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

thought her unattractive and without talent. ‘Lord how I wish she would marry and some man assume responsibility for her.’

When I look back on my hopes when I was expecting her, on my immense care, spiritual and material, throughout her childhood, and upon the relentlessness with which she has grown up idle, deceitful, untruthful and quite without any moral pride or independence, grown up to avoid work and to sponge upon her father’s relations, who she well knows hate and traduce her mother. It is not a cheering picture. However, I think I have done my best in the circumstances all along, and more than that no one can do.

Andrea had a thin twenty-first birthday. Summoned to Rye on 11 December, she arrived on the 11.17 train. John and Una waited for her in their library. Una scrutinized her. Her dark hair was waved and shoulder length, she wore lipstick and mascara, a little hat, imitation pearl earrings, a brown three-piece costume, a long coat with a fur collar, tight suede gloves, sheer silk stockings, high heeled court shoes, a fur muff with a zip fastening. She had, said Una, the ‘pose of head and general movement of a rather weary vamp, the sidling, inviting walk of a professional whore, the indescribable look of sullen, brooding, determined sexuality rampant’.

She was living alone in a bedsitter in Shaftesbury Avenue, two doors away from the Palace Theatre where she had a part in a play. The young man she loved did not want to marry her, but they spent time together in each other’s rooms. She had not been to confession or communion since Easter but went occasionally to church. Una interpreted her ‘entire look, bearing, circumstances and attitude of mind’ as ‘indescribably disreputable’.

‘Desperate with anxiety and disgust’, she urged Andrea to move from Shaftesbury Avenue, not to entertain or visit men in a ‘manner that must ruin her reputation’ and to find reputable, well-paid work. ‘Even better class theatrical managers would fight shy of any girl who suggested obvious immorality.’ She called her ‘a born degenerate’ and reminded her of ‘scandals at convent and college’.

Andrea left at three-thirty in the afternoon. ‘As she left the house she wrapped her coat closely round her, so that her figure was clearly defined, placed her hands in her muff and glided down Rye High Street as though she were doing her beat at midnight on Piccadilly or, as she seems to prefer it, on Shaftesbury Avenue.’

The obscenity trial made Una more respectable. She extolled her own abstinence and fidelity. She saw herself as a good mother. Her daughter was born bad and she said she ‘washed her hands of her’. To Andrea it might have seemed as if she had done that long ago. Una hired a private detective. She satisfied herself that Andrea was living in a brothel and that her landlady was ‘an elderly foreign jewess’.

Radclyffe Hall finished The Master of the House in November. Una touched each manuscript copy with her relic of the true cross then cabled the news to Jonathan Cape, Audrey Heath and the Smallhythe crew. She and John went to mass and benediction to light candles and to pray for the book’s success. Audrey came down to Rye, had the last eight chapters read to her and said it was by far the biggest book John had ever written. Cape was to publish it in America too. He had set up an imprint there in partnership with Robert Ballou.

At Christmas John and Una sent a hamper with turkey sausages, plum pudding and brandy butter to the nuns at Lynton. The Black Boy was decorated with shrines, a creche, holly and mistletoe and ‘the darlings’ from Smallhythe came to stay. They walked on the marshes, went to midnight mass and exchanged presents – an etching of Smallhythe and an illuminated Benedictine prayer on goatskin.

When proofs of The Master of the House arrived, Una read them aloud for twelve consecutive hours. John paid for full-page advertisements in the Publisher and the Bookseller. She refused to have it mentioned that it was by the author of The Well of Loneliness. She went to London by Daimler for publication, stayed at the Grand Central Hotel and had publicity photographs taken by Howard Coster, in Essex Street. She was guest of honour at a Foyle’s Literary lunch on 17 March. Seven hundred people came to hear her speak and she signed books for nearly an hour. The Smallhythe trio and many friends were there. Francis Yeats-Brown said she looked, as she lectured, like an ecumenical saint.

The book was published to bad reviews in the Telegraph, The Times and the Times Literary Supplement. The Spectator accused her of sentimentality and the Saturday Review of Literature called it a bad novel written to take cover after The Well of Loneliness. Much of the criticism was personal. Audrey sent red tulips and a card on which she wrote, ‘they thought they were doing in Our Lord when they spat upon him’. Una’s research on the Palestinian battle scenes in the book was criticized by The Times. She winged in a letter in her own defence.

There was some enthusiasm about the book’s mystical religious fervour and praise in Time and Tide and the Aberdeen Press. A woman staying in a convent wrote that it was the most beautiful book she had ever read. Perhaps the worst indictment was that James Douglas commended it in print. Miss Lugsch, a fan from Chicago, sent hagiographical screeds and photographs of herself. Una termed her a ‘raving nymphomaniac with delusions’ and passed her missives to Rubinstein. The Literary Guild did not want to take copies, Gallimard did not want to translate it, it did not take off in the States. When it seemed that it would not go into a second impression, Una asked St Anthony to help. ‘I cannot endure my beloved to be unhappy’, she told him.

Radclyffe Hall, ‘utterly cast down’, talked of enemies, of people hating her,