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

Paris bars and the casinos of the Riviera. In Paris they hired a car to take them shopping. They bought a dog called Tyke. They lunched at the Champs-Elysées Grill, then had tea with Colette and took her chocolates. At night with Natalie Barney and her current lover, Mimi Franchetti, they toured the lesbian clubs, the Select, the Regina, the Dingo. ‘Home abut 2.30’, Una wrote. At Natalie’s Temple of Love they met her former lover the Duchess of Clermont Tonnerre and the Broadway actress Eva Le Gallienne, whose affair with Mercedes de Acosta had come to an end. They had dinner with Toupie and Fabienne and saw at the Théâtre Femina La Prisonnière by Edouard Bourdet, based on the love affair of Violet Trefusis and the Princesse de Polignac. ‘Awful rot, but fun’, Una said of it. They drove to the cemetery at Passy to put artificial violets on the grave of Renée Vivien, another of Natalie’s erstwhile lovers. She wrote poems about ‘nights of savage desire’, drank alcohol and eau de cologne and died when she was thirty-one. In their twenties, she and Natalie had travelled to Lesbos together to revive ‘the golden age of Sappho’.

At Bagnoles John and Una took the thermal baths, were massaged and manicured and had their hearts and blood pressure checked. Then they went on to the Riviera, to the casinos of Cannes and Nice and to the Grand Hotel, Monte Carlo.

Radclyffe Hall returned home a best-selling author. Mr Gentry, publicity manager at Cassell, said Adam’s Breed was going so well no extra advertising was needed. G. K. Chesterton’s latest novel had had to wait while they printed three thousand more. Radclyffe Hall talked to the Writers’ Club about why she had written the book, to the Writers’ Circle on the ‘genesis and craftsmanship’ of it and to the Bookman’s Circle about ‘true realism’ in fiction. She was ‘lionised’ at a PEN Club dinner, a Women Writers lunch and a dinner at the Society of Authors, ‘decorations worn’. She was caricatured by ‘Tom Titt’, ‘Pax’ and ‘Matt’ and photographed with bow tie, cape and monocle.

In November Violet Hunt phoned to say Adam’s Breed had been shortlisted for the Femina Prize. Writing to her cousin Winifred, Jane Caruth’s daughter, Radclyffe Hall said:

it is far and away the best thing I have ever written. I shall not give it you, you must buy it yourself in America for the good of the author.

Isn’t it amusing that I should have become quite a well known writer? I sometimes cannot understand it myself. But there it is, it has certainly come to pass … Lady Troubridge asks to be remembered to you.

She won the prize. Messages and letters of congratulation poured in. Photographers and interviewers called from the Sphere, the Sketch and Mirror. Photographs of Miss Radclyffe Hall and Colette were printed side by side. Mr Gentry told her the book was on display in every London bookshop. The prizegiving was held at the Institut Français. The novelist John Galsworthy presented the award. Writers and friends gave praise, including Sheila Kaye-Smith, Beatrice Harraden, May Sinclair.

At high mass John and Una gave thanks, then went to Ladye’s grave and to seven churches. At Holland Street they then hosted a party for seventy. It went on until two-thirty in the morning. Ernest Thesiger, Helen Beauclerc, Lewis Casson, Sybil Thorndike and lots of famous people were there. ‘Half the ladies present favoured masculine mode and half the latest Victorian effect’, the papers said. J. Rosamund Johnson, Taylor Gordon and Florence Mills sang negro spirituals: ‘Deep river, my home is over Jordan’ and ‘Oh what a shame I ain’t nobody’s baby’. Una called it all ‘a huge success’. And even while enjoying this success Radclyffe Hall was halfway through her most important book which began as Stephen and became The Well of Loneliness and in which she knew she was laying her now glittering career on the line.

STEPHEN GORDON

17

Something of the acorn about her

The Well of Loneliness is a cautionary saga about the fate of a ‘congenital sexual invert’. Dubbed ‘the Bible of lesbianism’, in the telling there is no irony and few moments of fun. Radclyffe Hall described its hero, Stephen Gordon, as ‘the finest type of the inverted woman’. She intended it to be a pioneer work and said it had a social duty, a threefold purpose:

To encourage inverts to face up to a hostile world in their true colours, and this with dignity and courage. To spur all classes of inverts to make good through hard work, faithful and loyal attachments and sober and useful living. To bring normal men and women of good will to a fuller and more tolerant understanding of the inverted.

She wanted it read by schoolteachers, welfare workers, doctors, psychologists and parents so that they might ‘cease tormenting and condemning their offspring and thus doing irreparable harm to the highly sensitized nervous system that is characteristic of inversion.’ Here, she seemed to suggest, was a manual for the world on what not to do to these weird ones in their midst.

‘You can’t touch filth without getting filthy’, her mother said to her when the book caused a stir. While Radclyffe Hall was writing it, she and her mother had a series of violent rows. Their only contact seemed to be when Mrs Visetti wanted money. In December 1926 in one of her rages she fired the cook who, she said, drank, was a thief, and filthy dirty. There was a scene, she called the police and accused the cook of hitting her. All servants in her London house including the daily cleaner then left or were fired.

The Visettis went to the Metropole Hotel, Brighton for Christmas as guests of a friend. On 2 January 1927 Radclyffe Hall, working twelve hours a day on Stephen, as her Well of Loneliness was still then called, received a call from the hotel to come at once – her mother