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

madonna and burning incense. On the wall was a large crucifix, and a fox’s head on an oak shield. By the woodburning fire was John’s leather smoking chair and antique pipe rack.

In this cloistered, club lounge setting she started a novel: ‘Writing, it was like a heavenly balm, it was like the flowing out of deep waters, it was like the lifting of a load from the spirit, it brought with it a sense of relief, of assuagement.’ Its unfortunate title was Octopi, its theme a lesbian daughter, denied life by a manipulative mother.

A perception of Mother the Tentacled Monster was rooted in Radclyffe Hall’s psyche. Mrs Visetti was the archetype, but cameos glimpsed the world over confirmed the prejudice: the daughter of a clergyman’s wife ‘withering on the stem’ in the Grand Hotel, Tamaris, an elderly daughter fussing over her invalid mother in the Cottage Hotel in Lynton in Devon. Radclyffe Hall construed these relationships as ‘unmarried daughters who are unpaid servants and the old people sucking the life out of them like octopi’.

Mrs Ogden, chief octopus in her novel, uses tentacles of sickness and loneliness to bind Joan her daughter to her. She uses too tentacles of sexual possession, for her husband disgusts her. ‘Joan’s strong young arms would comfort and soothe and her firm lips grope until they found her mother’s; and Mrs Ogden would feel mean and ashamed but guiltily happy as if a lover held her.’

The Ogdens live in a stifling house in Seabourne, a one-horse town. Their lives are circumscribed by lack of money, fear of sex and fear of life. Elizabeth Rodney, hired to teach Joan, is a ‘new woman’, educated and independent, like the Modern Miss Thompson of Radclyffe Hall’s unpublished suffragette story. She and Joan fall in love and want to live together, Joan as a doctor, Elizabeth as a teacher. Mrs Ogden’s tentacles slither round them. Do you love me, she asks her daughter, who wants to reply, ‘I don’t love you, I don’t want to touch you, I dislike the feel of you – I dislike above all else the feel of you.’

Elizabeth waits. Each time Joan is at the point of breaking free, mother strikes. ‘I think it is a sin to let yourself get drained dry by anyone’, Elizabeth says as Joan disintegrates. ‘As quickly as you cut through one tentacle another shot out and fixed on to you.’

In an article written years later for an American magazine, Radclyffe Hall claimed high intentions in writing about Joan Ogden and her kind:

They wither away for want of self expression and encouragement, because they are too refined, too sensitive, too unselfish, or too timid, or perhaps too noble, to make a stand in defence of their rights as human beings.

… I came to the resolution that I would try to bring their grievances out into the light of day; a difficult task, perhaps a presumptuous task, but I felt that it had to be done and that I was the person to do it … I knew that I was throwing down the gauntlet but in a way this made the book all the easier to write, because I was fighting for others and not for myself.

She liked to remind ‘her public’, as she and Una came to call them, that she spoke for an underclass and was doing God’s work. But the strength of the book was that it was about herself, her precarious identity, her black view of mothers, her alienation from men, her desire to find a compensatory replacement for Mrs Visetti, whom she loathed.

All the imagery in the book is of snares. Joan Ogden’s feelings for her mother ‘eat into her flesh’. Only with Elizabeth Rodney might she ‘break once and for all the chains’. Men are no more than a narrative device. Mr Ogden cheats Joan out of her inheritance then dies to further the plot. Joan and Elizabeth are wooed by emotionally inconsequential brothers: Richard and Lawrence Benson. Elizabeth waits ten years for Joan, then marries Lawrence and goes with him to South Africa. She lives in splendour and kills her dream of life with Joan by ‘being busy and hard and quite unlike her real self’. Richard waits twenty years for Joan only to hear her say:

‘I’m not a woman who could ever have married. I’ve never been what you’d call in love with a man in my life … Only one creature could ever have saved me and I let her go while I was still young.’

‘Do you mean Elizabeth?’ he asked sharply.

She nodded. ‘Yes she could have saved me but I let her go.’

‘God!’ he exclaimed angrily …

In pencil on loose-leafed paper Radclyffe Hall produced misspelt, unpunctuated prose. Without expectations from a publisher or agent, she worked in a sporadic way. She put aside her manuscript because of dog shows, trips to London, visits from Mr Cobden the tailor to fit her brocade smoking jacket, driving lessons from Toupie Lowther in John’s new car, Blue Bird.

Ladye’s ghost was the main distraction. Next to John’s study was an office for psychical research ‘where the secretary had her habitat’. There was, said Una, ‘plenty of work needing close application; reports that must be so adequate and so accurate that they did not return to us from Sir Oliver; regular sittings with Mrs Osborne Leonard; visits to and from members including a young woman liable without warning to become one of two other personalities.’

The Society, embarrassed by the spooks and lesbians court case, prevaricated about accepting Radclyffe Hall on its council. She threatened more adverse publicity unless they acted fast. They duly elected her, so Fox-Pitt resigned. She and Una then went for a ‘members only’ week to Fishers Hill near Woking with Gerald Balfour and Mrs Sidgwick. It was a token appearance. Radclyffe Hall found other members’ psychical communications entirely dull. She was more interested in a meeting with the composer Ethel Smyth and her dog Pan on the golf links. (‘I