The Trials of Radclyffe Hall

by Diana Souhami

  Both Gautier and Radclyffe Hall had respected reputations and high moral purpose. Gautier protested about prudery and moral bigotry, Radclyffe Hall about misunderstanding and intolerance. Morally, Radclyffe Hall occupied the higher ground. Much of Gautier’s book was ‘undoubtedly vulgar and indecent’, The Well of Loneliness was ‘free from salacious and objectionable allusions’. The tone of Mademoiselle de Maupin was ‘light, bantering, pagan and frivolous’; it was anonymously published and had sexy pictures. The Well of Loneliness was ‘characterized by seriousness, dignity and restraint’, published by a reputable company and without ‘sensuous word pictures’ or illustrations. Ernst gave the judges a taste of Gautier’s prose:

  She came up to me, sat down on my knees more quickly than lightning, passed her arms around my neck, crossed her hands behind my head and clung with her lips to mine in a furious embrace; I felt her half-naked and rebellious bosom bounding against my breast, and her twined fingers twitching in my hair. A shiver ran through my whole body, and my heart beat violently. Rosette did not release my mouth; her lips enveloped mine, her teeth struck against my teeth, our breath mingled. I drew back for an instant, and turned my head aside two or three times to avoid this kiss; but a resistless attraction made me again advance, and I returned it with nearly as much ardour as she had given it. I scarcely know how it would all have ended had not a loud barking been heard outside the door together with the sound of scratching feet …

  No such passages spiced The Well. Nor, like a dirty postcard, could it be ‘absorbed at a single glance’ or like a sleazy pamphlet ‘perused in a few minutes’. It was a voluminous work which required protracted reading, assiduous application. The seeker of obscenity would be thwarted after thirty pages. ‘Readily corruptible persons’ would be in for a hard time. ‘No child, no moral defective, no impressionable seeker after prurient details would ever get far.’

  It was in its sixth American edition, widely circulated, stocked by reputable stores like Brentano’s and Macy’s and was sold openly at five dollars, a price that precluded a cheap thrill. Dirty postcards went for a few cents. Children and ‘moral weaklings’ would not have five dollars. ‘Vile postcards are vended by gutter peddlers. Booklets full of revolting details are sold in dives. Filthy motion pictures are filmed in secret and constitute back-door midnight entertainment.’

  The Well of Loneliness, Morris Ernst declared, was nothing less than literature, defended by the great and good. A ‘strenuous letter of protest’ against its suppression had been signed by Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Upton Sinclair and many more. It had received serious reviews. The New York Herald Tribune deemed it ‘courageous and honest, more of a sermon than a story, a passionate plea for the world’s understanding and sympathy, as much a novel of problem and purpose as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as sentimental and moralistic as the deepest dyed of Victorian novels.’ The Philadelphia Inquirer called it ‘remarkably fine literature’. The reviewer in the Nation said no subject of human interest and social significance should be per se undiscussable.

  Ernst backed his arguments with the opinions of experts. Dr Logan Glendening thought the censor, not the author, had a pornographic imagination. Dr Joseph Collins said ‘genuine homosexuality’ was an endowment, not a vice or disease. Edna Ferber feared what would happen when the New York Vice Society discovered the Old Testament. Llewellyn Jones said prosecution was ‘a silly piece of fanaticism’, Herbert Asbury blamed the idiotic attitude of the British authorities, Rabbi Felix H. Levy said here was fine literary work without a single objectionable feature from the moral point of view.

  The court adjourned, the judges went away for eleven days with copies of The Well of Loneliness and Ernst’s brief. They reconvened on 19 April 1929 and gave their verdict:

  The book in question deals with a delicate social problem which in itself cannot be said to be in violation of the law unless it is written in such a manner as to make it obscene. This is a criminal prosecution and as judges of the facts and the law we are not called upon nor is it within our province to recommend or advise against the reading of any book, nor is it within our province to pass an opinion as to the merits or demerits thereof, but only as to whether the same is in violation of the law. The people must establish that the defendants are guilty of violation of Section 1141 beyond a reasonable doubt. After a careful reading of the entire book, we conclude that the book in question is not in violation of the law.

  Donald Friede sent a cable to the Hotel Osborne with the good news. John and Una found it when they got back to their hotel from a cocktail party. Covici-Friede planned a celebratory edition. There was money to be made. ‘The most controversial book of the century’, he advertised. ‘Suppressed in England and vindicated by an American court.’

  Donald Friede asked Radclyffe Hall for a preface. She wanted to use extracts from ‘letters received from my public’. Rubinstein warned of copyright problems and warned again of proceedings for contempt of court if she commented on the English legal process. She kept the piece neutral – effusive with thanks but that was all. Friede urged her to be more revealing. She refused. ‘Tired as I am,’ she wrote to him, ‘I could not, even in supposition, face the merest possibility of being involved in any litigation concerned with any breach of the law … I just can’t and won’t have any trouble myself so there it is.’ Month after month of enduring the spite of the law, its bias, manipulation and expense, had taken its toll. In her novels she never again wrote about love between women.

  Una noted in her diary the ever-spiralling sales – 72,000, 83,000, 100,000. Radclyffe Hall received a royalty cheque of $64,000 and an avalanche of letters. Morris Ernst winged in a bill to Pascal Covici. ‘Long bitter experience has taught me that the time to send in bills is when clients are happiest’, he wrote. He wanted to meet him to determine the final fee. ‘As you will recall, I stated to you that our charges would take into consideration as an important factor, the result obtained.’

  Radclyffe Hall had fame but not of the sort she wanted. It was tinged with notoriety and had a disreputable edge. She was disenfranchised, her country had branded her, she did not now know where to make her home. She was flattered to receive, in Paris on 9 April 1929, a letter from an American actress who thought The Well of Loneliness a ‘great tragic story that would make a wonderful play’. Wilette Kershaw told Radclyffe Hall that she ‘knew her’ through her books and considered this a privilege. She would like to talk about a dramatization. ‘I feel Steven strikes a big tragic note and think I could reach it.’

  John and Una met her on 17 April. The meeting fitted in with worries over the content of the preface for Covici-Friede, tea with Dolly Wilde and Ezra Pound, Una having a permanent wave and the choosing of an ‘unpardonably inbred’ griffon called Tulip, which had six toes on each paw.

  John told Wilette Kershaw she would not do the dramatization herself, nor could she suggest anyone. Four days later Una wrote in her secretarial capacity: Miss Hall was far too busy to meet again, she was preparing material for a special edition of The Well of Loneliness and working on a new book. Miss Kershaw should let Miss Hall know as soon as possible her ‘definite plans anent dramatisation, theatre & financial basis, when, subject to the dramatic rights being still available she and her agent will gladly consider them’. Audrey Heath recommended Dorothea Fassett of the London Play Company in Piccadilly to act for Radclyffe Hall.

  Wilette Kershaw drew up an agreement which licensed her to produce the play against an advance of £100. She would stage it in New York or Paris within eighteen months, show Radclyffe Hall the script and pay agreed royalties. On 7 May Radclyffe Hall signed this contract, though a page of it was missing. ‘All my papers were mislaid and in disorder’, Kershaw later said. The advance was paid to the London Play Company.

  All seemed well. John welcomed all efforts to breathe life and good fortune into her book. She and Una shopped for their holiday. Una hired a car and a driver called Pie
rre from the Transports Automobiles. They left for the Riviera on Friday 17 May after an early breakfast at the Hotel Osborne. They travelled with ‘much luggage and impedimenta’, Barber the maid and Tulip the six-toed dog.

  THE MASTER OF THE HOUSE

  26

  An awful shock

  John and Una went south via Sens and Mâcon, Lyon, Orange, Avignon. They stopped when they felt like it, shopped for antiques in the markets, stayed in the best hotels and ate in the best restaurants. Pierre was told to drive at a snail’s pace. Barber was given ‘grave warnings’ for fortifying herself with alcohol. When she put a left shoe tree in one of John’s right shoes, Una threatened to pack her off back to England.

  Colette had recommended Seaward Lodge, an English pension near St Tropez. John thought the rooms dark, the lunch poor and deplored the walk to the sea. By evening they were at the Golf Hotel, Beauvallon. ‘Divine’, Una said of their spacious rooms, the balconies that looked out over the private beach.

  It was a perfect summer: clear sky, the blue Mediterranean, warm air from the wide open windows. John, Una said,

  grew as brown as a berry and her hair got bleached and her eyes were clear and very blue and her teeth very white in her tanned face … All the lines of strain and anxiety seemed to disappear and her smile grew rakish and carefree again and I think I never knew her to be so well. I myself had grown positively stout: I turned the scales at nearly eight stone and was mahogany coloured all over … Oh yes, it was indeed a holiday of holidays.

  They swam naked, lunched on lobsters, drove to Colette’s villa. The effort of a day was to buy a pair of sandals, go to the chemist, walk with Tulip on the golf course, or lie on their beds. ‘All afternoon we rested by open windows and read All Quiet on the Western Front’, Una wrote. Friends rented villas nearby – John and Jehanne Holroyd-Reece, Romaine and Natalie. John worked on her trolley book, The World, and made notes for her next novel, The Carpenter’s Son. It was to be about the martyrdom of Christ, written, Una said, ‘as an amends for that insult to her Lord and to her faith’ made in Egan’s caricature of her in The Sink of Solitude.

  After two months, at the end of July 1929, they decided to go back to Paris then on to Bagnoles in Normandy for thermal baths and the attention of doctors. Barber was sacked for drinking and inefficiency and sent to England by train. And Pierre the chauffeur went the way of all servants. In Paris Una called at the Transport Automobiles, complained about him and his driving and said he should be sacked.

  They lunched with Wilette Kershaw who told them that one of her three ex-husbands had dramatized The Well of Loneliness. He had added new characters and made it more cheerful. John thought her ‘mad and blasphemous’. She and Una went to see her in a play advertised as ‘banned’, called Maya. The Well of Loneliness was said to be ‘coming soon’. John found it all ‘an awful shock’. She sent Wilette Kershaw a letter that was more patronizing than amusing:

  Dear Miss Kershaw

  I know you would wish me to be as perfectly honest & sincere with you as you have been with me.

  Your performance last night, so essentially feminine and appealing, the very salient natural personal elements that went to enhance that appeal, only served to crystallise the doubts I have had from the first as to the advisability of your playing the part of Stephen Gordon.

  I am not losing sight for a moment of the latitude afforded by fine acting. But when an actress allows herself to be lured by personal enthusiasm into undertaking a part that is essentially foreign to both her natural charm & her individual beauty of appearance, & can only achieve an impersonation by a negation of those things that have won her her public, she not only risks the right interpretation of the part, but she risks for herself losing all that public who want her to be that which they have grown to love & admire.

  Dear Miss Kershaw, for both your sake & mine, you would be mad to cast yourself as Stephen Gordon.

  Radclyffe Hall sent back the £100 advance, asked for the return by registered post of her copy of the contract, then left with Una for the Grand Hotel, Bagnoles, driven there by a ‘mad, drunk & indecent chauffeur’.

  Wilette Kershaw did not reply. Una kept phoning and eventually got through to ‘a vague & irate friend’. Yes, the cheque had been received, Miss Kershaw would answer when she had a moment. Wilette Kershaw then wrote that she had no intention of abandoning the project and would keep her options open about who would play the part of Stephen Gordon.

  Radclyffe Hall again became enmeshed in the process of the law. She sought consolation from it that it was never going to provide. She sent wires to Harold Rubinstein and Theodore Goddard and wrote a bitter letter to Dorothea Fassett. She made much of the fact that her copy of the contract had a missing page and was therefore in her view void. She said that if the contract was not cancelled within a fortnight she would hold the London Play Company responsible.

  There was muddle and blame. Wilette Kershaw did not answer the high-handed letters showered at her. Dorothea Fassett passed the problem to Audrey Heath. Audrey wrote regretting the letters John had sent directly to Wilette Kershaw. These showed, she said, that John wanted to extricate herself from the contract because of a change of mind. Wilette Kershaw had not defaulted on the agreed terms. ‘Probably we are in the right on a slender technical thread, but it is a very moot point as to whether a court of law would adjudicate on that and not on the general intention of the parties. Shall I get you a solicitor’s opinion?’

  Una sent an irate wire to Audrey. She was extremely distressed by her letter which seemed to be supporting Dorothea Fassett. John, she said, could not rush to London so soon after her thermal baths. Her veins were ‘soft as pulp’ and it would ‘asking for phlebitis’. They would curtail their treatment and return to Paris. Audrey must meet them on Thursday 12 September as John’s guest at the Hotel Osborne. Meanwhile she was to make no concessions to Wilette Kershaw. ‘We both think it very obvious that you are not (as you think) in touch with the whole situation.’

  Distressed at the thought of failing them, Audrey took all the relevant paperwork to Paris and spent three days trying to revoke the contract. But Wilette Kershaw would neither accept repayment of her advance nor relinquish her rights. And as a further trial Theodore Goddard wrote that Mrs Visetti’s solicitor had contacted him. She needed money for an operation.

  Paris was hot and the ease of the holiday gone. John and Una could not reclaim their usual rooms at the Osborne. Those available were noisy. At dinner with Audrey, John nearly fainted. She reiterated her dislike of doing business with women and told her not to have further dealings with the London Play Company or to ‘recommend her luckless authors to them any more’.

  Audrey was never again quite in favour. Radclyffe Hall summoned Theodore Goddard. She met him at Boulogne and instructed him to sue the London Play Company and to injunct Wilette Kershaw. Goddard also thought the contract invalid because of the omitted page. ‘There is no contract’, he said. He drew up a High Court writ designed to stop Wilette Kershaw claiming she had the right to dramatize The Well of Loneliness or to go on declaring her intention to produce it in Paris, Berlin, New York or anywhere.

  Radclyffe Hall signed this writ at the British Consulate in Paris on 18 October and it was served on Wilette Kershaw. She then worked long hours on The Carpenter’s Son, her novel about the martyrdom of Christophe Bénédit. It contained much kneeling, clasping of crucifixes and agonized prayer. Una read it aloud, thought it inspired by God and called it an intensive study of the Passion of Christ.

  The style was a mix of Provençale dialect and gospel sermon. Radclyffe Hall would wake in the night talking to Bénédit. She used words like ‘perforce’, ‘bethought himself, ‘nay’ and ‘thus’ and ‘many an one’. Aged four, Bénédit sees his cousin hit a snake with a stick. ‘“Stop, stop!” he screamed. “You are hurting my shoulders’” – on which there then appears a long red weal – spelled wheal. He reads the gospels, has visions of suffering pack mules, goes
into psychic catatonic trances and knows that a firm hand is binding him for inscrutable ends.

  Andrea visited for a week. She was nineteen and had won a scholarship to read English at Oxford. Una met her at the Gare du Nord. They had not seen each other for nearly a year. Andrea did not know what to call Radclyffe Hall. John did not sound right. Una showed her the sights of Paris while John worked.

  Wilette Kershaw did not back down. Her solicitor, Clarence Samuel Tomlinson of New Bond Street, established that Dorothea Fassett was prepared, if subpoenaed, to testify that the discrepancy in the contract was because a secretary had inadvertently omitted a page in the post. He provided evidence that Radclyffe Hall’s real motivation in issuing a writ was that she did not think his client’s acting suitable for the part. Wilette Kershaw reiterated on his advice that she proposed to produce the play in accordance with her contract of May 1929. And he added a bombshell:

  I have made enquiries and have ascertained that on the 16th November 1928 an Order was made at the Bow Street Police Court directing that all copies of the Plaintiff’s book The Well of Loneliness (the same having been seized by the Police) should be destroyed upon the ground that they constituted an obscene publication. The memorandum of conviction is now produced.

  Radclyffe Hall saw this as no more than a gratuitous insult to stir prejudice. But Goddard realized what should have occurred to him at the start: because of its suppression, The Well of Loneliness probably had no copyright. He took counsel from Sir Patrick Hastings who thought it highly doubtful that a copyright existed and advised against legal proceedings. Goddard asked for a ‘Discontinuance’ of the trial. Radclyffe Hall paid all costs incurred by Wilette Kershaw and herself.

  She had sought to use a technicality of the law to overrule Wilette Kershaw in much the same way as Joynson-Hicks and Chartres Biron had overruled her. She lost. They had won. The obscenity ruling left her and her book unprotected. Her wishes did not count. Any charlatan could exploit her text.