The Trials of Radclyffe Hall

by Diana Souhami

  Their views and those of Radclyffe Hall polarized. She preached about congenital sexual inverts, truth, justice, and blind and ignorant persecution. They postured about filthy disgusting ungodly sin. Not much was said about women who loved each other, their partnerships and lives. There was no humour, generosity, enlightenment or ease. By this trial, the government stigmatized and criminalized a kind of love. Its idiocy echoed down the years, silencing writers, consigning people to concealment of their deepest feelings and to public scorn.

  The case was lost. The Well of Loneliness was destroyed. Radclyffe Hall longed to get away from England. It had been punishing litigation, prolonged, personal and offensive. It was another rejection to compound with those of her formative years, another nail in the cross of martyrdom. She made heroic display and was more than hurt. She had headaches and trouble with her eyes and was exhausted. For Una it had all been part of the test of loving John, on a par with the Fox-Pitt ‘grossly immoral woman’ charge, the Troubridge calumny, Minna’s disdain.

  They arranged to leave the Holland Street house on 11 January. They sacked the servants, packed their possessions, took a lease on a flat at Kensington Palace Mansions and went Christmas shopping. John bought Una a gold watch, Una bought her a gold cigarette lighter. They had a sitting with Mrs Leonard, then went to Rye for Christmas. Andrea, Audrey and Patience Ross – also from the Heath agency – joined them there. All three went walking on Camber Sands on Christmas day and to John’s annoyance were half an hour late for the turkey and plum pudding.

  Radclyffe Hall became the butt of public jokes. She thought her phone tapped, her letters opened. She was particularly offended by The Sink of Solitude, a verse lampoon by ‘several hands’ in the tradition of Pope and Dryden. Published by Hermes Press it was dedicated to Compton Mackenzie’s novel about lesbians, Extraordinary Women. Mackenzie was wistful at the Home Secretary’s uninterest in his book. It only sold two thousand copies. He had planned to conduct his own defence. Raymond Mortimer, lover of Vita Sackville-West’s husband Harold Nicolson, called it ‘an expression of male pique and wounded vanity’.

  The Sink of Solitude, twenty pages long, was in rhyming couplets:

  The way to make a modern novel sell is

  To have a preface done by Havelock Ellis …

  It satirized all involved with The Well of Loneliness but in particular James Douglas with his bluster about killing girls with prussic acid rather than letting them read the book:

  Depress! Repress! Suppress! (Sunday Express)

  James Douglas knows what others merely guess –

  That woman-interest, sex and moral ire,

  Will set a million readers’ veins on fire …

  Of rhetoric he need not burk a particle

  In this week’s splurging moral-uplift article.

  JIMMY is menaced. He is far from placid.

  Ho Ho The Borgias! Who likes prussic acid?

  Some women poison with a deadly look,

  But RADCLYFFE poisoned JIMMY with a book!

  The WELLS OF LONELINESS are far from pure

  For poisoned wells JAMES DOUGLAS has a cure,

  ‘Stop up the Well!’ is JIMMY’S urgent call

  (Inset: A picture of MISS RADCLYFFE HALL).

  A long preface by a Mr P. R. Stephenson was scathing about ‘pathetic post-war lesbians with their mannish modes and poses’, the ‘sentimental scientificality of psychopaths like Havelock Ellis’, the ‘feebleness’ of The Well of Loneliness as a moral argument, the ‘uncritical criticisms’ of James Douglas, the ‘spinelessness’ of Jonathan Cape.

  The text was illustrated with cartoons by Beresford Egan in the style of Aubrey Beardsley. One of these showed Radclyffe Hall nailed to a cross, a naked woman with swinging breasts astride her thighs. Cupid on the cross cocks a snook at her. Joynson-Hicks slinks away, wiping his hand on his sleeves, the book in his pocket.

  Radclyffe Hall thought the cartoon blasphemous. It caused her ‘profound and painful spiritual reaction’, Una said:

  throughout the remaining years of her life she could scarcely bear to speak of it, even to me. Once she did say: ‘To think that I should have been used as a means of disrespect to Him …’, nor did her complete helplessness and innocence in the matter seem to afford her any consolation.

  It was insult added to injury that her writing was suppressed but not the lampoons and satires that mocked her. She had wanted martyrdom. Here was her apotheosis. She thought of herself as on a par with the crucified Christ, ‘I renounce my country for ever’, she wrote to Audrey Heath. ‘Nor will I ever lift a hand to help England in the future.’

  Then came news from Donald Friede in New York. John S. Sumner, Secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, had, with two detectives, raided the offices of Covici-Friede in West 45th Street and taken all copies of the sixth printing of The Well of Loneliness. The Society operated ‘under Article 106 Sections 1140 to 1148 inclusive of the State’s Criminal Code’. This legislated against Indecency: obscene lewd filthy disgusting books, magazines, plays or pictures, exposure of genitals, sale of contraceptive devices, disorderly houses, criminal surgeons, and men who lived on the earnings of prostitutes.

  John S. Sumner had a bristly little moustache, a smooth sleek to his hair and pince-nez glasses. He had, he said, received twelve complaints about the book. He gained his warrant for the raid from Chief Magistrate McAdoo. Donald Friede was summoned ‘In the Name of the People of the State of New York’ to appear before McAdoo at the magistrates court at 314 West 54th Street on 22 January 1929 at 10 o’clock, ‘Complaint having been made this day by John S. Sumner that you did commit the offense of violating Section 1141 of the Penal Law by selling an obscene book’.

  Sumner then went on to Macy’s book department and threatened them with prosecution if they did not stop selling the book. Which they did not. Until there was any adjudication of guilt the book stayed on sale all over the country with all the wild benefits of this publicity. Within a week sales reached 25,000 copies and by February 40,000.

  Radclyffe Hall wanted to tell the world how she had been victimized. England and her party, the Conservative Party, had let her down. On 25 January 1929 she gave a lecture in Southend to Young Socialists. Rubinstein warned her to ‘be very guarded’ over what she said. ‘Proceedings for contempt of Court might follow any definite suggestion that the case was pre-judged.’

  ‘The torch is in your hands to lighten the darkness’, Radclyffe Hall told her audience.

  Your Party is young, courageous, virile, it has just arrived at the glory of manhood. Who defended my book within a few hours of the dastardly attack in the Sunday Express – what paper leapt to my defence? the Daily Herald … May you sweep the country clean at the next election and let some fresh air and sunshine into England. If we cannot have a country fit for heroes, if that is too vast an aspiration, at least let us have a country whose air is too pure for this present government to breathe.

  She was, she felt, a hero. (Her flirtation with Socialism did not last.) She circulated a letter to writers saying she had proof of the government’s control of her trial. She wanted to expose the conspiracy. But her story was cold. Arnold Bennett told her that ‘no editor in London would now consider any item connected with the case as news’. Her trial was just another perversion of justice. She was humiliated, her book was suppressed and the papers were full of other things.

  She and Una left for Paris on 4 February 1929 with Barber the maid and Gabriele the cockatoo. John Holroyd-Reece sent red roses to their hotel, the Osborne in rue St Roch. He was again reprinting The Well of Loneliness. Radclyffe Hall signed copies, lunched at Pruniers and was treated as a hero. ‘Total strangers would come up to her in the street or in a restaurant and express their admiration of the book, their amazement and indignation at its persecution’, Una wrote.

  Natalie Barney gave a celebratory party in her Temple of Love. Her guests were invited for tea, cucumber sandwiches and a meeting
with Miss Hall. Natalie wanted to give out copies of the book but Sylvia Beach told her she would have to wait for the next printing. All were sold as soon as they came into her shop.

  It snowed, the Seine was frozen and John and Una’s car skidded in the Bois de Boulogne. They skipped mass, stayed in the hotel and Una, for eight consecutive hours, read aloud John Brown’s Body. They went to a party given by Gertrude Stein’s friend the Duchesse de Clermont Tonnerre. John ate something there which gave her diarrhoea for which she was prescribed mulled wine. Una had her hair permed and bought camiknickers and hats in the Champs-Elysées. John bought diamond and sapphire cufflinks and a pinscher bitch she called Paris, which twice tried to bite Una. It was swapped for a bulldog that would not walk, then a griffon with distemper that died of convulsions. They had tea with Colette who talked of her house in St Tropez. It was in five acres of orchard and vineyard and a mile from the sea. She extolled the sea bathing, sunshine, seafood, nightingales and mimosa trees. Una pleaded with John to go south for a long holiday away from the battles of city life. John wanted to stay in Paris until the outcome of the New York trial.

  25

  The freedom of human beings

  Pascal Covici and Donald Friede hired Morris Ernst as their defence lawyer. Ernst brought to the case fresh air, style and much-needed humour. He became famous in American censorship trials for his defence of The Well of Loneliness, Ulysses and Forever Amber, of magazine pieces about childbirth issues and pamphlets like Mary Ware Dennett’s The Sex Side of Life. He wore bow ties and little round glasses, preferred biography to fiction and had left-wing liberal views. ‘The causes that touch off my glands,’ he wrote, ‘do seem to me to have always the same central core: the freedom of human beings and human thought throughout the world.’ It was a help to him that, unlike in England, the right to freedom of speech was enshrined in the Constitution of the United States.

  ‘The only essential obscenity in life,’ Ernst wrote, ‘is stealth and cowardice and concealment.’ He came from a modest background, paid his way through law school, married young – his wife was a teacher – and started a law firm with two college friends, Herb Wolff and Eddie Greenbaum. He spent summers on the island of Nantucket. He liked the ‘gaiety and gab and peace and comfort’ of the place. He kept a yacht there called Truant, made ‘science notes’ about flora and fauna, had his own lathe and made walnut tables, maple beds and pine bookcases.

  The Society for the Suppression of Vice put its complaint to Judge Hyman Bushell on 21 February 1929. Ernst thought the judge would dismiss it. But Bushell took his cue from his English counterparts. Lesbianism was obscene. He declared himself worried, outraged, shocked and said the book idealized and extolled unnatural and depraved relationships.

  The book is well written and contains no unclean words, but on the other hand the whole theme of the story could hardly be more vile, unmoral and unsocial.

  I am convinced The Well of Loneliness tends to debauch public morals, that its subject matter is offensive to public decency and that it is calculated to deprave and corrupt minds open to its immoral influences and who might come in contact with it.

  He upheld the complaint against Covici-Friede and referred the case to the Court of Special Sessions for trial. What he did not do was to manipulate the process of the law to ensure the outcome he desired.

  The story was national news. No legislation could control the thousands of copies already sold or in the shops. Radclyffe Hall was in all the papers – her picture and her propensities. Here was the notorious creature who ‘spilled filth into the minds of England’s young’.

  She is Byronese in appearance and her friends call her John. Her jewels, large emeralds sunk in rings of platinum, are the only softening note in her mannish profile. Her short blond hair is combed straight back and her blue suit is Bond Street tailored. Her shirt is blue linen with a standing collar and the tie navy. She wears a monocle on a cord, a watch in her handkerchief pocket suspended on a leather fob from the lapel buttonhole. In the evening Miss Hall wears a moiré tuxedo with a black satin stock and a ruffled shirt front. Her hat is a large Montmartre.

  She ‘summoned her liveried car with a noble sweep and a deep voice’ and lived with Una The Lady Troubridge. She needed no man, that much was clear.

  Donald Friede, in France on business, had lunch and dinner with John and Una on 7 March. He told them of the runaway sales and that the book was a success whatever the decision of the court. While he was with them the publisher Gallimard rang wanting to do the French translation – the first novel by a woman in his imprint.

  In New York on 8 April 1929 before Justices Solomon, Healy and McInerney, John Sumner singled out eighty-two pages of The Well of Loneliness that caused him mortification – all about Stephen and Angela Crossby, Puddleton’s past and Mary Llewellyn in the Ambulance Brigade. Ernst countered that if you looked for obscenity you could find it in a laudable book. ‘Conscious censoriousness begets prejudice and renders fair appraisal impossible. Let the horrified Mr Sumner and his list of pages be cast aside. Let The Well of Loneliness be read with an open mind.’

  Ernst had prepared a fifty-one-page brief. The basis of his defence was the constitutional right of liberty of speech. He played to the court, referred to the ‘subject matter’ and the ‘tragic problem’ and was careful not to mention congenital sexual inversion, lesbianism or kissing. He did not have Radclyffe Hall at his side to nudge him toward self-defeating candour.

  The heroine of the book, he said, was flawed from birth emotionally and psychologically, ‘doomed to a life of frustration’, ‘thwarted and bewildered because her instincts are not the instincts of others of her sex’. Hers was a tortured, desperate, barren life, a poignant tragedy that called for tolerance and understanding. Her story moved the reader to compassion and did not invite emulation. Who, he asked, was the book likely to hurt: the impressionable child, the moral weakling, the fatuous and vicious, the average intelligent adult?

  Had Stephen Gordon been glamorous, a social wow and having a great time in bed, he would have needed to take a different tack. His purpose was to keep the book on sale, not to defend lesbian rights. The subject matter was, he said, about ‘emotional maladjustment’. It was not new in contemporary literature. He reminded the judges of the ‘well-known inability of Queen Elizabeth to adjust herself emotionally to men’. Any high-school girl in New York, he said, could go to a bookstore or circulating library and obtain copies of Elizabeth and Essex by Lytton Strachey, Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust, Death in Venice by Thomas Mann, The Intermediate Sex by Edward Carpenter, or works by Voltaire, Whitman or Swinburne.

  To suppress The Well of Loneliness because of its theme would, as a corollary, condone the suppression of hundreds of other works of literature and ‘prevent the proper enlightenment of the public on an important social problem’. The Federal Public Health Service yearly distributed to adolescents and adults millions of pamphlets about masturbation, sexual intercourse and venereal disease. Times moved on, fashions changed, there was a time when literature urging the abolition of slavery was repressed, and a time when women in bathing suits on beaches were arrested.

  He cited recent cases where printed matter ‘calculated to appeal to lecherous instincts and to titillate the lewd and salacious’ had been suppressed by the courts. There was Broadway, a pamphlet with pictures of naked women partly covered with lamp black which the reader was invited to rub off with a piece of damp bread. There was Cupid’s Yokes or the Binding Forces of Conjugal Life. It had nothing to do with matrimony but ‘abounded in disgusting and lustful details’. There was a dissertation on ‘loathsome diseases of the degenerative organs’, a broadsheet, Lucifer the Light Bearer, about ‘unnatural intercourse’, and various publications to do with coercive sexual acts and venereal complaints.

  What, asked Ernst, had The Well of Loneliness in common with these publications? It was a ‘sincere, serious, beautiful book, fearlessly published and disseminated’. In 500 pages
there was not a filthy word or indecent scene.

  If Stephen were a man the book would be merely a rather over-sentimental bit of Victorian romanticism. There would be no element in it that could bring a blush of embarrassment even to the cheeks of the complainant. The sole objection is the theme itself. This presents the vital question in the case: Will the law condemn a book otherwise unobjectionable because of its theme?

  The English magistrates had done just that. It was not a feasible rule. Who, Ernst asked, would determine the dangerous social consequences of one subject rather than another? Would the ‘unorthodox emotional complications’ of The Well of Loneliness cause more havoc than sadism in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, abortion in The American Tragedy, incest in Oedipus Tyrranos, the adulteries of most contemporary fiction or the murder, robbery and assault of detective and crime novels?

  Miss Radclyffe Hall was a prominent British writer with a place in literature. She had won two literary prizes. The courts suppressed pornography and punished ‘purveyors of filth surreptitiously distributed’. They did not ban literary works by authors of literary acclaim. Her book had social significance, moral fervour, integrity of intention, distinguished style. She attempted to show a social problem, predicated by the assumption that such problems could only be solved by the interchange of ideas, not by throttling discussion.

  He wooed the court, asked if it was now to renounce the enlightened policy of recent trials, ‘brand this book as obscene and open the door henceforth to the wanton and undiscerning prosecution of legitimate literature’. He referred to two books recently cleared of the obscenity charge: Madeleine, the Autobiography of a Prostitute and Mademoiselle de Maupin by Théophile Gautier. The first, the ‘life story of a strumpet’, was badly written and without moral motive but not banned. Gautier had set out to shock with his salacious novel. Even so, the Court of Special Sessions acquitted the bookseller, who then got damages for malicious prosecution.