Tenderness

by Alison MacLeod

Genres: General Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Bloomsbury presents Tenderness by Alison MacLeod.

For fans of A Gentleman in Moscow and Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, an ambitious, spellbinding historical novel about sensuality, censorship, and the novel that set off the sexual revolution.

On the glittering shores of the Mediterranean in 1928, a dying author in exile races to complete his final novel. Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a sexually bold love story, a searing indictment of class distinctions and a study in sensuality. But the author, D. H. Lawrence, knows it will be censored. He publishes it privately, loses his copies to customs and dies bereft.

Booker Prize-longlisted author Alison MacLeod brilliantly recreates the novel’s origins and boldly imagines its journey to freedom through the story of Jackie Kennedy, who was known to be an admirer. In MacLeod’s telling, Jackie - in her last days before becoming first lady - learns that publishers are trying to bring D. H. Lawrence’s long-censored novel to American and British readers in its full form. The US government has responded by targeting the postal service for distributing obscene material. Enjoying what anonymity she has left, determined to honour a novel she loves, Jackie attends the hearing incognito. But there she is quickly recognized and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover takes note of her interest and her outrage.

Through the story of Lawrence’s writing of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the historic obscenity trial that sought to suppress it in the United Kingdom, and the men and women who fought for its worldwide publication, Alison MacLeod captures the epic sweep of the 20th century from war and censorship to sensuality and freedom. Exquisite, evocative and grounded in history, Tenderness is a testament to the transformative power of fiction.

 

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Release date: November 9, 2021

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Sample

i

The dead could look after the afterwards, but here, here was the quick of the universe: the town lifted from sleep in a vast net of light, and the Mediterranean, five miles away at Cagnes, flickering like a great opal. He’d woken early and had watched the dark gravity of the night yield to daybreak. Now the streets were a mirage, half-dissolved in the dazzle of morning. Even the town’s ancient walls were erased, while a barking dog in the road below was more bark than dog. On the balcony, among the geraniums, he squinted: the coastline as far as the Cap d’Antibes shook and shimmered. It was impossible to say where sea turned to sky. The smudge of an ocean-liner mate-rialised at what might have been the horizon, while light streamed – the run-off from the warp and weft of the world. Nothing the day touched remained solid, nothing held, nothing except the geraniums and their defiant fists of red.

The previous day, upright in his underwear in the medical bay, the exile had learned that he was, even still, five feet nine inches tall, or that he was when the state of his lungs allowed him to straighten. He would have been cheered by this fact had he not weighed in at forty-five kilos on the French scales, and one hundred pounds on the imperial – or not quite seven stone. He had insisted on both scales, but the two nations were agreed.

It meant at least that he could go, almost literally, where the wind blew him. The almond trees of the town were a pink-and-white froth of blossom. The breeze, slight as it was, had a reviving salt tang. He needed only his hat and shoes. ‘Are we ready?’ he called into the room. Where was the release for the brake on the blasted bath-chair?

Frieda stepped onto the balcony, clicked her cigarette-case open and leaned, with Rubenesque languor, against the rail. She would not be rushed. At her feet, the tiles were littered with cigarette butts and orange peels, some blackened with age, for she was careless, and careless that she was careless. Below the balcony, shutters were opening to the day in good faith. A middle-aged man was washing himself at a barrel in a back garden, his braces trailing from his trousers, and, as if for her, he sang as he flung water at himself – Verdi’s ‘La donna è mobile’. Frieda’s foot tapped along. She loved a vigorous tune.

Chickens, released from their coops, fattened and clucked. She could smell fresh bread from the baker’s across the road; Monsieur Claudel always arrived at his premises before first light. Cats prowled. A woman, her hair still in its net, pegged out sheets on a line, and somewhere, a baby wailed.

Little by little, morning took possession of the medieval streets and the old Roman ways. Fountains bubbled forth again. Shop-owners winched their awnings high against the downpour of light, and the hooves of an approaching dray-horse smote the cobbles. Every few doors, its driver hopped down from the gig to heave a great block of ice to a chute on a shop or café wall.

The morning brimmed, the cafés began to fill, and she watched as holiday-makers tentatively joined the day. ‘English,’ she noted for the benefit of her husband. She had never lost her German inflections. ‘One can tell by the faces. Pasty. Immistakably so.’

‘Unmistakably,’ he said.

She caught a whiff of something pungent – a blocked drain. ‘I prefer “immistakable”.’ She turned, tapped ash into the pocket-spittoon on the low table by his chair, and resumed her position, gazing down. ‘Isn’t it curious? English babies are most beautiful. They are fat, rosy peaches. They are the glory of all babies. But something happens as they grow. I do not understand it.’

He bowed his head. ‘May we go?’

‘You love the Med, Lorenzo.’ She drew deeply on her Gauloise. ‘And this really is the most marvellous view. The manager did not lie.’ ‘You sound like a Baedeker.’

She’d thought she sounded merely cheerful. In England – though not the other English-speaking nations – one always had to think before one spoke. One had to compose first and speak second. English in England was a trap in which one revealed, without realising, the details of one’s station: one’s rung on the ladder of life, one’s region – acceptable or not – and one’s education, to be envied or pitied. One could unwittingly reveal, too, in a few casual utterances, an apparent lack of feeling or an excess of it; qualities of discernment, gullibility or culpability; as well as one’s grasp of the code of belonging, or one’s failure to do so. An English person might say, ‘How interesting,’ and one had to know that he or she was actually saying, ‘How frightfully dull.’

It was a language for spies, Frieda thought, a means for its natives to find out what others were thinking, or who they truly were. German was matter-of-fact by comparison and, after all these years, she still craved its ease. One said what one meant. After marriages to two Englishmen, and the production of three English children by Husband Number One, she was a fluent speaker of English, natürlich. Yet still, she was deemed blunt or even rude in English where she would have been merely straightforward in German.

If this was a source of personal frustration, at least she side-stepped the traps the English set for each other, Lorenzo included. He had shaken off most of his Nottinghamshire inflections, though not his strong vowels. She had marvelled, years before, when she’d first heard him speak in his native dialect, to please Lady Ottoline at her elegant London dinner party. Afterwards, Frieda had told him that his voice mustn’t be a mere party-trick, that he mustn’t give up his true self, but he had merely shrugged. He wanted, he said, to move through society ‘undetected’.

Indeed, surveillance was so much the habit of the English that they mistook it, she believed, for human nature, presuming all languages to be peepholes for the spy in every person. What a perfect irony that, during the War, they had accused her of that very thing – spying! As if she were capable of keeping any secret! No, she did not miss that little island. No, not at all!

---

—

The exile exhaled. Frieda smoked in silence, at last. She blocked his view but there was peace.

They were a thousand feet above sea level. The maritime air should have been fresh, but it was already hot for the early hour. He longed to be out and away. Hadn’t he asked her, repeatedly, to get him released, to break him out? How could he know whether she actually had a plan to free him this morning or was about to cajole him again into a few more days in this place ‘for his health’?

For her ‘most marvellous view’, rather.

‘The English seaside,’ he muttered, ‘would have served us at least as well and at far less expense.’ Money – how it gnawed. Even now, he couldn’t trust it not to surprise him, like the jaw of a tiger. He’d had a good run with Chatterley, £1,400 in its first year, the most he’d earned from a book in his life. He’d felt quite jolly about that until his English agent told him that Arnold Bennett, whose reputation was finally – and belatedly in his view – on the down-turn, still managed to bring in £22,000 a year. Bennett was a pig in clover.

He watched Frieda light another cigarette. How he loathed her smoke. Why was he so often downwind of her?

In his more pragmatic moments, he accepted that she would not be budged from the Continent. She liked her Continental villas. She liked the endless oranges and European insouciance. She relied on French cigarettes and the presence of her Italian lover somewhere on the same land-mass. She’d be happy enough, he knew, never to see England again. England had been ruthless to them both. Even in his absence, it was ruthless – another novel seized (his last, his last!). Yet he missed it, England, pitiably.

Frieda, for her part, felt simply and happily grateful for the peace of her cigarette, for the view from his balcony, and for the prospect of a new villa – however temporary. What was Lorenzo’s rush? As a young girl, on family visits to the Prussian court, she had observed that no person of importance rushed, and it was a lesson she had carried with her through life, no matter how straitened her circumstances.

She shifted on her hip and watched a striking, dark-haired young man, in cream-coloured flannel trousers and a crisp white shirt, pass below. He looked a little like a cavalry officer she’d once had in a Bavarian inn. Why hurry on a hot day? Their cases were in the taxi. She had paid the driver for his patience. A plan was not beyond her. She was German after all, and more than capable.

Now, as she leaned against the rail, she felt the knot of her hair slip loose against her neck. Were the man in the flannel trousers to look up to the balcony, she would smile beguilingly. She would make him glance back. Life’s small pleasures saw one through.

The exile turned his head, cocking an ear, as an orderly entered his room and removed the breakfast he hadn’t wanted. The ‘Ad Astra Sanatorium’ tried in vain to mimic a luxury hotel, and the clattering of trays was known as ‘room service’. The motto of the place was nothing but an abuse of Latin. Per aspera ad astra – ‘Through hardships to the stars’. He’d smirked at that. Through hardships to the sanatorium bar, more like. The resident consumptives played gay holiday-makers, and the odour of desperation in the dining-room each night would kill him, he thought, faster than his own lungs.

Only at his dogged insistence had Frieda found them a villa at last. At least she claimed she had. Sometimes she simply said what she imagined the day required. A full ten days ago, he’d said he wouldn’t spend another night in the Sad Astra. He told her he’d die for lack of sleep; at night, the bouts of coughing from the neighbouring rooms shook the entire place. She told him the coughing that woke him was his own.

Now, she turned and tapped another full inch of ash into his spittoon.

‘I wish you wouldn’t do that,’ he said. A string of muscle tightened across his shoulders.

‘Perhaps we should take a trip to Nice one day,’ she said.

‘Nice isn’t Brighton – and I’m fed up to the back teeth with France.’

Of course Nice is not Brighton, she thought. But who would not choose Nice over Brighton? He was in one of his contrary moods.

She watched the ribbon of her smoke rise into the day. It had been difficult, exceedingly difficult, to secure a place they might call home in Vence. Assorted villa-owners had refused her a lease, fearing contagion. For the last week, she and Barby, her most capable child and now a young woman of twenty-five – had tried everything they could, from charm and guilt to desperation and bribes, but no one wanted a consumptive to expire on their property, and any journey beyond the radius of a taxi-ride was out of the question. Lorenzo was simply not up to it.

The morning’s heat crept beneath his collar, and its studs burned like blisters against his neck. He suspected she enjoyed the fact he was helpless these days, neutered, an invalid requiring her assistance to survive. They needed only to get to Boulogne and catch the packet to Newhaven or Brighton. ‘I am glad to be going to Sussex – it is so full of sky and wind and weather.’ He longed to see the white glow of the cliffs on the Channel coast. The sea-foam in the twilight. The yellow horned-poppies on the beach. He wanted to hear the noisy slap of the waves. All of it, now verboten.

‘This coast,’ he said, waving a hand, ‘is full of riff-raffy expensive people.’

‘People are simply enjoying the sun after a long winter, Lorenzo. Why shouldn’t they?’

He tugged at his collar. ‘No one’s happiness in an English resort depends on all this endless sunshine.’

Which is just as well, she thought.

And why did he always go on as if she had no English memory of her own?

‘In England, we think nothing of hopping over stones into a frigid sea. Bone marrow freezes on contact. Old hearts pack up. Testicles implode. But people are content. No one needs an eternally “marvellous view”.’

She hoisted her bosom and wondered: would the man in the flannel trousers walk back up the road?

‘We want a change of scene, a nice shell or two, a curio from some mouldering shop. We expect the ring-a-ding-ding of the pier, a day or two of fog, and…and outside your lodgings, well’ – he gripped his armrest – ‘only the dustbin-men shouting to wake the dead.’ A cough climbed out of his stomach. ‘Damn it, if only some good old English bin-men would wake me when the time comes. If they failed, they could at least offer quick disposal. Whizz-bang!’

‘Lorenzo, you mustn’t tire yourself like this.’

‘I am not tiring myself, Frieda. Imminent death tends to do that unaided, you see.’

She tilted a wrist. Her cigarette hovered elegantly.

His eyes burned. Was she meeting her lover, Il Capitano, these days? It was no great distance from the Italian Riviera to the French Riviera, and, one thing was certain, that man was stuffed full of spunk and gusto. The relationship had long ceased to be a secret between husband and wife; it was merely a subject they each knew to avoid.

At times such as these, he let himself wonder. What would life have been had he not walked down the hill that evening, through the olive grove, and away from her? Darling R., Frieda to arrive in a week. She pesters from Baden-Baden. What – who – would he have been now if, after those few weeks at San Gervasio with her, he had simply stayed?

Darling R. Together, they would have raised her three little girls. He might have fathered his own. Who could say? He would have written each morning in that ancient olive grove, with the view of the duomo shimmering on the plain below.

Frieda would have had her Angelo – even more than she did currently. There would have been no Chatterley because there would have been no need to write R., to conjure her and draw her close.

Well, so many words, because I can’t touch you. If I could sleep with my arms round you, the ink could stay in the bottle.

He would have raised his head at the end of day to see her coming through the door with figs, cheese and bread from the market. He would have looked across the courtyard at Canovaia to see her red-brown head bent over her needlework or drawings. In bed at night, her body would have stretched to his. There would have been no need to reach for her through the welter of time.

That evening as he descended the hill, he did not turn to look back to her. He let her think him resolute. He sent a few cards, and did not see her again.

On the balcony at the Sad Astra, he tried now to turn his bath-chair from the sun, wresting thoughts of her, and that other far-away, Florentine balcony, from his mind. He resumed his theme: ‘Brighton. Worthing…’ he said to Frieda, fighting with a wheel. ‘Littlehampton was jolly enough. Remember? Or Bognor. I’d be as happy as a trout in some dank Bognorian lodging-house. I’d fuck off there tomorrow if the knives weren’t out for me.’ He looked up. His wife was smiling and waving to a passer-by below, as if from an imperial balcony.

‘No one has any knife out for you.’ She turned and released the brake on his chair. ‘You are a writer, not a fugitive.’

‘I’d take a knife over prison.’

‘You could write in prison. They feed you in prison. Every cloud, Lorenzo.’

He looked up. It was a brutally cloudless day in Vence. What hope was there for him here? Life flattened out into meaningless good cheer when the sun was so indiscriminate. That was the Riviera all over. Predictable. Promiscuous. Popular. It had once been his thrill and his sanctuary, but he hated the place now. People, people everywhere.

She cast her cigarette into the day and clapped her hands. ‘Now then. Our taxi is around the corner. I hear the motor.’

His feet were pale, naked creatures – molluscs out of their shells. They looked absurd, he thought, on the foot-flaps of his bath-chair. ‘Can we?’ he said, staring at them. ‘Can we actually?’

She emptied the ash in the spittoon over the rail, then stretched her arms luxuriously. She did not believe he believed that he was dying. Had he believed it, he would not have been able to speak of it so volubly. As he did not believe it, she would not believe it either. His death had been foretold for years, and they’d learned to dismiss the claims and diagnoses. His friends thought her reckless, irresponsible, even criminal. They despised her for it, and for more. Let them, she thought. He had defied every prognosis through the sheer force of their collective will, which meant she would not brood on the fact that he was now asking her to put on his stockings and shoes for him. For the first time, he said that bending over left him sick to his stomach and breathless.

---

—

The clip on his suspender wouldn’t clip. She was bent double over his feet. As he waited, he looked away, studying the horizon, as if in search of some hairline crack in the bowl of the day. All those words, all that writing – now under arrest. What had been the point?

‘I don’t want to die in a taxi,’ he said.

She told him he would have to accept a stocking at half-mast. For a moment, she considered unbuttoning his flies and fellating him, or offering him a weighty breast to calm him. But it was time to go, and his desires were no longer straightforward, if they had ever been. She rose, red-faced, and huffed a lock of blonde-grey hair from her eyes.

‘My hat!’ He gripped both wheels of the bath-chair.

‘It is in the taxi, Lorenzo. If we don’t go now, the driver will sell it and be gone. Please don’t be unbearable.’

He said nothing. He was her dependant now. He needed her to live. Perhaps he always had. Any biddable wife would have tranquillised brain and soul. He’d needed the challenge of her. Perhaps he’d even needed the problem of her.

As husband and wife, they’d struggled from almost the first. She was at ease with her appetites, with the casually, merrily carnal. He thirsted for mystery, for the kindred who was also other; for the uncharted hinterland of the beloved. Illness had reduced him, while her appetite had made her stout. He was not enough for her, and she was too much for him. The force of their mutual frustration was their enduring bond and, in periods of relative harmony, she mothered; he was mothered. It was enough. Now it was. The end of their marriage had long been forecast by friends, yet here they were, familiars in a place they didn’t know, on this narrow perch of life.

His shoes were tied. His tie was straight. Natty summer-grey suit. Laundered shirt with collar. A red handkerchief, so that no spattering of blood would show. Polished brown brogues. ‘He might almost be a gentleman.’ Homburg hat. Coat folded over arm. He shunned the existential class of ‘the invalid’, the pyjama-ed person, the not-valid. Any day, he would open his passport to find a page stamped with it: ‘In-valid’. He preferred ‘Public Enemy’.

Frieda steered his bath-chair from the balcony through the thin curtains into the dreary room and out the door. ‘If anyone asks,’ she said as they waited for the lift, ‘it is a beautiful day. That is reason enough.’

‘Of course it’s a beautiful day! It is always a beautiful day! That means nothing to these people. You might as well say, “The water is wet.” ’ He felt as weak as a wilting white geranium in a pot.

She hit the call-button. ‘We are taking the air,’ she said calmly ‘That is all.’

He gripped his kneecaps. They rose like Golgothan hills of bone through his trousers. ‘And if we meet my doctor?’

‘Repeat, Lorenzo: we – are – taking – the – air.’ Her r’s rolled with Teutonic authority.

The lift arrived with a little ring.

Invalid, invalid, squeaked the wheels of his bath-chair.

The service-boy slid the cage, then the door, shut. He nodded good-day to the resident and his wife, and eased the crank to the left. The cab lurched horribly, and down they went.

All the while, using only his elbow, the exile clasped The Life of Columbus to him, a stowaway under his jacket. The library had been the only decent thing in the place.

‘Yes?’ she said to him. ‘We are taking the air.’

He nodded, his jaw set, his knuckles white. The cables of the lift shunted and chirred. The Life of the Life of the Life of—

Then the cage opened, daylight rushed in, the bell of his heart rang out, and how glad he was, how eternally glad, to be on the move again.