Tenderness, page 27
‘I suppose I meant that if we don’t understand that the emotions govern the political, if we trust only to the conceptual – be it crass ideology or one-track idealism, or even pure reason or pure logic—’
‘—we will be lost to our emotions.’
‘Our emotions will grow monstrous and bite us from behind. We won’t even see them coming. Even the facts will be devoured by them if those emotions are not understood in their complexity and integrated; if, in other words, we ignore the education of our imaginations and our sensibilities, as individuals and as a nation. This is my long-winded way of saying, yes: if we don’t imagine the politics we need, politics will imagine us. And we won’t much like it. Some dark projection will be cast – such as this new concept of the “un-American” or the impure citizen.’
She shivered in the breeze.
‘In my view, we don’t need “purity”. We need to be mature enough to admit the contradictory, the various. Crazy as it sounds, I’d like to see a politics for this country that never strays far from poetry. Or from poetic truth, at least. We need its complexity. We need its simplicity. Poetry keeps us honest. It admits all that is human and it lets us see it, love it and wrestle with it. With education in poetic truth and in the human complexities we find in great novels and plays, our emotions are less likely to run rings around us and wreak havoc, as we saw happen in Germany after its deep national humiliation following the First World War. The education of all our faculties is everything. If we glorify the conceptual or the rational at the expense of all the rest, we do so at our peril. Manipulators and predators will exploit our emotions. It’s the one truth which the Academy, as magnificent as it often is, often fails to spot. It’s too invested in that glorification of the rational above all else.’
‘Jack loves the work of Robert Frost. He’s a great reader. When he was young, he was so bookish his father didn’t think he was cut out for politics.’
‘Then we’re lucky to have him in the Senate. Above all, we have to be wary of jingles, jargon and slogans. The truth is never so easy.’
‘Literature is subversive.’ She flipped through her notes. ‘You say that somewhere…As if it’s dangerous. As if it might overwhelm us.’
‘Yes.’ He met her eyes. ‘Or apprehend us. But that’s the sort of danger we need. To wake us up. To help us keep our wits about us. To remind us of what it is to be human, for good and for ill.’
‘I think I understand…I hope I do.’
‘Let me give you an example of what I don’t mean.’ He looked tired suddenly, older, under the bright bulb of the midday sun. ‘My own weakling novel was all concept, you see, all schema, with too little life. I couldn’t “bring life down”. Do you understand? A great book, at its most essential, is a summoning or a visitation. Some academics pretend they master literature – the frauds do – but a great book masters us, even its author.
‘You can strip away a great novel’s esthetic shortcomings. You can spot the wayward tangents of prose, the blinkered vision of the times in which that novel was written, and the personal limitations of the author…The gamekeeper – Mellors – for example, makes a sickening comment about black women in Chapter Fourteen, and he has an absurd view of lesbians. There’s an unpleasant remark or two about Jews as well.’
He shrugs. ‘We must be honest: these comments may belong to the character Mellors only, or they may represent Lawrence’s own vileness and ignorance. Sometimes there’s no denying the dross of an author’s biography, and the cultural impurities we all carry at some point in our lives, but I would contend that there remains something in a great work of literature which is indelible and animate. Something mysterious which exceeds the author. Something big-spirited and alive. It vibrates with life, across time, and that, for me, is literature. That’s what we need to hold onto.’
He tapped her copy of Lady Chatterley on the table. ‘Lawrence emptied the last of his life into that book. He worked high up a hill, in a pine wood. Wildflowers grew at his feet. Peasants sang in the neighboring fields. A spring bubbled away. And he was dying.
‘My colleagues tell me I do not pay enough attention when I teach to style, esthetics and technique; that I fail to isolate sufficient themes and concepts for my students before they take their exams. Yet, for the writer, these things do not arrive in parcels of theme and form. They arrive in a wave, in a shimmer. They are experienced as a feeling across the back of the neck, or as a pressure in the heart during the deep “excavation” of a story. One cannot isolate an “effect” on the page or “lift out” a literary intention, as if it is a tooth to be pulled. Not even in Lawrence, who sometimes liked to preach his philosophy at his readers. Each part contains the whole. The wildflowers at his feet – as much as the spring and the song of the peasant girls – are as fundamental to the prose “style” of Lady Chatterley’s Lover as Lawrence’s despair about the Great War and his hopes for the healing of his country.
‘A story is not a concept or a scheme or a theme. It is an author’s breath, heat and heartbeat – and when I say that, I don’t mean to suggest that the process is primitive or unsophisticated. Quite the opposite, in fact.’
She picked up her edition, and a shadow crossed her face. ‘I can’t understand why the Hearing Examiner delayed the decision. When I left the G.P.O. that day, at the recess, I was sure Grove Press was going to win.’ She shrugged, fatalistically.
He sighed. ‘The news is not good. I’m afraid I heard the latest yesterday, from someone in the Law Department at Columbia. The top man, Richard Montgomery, the Postmaster General, has now decided. He’s upholding the postal ban. He has found that the novel is “obscene and filthy”, although he has also, rather proudly, noted that he isn’t accustomed to reading fiction. He prefers articles on fishing, apparently. Nevertheless, he is sure that “filth is filth”.’
She tossed her napkin on the table. ‘Of course he is.’
‘The headlines will come tomorrow.’
‘But the – sex – is merely…’
‘Human.’
‘Yes.’
‘And the book,’ he added, finishing his peach crisp, ‘is as much about war and grief as it is about sex.’
‘She is astonishing.’
‘Constance?’
She picked up her sunglasses, as if she might disappear behind them again – a reflex – then changed her mind. ‘She simply wants to be known.’ She blinked. ‘In both the biblical sense, and in the more ordinary sense too. She simply wants to be known, in her self, for who she is. She wants only to know that she will be known in this life.’
Her voice was low but urgent. He was unsure whether she was speaking about Lady Chatterley or herself. ‘Lawrence,’ he replied, ‘had a rare awareness of the female principle, of its force.’
‘I read somewhere that his wife was the model for Lady Chatterley. I thought that was touching.’
‘It is sometimes said that Frieda was the model for Constance, and of course it might be true in the most literal sense – an aristocratic woman who ran away with a working-class man – but in reality, theirs was a very trying marriage. I suspect the “cover-story” of Frieda “as Lady Chatterley” suited them both. Frieda was certainly the force behind The Rainbow, in the first flush of their love, but Lady Chatterley—’ He shrugged. ‘It’s doubtful. Frieda had taken a lover by the time Lawrence was writing Chatterley, a man called Angelo Ravagli, whom she married after Lawrence died. In that illicit relationship, we find another superficial parallel. But the character of Oliver Mellors is undoubtedly Lawrence himself, as is Sir Clifford, as is even Constance in many of her aspects – in her desire for a child especially, but also in her struggle toward an honest life and freedom.’
‘So there was no “real” Lady Chatterley…That’s a shame.’
‘We may never know. I’m inclined to think there was. You see, Lawrence usually needed the “clay” of lived experience in order to create.’
She turned and looked out to the Sound. ‘I’d hoped we might come up with an idea today, to help Grove Press, even if I were to have to disguise my role in any plan. Yet, from what you say, we’re too late.’
‘Don’t give up just yet. Rosset’s taking the case to the federal court. He filed his suit yesterday.’
Trilling watched her close her notebook. How interesting it was that no one ever knew what youth was while they had it. She was only half-formed still, and mysterious with it, perhaps above all to herself. He placed his hand lightly over hers. ‘Humor me while I tell you about one last thing.’
‘No humoring is required.’
‘E. M. Forster and Lawrence,’ he began, ‘fell out, just as he and John Middleton Murry did. Lawrence was always falling out with people. He was a wonderful friend but he also turned on friends – and viciously. Be that as it may, and as different as they were, Forster and Lawrence were of the same mind in several important ways; they each rejected imperial might, imperial nostalgia, the intellectual domination empires accord themselves in the world, and they rejected, too, the Machine Age. They shared a vision, in other words, a passionate one. At his death, Lawrence was, at best, ignored and, at worst, derided, but in the obituary press, Forster – who had fallen out with Lawrence, remember – defended him. Have you ever come across it?’
She shook her head.
‘I believe I still know the pertinent bit. Forster wrote: “All that we can do is to say straight out that he was the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation.” ’ He raised a finger and looked at her meaningfully, his gaze warm. ‘ “The rest must be left where he would have wished it to be left – in the hands of the young.’ ”
She nodded and smiled falteringly, as if with both gratitude and modesty, as if she couldn’t make too great a claim for either her generation or herself. But yes, her eyes seemed to say, she would allow herself to hope, and to stay true to the book. ‘Do you think Rosset can beat the Post Office’s lawyers in court?’
‘It’s hard to say. In my understanding of these things, when a court reviews the decision of a government agency, such as the Post Office, there is almost always a presumption that the government agency is right. Even if the judge might have decided things differently if the issue had been with him from the start, it’s another matter to overturn the decision of a respected government authority. To do so, he would have to disagree very strongly – which means the odds are against it. But no doubt, Barney Rosset and that lawyer of his are going to throw everything they have at it. They’ll be up against some heavyweight government lawyers, but sometimes, youth and energy do win the day.’
He passed her copy to her. ‘Now, before I take my leave, you must read me a passage – simply to round off the pleasure of this afternoon. And because I am neither youthful nor energetic, we must simply skip over the bit where you demur and I insist.’
She smiled at the table, then eyed him over the rim of her iced tea. He held her gaze. Both gave up any last vestige of shyness.
The osprey, whose nest must have been nearby, circled again over the lawn, watching. She took the illicit book and opened it to a turned-down corner, one of several pages she had marked. She straightened in her chair. Her voice was typically whispery and soft, and often the target of teasing from Jack’s sisters, who called her ‘Babydoll’ because of it, when they thought she was out of earshot. But as she began to read, her voice grew steady and resonant. She found her pitch:
‘At the back of the cottage, the land rose rather steeply, so the back yard was sunken and enclosed in a low stone wall. She turned the corner of the house, and stopped. In the little yard two paces beyond her, the man was washing himself, utterly unaware. He was naked to the hips, his velveteen breeches slipping down under his slender loins. And his white, slender back was curved over a big bowl of soapy water, in which he ducked his head, shaking his head with a queer, quick little motion, lifting his slender white arms and pressing the soapy water from his ears: quick, subtle as a weasel playing with water, and utterly alone.
Connie backed away from the corner of the house, and hurried away to the wood. In spite of herself, she had had a shock. After all, merely a man washing himself! Commonplace enough, heaven knows.
Yet, in some curious way, it was a visionary experience: it had hit her in the middle of her body. She saw the clumsy breeches slipping away over the pure, delicate white loins, the bones showing a little, and the sense of aloneness, of a creature purely alone, overwhelmed her. Perfect, white solitary nudity of a creature that lives alone, and inwardly alone.’
The band was 940–980 MHz. The bug was no bigger than a silver dollar – it had been easy to fix to the underside of the Kennedys’ patio table. All he’d needed, apart from the transistor receiver, was the miniature hand-cranked drill from the kit and a bit of wire.
Like the bug itself, he was a plant – in the Secret Service – and had been dropped into Hyannis Port. Hoover had set it up personally, through Howard Johnson and the Washington Field Office. It was a perk of an assignment and Agent Mel Harding’s last chance to get things right.
At the front of the house on the quiet street, he hovered now by the wind-bent picket fence. Sand glittered at the edge of the road. A gull wheeled overhead. Earlier, he had moved across the front lawn, experimenting with the reception. The fence, where it met the paved walk up to the front of the house, seemed the best location. She turned the corner of the house, and stopped—
The radio, the bug, the drill kit and earpiece had been delivered on his arrival in Hyannis Port by an agent in a plumber’s van. The radio had a case with a shoulder-strap. In his right hand, he held a pocket notebook, the kind often used for scores and sports results; in his left hand was the stub of the pencil he kept behind his ear. Commonplace enough, heaven knows His shorthand was good. Part of his training. Alone, in the heat of the day, he had let himself take off his suit jacket. Mrs. Kennedy and Professor Trilling had been talking for nearly two hours, the radio-strap dug into his shoulder, and he a creature that lives alone, and inwardly alone held on to every word.
* * *
—
Hoover had that day’s report from Hyannis Port by the time he sat down to The Lawrence Welk Show at 9 p.m. Eastern Time. ‘Literature is subversive. You say that somewhere…’ They had a fat ‘Bufile’ – Bureau file – already on Professor Trilling, but even so, something made Hoover sit up in his La-Z-Boy recliner. A whiff of something. A scent.
Mrs. Kennedy’s visit to the G.P.O. hearing hadn’t merely been some misguided adventure. Today proved that. She should have been out shopping on a Saturday, like other ladies, or hosting some charity tea-party. Instead she had invited, to a very private lunch, a fellow sympathizer, a Jew with connections, a known subversive – a one-time Trotskyite and an officer of the Authors’ League of America, a group which the Bureau had been monitoring for the last decade. Of course she wouldn’t have known all that – she had no idea, whatever the jokes the Professor cracked about the F.B.I. and keeping agents in work. But ignorance was no excuse. She was using whatever thin political influence she could muster to champion a book which had been publicly judged to be obscene; a book that celebrated an upper-class woman’s affair with her husband’s servant; a so-called heroine who abandons her husband, a war-hero for Christ’s sake, in a wheelchair. Mrs. Kennedy just wouldn’t let it drop.
She and the Senator were known to have spent the autumn of ’56 apart. She’d taken off to England. God knows what she got up to over there. MI5 claimed not to have a file. Of course they had a file.
Her Bufile was growing with new intelligence, almost weekly. It was said in some circles that her father, Black Jack Bouvier, was part Negro. The Bureau had even bribed the emergency-room doctor to obtain her permission for an autopsy. The doctor did ask, in the elevator supposedly, as he escorted her and the Senator to a private exit, but then he bungled the conversation and they sensed something was up.
Harding had managed to get a clear shot of Mrs. Kennedy and the Professor, at the front door as she welcomed Trilling into the house. He’d got a number of shots, in fact, before she’d shut the door, as the pair looked at something in the entry. A picture maybe. Hoover had to give credit where credit was due. It had been a good day’s hunting. Harding had done well.
He looked up from the report and the enclosures in his lap. Lawrence Welk was introducing the next number, an old ballad, he said. When he spoke to the audience in the studio and at home, he sounded German. Or like a German trying not to be German. It was too bad. But every Saturday night, the country forgave him. World War Two was over. Forgive and forget. Americans were big-hearted, and Mr. Welk was a kind father figure to all those beautiful young people onstage.
Annie had left Hoover’s mug of hot milk on the side-table, with a dash of vanilla, just the way he liked it. On the television, bubbles streamed over the bandstand. Bobby – toothy, strong and all-American – crooned to the camera in a striped blazer naked to the hips and a boater. Cissy twirled around him in a dress stiff with crinolines. The studio-set was of a church picnic, with a white steeple in the distance and the outlines of rolling hills. As the chorus appeared, plastic flowers popped up from a shiny black-and-white meadow. Big-eyed singing girls in long, pale dresses walked by with handsome tenors, two by two. The girls carried parasols; the boys picnic baskets. Hoover sipped his milk. Bobby velveteen breeches slipping sang on. Out of view, the bubble-machine ejaculated.
Prior to Harding’s arrival in Hyannis Port, Hoover had personally instructed the plants team to refrain from bugging the bedrooms and bathrooms on Irving Avenue. Mrs. Kennedy was a Person of Interest, but she was also a lady – and he was a gentleman who had been raised in the South.
