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

noted author Miss Radclyffe Hall’ appeared in TP’s Weekly and Popular Pictures. Assiduous of her image, she wore a black sombrero, a black cape, and diamonds in her cuffs and ears. Una was in the frame in a leopardskin coat, her hair shingled, her nails painted, a monocle screwed in her eye. ‘It is pleasant to feel oneself distinguished’, Radclyffe Hall wrote in an article ‘First-Nighters’. ‘Childish perhaps; but we are nearly all children at the bottom of our hearts.’ ‘First nights,’ she said, were ‘like the best kind of club.’ She was a member, along with Noël Coward, Somerset Maugham, Arnold Bennett, C. B. Cochran, Ivor Novello, defined as successful by the company she kept.

Una called many of these shows ‘awful tosh’. They did not now go to classical concerts or to the opera which she had once so loved. Both abhorred the avant-garde. Una described a reading by Edith Sitwell at the Poetry Bookshop as ‘a bedlam afternoon of Miss Sitwell shouting down a megaphone’. And John ‘barred the reading of good English novels, lest they might affect her own style’. She preferred Jeremy and Hamlet and The Flaming Jewel.

To spread her name she wrote magazine articles about dogs and old oak furniture, first nights and games of golf. Copy was sent off with publicity photographs by Lafayette and Howard Coster, ‘photographer of men’. She took her editor, Newman Flower, to lunch at the Savoy, her agent to lunch at the Berkeley and she and Una dined at the Ivy, the Monte Carlo and the Eiffel Tower. She went to PEN Club meetings and to literary lunches. Audrey drew up the contract for her next novel, A Saturday Life, and said an American colleague, a Mr Washburn, would find a New York publisher for The Unlit Lamp.

Radclyffe Hall had a profession now. Socially she was a society lesbian for whom these were party days. She and Una gave a fancy dress ball for Romaine at Guy Allan’s Studio, their wigs and costumes made at Nathan’s. Una went as Harlequin, John as an Indian chief. In The Forge she described such a ball:

A tall oriental, naked to the waist, was followed by a harem of six veiled women … A youth dressed as a peacock gyrated, his magnificent tail furled and unfurled … An elderly lady in short skirt and yellow wig bowled a hoop in and out among the dancers … A man completely covered in silver paint danced gravely with a woman in crinolines … A couple of Grey Friars shouted disrespectful compliments to a Cleopatra whose breastplate had become displaced. Two women passed, dancing together. One of them wore the clothes of a Paris workman, corduroy trousers and jacket and soft peaked cap. Around her heavy handsome throat she had knotted a red bandanna … Then linking arms they wandered off in the direction of the garden.

American and Parisian lesbians knew the cues and joined the scene. Through Gabrielle Enthoven and Toupie, John and Una met Teddie Gerrard, Tallulah Bankhead and her lover Gwen Farrar. Teddie Gerrard wore backless dresses, had her black hair cut into a bob and liked women, drink and drugs. Noël Coward was her friend and she was in his revue London Calling. (Edith Sitwell was parodied in it as Hernia Whittlebot.) John and Una went to parties at Teddie Gerrard’s flat in Sackville Street and at her weekend house, Orchard Cottage in the Cotswolds. Una made a note in her diary of a night in January 1924 when Teddie and her lover, Etheline Cripps, took them to a Chinese restaurant ‘and then we toured London till 12 seeking vainly for someone to devil’. On 7 February they all went to Violette Murat’s party until four-thirty in the morning. Next day there was a tea dance at Augustus John’s (Tallulah paid him £1,000 to paint her portrait) then a party at Gwen Farrar’s until dawn. John and Una were special guests at Tallulah’s first night of The Green Hat at the Comedy. They sent flowers to her backstage then went on with her to the Cave of Harmony in Charlotte Street in Soho.

Una tolerated this social whirl. It was not the image of John she wanted to promote. Una liked West End style, but she neither drank nor smoked. She had headaches if she went to bed late and she disapproved of demands on John’s time. Una was the brake on excess. She promulgated a myth of austere respectability:

the life that proudly and joyfully was mine: a life of watching, serving and subordinating everything in existence to the requirements of an overwhelming literary inspiration and industry, guarding and sustaining a physique that was never equal to John’s relentless perseverance or to the strain she compelled it to bear.

Una exaggerated the pain. John’s irascibility and bad temper were a problem, but there was nothing arduous about either of their lives. They were entirely indulgent. Both enjoyed great privilege and ‘orgies’ of shopping, travel and parties. They demanded high standards of service. Lyon the cook was out at a moment’s notice ‘for insolence and drinking our brandy’. They pandered to their ailments. Two doctors and a nurse, Miss Bruce, attended for a fortnight when John had a feverish cold. And they indulged their hobbies. They celebrated with champagne at the Eiffel Tower when Wotan won all the prizes at the Richmond Dachshund Show and was voted Champion. Una then mated him with Hexel and Pickles in the bathroom while John wrote The Saturday Life. By Una’s birthday in March 1924 The Forge had reprinted. John gave her another gold-backed brush for her dressing table. Next month the sale of the Sterling Street house was completed, their furniture went again into store and their jewels to the bank. They rented a flat at Kensington Palace Mansions, planned a holiday and searched for the perfect house.

At her Chelsea studio at 15 Cromwell Road, Romaine painted Una’s portrait. Una had nine sittings and posed with two of