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

disgusting ungodly sin. Not much was said about women who loved each other, their partnerships and lives. There was no humour, generosity, enlightenment or ease. By this trial, the government stigmatized and criminalized a kind of love. Its idiocy echoed down the years, silencing writers, consigning people to concealment of their deepest feelings and to public scorn.

The case was lost. The Well of Loneliness was destroyed. Radclyffe Hall longed to get away from England. It had been punishing litigation, prolonged, personal and offensive. It was another rejection to compound with those of her formative years, another nail in the cross of martyrdom. She made heroic display and was more than hurt. She had headaches and trouble with her eyes and was exhausted. For Una it had all been part of the test of loving John, on a par with the Fox-Pitt ‘grossly immoral woman’ charge, the Troubridge calumny, Minna’s disdain.

They arranged to leave the Holland Street house on 11 January. They sacked the servants, packed their possessions, took a lease on a flat at Kensington Palace Mansions and went Christmas shopping. John bought Una a gold watch, Una bought her a gold cigarette lighter. They had a sitting with Mrs Leonard, then went to Rye for Christmas. Andrea, Audrey and Patience Ross – also from the Heath agency – joined them there. All three went walking on Camber Sands on Christmas day and to John’s annoyance were half an hour late for the turkey and plum pudding.

Radclyffe Hall became the butt of public jokes. She thought her phone tapped, her letters opened. She was particularly offended by The Sink of Solitude, a verse lampoon by ‘several hands’ in the tradition of Pope and Dryden. Published by Hermes Press it was dedicated to Compton Mackenzie’s novel about lesbians, Extraordinary Women. Mackenzie was wistful at the Home Secretary’s uninterest in his book. It only sold two thousand copies. He had planned to conduct his own defence. Raymond Mortimer, lover of Vita Sackville-West’s husband Harold Nicolson, called it ‘an expression of male pique and wounded vanity’.

The Sink of Solitude, twenty pages long, was in rhyming couplets:

The way to make a modern novel sell is

To have a preface done by Havelock Ellis …

It satirized all involved with The Well of Loneliness but in particular James Douglas with his bluster about killing girls with prussic acid rather than letting them read the book:

Depress! Repress! Suppress! (Sunday Express)

James Douglas knows what others merely guess –

That woman-interest, sex and moral ire,

Will set a million readers’ veins on fire …

Of rhetoric he need not burk a particle

In this week’s splurging moral-uplift article.

JIMMY is menaced. He is far from placid.

Ho Ho The Borgias! Who likes prussic acid?

Some women poison with a deadly look,

But RADCLYFFE poisoned JIMMY with a book!

The WELLS OF LONELINESS are far from pure

For poisoned wells JAMES DOUGLAS has a cure,

‘Stop up the Well!’ is JIMMY’S urgent call

(Inset: A picture of MISS RADCLYFFE HALL).

A long preface by a Mr P. R. Stephenson was scathing about ‘pathetic post-war lesbians with their mannish modes and poses’, the ‘sentimental scientificality of psychopaths like Havelock Ellis’, the ‘feebleness’ of The Well of Loneliness as a moral argument, the ‘uncritical criticisms’ of James Douglas, the ‘spinelessness’ of Jonathan Cape.

The text was illustrated with cartoons by Beresford Egan in the style of Aubrey Beardsley. One of these showed Radclyffe Hall nailed to a cross, a naked woman with swinging breasts astride her thighs. Cupid on the cross cocks a snook at her. Joynson-Hicks slinks away, wiping his hand on his sleeves, the book in his pocket.

Radclyffe Hall thought the cartoon blasphemous. It caused her ‘profound and painful spiritual reaction’, Una said:

throughout the remaining years of her life she could scarcely bear to speak of it, even to me. Once she did say: ‘To think that I should have been used as a means of disrespect to Him …’, nor did her complete helplessness and innocence in the matter seem to afford her any consolation.

It was insult added to injury that her writing was suppressed but not the lampoons and satires that mocked her. She had wanted martyrdom. Here was her apotheosis. She thought of herself as on a par with the crucified Christ, ‘I renounce my country for ever’, she wrote to Audrey Heath. ‘Nor will I ever lift a hand to help England in the future.’

Then came news from Donald Friede in New York. John S. Sumner, Secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, had, with two detectives, raided the offices of Covici-Friede in West 45th Street and taken all copies of the sixth printing of The Well of Loneliness. The Society operated ‘under Article 106 Sections 1140 to 1148 inclusive of the State’s Criminal Code’. This legislated against Indecency: obscene lewd filthy disgusting books, magazines, plays or pictures, exposure of genitals, sale of contraceptive devices, disorderly houses, criminal surgeons, and men who lived on the earnings of prostitutes.

John S. Sumner had a bristly little moustache, a smooth sleek to his hair and pince-nez glasses. He had, he said, received twelve complaints about the book. He gained his warrant for the raid from Chief Magistrate McAdoo. Donald Friede was summoned ‘In the Name of the People of the State of New York’ to appear before McAdoo at the magistrates court at 314 West 54th Street on 22 January 1929 at 10 o’clock, ‘Complaint having been made this day by John S. Sumner that you did commit the offense of violating Section 1141 of the Penal Law by selling an obscene book’.

Sumner then went on to Macy’s book department and threatened them with prosecution if they did not stop selling the book. Which they did not. Until there was any adjudication of guilt the book stayed on sale all over the country with all the wild benefits of this publicity. Within a week sales reached 25,000 copies and by February 40,000.

Radclyffe Hall wanted to tell the world how she had been victimized. England and her party, the Conservative Party,