The Trials of Radclyffe Hall

by Diana Souhami

  It may be possible in the near future I shall have to deal with immoral and disgusting books … I am attacked on the one hand by all those people who put freedom of speech and thought and writing before everything else in the world, as if there were freedom in God’s world to pollute the young generation growing up. There must be some limit to the freedom of what a man may write or speak in this great country of ours. That freedom in my view, must be determined by the question as to whether what is written or spoken makes one of the least of these little ones offend.

  The following day a letter from the publisher Geoffrey Faber expressed disbelief:

  He indicates the kind of censorship he will practise … the whole of the content of English literature is to be restricted in future to such stuff as Sir William thinks it safe to put in the hands of a schoolgirl. Is it possible that a 20th century British Government can be contemplating such an incredible betise?

  The answer was no. Hicks was not interested in literature or the minds of the young. He was not going to censor ill-written novels about murder, burglary, adultery, torture, war and cataclysm. It was sex between women that interested him. He thought it a pollutant and he was going to deal with it.

  On 18 October, Rubinstein got a warning letter from a junior official at the Customs Board:

  Gentlemen

  I am instructed by the Commissioners of Customs and Excise to refer to your letter of the 10th instant and to inform you that instructions have been given to release the consignment of copies of The Well of Loneliness which were detained at Dover.

  I am however to add that the decision of the Commissioners to release the consignment is without prejudice to any action that may be taken by any other Department.

  I am Gentlemen

  Your Obedient Servant

  James Cook

  The consignment, reduced to 247 copies, was delivered to Leopold Hill on 19 October. The four intercepted copies were waiting at Cape’s office. Chief Inspector John Prothero of the Metropolitan Police Force and his men were at both places with search warrants. These had been issued under the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 by no other than Sir Chartres Biron, Chief Magistrate at Bow Street. The police took the books and circulars and proof of postage to customers. They tried to search Cape’s private files until stopped by Rubinstein. They handed their spoils to Chartres Biron.

  ‘The government was bent upon persecution’, Radclyffe Hall wrote. ‘Are we living in England? … It seems to me that this shameless & benighted government of ours would gladly institute a rain of teror. They have tried by every means in their power to terrify me into cowed submission – but in this they have failed I do assure you.’

  Summonses followed. Leopold Hill and Jonathan Cape were ‘commanded to appear’ at Bow Street Court on 9 November before Chartres Biron to ‘show cause why the said obscene books so found and seized as aforesaid should not be destroyed’. Rubinstein had fifteen days to prepare what he thought would be their defence.

  Radclyffe Hall galvanized support and worked at the statement she intended to make in court. It was clear to her that it was she who was on trial, the essence of her, her life, her sexuality and her book. Una typed this statement, honed it, read it out. They moved between the turmoil of London and the peacefulness of Rye, between walks with the dogs on Camber Sands and Romney Marsh and endless meetings with lawyers. They lunched at the Mermaid Hotel and took mass with Father Bonaventura in the small Catholic church. In the evenings Una read aloud Orlando.

  22

  A serious psychological subject

  Rubinstein sent out 160 letters eliciting support for publication of The Well of Loneliness. He aimed to pack the Bow Street court with eminent professionals opposed to the destruction of the book, who would defend it persuasively. He compiled a mass of expert testimony to its virtues and gathered a glittering array of witnesses to give ‘good cause’ why the book should freely circulate. He believed that the numbers of the book’s supporters, their status and expertise, would overwhelm any case for the prosecution.

  He marshalled support from the literary, the erudite, the devout, the successful and respectable. Many of those he approached were anxious to avoid the witness box; ‘they generally put it down to the weak heart of a father, or a cousin who is about to have twins’, Virginia Woolf wrote. It was only Radclyffe Hall who wanted to stand in the dock, embarrass the world to its withers and declaim, ‘I am an invert, read me.’ The Archbishop of York foresaw ‘practical difficulties’ if he offered support. H. G. Wells had ‘gone abroad’. Arthur Conan Doyle had ‘left for South Africa’. John Galsworthy, President of the PEN Club, was too busy and did not think literary freedom was at risk. (Joynson-Hicks had personally asked him to testify against the book.) Bernard Shaw said he was himself too immoral to have credibility. Alec Waugh had not read it and hated legal proceedings. Harley Granville-Barker did not regard ‘sexual perversion a fit subject for art’. Professor J. B. S. Haldane’s ‘scientific occupations did not permit him to take part in such controversies’. Geoffrey Faber, as head of a publishing company, could not defend particular books. James Agate declared himself ill and Eden Phillpotts declared himself a recluse.

  Havelock Ellis would do no more than he had done already. ‘I have never been in the witness box’, he wrote to Radclyffe Hall. He said he ‘lacked the essential qualities of a witness’, that his book Sexual Inversion had been condemned as an obscene libel thirty years earlier, so he was ‘tarred with the same brush’. ‘The less said about me the better for you. In any case, for good or evil my testimony is already contained in the book itself. It is people of the highly conventional and respectable kind, and occupying a high position who will be really helpful.’ Hugh Walpole agreed to stand, though he disliked airing the subject of homosexuality and thought Cape had undermined the defence by sending the book to the Home Secretary, then withdrawing it voluntarily.

  Unequivocal support came from Robert Henry Cust, author and magistrate. He resigned from the executive committee of the London Morality Council because of its hostile attitude to The Well of Loneliness. Cheap bookstores, he said, were ‘brimming with filth of the vilest kind’, yet here was a ‘heart-rending decent book’. ‘Such a persecution of its authoress savours of medieval or even primitive barbarism.’ Charles Ricketts, printer, thought it an admirable study of English rural and cosmopolitan life and would recommend it to any mother of daughters. Sheila Kaye-Smith called it sincere, moving, restrained. To judge literature by its possible effects on children or those of ‘abnormal mentality’, she said, would end in its total suppression, as no book could be guaranteed not to mislead the young or mad.

  Many who offered support did so in defence of the principle of literary freedom rather than out of enthusiasm for Radclyffe Hall or her book. Leonard Woolf said that as literary editor of the Nation and proprietor of the Hogarth Press most books published in Britain passed through his hands. Taking the standards of modern books published every day and masterpieces continually republished in cheap editions, The Well of Loneliness was not indecent or likely to corrupt anyone. E. M. Forster said obscenity existed not in a subject but in its treatment and that ‘Miss Hall’s treatment is unexceptionable.’ Radclyffe Hall did not like the word unexceptionable applied to her writing. Virginia Woolf, from whom any blandishment was laced with irony, said it treated a delicate subject with great decency and discretion. Storm Jameson, until that year a manager for the London branch of Knopf, thought if it had not been for James Douglas’s stunt, only the serious-minded would have bothered to read the book.

  Rose Macaulay was rude about Radclyffe Hall’s prose. She did not see how the book could corrupt anyone as its heroine had such a rotten time. Stephen Gordon, she said, was pointed at in the street, abused by her mother, snubbed by society and had to live in Paris to escape contumely. She seemed ‘physically and mentally defective, an imputation which I am told is resented by addicts and which probably has a salutary effect on young or would be addic
ts’.

  Naomi Mitchison thought the book long, very sincere, sentimental and distinctly depressing. Adolescents with homosexual tendencies would be discouraged. Normal men or women would see it as a call to be kind to their ‘abnormal fellow beings’.

  Laurence Housman called it ‘an unexaggerated statement of the social sufferings and disabilities of an involuntary invert’. He recommended classification of these unfortunates be altered from the criminal to the medical and commended publication because it provoked discussion.

  Joan Sutherland, author of Beauty for Ashes and The Enchanted Country, said she had a son and daughter, that The Well of Loneliness was a serious novel which could not harm them and that authors should be permitted freely to write what they desired to express.

  Edward Garnett, whom Virginia Woolf described as a ‘surly, shaggy, unkempt old monstrosity’, had forty years’ experience as a publisher’s reader and literary adviser. He derided James Douglas’s article in the Sunday Express as hysterical, uncritical and sensational. He had looked through all the twenty-four reviews of The Well of Loneliness. None had asked for the book to be withdrawn. Many praised its beauty, burning sincerity, high-mindedness, honesty. Some had thought it too long, sentimental and overcharged. None challenged it on the grounds of immorality.

  Alfred Lyons, Cape’s London salesman, said the only complaints he had received had been about the book’s high price. Alfred Butes, manager and director of the Times Book Company and the Times Book Club, called himself ‘an interpreter of the mind of a large reading public’. He thought the book admirable. If it was obscene, he would not have ordered copies. Library subscribers, he said, would not be dictated to as to what they ought or ought not read, but if he judged a book offensive he told the library superintendents not to put it on the open shelves. The Well was not in that category. It was in great demand after the success of Adam’s Breed. Seven hundred copies were in circulation and he had not received a single objection from subscribers.

  Those with medical qualifications gave their views to Rubinstein, however specious, with authority. James Norman, lecturer in mental diseases at the Westminster Hospital Medical School and author of Mental Disorders, said sexual inversion was a congenital disposition and The Well of Loneliness an interesting study of sexual inversion in the female. Dr Stella Churchill said the fate of the invert was a melancholy one and this book should act as a warning to young normal girls tempted to experiment with such relationships.

  Norman Haire, who was to be Radclyffe Hall’s star witness after Havelock Ellis bowed out, declared that homosexuality ran in families and a person could no more become it by reading books than he (if not she) could become syphilitic by reading about syphilis.

  John Thomson Greig, Registrar of the University of Durham, thought society should be educated into accepting inverts. There were more of them than the world supposed and no psychologist worthy of the name confused inversion with induced or acquired homosexuality which was a form of sexual perversion.

  Rabbi Joseph Frederick Stern, of the East London Synagogue in Stepney, had set out to read The Well of Loneliness ‘like a prude on the prowl’ looking for obscenities – which he could not find. He ended up feeling ‘profound sympathy for tragic suffering’.

  A. P. Herbert, author, barrister and father of ‘three healthy girls and one healthy boy’, read it on the recommendation of his wife. He thought postwar society was in an unnatural state with two million more women than men. ‘This sort of thing was bound to arise from this state of affairs.’ Not being a girl he could not say what effect the book would have on a girl’s mind but if he found a healthy girl of twenty reading it he would say, Read on my child, but you’ll be bored. If he found an unhealthy girl reading it he’d say, Read on, this will be a lesson to you.

  Oliver Baldwin, author, journalist, politician and the homosexual son of the Prime Minister, said, ‘Why England should suffer such an attack on the liberty of literature is beyond my comprehension unless we have returned to the days of “Here’s something we don’t understand let’s suppress it,”’ and Mrs Gladys Edge, author of Spiritual Healing and Towards a Christian Commonwealth, said all social workers knew of such cases of the tragedy of people born to such a condition.

  Radclyffe Hall was grateful to her defendants but felt boxed in by their equivocation. Their testimony read like tolerance of a club to which others belonged. Their elicited comment seemed riddled with subtext and self-protection. Direct action might have been preferable: marching the streets, Romaine, Toupie and Una chained to the railings. Few of the supporters gathered by Rubinstein could break through the barrier of embarrassment, speak out and rid their words of awkwardness.

  ‘Our thoughts centre upon Sapphism,’ Virginia Woolf wrote to Quentin Bell on 1 November, ‘we have to uphold the morality of that Well of all that’s stagnant and lukewarm and neither one thing or the other; The Well of Loneliness.’ Those due to appear in court met for a buffet supper at the studio of the architect Clough Williams-Ellis. Virginia Woolf left early. ‘The company grew bolder and more outspoken as time went on,’ Vita Sackville-West wrote to her, ‘and the little waitress from Harrods sitting behind the buffet nearly exploded with excitement. There, I thought, is another young life gone wrong.’

  At this supper, Leonard Woolf told Virginia she must not go into the witness box or she would ‘cast a shadow over Bloomsbury’ by saying what she and they thought of the book. Bernard Shaw ‘made a long, paradoxical, witty and entirely destructive discourse’, then announced that he was not going to turn up on the day. He was convinced the magistrate would take the line that the book’s literary status was irrelevant and that the only issue would be whether he, the magistrate, regarded the book as obscene.

  Up to the day of the trial, Radclyffe Hall plied Rubinstein with supplementary observations and considerations contingent to the case. As counsel, he engaged Norman Birkett for Cape, and J. B. Melville to represent Leopold Hill. Rubinstein advised Birkett that his client wanted to be cross-examined in court and gave him her prepared statement which she planned to read out. It was in the nature of a sermon and an appeal. She reiterated her now well-known high moral purpose: how it was her duty to tell the world the truth ‘about this very grave social problem’, how she was a practising Christian who had studied abnormal psychology, how she wanted to plead for those ‘doomed to be abnormal’.

  It is not too much to say that many lives are wrecked through the lack of proper understanding of inversion. For the sake of the future generation inverts should never be encouraged to marry.

  I do not regret having written the book. All that has happened has only served to show me how badly my book was needed. I am proud to have written The Well of Loneliness and I would not alter so much as a comma.

  … Inverts are certainly no better and no worse than normal people – only when they are good they deserve more praise because from their birth nearly every man’s hand is against them. Hopeless outcasts are a social danger, and persecution is as harmful to the persecutors as to the persecuted.

  According to Magnus Hirschfeld whose statistics are generally considered to be the most accurate fifteen person in every thousand are inverted and the question is of grave social importance.

  Birkett knew the enemy. This was not a wily defence, given the prosecuting counsel. If Radclyffe Hall went into the witness box to pontificate about Christianity and ‘the serious question of congenital inversion’, she would compound their prejudice. He said the best interest of her book would not be served by her appearing. She became very agitated and wanted his reassurance that he would not give the impression that she was ‘ashamed of her abnormality or that there is anything in such an abnormality to be ashamed of’. Nor did she want other writers to think her cowardly. ‘Miss Hall maintains that her private life would compare very favourably with the private lives of ordinary respectable people’, Rubinstein told him.

  Radclyffe Hall was exercised too with the idea that Birkett mi
ght not fully grasp her distinction between inversion and perversion. Inversion was what her book was about, perversion was what she called a term of opprobrium. Birkett curled in his boots. He did not want to enlighten Chartres Biron on such conceptual niceties. He would have liked to imply that the book was about something quite other – irrigation perhaps, or geogony – and to focus on the absence of expletives in the text. But Radclyffe Hall was not going to compromise her cause or adapt to the theatre of this particular court. It was her trial and she wanted to speak out. ‘We, neither you nor I,’ she warned Birkett, ‘must not sell the inverts in our defence – they trust me, and I trust you.’

  Birkett reminded her that no one was to be ‘accused’ by the terms of the proceedings. What the defence had to do was ‘show cause’ why the book should not be destroyed. Given the homophobes to whom they were answerable, that was a hard task. Joynson-Hicks and Chartres Biron were men of like minds. So too was Sir Archibald Bodkin, Director of Public Prosecutions. The logistics of indictment were his. Joynson-Hicks had authorized him to be in court. Bodkin had represented Britain at Geneva in 1923 at the International Conference for the Suppression of Obscene Literature. He and Joynson-Hicks had been working as hard as Rubinstein. They had personally solicited testimony against the book from the Church, writers and doctors of medicine. Stanley Baldwin and Winston Churchill assured them of their support. The arm of government stretched wide.

  23

  I have read the book

  Cartwright called John and Una at six in the morning on Friday, 9 November. John dressed in a leather coat with astrakhan collar and cuffs and a dark blue, wide-brimmed hat. Una wore mauve and lots of make-up. They picked up Harold Rubinstein from his office and drove to Bow Street Magistrates Court.