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

great writer, a jeaneous, no less. Her novels of ‘outstanding literary merit’ have titles like The Furrow. She is ‘true genius in chains, in the chains of the flesh’. Valerie Seymour finds her a house in Paris in the rue Jacob. In its grounds is a derelict temple, which Stephen renovates. (Radclyffe Hall filled her book with such allusions for the delectation of friends.)

In the 1914 war, instead of knitting socks in Malvern with Mabel Batten, Stephen, like Toupie Lowther, drives an ambulance in occupied France. She meets in her unit ‘many a one who was even as herself’, CSIs who have ‘crept out of their holes’ and ‘found themselves’ in the ‘whirligig of war’. She gets her face lacerated by flying shrapnel, ‘an honourable scar as a mark of her courage’. Like Toupie she is awarded the Croix de Guerre. She falls for Mary Llewellyn, who was orphaned as a child, is little, obedient, young and uneducated. ‘She knew nothing of life, or of men and women and even less did she know of herself.’ The head of the unit, Mrs Breakspeare, disapproves of the relationship and discourages it. She says ‘it savours a little too much of the schoolroom’.

But Mary is besotted with Stephen. All her life she has been waiting for her. She wants to kiss her ‘more than anything in the world’. Stephen warns her of the price she will pay:

If you come to me, Mary, the world will abhor you, will persecute you, will call you unclean. Our love may be faithful even unto death and beyond – yet the world will call it unclean. We may harm no living creature by our love; we may grow more perfect in understanding and in charity because of our loving; but all this will not save you from the scourge of a world that will turn away its eyes from your noblest action, finding only corruption and vileness in you. You will see men and women defiling each other, laying the burden of their sins upon their children. You’ll see unfaithfulness, lies and deceit among those whom the world views with approbation. You will find that many have grown hard of heart, have grown greedy, selfish, cruel and lustful; and then you will turn to me and will say: ‘You and I are more worthy of respect than these people. Why does the world persecute us, Stephen?’ And I shall answer; ‘Because in this world there is only toleration for the so called normal!’ And when you come to me for protection I shall say: ‘I cannot protect you, Mary, the world has deprived me of my right to protect; I am utterly helpless, I can only love you.’

Mary is not put off. None of that matters at all. ‘Can’t you understand that all that I am belongs to you, Stephen?’ she says. Like Radclyffe Hall and Mabel Batten, they go to Tenerife and Santa Cruz. They stay in the same hotels and villas as they did. In Paris they set up home with a dog called David in the house with the temple in the garden. Stephen pays the bills and writes sensationally successful books. Mary does wifely things like shopping, marvelling at Stephen’s prose and lunching with her at Pruniers.

‘Being a woman’, she wants ordinary things like friendly neighbours and weekend visits to in-laws. Stephen has ‘county instincts’. She is law-abiding and wears berets and double-breasted suits. As a couple, they are devoted and respectable. But they are ostracized. Lady Anna, beastly as ever, will not let Mary near Morton. And Lady Massey who was once a friend cancels an invitation for Stephen and Mary to spend Christmas at Branscombe Court: ‘Of course a woman in my position with all eyes upon her has to be extra careful’, she says.

Jonathan Brockett warns Stephen that Mary has become socially isolated. Stephen takes her to Valerie Seymour’s salon. They befriend Pat whose ankles ‘were too strong and too heavy for those of a female’; Jamie from the Highlands who is a ‘trifle unhinged’ and whose friend Barbara gives her awful haircuts; Wanda, a struggling transsexual Polish painter; Hortense, Comtesse de Kerguelen, ‘a very great lady’ and Margaret Roland, Valerie Seymour’s current partner, a poetess with a voice ‘like a boy’s on the verge of breaking’.

Stephen and Mary dance together in clubs like Le Narcisse and Alec’s, ‘to which flocked the battered remnants of men whom their fellow men had at last stamped under’. Like Brockett these men have soft white hands and ‘the terrible eyes of the invert’. Stephen fears Mary will herself become a battered remnant unless she has a husband, children, and normal friends. She speaks of prejudiced people who are ‘socially murdering’ them. In an unlikely denouement she pushes Mary into the arms of her own old admirer Martin Hallam. To make Mary feel betrayed and therefore able to leave, Stephen feigns spending the night with Valerie Seymour.

Stephen then falls ever deeper into The Wells of Martyrdom. Her purpose in life is to fight the cause of inverts. ‘In their madness to become articulate through her, they were tearing her to pieces’:

They possessed her. Her barren womb became fruitful – it ached with the fierce yet helpless children who would clamour in vain for their right to salvation. They would turn first to God, and then to the world, and then to her. They would cry out accusing: ‘We have asked for bread; will you give us a stone? Answer us: will you give us a stone? You, God, in Whom we, the outcast, believe; you, world, into which we are pitilessly born; you, Stephen, who have drained our cup to the dregs – we have asked for bread; will you give us a stone? … Stephen, Stephen, speak with your God and ask Him why He has left us forsaken.’

And now there was only one voice, one demand; her own voice into which those millions had entered. A voice like the awful, deep