CHAPTER FIVE: DIME-BOOK LEGENDS
& COMIC-BOOK YELLOW JOURNALS
At the beginning of the new century Europe was caught up in the throes of remarkable modernisations. And Paris – which, to Walter Benjamin had already been the ‘capital of the nineteenth century,’ became electrified suddenly, overnight in 1900 when – with the flick of a switch, 6,000 bulbs were ignited and the Seine was transfigured into a river of reflected light, a city illuminated with an otherworldly beauty. People who’s lives have been lived in gas and candlelight could see the night skyline for the first time – the Eiffel Tower, the turning Ferris wheel, the glinting domes of the Grand and the newly completed ‘Petit Palais’ – the start of the Exposition Universelle, the biggest fair the world had ever known. One million visitors were expected. Fifty-million turn up. In 1909 Bleriot flew La Manche – the English Channel, while faster trains and cars were quickening the pace of urban life. Culture was reinventing itself through technology.
Between 1851 and 1891 the population of inner London doubled to four million, creating a vast potential consumerdom. Railways and the new Underground offered quick transport links to the West End. Where – beneath its glitz, there has always existed a ‘twilight’ world of poverty, crime, vice and drugs. Victorian journalists profess to be scandalised by the immorality of the area, while police monitor political extremists who frequent the anarchist clubs of Soho. Meanwhile a ‘clean-up’ of the areas was demanded by social reformers keen to expose the pornography trade along the Strand and within the notorious red light area through the Aldwych. The most cost-effective way to be rid of the slums seemed to be to build three new roads, which create sites for new theatres. Between 1875 and 1914 forty theatres and music halls were built, providing elegant venues to stage the fashionable plays of Oscar Wilde, Pinero et al. Cinema, photography and the phonograph are just a few of the other developments changing society.
New ideas, among them Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity and Sigmund Freud’s theory of the unconscious, were also altering the most fundamental understanding of reality. In 1905 Freud introduced his ‘Three Essays On Sexuality’. The gradual insinuating of his message was to undermine a bourgeois complacency that was comfortably swaddled in euphemism and evasion. As lethal as germ warfare it unleashed the sack of a civilisation, shattering its arrogance forever. In the harsh intellectual illumination that Freud cast, imaginary thought-crimes lurk in the closeted heads of even the most otherwise sedate patients, prosperous citizens become maniacs or perverts the moment those lights go down. Thanks to his legacy all that had seemed virtuous and smug, all that was safe and secure had become an asylum crammed with unsettling dreams. The layered archaeology of the mind was an excavation of truths buried as deep as the compressed ruins of ancient times.
In art the Cubists and Futurists sought a visual language to convey the complexity of this transfigured world. Poets and musicians invent new forms to convey its pulsing rhythms. This optimistic vision of a liberating technology would end with the First World War and – for many artists, their first-hand experience of its killing machines. But also around this same time there were innumerable weekly and monthly magazines featuring pictures (mostly woodcuts) of actresses, dancers, and burlesque stars. The discovery of ankles, calves, and thighs – albeit chastely concealed by tights, had a potent effect on what we perhaps naively assume to be a fairly straight-laced and puritanical population. Yet it is precisely the escape valve of theatre, chiefly burlesque – that helped create girlie magazines, by providing a zone where it was briefly admissible to ditch social restrictions.
This was the period of the very popular ‘Minsey’s’ magazine (1889-1929) which, while it contained general-interest articles, poems and fiction, also reproduced coy displays of nude-images under the pretext of illustrated ‘works of art’, with features headed ‘Types Of Beauty’, ‘Artist’s Models’ or ‘Types of Fair Women’. And there were always pictures of ‘Stage Favourites’, visions etched in black-and-white that were zinc-oxided into memory. Photo-poses of Lily Langtree helped many a youth ‘to sleep at night’, in the way that she solved Pete Townshend’s ‘childhood problem’ in the Who song, as late as the mid-1960s! ‘Nickell Magazine’ (1894-1905) was also running ‘snappy stories’ accompanied by sketch-drawings of scantily-clad female bodies alongside early photo-features based on popular actresses. And ‘Peterson Magazine’ (1842-1898) was a general-interest publication best known for its stylish fashion, home, furnishing, and hobbies features, alongside its ‘Among The Players’ drama articles which were streamed through most of its years. Yet – across its final issues this feature was used as an excuse to regularly present beautiful actresses in cleavage-enhancing low-cut gowns. While the early-1900s Munsey stable published ‘Cavalier’ (its January to April 1912 issues running George Allen England’s fine ‘Darkness At Dawn’ four-part serial), as well as ‘Live Wire’, ‘Scrap Book’, and ‘All-American Fiction’. As Frank A Munsey’s ‘All-Story Weekly’ serialised Edgar Rice Burroughs’ exposure about prostitution – ‘The Girl From Farros’, in its 23 September to 14 October 1916 issues.
There was already the Nudist ‘Health’ life-style excuse for pictorial nudity, alongside the continuing ‘Modern Art For Men’ portfolio-periodicals. The original ‘Life’ magazine (begun in 1883 as a semi-humorous mag wittily satirising real aspects of American life-styles and morés) is best remembered, both in the US and abroad from 1887 to 1910, for advancing the image of the ‘Gibson Girl’, Charles Dana Gibson’s stylish pen-and-ink line-drawings. Although far from what would today be labelled a top-shelf mag, ‘Life’s circulation skyrocketed as a result of their inclusion, establishing the female form in its first mass-appeal incarnation of the high-class stereotype of woman, both voluptuous, but natural. Who was she? She was the toast of the town. The belle of the ball. She was fashion plate and inspiration. Significantly, she was also the first widely recognised female image to be appreciated for her own sake – not in the thematic guise of theatre art, or advertising. The Gibson Girl may have been regarded as the epitome of refinement and genteel breeding, she may have had style and class, but she was there to be ogled. And she commanded global attention as the American Beauty – through ‘Life’ and later ‘Colliers’. Art students might dare to adopt her as their favourite model (in deference to the formidable inspiration of formal academy-approved art), but as the merchandising industry discovered its potential, she could also be found adorning calendars and wallpaper, plates and spoons, emblazoned on chair-backs and table-tops.
Of course, I wasn’t around at the time. Neither were you. But my grandfather was. He was running a market garden in Liverpool. And – being an Atlantic-facing port, Liverpool was ideally situated to benefit from New World marine trafficking. It was importing – and eagerly consuming all the latest American fads and fancies. Music on black shellac 78rpm records, and magazines too, glamour, eroticism, drama, and intensely vivid outbreaks of the hottest beauties vivaciously depicted. Yankee imports, to match, compare and contrast with their less glitzy homegrown competitors. Check out the newsstands, the Newsagents, as well as the backstreet bookshop sleaze emporiums. Let’s follow an imaginary furtive magazine-sniff as he approaches his local backstreet newsagent somewhere around this time. What’s he hoping to find? What makes the biggest impression? First off – text! Huge black unbroken slabs of it. Page after page of it. A weight of wordage the twenty-first century browser would find intimidating. In these days, even kids comics like ‘Rover’ and ‘Hotspur’ come with relentlessly novel-length word-counts. While the occasional illustrations – covers apart, are strictly monochrome. But more than anything else there are solid wedges of prose.
So was this a more literate culture? Perhaps, but only by necessity. There was no TV. No TV-Soaps. No TV-movies. So it was left to the medium of print to convey their escapist aspirations. Hence Pulps. Big thick magazine editions – usually 7”x10” with cheap rough-edged woodpulp pages – Detective Tales, War Stories, garish ‘Scientifiction’, Nautical Yarns, Jungle exploits, and ‘Man’s Adventures’. And strange cross-overs, the December 1929 issue of ‘Paris Nights’ magazine features vaguely risqué speculations about what will be the nature of ‘A 1950 Marriage’ written by ‘Amy Worth’, which was an alias used by high-profile SF writer David H Keller.
These were largely American imports, mostly shipped across the Atlantic as ballast. And the Girlie mags of the 1920s and 1930s that our furtive magazine-sniff would see appear to come in two notable guises. One – fairly obviously, covers the Hollywood fan-mag spin-off ‘actressy’ tradition, the other a little more devious in intent, offers ‘art’ or ‘art photography’ as their facade of choice. There were a few other men’s titles around during this time, but they paid more attention to bawdy humour and lightly suggestive cartoons with only the lightest sprinkling of photos of coy bathing beauties or eager starlets. And their names certainly promise more than they deliver – ‘Jim Jam Jems’, ‘Captain Billy’s’, ‘Calgary Eye’, ‘Whiz Bang’, ‘Ballyhoo’, ‘Opener’, ‘Smokehouse Monthly’ and ‘Burlesk’ – the stress rather more on words than images.
If our mag-sniff wants photos of sexy females displaying their perfumed anatomies – and he usually does, he chooses screen or ‘art’ magazines. Every month they offer hundreds of nude and semi-nude pictures. The original art magazines of the mid-Twenties are ‘Art Inspirations’ and ‘Artists And Models’. Along with the scores of imitators that follow in their wake, they claim – somewhat unconvincingly, that their motives are altruistic and not prurient. The female bodies draped across their pages are intended for ‘serious artists, art students, collectors and photographers’. As well as studio directors whose casting requirements might be aided by printed images in lieu of live model auditions. Many of the magazines contain filler-text of a serious and technical nature, discussing paints, cameras, film, posing and the like. Perhaps some of the readers actually even read them. In fact, most of the photos in these ‘art-mags’ are of poor quality. But what their fuzzy rotogravure reproduction lacks in technical quality, they achieve in erotic interest. If a caption reads ‘soft and careful retouching makes this study both one of character and beauty,’ even the most naive reader would surely smile while drooling over breasts and bums in an infinite array of evocative poses. Artistic? – perhaps, but most of them are plain and simple nudie-shots with no formal merit.
British girlie-publishing of the period – as in ‘Photo-Bits’, were very restrained by comparison, according to Maurice Girodias (publisher of The Olympia Press) ‘it seems hard to understand how a whole generation of men who had been through the toughest of wars – and won, could be reduced to the level of schoolchildren, and be told what to read and what not to read by a conglomerate of spinsters and bowler-hatted policemen.’
‘You know, sex is really a ridiculous thing’ says Robert Silverberg (in his wonderfully inventive 1969 time-travelling novel ‘Up The Line’). ‘You take this short rigid fleshy rod and you put it into this lubricated groove, and you rub it back and forth until enough of a charge is built up so that discharge is possible. Like making a fire by twirling a stick against a plank.’ But if here and now – in this feature, we can be said to be attempting anything as pretentious as charting the development of attitudes relating to this ridiculous activity, its literature and depiction – which we are, then it helps to have some kind of hold on the shifting morés of times beyond our reach. Most of the problems and sexual conundrums that bothered the days of yore, still bother us. We are their children, or their children’s children. There are direct bloodlines. We aren’t that different. We are also beset by erotic desire, the desirability of birth control, abortion, gay rights – stuff like that, and in a wider context, the problematical equations of a state system attempting to regulate private behaviour. Publisher Alfred Barrett, for example, was charged with ‘conspiring to corrupt public morals’ when he ran coded ‘Lonely Hearts’ personal-ads in his ‘The Link’ magazine, listing dating-profiles of young men who describe themselves as ‘theatrical, ‘unconventional’ or of ‘peculiar temperament’ in such a way that could introduce ‘men to men for unnatural and grossly indecent practices.’ Heaven forfend…!
And nowhere we look are things exactly black and white. Did you ever expect them to be? Franz Kafka had a penchant for porn. In England, Nancy Mitford thought it was common even to know the word ‘common’. People are muddled and confused. They are now. They were then. Those who edge the envelope forward – such as H.G. Wells, that great advocate of ‘Free Love’ and the ‘Modern Woman’, were less than sympathetic to their own partners’ needs. The warpingly-idealistic views of women – nurtured by the church and society for so very long time – centuries even, that they must lie back, think of the Empire, and get the sordid sex business out of the way, are too great an obstacle to surmount in a single bound.
The pioneer Feminists soon discovered that their urgent aspirations for emancipation, for total equality with men, and the necessity of the vote, brought them into conflict not only with currents of opinion damning them for failing to meet deeply ingrained stereotypical views of how ‘good mothers and wives’ should behave, but with the residue of that guilt in accepting their own more healthily prurient desires. So that too often, assaulting social injustice must also involve repressing some of the more ‘basic’ instincts that – coincidentally, bind them into coercive dependence on men. To do otherwise, must involve a betrayal of the Sisterhood. Marriage. Even committed relationships, must by necessity involve an element of surrender. Compromise. But hey – even ardent social and Socialist reformer Beatrice Webb, an idealistic intellectual who achieved so much in advancing the tempo of her conformist time, found herself fretting about her ‘indecent ways of thinking of men.’ She was further dismayed to discover that even by relentlessly throwing herself into her work she was still incapable of totally extinguishing the persistent itch of her physical passions.
Of course people are walking contradictions. It’s a condition of life. Around the same time Surrealism was ripping open the Freudian motivations underlying our supposedly rational behaviour, delving into the subconscious in order to discover the reality of our lives, the anatomy of our desires. Catalonian Salvador Dali’s strange and often disturbingly repellent art, German-born Hans Bellmer who threw himself into the arms of the Parisian avant-garde after Hitler came to power in 1933, with sexual fantasies of a particularly perverse kind, manipulating, fashioning, and reassembling dolls into highly eroticised configurations. D.H. Lawrence wrote a sequence of poems about overcoming his sexual hang-ups called ‘Look! We Have Come Through!’. Bertrand Russell remarked that he was pleased Lawrence and Frieda had come through, then adds ‘but why should we look?’ Yet they write, and we choose to look. Always have, always will.
The strange case of Frank Harris is a useful example of those contradictions, inherent in the tempo of the time. A one-time anarchist – although one suspected of being an agent provocateur by Peter Kropotkin!, he gleefully discussed blowing up Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone, yet later came close to becoming a Conservative MP humself. Like many other aspects of his life, even his birth date is uncertain – although it’s probably 14 February 1856 in Galway. Yet his eventual demise of a heart-attack in France, 27 August 1931, means that his time-frame encompasses the outrageous imperial optimism of the late-Victorian years, the decadent 1890s, the Edwardian period – even meeting and, by his own account, rebuffing that Prince of Wales himself, and the period of its aftermath. As editor of the respected London ‘Evening News’ and later the New York-based ‘Pearsons Magazine’, he had a taste for Greek Literature and Swinburne, and found himself well-placed to gain access to, and became a confidante of notable figures of the day, both attracted by the intelligentsia, and repelled by their gluttonous excesses.
He exalted in moving in such literary circles, H.G. Wells, Bram Stoker, Aleister Crowley, Alfred Tennyson, Max Beerbohm, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Matthew Arnold, and a rampant sexually rapacious Guy de Maupassant who he claims to have been capable of achieving erection at will, and who eventually died insane from syphilis. But Harris harboured vaunting literary ambitions of his own, in fact – in his chapter ‘The Foretaste Of Death From 1920 Onwards’, he bemoans the poor reception his published work received and the blindness of critics who stubbornly refuse to recognise his genius alongside that of James Joyce or Shakespeare! ‘Modesty’ he claims, ‘is the fig-leaf of mediocrity.’ He wrote novels – the anarchist-themed ‘The Bomb’ (1896) and ‘Love In Youth’ (1916) as well as biographical works such as ‘Oscar Wilde: His Life And Confessions’ (1916). But the first of Harris’ notorious five-volume autobiography ‘My Life And Loves’ was published as a private Paris edition in 1922, enhanced with tipped-in photos of undraped women, an innovation that immediately attracted the attention of diligent French and German customs officials, so ensuring its instant international notoriety.
His collected ‘complete and unexpurgated’ confessions were published in a single volume in 1964 (by WH Allen & Co, and Corgi paperback), which run to some 1,063 pages. But that reduces to considerably less if you’re only speed-reading to hunt out the ‘dirty’ bits. And some of his confessions are deeply disturbing to contemporary readers. Such as his assertion that most boy’s first learn about sex via their sisters, something that would surely involve a swift visit from the Social Services today. Even though families tended to be bigger then, and sisters more numerous. Also his deeply unsettling penchant for ‘young’ girls.
There’s a sequence in volume two where he’s infatuated with ‘an incomparable mistress’ called Jeanne. Sexually she’s what the French call ‘Casse Noisettes’ – or ‘nutcrackers’, a woman whose sex has ‘the contractile strength of a hand, and Jeanne knew the exact moment to use it.’ However, she wants to become more than just his mistress, and actually proposes marriage to Harris. ‘What a prospect…! I laughed to myself and could not help shaking my head.’ As a further inducement to matrimony she appears to offer her own daughter as an inducement to snare Harris into a ‘Lolita’-style tryst. She tells Harris ‘I shall have to send Lisette to school unless we go south together, she’s getting to be a big girl and is exquisitely pretty. You should see her in her bath!’
During a later encounter, following a social evening, the offer Jeanne intends becomes even more explicit as he kisses Lisette. ‘You’ll stay with us, won’t you?’ she invites. Harris ‘kissed her for her sweetness’ but wisely didn’t stay around long enough to take peadophile advantage of the situation.
Relentlessly energetic, gloriously bold, buoyantly enthusiastic, his stated intention is to be totally candid in matters sexual, yet there are bizarre elements of ‘Boy’s-Own’ adventure yarns to his tales, a derring-do that carries him all the way from defeating the boarding school bully, to crossing the Atlantic to become a cowboy in the still-Wild West, and back to Paris to take in a lecture by French philosopher Hippolyte Taine. And it’s from one of Taine’s observations that he seems to assume the tone of his narrative – one of subjective truth, achieved through tactical exaggeration, ‘a lion was not a running beast, but a great jaw set on four powerful springs of short massive legs. The artist… seizing the idea of the animal may exaggerate the size and strength of the jaw a little, emphasize too the springing power in his loins and legs and the tearing strength of his front paws and claws, but if he lengthened his legs or diminished his jaw, he would denaturalize the true idea of the beast and would produce an abortion.’ So Harris is true to the nature of his beast, rather than its absolute truth, and his claim ‘Casanova! My dear man, Casanova is not worthy to untie my boot-strings’ must be taken with a generous pinch of cynicism.
His second volume followed in 1925, recounting his exploits alongside Russian General Skobelof during the 1877 Russo-Turkish campaigns, although in fact the two never met! Volume three loses some of its momentum, until volume four (both completed in 1926 and published the following year) regains some of his original zest, detailing his dashing African adventures on the brink of the Boer War, sailing up the Zambesi to the Victoria Falls, then picking up pace with his San Remo orgies. When he died, the uncompleted manuscript of his fifth and final volume was sold by Nellie – his impecunious widow, to Maurice Girodias of the Olympia Press. A version was revised and completed by an uncredited Alexander Trocchi, which followed as late as 1954. Another supposedly more authentic reconstruction came from the Grove Press in 1963, edited by John F Gallagher.
Throughout the serial instalments of this monstrously outrageous work, the bragging self-aggrandising is enlivened by risqué anecdotes. Harris’ irrepressible ego and single-minded obsessiveness sometimes interrupt and frequently draws into question his narrative veracity, not that that detracts greatly! And there’s his need to over-divulge the descriptive geography of his conquests’ genitalia. When asked if his famously mendacious friend ever told the truth, Max Beerbohm said ‘sometimes, don’t you know – when his invention flagged’! But his later volumes reflect some even more eccentric attitudes to matters sexual, with affairs left purposely unconsummated due to their detrimental effect on his creative work-rate. And complicated further by his meeting with Laura Clayton, the great love of his life. Odder still are his beliefs about contraception, his lack of interest in black women, his encounter with a lesbian, and – murkier yet, the dread perils of masturbation. For a book destined to become one of the most celebrated of onanist’s bibles, his texts are curiously downbeat about the recreational wrist-job. According to Harris’ curious personal creed full heterosexual sex – it has to be with a woman of course, equates positive virtue, whereas wasting precious seminal fluid through masturbation is a mortal sin. The occasional wet dream is excusable as a venial lapse, but recurrent nocturnal emissions must inevitably result in dissipation and even death… Accused of being a rake and bounder, a braggart and liar, he merely responded with a shrug that ‘memoirs are a well-known form of fiction.’
For a supposed self-declared libertine and sensualist such contradictions can be explained only as the products of his time. This social conditioning, this knee-jerk morality, this imposition of war-on-sex straitjacket thinking – the power of this moral policeman in the head, can only be loosened gradually, as the quest for individual happiness gradually overtakes, bite by bite across years, across decades, across the century, the harsh and restrictive codes of self-denial. But here, science plays its part. And there’s Freud, whose psychoanalytical studies of gender clearly indicate that sexual desire is not only an entirely natural instinct, but that more – if repressed, it can result in catastrophically dangerous consequences. Havelock Ellis agrees. He repudiates the image of females as purely passive recipients. He puts the blame squarely at the feet – or at least, the technique of men, for too often delivering short-measure in the ‘Game of Love’. They should try harder.
Then the courageous Dr Marie Stopes published her extraordinarily modern book ‘Married Love’ (1918), which sold two-thousand copies in its first two weeks, with demand prompting seven reprints that same year. One ‘gentleman’s club’ was forced to ration demand to one reader per hour, due to the demand for its library copy. Within that hour they could read Stopes patiently – but persistently explaining how sexual fulfilment for both husband and wife is an integral part of mutual long-term happiness. Her best-selling manual was written after the pain of her own sexless marriage – ‘I paid such a terrible price for sex-ignorance.’ For just about the first time in modern times – at least since Fanny Hill, a woman was there, in print, legitimising the strange idea that the female impulse to procreate, to have a baby, is a separate and different desire from her impulse towards a quality orgasm. And that both desires should be equally celebrated. Good girls deserve a satisfying orgasm as well as bad girls.
Marie Stopes set up her pioneering British Birth Control Clinic on the 17 March 1921. A major and heroic advance away from prevailing ignorance, yet her explicit advice and eminently sensible championing of birth-control immediately brought her into conflict with the bigots of the Catholic Church. And the ramifications of what she pioneered are still being fought over by the medieval forces of the religious right-wing, and the tabloid exposes of pramface teenage Mums, kids on the pill and secret schoolgirl abortions.
While sisters were also doing it for themselves. Radclyffe Hall achieving unwanted notoriety through being charged with obscenity for her modest lesbian novel ‘The Well Of Loneliness’. An appropriately outraged ‘Sunday Express’ headlined it as ‘a book that must be suppressed’ (16 November 1928), with James Douglas opining ‘I would rather give a healthy boy or girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel.’ The likes of H.G. Wells, George B. Shaw, and E.M. Forster stood up to be counted by supporting the novel in court. Her story of the awkward misfit child ‘Miss Stephen’ is told in a florid narrative style, its authenticity only slightly detracted from by the frivolously Gormenghastian unreality of its privileged Merchant-Ivory setting and its distasteful enthusiasm for fox-hunting. There’s almost a gender-conspiracy against ‘Miss Stephen’, to predispose her orientation, almost from the womb where her anticipated masculinity is taken for granted. ‘She’s a queer kid’ gossip the domestics, ‘Miss Stephen’s quite different from other young ladies.’ Her sympathetic father, guessing her true nature, reads sexologist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs for clues concerning ‘those who stand mid-way between the sexes.’ When she’s just seven she’s smitten with the intensity of a naïve crush on ‘florid, full-lipped and full-bosomed’ maid Collins – ‘rather ample indeed for a young girl of twenty’ runs the commentary. When Collins is pressured into leaving, Miss Stephen figuratively ‘transmigrates’ the maid into a bay pony she can ride astride.
She lives with ‘queer hopes and queer longings, queer joys and even more curious frustrations,’ although – of course, the ‘queer’-word has yet to assume its later gay-bashing connotations. Less an erotic tale of girl-on-girl action it’s more that, as its title indicates, ‘she had not yet learnt that the loneliest place in this world is the no-man’s-land of sex.’ A multiple metaphor – no man, literally. But ‘no-man’s-land’ is also the First World War zone between opposing trenches, a viciously hazardous place to be. And there’s a poignant melancholy in that her father senses her true nature even before she does. Until she meets Angela Crossby and ‘fell quite simply and naturally in love, in accordance with the dictates of her nature.’ She declares her love, ‘then Stephen took Angela into her arms, and kissed her full on the lips, as a lover.’ That’s about as explicit as it gets. Broken and humiliated by the end of the affair, she discovers that ‘love is only permissible to those who are cut in every respect to life’s pattern,’ something forever forbidden to what she terms ‘inverts’, or ‘god’s mistake’. In her own life Radclyffe Hall dressed as a man and styled herself in her relationship with sculptor Una Troubridge as a respectable husband who was, naturally, entitled to a mistress. Her long-term affair with her Russian nurse Evguenia – who at first protested that she didn’t really want to be a lesbian at all, was devastating to Una. But the long-suffering ‘wife’ got her revenge when Radclyffe died and Una cut off Evguenia from her inheritance.
Tut-tutting reactionaries who sermonise about the ethical erosion that’s taken place over the century since the collapse of those strict but narrow standards surrounding its publication, those who claim that morality has corroded into the quotidian ooze of our dumbed-down moronically-levelled society, and that all we have in its place is a directionless mire of relativism, could take a valuable lesson from this searingly painful book. About how far we’ve come in gaining a valuable tolerance and inclusiveness where such pain and exclusion is no longer the inevitable consequence of nonconformity. This is an acceptance to be celebrated and fought for. ‘You are neither unnatural nor abominable, nor mad’ she protests, ‘you’re as much a part of what people call nature as anyone else, only you are unexplained as yet – you’ve got your niche in creation.’ Then, ‘some day the world will recognise this’ predicts Stephen’s ageing tutor ‘Puddle’. And now, at last, it does.
BY ANDREW DARLINGTON