Lady in the Death Cell:
WAGNER, GEOFFREY
Lady in the Death Cell Yield to the Night. By Joan Henry. Doubleday. 190 pp. $2.75. Reviewed by Geoffrey Wagner Author, "The Venables," "The Passionate Land" "YOU SHOULD BE well looked after...
...The novel is aimed at capital punishment, but it is not a thesis book...
...Yes, a miserable business it must be, "the nine o'clock walk," and Miss Henry's contention is that it is made far more miserable than need be by the general abnormality of the prisoner's surroundings, those of a mental ward really, in the last three weeks...
...His client happens to be a murderess in the condemned cell...
...they are extraordinarily similar to those of Popeye on the gallows in Sanctuary...
...Again, in some Home Office memoranda Miss Henry quotes (with obvious horror), we learn that the hangman is to watch the prisoner at exercise and calculate his physique, in order to know the length for "the drop...
...The ethics of her conviction concern Miss Henry much less than the main plea, against the conditions in the condemned cell...
...Dame Edith Sitwell calls Miss Henry's novel "a service to humanity," and, as another contribution to this whole vexed problem, it is indeed well worth reading...
...It is inevitably a touching book...
...She is guilty of a crime passionel, of course, partly the result of cruel upbringing...
...Miss Henry, author of Women in Prison, writes of the last three weeks of an Englishwoman convicted of murder in a clear prose, informed with observation of prison life that is obviously authentic...
...it is not an argument against capital punishment...
...But if the prisoner does not see him—and the executioner is supposed to spy unobserved—the interests of clemency are being served, at least in a relative sense...
...she assails the method of capital punishment, not its social background...
...But she chooses to deal with an extremely sensitive woman...
...Miss Henry's appeal is purely emotional...
...The supervision of the condemned woman, the invasion of her privacy, the care taken to keep her healthy for "the drop," this information is fed into the story in a sharp and convincing way...
...Unpleasant as Heath's last moments may have been, they were not a fraction as horrible as those of one of his several victims...
...The last actions and words of the late sadist-murderer, Neville Heath, who committed unspeakable atrocities on some of his female victims, can be read in the Notable British Trials volume dealing with his case...
...Certainly Yield to the Night suggests some very sorry details in this method indeed—the possibility of Lesbian wardresses guarding a woman in her last hours on earth is a particularly ugly one—but the "heroine" has the dice loaded on her behalf...
...Reviewed by Geoffrey Wagner Author, "The Venables," "The Passionate Land" "YOU SHOULD BE well looked after here," says the lawyer to his client...
...The long period of waiting, which may cause such suffering to the victim, also allows him (or her) the possibility of petition or reprieve...
...It does not explore the arguments nearly as well as does a recent movie, Charles Spaak's Nous Sommes Tous des Assassins...
...Yet if we grant the need for capital punishment, it is hard to see any way around certain aspects of the method involved...
...She herself served a term in a British prison...
...The prison scenes are much better than the thought-streams by means of which we flashback to the reasons for the murder...
Vol. 37 • September 1954 • No. 39
