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

is Byronese in appearance and her friends call her John. Her jewels, large emeralds sunk in rings of platinum, are the only softening note in her mannish profile. Her short blond hair is combed straight back and her blue suit is Bond Street tailored. Her shirt is blue linen with a standing collar and the tie navy. She wears a monocle on a cord, a watch in her handkerchief pocket suspended on a leather fob from the lapel buttonhole. In the evening Miss Hall wears a moiré tuxedo with a black satin stock and a ruffled shirt front. Her hat is a large Montmartre.

She ‘summoned her liveried car with a noble sweep and a deep voice’ and lived with Una The Lady Troubridge. She needed no man, that much was clear.

Donald Friede, in France on business, had lunch and dinner with John and Una on 7 March. He told them of the runaway sales and that the book was a success whatever the decision of the court. While he was with them the publisher Gallimard rang wanting to do the French translation – the first novel by a woman in his imprint.

In New York on 8 April 1929 before Justices Solomon, Healy and McInerney, John Sumner singled out eighty-two pages of The Well of Loneliness that caused him mortification – all about Stephen and Angela Crossby, Puddleton’s past and Mary Llewellyn in the Ambulance Brigade. Ernst countered that if you looked for obscenity you could find it in a laudable book. ‘Conscious censoriousness begets prejudice and renders fair appraisal impossible. Let the horrified Mr Sumner and his list of pages be cast aside. Let The Well of Loneliness be read with an open mind.’

Ernst had prepared a fifty-one-page brief. The basis of his defence was the constitutional right of liberty of speech. He played to the court, referred to the ‘subject matter’ and the ‘tragic problem’ and was careful not to mention congenital sexual inversion, lesbianism or kissing. He did not have Radclyffe Hall at his side to nudge him toward self-defeating candour.

The heroine of the book, he said, was flawed from birth emotionally and psychologically, ‘doomed to a life of frustration’, ‘thwarted and bewildered because her instincts are not the instincts of others of her sex’. Hers was a tortured, desperate, barren life, a poignant tragedy that called for tolerance and understanding. Her story moved the reader to compassion and did not invite emulation. Who, he asked, was the book likely to hurt: the impressionable child, the moral weakling, the fatuous and vicious, the average intelligent adult?

Had Stephen Gordon been glamorous, a social wow and having a great time in bed, he would have needed to take a different tack. His purpose was to keep the book on sale, not to defend lesbian rights. The subject matter was, he said, about ‘emotional maladjustment’. It was not new in contemporary literature. He reminded the judges of the ‘well-known inability of Queen Elizabeth to adjust herself emotionally to men’. Any high-school girl in New York, he said, could go to a bookstore or circulating library and obtain copies of Elizabeth and Essex by Lytton Strachey, Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust, Death in Venice by Thomas Mann, The Intermediate Sex by Edward Carpenter, or works by Voltaire, Whitman or Swinburne.

To suppress The Well of Loneliness because of its theme would, as a corollary, condone the suppression of hundreds of other works of literature and ‘prevent the proper enlightenment of the public on an important social problem’. The Federal Public Health Service yearly distributed to adolescents and adults millions of pamphlets about masturbation, sexual intercourse and venereal disease. Times moved on, fashions changed, there was a time when literature urging the abolition of slavery was repressed, and a time when women in bathing suits on beaches were arrested.

He cited recent cases where printed matter ‘calculated to appeal to lecherous instincts and to titillate the lewd and salacious’ had been suppressed by the courts. There was Broadway, a pamphlet with pictures of naked women partly covered with lamp black which the reader was invited to rub off with a piece of damp bread. There was Cupid’s Yokes or the Binding Forces of Conjugal Life. It had nothing to do with matrimony but ‘abounded in disgusting and lustful details’. There was a dissertation on ‘loathsome diseases of the degenerative organs’, a broadsheet, Lucifer the Light Bearer, about ‘unnatural intercourse’, and various publications to do with coercive sexual acts and venereal complaints.

What, asked Ernst, had The Well of Loneliness in common with these publications? It was a ‘sincere, serious, beautiful book, fearlessly published and disseminated’. In 500 pages there was not a filthy word or indecent scene.

If Stephen were a man the book would be merely a rather over-sentimental bit of Victorian romanticism. There would be no element in it that could bring a blush of embarrassment even to the cheeks of the complainant. The sole objection is the theme itself. This presents the vital question in the case: Will the law condemn a book otherwise unobjectionable because of its theme?

The English magistrates had done just that. It was not a feasible rule. Who, Ernst asked, would determine the dangerous social consequences of one subject rather than another? Would the ‘unorthodox emotional complications’ of The Well of Loneliness cause more havoc than sadism in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, abortion in The American Tragedy, incest in Oedipus Tyrranos, the adulteries of most contemporary fiction or the murder, robbery and assault of detective and crime novels?

Miss Radclyffe Hall was a prominent British writer with a place in literature. She had won two literary prizes. The courts suppressed pornography and punished ‘purveyors of filth surreptitiously distributed’. They did not ban literary works by authors of literary acclaim. Her book had social significance, moral fervour, integrity of intention, distinguished style. She attempted to show a social problem, predicated by the assumption that such problems could only be solved by the interchange of ideas, not by throttling discussion.

He wooed the court, asked