Tenderness by Alison MacLeod

Review by Jess Moody

D.H. Lawrence considered ‘Tenderness’ as an alternative title for his last major work, the 1928 Lady Chatterley’s Lover. With such a title, would the book have fared better against its detractors, who saw only ‘adultery across class lines’ in the relationship between Lady Chatterley and gamekeeper Mellors, and ‘obscenity’ in its uncensored sex and sexual language? Alison MacLeod’s substantial new novel about the infamous and oft-censored book dares to claim the title for itself, setting out from the start its premise: what if?

MacLeod’s story is based in fact (the research sometimes overwhelming, but always awe-inspiring); yet it fictionalises just enough of the historical record to create a new stage – several in fact – on which to explore the dramatic histories of the novel often knowingly referred to as simply ‘Lady C’.

Tenderness opens with, and returns throughout, to the story of ‘the Exile’: Lawrence himself. In his final years, he lives ill, and ill at ease, with wife Frieda in Europe, under threat of arrest should he return to England. We are teased with his memories of an affair that inspired the book, but mostly we fall back into events during the First World War which reveal a betrayal, and his turning against propaganda; all that is dishonest and makes machination of humanity.

We are jolted forward to 1959 New York, and the lonely intelligence of pre-White House Jackie Kennedy (‘The Subversive) as she sneaks into the US Postal Service trial against the novel. Being pulled from European pastoral idylls to the glare and flash of a press-filled New York trial is a tad disconcerting. But when an undercover FBI Agent and J. Edgar Hoover himself enter the narrative, it becomes clear that MacLeod is utterly unafraid of her scope and unintimated by the prestige of her characters.

It does all start to make sense: the themes of propaganda, surveillance by the state, and the banality of absolutism recur again and again in both the depictions of The Exile’s life, but also in how the novel – very much a character in its own right – is debated on both sides of the Atlantic. The third thread – the one that draws the others together, and takes over rather eagerly for the dramatic climax of the novel – is the 1960 prosecution of the novel’s UK publishers at the Old Bailey, set against the sexual awakening (yes, really) of a young woman writer who will be witness for the defence.

Tenderness is a risky book. A novel of this epic undertaking could easily have veered too far over into bitter realism, high flung melodrama, political thriller, or a drier legal or literary history. However MacLeod has made a bold choice to try and tonally tie the whole thing – three casts of characters, celebrities, world events – all together: she has given up space in her novel, for another writers’ words. For the writer’s words.

Quotations from Lawrence’s works – a phrase, a line, a feeling, a name – are embedded throughout and frequently without the text, dropped right into the middle of sentences, forming the meaning of sentences. Photography is a recurring motif in the novel – the truth or lie of frozen intimacy – and these are snapshots of language, of Lawrence himself, his voice, his chosen words. The quotations act as curious omens, and knowing echoes, signposting future events or past inspirations. They underline (occasionally, a tad heavily) the parallels between Lawrence’s’ life and works, and cause the reader to look at the world as a writer would. But they also beg the question (as is asked at trial) – can you ever really place your own meaning on a moment, taken out of context? For the reader, this stylistic choice of MacLeod’s is unnerving, occasionally distracting, and endlessly fascinating.

There are wider discourses here of course, of interest to the modern reader’s world: about who gets to say what ‘literary merit’ is, what ‘public good’ is, about when we recognise the appetite of ‘the masses’ for art that reflects the complexity of love and sex.

Less readily concluded in the legal wrangling is how history judges an artist, for what they create, or the harm done to others in the forging of those creations. MacCleod gives some brief recognition to the more violent undertones of the Lawrence’s marriage, as well as his use of racialised tropes (an issue lightly raised but left unresolved through the device of a lunchtime chat between Jackie and an literary scholar). The book engages with, but chooses never to quite answer the question of who or what is on trial: the writer, a book, the Establishment, or simply the very relationship between ‘Connie’ and Mellors?

Or, is it, dear reader, ourselves? Tenderness is above all a novel about readers. About the ripples into and across their lives, all from a story, the way that story is told, and when it is allowed to be told. It is not for nothing that several characters talk of ‘re-reading’ Lawrence’s stories and finding something new, or their minds changed.

Here MacLeod has certainly created her own substantial work of depth and complexity, of shifting tones and times converging on – well, if not a truth, then the search for some greater, more authentic questioning of what truth can be, and, perhaps, what tenderness may be found in the asking.

Tenderness is published by Bloomsbury, 14th September 2021