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

Souline’. They made promises of inheritance and declarations of love. One of those he showed Rubinstein was written when John was in Sirmione and Evguenia in Paris in 1934. It was the start of the nine years:

I think that being deeply in love is the greatest pain & the greatest joy. I have no real life at all except the life I am living through you, and now all that I see I seem to see through you – its difficult to put this into words, I can only say that you’re everywhere, that apart from you nothing has any meaning.

‘My poor sweet,’ Una wrote to the memory of John, ‘you sure did tomber mal when you conceived an affection for that woman. The only hold I have on her conduct is the ability to reduce or cancel the allowance if she gives trouble.’ Rubinstein again repeated that Una had no legal obligation to Evguenia under the terms of John’s will. Una paid the £20 a month, maintained her silence, kept her distance, put the matter from her mind and left all dealings to him.

On 25 July 1958 she received a note from Armando Child. He enclosed a cutting from The Times. Evguenia had died on 16 July. She is beyond suffering now, Child said. She had died aged fifty-three of carcinoma of the rectum with secondary deposits in her spine and abdomen. Her funeral had been on 21 July with Russian orthodox rites. Her will was a meticulous document of small bequests to her many friends. She was buried in Mill Hill Cemetery. ‘I do not feel that I can blame myself where she was concerned’, Una wrote. ‘For nearly fifteen years I have given her the same as John allowed her. Ever since her illness she has had full “unemployed” allowance even though I sometimes felt it might be interpreted as yielding to threats of scandal.’

By the same post came Una’s visa for America. Nika was to sing the role of Archbishop Thomas Becket in Ildebrando Pizzetti’s Murder in the Cathedral at Carnegie Hall, New York in August. Una was to go with him for a six-week trip. There were itineraries to be checked, aeroplane reservations to be made, rooms to be booked at the Hotel Meurice on 58th Street, interviews, press photographs and recording sessions to be arranged. That afternoon she booked two seats with Pan American then went to the sale-rooms with Nika. They bought blue and gold Bohemian glass, a walnut bookcase, a mahogany couch carved with rams’ heads. Una then walked a while in the cool breeze of the Roman evening and took a taxi home.

‘I cannot pretend that I feel any sorrow at her death’, she wrote that night of Evguenia.

She has always been disastrous in both our lives. I imagine the husband did not notify me as he hoped to get a couple of extra instalments of the allowance. I have of course written today to stop its payment.

Her death of course clears the way for publication of my book. Strange that having treated you so cruelly throughout your last illness she should herself die in exactly the same manner! Perhaps it was her purgatory?

Or perhaps Una had forgotten what she wrote of herself fifteen years previously after Radclyffe Hall died: ‘It would not even be strange to me if my flesh took on the stigmata of your suffering and I went to my death by the same road. I should be afraid perhaps but glad.’ But Evguenia’s purgatory, John’s Calvary and Una’s possession were trials of the past. Una was cast in a different part and served another master now.

Image Gallery

‘Would I have loved my father if I had known him?’ Radclyffe Radclyffe-Hall, circa 1880 and Marguerite, age five. Oil painting by Katinka Amyat, 1885

‘My true unfailing inspiration, my reason for all things’. ‘Ladye’, Mabel Batten, circa 1900

‘I should not have been sidetracked into marrying at all’. Una Vincenzo Troubridge with her daughter, Andrea, circa 1912

‘Troubridge brought me no spiritual development, no evolution, no kindness.’ Admiral Sir Ernest Troubridge, circa 1919

‘Had I been a man I should have married Una.’ Una Troubridge, circa 1916

‘No face seems beautiful to me but yours—your queer little ugley alian Chink Face.’ Evguenia Souline, circa 1934

BOOKS AND NOTES

PUBLISHED WORKS BY RADCLYFFE HALL

POETRY

1894  Reverie and other poems (untitled and privately printed)

1906  Twixt Earth and Stars (Bumpus)

1908  A Sheaf of Verses (Bumpus)

1910  Poems of the Past & Present (Chapman Hall)

1913  Songs of Three Counties (Chapman Hall)

1915  The Forgotten Island (Chapman Hall)

1948  Rhymes and Rhythms. Rime e Ritmi (Orsa maggiore, Milan)

FICTION

1924  The Unlit Lamp (Cassell)

1924  The Forge (Arrowsmith)

1925  A Saturday Life (Arrowsmith)

1926  Adam’s Breed (Cassell)

1928  The Well of Loneliness (Cape)

1932  The Master of the House (Cape)

1934  Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself (Heinemann)

1936  The Sixth Beatitude (Heinemann)

UNPUBLISHED WORKS BY RADCLYFFE HALL (IN TEXAS)

Michael West

Forebears and Infancy

Novel Writing

Why I Write

Lecture notes on the trial of ‘The Well of Loneliness’

Miracle of St Ethelflaeda

The Faith of Father Dearing

Woman in a Crêpe Bonnet

The World (fragment)

The Career of Mark Anthony Brakes

The Cunningham Code

Like Cures Like

The Scarecrow

Emblem Hurlstone

The Shoemaker of Merano (fragment. mss destroyed by UVT)

BOOKS

Bagnold, Enid, Diary Without Dates (London 1978)

Baker, Michael, Our Three Selves: A Life of Radclyffe Hall (Hamish Hamilton 1985)

Barney, Natalie Clifford, Adventures of the Mind (New York University Press 1992)

Beach, Sylvia, Shakespeare & Company (Faber and Faber 1956)

Belford, Barbara, Violet: the Irrepressible Violet Hunt (Simon & Schuster 1990)

Bell, Anne Olivier and McNeillie, Andrew, eds, The Diary of Virginia Woolf (Hogarth Press 1977–84)

Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen, Poetical Works (London 1914)

——, My Diaries (London 1919)

Boyer, Paul S., Purity in Print: the Vice-Society movement and book censorship in America (Saunders 1968)

Brittain, Vera, Radclyffe Hall: A Case of Obscenity? (Femina Books 1968)

Carpenter, Edward, The Intermediate Sex (Allen & Unwin 1908)

Castle, Terry, Noël Coward and Radclyffe Hall: Kindred Spirits (Columbia University Press 1996)

Cline, Sally, Radclyffe Hall: A Woman Called John (John Murray 1997)

Collis, Rose, Portraits to the Wall: