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

James Douglas voiced his bigotry to sell his newspapers. Chartres Biron, like Joynson-Hicks, used his judicial power to enforce his homophobic views. ‘Unnatural practices between women,’ Biron said, were ‘of the most horrible and disgusting obscenity.’ Inverts and perverts should be ‘treated with condemnation by all decent people’. They were ‘practitioners of unnatural vice, living in filthy sin’.

The Well of Loneliness posed problems for those it purported to defend. Lesbians might squirm at its theories and curl at its rhetoric, protest that its author’s perceptions were not theirs, recoil at being claimed so categorically, or defined by its terms. But such embarrassment was a small price when set against the homophobia the book uncovered in the ruling class, the men of the establishment, the government that made the rules, the judiciary that enforced them, the press that disseminated them.

Radclyffe Hall was proved right in her suspicion that her book would provoke antagonism. Her courage was put to the test. ‘I hate inaction’, she wrote. ‘I am by nature a fighter.’ Havelock Ellis told her that unjust decisions ‘light up the principle involved and stir enthusiasm’. Her book beamed like a searchlight into the dim lounges of clubs like the Garrick. It lit up the flawed men of power, gossiping with each other, plotting strategy, entrenching prejudice. It was not the state of literature that disturbed them. They did not care about literature. It was passion between women. They feared its acceptance if Radclyffe Hall was heard. They had their view of a woman’s place and they intended to legislate against this affront to it. They had not forgotten Radclyffe Hall’s challenge to Sir John Lane Fox-Pitt and Admiral Troubridge. The Home Secretary, the newspaper editor, the Chief Magistrate, the government of the day, closed ranks to silence her and to show that she was, after all, ‘a grossly immoral woman’.

Radclyffe Hall was frustrated that it was Jonathan Cape not herself who stood accused by the Home Secretary. ‘I,’ she said, ‘as nothing more important than the Author, I, mark you, could not take legal action.’ Her book and her right to live as she did were under attack. There was an atmosphere of repression, of picking safe words and taking a stance. She was infected by it too. On 24 August, the Daily Herald printed a letter of protest from her ‘on behalf of literature’. It was a pleading for freedom of speech, not a defence of lesbian rights.

If seriously written psychological novels are to be subjected to arbitrary attack from the Home Office, which attacks result in their being withdrawn, what chance has our sane and well educated public of obtaining the best output from publisher and author?

Must there never be any new pastures for the writer? Never any new aspects of social problems presented to the adult and open minded reader? Is the reader to be treated like a kind of mental dyspeptic whose literary food must be predigested by Government Office before consumption?

Such action can only insult the public intelligence and discourage our authors from writing sincerely, especially our younger and less established authors some of whom may yet have new messages for us.

On behalf of English literature I must protest against such unwarrantable interference.

In literary circles the talk was of ‘sapphism and censorship’. Virginia Woolf complained of the distraction in a letter of 30 August to Vita Sackville-West, with whom she was, in a way, in love:

For many days I have been so disjected by society that writing has been only a dream – something another woman did once. What has caused this irruption I scarcely know – largely your friend Radclyffe Hall (she is now docked of her Miss owing to her proclivities) they banned her book and so Leonard and Morgan Forster began to get up a protest, and soon we were telephoning and interviewing and collecting signatures – not yours for your proclivities are too well known. In the midst of this, Morgan goes to see Radclyffe in her tower in Kensington, with her love: and Radclyffe scolds him like a fishwife, and says that she wont have any letter written about her book unless it mentions the fact that it is a work of artistic merit – even genius. And no one has read her book; or can read it: and now we have to explain this to all the great signed names – Arnold Bennett and so on. So our ardour in the cause of freedom of speech gradually cools, and instead of offering to reprint the masterpiece, we are already beginning to wish it unwritten.

Vita was in Potsdam on holiday with her two sons. To Harold Nicolson, her husband, she wrote that The Well of Loneliness was ‘not in the least interesting apart from the candour with which it treats its subject. Of course I simply itch to try the same thing myself. You see if one may write about b.s.ness the field of fiction is immediately doubled.’ (Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West used their marriage as a cover and referred to their same-sex lovers as ‘backstairs business’.) To Virginia she replied that she felt very violently about the ban, ‘not on account of what you call my proclivities; not because I think it is a good book; but really on principle’. The preposterous Jix made her want to renounce her nationality, she said. ‘But I don’t want to become a German, even though I did go to a revue last night in which two ravishing young women sing a frankly Lesbian song.’

Radclyffe Hall scorned a protest that opposed the suppression of literature in principle but made no mention of ‘either the merits or the decency’ of The Well of Loneliness. Such an attitude would compromise her ‘in the eyes of her public’, she said. She could not tolerate the Bloomsbury Group’s intellectual superiority and equivocation. She felt they would disparage her book ‘given sufficient scope’.

Which scope they had. In her diary, Virginia Woolf