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

square shouldered and flat chested, who in her time has dallied with the ladies ‘in accordance with the dictates of her nature’. Puddle, as Stephen calls her, knows Stephen has ‘real red hot talent’ and will be a great writer. ‘Face yourself calmly and bravely, do the best with your burden,’ she tells her charge.

‘The invert’s most deadly enemies are not infrequently his or her parents’, Radclyffe Hall wrote in notes for an unpublished article about her book. Lady Anna loathes her daughter Stephen with a quintessential recoil. ‘All your life I’ve felt a kind of physical repulsion, a desire not to touch or be touched by you’, she tells her. Stephen is ‘ill at ease and ungracious’ at garden parties. She shakes hands too strongly and has nothing in common with other girls. She prefers men ‘because of their blunt, open outlook’, but they find her too clever, too like themselves: ‘They were oak trees preferring the feminine ivy. It might cling rather close, it might finally strangle, it frequently did, and yet they preferred it, and this being so, they resented Stephen, suspecting something of the acorn about her.’

Stephen meets Martin Hallam, who owns farms in British Columbia. They are ‘perfect companions’. He rides, hunts, fences and touches trees ‘with gentle pitying fingers’. In Stephen’s view they are like brothers, but he ‘trembles before his own passion’ for her. When he tells her he loves her ‘over her colourless face there was spreading an expression of the deepest repulsion – terror and repulsion and something else too, a look as of outrage’. She feels that ‘the loneliest place in this world is the no-man’s land of sex’ and that she has more in common with her horse, Raftery.

Why a man should desire a woman who finds him sexually repulsive is an unexplored theme. ‘Is there anything strange about me Father that I should have felt as I did about Martin?’ Stephen asks poor Sir Philip, who shuts himself in his study making marginal notes about her in Psychopathia Sexualis and Sexual Anomalies and Perversities. ‘It had come. It fell on his heart like a blow.’ He knows that his daughter is a Congenital Sexual Invert. ‘His loins ached with pity for this fruit of his loins … You have maimed my Stephen’, he wants to say to God.

He and Lady Anna quarrel about the fruit of their loins. It would be a disaster if Stephen were to marry, he tells her. Anna is jealous of Stephen’s closeness to him; ‘she has taken you from me, my own child, the unspeakable cruelty of it’, she says. Then Sir Philip gets killed by a falling tree. His dying words are: ‘“Anna – it’s Stephen – listen. It’s Stephen – our child – she’s, she’s – it’s Stephen – not like –” … His head fell back rather sharply then lay very still upon Anna’s bosom.’

He might have been going to say she’s not like other girls, but mother knew that already.

18

She kissed her full on the lips

Radclyffe Hall had no abiding interest in the psychopathology of sex. Congenital inversion was not the stuff of daily life or popular fiction. She and Una were soon back to their normal reading matter – Crazy Pavements, A Misjudged Monarch, Mother’s Axe – and to first nights in the West End: Noël Coward’s ‘awful play’ Sirocco Days and Thunder in the Air at the Duke of York’s.

She wanted authority of a clinical sort to get her book about the unfortunate Stephen Gordon past the censor and to hush cries of ‘filth’. From Fox-Pitt, the Troubridges and her mother, she knew the force of homophobia. Her book was a protest against what she called ‘the deadly campaign of silence’:

Not only has this constituted a grave danger to the inverts themselves who, in addition to all else have not hitherto dared to proclaim their existence, (a most undesirable state of affairs and one likely to render them morbid,) but this campaign of silence has been a grave danger to a hetero-sexual society, that has resolutely refused to face a problem which was and is above all things social.

As each chapter was typed, a ‘special copy’ was put aside marked ‘for the attention of Dr Havelock Ellis’. She wrote and told him he was ‘the greatest living authority on the tragical problem of sexual inversion’ and asked him if he would write a preface. He said he always refused such requests but that he was deeply interested in the subject, ‘having had many friends, both men and women, who were, as they sometimes say, “so”’, and he would like to read her book when it was finished. Radclyffe Hall persisted. A preface from him would give gravitas to her story. She called at his house uninvited and left a sycophantic letter. Her tenacity was rewarded. Havelock Ellis agreed that if the book appealed to him, he would ‘express an opinion that might be used’.

By November 1927 Radclyffe Hall was on page 780 of Stephen. She was more ambitious for this than for any other of her books. Another literary award for Adam’s Breed – the James Tait Black Prize – made her certain her new book would cause a stir. Una did a word count and came up with the title The Well of Loneliness. She read chunks of it aloud to Audrey and they all talked of how later chapters should develop.

Radclyffe Hall prepared for fame. Charles Buchel did a drawing of her, which she wanted used for publicity. She ordered new uniforms for the servants and two fur coats for Una – a Persian lamb and a mink. She had the house redecorated and recarpeted, bought leather chairs and more oak furniture. And she socialized with the lesbian haut monde, all of whom anticipated publication of her book. At dinner at Gabrielle Enthoven’s she met Mercedes de Acosta, who was in love with Greta Garbo. Evelyn Irons, the Women’s Page editor