Don’t be misled by the hyperbole: ‘The spellbinding story of Lady Chatterley's Lover’.
Alison MacLeod, a British/Canadian author was Professor of Contemporary Fiction at the University of Chichester in the UK until 2018 when she retired to become a full-time writer. Tenderness is her third book—a complex novel examining the long genesis of D. H. Lawrence’s final novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover through the life and times of the novelist himself interwoven with the obscenity trial of the novel in 1960. The title was also the original title for Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Lawrence had been dead for 30 years by the time of the trial, which found in favour of the publisher Penguin Books.
As well as the life and literary development of Lawrence, a further counterpoint is provided by an American perspective on the contentious book. The author imagines how FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover, uses underhand tactics to maintain the ban on publication. Following an accidental meeting between an undercover agent and Jackie Kennedy at a hearing on banning Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Hoover begins surveillance on her as part of his campaign to keep J. F. Kennedy from winning the Democratic Party presidential nomination. These episodes are beautifully written, and one can almost feel the agent’s dilemma when he discovers what a hypocrite Hoover is, hiding his own homosexuality while destroying others through blackmail and innuendo. But I remain unsure of their value as a counterpoint to Lawrence’s own story.
She freely uses real people in her novel, with no need to disguise them as her hero did—however sketchily—as they are all dead. Lawrence had no compunction about basing characters on people he knew, even to the extent of twisting facts to suit his fictional narrative while leaving the individuals concerned clearly identifiable. It has been said that only his own life and work mattered to him—not “Art for Art’s sake” but rather “Art for My sake”. Clearly MacLeod is a great admirer of Lawrence’s work, and long quotes, set aside in a different font, appear throughout the novel to demonstrate this.
These long quotes and the trial transcripts interrupt the flow of Macleod’s own narrative which is at its best when her imagination is given free reign and we see the tender, human interactions between the imagined actions of “real” people. Here we see the author’s true brilliance. The use of quotes and transcripts, which I find extraneous, brings the novel to 600 long pages, with a further 15 pages of endnotes. I think some judicial editing would have improved this book as at times it seems unsure of what it is trying to achieve.
Reviewed by Jan Kershaw
This review is the opinion of the author and not Glam Adelaide.
Distributed by: Bloomsbury
Released: November 2021
RRP: $39.99
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