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

and not treated with condemnation, which they are at present by all decent people’. He quoted episodes that showed that Radclyffe Hall condoned ‘horrible practices’ – he used the term eight times. He picked out the scene where Stephen Gordon tells her mother that she loves Angela Crossby; her jealousy when Angela spends a night with a man; her meeting with Mary Llewellyn in the war:

Biron:  This takes place at the Front where, according to the writer of this book, a number of women of position and admirable character, who were engaged in driving ambulances in the course of the war, were addicted to this vice.

Goaded by an hour of his insults, Radclyffe Hall called out, ‘I protest. I am that writer.’

Biron:  I must ask people not to interrupt the Court.

Radclyffe Hall:  I am the authoress of this book.

Biron:  If you cannot behave yourself in Court I shall have to have you removed.

Radclyffe Hall:  It is shameful.

Which indeed it was. He was telling her that her efforts at openness were obscene, that her book should be burned, that she should be condemned by all decent people, that no one should be allowed to defend her. She had sought martyrdom and she had got it. Sir Chartres Biron was her Pontius Pilate, mean-minded, dishonourable and powerful.

It had been punishing for her to sit and listen in silence to this defamation of her life and work. In a public lecture two months later she said she could not let this slur on Toupie Lowther and her army sisters pass. She had, she said, written of them with ‘so much respect that it all but amounted to reverence’.

I had written of them as I believed them to have been, pure living, courageous, self-sacrificing women facing death night and day in the service of the wounded. Yet that old man sought through his preposterous statement to bring shame, not only on me as an author but upon the women of the British Empire. My friends it was too much. I could not endure it so I got up and called him to order. He threatened to have me taken from the Court as though I were one of those habitual drunks with whom, no doubt, he is accustomed to dealing. But once again I called him to order and I noticed that he did not repeat his insult to the splendid war workers.

Radclyffe Hall had said in her book that in the ambulance unit there was ‘many a one who was even as Stephen’. For Sir Chartres Biron that translated into filthy disgusting vice-ridden perverted debauchees. Years later in a diary entry, Una referred to how John had in fact scorned Toupie’s friends and the ‘perpetual sexual carrying on between members of the same Army Unit’ and how she ‘gave Chartres Biron the lie so vehemently’. It was clear from their social meetings that Toupie was surrounded by lesbians from her army days. It was also clear from her war record that the ambulance unit she managed was efficient.

To Biron’s thinking, a lesbian of good character was a contradiction in terms. He did not want to hear about their contribution to society. He did not care whether they were born like it, became like it, acted out of compulsion or choice, were promiscuous or monogamous, clever or stupid. They should all be eradicated, in his view. Referring to when Stephen Gordon’s mother throws her from the house, he said it was ‘not an unreasonable conclusion under the circumstances’. The stocks and gibbet might have been too kind. He found references to God in the book ‘singularly inappropriate and disgusting’. He had no hesitation whatever in saying that The Well of Loneliness was an obscene libel, an offence to public decency and that it would corrupt those ‘into whose hands it should fall’. He brought the proceedings to an abrupt close.

Biron:  Now what do you say about the costs in this case, Mr Fulton?

Fulton:  I submit that in a case of this sort the costs ought not to fall on the public.

Biron:  Yes, I think that is only right.

Melville:  Sir, I am sure that in all fairness you will allow me to repeat what I said on the last occasion, that the authoress, Miss Radclyffe Hall, was at all times most anxious to go into the box and give her view of the book.

Biron:  That does not deal with the subject with which I was dealing. I was speaking about costs.

Melville:  I thought you had dealt with the question of costs. I am sorry.

Fulton:  Sir, I ask for 20 guineas costs on each Summons.

Biron:  I think that is a reasonable order. I shall make the order for the destruction of the book with these costs.

24

Depress! Repress! Suppress!

‘This is the End of It’, the Daily Express declared. James Douglas praised the stand his paper had ‘felt compelled to take on this insidious perversion of the English novel … English literature is the gainer and nothing but the gainer.’ Radclyffe Hall was tired, had headaches and was sick all one night. She and Una tried to find peace and ordinary life at Journey’s End in Rye. They walked by the sea and in the shipyard, had tea at the Mermaid, went to mass and called the surveyor in because of the smell of the drains in the cobbled lane, Hucksteps Row, that led to their house. In the evenings Una read aloud Elizabeth and Essex and The Shuttles of Eternity.

Radclyffe Hall did not accept Leonard Woolf’s offer of a public subscription to help with legal fees. She had assets. The sale of 37 Holland Street freed ready cash. ‘Also, I am going to put down the motor’, she told Havelock Ellis. She sold Sargent’s portrait of Ladye. She offered it first to the Tate Gallery then to the Glasgow Museum of Art and she talked of ‘going slow financially’ until the storm was over.

The storm brought huge publicity and profit. Sales of her other books were brisk. In America Pascal Covici and Donald Friede planned to