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

It is no use to say that the novel possesses ‘fine qualities’ or that its author is an ‘accomplished’ artist. It is no defence to say that the author is sincere or that she is frank, or that there is delicacy in her art.

The answer is that the adroitness and cleverness of the book intensifies its moral danger. It is a seductive and insidious piece of special pleading designed to display perverted decadence as a martyrdom inflicted upon these outcasts by a cruel society. It flings a veil of sentiment over their depravity. It even suggests that their self-made debasement is unavoidable because they cannot save themselves.

This terrible doctrine may commend itself to certain schools of pseudo-scientific thought, but it cannot be reconciled with the Christian religion or with the Christian doctrine of free-will. Therefore, it must be fought to the bitter end by the Christian Churches. This is the radical difference between paganism and Christianity.

If Christianity does not destroy this doctrine, then this doctrine will destroy it, together with the civilisation it has built on the ruins of paganism. These moral derelicts are not cursed from their birth. Their downfall is caused by their own act and their own will. They are damned because they choose to be damned, not because they are doomed from the beginning.

We must protect our children against their specious fallacies and sophistries. Therefore, we must banish their propaganda from our bookshops and libraries. I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel. Poison kills the body, but moral poison kills the soul.

What, then, is to be done? The book must at once be withdrawn. I hope the author and the publishers will realise that they have made a grave mistake, and will without delay do all in their power to repair it. If they hesitate to do so, the book must be suppressed by the process of law … I appeal to the Home Secretary to set the law in motion. He should instruct the Director of Public Prosecutions to consider whether The Well of Loneliness is fit for circulation, and, if not, to take action to prevent its being further circulated.

Finally, let me warn our novelists and our men of letters that literature as well as morality is in peril. Fiction of this type is an injury to good literature. It makes the profession of literature fall into disrepute. Literature has not yet recovered from the harm done to it by the Oscar Wilde scandal. It should keep its house in order.

Radclyffe Hall’s photograph was printed alongside this diatribe. There she was with short hair, bow tie, chappish clothes, hand in pocket, lighted cigarette, clearly lesbian, a decadent apostle of hideous and most loathsome vices, a moral derelict and a poisoner of souls.

Douglas’s prose style seemed to parody her own. Each hectored, invoked the Lord and buried their argument beneath overblown prose. Both were ambitious, melodramatic, opinionated, upholders of the moral high ground, preachers of The Truth. Like Fox-Pitt with his ‘grossly immoral woman’ charge, Douglas was the outraged patriarch, the guardian of the nation’s morals. In a single editorial he contrived to be offensive to homosexuals, lesbians, those with leprosy, the French, the Germans and all who were not Christians.

Jonathan Cape reacted in fear and haste. That same day, without talking to Radclyffe Hall or Audrey Heath, he sent a copy of The Well of Loneliness and a selection of its reviews to the Home Secretary. He invited him to pass the book, if he wished, to the Director of Public Prosecutions. He then wrote a reply for Douglas to print:

If it is shown to us that the best interests of the public will be served by withdrawing the book from circulation we will be ready to do this and to accept the full consequences as publishers. We are not however prepared to withdraw it at the behest of the Editor of the Sunday Express.

Cape accused Douglas of giving widespread and unwanted publicity to the book and of spoiling his own intentions of targeting ‘the right class of reader. Smut hounds and those with a taste for pornography would now be seeking the book out.’

James Douglas was victorious. He printed Cape’s letter on Monday 20 August in the Daily Express. His new headline was A BOOK TO BE BANNED. THE HOME SECRETARY’S DUTY. He ranted about The Well of Loneliness in another editorial. It condoned sexual perversity, loosened ‘the very sheet anchor of conduct and principle’, made crime and indecency a matter of individual judgement and inferred that ‘there were no such things as right and wrong in the universe. On these lines murderers could be comfortably assured not merely of acquittal, but of sympathy as the martyrs of their “psychological impulses”. And murderers only slay the body, while these perverts destroy the soul.’

Radclyffe Hall was incredulous when she read Cape’s letter in the Daily Express. ‘This was the first that I knew of my publisher’s intention’, she revealed. ‘His were the sins of imbecility coupled with momentary panic.’ Havelock Ellis was disbelieving too. ‘I have not anywhere met with approval of his action’, he wrote to her that week. ‘He invited the Home Secretary’s opinion – which he might have known beforehand!’

The Home Secretary, Sir William Joynson-Hicks, ‘the Preposterous Jix’, was an evangelical moralist. He was President of the Zenana Bible Mission and a fervent opponent of the Revised Prayer Book. Even the Bishop of Durham called him a ‘dour fanatic’ who proceeded against one cause after another with ‘dervish like fervour’. Joynson-Hicks instructed the police to patrol public parks ‘for violations of public decency’, established the Street Offences Committee, chaired by his wife, to crack down on prostitution, prosecuted dozens of nightclubs and casinos for gambling and sexual offences, secured a judicial ruling that made the Communist Party illegal and authorized a 200-strong police raid on a small, unwitting Russian trade delegation.

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