The Trials of Radclyffe Hall by Diana Souhami (interesting novels to read txt) 📕

better. Homosexuality is, after all, as rich in comedy as in tragedy, and it is time it was emancipated from the aura of distinguished damnation and religious martyrdom which surrounds its so fiercely aggressive apologists.

The subject matter was not a problem. The fears of publishers appeared misplaced. Reviews accrued over the next four weeks. Many were favourable, some were critical, all were unsensational. Una began a book of press cuttings. By 2 August Harrods and the Times Bookshop had sold all copies and reordered twice. Cape planned a third edition. John and Una were thrilled by what looked like clear success. They decided to leave London on 23 August for a long summer holiday. Una went to Cook’s and booked travel tickets and hotel reservations. They planned to sail to Calais, take the Golden Arrow to Paris, go to Bagnoles for the thermal baths, then journey on to Italy and summer in the sun.

They had their hair cut at Harrods and took a course of treatment at Cyclax for their complexions. Andrea dined one evening, but they left her and went to the first night of The Skull at the Shaftesbury Theatre. The vet called to cut Lurulu’s wings and claws. An acquaintance, Anne Elsner, a travel writer who admired The Well of Loneliness and who lived in a house called Journey’s End in Rye, invited them to spend a weekend with her. John loved Rye. She was thrilled by the views of marshland and the sea, the distant lighthouse and the glimpse of France, the cobbled streets and Tudor architecture. At the Catholic church of St Anthony, the priest, Father Bonaventura, gave her a silver gilt medal of this saint and invited her to kiss a relic of the true cross. She resolved to buy a house in Rye after the summer holidays. She went home to London ‘tired but happy’. In the Evening Standard Arnold Bennett wrote of her book’s ‘notable psychological and sociological significance’ and called it ‘honest, convincing and extremely courageous’.

On her forty-eighth birthday John went to high mass with Una and Andrea. In the evening Una read aloud Havelock Ellis’s latest book, his seventh. It was called Eonism and Other Supplementary Studies and it was about transvestism. On Friday 17 August the Daily Telegraph gave The Well of Loneliness the best of reviews and said it was ‘truly remarkable’, ‘a work of art finely conceived and finely written’. More tours of the London bookshops gratified. The Well was in all the windows. Sales were fast. John went to the chiropodist and a Mrs Fowler came to collect Mitsie to keep her in kennels over the holiday.

John felt established as the ‘bold pioneer’, the first writer to ‘smash the conspiracy of silence’. She was proud of the praise her book received. She did not know that Jonathan Cape had that morning received a note from James Douglas, editor of the Sunday Express, director of London Express Newspapers, member of the Garrick Club, author of The Unpardonable Sin and The Man in the Pulpit. Douglas informed Cape that he had written an editorial calling for The Well of Loneliness to be suppressed. It would appear in his paper that weekend.

20

Depraved practice

Jonathan Cape had not sent review copies of The Well of Loneliness either to the Daily Express or the Sunday Express. He wanted to avoid their editor’s brand of lurid interest. But James Douglas read the book and knew he could drum up scandal of the sort that sold his newspapers. On Saturday 18 August Express hoardings advertised impending disclosure of ‘the book that must be banned’. George Ellard, a sales clerk at Cape’s offices at Bedford Square, said the phone did not stop ringing all day. Bookshops rushed to order more copies of The Well. Collectors and messengers queued outside the trade counter. ‘They all wanted copies: ones, twos, sixes, tens, twenty-fives, fifties; and in the case of Bumpus, a hundred.’

Next morning, Sunday 19 August, at Holland Street, John and Una had the newspapers and breakfast brought to their bedroom by Cartwright the maid. Douglas’s peroration spanned five columns of the Sunday Express. His inch-high banner headline was A BOOK THAT MUST BE SUPPRESSED. Publication of The Well of Loneliness was ‘an intolerable outrage – the first outrage of the kind in the annals of English fiction’. This was a book that contaminated and corrupted literature. It was not fit to be sold by any bookseller or borrowed from any library. It was his duty as a critic to make it impossible for any other novelist to repeat this outrage.

Its theme is utterly inadmissible in the novel … I am well aware that sexual inversion and perversion are horrors which exist among us today. They flaunt themselves in public places with increasing effrontery and more insolently provocative bravado. The decadent apostles of the most hideous and most loathsome vices no longer conceal their degeneracy and their degradation.

They seem to imagine that there is no limit to the patience of the English people. They appear to revel in their defiance of public opinion. They do not shun publicity. On the contrary they seek it and they take a delight in their flamboyant notoriety. The consequence is that this pestilence is devastating the younger generation. It is wrecking young lives. It is defiling young souls.

It was, Douglas reasoned, perhaps a blessing or a curse in disguise that this novel had appeared. Its purpose was to make society face a disagreeable task which it had hitherto shirked, ‘the task of cleaning itself from the leprosy of these lepers, and making the air clean and wholesome once more’.

The battle against this filth, he said, had been lost in France and Germany, but not in England,

and I do not believe that it will be lost. The English people are slow to rise in their wrath and strike down the armies of evil, but when they are aroused they show no mercy, and they give no quarter to