Tenderness

Addendum # 15

One of the epigraphs in my recent novel, Some Months in 1968, is the title of a song performed by Otis Redding – “Try a Little Tenderness” – and recorded in its early days by none other than Bing Crosby, a singer, who compared to Redding, was from a distant, pale galaxy. Anyone who has heard Redding sing that song knows how powerful and moving yet distinctly tender his voice is as he offers, what is in effect, advice, imploring the listener to do what the title says. The tenderness he sings of speaks to caring, to physical intimacy, to strong yet gentle loving: “You got to rub her gentle, man.” It speaks, also, to a kind of emotional recognition that encompasses happiness and weariness. So much of life is the bluster of opinion and blame. So much of life scants our feelings and asks us to applaud the paucity. What Redding offers is an affirmation and a willingness to go beyond the clichés of love songs: “It’s not just sentimental / She has her grief and her care.” She also is the daughter of history: the song came from the early, very dark years of the Depression. Redding knew many blues in his bones. His voice reached a kind of ecstasy of empathy.

“Tender is the night,” wrote John Keats, a poet who knew his intuitive way around the ecstasy of empathy, reveling in the song of a bird and unpacking the human condition in the process. Hauntingly, but not, I think, coincidentally, “weariness” appears in “Ode to a Nightingale.” Keats notes “The weariness, the fever, and the fret.” Redding sang that “She may be weary / And young girls they do get wearied / Wearing that same old shaggy dress.” The detail in the song is homely but that is part of its genius just as Keats’ genius lies in his talent for flight – “for I will fly to thee.” Redding sings of a man who needs to, as the expression goes, “man up,” but in a particular way, not asserting an all-purpose machismo but nurturing his awareness. Again, the weariness is not lost on Redding. At the beginning of the song, his voice trembles with it. Nor is it lost on Keats who uses the fullness of his stanzas to register thoroughly an emotional plight, a poetic aptitude that in its completeness has an almost paragraph-like feel to it.

Quite literally, “tender” is a feeling, since the night is soft, vulnerable, open to all the senses, ravished and ravishing at the same time. The night is nearby, known to the poet over the course of a thousand and one nights, but distant, unknowable, the way the bird even as it importunes the poet is unknowable. However much human feeling reaches toward the bird and the night, such feeling can only reach so far. The nightingale who “singest of summer in full-throated ease” leads the poet to “easeful Death.” The bird will be “pouring forth thy soul abroad / in such an ecstasy.” The poet who would “cease upon the midnight with no pain,” would “have ears in vain – / To thy high requiem become a sod.” That last word comes down with a sullen, dense finality, tellingly unpoetic.

Otis Redding and John Keats hearken to “tender,” because they are assaying the wages of feeling, the demands that feeling makes, the desire to confront feeling in “Try a Little Tenderness” and the desire to abandon feeling in Keats’ ode, even as he so richly indulges it, because it is too much, it is not to be borne, much as the song has it: “You know she’s waiting / Just anticipating / The thing that she’ll never, never possess.” Again, we are in a haunted place, the place of wanting that Keats knew so well. “Never” is a cruel word but Keats registers a world “Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, / Or new Love pine at them beyond tomorrow.” How do we address the cruelty? We typically shrug it off as the human plight – people being the toys of time – or we may register something more, something that takes account of the double-edged sword of agency, something that activates love – makes it sensible – while staring death in its ubiquitous face. “Darkling I listen.” The bird makes, as people like to put it, a song, in both its voice and its sheer being.

To move from song and poem to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, Tender Is the Night, is to move from the world of lyric to the socialized world where the lyric lives as an echo, an outcast, a reminder, a remonstrance, a fugitive rapture. In the epigraph from Keats’ poem Fitzgerald quotes the lines that speak of earthly fate – “But here there is no light / Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown / Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.” Tenderness can only be a gesture. How each human actor (Rosemary Speers, a main character, is “an American actress”) chooses to make the series of gestures that constitute a life is that person’s often unwelcome pleasure since others are making contravening gestures all the while, to say nothing of the ongoing economic and political forces, the wars, manias, and persecutions. “Doom” is a word with which Fitzgerald was familiar, a word that hovers around Keats but a word that Redding lances in the purity and ardor of his song.

Something unbearable keeps happening in Fitzgerald’s novel. People rouse themselves or don’t. They want to flee weariness, as they move from here to there and fall in and out of love. They want the elixir of happiness, which the modern world dangles in front of them in seemingly countless forms. Yet an inviolate note remains in Fitzgerald’s marvelous sentences about the physical world through which his characters briskly and haltingly move. The bird’s note, the poem, the song, the power of metaphor, all strangely endure to haunt the human inhabitants of the play they can’t help devising, even as the mortal terms impinge on them at every turn. For me, Redding’s voice, through the mechanical marvel of recording, still is testifying. He got it right, as did his artistic brothers.