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

of the Daily Mail, who was in her twenties and lived in Chelsea with her partner Olive Rinder, interviewed her for a satirical article on ‘How Other Women Run Their Homes’. ‘If I spy specks of dust I have to control my itch to remove them, for I have the housewife’s seeing eye’, Radclyffe Hall was supposed to have said. Irons and Rinder, as Una called them, joined their set. Violet Hunt, who had so helped Radclyffe Hall win the Prix Femina, wrote, ‘I want to see your new novel. I believe I shall like it better than Adam’s Breed.’ Toupie heard screeds of it read aloud.

Radclyffe Hall’s assertion that The Well of Loneliness was fictional over details of place and people was not true. She did not invent in her novels. They were storehouses of her experiences and preoccupations. Her settings for the book were Malvern, the lesbian salons of Paris after the First World War, the Canary Islands where she went with Mabel Batten, the ambulance unit in occupied France as described by Toupie. Friends were in the narrative undisguised. The ‘brilliant’ playwright Jonathan Brockett, tall, sardonic, thin, was Noël Coward even to the bags under his eyes and ‘feminine’ white hands. The dilettantish writer, Valerie Seymour, with ‘very blue, very lustrous eyes’ and ‘masses of thick fair hair’, who rules the lesbian salon life of Paris, was Natalie Barney. ‘Her love affairs would fill quite three volumes, even after they had been expurgated’, Radclyffe Hall wrote. The swipe was pure Una about Natalie.

The Well of Loneliness had bits of pathological case history, religious parable, propaganda tract and Mills & Boon romance. From Havelock Ellis she took the idea of the ‘congenital invert’. From the church she said God the Father created all things. To justify desire, she invoked sexology and the Lord. Her prose style was lofty, with words like betoken and hath. Stephen Gordon makes biblical utterances: ‘How long O Lord, how long!’ and ‘I have the mark of Cain upon me.’ But friends, everyday life and different constructions of lesbianism kept sneaking in to make the book more interesting: Natalie Barney’s soirées, the suffragettes’ revolt against patriarchy, Toupie and her ambulance unit.

Radclyffe Hall was too troubled a person to write an untroubled book, but she might have acknowledged the privilege, seductions, freedom and fun that graced her daily life. She indicted the ‘ruthless pursuing millions, bent upon the destruction of her and her kind’, but seemed to endorse the value system that saw marital, reproductive sex as best. Her model of ‘the finest type of the inverted woman’ was scary and doomed. Stephen Gordon was a transsexual, ill at ease with herself and her body, ‘her strangely ardent yet sterile body … she longed to maim it, for it made her feel cruel’.

Nothing overly sexy goes on in The Well of Loneliness. ‘She kissed her full on the lips like a lover’ is the subversive depth of the book. Lovers do spend the night in bed with each other, but they are ‘in the grip of Creation, of Creation’s terrific urge to create; the urge that will sometimes sweep forward blindly alike into fruitful and sterile channels’. (From time to time Radclyffe Hall said she wanted to father a child.)

When she is twenty-one, Stephen Gordon inherits a whack of money, like her author. She starts an affair with Angela Crossby, an American wife of the disaffected sort Radclyffe Hall liked to seduce. ‘As their eyes met and held each other something vaguely disturbing stirred in Stephen.’ Angela has a homophobic toad of a husband, Ralph, who, like Oliver Hoare, forbids his wife to see ‘this freak’. ‘That sort of thing wants putting down at birth’, he says. Ralph gives Angela ‘flaccid embraces’, has a ‘sly pornographic expression’, is given to ‘arrogant masculine bragging’ and goes to bed in pink silk pyjamas. Stephen, by contrast, ‘would sacrifice her life for the sake of this woman’, gives her pearls, wears white crêpe-de-Chine pyjamas and drives a red ‘long bodied sixty horse power Metallurgique’.

‘Can you marry me?’ Angela asks her. Marriage was an issue for Radclyffe Hall. She believed it should be an entitlement for lesbians. She described Una as her mate and said were she herself a man in the biological sense they would have married. But Una might not have wanted to marry such a man of a man, feeling as she did about sex. Nor, because of the Catholic Church, had she divorced Troubridge. In the religion they chose for the signposts it gave, homosexuality and adultery were sins.

It was all morally and semantically awkward. ‘I cannot keep the fifth commandment’, Radclyffe Hall wrote of her dishonourable parents. It was not the only commandment she could not keep. And yet, in her fiction and in her life, she kept pitting herself against manmade edicts, patriarchal values, in order to be martyred the more. In The Well of Loneliness Stephen writes a love letter to Angela, ‘page after page … What a letter!’

You know how I love you, with my soul and my body; if it’s wrong, grotesque, unholy – have pity … I’m some awful mistake – God’s mistake – I don’t know if there are any more like me, I pray not, for their sakes, because it’s pure hell.

Ralph shows the letter to Stephen’s mother, Lady Anna, who banishes Stephen from Morton. ‘I would rather see you dead at my feet’, she says and calls her a scourge, vile, filthy, corrupt, against nature and against God. ‘As a man loves a woman that was how I loved – protectively like my father’, Stephen declaims. ‘In my hour of great need you utterly failed me; you turned me away like some unclean thing … If my father had lived he would have shown pity, whereas you showed me none.’

So much for mother; no vestigial maternal understanding, incapable of a hug for her daughter or a word of care. Work is Stephen’s palliative. She is a