Authors: Virginia Nicholson
ploughs its way through the ups and downs of their relationship – the
loneliness, the jealousies, the cross-purposes and the brief ecstasies – makes an unambiguous plea on behalf of all the misunderstood women for whom ‘friendship’ – as Stevenson terms it – meant more than marriage ever could.
Surplus
reads very like autobiography, as it traces its heroine’s life and love story. Sally (Sylvia?) knows from the outset that she will never pair off with a man: ‘. . . she had a perverse and ridiculous objection to being kissed.’ She’s as much of a misfit when it comes to work too, refusing to
get a job as a lady’s companion. To her father she’s a failure, with no
qualifications, no job and no husband. Then she meets Averil. For Sally it
A Grand Feeling
is love at first sight, but though Averil adores her their friendship has, for her, no baggage of commitment. Agonisingly for Sally, Averil likes men, and she even enjoys kissing them. More angst is in store when a third
woman appears on the scene, and Sally is consumed with jealousy, followed
by stricken disbelief when Averil then announces she wants to get married.
Married!
‘. . . What’s the idea? Are you getting tired of me, or what?’
‘Of course not’ – Averil put out a weary hand – ‘But we couldn’t expect to go on living together all our lives, surely?’
She said it as if it were quite an ordinary statement, and it was too much for Sally.
‘We are going on together – I thought it was to be for always and so did you,’
she cried. ‘We belong together. Promise you won’t leave me, promise! You’re the only creature I really care for in the world, you can’t leave me alone. I want you too much.’
‘But, my dear old thing, Barry wants me too,’ said Averil.
Almost to the last breath, terrified of being left alone, Sally fights to keep Averil. Life is cruel. Already the war had robbed so many women; her failure to find a job or to be married had outlawed and condemned her.
Then Averil came along and seemed to offer the sweet surety of love; and
now, mercilessly, ironically, marriage comes like a thief to steal the one
companion she would live or die for. Sally feels like a freak, a ‘scapegoat, cast out from the herd’, a frustrated spinster: ‘It’s unfair!’ she cried. ‘I love a woman with all the strength of my heart, and I’m sneered at, laughed at, condemned to solitude as if I’d committed a crime.’
How could she live, alone for ever?
Surplus
ends, however, with hope. Was Sally really a freak? – a misfit? Maybe not. Maybe there were ‘others like her . . .’? Maybe there were even great numbers of ‘unmated women’ out
there, looking for ‘friendship’? And if there were, and they were to find it, surely they would discover that they had not, after all, missed out on the greatest thing the world has to offer: love – ‘the only human attribute that is indestructible by time, that is certain to survive time, if humanity itself survives’.
As the aggrieved heroine of a rather tedious novel Stevenson’s Sally
Wraith is not a character worth following for -odd pages; however, as
the archetype of a misfit – a suffering, denying, unhappy, misunderstood
Singled Out
example of what many, many women at that period must have undergone
– her plight is pitiable. Just how many there were is impossible to say.
Crushed by the respectable world, this love dared not speak its name.
Luckily for those misfits daring enough to venture beyond the confines
of respectability, there was a joyful alternative. In s Britain – above all in London – artists and subversives made up a recognisable Bohemian sub-culture. At the CafeŔoyal homosexual woman felt accepted among
like-minded comrades: modernist poets, exhibitionists, cross-dressers,
abstract expressionists, models and nightclub dancers. The Ham Bone Club
and the Cave of Harmony too were full of them. Here they could dance
together, unafraid, knowing that the shortage of men had made this a
common sight. In
The Long WeekEnd
(), a social history of Great Britain between the wars, Robert Graves and Alan Hodge noted the increase of homosexuality following the German example: ‘In certain Berlin
dance-halls, it was pointed out, women danced only with women and men
with men. Germany land of the free! The Lesbians took heart and followed
suit, first in Chelsea and St John’s Wood, and then in the less exotic suburbs of London . . . [They] were more quiet about their aberrations at first; but, if pressed, they justified themselves . . . by pointing out that there were not enough men to go round in a monogamous system . . .’
Like Marie Stopes, Graves and Hodge appear to have viewed ‘The
Lesbians’ as deviant. The psychologist Esther Harding was more apologetic;
she felt that the ‘rise’ in lesbianism was attributable to career women
who reached their thirties only to find ‘all the men of their age already
married . . .’, the implication being that such ‘deviancy’ was forgivable in the circumstances. Even so, Harding’s attitude betrays her sense that if they couldn’t get a man, the Surplus Women would have to get their fun where they could.
The lesbians themselves had their own charmed circles, however; and
they saw themselves as the last word in modernity and emancipation. In
the early s Radclyffe Hall (known to her friends as John) was at the centre of an exuberant crowd of artistic and theatre types. There was the cellist Gwen Farrar, with her basso profundo voice, her horn-rimmed glasses and
her on- (and off-) stage partner, the pianist Norah Blaney. There was the
American revue star Teddie Gerard, who stunned audiences in with
her appearance in a backless gown while behind her a chorus of male
crooners sang, ‘Glad to see You’re Back, Dear Lady’. The defection of
Teddie’s lover Etheline to Eileen Bliss got everyone gossiping, but Teddie
herself seemed unperturbed. She was a hard-drinking, promiscuous adven—
turess with a drug habit. They were joined by the spendthrift Alabama-born
A Grand Feeling
According to
Punch
, size mattered to certain women as much as to men (June ) actress Tallulah Bankhead, the eccentric millionairess and speedboat racer Jo Carstairs, and the widowed but lesbian playwright, Gabrielle Enthoven.
Then there was ‘Toupie’ Lowther, divorced daughter of the Earl of Lons—
dale, and Enid Elliot and the Honourable Eileen Plunkett, all ex-wartime
ambulance drivers. The
Daily Mail
fashion correspondent, Evelyn Irons, and her partner Olive Rinder both provided the intrigue of their tortuous
meńage à trois
with Vita Sackville-West, while ‘Poppy’ and ‘Honey’ were a pair of drunk-and-disorderlies known only by their first names. Escaped from her marriage of convenience, the artist Romaine Brooks (of a slightly
older generation) sometimes put in an impressive appearance with her
lover, the American poet Natalie Barney. Romaine Brooks, like Radclyffe
Hall and many of the others, preferred to wear severe, masculine attire; her self-portrait shows a crop-haired wraith with feverish eyes and funereal garb. In
The Forge
(), Radclyffe Hall described her as ‘beautiful with an elusive, inward kind of beauty difficult to describe’. This crowd rode motorcycles, cropped their hair, smoked jewelled pipes and danced jazz.
Hall herself wrote all day, talked, smoked and partied all night.
If like Radclyffe Hall you were ‘in’ with them, the social whirl was an
intoxicating cocktail. In Bohemia, ‘Sapphism’ was just another life-enhancing eccentricity. If you wanted to call yourself Dickie, Jo or Billie, wear double-breasted jackets and wing collars and crop your hair, nobody felt threatened. At Goldenhurst, his house on Romney Marsh, Noe¨l
Singled Out
Coward kept open house for the
beau monde
, which included the Radclyffe Hall circle. The dinner parties there rang with howls of laughter.
But when the storm broke over
The Well of Loneliness
in Radclyffe Hall’s privacy was at an end. By the time it was published she was already an acclaimed writer, with a best-selling novel and two prestigious literary
prizes behind her. As such she was positioned to attract both notice and
censure. For the editor of the
Sunday Express
no abuse was too strong: ‘I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel,’ he raged.
The Well
had gone as far as any book could in depicting lesbian relationships, although the nearest it came to being explicit was some rather hot kissing. Probably the righteous anger of the
Sunday
Express
was directed against the euphemistic phrase which ends Chapter : ‘. . . that night they were not divided’. There is nothing stronger than that, unless one takes exception to some fuzzy emotional passages referring to ardent fulfilment, turbulent rivers and dim golden hazes.
Recently, it has emerged that the storm over
The Well
made waves even in political circles. The male establishment had strenuously discouraged any mention of lesbianism, to the extent of actively denying its existence. In a bill making lesbianism illegal failed to pass into law because MPs
considered that it was wiser to sweep the whole issue under the carpet
than to risk dignifying such a disturbing and repellent practice with legal
endorsement. Plainly, they feared ‘the oxygen of publicity’. When the
Well
storm broke, the Prime Minister, the Chancellor and the Home Secretary went to great lengths to suppress Hall’s book, and the Director of Public
Prosecutions made clear his fear that an increase in female homosexuality
would exacerbate the man shortage: ‘I am afraid [that] curiosity may lead
to imitation and indulgence in practices which are believed to be somewhat
extensive having regard to the very large excess in numbers of women over
men,’ he wrote. In other words, the powers-that-be were persuaded that
the book’s lesbian content threatened the wellbeing of the entire nation.
But now Radclyffe Hall was on the warpath. Conspicuous in the court
in a Spanish riding-hat and a long leather coat, she became the public and
political face of lesbianism. Her stand was for all those ‘inverts’ and ‘deviants’
abused by a hostile world; she stood up for the unlucky, ‘the weak and the
hopeless’; she wanted to bring the rest of the world to understanding. In
the event Sir Chartres Biron, the Chief Magistrate, condemned
The Well
of Loneliness
to be burnt as an obscene libel.
There is of course nothing like banning a book to guarantee that it will
be obtained, read and discussed in the most public way possible.
The Well
found publishers and translators abroad and sold millions of copies; in
A Grand Feeling
the Falcon Press bravely tested the law again and the book was published
in Britain. By a certain satisfying justice, the case achieved the exact result that the politicians had most feared, and to the fury of those who wanted the novel extinguished, the Radclyffe Hall trial fanned the lesbian flames
into a bonfire. Homosexual women had found their champion – one they
had long been waiting for.
The Well of Loneliness
is still in print.
*
Dancing to jazz bands, smoking jewelled pipes, and confronting the might
of the law weren’t everyone’s notion of a contented emotional life. From
the outset Angela du Maurier had hankered for marriage, but her lack of
success with men may well have turned her towards her own sex. Angela
was a serial faller-in-love. In the summer of , when she was twenty-five, she fell madly in love with ‘X’, a man whom she described as Mr Right; unfortunately nobody else agreed, including X’s wife. The affair, like all
the others, ended in tears. The following year she met her ‘twin’, Angela
Halliday. It was as if their identities had become blended from the outset,
for they were both born on the same day, March ; both their mothers
were named Muriel, and both their fathers went to Harrow. Their nurses
were both called Nurse Pierce, and as babies both were wheeled in their
perambulators around Regent’s Park. However, they differed by being ten
inches apart in height. In her autobiography du Maurier is cryptic, but the
clues are there; she appears to have found her true orientation.
From that point on, there is little talk of relationships with men; instead
she sits down to write her first novel,
The Little Less
, the story of a lesbian love affair. (After
The Well of Loneliness
no publisher would touch it, and Angela had to bowdlerise it for eventual publication in .) Later in life, when she came to write a second volume of memoirs,
Old Maids Remember
(), Angela took good care to remind her readers that the Bible – in
the story of Ruth and Naomi – acknowledged female love. In the memoir
du Maurier persisted in claiming that her relationships were innocent, and
it may well be that they were. It infuriated her to think that a same-sex meńage was always immediately assumed to be debauched. Living on your own was the only way to ensure an unsullied reputation, and who in
their right minds would settle for that? So what could a middle-aged old
maid possibly tell anyone about love? More than you might think, was
the implication of her defended reply. Sex was a justifiable pleasure in life, and after all, in her words, ‘to be white as the driven snow at thirty is just damn silly’.
For Angela du Maurier discretion was the key, and there are plenty of