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

Bénédit enlists in the war, is sent to Palestine, ‘stares into the eyes of the Indestructible Compassion’, exhorts the Infidels to lay down their arms in the name of Jesus Christ, gets crucified and tells God to abandon him: ‘Lord if You are with me still do not stay … do not suffer … But the words sank down and were lost in a bottomless pit of physical anguish.’

September 1930 brought bottomless pits from Wilette Kershaw. The Well of Loneliness was staged in Paris at the Théâtre de la Potinière. Janet Flanner, who as Gênet wrote a fortnightly ‘Letter from Paris’ for the New Yorker, said the first night was something of a riot. The theatre filled with large ladies who would not sit where directed by the ushers. Wilette Kershaw’s show was three acts containing eleven scenes of tableaux vivants. At the end she made a curtain speech

in which she begged humanity, ‘already used to earthquakes and murderers’, to try to put up with a minor calamity like the play’s and the book’s Lesbian protagonist, Stephen Gordon. However, she made up in costume what she lacked in psychology: dressing gown by Sulka, riding breeches by Hoare, boots by Bunting, crop by Briggs, briquet by Dunhill and British accent – as the program did not bother to state – by Broadway.

Holroyd-Reece called the production ‘backboneless, sugary and unclean’. Posters advertised it as from the novel by Radclyffe Hall and gave quotes from Havelock Ellis and Bernard Shaw. Radclyffe Hall and Audrey published complaints in the press. Rubinstein’s Paris agents served a lengthy ‘protestation’ on Wilette Kershaw, her solicitor and the theatre. The fuss was disproportionate. ‘Miss Radclyffe Hall’s press statement,’ Janet Flanner wrote, ‘that she knew nothing about the adaptation of her novel, and as soon as she did would go to law, made the public fear that her – well, loneliness was greater than had been supposed.’

Morris Ernst advised Rubinstein that any attempt to injunct a New York production would fail. The only course would be to ‘use the censorship arm of the government’ and invoke a criminal statute known as the Wales Law, levelled against obscene plays. It was, he said, an arm which long ago should have atrophied; it raised ‘various spiritual objections’ and he warned against calling ‘more attention to the situation than the situation warrants’. It was a contradiction of principle, an hypocrisy and he did not want to get involved.

It was an irony that Radclyffe Hall emulated her opponents. Despite her rhetoric about free speech, she fought to censor what went against her interests. The New York Times reported the dispute, printed excerpts from Wilette Kershaw’s contract and said she had sent Radclyffe Hall a ‘substantial check’ for royalties. Radclyffe Hall wanted to sue for libel. But after the large ladies departed, Kershaw played to empty houses, she and her production fizzled into oblivion, the dispute was only a codicil to a keener injustice.

John and Una moved to their Rye house, Father Bonaventura called to bless it and Maples called to fit the carpets, curtains and bedspreads. Miss McEwan was hired as a housemaid and Mabel Bourne as housekeeper. Una’s Chéri opened at the Prince of Wales Theatre on 26 October 1930 with Gabrielle Enthoven in the lead. Edy Craig who lived at Smallhythe near Rye went to the first night. For good luck she took along a medal awarded to her mother Ellen Terry. It worked no magic. All the reviews were ‘unspeakable’.

Dismissive of her own efforts, Una lived through John. Her failure was lost in preparations for Christmas: presents and tree trimmings bought in Hastings, a hamper for the Sisters of the Poor Clares at Lynton, mass at St Anthony’s Church in Rye. For Christmas dinner at the Mermaid, John dressed as a French porter, Una wore velveteen. On 28 December Noël Coward and his lover Jeffery Amherst called for tea at the Black Boy. Coward ‘adored’ the house and there were ‘howls of laughter’ from them all. On New Year’s Eve John and Una heard the bells of Rye at midnight and saw in their seventeenth new year together.

27

Just Rye

In Rye, as in Paris and London, Radclyffe Hall was drawn to the artistic lesbian and gay coterie that gathered there. Edy Craig, whom she had met at school, had inherited a sixteenth-century farmhouse, at Smallhythe near Tenterden, from her mother. She lived there with Christopher St John her partner of thirty years, and Tony (Claire) Atwood. Una called them Edy and the boys. Edy Craig staged monthly barn shows, with soliloquies and sandwiches, in her mother’s memory. Christopher’s real name was Christabel Marshall. A devout Catholic convert, like John and Una, the St John was out of affinity with St John the Baptist. Tony Atwood painted flowers, marsh scenes with sheep, and portraits of friends. She gave John and Una a relic of the true cross acquired by her ancestors from a pope. Una put it with candles and flowers in the shrine in her bedroom.

E. F. Benson, ‘Dodo’, the author of camp novels featuring Miss Mapp and Lucia, lived in Henry James’s former home, Lamb House, down the high street from the Black Boy. He served John and Una awful lunches, regaled them with gossip and let them read the manuscripts of his novels. They savoured these for details of Rye. Una thought he had never been in love with anyone but was ‘just fond of people’. His brother, Monsignor Hugh Benson, he told them, had been a Catholic convert and died leaving a box containing a ‘discipline’ – a scourge with small spikes clotted with blood.

Other friends were Francis Yeats-Brown, author of The Bengal Lancer, the painter Paul Nash, who was the stepson of Una’s great aunt and whose work Una called ‘chaotic compounds of disassociated fragments’, Lady Maud Warrender, once mayor of Rye, who lived at Leasam with a singer Marcia van Dresser, Sheila Kaye-Smith, whose novels Noël Coward ‘passionately admired’ and who lived