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

that according to Mr Podsnap, she seemed always liable to burst into blushes when there was no need at all.

It was perhaps difficult to grasp what test had been devised or applied to prove a correlation between reading The Well of Loneliness and the depravation and corruption of an impressionable mind. But it was clear that Sir Chartres knew filth when he read it. The ‘substantial question before me,’ he said, ‘is does this book as a whole defend unnatural practices between women?’

That is the question to which I must direct my mind. In considering this question it is necessary to speak somewhat plainly. These unnatural offences between women which are the subject of this book involve acts which between men would be a criminal offence, and involve acts of the most horrible, unnatural and disgusting obscenity. That is a fact which no one could deny.

The court was full of people who could and would, at least privately, deny that the acts between Stephen Gordon and her women friends were horrible, unnatural, disgusting or obscene. Nor was there a law which criminalized sex between women. A move to legislate had been defeated in 1921.

Radclyffe Hall called it ‘the deadly campaign of silence’ but at the Garrick they knew all about Radclyffe Hall and her depraved practices, her seduction of an admiral’s wife, her blatant aping of manly ways.

Jonathan Cape and Leopold Hill had been ‘summoned to shew cause’ why The Well of Loneliness should not be destroyed. Their lawyers wanted witnesses to be cross-examined so that they might put their case as to why the book should be allowed to circulate freely. None of these witnesses was to be heard. Biron called only one witness. He was Chief Inspector Prothero for the Crown. Radclyffe Hall wrote:

The policeman might get up & say that my book was obscene – & he did say so in carefully studied language. But not one of those eminent men & women might say that my book was not obscene. They were treated with the grosses discourtesy, were most offensively treated by Sir Chartres Biron, who rejected group after group with a sneer. These people had come from all over England – they were quiet, learned people of high character, but they sat in that court & heard themselves sneered at – I burnt with anger on their behalf, & I marvelled that a chief magistrate like Biron could descent to so grave a laps of courtesy in his own court, to me it seemed very shocking.

Chief Inspector Prothero, the Crown’s mutual friend, described how on 19 October 1928 he did enter 101 Great Russell Street WCI being premises in the occupation of Leopold B. Hill there to search for and seize all copies of an indecent and obscene book called The Well of Loneliness. Cross-examined by Birkett, he remembered what his masters had told him to say. Yes, he had read the book and yes, he thought its theme and treatment objectionable and obscene. It dealt with physical passion. He had experience of a great deal of obscene literature and this book dealt with the problems of an invert which was a subject which should only be treated in text books. ‘The book is indecent; it deals with an indecent subject.’ He did not agree with the opinions of the book expressed in the Times Literary Supplement or the Sunday Times.

Birkett asked Prothero if he would be influenced by the evidence of the distinguished specialists in the court. Biron intervened. ‘I do not think the opinion of this witness is of very great importance’, he said. It was a confusing intervention. Prothero was the only witness allowed. His opinion seemed important for that reason, and because it was the same opinion as that of Joynson-Hicks, Chartres Biron and the Director of Public Prosecutions.

Eustace Fulton had been employed by the Director of Public Prosecutions to represent the Crown. The Director sat beside him in court. Fulton then said the book dealt with an obscene theme and ‘a person who chose an obscene theme could not but write an obscene book’. By the same reasoning he might have contended that a person who chose the theme of bigotry could not but write a bigoted book. What was true from his prosecution was that those who had prejudged the case could not but come to a foregone conclusion. The whole court process was a conceptual shambles, a philosophical fraud, silly and devoid of common sense. Biron invoked convolutions of logic that would have consigned swathes of literature and art to the King’s furnace.

Norman Birkett arrived in court late. For the defence he contended that the word obscene had been misinterpreted and that the 1857 act never intended to ‘touch a book of this character’, that there was no public advantage to prosecuting it and to do so struck ‘a great blow, not only against literature but against the public good’.

What he did not, or could not, outright address were the attitudes of Joynson-Hicks, Sir Archibald Bodkin, Sir Chartres Biron and James Douglas. He did not talk of their homophobia, their quangos of self-interest, their twisting of the judicial system, their repressive views of women. Nor did he or anyone conjecture that sexual relationships between women might be positive, enjoyable, permissible. There was moot acceptance that they might at best be said to be a misfortune or an abnormality. At worst, they were obscene.

Caught into posturing and mincing words, Birkett tried to reason with Biron. He suggested it would be folly to pretend that police officers were literary experts. The book had received ‘a chorus of praise from those well-qualified to speak upon matters affecting literature in general’. ‘I have here in Court distinguished people in every walk of life who desire to go into the witness box and testify that this book is not obscene and that it is a misuse of words for the prosecution to describe it as such.’

Sir Chartres Biron did not want to hear