The Trials of Radclyffe Hall

by Diana Souhami

  The Well of Loneliness posed problems for those it purported to defend. Lesbians might squirm at its theories and curl at its rhetoric, protest that its author’s perceptions were not theirs, recoil at being claimed so categorically, or defined by its terms. But such embarrassment was a small price when set against the homophobia the book uncovered in the ruling class, the men of the establishment, the government that made the rules, the judiciary that enforced them, the press that disseminated them.

  Radclyffe Hall was proved right in her suspicion that her book would provoke antagonism. Her courage was put to the test. ‘I hate inaction’, she wrote. ‘I am by nature a fighter.’ Havelock Ellis told her that unjust decisions ‘light up the principle involved and stir enthusiasm’. Her book beamed like a searchlight into the dim lounges of clubs like the Garrick. It lit up the flawed men of power, gossiping with each other, plotting strategy, entrenching prejudice. It was not the state of literature that disturbed them. They did not care about literature. It was passion between women. They feared its acceptance if Radclyffe Hall was heard. They had their view of a woman’s place and they intended to legislate against this affront to it. They had not forgotten Radclyffe Hall’s challenge to Sir John Lane Fox-Pitt and Admiral Troubridge. The Home Secretary, the newspaper editor, the Chief Magistrate, the government of the day, closed ranks to silence her and to show that she was, after all, ‘a grossly immoral woman’.

  Radclyffe Hall was frustrated that it was Jonathan Cape not herself who stood accused by the Home Secretary. ‘I,’ she said, ‘as nothing more important than the Author, I, mark you, could not take legal action.’ Her book and her right to live as she did were under attack. There was an atmosphere of repression, of picking safe words and taking a stance. She was infected by it too. On 24 August, the Daily Herald printed a letter of protest from her ‘on behalf of literature’. It was a pleading for freedom of speech, not a defence of lesbian rights.

  If seriously written psychological novels are to be subjected to arbitrary attack from the Home Office, which attacks result in their being withdrawn, what chance has our sane and well educated public of obtaining the best output from publisher and author?

  Must there never be any new pastures for the writer? Never any new aspects of social problems presented to the adult and open minded reader? Is the reader to be treated like a kind of mental dyspeptic whose literary food must be predigested by Government Office before consumption?

  Such action can only insult the public intelligence and discourage our authors from writing sincerely, especially our younger and less established authors some of whom may yet have new messages for us.

  On behalf of English literature I must protest against such unwarrantable interference.

  In literary circles the talk was of ‘sapphism and censorship’. Virginia Woolf complained of the distraction in a letter of 30 August to Vita Sackville-West, with whom she was, in a way, in love:

  For many days I have been so disjected by society that writing has been only a dream – something another woman did once. What has caused this irruption I scarcely know – largely your friend Radclyffe Hall (she is now docked of her Miss owing to her proclivities) they banned her book and so Leonard and Morgan Forster began to get up a protest, and soon we were telephoning and interviewing and collecting signatures – not yours for your proclivities are too well known. In the midst of this, Morgan goes to see Radclyffe in her tower in Kensington, with her love: and Radclyffe scolds him like a fishwife, and says that she wont have any letter written about her book unless it mentions the fact that it is a work of artistic merit – even genius. And no one has read her book; or can read it: and now we have to explain this to all the great signed names – Arnold Bennett and so on. So our ardour in the cause of freedom of speech gradually cools, and instead of offering to reprint the masterpiece, we are already beginning to wish it unwritten.

  Vita was in Potsdam on holiday with her two sons. To Harold Nicolson, her husband, she wrote that The Well of Loneliness was ‘not in the least interesting apart from the candour with which it treats its subject. Of course I simply itch to try the same thing myself. You see if one may write about b.s.ness the field of fiction is immediately doubled.’ (Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West used their marriage as a cover and referred to their same-sex lovers as ‘backstairs business’.) To Virginia she replied that she felt very violently about the ban, ‘not on account of what you call my proclivities; not because I think it is a good book; but really on principle’. The preposterous Jix made her want to renounce her nationality, she said. ‘But I don’t want to become a German, even though I did go to a revue last night in which two ravishing young women sing a frankly Lesbian song.’

  Radclyffe Hall scorned a protest that opposed the suppression of literature in principle but made no mention of ‘either the merits or the decency’ of The Well of Loneliness. Such an attitude would compromise her ‘in the eyes of her public’, she said. She could not tolerate the Bloomsbury Group’s intellectual superiority and equivocation. She felt they would disparage her book ‘given sufficient scope’.

  Which scope they had. In her diary, Virginia Woolf called The Well of Loneliness a ‘meritorious dull book’. To Ottoline Morrell she wrote, ‘The dulness of the book is such that any indecency may lurk there – one simply can’t keep one’s eyes on the page.’ To her sister Vanessa Bell, she mocked her mother-in-law’s interest in it. She said Radclyffe Hall ‘screamed like a herring gull, mad with egotism and vanity’ when E. M. Forster questioned its literary worth. Orlando, her own virtuoso novel, was to be published in 1928 to lasting praise. It won the Prix Femina that year. It was about and dedicated to Vita Sackville-West. The lesbian allusions in Orlando, its flights of gender, were too aerial and implicit, too clever and concealed, to interest the Home Secretary or the editor of the Express.

  Radclyffe Hall felt patronized and paranoid. Here was support, but not the sort she wanted. She drew up her own letter of protest and with Una elicited the backing of doctors, booksellers, ministers of religion, social workers. The Bloomsbury petition dwindled to a short piece by Forster, a tepid defence of literary freedom, published in the Nation on 8 September, which he asked Virginia Woolf to sign too. It fumbled any mention of lesbianism; ‘it enters personally into very few lives and is uninteresting or repellent to the majority’, Forster wrote. To Leonard Woolf, he said he found ‘Sapphism disgusting’.

  Radclyffe Hall was the plodding amateur, not one of them, not of the elite. She lacked their intellect, style and wit. They did not seek to change minds as she did with her proselytizing, rather they reached out to like minds. They recoiled from her bluntness and felt compromised by supporting her. The use of the word ‘proclivities’, the closeting of their own sexual preferences, the guarded manner of their protest, spoke of their lack of candour and their vanity for the social show.

  They had same-sex relationships but liked to demarcate between private indulgence and public discomfort. Vita was an aristocrat and a lesbian, therefore she should not sign a public letter for fear of jeopardizing her social position. Her novel about b.s.ness did not transpire, though both she and the love of her life, Violet Trefusis, believed they could outdo The Well of Loneliness. Vita’s account of their affair lay locked away in a Gladstone bag and was not to be published until after their deaths.

  The manuscript of E. M. Forster’s novel Maurice, his admission of homosexuality, was hidden too until he died. A visit to Edward Carpenter in 1913 had inspired it. Carpenter, like Havelock Ellis, was another proponent of the idea of the ‘intermediate sex’. His partner, George Merrill, fondled Forster’s bottom ‘gently and just above the buttock. I believe he touched most people’s’, Morgan wrote.

  The sensation was unusual and I still remember it, as I remember the position of a long vanished tooth … It seemed to go straight through the small of my back into my ideas, without involving my thoughts. If it really did this, it would have acted in strict accordance with Carpent
er’s yogified mysticism, and would prove that at that precise moment I had conceived.

  I then returned to Harrogate, where my mother was taking a cure and immediately began to write Maurice.

  He was to shut his baby up in a cupboard for nearly sixty years.

  On 1 September John and Una visited Noël Coward. He was in a London nursing home, having had his piles surgically excised. They found him writing the second act of Bitter Sweet. It was not his style to give public support to The Well of Loneliness, but he invited them to visit him and his mother the following weekend at his house, Goldenhurst Farm, Aldington, near Rye. It was a seventeenth-century farmhouse with oak beams, six acres of land, an orchard, ponds and views of the Romney marshes, the sea and the coast of France. John and Una lazed in the sun and had ‘a delightful day’. They stayed at the Mermaid Inn in Rye and themselves hunted for a house away from the squalls of city life. They took a short lease on Anne Eisner’s Tudor cottage, Journey’s End, with its views of the River Rother, of timber ships with tall masts and of lighthouses and the sea. Lighted by oil lamps and heated by wood fires, it was, said Una, ‘a heavenly haven of peace in which we pulled ourselves together for the next round’.

  In London Radclyffe Hall offered the Holland Street house for sale. She took translation copies of The Well to Audrey Heath who within a week sold Dutch rights. She wooed Blanche Knopf with lunch at Kettners and dinner at the Savoy and urged her to keep her promise to publish in America. And Jonathan Cape pressed on with his subversive plan. His partner, Wren Howard, a stocky man with a military manner, blue eyes, red cheeks and a bristling moustache, flew to Paris on 6 September with the papier-mâché moulds of The Well of Loneliness in suitcases as hand baggage. It was the early days of air travel and scrutiny by Customs at airports was scant.

  Howard delivered the moulds to John Holroyd-Reece, proprietor of the Pegasus Press at 37 rue Boulard. Holroyd-Reece had worked with Cape before and had met Radclyffe Hall at Datchet at Ida Temple’s house. He had voiced interest in publishing The Well of Loneliness himself. European in outlook with a German father, Johann Riesz, and a Scottish mother, he was keen on taking risks and making money. He had a wife, a lover, a taste for lavish houses and expensive antiques. He instructed a London solicitor, Harold Rubinstein, a partner in the firm of Rubinstein, Nash & Co., ‘a man of liberal and literary sensibilities’, to act for him and Pegasus Press. He introduced Cape and Radclyffe Hall to Rubinstein who acted for them too.

  Cape leased the rights of The Well to Pegasus and gave Holroyd-Reece a list of unfulfilled British orders and an overseas mailing list. Within three weeks pirate copies were printed and circulars sent to British booksellers offering the book at twenty-five shillings plus eleven pence postage. Here, the circular promised, was the original edition with not a comma changed. ‘The book is concerned with the phenomenon of the masculine woman in all its implications. It deserves better than to be suppressed by government action following on a campaign by a single newspaper.’ Orders were brisk. Holroyd-Reece appointed a London bookseller, Leopold Hill at 101 Great Russell Street, to act as his distributor. There was no formal ban on publication and initially no interference from the authorities.

  Blanche Knopf, though, on 27 September ‘ratted’, as Una put it, on American publication. From New York she wrote that orders were coming not from the ‘better type of booksellers’ but from dealers in dirty books who expected something ‘very salacious’.

  Our decision not to publish it will, I am sure, come as a very great shock to you, but you must view the situation from our point of view. You are an English author, and you secured a reputable English publisher for this book. The English publisher, on request of a public authority, withdrew the book from circulation, and in this withdrawal you acquiesced. You made no attempt to compel him to carry out the terms of his agreement and thus bring the matter to the attention of the Courts, the only bodies competent to render a legally binding decision. We are thus faced with the hopeless prospect of attempting to defend a book which has not been defended in its author’s own country.

  She wanted to ‘preserve’ the signed contract as an option on the next two books Radclyffe Hall might write. Radclyffe Hall scorned her. It was not her nature to see ‘the situation’ from another’s point of view. Audrey Heath sent a cable to Carl Brandt: ‘In view disgraceful termination contract John absolutely refuses any compromise with Knopf. Has already received alternative offers and has signed contract with Cape.’ Cape took over the American rights. Audrey sailed to the States to try to find a new publisher.

  In London Radclyffe Hall courted support and publicity. She gave press interviews, wrote letters and with Una in one week went to first nights of The Song of the Sea, The Scarlet Pimpernel and Thunder on the Left. ‘John mobbed for her autograph’, Una said. Secretarial help came in the form of a Miss Webber, who addressed envelopes all day.

  ‘Now enter Mr James Douglas again’, Radclyffe Hall wrote in her unpublished account of the fate of her book. ‘This time we get the Daily Express breaking out into fresh invictives.’ On 3 October a journalist from the Daily Sketch phoned the Home Office saying he had seen a circular issued by Pegasus about subscriptions for The Well of Loneliness. He asked what action the government intended. ‘Pending consideration of the circular it was too early to make any statement’, was the Home Office reply. But Joynson-Hicks wasted no time. He that day issued a warrant to the Postmaster-General ‘and all others whom it may concern’.

  I hereby authorise and require you to detain, open and produce for my inspection any postal packets which may be observed in course of transmission through the post and which are addressed to the Pegasus Press …

  Next day Douglas ran a story of how The Well of Loneliness was pouring into Britain and all over the world. He demanded immediate action from the Home Secretary. Joynson-Hicks issued another warrant – to the Chairman of the Board of Customs Sir Francis Floud. Floud was to prevent the book being imported. He instructed all the ports. Copies found ‘in goods or in passengers’ baggage’ must be seized. At Dover a consignment of 250 copies addressed to Leopold Hill was held. The Express aired Douglas’s approval:

  That is the kind of invigoratingly prompt and effective action that becomes a Government department. The book was suppressed for reasons of decency and taste. But other questions arise when an attempt is made to evade this suppression by delivering the offending novel through the post and from abroad. The matter then becomes one of deliberate affront to the constituted authority. As such it must be sharply resented and its perpetrators taught that they cannot thus trifle with Government.

  A general election was imminent. Douglas was telling the Conservative government what it must do to get the support of readers of his newspapers.

  Harold Rubinstein, for Pegasus Press, asked Joynson-Hicks on what authority he acted, ‘so that our clients may take appropriate action to test the matter’. John Anderson from the Home Office replied: ‘The matter is one for the Board of Customs and Excise, to whom any communication on the subject should be addressed.’ The Board of Customs and Excise then replied to Rubinstein that it had a statutory obligation to detain literature that might be ‘obscene and indecent’. Rubinstein asked them to hurry up and decide whether The Well of Loneliness was obscene and indecent. The Board replied that it was not a matter to be dealt with hastily and they ‘were according it particularly careful consideration’.

  In fact there was a problem. It was the duty of Customs to prevent the importing of indecent books under section 42 of the Customs Consolidation Act of 1876. By 9 October Sir Francis Floud and other members of his Board had read The Well of Loneliness. They did not think it obscene. Floud thought it a fine book. He called to see Sir John Anderson at the Home Office. Anderson told him that the Lord Chancellor and the Home Secretary intended proceedings under the Obscene Publications Act.

  Floud wanted no part in it. He disliked the involvement forced upon him. He did not want to fob off Rubinst
ein, hold the consignment of books at Dover, or testify against the book in court. Nor did he want to flout ‘the publicly expressed opinion of the Home Secretary’. He gave his view in a memorandum to the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

  The subject is treated seriously and sincerely, with restraint in expression and with great literary skill and delicacy … If the subject is one that can permissibly be treated at all in a novel, it is difficult to see how it could be treated with more restraint. If on the other hand the subject is to be regarded as inadmissible, it will be difficult to know where our censorship is to stop.

  He asked for permission to release the books. The Chancellor deferred his decision until he had seen the Home Secretary.

  Without Floud’s support Joynson-Hicks had to put into place an alternative strategy of censorship. His colleagues came to his rescue: the Lord Chancellor Lord Hailsham, the Attorney-General Sir Thomas Inskip, the Director of Public Prosecutions Sir Archibald Bodkin, the Chief Magistrate Sir Chartres Biron.

  On 11 October the Director of Public Prosecutions gave instructions to the Metropolitan Police. The Dover consignment when released was to be shadowed until delivered to Leopold Hill. A watch was to be kept on Hill’s premises ‘in case the parcel is removed to any other address’. Four copies of the book, ordered by Jonathan Cape and intercepted by the Post Office, were to be delivered at the same time as the Dover consignment. The police were to be waiting at both addresses with search warrants.

  Joynson-Hicks had a further problem. He feared that if tried by jury The Well of Loneliness would not be banned. He knew the strength and eminence of those defending this book, how articulate they were, how wide their support of it and interest in it, how persistent the press coverage, how cogent and persuasive judicial defence might be. He intended to avoid such a trial and impose his prejudice. On 15 October, with the book still stuck at Dover, he warned of his intentions in a lecture to the London Diocesan Council of Youth. It was reported in The Times the next day: