To the Hermitage (24 page)

My friend Monkman now had skull and bones. All he needed was a grave to put them in. Fortunately the ideal answer presented itself: an academic conference. In the summer of 1968, the University of York decided (in between the student sit-ins so fashionable at the time) to hold a great International Sterne Conference two hundred years after his death. It was like our present gathering, except instead of being held on a ship heading for a revolution it was held on the campus in the middle of one, and instead of us nine something like two hundred international scholars came. (
BO: But quantity is not always quality . . . MOI: Definitely not, but it was still a very splendid and memorable occasion. I was there myself. BO: I do hope you had papers . . . MOI: Yes, I gave one. BO: If you could do it then, you could . . .
) I had time in those days. Besides, our conference now had more than papers. It also had Sterne’s bones and winged skull. (
LARS: Which reminds me, where is Diderot?
) So we arranged a funeral, and decided to bury him in the graveyard of the church he’d made famous, Coxwold.

So, a portion of the world’s thinking finest, we all met at Shandy Hall, Sterne’s crazy house in the village, his ‘philosophical hut’, as he called it. He’d spent the profits of
Tristram Shandy
remodelling it to fit his own fantastic imagination, and now Monkman had restored it to its former glory. It was quite a remarkable occasion. The Church of England decided to let bygones be bygones, so the current Chancellor of York – his name was Canon Cant – agreed to give the funeral oration. A firm of wine-shippers, Croft’s (Sterne had known the founder) agreed to ship over a case of his favourite bromide, port from Oporto. We walked in a row through the lovely estate village. We sat down among the Grinling Gibbon tombs, and awaited the oration. But – alas, again, poor Yorick. Just one important person was missing, and that was the deceased himself. By a fatal error the British will understand only too well, the remains had been assigned to travel from London to Coxwold by British Rail. Following an ancient rule, they had delivered them to a wrong destination, a village of vaguely similar name in darkest Wales. Worse still, the occasion, like Stockholm, was totally
alkoholfri
. British Rail had also been entrusted with the case of port.

The funeral took place even so. Canon Cant’s obsequy was quite excellent; a crying shame Sterne himself had missed it. The skull and bones did turn up several weeks later, after having toured most of Britain. By now the scholars had returned to their distant lecture-halls, so what remained of the remains had to be reburied by a tiny handful of dedicated Sterneans, who admit to little memory of the event, since the case of port turned up too. So now, if you care to visit Coxwold, as you should, you will find Sterne’s remains are now interred there. In fact you’ll find two tombstones in the churchyard, one put up long ago by some friendly Freemasons, the other a new one. Incidentally, as far as details of birth and death are concerned, both are incorrect. And, sad to say, at the foot of the graves lies that of Kenneth Monkman, the only one who really knew the full story, and the greatest Sternean of them all.

(
BO: I’m sorry, but we are really here for Diderot . . .
)

Ah, yes, Diderot . . .

As Dr Johnson famously complained,
Tristram Shandy
is the oddest of books. Sterne used his transverse zig-zaggery to break every rule of the new form so rightly called ‘the novel’. He left blank pages for the reader to paint in, put the preface in the middle, set the chapters in the wrong order. Consequences come before causes, and only after he’s published several volumes does he say he’s ready to start. Most novels then started with the birth of the hero, so he started with his conception. And it’s a botched conception – by a Lockean association of ideas, Tristram’s father-to-be winds the clock and makes love to his wife on the last night of the month, one thing reminding him of the other. Tristram’s mother-to-be finds it difficult to concentrate on the one, as she’s wondering if he remembered to do the other. So Tristram’s conception is a damp squib, as it were, and he’s born a botched child, an imperfect specimen. But then the whole book is a botched conception too. In fact it’s all a cock and bull story, Sterne says.

But if he designed a fantastic mystification for the book’s beginning, he devised an even cleverer one for the ending. He chose to conclude the book in the most striking way possible: the Death of the Author. He had congenital tuberculosis, and started the book as a comic stay against his misfortunes. He decided to keep writing a couple of volumes a year till he just dropped dead. Then the book would end, ‘Now it is done.’ Or that’s what he thought. In 1760, 1761, 1762, his writing was well up to schedule. Six volumes were out, he’d become an international celebrity. But his health was fading, so in 1762 he decided to make his will, leave Shandy Hall, and travel to France and Italy – partly to convalesce, partly because he was hoping to donate his porcupine wife to Europe in the interests of greater integration. Before he set off on his strange and irreverent Grand Tour, he decided to send the six volumes to the French writer he admired most. And he happened to be Denis Diderot. (
BO: Ah . . . at last . . .
)

Diderot fell in love with the book. He told all his friends Sterne was the ‘Rabelais of the English’ and this was ‘the craziest, wisest and greatest of all books’. Seventeen hundred and sixty-two was, as so often, not really a great year to be English in Paris. The Seven Years War was ending, and the French were just losing their two Indies – America and India – to the British. Their overseas empire was dying, the much-resented Peace of Paris about to be signed. None of this improved Franco-British relations (they were soured for generations). Still, nothing ever did. The French became deeply Anglophobe, and soon, through the playwright Beaumarchais, they were sending arms to American Revolutionaries and making national heroes of the electric Ben Franklin, the great George Washington, the splendid Thomas Jefferson. It proved a dangerous strategy, for in supporting the American revolutionaries the French court was encouraging the coming of its own. But that was ahead, this was still the Age of Reason. And, as you know, the French generally forgive writers and philosophers, people like us who rise above local difficulties and are citizens of the world . . . (
ANDERS: Let’s hope this is true in Russia . . .
) And in any case Sterne was Irish . . .

So, after all, 1762 turned into a good British year in Paris (a city which looked, said Sterne, a good deal better than it smelled). David Hume, like some fat Cistercian, was on the staff at the new British Embassy. Edward Gibbon, the man who was still scribbling the great book of empire that he had dreamt of on the steps of the Capitol in Rome, was there, charming his way all around town. So was the actor David Garrick, a very good friend to Sterne. Sterne’s fame had gone before him, and soon he too was ‘shandying around’ all the salons in his drab black suit: meeting the learned doctors of the Sorbonne, flirting with the ladies, becoming a friend of Diderot’s atheistical friend d’Holbach – that great protector of wits, he called him. Before long he’d converted Parisians to the new philosophy of ‘Shandyism’. He had Garrick read a play of Diderot’s to consider staging it in London, though Garrick found it far too French: ‘’Tis love love love throughout, without much separation in the character,’ he observed shrewdly. And in turn he encouraged Diderot to study Garrick’s acting performance, which led him to write a very important treatise on the matter. (
LARS: Ah yes, I know, I know – The Paradox of the Comedian . . .
)

But the great moment came at the end. Sterne was invited at the last minute to give a sermon of dedication for the new chapel in the British Embassy. It was of course a grand occasion, with princes, courtiers and ambassadors, bishops and priests present. And the philosophes were out in force as well. Hume, who worked in the Embassy, was there, and so were his friends d’Holbach and Diderot. Unfortunately Sterne seems to have decided to give a sermon that wasn’t a sermon. (
BO: Ah, yes, now we know . . .
) He chose to preach on a very odd text from Hezekiah – an ‘unlucky text’, as he admitted later. It concerns the rather remarkable miracle where Hezekiah put all his concubines on display, and this makes the sundial, affected as it were by Viagra, mysteriously move by ten degrees. The princes and priests were scandalized, and thought it no way to dedicate an official Parisian residence, however protestant. (
ANDERS: I would think it was ideal . . .
) The philosophes, of course, thought the sermon was admirable. Half of them were former Jesuits anyway, and it seemed to them that if only they could preach from the altar like this it might even be worth believing in God.

And Diderot, feeling he’d found a soulmate, promptly decided to write a novel in the manner of
Tristram Shandy
, using the same techniques . . . (
BO: Transverse zig-zaggery?
) The book, he said, worked as true creativity did: ‘By long observation, consummate experience, tact, taste, instinct, a sort of inspiration; by a long and awkward march, by painful fumbling, by a secret notion of analogy derived from an infinity of observations, whose memory gets wiped out but whose trace remains.’ He particularly liked one delicious touch, Uncle Toby’s famous groin wound, which makes his amours a problem. Because of the wound, Toby is forced to explain everything else he knows, like the events of the Siege of Namur, in encyclopedic detail – literally, for Sterne got his information from the great British encyclopedia of the day,
Chamber’s
, which Diderot tried to translate. (
BO: It started the
Encyclopedia
. . .
). The odd sexual joke seemed the source of a new way of storytelling, and that started Diderot off on his own book. For Sterne, this would create a remarkable paradox – one he could never know about. His aim was that
Shandy
would end with the death of the author, a totally fair surmise. ‘Now it is done,’ were his last words; and some people think he meant his book. But it wasn’t done. Diderot had begun to continue it, and would for years after Sterne’s death.

But Denis being Denis, the book that started out this way turned into something quite different. The wounded Uncle Toby turns into a fatalistic servant, bold enough to tell his master the one reason he’ll be remembered is because he had such a famous valet. (
BIRGITTA: Ah, my darling, I know what it is. Jacques the Fatalist And His Master . . .
) The servant became a significant figure of the day, in fact finally became— (
BIRGITTA: Figaro, of course. I told you that
). So we can say Sterne turns into Diderot; who turns into Beaumarchais; who turns into Mozart; who turns into Rossini. He also turns into Proust and Joyce, Beckett and Nabokov, and thus an essential part of our own literature. Instead of writing a book nobody would remember, because as Dr Johnson said nothing so odd can live long, he became the source of a whole tradition of stories, plays, operas – a classic case of Postmortemism.

But our Diderot really wouldn’t be Diderot if he didn’t make his book new. Sterne asked many of the great literary questions, and that’s why we love him. Diderot asked a great many more. He added fresh tricks, postmodern diversions, all sorts of new games to play between the writer and the reader. It’s always been said his book has four characters – Jacques, his master, the writer, the reader – and no one can tell which is in control. He adds lots of mystifications and operatic strategems, like the tale of the vengeful Mme. de la Pommeraye. But one thing clearly carries on from Sterne. Just like
Shandy
, Diderot’s
Jacques
doesn’t conclude. No one really gets anywhere, beds anyone, or discovers anything. After all, the only complete story is written in the Book of Destiny above, Jacques says, and who can possibly know how that will end?

So Diderot recommends we finish the tale ourselves. But then, when he checks the manuscript again, three endings have suddenly appeared. One has popped out of the pages of
Tristram Shandy
. Can it be plagiarism? Perhaps, he says – ‘Unless this dialogue between Jacques and his master actually pre-dates that book, so that our good master Sterne is the real plagiarist. But this I doubt, because of the high esteem in which I hold Mr Sterne, whom I distinguish from most of the writers of his nation, who steal from us first and then insult us.’ (A charge, incidentally, I’d like to refute here and now. I never steal. I simply inter-textualize.)

Diderot tells us a tale with no ending still has to end somewhere, like everything else in the world. That applies to Sterne’s book, his own, and me now. So that’s all I have to say in this paper that wasn’t really a paper. Except for one thing. While he was in Paris, Sterne sent to his London bookseller for some books by British authors (Chaucer, Pope, Cibber, Locke), to be put to his account but sent elsewhere, ‘for they are for a present’. The books were a gift for Diderot, and crossed the channel to join his library. But this was the library Diderot was in the process of selling to Catherine of Russia. So, when he in his turn suffered the fatal Death of the Author in 1784 (that’s the date claimed in all the encyclopedias), all his books, including those Sterne gave him, went to Russia and joined the library in the Hermitage, which I believe we will soon be privileged to see, so maybe we’ll be looking at them soon . . . (
BO: Well, perhaps, nothing is certain . . .
)

And then, as I understand it, many of Diderot’s manuscripts went to Russia as well, including the wonderful
Rameau’s Nephew
(
BIRGITTA: If you say so . . .
) and the still unfinished text of
Jacques
. Later on, through all sorts of strange channels, these works which weren’t published at all in Diderot’s lifetime began to reappear in Germany and France, and began to be published, but in very confused editions. People still wonder whether there are more manuscripts in Russia (
BO: I don’t think so . . .
) but maybe when we arrive in Petersburg we’ll find out more about how the story that never finished went on— (
ANDERS: Except have you seen this morning’s news? . . .
)