The court was again packed with all the same witnesses. The Well of Loneliness, Biron said, dealt solely with ‘unnatural offences’.
There is not a single word from beginning to end of this book which suggests that anyone with these horrible tendencies is in the least blameworthy or that they should in any way resist them. The characters in this book who indulge in these horrible vices are presented to us as attractive people and put forward for our admiration; and those who object to these vices are sneered at in the book as prejudiced, foolish and cruel.
Not merely that, but there is a much more serious matter, the actual physical acts of these women indulging in unnatural vices are described in the most alluring terms; their result is described as giving these women extraordinary rest, contentment and pleasure; and not merely that, but it is actually put forward that it improves their mental balance and capacity.
It was all too much for poor Sir Chartres. Stephen Gordon’s well of loneliness was not nasty enough. Had it been filled with prussic acid, immersion of its author in it, inch by inch, would have been too kind. Perhaps if Stephen Gordon had been covered in wens, pilloried by every citizen of Worcestershire, London and Paris and had erupted in sores after a single lesbian kiss, he might have allowed her life story to find its way on to Miss Podsnap’s bookshelf.
As it was the book ‘pleaded for the invert to be recognised and tolerated, and not treated with condemnation, which they are at present by all decent people’. He quoted episodes that showed that Radclyffe Hall condoned ‘horrible practices’ – he used the term eight times. He picked out the scene where Stephen Gordon tells her mother that she loves Angela Crossby; her jealousy when Angela spends a night with a man; her meeting with Mary Llewellyn in the war:
Biron: This takes place at the Front where, according to the writer of this book, a number of women of position and admirable character, who were engaged in driving ambulances in the course of the war, were addicted to this vice.
Goaded by an hour of his insults, Radclyffe Hall called out, ‘I protest. I am that writer.’
Biron: I must ask people not to interrupt the Court.
Radclyffe Hall: I am the authoress of this book.
Biron: If you cannot behave yourself in Court I shall have to have you removed.
Radclyffe Hall: It is shameful.
Which indeed it was. He was telling her that her efforts at openness were obscene, that her book should be burned, that she should be condemned by all decent people, that no one should be allowed to defend her. She had sought martyrdom and she had got it. Sir Chartres Biron was her Pontius Pilate, mean-minded, dishonourable and powerful.
It had been punishing for her to sit and listen in silence to this defamation of her life and work. In a public lecture two months later she said she could not let this slur on Toupie Lowther and her army sisters pass. She had, she said, written of them with ‘so much respect that it all but amounted to reverence’.
I had written of them as I believed them to have been, pure living, courageous, self-sacrificing women facing death night and day in the service of the wounded. Yet that old man sought through his preposterous statement to bring shame, not only on me as an author but upon the women of the British Empire. My friends it was too much. I could not endure it so I got up and called him to order. He threatened to have me taken from the Court as though I were one of those habitual drunks with whom, no doubt, he is accustomed to dealing. But once again I called him to order and I noticed that he did not repeat his insult to the splendid war workers.
Radclyffe Hall had said in her book that in the ambulance unit there was ‘many a one who was even as Stephen’. For Sir Chartres Biron that translated into filthy disgusting vice-ridden perverted debauchees. Years later in a diary entry, Una referred to how John had in fact scorned Toupie’s friends and the ‘perpetual sexual carrying on between members of the same Army Unit’ and how she ‘gave Chartres Biron the lie so vehemently’. It was clear from their social meetings that Toupie was surrounded by lesbians from her army days. It was also clear from her war record that the ambulance unit she managed was efficient.
To Biron’s thinking, a lesbian of good character was a contradiction in terms. He did not want to hear about their contribution to society. He did not care whether they were born like it, became like it, acted out of compulsion or choice, were promiscuous or monogamous, clever or stupid. They should all be eradicated, in his view. Referring to when Stephen Gordon’s mother throws her from the house, he said it was ‘not an unreasonable conclusion under the circumstances’. The stocks and gibbet might have been too kind. He found references to God in the book ‘singularly inappropriate and disgusting’. He had no hesitation whatever in saying that The Well of Loneliness was an obscene libel, an offence to public decency and that it would corrupt those ‘into whose hands it should fall’. He brought the proceedings to an abrupt close.
Biron: Now what do you say about the costs in this case, Mr Fulton?
Fulton: I submit that in a case of this sort the costs ought not to fall on the public.
Biron: Yes, I think that is only right.
Melville: Sir, I am sure that in all fairness you will allow me to repeat what I said on the last occasion, that the authoress, Miss Radclyffe Hall, was at all times most anxious to go into the box and give her view of the book.
Biron: That does not deal with the subject with which I was dealing. I was speaking about costs.
Melville: I thought you had dealt with the question of costs. I am sorry.
Fulton: Sir, I ask for 20 guineas costs on each Summons.
Biron: I think that is a reasonable order. I shall make the order for the destruction of the book with these costs.
24
Depress! Repress! Suppress!
‘This is the End of It’, the Daily Express declared. James Douglas praised the stand his paper had ‘felt compelled to take on this insidious perversion of the English novel … English literature is the gainer and nothing but the gainer.’ Radclyffe Hall was tired, had headaches and was sick all one night. She and Una tried to find peace and ordinary life at Journey’s End in Rye. They walked by the sea and in the shipyard, had tea at the Mermaid, went to mass and called the surveyor in because of the smell of the drains in the cobbled lane, Hucksteps Row, that led to their house. In the evenings Una read aloud Elizabeth and Essex and The Shuttles of Eternity.
Radclyffe Hall did not accept Leonard Woolf’s offer of a public subscription to help with legal fees. She had assets. The sale of 37 Holland Street freed ready cash. ‘Also, I am going to put down the motor’, she told Havelock Ellis. She sold Sargent’s portrait of Ladye. She offered it first to the Tate Gallery then to the Glasgow Museum of Art and she talked of ‘going slow financially’ until the storm was over.
The storm brought huge publicity and profit. Sales of her other books were brisk. In America Pascal Covici and Donald Friede planned to publish The Well of Loneliness in December as their first joint publishing venture. Pascal Covici was the publisher and friend of John Steinbeck. Donald Friede had been a vice-president of Liveright. They gave Radclyffe Hall an astonishing advance of ten thousand dollars, then sold the book at five dollars, not the usual two. Cape increased her royalties on the nine thousand copies already sold in Paris. Holroyd-Reece reprinted each month. Newspaper sellers with carts at the Gare du Nord sold the book to passengers on the Golden Arrow. In the rue de Castiglione dealers bought English first editions for six thousand francs and sold them for ‘as high as anything you are silly enough to pay’. Sylvia Beach, who published James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922, had more orders at her bookshop Shakespeare and Company in rue de l’Odéon for The Well of Loneliness than she could meet.
In England newspapers filled with comment on the dangers of censorship and pleas for a change in the obscenity law. Silence about same-sex relationships splintered, though it did not break. There were whispers that they might exist. Hugh Walpole, in Time and Tide on 23 November, wrote of h
ow between them James Douglas, Joynson-Hicks and Chartres Biron had ‘caused certain subjects to be discussed, inquired into and pleasingly investigated as never before in the history of this our hypocritical country’. In the same issue, an editorial claimed that a world best-seller had been created and that now no reader was unaware of the subject of the book. A ‘Modern Mother’ wrote that she defied any young person to ‘remain ignorant of certain facts which ordinarily would never have come to their notice’.
Other issues were glossed over. There was no discussion about institutionalized homophobia or the government’s manipulation of the law. The fuss embarrassed women who might have liked to live openly lesbian lives. Janet Flanner commented that The Well of Loneliness was a rather innocent and confused book. In a more adult society it might have braved the way for books that gave other views, that reflected diversity.
Radclyffe Hall insisted on an appeal to a higher court. She fought on, so she said in her oratorical style, ‘for the sake of the honour of literature, for the sake of all serious minded writers, for the sake of the freedom of the press which every writer holds sacred’.
The appeal against the Order made by Sir Chartres Biron was set for 14 December in the London Sessions Court. It was to be heard by Sir Robert Wallace KC ‘and a very large bench of London justices’. They were to judge whether Biron’s sentence should be upheld. Prior to the hearing, Rubinstein wrote to the Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Archibald Bodkin, asking him to release copies of the book for these magistrates to read. Sir Archibald replied in problematic prose:
With reference to your request that I should supply copies of the above-named book to the Court of Quarter Sessions with a view to the Justices attending thereat in connection with the appeal should have an opportunity of reading the book before the appeal is heard, I beg to inform you that I have been in communication with the Clerk of the Peace, Sessions House, Newington, who, on the directions of the Chairman of the Court, informs me that it would not be appropriate nor practicable to act upon your suggestion. I therefore do not propose to adopt it.
The Chairman of the Court, Sir Robert Wallace, was seventy-eight. He had already made clear his horror of the book in the papers. ‘His aged mind,’ wrote Radclyffe Hall, ‘evidently did not grasp that before being asked to pass judgement on a book the judges should one and all have read it.’
Sir Robert had been briefed by Sir Archibald as to how to proceed. And the Preposterous Jix was still there, positioning his men and stitching things up. The Attorney-General, Sir Thomas Inskip, was to act for the Crown. Sir Thomas’s fee was much higher than for ordinary counsel. He was entitled, because of his high office, both to open the case and to close it. The Home Office pathologist, Sir William Willcox, was to appear in court. Two doctors and a bacteriologist were paid fees totalling 115 guineas for agreeing to testify for the Crown. The Bishop of Durham wrote in his diary: ‘I received a letter from the new Archbishop of Canterbury conveying a suggestion from the Home Secretary that I should consent to give evidence in favour of prohibiting The Well of Loneliness as an obscene book.’ He noted his own reply: ‘I do not feel myself disposed, nor am I in the least competent to argue the case. Moreover, the whole subject is disgusting to me, and I have no desire to be mixed up with it, even in the modest degree your Grace suggests.’
Among writers solicited by the Home Secretary, Rudyard Kipling, a frequent guest at Whiteladies, Joynson-Hicks’s home, agreed to testify. Stanley Baldwin was his cousin. Kipling’s was the complex face of prejudice, as Hugh Walpole revealed:
I asked him at luncheon whether he approved of censorship (apropos of this tiresome, stupid The Well of Loneliness). No, he doesn’t approve of the book. Too much of the abnormal in all of us to play about with it. Hates opening up reserves. All the same he’d had friends once and again he’d done more for than for any woman. Luckily Ma Kipling doesn’t hear this.
The government, Radclyffe Hall said, was out for her blood. The defence knew that they would not be properly heard. The court was again packed with spectators. Marie Stopes, the advocate of birth control, was there. Her books were soon to be tried in the USA. Kipling showed up but left after Sir Thomas Inskip whispered to him that professional evidence would not be sought.
Twelve magistrates had been hired to condemn a book they were not allowed to read. The sole witness was again to be poor Inspector Prothero. The Attorney-General presided over this kangaroo court. He opened the case and closed it and pretended unanimity for the decision he and his friends imposed. He held The Well of Loneliness at arm’s length, confided how loath he was to read aloud from it, bowed to the press and said, ‘I shall have to go into a good deal of detail in these passages. I can only hope – and I am sure I may say this – that repulsive as it is to all of us the Press will show their accustomed restraint in reporting the many observations I may have to make.’
He had, he said, no idea whether the book had any literary qualities; his purpose was to show it was obscene. He chose his detail and gave his views. This book would suggest thoughts of a most impure immoral unclean and libidinous character to the minds of the young. It brought the name of God into corrupt passions. The practice in which its heroine Stephen Gordon indulged was referred to in a very well-known passage in the first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans and in a book of Juvenal. It glorified the vice of physical relations between women. It asked for toleration of the people who indulged this vice. It was
propaganda for the practice which has long been known as Lesbianism, a well-known vice, unnatural, destructive of the moral and physical fibre of the passive persons who indulge in it, who are the victims of others; this book is a plea for the active persons who practice this vice.… I submit that it is corrupting and obscene and its publication is a misdemeanour.
Sir Thomas passed two copies of the book to the twelve magistrates. The offending passages were marked with little bits of paper. ‘He was very absurd and he over play acted,’ Radclyffe Hall wrote: ‘I thought him rather a stupid Counsel, but he managed to be extremely vindictive. And yet as I listened to those parts of my book especially selected for its damnation, I was struck with the high moral tone of my writing & with my great decency and restraint.’
James Melville went through a ritual of defence. The previous evening he had sent telegrams to all his witnesses telling them their attendance would not be required. He knew the case was prejudged. He again pleaded for the freedom of literature, again urged the court to differentiate between the theme of a book and treatment of a theme. He might have saved his breath. While he was addressing the court, the Attorney-General Sir Thomas Inskip talked to colleagues and made a fuss about sending someone out for a railway timetable.
The jury retired at two twenty-five p.m. and returned at two-thirty p.m. Five minutes were all that were needed for Sir Robert Wallace to tell them what they must decide. ‘The bewildered and sheepish expressions of Sir Robert’s fellow magistrates provided a memorable spectacle’, Rubinstein wrote. ‘This was the only consolation afforded to our clients.’
Old Sir Robert delivered judgement. It was, he said, undesirable that there should be a constant repetition of the type of passages read to the court. The book was dangerous, corrupting, disgusting, obscene and prejudicial to the morals of the community. It was ‘more subtle demoralising corrosive and corruptive than anything ever written’. It was enough to make anyone want to read it. He dismissed the appeal and the defence again incurred all costs.
Sir Archibald Bodkin was again in court. Joynson-Hicks had asked him for notes on the appeal proceedings. Here is some of what he wrote that day:
… The Court retired for about five minutes and the Chairman in delivering judgement dismissed the Appeal and said the decision of the Court was unanimous; that the book was regarded as a subtle and insinuating one and the more dangerous because of its literary character: that it was corrupting in its tendency, was a condonation of unnatural practices, was a disgusting and obscene book
and prejudicial to the morals of the community. The order was therefore confirmed with costs and the Appeal dismissed.
I may mention that there were in attendance as witnesses on behalf of the informant Sir William Willcox [the Home Office pathologist], Dr Birley of 10 Upper Wimpole St, Dr Maurice Wright of 86 Brook St, Miss Lillian Barker and Mr Rudyard Kipling. I desire to place on record the readily-proffered assistance rendered by all these persons and I have no doubt, although not a tenth in number of those proposed to be called on the other side, their evidence would undoubtedly have obliterated any impression which the so-called experts in literature etc., might have made upon the Court. I am writing to them individually to thank them. It may be that the Secretary of State would like to send a line personally to Mr Rudyard Kipling who, although far from well, attended at the Sessions House.
In view of the discreditable action, as I regard it, of Mr Jonathan Cape, it would appear undesirable to accept any undertaking in the future to withdraw objectionable books from circulation. I am afraid the unfortunate feature of the whole matter is that from the proceedings the appellant will have derived very considerable profits, but at least the standard of decent literature in this country has to some extent been maintained. The Attorney General especially referred to the position of the Secretary of State, not only in regard to the law of this country, but also its International obligations.
AHB
Thus the unedifying process of the law, the well-worn drama of the English establishment, the Old Boys, their intrigue, misogyny and blustering terror of sex. Sir Robert Wallace, Sir Thomas Inskip, Sir William Joynson-Hicks, Sir Archibald Bodkin, peers of the realm, oligarchs, guardians of the nation’s morals, fools and bigots of their time, puffed with power, tainted with prejudice and sexual unease.
The Trials of Radclyffe Hall Page 24
