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

of meals the servants ate each day. Hadley Wood, she complained, was no place for a writer to be buried. Above all, she wanted contact with the London lesbian scene. Una, like Mabel Batten, was uprooted whether she wanted to be or not. But she said she did not mind where they went as long as they were together. To prove her point, she wrote for details of a lighthouse for sale off the Cornish coast.

A Mr and Mrs Thomas bought Chip Chase for £5,000 in January 1921. It took a week for all John and Una’s belongings to be moved to Taylor’s Depository in London. Servants were fired and most of the dogs were kennelled. John and Una rented temporarily a flat at 7 Trevor Square, Knightsbridge by Hyde Park, then in May they moved to 10 Sterling Street nearby.

Alfred Sachs was a walk away. He showed Una her streptococci under a microscope. ‘They look rather like inverted commas’, she said. His bills were high. For seven months of visits, vaccines and pathologists’ reports, John paid him £380 – about as much as Troubridge’s annual maintenance.

Now she was writing the novel William Heinemann had urged, Radclyffe Hall wanted a place in London literary life. Her women friends helped forge this. Toupie was a pivotal figure in the London lesbian scene of the twenties. Literary and artistic lesbians gravitated to her house and to another former friend of Mabel Batten’s, Gabrielle Enthoven. She was a playwright and theatre historian and gave, according to Una, ‘faultless dinner parties’.

At Toupie’s salon evenings, Radclyffe Hall talked of her work to the novelists Ida Wylie, May Sinclair and Vere Hutchinson. They were popular writers of the time, independent women who led unconventional lives. Ida Wylie recommended her to the literary agent Audrey Heath, a Cambridge classics graduate who in partnership with a friend, May Drake, had set up in 1919 in an office in Soho. Ida was published by Mills & Boon and wrote novels with titles like Towards Morning and The Silver Virgin. She described herself as ‘violently active in the suffrage movement’. Like Toupie she had done war work in France. When she was ten her father had given her money and encouraged her to travel on her own all over England and the Continent. He married ‘from time to time’, she said, but she had no connection to his wives.

May Sinclair shared John’s belief in psychical phenomena. She too was a feminist and suffragette and served with an ambulance corps in Belgium in the war. She wrote a biography of the Brontës and psychological novels: The Three Sisters, Anne Severn and the Fieldings. Vere Hutchinson, author of Sea Wrack, The Naked Man and Thy Dark Freight, openly dedicated her novels ‘with undying love’ to her partner ‘Budge’, a painter of animal portraits, Dorothy Burroughes-Burroughes.

In St James’s Park one afternoon, walking the dog, John re-met Violet Hunt. Violet came for dinner the following day, gave John several of Ford Madox Ford’s novels and talked of his sexual rejection of her, the money he owed her and the social scandal he had made her endure. She took her and Una to the Orange Tree and the Cave of Harmony, clubs in Soho where lesbians danced together.

They all went to PEN Club meetings, motored to the country, played whist and tennis. At a fancy dress ball of Toupie’s, John was Prince Charles Edward, Una La Bohème. Toupie’s army unit was there: Joan, Liza, Hilary, Susan, Poppy, Honey, Nelly. Una deplored the way they ‘carried on’ sexually with each other. ‘All between members of the same army unit’.

Through Toupie, John also met Romaine Brooks. She called her a ‘very great artist’. Romaine was famous for her monotone portraits and sexual affairs. With money inherited from her American mother, she bought the Villa Cercola in Capri and studios and apartments in Paris, London and New York. She had been the lover of the actress Ida Rubinstein, was the partner of Natalie Barney and admired by the fascist poet Gabriele d’Annunzio, who wooed her with jewels. (Gabrielle Enthoven adapted D’Annunzio’s The Honeysuckle for the stage. John called one of her canaries Gabriele d’Annunzio.)

In July 1921 Romaine spent a lot of time with John and Una. They lunched at the Savoy, dined at the Prince’s Grill, drove to the country, went to The Beggar’s Opera and talked until late at night. Toupie was enamoured of Romaine. She misconstrued what Romaine called a ‘fragile commencement’ between them and bombarded her with phone calls and letters. Romaine, for her part, was enamoured of John, who ‘did not respond’. ‘One always feels slightly grateful’, John said of the interest shown. Romaine invited her and Una to stay for the summer in her villa in Capri. John talked over the idea with Una until one-thirty one morning. Una was against it. In previous years John might have pursued such a stylish affair, but Mabel Batten’s death, her own literary ambition and Una’s watchfulness now made her cautious.

14

Octopi and chains

Radclyffe Hall said she had the ‘soul of a solitary’ and that she spoke for misfits. As a Roman Catholic she deferred to the Pope and the gospel of Christ. She also had inchoate theories about predestination, reincarnation and halloaings from the dead. Hers was a deterministic view, however shifting the detail.

In her fiction and fantasy she was drawn to themes of martyrdom and heroic tragedy. In reality she was never alone, indulged all whims of purchase and travel and took the best suite in all the Grand Hotels. Nothing was too good for her and money gave her power. She was served by hired staff, had ninety-four neckties and lodged her jewels at the bank when abroad. Una was her acolyte at her beck and call, often in the room with her while she wrote.

In summer 1921 they decided to go to Italy. John wanted to work on her book and enjoy the sun. Alberto Visetti was ill with