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

school on Friday 19 December and was despatched next day to Ida Temple at Datchet with the housekeeper Miss MacLean. John and Una went to Highgate Cemetery to put a wreath on the door of Ladye’s catacomb. They saw Tallulah in Creaking Chair, went on to the Cave of Harmony and down to Teddie Gerrard’s cottage. They joined Andrea at Datchet late on Christmas Eve. ‘John, I and Andrea to Midnight Mass, John’s 10th with me’ was Una’s diary entry, the order of allegiance clear. Her Christmas present from John was the mirror of the gold dressing-table set. On New Year’s Eve, back at Holland Street, Toupie came to dinner with her new lover, Fabienne Lafargue De-Avilla, and Gabrielle Enthoven. They all danced together as the bells of midnight chimed. Vere Hutchinson and Budge Burroughes stayed home. Vere, who was thirty-three, had multiple sclerosis which was paralysing her body and unbalancing her mind.

16

Books about ourselves

‘If we cannot write books about ourselves then I ask about whom may we write them?’ Radclyffe Hall said in a lecture to the English Club on novel writing. The self about whom she wrote was drawn to the central grief of an unwanted child. Fear of abandonment loomed in her novels as in her life, whatever her fabrications of plot or grandeur of lifestyle. It gave a tension to her work which ameliorated its logical flaws and indulgence. She saw herself as rejected by her father, despised by her mother and answerable only to God.

She was also rich, theatrical and hugely ambitious. And Una was there to collude with her vanity. Una was a strategist, her objectives clear: Radclyffe Hall was the greatest living English novelist whose reputation must be served. Una’s was not an inflectional love of moods and nuance. Pontifical, doctrinal, it was as absolute and rigid on day one as year twelve. She encouraged Radclyffe Hall’s grandiose fantasies and gave her a safe place to weave her fiction. She allowed her to be a misfit, a man, a genius, martyr and messiah. The price of her indulgence was entrapment within the world they agreed. The trial was in living up to the fantasy. The danger was that life of some other sort might break in.

John knew the value of Una’s devotion. Her next novel had, before its publisher protested, the unpropitious title Food. Its hero, Gian-Luca, marries a woman he does not love, but sees the benefit of her loving him: ‘It is wiser and it leaves a man more free for his business. When one loves one is all misery, all body and no brain. One becomes a fool, one says and does nothing but foolish things.’

John’s business was to write books that changed the world. Publication of The Unlit Lamp and its good reviews was proof of her divine gift. Life at Holland Street reflected her importance. She controlled the household. She rang a handbell for service at table. She sacked the chauffeur, Budd, for driving Una too fast to the shops. She employed a secretary, Miss Clark. Miss Shackleton came to draw her, Mr Dywell called to cut her hair, Rebecca West and May Sinclair dined in April 1925. ‘A very successful evening’, Una said. When Alec Waugh came to supper with Leonard Rees, Una read Kept, his recent novel, aloud all afternoon so that John would appear informed.

Up in her study John now worked long hours.

If our literary instinct says ‘Work all night’ because by doing so your work will be better, if it tells you that, if you break for your lunch you are going to check a good bit of writing, if it tells you that by going out for a walk your physical condition may be improved but that your mind may well be distracted, then I think that you should sacrifice yourself to art. All art is a hard taskmaster at times, and takes very little account of the body.

She began Food on Tuesday 14 April 1925. It was long but she wrote it in six months. Its central allegory was of a surfeit of sausages and pasta and a starved soul. The idea came to her lunching with Una at the Pall Mall restaurant. Smart places inspired her with fantasies of deprivation. It was a way of subverting privilege. She could romanticize hardship knowing she was rich. She said she was going to write about a waiter so sickened by food he dies of starvation.

She took the road to Calvary theme, resonant with Christ’s stations of the cross. Una bought a model of a lamb as an offering for the book’s success. There was a kind of camp melodrama to their religiosity. The story was set in the Italian community in London’s Soho. By way of research for authentic settings, they went to St Peter’s Italian Church in Hatton Garden, to the best Italian restaurants and to a delicatessen called King Bomba in Old Compton Street. Una took notes on the stock: olives, split peas, Orvieto, tagliatelle, cheeses, coffees.

Una monitored the book’s progress in her diary and took to staying in bed while John worked. Her entry for 22 April read: ‘John had breakfast in bed and then sent me back there while she went to work. I staid in bed all day. Minna came in at tea time. Later I got up for dinner & John and I to first night Haymarket. V. amusing.’

And two days later: ‘John and I breakfasted in our room & she to work after I had read her Food from the beginning. Minna lunched and staid till 4 oc. then John worked again till past midnight & then I read her work aloud to her.’

Food became the focus of both their days. There were fewer dog shows now, or visits to Mrs Leonard. Una interviewed men from Barker’s when beetles appeared in Dickie the manservant’s bedroom, she pasted reviews of The Saturday Life from the Queen and Punch into the scrapbooks, shopped at