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

had let her down. On 25 January 1929 she gave a lecture in Southend to Young Socialists. Rubinstein warned her to ‘be very guarded’ over what she said. ‘Proceedings for contempt of Court might follow any definite suggestion that the case was pre-judged.’

‘The torch is in your hands to lighten the darkness’, Radclyffe Hall told her audience.

Your Party is young, courageous, virile, it has just arrived at the glory of manhood. Who defended my book within a few hours of the dastardly attack in the Sunday Express – what paper leapt to my defence? the Daily Herald … May you sweep the country clean at the next election and let some fresh air and sunshine into England. If we cannot have a country fit for heroes, if that is too vast an aspiration, at least let us have a country whose air is too pure for this present government to breathe.

She was, she felt, a hero. (Her flirtation with Socialism did not last.) She circulated a letter to writers saying she had proof of the government’s control of her trial. She wanted to expose the conspiracy. But her story was cold. Arnold Bennett told her that ‘no editor in London would now consider any item connected with the case as news’. Her trial was just another perversion of justice. She was humiliated, her book was suppressed and the papers were full of other things.

She and Una left for Paris on 4 February 1929 with Barber the maid and Gabriele the cockatoo. John Holroyd-Reece sent red roses to their hotel, the Osborne in rue St Roch. He was again reprinting The Well of Loneliness. Radclyffe Hall signed copies, lunched at Pruniers and was treated as a hero. ‘Total strangers would come up to her in the street or in a restaurant and express their admiration of the book, their amazement and indignation at its persecution’, Una wrote.

Natalie Barney gave a celebratory party in her Temple of Love. Her guests were invited for tea, cucumber sandwiches and a meeting with Miss Hall. Natalie wanted to give out copies of the book but Sylvia Beach told her she would have to wait for the next printing. All were sold as soon as they came into her shop.

It snowed, the Seine was frozen and John and Una’s car skidded in the Bois de Boulogne. They skipped mass, stayed in the hotel and Una, for eight consecutive hours, read aloud John Brown’s Body. They went to a party given by Gertrude Stein’s friend the Duchesse de Clermont Tonnerre. John ate something there which gave her diarrhoea for which she was prescribed mulled wine. Una had her hair permed and bought camiknickers and hats in the Champs-Elysées. John bought diamond and sapphire cufflinks and a pinscher bitch she called Paris, which twice tried to bite Una. It was swapped for a bulldog that would not walk, then a griffon with distemper that died of convulsions. They had tea with Colette who talked of her house in St Tropez. It was in five acres of orchard and vineyard and a mile from the sea. She extolled the sea bathing, sunshine, seafood, nightingales and mimosa trees. Una pleaded with John to go south for a long holiday away from the battles of city life. John wanted to stay in Paris until the outcome of the New York trial.

25

The freedom of human beings

Pascal Covici and Donald Friede hired Morris Ernst as their defence lawyer. Ernst brought to the case fresh air, style and much-needed humour. He became famous in American censorship trials for his defence of The Well of Loneliness, Ulysses and Forever Amber, of magazine pieces about childbirth issues and pamphlets like Mary Ware Dennett’s The Sex Side of Life. He wore bow ties and little round glasses, preferred biography to fiction and had left-wing liberal views. ‘The causes that touch off my glands,’ he wrote, ‘do seem to me to have always the same central core: the freedom of human beings and human thought throughout the world.’ It was a help to him that, unlike in England, the right to freedom of speech was enshrined in the Constitution of the United States.

‘The only essential obscenity in life,’ Ernst wrote, ‘is stealth and cowardice and concealment.’ He came from a modest background, paid his way through law school, married young – his wife was a teacher – and started a law firm with two college friends, Herb Wolff and Eddie Greenbaum. He spent summers on the island of Nantucket. He liked the ‘gaiety and gab and peace and comfort’ of the place. He kept a yacht there called Truant, made ‘science notes’ about flora and fauna, had his own lathe and made walnut tables, maple beds and pine bookcases.

The Society for the Suppression of Vice put its complaint to Judge Hyman Bushell on 21 February 1929. Ernst thought the judge would dismiss it. But Bushell took his cue from his English counterparts. Lesbianism was obscene. He declared himself worried, outraged, shocked and said the book idealized and extolled unnatural and depraved relationships.

The book is well written and contains no unclean words, but on the other hand the whole theme of the story could hardly be more vile, unmoral and unsocial.

I am convinced The Well of Loneliness tends to debauch public morals, that its subject matter is offensive to public decency and that it is calculated to deprave and corrupt minds open to its immoral influences and who might come in contact with it.

He upheld the complaint against Covici-Friede and referred the case to the Court of Special Sessions for trial. What he did not do was to manipulate the process of the law to ensure the outcome he desired.

The story was national news. No legislation could control the thousands of copies already sold or in the shops. Radclyffe Hall was in all the papers – her picture and her propensities. Here was the notorious creature who ‘spilled filth into the minds of England’s young’.

She