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

They lunched with Wilette Kershaw who told them that one of her three ex-husbands had dramatized The Well of Loneliness. He had added new characters and made it more cheerful. John thought her ‘mad and blasphemous’. She and Una went to see her in a play advertised as ‘banned’, called Maya. The Well of Loneliness was said to be ‘coming soon’. John found it all ‘an awful shock’. She sent Wilette Kershaw a letter that was more patronizing than amusing:

Dear Miss Kershaw

I know you would wish me to be as perfectly honest & sincere with you as you have been with me.

Your performance last night, so essentially feminine and appealing, the very salient natural personal elements that went to enhance that appeal, only served to crystallise the doubts I have had from the first as to the advisability of your playing the part of Stephen Gordon.

I am not losing sight for a moment of the latitude afforded by fine acting. But when an actress allows herself to be lured by personal enthusiasm into undertaking a part that is essentially foreign to both her natural charm & her individual beauty of appearance, & can only achieve an impersonation by a negation of those things that have won her her public, she not only risks the right interpretation of the part, but she risks for herself losing all that public who want her to be that which they have grown to love & admire.

Dear Miss Kershaw, for both your sake & mine, you would be mad to cast yourself as Stephen Gordon.

Radclyffe Hall sent back the £100 advance, asked for the return by registered post of her copy of the contract, then left with Una for the Grand Hotel, Bagnoles, driven there by a ‘mad, drunk & indecent chauffeur’.

Wilette Kershaw did not reply. Una kept phoning and eventually got through to ‘a vague & irate friend’. Yes, the cheque had been received, Miss Kershaw would answer when she had a moment. Wilette Kershaw then wrote that she had no intention of abandoning the project and would keep her options open about who would play the part of Stephen Gordon.

Radclyffe Hall again became enmeshed in the process of the law. She sought consolation from it that it was never going to provide. She sent wires to Harold Rubinstein and Theodore Goddard and wrote a bitter letter to Dorothea Fassett. She made much of the fact that her copy of the contract had a missing page and was therefore in her view void. She said that if the contract was not cancelled within a fortnight she would hold the London Play Company responsible.

There was muddle and blame. Wilette Kershaw did not answer the high-handed letters showered at her. Dorothea Fassett passed the problem to Audrey Heath. Audrey wrote regretting the letters John had sent directly to Wilette Kershaw. These showed, she said, that John wanted to extricate herself from the contract because of a change of mind. Wilette Kershaw had not defaulted on the agreed terms. ‘Probably we are in the right on a slender technical thread, but it is a very moot point as to whether a court of law would adjudicate on that and not on the general intention of the parties. Shall I get you a solicitor’s opinion?’

Una sent an irate wire to Audrey. She was extremely distressed by her letter which seemed to be supporting Dorothea Fassett. John, she said, could not rush to London so soon after her thermal baths. Her veins were ‘soft as pulp’ and it would ‘asking for phlebitis’. They would curtail their treatment and return to Paris. Audrey must meet them on Thursday 12 September as John’s guest at the Hotel Osborne. Meanwhile she was to make no concessions to Wilette Kershaw. ‘We both think it very obvious that you are not (as you think) in touch with the whole situation.’

Distressed at the thought of failing them, Audrey took all the relevant paperwork to Paris and spent three days trying to revoke the contract. But Wilette Kershaw would neither accept repayment of her advance nor relinquish her rights. And as a further trial Theodore Goddard wrote that Mrs Visetti’s solicitor had contacted him. She needed money for an operation.

Paris was hot and the ease of the holiday gone. John and Una could not reclaim their usual rooms at the Osborne. Those available were noisy. At dinner with Audrey, John nearly fainted. She reiterated her dislike of doing business with women and told her not to have further dealings with the London Play Company or to ‘recommend her luckless authors to them any more’.

Audrey was never again quite in favour. Radclyffe Hall summoned Theodore Goddard. She met him at Boulogne and instructed him to sue the London Play Company and to injunct Wilette Kershaw. Goddard also thought the contract invalid because of the omitted page. ‘There is no contract’, he said. He drew up a High Court writ designed to stop Wilette Kershaw claiming she had the right to dramatize The Well of Loneliness or to go on declaring her intention to produce it in Paris, Berlin, New York or anywhere.

Radclyffe Hall signed this writ at the British Consulate in Paris on 18 October and it was served on Wilette Kershaw. She then worked long hours on The Carpenter’s Son, her novel about the martyrdom of Christophe Bénédit. It contained much kneeling, clasping of crucifixes and agonized prayer. Una read it aloud, thought it inspired by God and called it an intensive study of the Passion of Christ.

The style was a mix of Provençale dialect and gospel sermon. Radclyffe Hall would wake in the night talking to Bénédit. She used words like ‘perforce’, ‘bethought himself, ‘nay’ and ‘thus’ and ‘many an one’. Aged four, Bénédit sees his cousin hit a snake with a stick. ‘“Stop, stop!” he screamed. “You are hurting my shoulders’” – on which there then appears a long red weal – spelled