Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (7 page)

I wrote not to be fed but to be famous.
Sterne, in a letter

The two most playful novelists in English literature, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and Laurence Sterne (i.e. Lewis Carroll and Parson Yorick) were clergymen of the national church. As a doctrine, Anglicanism has generally – unlike more severe theologies – been tolerant of secular literature, even novels. Sterne embarked on them late in life, as the easy-going holder of three livings. It might be said he was bounced into novel-writing, impelled by his desires to be both famous and mischievous. Sterne’s life was, in shape, one long ricochet – and, at the same time, a desperate race with the tubercular bacillus, that occupational hazard (and, arguably, occupational stimulus) of great writers from Keats to Orwell. In
Tristram Shandy
, Sterne will occasionally interrupt his gamesomeness to inform the reader how many dozen drops of blood his lungs have just expelled.

Sterne’s father was a junior officer in the British army. His rank did not reflect his ability; senior commissions at this period had to be purchased, not earned. He saw action with Marlborough in that most pointless of conflicts, the War of the Spanish Succession. Roger Sterne (‘a smart little man,’ Laurence called him) was chronically impecunious but well connected, with family roots in the Yorkshire gentry and the Church of England. The grandest connection – one to be of great assistance to Laurence – was a grandfather who had been Archbishop of York in the late seventeenth century. Ensign Sterne married the widow of a fellow officer, Agnes Sterne (‘debt’ was involved, according to Sterne) and there were subsequently seven children. Sterne’s family life – natal and married – would be emotionally cold and his mother, a chronically improvident woman, the source of lifelong embarrassment. For a while in Dublin she ran a school for seamstresses. In later life (before her death, in 1759) she harassed her son – on one occasion, in 1751, from a debtors’ jail.

Despite the end of the war in 1714, it was a lively time for the British Army. Sterne was born in Clonmel, Co. Tipperary, and his first ten years were largely passed in temporary quarters in Ireland, wherever his father was next posted. Stability and direction entered Sterne’s life at the age of ten when he was sent to live with his wealthy uncle Richard, in Yorkshire. Here he received eight years of excellent school education. His father, whom he had never really known, died in 1731, as his schooldays ended. He had served gallantly in the defence of Gibraltar but engaged himself on a foolish duel with a fellow officer (the argument, bizarrely, was over a goose, according to Laurence), sustaining a serious sword wound which led to his death.

The tender depiction of Tristram Shandy’s father (by far the most described
character in the novel) and Uncle Toby’s ‘obscure hurt’ may be filial memorials. Laurence’s principal bequest from his father – other than a useful surname – was a lifelong nostalgia for a military career he would never have. As Thackeray (a half-admirer) elegantly put it:

Trim’s montero cap, and Le Fevre’s sword, and dear Uncle Toby’s roquelaure, are doubtless reminiscences of the boy, who had lived with the followers of William and Marlborough, and had beat time with his little feet to the fifes of Ramillies in Dublin barrack-yard, or played with the torn flags and halberds of Malplaquet on the parade-ground at Clonmel.

As an adolescent Sterne already had those feet on the rungs of patronage – a tricky means of ascension at the period, but necessary for those without other advantages than ‘friends’. Physically frail, the army was out of the question. The Church was the only gentlemanly alternative – as a career, never a vocation (leave that to religious ‘enthusiasts’). In 1733, family connection secured him a place at Jesus College Cambridge as a sizar (a student whose charges were remitted in return for ‘fagging’ for more advantaged undergraduates). He was supported by the Archbishop Sterne scholarship, endowed in the name of his ancestor who had been Master of the College. At Cambridge he met the fellow Yorkshireman who would be his bosom friend through life, John Hall-Stevenson, ‘Eugenius’ in
Tristram Shandy
. In later life, Hall-Stevenson’s Skelton Hall (‘Crazy Castle’) would be a second home for Sterne. It was at Cambridge that he suffered his first forecast of early death. He woke one morning to find that a blood vessel had burst in his lungs. ‘I bled the bed full,’ he observed laconically.

At university, in addition to steeping himself in the philosophy of Locke (the key, to perpetrate a feeble pun, to his novel), Sterne methodically absorbed the encyclopaedic store of miscellaneous learning which ornaments his later writing. On graduation and ordination family connections with another friendly uncle (Jacques Sterne, a high church dignitary at York) got him, in his mid-twenties, a living at Sutton-on-the-Forest, a village eight miles north of York. He would occasionally preach at the Minster, although his fame in that line was twenty years in the future.

His first public writing was as a pamphleteer, writing in the Whig interest. It got him both liked and disliked (something that never troubled him). He married well in 1741, choosing as his wife Elizabeth Lumley, whose family, like his, was well connected with the Yorkshire gentry. The couple had one surviving daughter, Lydia, of whom Sterne was fond, but the marriage, after an idyllic few years, was brought to the point of breakdown (nervous breakdown, that is, on Elizabeth’s part) when he was discovered in bed with one of his wife’s maids.

Why, in his late forties, Sterne should have embarked on his novel has never been entirely clear. What is clear is that it was a difficult time in his life. The first two books of
Tristram Shandy
were composed in Yorkshire the same year ‘under greatest heaviness of heart’. Sterne was pressed for money; his wife, maddened by his sexual delinquencies, had been temporarily committed to an asylum. His own health was poor, as was that of Lydia. The London publisher, Dodsley, to whom he submitted a sample of this speculative work, suggested fairly radical rewriting and something different from the initial Rabelaisian fantasia on encyclopaedism and more ‘Cervantick’.

The first two volumes with no great expectation of continuation, were co-published at York and in London in 1759. Sterne himself picked up some of the expense. As sometimes happens, and is usually hard to explain,
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
took off like a rocket. Sterne helped manipulate its word-of-mouth appeal, but the more likely explanation for its success is that the world, more specifically London, was ready for such a book. The reading public was bored and wanted novelty. If so,
Tristram
fitted the bill. As reprint followed reprint, Dodsley promptly quintupled his offer for two sequel volumes to £250. William Pitt, no less, was recruited as the dedicatee for the third volume – that which sees, at long last, the birth of the hero and the start (it is forlornly predicted) of the narrative.

A literary lion now, Sterne was painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds and enriched his private life with a glamorous London mistress, the young French singer Catherine Fourmantelle (‘Jenny’ in the books). It was more wormwood for the maddened Mrs Sterne, who can have taken no pleasure in her husband’s overnight fame. On the strength of its earnings he was able to live in higher style in his new living at Coxwold, nicknamed ‘Shandy Hall’.

Technically what
Tristram Shandy
bequeathed to English fiction was immediacy – ‘writing to the moment’. His sign manual is the ‘dash’ – typically a ‘5 em’ thing which lubricates the frictionless pace of narrative (speeding up one’s reading in the process).
Tristram Shandy
, with its expressive typography (super large capitals, different fonts, the creative use of white space and blocked pages) is a tribute to the growing skill of the mid-eighteenth century London printing trade. The fluidity Sterne aimed at was that of speech. ‘Writing,’ he wrote, ‘when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.’

He did not have long left to converse with the world. While seeing the fifth and sixth volume of
Tristram Shandy
through the press, in 1761, he suffered his worst ever haemorrhage of the lungs. Recuperation in the warm climates of France and Italy was prescribed. Over the next few years these sunny excursions to nowhere in particular would solidify as Sterne’s second great book,
A Sentimental Journey
through France and Italy, by Mr. Yorick
. Half-travel book, half-egotising, it codified the period’s cult of sentimentality – a vein even more lucratively exploited by Oliver Goldsmith in
The Vicar of Wakefield
(1766). Sentimentalism was one of the ways in which Sterne changed the psychology of his age. Whether his sermons (sell-out occasions when he delivered them in fashionable London pulpits) were as efficacious on the morality of his time is doubtful. But they proved another source of income.

And he needed income. A life of grand touring was expensive, and Sterne’s style of life at home was now lavish.
Tristram Shandy
was in its ninth volume as his life drew to a close. His last months were consumed by consumption and a passionate late-life love affair with a married woman, Eliza Draper.
The Journal to Eliza
(modelled on Swift’s
Journal to Stella
) is his last work, an exercise in stylised ‘spiritual adultery’. He was unfaithful to Eliza, though, as to all the women in his life. He died after a trip to London on publishing business in the company of Hall-Stevenson. In a macabre postlude, Sterne’s corpse was stolen from its resting place and recognised – just before dismemberment – on a medical school dissection table at Cambridge: the body was reinterred. The skull was then disinterred in the 1960s from the mass grave in which Sterne’s remains had been buried and reinterred, yet again in Coxwold. As was observed, it could be seen as payback for all the Yorick jokes Sterne had perpetrated.

Critical opinion about Sterne will forever be divided. A novel which begins with coitus interruptus and features characters called ‘Kysarcius’ was not designed to please moralists. Samuel Richardson found the work ‘gross’ – although he granted it was not sexually ‘inflaming’. No maidenheads were put at risk by young bucks reading Sterne. F. R. Leavis, while banishing
Tristram Shandy
from the Great Tradition of English fiction, summed up a pervasive line of objection with his stern verdict: ‘irresponsible (and nasty) trifling’.

The Victorians in general disliked him. Thackeray (who none the less learned some useful narrative tricks from Tristram) was harsh in his judgement on the unmanliness of Sterne the man: ‘he used to blubber perpetually in his study, and finding his tears infectious, and that they brought him a great popularity, he exercised the lucrative gift of weeping; he utilised it, and cried on every occasion. I own that I don’t value or respect much the cheap dribble of those fountains.’ Critics of a traditional mind find Sterne irritatingly eccentric. Hence Dr Johnson’s strikingly wrong prediction to Boswell: ‘Nothing odd will do long.
Tristram Shandy
did not last.’ In his authoritative study,
The Rise of the Novel
, Ian Watt excludes Sterne on the grounds of his inherent ‘negativity’. He is always demonstrating what fiction
can’t
do. This negativity is hilariously bemoaned by Tristram in his famous rumination on progression and digression, in Book IV:

I am this month one whole year older than I was this time twelve-month; and having got, as you perceive, almost into the middle of my third volume [i.e. according to the original editions] – and no farther than to my first day’s life –’tis demonstrative that I have three hundred and sixty-four days more life to write just now, than when I first set out.

He is living 364 times faster than he can write. The novel, any novel, is epistemologically impossible. It’s like putting a number on eternity.

Negative as his fictional boundary-marking may be, Sterne has become in the twentieth century the darling of theorists. Like Charlie Chaplin in
Modern Times
, his failure defines the strangeness and essential wrongness of machines; even the machines we call novels – and, in so doing, creates not merely comedy (any clown can do that) but English literature’s greatest comic novel. Out of its impossibility, perversely.

We read the Vicar of Wakefield in youth and in age – we return to it again and again, and bless the memory of an author who contrives so well to reconcile us to human nature.
Walter Scott

Goldsmith is the despair of biographers. Little of his life is recorded, and that little is largely anecdotal and rendered dubious by his own incorrigible propensity to gilding the lily. ‘He was’, says his most authoritative biographer ‘an inveterate liar.’ He published only one novel. Why he even did that is not clear since, despite chronic penury, he did not, apparently, feel inclined to publish it. In fact he proclaimed a scorn for fiction. None the less
The Vicar of Wakefield
has diffused into the mainstream of English fiction. No work was more influential on the novels of the succeeding century.