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

married you sweetheart. It must be because you love me so much; all my life I have wanted someone to love me.’

Sex is a veiled problem and she does not have the children she wanted. Crisis comes when Gian-Luca’s hero, Ugo Doria, books a table at the Doric. He arrives with a louche woman, is bragging, drunk and insecure. Gian-Luca sees ‘a large, foolish, lovesick viveur of sixty’. Ugo Doria is of course Gian-Luca’s father though neither knows it. There follows from Gian-Luca ‘a tirade on the man who conceived him then abandoned him’. He rails at ‘all the years of his lonely, outraged childhood, of his painful adolescence, his maturity of toil with its bitter will to succeed’.

Men seldom behave well towards women in Radclyffe Hall’s books. Gian-Luca becomes crazy and unpleasant, hits his wife in the face when she serves him breakfast, gives his customers salmon when they ask for oysters and wants ‘to grasp something that was infinitely stronger than he was’. He gives his money to a blind child beggar and wanders round Italy telling peasants to show mercy to their beasts. ‘On they must stumble to calvary as Another had stumbled before them’, he says of cattle led to the slaughterhouse, ‘… poor, lowly, uncomprehending disciples, following dumbly in the footsteps of God who had surely created all things for joy, yet had died for the blindness of the world.’

Back in London he tells Maddalena he is going away ‘to find God in great solitude’. She packs his bag. He heads for the New Forest on foot and feels ‘like a lover on the eve of ultimate fulfilment’. (Radclyffe Hall’s father painted landscapes and rode horses in the New Forest.) He lives rough, birds eat out of his hands and he gets followed by a Roan pony. He asks the rabbits, ‘Have you got a God?’ After a year of it he finds God in his heart ‘and in every poor struggling human heart that was capable of one kind impulse’. He dies of starvation blessing God as he does so and his body is laid out in a stable. ‘The path of the world was the path of His sorrow and the sorrow of God was the hope of the world, for to suffer with God was to share in the joy of his ultimate triumph over sorrow.’

It was all very like the Bible. Given that these were years of literary innovation it was surprising that publishers liked it. James Joyce had published Ulysses in 1922, T. S. Eliot The Waste Land, Virginia Woolf was writing To the Lighthouse in 1925. H. D. and Edith Sitwell, Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein, were all breaking rules of content and form. Radclyffe Hall took no notice of their heresies. Adam’s Breed was for readers resistant to stylistic innovation and modernism. It was all about redemption, suffering and Jesus Christ. The French did not take to it and in the States it sold less than four thousand copies.

There was hubris in the seeming humility of the story. Una compounded a deception. ‘We followed Gian-Luca step by step to the New Forest,’ she wrote, ‘we trudged and waded in abominable weather.’ It was not at all like that. Bradley, their liveried chauffeur, drove them there. They stayed at Balmer Lawn in the village of Brockenhurst and lunched at Winchester and the White Hart, Whitchurch. Radclyffe Hall wrote the chapters about Gian-Luca’s demise in the Grand Hotel, Brighton. She and Una had breakfast in bed, sat in the sun, had stout and oysters for lunch at Chiesmans and potted meat for tea. It was all very well for her to extol starving to death in the woods when she was so well off. Her point of interest was herself and her interpretation of her life. She minded very much about cruelty to animals and hated the denial of their rights, but she indulged her pity. It was all very well in the morning to dictate lines like, ‘In as much as your Christ had pity, so must every poor beast be Christian’, then lunch on veal at the Berkeley Grill and in the afternoon buy a tigerskin coat for herself, a leopardskin one for Una and pearl earrings for them both. She gave money to beggars and to the Church but she was not egalitarian. Servants, waiters and tramps had their quarters. She viewed the aristocracy and Christian martyrs as the true elite. But she was also contradictory. She subverted what she had and believed, deconstructed her God and her politics, built up her houses in order to fracture them and in a way did the same with her relationships and work.

She finished Adam’s Breed at the Grand Hotel at two in the morning on Sunday 8 November. Una prepared one manuscript for Cassell, another for the American publisher Doubleday. It was then parties and shopping, first nights and dog shows. ‘We are hugely enjoying our well earned holiday’, Una wrote. They had dinner with Toupie and Fabienne at the Kit Kat Club. The vet came and clipped the wings of Sappho the parrot, they bought a cockatoo from Gamages, went to a party at Violet Hunt’s and to a matinée of Where the Rainbow Ends. John cried all the way home.

At Christmas they went as usual to Ida Temple at Datchet. Andrea travelled there by train with Dickie and the maid. John, Una and the dogs went by car. In London on New Year’s Eve, John and Una ‘intercepted’ a letter to Andrea from her boyfriend. She was lectured ‘for a long time’. Minna was told and the doctor was again called. Andrea was sent to her father for a fortnight, then given another lecture before being sent back to her current boarding school, St George’s at Harpenden. James Garvin, Viola’s second husband, tried to intervene on Andrea’s behalf. ‘Don’t repress my little favourite Andrea too much’, he wrote. ‘She’s full of sap and must follow nature. She