The Trials of Radclyffe Hall by Diana Souhami (surface ebook reader .TXT) 📗

1 October she was moved by ambulance with John and Dr Cheattle to the White Cottage.

The focus of life then became Ladye’s headaches, wounds, temperature, aches and pains. She was in a wheelchair. She could not wear a hat and wound chiffon round her head to hide her shaved hair. John took her to Birmingham hospital to be X-rayed. The cost of doctors, nursing, heat treatments and massage was high.

John built a shrine to the Virgin Mary on the back wall of the White Cottage in gratitude for the sparing of Ladye’s life. The priest came and blessed it. And then, with passionate attention to detail, she collected and collated the evidence needed to sue Mrs Lakin: statements made at the time, photographs of the crossroads, the damaged wall and car. She saw her London solicitor, Theodore Goddard, and waited for the trial.

At the White Cottage the ritual was mornings in bed and lunch at one. At three, they set out for Malvern for Ladye’s massage and steam bath. They had tea at the confectioner’s, returned home at six, then rested until dinner at seven-thirty. John was now trapped. As consolation, she turned to what was to be her life’s work – writing prose. She began with short stories. Like her fantasy of self, these had a Messianic edge. Heavily parabolic, cautionary, they aspired to prophetic heights. Written without irony, their illiteracy was stark. Her childish handwriting sloped backwards. Clichés peppered each page. It was as if she chipped her stories out of the stones of dyslexia, cliché and childhood pain.

Their winter holiday was at the thermal baths at Llandudno in Wales. John pushed Ladye’s bathchair along the sea front and together they took the spa waters. It was a far cry from the sunny beaches and starlit nights of Tenerife. Back at the White Cottage, Christmas was quiet. John had yet another cold. Ladye wrote to Cara, urging her to get out into the world and to have some fun before her life, like her mother’s, became devoid of pleasures. ‘Last day of a sad year’, she wrote in her diary on New Year’s Eve in a shaky, scarcely legible hand. ‘Vale 1914.’

8

Roads with no signposts

Ladye read John’s stories aloud to visitors to the White Cottage. Ernest Thesiger, invalided home from the trenches of France, heard the first. Called ‘Out of the Night’, it was about a poet dying of hunger and driven by the ‘compelling, devouring vampire of genius’ (spelled jeaneous or geanous) to write the greatest religious poem of the century. ‘It will go all over the Christian world.’ He writes in a prostitute’s bedroom. The night is rough, her heart is soft, she takes him in and gives him pencil and paper. The priest she brings to his bedside as he dies gives the poem to a grateful (greatfull) publisher. The prostitute conceals her trade to protect the jeaneous’s reputation.

Here was the essential theme of Radclyffe Hall’s ambition. The truth must be told and she was there to tell it. She was a genius with a gift from God. Her writing would be disseminated throughout the world. Like Christ, she needed the selfless devotion of a woman to further her martyred art. The conundrum of her chauvinism was that she herself was a woman who cast herself in the male hero’s part.

Betty Carstairs stayed at the White Cottage early in 1915. She had tea with Ladye, they did psychical things with swinging amber beads to communicate with dead relatives, then Ladye read her ‘The Recording Angel’ (‘The Rechording Angle’) and ‘The Career of Mark Anthony Brakes’. Set in a venue favoured by Radclyffe Hall – the gates of paradise – the Recording Angel weighs his clients in the balance and administers capricious justice. A vain woman, uneasily resembling Mrs Visetti, gets pain, poverty and old age as a lesson in compassion. ‘Tears will wash her soul.’ A dissolute young man with the attributes of Radclyffe Radclyffe-Hall gets absolution because he once saved a boy from drowning and once set a blackbird free. ‘Kindnesses are priceless jems in the site of God’, the angel, or angle, reminds.

‘I always write about misfits’, Radclyffe Hall said, the inference being that she always wrote about herself. In ‘Mark Anthony Brakes’ she intended to write a pioneer piece on race, though the only black people she had come across were servants in her grandmother’s Philadelphia house. Brakes acts white ‘though in his soul he knew that he sprang from a race of born slaves’. Radclyffe Hall had a parallel predicament with gender. ‘Dat chile of ours am destined to be a great man’, Brakes’s father says. Dat chile ‘devours’ books, pomades his hair, talks without accent and excels at segregated college. He works as a lawyer. But ‘his was a low-class practice entirely among negroes and his heart began to sicken at the futility of his work’.

A white actress, who can afford no better, lets him represent her. Emboldened when he wins her case, he declares his love, asks her to be his wife and says he will give her a cleaner life. ‘A cleaner life with a nigger?’ she alarmingly responds. ‘You just get right out of this – get out will you, you black nigger get out!’ Something then ‘surges up to his reeling brain and down to his feet’. He rapes her – ‘gloated over her like a beast over its prey’ – then shoots himself.

Radclyffe Hall was no stylist. It was a stark theme for her clumsy prose. It turned into a jumble of unhelpful views on race caught by the assumptions of her time and class. Her interest in Mark Anthony Brakes was sentimental. He, like her, was a misfit, goaded for what he was. And behind this was a raw view of sex that equated with compulsion, rejection and sin.

In ‘The Modern Miss Thompson’ she was pontifical about women’s suffrage (spelled sufferidge). John wanted the vote for herself if not for