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

It was no idle threat as Birkett knew. It was anathema to Radclyffe Hall to be so denied, so vilified and to have to keep quiet. ‘In the eyes of the law I am non existent’, she wrote to Havelock Ellis. This was her trial and it was of more than her book. It was of her right to be who she was. She wished for justice of a clear and open kind. She wanted to proclaim to the court that she stood by every word, was proud of it, had written it as a social duty, was herself a congenital sexual invert and a man in a woman’s body. Denied a voice of her own and counsel of her own, she felt unrepresented by those appointed to help her.

Birkett when the court reconvened offered a stuttering capitulation. He was not, he told Chartres Biron, in a position further to contend that the book did not refer to physical relationships between women. It was the author’s wish that he should correct this misapprehension. Sir Chartres Biron gloated. Norman Birkett then pleaded that the treatment of these relationships was in good taste and of high artistic and literary merit. He made a disconsolate distinction between inversion and perversion and knew that the game was lost.

J. B. Melville then gave defence on behalf of Leopold Hill the bookseller. He referred with apparent insouciance to Biron’s open mind and offered to assist him in understanding the author’s point of view. He said the theme itself should not be proscribed – ‘the question is the treatment of the theme’. He went over incidents in the book in detail, bleaching them of sexual significance.

The moral is it not, is this? These people who are born with this misfortune cannot expect happiness. To those at large it says there should be toleration and understanding for those who are God’s creatures. I submit to you Sir that this book is written in a reverend spirit; that it is written in a manner which is not calculated to excite libidinous thoughts, but is an attempt to deal with a social question that exists …

I know that you will act upon the principles upon which you in your judicial office must always act, and that is, that if you feel that this case is even doubtful it will not be resolved upon the side of the suppression of a work which is a thoughtful work, which has been said on all sides to be a fine literary work, which has, I am told and I believe, already taken up some two years of the life of a most distinguished writer.

Chartres Biron was not stung by such veiled rebuke and questioning of his integrity. At two-thirty he adjourned the court. He was going to read the book again in the light of the speeches of counsel. The court would reconvene in a week’s time. ‘It will be resumed then merely for me to give judgment’, he said, so letting it be known that discussion, such as it was, was at an end.

John had neuralgia and was depressed. She and Una talked about the case until two in the morning with Audrey Heath and Holroyd-Reece. Next day Chesterton’s estate agents surveyed the Holland Street house. A Mr Laskey bought it three days later. John and Una planned to be out by mid-January. All week John had meetings with Rubinstein, Audrey, Holroyd-Reece and Cape. Legal costs already ran into four figures. She saw Theodore Goddard about raising her fifty per cent share if, as seemed certain, the case went against them. Leonard Woolf offered to help by launching an appeal fund. Jonathan Cape sailed to America to try to save the book’s life there. Holroyd-Reece returned to Paris to print more pirate copies.

On Friday 16 November John and Una lunched at the Savoy with Harold Rubinstein and Audrey, then went on to Bow Street where, said Una, ‘Sir Chartres Biron lied solemnly for more than one hour and condemned The Well of Loneliness to be burnt as an obscene libel.’ ‘He made of my book a gross and filthy thing which could only bring shame to its author’, Radclyffe Hall wrote.

He degraded the work of more than two years to the leval of low paunography. I could scarcely believe my ears as I listened. I would rather be excused from repeating his words, they were too offensive & too unguarded. I say that he took an unworthy advantage of an adventageous position.

The court was again packed with all the same witnesses. The Well of Loneliness, Biron said, dealt solely with ‘unnatural offences’.

There is not a single word from beginning to end of this book which suggests that anyone with these horrible tendencies is in the least blameworthy or that they should in any way resist them. The characters in this book who indulge in these horrible vices are presented to us as attractive people and put forward for our admiration; and those who object to these vices are sneered at in the book as prejudiced, foolish and cruel.

Not merely that, but there is a much more serious matter, the actual physical acts of these women indulging in unnatural vices are described in the most alluring terms; their result is described as giving these women extraordinary rest, contentment and pleasure; and not merely that, but it is actually put forward that it improves their mental balance and capacity.

It was all too much for poor Sir Chartres. Stephen Gordon’s well of loneliness was not nasty enough. Had it been filled with prussic acid, immersion of its author in it, inch by inch, would have been too kind. Perhaps if Stephen Gordon had been covered in wens, pilloried by every citizen of Worcestershire, London and Paris and had erupted in sores after a single lesbian kiss, he might have allowed her life story to find its way on to Miss Podsnap’s bookshelf.

As it was the book ‘pleaded for the invert to be recognised and tolerated,