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

witnesses to give ‘good cause’ why the book should freely circulate. He believed that the numbers of the book’s supporters, their status and expertise, would overwhelm any case for the prosecution.

He marshalled support from the literary, the erudite, the devout, the successful and respectable. Many of those he approached were anxious to avoid the witness box; ‘they generally put it down to the weak heart of a father, or a cousin who is about to have twins’, Virginia Woolf wrote. It was only Radclyffe Hall who wanted to stand in the dock, embarrass the world to its withers and declaim, ‘I am an invert, read me.’ The Archbishop of York foresaw ‘practical difficulties’ if he offered support. H. G. Wells had ‘gone abroad’. Arthur Conan Doyle had ‘left for South Africa’. John Galsworthy, President of the PEN Club, was too busy and did not think literary freedom was at risk. (Joynson-Hicks had personally asked him to testify against the book.) Bernard Shaw said he was himself too immoral to have credibility. Alec Waugh had not read it and hated legal proceedings. Harley Granville-Barker did not regard ‘sexual perversion a fit subject for art’. Professor J. B. S. Haldane’s ‘scientific occupations did not permit him to take part in such controversies’. Geoffrey Faber, as head of a publishing company, could not defend particular books. James Agate declared himself ill and Eden Phillpotts declared himself a recluse.

Havelock Ellis would do no more than he had done already. ‘I have never been in the witness box’, he wrote to Radclyffe Hall. He said he ‘lacked the essential qualities of a witness’, that his book Sexual Inversion had been condemned as an obscene libel thirty years earlier, so he was ‘tarred with the same brush’. ‘The less said about me the better for you. In any case, for good or evil my testimony is already contained in the book itself. It is people of the highly conventional and respectable kind, and occupying a high position who will be really helpful.’ Hugh Walpole agreed to stand, though he disliked airing the subject of homosexuality and thought Cape had undermined the defence by sending the book to the Home Secretary, then withdrawing it voluntarily.

Unequivocal support came from Robert Henry Cust, author and magistrate. He resigned from the executive committee of the London Morality Council because of its hostile attitude to The Well of Loneliness. Cheap bookstores, he said, were ‘brimming with filth of the vilest kind’, yet here was a ‘heart-rending decent book’. ‘Such a persecution of its authoress savours of medieval or even primitive barbarism.’ Charles Ricketts, printer, thought it an admirable study of English rural and cosmopolitan life and would recommend it to any mother of daughters. Sheila Kaye-Smith called it sincere, moving, restrained. To judge literature by its possible effects on children or those of ‘abnormal mentality’, she said, would end in its total suppression, as no book could be guaranteed not to mislead the young or mad.

Many who offered support did so in defence of the principle of literary freedom rather than out of enthusiasm for Radclyffe Hall or her book. Leonard Woolf said that as literary editor of the Nation and proprietor of the Hogarth Press most books published in Britain passed through his hands. Taking the standards of modern books published every day and masterpieces continually republished in cheap editions, The Well of Loneliness was not indecent or likely to corrupt anyone. E. M. Forster said obscenity existed not in a subject but in its treatment and that ‘Miss Hall’s treatment is unexceptionable.’ Radclyffe Hall did not like the word unexceptionable applied to her writing. Virginia Woolf, from whom any blandishment was laced with irony, said it treated a delicate subject with great decency and discretion. Storm Jameson, until that year a manager for the London branch of Knopf, thought if it had not been for James Douglas’s stunt, only the serious-minded would have bothered to read the book.

Rose Macaulay was rude about Radclyffe Hall’s prose. She did not see how the book could corrupt anyone as its heroine had such a rotten time. Stephen Gordon, she said, was pointed at in the street, abused by her mother, snubbed by society and had to live in Paris to escape contumely. She seemed ‘physically and mentally defective, an imputation which I am told is resented by addicts and which probably has a salutary effect on young or would be addicts’.

Naomi Mitchison thought the book long, very sincere, sentimental and distinctly depressing. Adolescents with homosexual tendencies would be discouraged. Normal men or women would see it as a call to be kind to their ‘abnormal fellow beings’.

Laurence Housman called it ‘an unexaggerated statement of the social sufferings and disabilities of an involuntary invert’. He recommended classification of these unfortunates be altered from the criminal to the medical and commended publication because it provoked discussion.

Joan Sutherland, author of Beauty for Ashes and The Enchanted Country, said she had a son and daughter, that The Well of Loneliness was a serious novel which could not harm them and that authors should be permitted freely to write what they desired to express.

Edward Garnett, whom Virginia Woolf described as a ‘surly, shaggy, unkempt old monstrosity’, had forty years’ experience as a publisher’s reader and literary adviser. He derided James Douglas’s article in the Sunday Express as hysterical, uncritical and sensational. He had looked through all the twenty-four reviews of The Well of Loneliness. None had asked for the book to be withdrawn. Many praised its beauty, burning sincerity, high-mindedness, honesty. Some had thought it too long, sentimental and overcharged. None challenged it on the grounds of immorality.

Alfred Lyons, Cape’s London salesman, said the only complaints he had received had been about the book’s high price. Alfred Butes, manager and director of the Times Book Company and the Times Book Club, called himself ‘an interpreter of the mind of a large reading public’. He thought the book admirable. If it was obscene, he would not have ordered