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

presents difficult and still unsolved problems. The poignant situations which thus arise are here set forth so vividly and yet with such complete absence of offence, that we must place Radclyffe Hall’s book on a high level of distinction.

John and Una went to Turandot at Covent Garden, which neither of them enjoyed. Poucette was sick in the car en route to the Windsor Dog Show where she came only third in her class. Men from Maples came to fit new carpets and curtains and a sunny room at the back of the house was fitted out as a sitting-room for Una who had shingles, thrush and an everlasting cold.

An American publisher for The Well of Loneliness proved hard to find. Doubleday, Houghton Mifflin and Harpers all turned it down. Then, at a literary party on 23 May, Radclyffe Hall talked to Blanche Knopf, wife and business partner of Alfred Knopf. She liked the avant-garde and had flirted with the idea of publishing Gertrude Stein. She evinced great interest. A copy of the manuscript was delivered to her at the Carlton Hotel that night. Six days later Radclyffe Hall dined alone with her. Una spent the evening with Minna. Blanche Knopf asked for an option on the book until the middle of June. She wanted to take legal advice in New York. Radclyffe Hall wanted unequivocal and immediate acceptance. She discussed strategy with Audrey, gave Mrs Knopf a grand dinner at the Savoy and tried to fathom her intentions at a session with Mrs Leonard.

Three weeks later Una wrote in her diary of a ‘thousand alarms & excursions anent Knopf & book’. (Both Una and Radclyffe Hall favoured the Old English ‘anent’ instead of ‘about’ or ‘in reference to’.) The contract Knopf offered had a clause that made Radclyffe Hall financially responsible for any action taken against the book under Manhattan law. Advised by Theodore Goddard, she instructed her American agent, Carl Brandt, to give Mrs Knopf a week to withdraw the offending clause. If she refused, he should offer the book to Harcourt Brace.

Proofs arrived from Cape and John and Una checked that not a word had been changed or deleted. They put their furs into store for the summer and Una ordered a divan and cushions for her new room. Cape intended to use Havelock Ellis’s piece as a foreword, but wanted to change the phrase ‘various aspects of sexual inversion’, to ‘one particular aspect of sexual life’. Sexual inversion, he felt, might offend sensitive minds.

Havelock Ellis agreed the change, but was uncomfortable at being dragooned into seeming so intimately to support this particular book. Radclyffe Hall was determined to blaze his endorsement. ‘The thought of your appreciation of The Well of Loneliness sustains me perpetually’, she wrote to him on 4 June. ‘I say to myself, “What need you care what the fools of this world say, think or do, since one of the wise and great has set his seal on your work.”’

She sent him handkerchiefs, regretted his reluctance to be her guest at supper and let him know that equal deference came for him from Una, ‘the friend who has shared my home for thirteen years and who is prepared to stand shoulder to shoulder with me.’ ‘The mate of the invert must be strong unto death and not everyone can stay the course’, she told him. (She was an invert, Una was an invert’s mate.)

No such solidarity was accorded Blanche Knopf, whose equivocation tried John’s nerves. ‘My patience is completely at an end’, she wrote to Brandt as the Knopf deadline drew near:

It is not that I do not like Mrs Knopf personally, I do; but I am accustomed to dealing with men in business, to going perfectly straight for a point, and above all to sticking to essentials. I find it both difficult and tedious to deal with a woman and this I have several times told her quite frankly, asking her to settle all business details with my agents … it is better for women to keep out of business negotiations.

Perhaps neither she, Audrey or Una came into the disparaging category of women. Inverts and inverts’ mates were men enough to stick to essentials and get to the point.

Blanche Knopf amended the contract and on 26 June Radclyffe Hall signed it at Audrey’s office with Una as witness. She then went into action. No detail of publication was to be left unsupervised. Knopf were to typeset from Cape’s proofs. She had ticked each page in red and if any word was altered or omitted she would ‘consider it a breach of contract’. Blanche Knopf was on no account to use the publicity photograph Doubleday chose when promoting Adam’s Breed. It made Radclyffe Hall look, she said, like ‘a middle-age gent given to imbibing, or worse still a stout old lady masquerading’.

Proofs were corrected, copies collated, prelims prepared. At the end of June, Cape decided to bring forward publication to 24 July. Compton Mackenzie’s novel Extraordinary Women was to be published by Martin Seeker in September. It was a spoof on society lesbians, set on Capri during the 1914–18 war. In it he mocked the clothes, monocles, affairs and lives of Radclyffe Hall, Una, Romaine Brooks and Natalie Barney. He compared them to ‘peculiar Aeolian fauna’ and made them farcical in appearance and behaviour. They would, he said, make ‘Freud blush, Adler blench, Jung lower his eyes and Dr Ernest Jones write his next book in Latin.’

His book was humorously malicious and designed to entrench prejudice, not dispel it. Cape and Radclyffe Hall saw it as competition and in the time-honoured publishing panic of which book the world will want, they aimed to get there first. Radclyffe Hall added £150 to Cape’s £300 advertising budget and, in a metaphor as mixed as her depiction of gender, told him to use the money in ‘the best and wisest way to defeat our rivals and steer The Well of Loneliness to success’.

She aspired to moral, financial