The second volume of Arthur H. Cash’s Sterne biography covers the years when he became public property, following the publication of the first euphoric instalment of Tristram Shandy. Sterne and his creature Tristram merged into one tricksy and titillating ‘character’, larger than life and twice as odd, a prodigy, a ‘phenomenon’. Lapdogs and racehorses were named after Tristram; Garrick befriended him; Sir Joshua Reynolds painted him; 19-year-old James Boswell, looking for someone to hero-worship, tried him out for size in a ‘poetical Epistle’:
He runs about from place to place
Now with my Lord, then with his Grace …
A budding whisper flys about,
Where’er he comes they point him out.
Boswell, though, went on to settle on someone quite different, soundly three-dimensional Dr Johnson, whose maggots and eccentricities were ballasted with moral authority. Sterne was slippery, skinny and ambiguous, his fascination tied up with his contradictions – the obscenity with the sentiment, the tears with the wit, the clergyman with the buffoon.
Moreover, he had stage-managed his own début, ghosting a letter from his mistress to Garrick (‘The Author … is a kind and generous friend of mine’) and arranging for Hogarth to be shown another letter to a third party, in which Sterne wished – all innocently – for a Hogarth illustration for his book … and so forth. Small wonder it soon became the height of fashion to complain about how fashionable he was: ‘A very insipid and tedious performance,’ opined Horace Walpole enviously; and the classics tutor at Emmanuel, one Richard Farmer, solemnly predicted that ‘in the course of 20 years, should anyone wish to refer to the book in question, he will be obliged to go to an antiquary for it’.
There was more to his respectable contemporaries’ distaste than fashion, however. One of Sterne’s most lasting friendships was with dangerous John Wilkes, atheist, rake, and proto-revolutionary; and his admirers included d’Holbach, Diderot and the Encyclopaedists. The philosopher David Hume pronounced Tristram Shandy ‘the best Book that has been writ by any Englishman these 30 years … bad as it is’. Shameless Shandy was a subversive, all the more effective because he posed as a humble jester (‘alas, poor Yorick!’), and threw off his jibes against authority with a whimsical air. He was profoundly, irretrievably indecorous – not just in the matter of doubles entendres, smut and playing with dirt (‘a naughty boy, and a little apt to dirty his frock,’ said motherly blue stocking Elizabeth Montagu), but in the way he upset hierarchies and categories of meaning. He was an intellectual, but he refused to sweep out his mind, or spring-clean his imagination – and (worse) he persuaded his readers to collude with him in his nastiness and irreverence.
It’s this promiscuous closeness with strangers – on or off the page – that’s perhaps the most striking and extraordinary thing about him. Professor Cash, after patiently tracing and identifying hundreds of friends and contacts, sums it up this way: ‘Sterne had a knack for intimacy, in his letters, his life and his fiction. His letters to his bankers … read as though written to brothers.’
The cumulative effect is close, cloying, a touch repulsive even – a whisper in one’s ear, a breath on one’s neck, a thumb in one’s buttonhole. One of Professor Cash’s most telling exhibits is a caricature in oils by the historical painter John Hamilton Mortimer reproduced on the handsome dustjacket. It shows a boozy, dishevelled and unshaven group of boon companions of the 1760s – all flushed faces, grey jowls, hectic, rolling eyes – with a grinning, emaciated wigless Sterne baring his breast to display the locket that holds the picture of his last chaste and sentimental love, Eliza Draper.
It’s an image that is at once comically congenial and somehow chilling. Sterne was, of course, dying of TB, and he knew it; indeed, he’d been dying all his life a lot more consciously than most of us (he had his first major haemorrhage as a student at Cambridge) and it was that awareness that gave the edge of urgency to his jokes – especially the ones about sex.
Professor Cash is not given to elaborate theorising about Sterne’s subconscious goings-on, but he does point out that the sentimental affairs (and the wretched quarrels with his wife) were not about love (or hate) but the desperate desire for health. Sex ‘straight’ reminded Sterne of his own mortality; only postponed, avoided, played with did it promise life. He regularly compared writing with childbirth (‘I miscarried of my tenth volume’) and he played both father and mother to his own creations. His wife Elizabeth and his daughter Lydia were, in the end, excised like rejected chapters, less real to him than the life on paper.
In effect, and ironically enough, this means that this splendid biography makes him less real, and a lot more distant, than he is in his fiction. In the books he is everyone’s closest friend; here, he is a bit of a monster, a man who bled black ink for posterity, and wrote out his death. There’s a macabre appropriateness about the postscript: Sterne’s body was snatched from the grave for an anatomy lesson almost as soon as he was laid to rest, by those experts in immortality known as resurrection men.
The Letters of Edith Wharton EDITED BY R. W. B. LEWIS AND NANCY LEWIS
EDITH WHARTON’S POWERS OF mobilising people and making things happen extended, famously, far beyond her fiction. Her good friend Henry James pretended awe in the face of her energy, wealth and social appetites and heard in the sound of her car-horn (‘your silver-sounding toot’) an echo of the Last Trump. He consented, of course, to be called back to life every time, but got his revenge by portraying her as a comic figure, a matron of misrule.
This picture was given new depth by the revelations about her passionate affair (at 45) with fellow expatriate journalist and writer W. Morton Fullerton, in R. W. B. Lewis’s 1975 biography; and in this book of the letters he’s able to reveal more by printing letters to Fullerton which came mysteriously to light only in 1980. The intensity of her response to Fullerton took her by surprise (‘you woke me from a long lethargy … all one side of me was asleep’) and so did his absences, mystifications and lies:
Dear, won’t you tell me the meaning of this silence … this aching uncertainty … we might have had together, at least for a short time, a life of exquisite collaborations …
But it was not to be.
Morton seems to have been a practised juggler, who liked to keep several ladies in the air at once, so that Edith found herself, humiliatingly, elaborating a whole love-story round a man who only wanted the occasional intimate episode:
What you wish, apparently, is to take of my life the inmost & uttermost that a woman – a woman like me – can give, for an hour, now & then, when it suits you; & when the hour is over, to leave me out of your mind & out of your life. I think I am worth more than that …
Professor Lewis suggests that these complaints ‘cannot but strike a disquieting note for a reader in the late 1980s’, but I’m not sure why. It isn’t as if this particular problem has dated. It’s true that Edith revealed her vulnerability, but she also copes with it splendidly. In the end, you feel, she proves that she was simply better at loving than Fullerton – more able to rise to the occasion, rather as she did when she set about gruelling war-work six years later in 1914. She did nothing by halves (this was what terrorised James) but she was very good at patching up disasters, and before long she’d rewritten Morton as one of her entourage of friends.
She had already radically rearranged most parts of her life; it only remained to divorce mindless and increasingly manic-depressive Teddy Wharton, who’d married her as ‘Pussy’ Jones back in Old New York and whom she’d long left behind in the senses that counted. She could look back on the ready-made, dull distinction that stifled her so long with brisk aversion: ‘… for 12 years I seldom knew what it was to be, for more than an hour or two of the 24, without an intense feeling of nausea … this form of neurasthenia consumed the best years of my youth … Mais