The Trials of Radclyffe Hall, Diana Souhami [best sales books of all time .TXT] 📗

Rubinstein ‘to keep her in order for me’. At Una’s instruction John Holroyd-Reece drew up a covenant which Rubinstein sent to Mrs Visetti’s lawyer. It granted her £200 a year on condition she gave no interviews about her daughter, said nothing detrimental, provided no publicity and surrendered to Una all biographical material connected with her, all childhood photographs and the portrait by Katinka Amyat of Marguerite aged five with blonde curls.

‘If I comply with all this, I may get a hundred or two a year out of £118,500 all left to the Troubridge woman’, Mrs Visetti wrote to Jane Caruth.

When you realize the £2000 a year I gave up to ensure her inheritance, thousands of capital legally belongs to me. The Troubridge woman seemed to control Marguerite. What can I do? accept all insults, all unfair pressure and bow my head in gratitude to this woman who has allowed all this evil to be done to me? Pity me and pray that I may be given control not to act in any way aggressively and so lose the assistance to live. My grief, my rage, are both telling on my nerves. I am not well.

For two months Mrs Visetti delayed signing this covenant. Una therefore delayed paying her any money at all. Una assured Dear John that she was doing her utmost to act fairly and justly but she was not going to pander to extortion and threats. Mrs Visetti’s prevarications, she complained, cost her an extra £36 in tax.

Una intended to write a hagiographical memoir of Radclyffe Hall. Its aim was to eulogize and sanctify both their lives. She did not want Evguenia or Maria Visetti telling the world they had been swindled and deceived. If they made any public utterance, financial penalties would follow.

Una had a psychopath’s skill to convince herself of the truth of her lies. She called her book The Life and Death of Radclyffe Hall. Death was the lever of her control. Her book was to be ‘sincere and truthful’ a record of ‘lasting & fulfilling devotion’, of perfect lesbian love that nothing could blemish. The world was to learn how Radclyffe Hall’s genius had found expression in her literary masterpieces, her ‘fight for the persecuted of her own kind’ and of course her love for Una.

It took Una a month to write – from 19 February to 18 March 1945. She could not then remember a word she had written. It was, she maintained, the most surprising experience of her whole life. She supposed this was because a higher power was guiding her hand. The way round her problems of vanity, falsification and omission was to abnegate all responsibility. She claimed that Radclyffe Hall authored it and that she was only the amanuensis, the guided hand. ‘Truly your mantle descended upon me!… quite suddenly I suppose you began to write it and it fell into its place. Not an account that would satisfy Evguenia’s illusions about herself for that is impossible.’ Radclyffe Hall, Una said in a foreword, ‘always dwelt of choice in the palace of truth where I dwelt with her, and I have decided, so far as in me lies, to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.’

She used the courtroom oath and let slip a telling pun. She wrote of Radclyffe Hall’s unhappy, bullied childhood, her mother’s ‘lunatic rages’ and brutality and of how despite ‘such cruelly uncongenial soil’ she grew up to have a profound personality and be a great artist. Enduring love of Una was the guiding light of her life. Evguenia tried to intrude into their love and blemish their lives. Radclyffe Hall yielded against her better judgement to conciliate her. She showed ‘marvellous patience and charity’ and through all the stress and anguish never stopped loving Una with ‘indestructible devotion’.

Una read again John’s

darling little notes of love & missing me when you were away with Evguenia for only a few days. How desperately hard you tried, even under the stress of an intense attraction & infatuation not to hurt me, to spare me all you could, how faithful you really were to me even in the first flare of your surface infidelity; how your generous, pitiful, loyal nature kept you so good, so deeply devoted & loving all through.

‘Evguenia’, she said, ‘will never in this world be able to wash out the fact that you treated her well, and she treated you badly and she may think herself fortunate that she and the record are in my merciful hands.’

Una was well pleased with her book. She called it a monument and thought it conveyed Radclyffe Hall’s creative genius, simplicity, humility, piety, courage and passion. She trusted she had not appeared ‘spiteful or unjust’ to Evguenia. (She described her as ‘violent and uncontrolled as a savage … a bucking bronco, headstrong, wild and inconsistent, with alternating moods of incoherent rage, of abysmal gloom and crazy optimism’). She figured that Evguenia had ‘got all the advantages of the situation’ and continued to do so, so must ‘take the implications and be courageous about it’.

Una wanted her memoir published so that ‘honour be done to John’. She showed the manuscript to Horatio Lovat Dickson, a director with the publishing house of Macmillan, and to Harold Rubinstein. Lovat Dickson thought it ‘beautifully written’ but not documented or substantial enough. ‘I think such solemn documented biographies are seldom readable and seldom read’, Una said. Lovat Dickson asked a reader at Macmillan to give an appraisal.

The reader damned the book. Lovat Dickson showed the report to Una. It made her tremble and feel sick. It called her work sketchy and no more than notes for a book. It said there was not enough about the trial of The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall’s lesbianism or Evguenia and the sexual triangle. Most cutting of all, it said Una’s eulogizing accorded Radclyffe Hall an unjustified literary eminence.

Harold Rubinstein, whom Una called ‘the most Christian of Jews’, wrote a ‘paean of praise’