Radclyffe Hall and The Well of Loneliness

A book is not silenced by being burned. It is silenced by being unwritten, by being thought and then set aside, by the author who calculates the cost and decides the cost is too high. The rarer act, and the one that changes the weather of a country, is the act of a writer who knows in advance what the publication will cost her and who publishes anyway. She does it not from recklessness but from a settled conviction that the silence itself has become the greater obscenity.

THE WOMAN IN THE TWEED SUIT

She was born Marguerite Radclyffe Hall at Sunny Lawn on West Cliff in Bournemouth on the twelfth of August 1880, the only child of an absent father and a mother who did not want her. She was schooled at King's College London and at the Dresden Conservatoire, came into her grandfather's money at twenty-one, and published her first book of verse, Twixt Earth and Stars, in 1906. By her mid-thirties she was living openly with Mabel Batten, and then, from 1915 onward, with Una, Lady Troubridge, the daughter of a naval captain and the estranged wife of an admiral. She cropped her hair, took the name John among her friends, and wore the cut-tweed trouser suit, the white shirt, the monocle, that she would wear until the end of her life. She was already, by 1926, the author of four novels and the winner of the Prix Femina and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Adam's Breed. She did not need to write The Well of Loneliness. She wrote it because no one else would.

She told Una, before she began, that she meant to write the book that would put the lives of women like herself before the reading public of England, and that she expected the cost to fall on her own head and not on the heads of the obscure women whose cause she was taking up. Una recorded the conversation in her diary. The sentence, by Una Troubridge's account in The Life of Radclyffe Hall, was: I am willing to give up my whole life to it, and to sacrifice my literary reputation, if need be. She wrote the book through 1927 in the house at Sterling Street, Knightsbridge. Jonathan Cape took it. It was published on the twenty-seventh of July 1928, in a sober black binding, at fifteen shillings, with a preface by the sexologist Havelock Ellis calling it the first English novel which presents, in a completely faithful and uncompromising form, one particular aspect of sexual life as it exists among us today. For three weeks nothing happened.

THE EDITOR OF THE SUNDAY EXPRESS

On the morning of Sunday the nineteenth of August 1928, the editor of the Sunday Express, James Douglas, ran his leading article across the front of the paper under the headline A Book That Must Be Suppressed. The sentence that travelled was: I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel. Within seventy-two hours the Home Secretary, Sir William Joynson-Hicks, had written to Jonathan Cape asking him to withdraw the book. Cape complied in form, leased the moulds to the Pegasus Press in Paris, and arranged for copies to be sent back across the Channel into England. On the twenty-second of August the Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Archibald Bodkin, moved against the book under the Obscene Publications Act of 1857. On the nineteenth of October the Metropolitan Police raided the offices of Jonathan Cape on Bedford Square and the three London bookshops carrying the imported edition. The summons was returnable at Bow Street on the ninth of November. The novelist was not the defendant. The defendant was the book.

THE MORNING OF THE SIXTEENTH

Friday the sixteenth of November, twenty past ten, pale north light through the high east windows of Court Number One. The Victorian-Gothic courthouse on Bow Street, opposite the Royal Opera House. The prosecution had run on the ninth and the tenth. The defence had assembled, on the question of the book's literary merit, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, Desmond MacCarthy, Storm Jameson, Julian Huxley, and twenty-two others. On the Wednesday morning Sir Chartres Biron had refused them all leave to testify, on the ground that no expert on questions of literature is qualified to give expert evidence on a question of obscenity. The leader for the defence, Patrick Hastings KC, had withdrawn the previous week. The junior, Norman Birkett KC, had been left to carry the brief alone. She sat in the public gallery beside Una, who was in a quieter black skirt and jacket, and Vita, whose own Orlando had been published by the Hogarth Press six weeks earlier and was at that moment on the bookshop tables of London. The magistrate's clerk called the court to order. Biron began to read.

THE INSTANT BEFORE THE WORD

He read for fifty minutes. She knew before the first ten were out that the judgement was going against the book. The framework Biron set, in the careful magisterial sentences he was constructing as he spoke, was that the question before the court was not whether The Well of Loneliness was literature, but whether it was obscene under the Hicklin test of 1868, which asked whether the tendency of the matter was to deprave and corrupt those whose minds were open to such immoral influences. She had read enough of the law, in the weeks since the summons, to know what the answer would be. She listened, the monocle in her right eye, her hands quiet on the rail of the gallery, and let the calculation run in her head one more time. Twelve thousand copies sold in the United Kingdom in the twenty weeks since the twenty-seventh of July. The Pegasus Press edition out of Paris already in circulation. The Doubleday edition out of New York on sale by the end of the month. The book was, in the practical sense, beyond the reach of the magistrate. What the magistrate could do, what Biron was about to do, was put the question into the air of England. Bodkin and Joynson-Hicks had moved against the book to bury the subject. They had instead, by moving, made the subject the most discussed question in the English press for the autumn of 1928. There were three columns on the case in The Times every morning. Every literate person in London now knew what the book was about, who had written it, and how she lived. The prosecution had done in three months what twenty years of pamphleteering by Havelock Ellis and Edward Carpenter had not done. Una's gloved hand, beside hers on the rail, did not move. She did not turn her head. She thought of the line she had given Stephen Gordon on the last page of the novel, the line she meant to be carved over her grave, and she let the magistrate finish his sentence.

THE RULING

At twenty past eleven Biron ruled the book an obscene libel, ordered the destruction of all copies seized in the August raids, and dismissed the Cape application for the return of the confiscated stock. The court rose. She walked out of Bow Street on Una's arm, into Covent Garden, past the porters with their crates of cabbage and the early-afternoon crowd at the Opera House stage door, and into the rest of her life. The appeal was heard at Bow Street on the fourteenth of December before Sir Robert Wallace, sitting with eleven other magistrates. It was dismissed in five minutes. The book was, in England, finished.

THE COURTROOM IN NEW YORK

On the twenty-first of February 1929, in the Court of Special Sessions of the City of New York, the publisher Donald Friede stood trial under the Comstock Act for the American edition of The Well of Loneliness. Morris Ernst defended. The bench, three judges sitting together, ruled on the third of April that the book was not obscene under the law of the State of New York. The ruling did not cross the Atlantic, but the precedent stood. Doubleday took the book over from Covici-Friede later that year. By 1930 it was in French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Czech, Hungarian, and Polish translation. The English ban held. The Pegasus Press copies came across the Channel in suitcases and trunks, in the linings of coats, in the diplomatic bags of sympathetic friends, for the next twenty years.

THE LONG QUIET

She went on writing. The Master of the House in 1932, Miss Ogilvie Finds Herself in 1934, The Sixth Beatitude in 1936. None of them sold as the banned book sold. She and Una moved between Rye, Florence, and a flat in Dolphin Square, Pimlico. She fell in love, in the mid-thirties, with the Russian nurse Evguenia Souline, and the household reorganised itself painfully around the fact; Una stayed. She was diagnosed with cancer of the colon in 1943. She died at Dolphin Square on the seventh of October of that year, sixty-three years old, and was buried in the vault at Highgate Cemetery, West Side, that she had built for the two of them. Una was laid beside her twenty years later. The inscription on the tomb, by her own pre-arrangement, was the line she had thought of in the gallery at Bow Street: and, all our love hath been a sacrament of God, drawn from the close of the final chapter of The Well of Loneliness. The book was reprinted in England by Falcon Press in 1949. The Director of Public Prosecutions, on a private legal opinion, did not move against the reprint. The 1928 conviction was never formally lifted. It has not needed to be.

A writer who chooses the subject the law forbids does not always know that she is choosing the future. Sometimes she is only refusing to be silent in the present, and the future arranges itself around the refusal. The Sexual Offences Act of 1967 did not mention women, because the law of England had never quite known what to do with them. Sally Cline, Diana Souhami, and Laura Doan have written the twentieth-century lesbian literary tradition back to a single black-bound novel of 1928 and the woman who wrote it knowing what it would cost her. The book has been continuously in print in English since the Falcon Press reprint. Visitors to Highgate Cemetery still leave letters at the door of the vault on the West Side, addressed to John, weighted under a stone against the weather.