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

these witnesses. He said the evidence Birkett proposed was expert witness as to whether or not the book was ‘a piece of literature’. ‘That is not the point’, he said. ‘The book may be a very fine piece of literature and yet be obscene. Art and obscenity are not disassociated. This may be a work of art. I agree it has considerable merits, but that does not prevent it from being obscene and I shall therefore not admit this expert evidence.’ Birkett protested. ‘They have read the book, and have knowledge of the reading public and in their view this book is not obscene’, he said.

Biron allowed him to call Desmond MacCarthy, editor of Life and Letters. In the witness box MacCarthy looked, said Virginia Woolf, ‘too indifferent, too calm, too completely at his ease to be natural’. Birkett asked him whether having read the book he thought it obscene. Biron interrupted. Such evidence was inadmissible he said. It was only an expression of opinion. But it was the same question as had been put to Inspector Prothero. The difference was that Prothero gave the answer Biron wanted to hear. ‘We could not be called as experts in obscenity, only in art’, Virginia Woolf wrote.

‘How can the opinion of a number of people be evidence?’ Biron asked. ‘The test is whether the book is likely to deprave or corrupt those into whose hands it is likely to fall.’ Norman Birkett said that if Biron excluded expert evidence it would mean that the law could impose, through an individual magistrate, censorship of the whole field of literature so far as obscenity was concerned. ‘I want,’ said Birkett,

to call medical testimony, I want to call a minister of religion, critics, reviewers, authors, authoresses, publishers and people from the libraries in London. I want to give evidence from every conceivable walk of life which bears upon this test as to whether the book depraves the mind of the person who reads it.

‘A more distinguished body of witnesses have never been called’, he said.

He suggested there should be informed debate before books were burned. It was not a proposition Biron would pursue. The question that followed was who, if not any of those assembled in court, was in a position to say that a book was obscene and would deprave those who read it and what evidence was admissible to test such a charge. Biron had the answer. He was Mr Podsnap. He knew his daughter would blush if she read The Well of Loneliness.

‘I am here to decide whether this book is obscene or not’, he told Birkett. ‘I may be a very competent or incompetent magistrate, but I am going to shoulder my responsibility.’ No evidence was admissible except Chief Inspector Prothero’s and no judgement was allowed but Biron’s.

Birkett struggled on. Authors of distinction ‘who have given their lives to this matter’ could testify that the book would not ‘tend to deprave or corrupt’ anyone who read it. ‘Oh no’, said Sir Chartres. ‘That could not be evidence under any circumstances.’ ‘Well I tender the evidence’, said Birkett. He began to sound like a doomed salesman with his eminent witnesses. Booksellers, he said, would testify that The Well of Loneliness was not obscene. ‘Booksellers are only tradesmen, they are not experts’, said Sir Chartres with offensive irrelevancy as he had precluded the validity of expertise. ‘I hope they are not present in court to hear that observation’, said Birkett. He offered social workers, a magistrate, biologists. ‘And I reject it all’, said Sir Chartres. ‘Well I tender it’, said Birkett and asked for a higher court to determine the question of the admissibility of expert witnesses.

‘Oh no’, said Sir Chartres. The testimony of expert witnesses as to the book’s literary or social value was irrelevant because it was opinion. ‘I don’t think people are entitled to express an opinion upon a matter which is the decision of the court’, he said.

He was the court and therefore by some conceptual alchemy that transcended logic, his opinion transmuted into law. No matter that Arnold Bennett had confronted him in the lounge of the Garrick with James Douglas some three months previously and found both of them blustering about how the book must be banned. What Biron now pronounced was not opinion, prejudice, misogyny, homophobia, venom or crass stupidity. It was law.

Birkett floundered. He then tried to contend that Stephen Gordon’s relationships with women, though romantic and sentimental, were ‘purely of an intellectual character’ and had nothing to do with sex. Sir Chartres called a halt. ‘I have read the book’, he said and adjourned the court for lunch.

Virginia Woolf had sat all morning absorbing the atmosphere of the court, the stuffy formality, the ruminations on what is obscenity, what is literature, when is evidence permissible, what is the difference between the subject and the treatment. In her diary she wrote that she was ‘impressed by the reason of the law, its astuteness, its formality’. She was also mightily relieved that neither she nor anyone else had to go into the witness box. Outside the courtroom she talked to Una. They had last met at a tea party as children at Una’s parents’ house in Montpelier Square in Knightsbridge. Una’s grandfather, Sir Henry Taylor, had been a friend of Virginia Woolf’s great-aunt, Julia Margaret Cameron.

Una had hated the morning, the public humiliation, the airing of a subject which embarrassed her, the insult to John. John was ‘flushed and tearful’ and ‘in a passion of indignation’. She went with Una, Birkett and Rubinstein to lunch at the Waldorf. It was a meal Birkett later described as the most miserable of his life. Radclyffe Hall said that her work had been ‘shamed and degraded’ and accused him of lying by his ‘blatant denial’ of sex in her book. ‘I made it abundantly clear that unless Birkett got up and retracted his words I would get up before anyone could stop me and would tell the Magistrate the