel terrace and went to the casino. Audrey sent out proofs of The Unlit Lamp, Una corrected them in a day and sent them back by the evening post. In gratitude John bought her an ivory and gold bracelet. Una viewed it as a trophy of love.

‘Great fuss made of John’, Una wrote in her diary about the party given for them by their friends Vere Hutchinson and Budge Burroughes when they got back to London at the end of July. Violet Hunt was there, Leonard Rees, editor of the Sunday Times, Michael Arlen, best-selling author of The Green Hat and Margaret Irwin, author of Still She Wished for Company. John invited Leonard Rees to lunch at the Savoy. He then invited her to his party where she met E. V. Lucas the Chairman of Methuen, St John Adcock editor of the Bookman, the writer Rebecca West, the publisher John Murray, Alec Waugh literary critic of the Sunday Times. It was the way to get famous, the way to get known. ‘Nine years’, Una wrote in her diary on 1 August. She circled the date, went to mass and gave thanks.

The Unlit Lamp was published to good reviews. The Daily Telegraph called it ‘a novel of uncommon power and fidelity to life’, the Observer said it was ‘strong and quiet – a very moving picture of a character refreshingly fine’. Romeike and Curtice sent five reviews ‘all magnificent’. Ida Wylie praised it in the Queen. Cassell advertised it on the clock tower of St Pancras Station. John and Una drove to admire this, then went on to Harrods and The Times Bookshop to note with pleasure that all copies had been sold. Mr Francis of Cassell’s publicity department had tea with them, stayed to dinner and got drunk. ‘It was awful’, Una wrote.

In October Una had ‘electricity’ treatment for her nerves, venereal disease or both and John resigned from the Society for Psychical Research. Being a famous author now took all her time. They took a week’s break in the Grand Hotel, Folkestone – they always had room 455. They walked through the town looking in bookshops for The Unlit Lamp. In the evenings Una read aloud The Broken Bow. John began writing The World, a ‘trolley book’ about a dead cat, an asthmatic bank clerk and a German landlady. More happily perhaps, in the general election the Conservatives had a landslide victory and Mrs Leonard, in a now-rare sitting, predicted Twonnie would be great. Newman Flower who was a client of hers had told her so.

John and Una moved into the Holland Street house. Once again they created the illusion of a settled home. Taylor’s Depository delivered the huge refectory tables, John bought a ‘beautiful sideboard’ from Narramores and a Steinway piano. It took a full day to shelve their 2,000 books and another to supervise the hanging of their pictures, their bewhiskered relatives, Sargent’s portrait of Ladye, the Madonna and Child, the crucifixions, the pastoral landscapes.

Their maids wore starched aprons and caps; the chauffeur was in livery. Father Hague came to bless the house. He came to lunch and he stayed to tea. John and Una declared themselves enchanted with it all. It was convenient for Brompton Oratory, the parks, the shops. They shared a bedroom because the rooms were disparate sizes and they did not want to be on separate floors. ‘John and I breakfasted in our bedroom’, Una wrote every day until the year’s end.

Andrea arrived from boarding