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

get published a ‘Collected Memorial Edition’ of the works of Radclyffe Hall. She hoped it would include The Well of Loneliness. The book had sold steadily in America and other countries for eighteen years without confounding the institution of marriage or depraving the young.

Peter Davies, director of the Windmill Press, thought the post war Labour administration might oppose the suppression of literature and lift the ban. Una wrote to the Home Secretary James Chuter Ede. Davies wrote to a friend, Sir Oscar Dowson, who was legal adviser to the Home Office. Davies asked what would happen if, as requested by Lady Troubridge, he published the book. Unknown to Una, he added a postscript, typical of the awkwardness the book provoked in publishers: ‘I am not really anxious to do The Well of Loneliness and am rather relieved than otherwise by any lack of enthusiasm I may encounter in official circles.’

Sir Oscar passed this letter to the Home Secretary. Chuter Ede sought advice. He wanted to know ‘the desirability or otherwise’ of publishing The Well of Loneliness, the technical and legal issues this raised, how and by whom a prosecution could be instituted, whether by the Director of Public Prosecutions, the police, or a ‘common informer’ and what his own powers in the matter were. He wondered if more harm than good might be done by continuing to suppress the book though he had, he said, ‘the impression that the perversion which it is supposed to celebrate is more widespread than is commonly thought’.

His advisor was a senior civil servant, Mr F. H. Logan, in the Dangerous Drugs Branch. Banned books and banned substances perhaps came into the same category. (‘I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel’, James Douglas had written. ‘Poison kills the body, but moral poison kills the soul.’)

Mr Logan’s advice to the Secretary of State was unequivocal:

From the Home Office point of view it would be most undesirable to have the question reopened. The 1918 proceedings provide a fixed point in regard to one aspect of sexual morality in a field where it is peculiarly difficult to establish any satisfactory standards. If it were to be thought that the authorities are now inclined to take a more lenient view of The Well of Loneliness, it might well lead other and less scrupulous writers than Miss Radclyffe Hall to make use of the same theme with results that could scarcely fail to be embarrassing to all concerned with the administration of this branch of the law.

It seems to be very desirable therefore that Lady Troubridge should be discouraged from including The Well of Loneliness in the proposed edition of Miss Radclyffe Hall’s works.

And discouraged she was. Chuter Ede wrote to her that any publisher reprinting The Well of Loneliness would ‘do so at the risk of proceedings’. The views of a supposedly reforming, egalitarian government were enforced. Lesbianism was obscene. It was a widespread perversion. To write about it was embarrassing. Silence was required.

Una returned to Florence on 16 November 1946. Initially she found herself disorientated and diffident. ‘Oh it is painful my sweet & sad, sad, sad to be alone here’, she wrote in a Letter to John. But she was excited too and knew she would ‘soon slip into it all’. She was in robust health and had enough acquaintances for life to be social in an undemanding way: May Massola, Maria Corsini, Fonfi Piccone. Romaine invited her to her Villa Gaia high up in Fiesole with views over Florence. She fed her on roast pheasant, baked apples and cream and ‘nasty sweet white wine’. Sandra Tealdi told her about the ‘black lire’ which gave her £2 for every £1 she cashed. ‘It is of course pleasant’, Una told the ghost of John. Funds were ‘prosperous’. Stanley Rubinstein cheered her by telling her she would pay practically no income tax or surtax for the next ten years. Her pension from Troubridge increased. She bought stocks with surplus investment income. ‘Minna’s money when it comes will be in Trustee stocks.’ Six months’ royalties on American sales of The Well of Loneliness in 1946 totalled £353 for 5,300 copies – three and a half times Evguenia’s annual allowance.

Una was appalled by the war damage to Florence, the bombed bridges, the destroyed houses of the Borgo San Jacopo and by photographs in Life magazine of the Duce, dead and hung upside down by ‘the Communists’. But the shops were full of produce. She was amazed at the variety of food compared to England: chicken, guinea fowl, fresh vegetables, cakes made with real cream, marrons glacés. She found a flat opposite San Jacopo sopr’Arno with ‘the church shining in the moonlight opposite’. A daily communicant at the churches of San Spirito or San Felice, she disliked not being first ‘in case the priest’s fingers are wet from other lips’.

She retrieved the belongings she and John had abandoned in 1939: linen, furniture, silver, pictures and clothes. There were seals of sequestration on the rooms where it all was stored. For an entire morning she destroyed more of John’s papers. Dressed in John’s silk coat and diamond and onyx cufflinks she indulged again her passion for opera. She went to Lohengrin, The Pearl Fishers and La Bohème.

Minna, her mother, died in January 1947. Una did not return for the funeral. Nor would she let Andrea’s second husband, Brigadier Turnbull, act as co-trustee of the estate as Harold Rubinstein suggested. ‘If only she didn’t give everything before marriage’, Una said of Andrea and thought both she and this new husband drank too much.

The sight of Evguenia’s handwriting on an envelope always gave her a thud of anxiety. She dreaded she might come to Florence: ‘I simply can’t face up to her coming here and either telling our friends that you promised to leave her money in equal shares with me & then didn’t do it, or that I am not carrying out