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

Birkett knew the enemy. This was not a wily defence, given the prosecuting counsel. If Radclyffe Hall went into the witness box to pontificate about Christianity and ‘the serious question of congenital inversion’, she would compound their prejudice. He said the best interest of her book would not be served by her appearing. She became very agitated and wanted his reassurance that he would not give the impression that she was ‘ashamed of her abnormality or that there is anything in such an abnormality to be ashamed of’. Nor did she want other writers to think her cowardly. ‘Miss Hall maintains that her private life would compare very favourably with the private lives of ordinary respectable people’, Rubinstein told him.

Radclyffe Hall was exercised too with the idea that Birkett might not fully grasp her distinction between inversion and perversion. Inversion was what her book was about, perversion was what she called a term of opprobrium. Birkett curled in his boots. He did not want to enlighten Chartres Biron on such conceptual niceties. He would have liked to imply that the book was about something quite other – irrigation perhaps, or geogony – and to focus on the absence of expletives in the text. But Radclyffe Hall was not going to compromise her cause or adapt to the theatre of this particular court. It was her trial and she wanted to speak out. ‘We, neither you nor I,’ she warned Birkett, ‘must not sell the inverts in our defence – they trust me, and I trust you.’

Birkett reminded her that no one was to be ‘accused’ by the terms of the proceedings. What the defence had to do was ‘show cause’ why the book should not be destroyed. Given the homophobes to whom they were answerable, that was a hard task. Joynson-Hicks and Chartres Biron were men of like minds. So too was Sir Archibald Bodkin, Director of Public Prosecutions. The logistics of indictment were his. Joynson-Hicks had authorized him to be in court. Bodkin had represented Britain at Geneva in 1923 at the International Conference for the Suppression of Obscene Literature. He and Joynson-Hicks had been working as hard as Rubinstein. They had personally solicited testimony against the book from the Church, writers and doctors of medicine. Stanley Baldwin and Winston Churchill assured them of their support. The arm of government stretched wide.

23

I have read the book

Cartwright called John and Una at six in the morning on Friday, 9 November. John dressed in a leather coat with astrakhan collar and cuffs and a dark blue, wide-brimmed hat. Una wore mauve and lots of make-up. They picked up Harold Rubinstein from his office and drove to Bow Street Magistrates Court.

The court was packed. Sheila Kaye-Smith said it was ‘an assemblage which might have been called a galaxy, for almost every author of repute was there’. ‘All London, they say, is agog with this’, Virginia Woolf wrote. Policemen at the door turned visitors away from the public gallery when it became too full. There were about forty witnesses for the defence, ‘eminent men & women of good will’, Radclyffe Hall called them. ‘We had doctors male & female, men of science, educationalists, clergy, journalists, prominent booksellers, & of course a great number of my fellow authors.’

E. M. Forster wrote of ‘fidgeting’ as to what figure he should cut in the witness box. Virginia Woolf described Radclyffe Hall as ‘lemon yellow, tough, stringy, exacerbated’ and called The Well of Loneliness ‘the pale tepid vapid book which lay damp & slab all about the court’.

The door at the top of the court opened at ten-thirty and in came Sir Chartres Biron. The court rose, he bowed, then took his seat under the lion and the unicorn. He looked, said Virginia Woolf, ‘something like a Harley St. specialist investigating a case. All black & white, tie pin, clean shaven, wax coloured & carved, in that light, like ivory.’ He wrote with a quill pen, sipped from a glass of water and read out points of law from calf-bound books.

Biron had a different demeanour from when he was castigating the book some three months earlier in the lounge of the Garrick Club. Now in his judicial role, it was for him to determine impartially whether The Well of Loneliness was an obscene libel according to the law of the land. The relevant legislation was the Obscene Publications Act of 1857, which prohibited the sale of books, pictures and ‘other articles’ that ‘depraved and corrupted’ the morals of young people and shocked ‘the common feelings of decency in any well regulated mind’. Under this act, D. H. Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow in 1915 had been tried, condemned and ordered to be burned in the same court – also after one of James Douglas’s outbursts.

The court must decide if depraved morals and shocked decency would follow from reading The Well of Loneliness. Would the book, Sir Chartres mused, if read by the weak-minded, incite them to vice? Would it ‘deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall’?

This was the test for obscenity as defined by Lord Chief Justice Cockburn in 1868 in what became known as ‘the Hicklin Rule’. (He was judging an anti-papist pamphlet seized by the Crown. It was called The Confessional Unmasked and was by a man called Hicklin. Thereafter ‘the Hicklin Rule’ became the judicial yardstick of whether a publication was obscene.) Charles Dickens, in Our Mutual Friend, preferred the term ‘Podsnappery’:

A certain institution in Mr Podsnap’s mind which he called ‘the young person’ may be considered to have been embodied in Miss Podsnap, his daughter. It was an inconvenient and exacting institution, requiring everything in the universe to be filed down and fitted to it. The question about everything was, would it bring a blush to the cheek of the young person? And the inconvenience of the young person, was