Authors: Virginia Nicholson
as they talked it appeared that he liked her too. They would write, he said, and walk, and go for drives to sleepy hill villages in his battered car. ‘We can work, swim, talk or be silent together.’ Then as the sky turned rose-colour, he strolled back with her towards the hotel; twilight was gathering.
As they parted Irene could not suppress the urge she felt to raise her hand
to his breast; he intercepted her gesture and held it in his – ‘Then quick
and light he put a kiss on it;/ Turned; went.’ Was it a salutation, a gift, or a promise? Faint with emotion, Irene walked on suffused with the sweetness of that moment, sure now of her feelings, though unsure of his.
It was only a fortnight, but the memories were to last her lifetime. They
became lovers. The hot, jewelled days succeeded each other. The mornings
she spent reading, idling or exploring the vineyards, then the hour came
when she walked to the villa and in the heat of the day they both flung
themselves near-naked across the bright sand and into the translucent sea,
to swim and float dreamily, then bake their salty bodies on the sun-struck
beach. Then back to the villa for bread, chicken, salad, fruit, dawdling over their red wine till desire overcame languor and they moved to the cool shadowed bedroom. Expert, tender, sexy, imaginative, Richard’s love— making left Irene brimful and replete with consummation:
. . . I thank him for ever (looking back)
Thank my perfect lover
For the sheer beauty he brought to those hours:
Tears stand in the eyes at it.
Singled Out
Nothing tainted their idyll. Even the small discolorations – the ‘bruised
blossom marks’ – she later found on her skin were to her evidence of their
fierce desire for each other, and she smiled secretly to herself when she saw how he had marked her body with his passion, knowing too how fiercely she had responded.
For her the happiness was entire and perfect. The battered car took them
up to a mountain
auberge
with a sunset view where they drank
vin du pays
under a vine canopy and slept deeply in a huge bed. Wakened early by goat-bells, they relaxed back into warm contentment till the girl came to
bring ‘Monsieur et Madame’ their coffee.
Richard was rare, as Irene said, in combining a graceful body with a lively
and learned mind, and so they talked on history, and literature, discussing
mankind and civilisation, peace, war, philosophy, sex, power and religion.
Pink roses and oleander scented their moonlit terrace as she recited poetry to him, Milton, Carew and Ronsard. Sometimes the song of the nightingales drowned their conversation and they fell silent to listen. And sometimes
she cried in his arms at the beauty of it all: ‘Now, now,
now
I am happy.’
But it could never have lasted. Richard’s complicated love life ruled out
anything beyond this temporary affair. Not yet divorced from his first wife, he was at this time heavily involved with Brigit Patmore. He was disinclined to waste the opportunity of making love to his attractive admirer, but nothing more permanent was ever on the horizon. Richard asked Irene to
stay longer, but what was such an invitation? It was not the invitation she
wanted, the invitation to become Madame to his Monsieur. ‘I adore you’
was always on his lips, but never ‘I love you’:
It was death in life to say no.
But unless I stayed for always
(And that was not asked)
‘Longer’ was impossible.
He declared that he would come to see her, after the summer. He couldn’t
do without seeing his friends, and libraries, and her, he said . . . but they were empty assurances, and he did not return to England. Finally a letter came that ended it all for her, ‘Then no more ever.’
Lynn Knight’s introduction to the edition of
We That Were Young
reports that Irene Rathbone’s affair with Richard Aldington continued on
and off until he left Brigit Patmore for his next lover, Nellie McCulloch,
in – the year that Irene wrote
Was There a Summer
? The poetic version of her affair would seem to have been a dramatisation of events; things
A Grand Feeling
weren’t in reality so cut and dried. In her essay Knight hints at the messy, clandestine nature of their relationship, with Irene in the role of the ‘other woman’, snatching what time Richard could spare her from Brigit, living for his brief visits to London, and the final shock of that last letter, finishing things for ever between them.
Whatever the case, Irene’s searing affair with Richard Aldington continued to possess her. It surfaces with regularity in her fiction. In
October
() the warm south of her idyll is represented by two Frenchmen, Gilbert and Henri. Gilbert wrote novels – Jenny had read them, and
loved him for them, even before she met him. Jenny and Gilbert loved
tempestuously, but Gilbert left her – ‘full of promises, full of smiles’ – and never wrote to her again. Henri and Rose too have loved each other with heartbreaking passion among the perfumed, moonlit Provenc¸al nights; she
writes to him, but he never replies . . . After
October
Irene wrote
They Call
It Peace
(), in which the sensual side of her affair is achingly resurrected; here Joan and Paul’s love is consummated over a London summer of hot city pavements, ‘great still shadows in the breathless parks’, the air filled with the drugged scent of honeysuckle, and roses blowing and scattering their petals in Kew Gardens. Joan, dreamy and desirable in briefs and
camisole, blooms too – ‘not [with] the bloom brought by fresh air, but that
other, more subtle, brought by a physical love-life delighted in’. Paul drives her out to a riverside inn, where they swim, dine on the terrace and he makes love to her in a bedroom with a window opening on to trees. But
their affair has no future; Paul is married:
Now she knew that Paul had a wife, had a child, had a house. Knew it. Domesticity had smiled its smug smile at her . . . she had seen . . . a pair of toothbrushes in the bathroom . . .
The cost had been very dear. Envy of wifehood – not of house, not of child,
but just of wifehood – shook her. The female in her forlornly raged.
Lynn Knight comments sparingly: ‘There were other love affairs, but
Aldington remained significant . . .’ Irene Rathbone never married. It is
probable that in , when she was in her fifties, she met Richard once
again. He was back in Paris. Their views on that occasion seem to have
collided over the question of France’s suffering during the recent conflict, for Aldington, now married to Nellie McCulloch, had spent the years of the Second World War in America. It is hard not to wonder whether he
had read
Was There a Summer?
‘I loved him once,’ Irene wrote to her friend Nancy Cunard.
Singled Out
Aldington and Nellie parted in , and he suffered a nervous breakdown. Soon after, his literary reputation received a major setback when he published a debunking biography of T. E. Lawrence. He lived the rest of
his life in poverty in France, and died in the Burgundian village of Sury-en-Vaux in . Irene read of his death in
The Times
. ‘For years & years, as you know,’ she wrote to Nancy, ‘R. & I had not met, not written.
Therefore my sorrow may be considered foolish. But I can’t somehow bear
him not to be in this world.’ In , after a visit to Nancy in the south-west of France, Irene returned home via Burgundy, where she sought out Richard’s grave. There she placed flowers on the black commemorative
slab and, for a while, remembered. ‘It was very clear that she had never
wavered in her love for Richard,’ wrote a friend who knew them both.
If the abiding impression of Irene Rathbone’s love affair with Richard
Aldington is one of waste and melancholy – of the emptiness of a barren
life – then perhaps the last word on it should be given to the author herself, who, despite being deserted and betrayed, despite all the heartbroken tears and forlorn rage, rejected the pity of others, and refused to pity herself:
Hear this, you tired fat-shouldered London trees,
You smug furred women,
And you, my other self in me who bleeds!
I hold this truth, at this moment –
Even if I lose or deride it later –
The heaven of Happiness-in-Love once entered
Is there for always.
I have been blind with pain
But then
Blind almost with bliss too . . .
For how many of the smug, furred, married women had ever had such a
summer, or could ever have such memories?
*
Perhaps the definition of spinster needs to stretch to accommodate women
like Irene Rathbone who saw no reason to conform to the expectations of
that term, who were open about their erotic needs and refused to deny
them. The ‘female in her’ may have envied wifehood and coveted that
symbolic wedding ring, but for her such a love needed nothing so banal to
sanctify it. Blessed by sun and sex, ‘We knew, my love and I,/That this life
A Grand Feeling
of ours here was a sacrament . . .’ She had burned to that white heat. Irene Rathbone, and others like her, were pioneers, ahead of their time, and perhaps today’s general acceptance of their expanded morality is one of the
reasons that the word spinster has so little relevance in the twenty-first
century. Bohemianism had unlocked the door.
Bohemianism also unlocked the door for lesbians. During the war women
who didn’t marry because they loved women had a brief sense of having
found a purposeful identity. Writing about the women’s ambulance unit
on the Western Front in
The Well of Loneliness
(), Radclyffe Hall recalled: . . . a battalion was formed in those terrible years that would never again be completely disbanded. War and death had given them a right to life, and life tasted sweet, very sweet to their palates. Later on would come bitterness, disillusion, but never again would such women submit to being driven back to their holes and corners.
Their relationships brought them the tenderness and intimacy – the passion
too – which as human beings they craved. Nevertheless many lesbians left
out on the margins still felt a mixture of shame and confusion, alongside a
deep-rooted belief that a sexual orientation which brought them happiness
and fulfilment must be blameless. Lesbianism (unlike male homosexuality)
was not illegal, but it was not sanctioned either. In , even before the
highly public court case surrounding the publication of
The Well of Loneliness
, Radclyffe Hall had gone to court to defend herself against accusations that she was ‘a grossly immoral woman’. The jury, manoeuvred by the skill of a shrewd counsel, acquitted her, as did her own conscience, but she
knew that if her sexual behaviour had come under real scrutiny she might
not have got off so readily.
At that time lesbian women had no public champion, and another ten
years were to pass before Hall was to stand in the witness-box on their
behalf. After the war lesbians looked in vain for someone to speak out on
their behalf. In one of them wrote pleadingly to Marie Stopes. She
was forty-eight years old, she said, and having always been highly-sexed
had been driven to relieve herself by masturbation. She wanted advice, but
she also wanted Dr Stopes to take up her cause and that of other ‘Uranians’:
Singled Out
I write, hoping you will not think me impertinent in doing so, to ask you quite frankly if you will not come forward as the champion of woman Uranians, and explain our position to the public in a way they can understand; they must not go on thinking the silly cruel things about us they do at present . . .
What I feel so strongly is that the girls must be helped. I have suffered so much in my life (and so have some of my women friends who are also inverts) because my temperament was neither recognized nor understood; so much of my suffering was so entirely unnecessary. Until parents and teachers are instructed in the matter this endless mishandling of such girls will continue.
Someone
must instruct them, and it is essentially a woman’s job. Won’t you be the woman to help us through?
. . . We want a champion badly, and would be only too willing to welcome her.
Marie Stopes was not sympathetic. Her reply was brief – she would be
happy one day to attempt a short book on the ‘disease of Uranianism’. She
could see herself as the doctor, or saviour perhaps, of such women – but
never their champion. They must fend for themselves.
Not surprisingly in this climate the voices that did speak out for lesbian
women were cautious ones. In , four years before
The Well of Loneliness
was published, a minor writer called Sylvia Stevenson set down her painful meditations on the theme of lesbian orientation in a novel whose heroine,
Sally Wraith, struggles for recognition of her forbidden emotions. The
novel, mostly forgotten now, was entitled
Surplus
.
Surplus
was not prosecuted, perhaps because its author, in insistently stressing that her heroine was virtually asexual, was very careful not to stick her head over the parapet. But despite itself, Sally Wraith’s yearning to demonstrate her love persistently surfaces, barely articulated. The book is
in fact a rather wearying example of confessional literature, which asks the reader to follow the meandering and ultimately unsatisfying relationship between Sally, who works as a garage hand, and her artist friend Averil
Kennion, charming in paint-smeared overalls. Nevertheless the novel, as it