This is Lorence:
A Narrative of the Reverend Laurence Sterne, by Lodwick Hartley.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1943.
DID the chaise break down under the broiling sun in a treeless waste near Toulouse, as Sterne wrote in a letter to his banker, or was it much earlier and more amusing, near Lyons, as he says in Tristram Shandy, or were there two accidents? And why did he say in that book he decided to dash to France so suddenly it never entered his mind that England and France were at war, when plainly he had planned it long before, and had to get leave from his Bishop and ask for a safe conduct from Mr. Pitt? To say nothing of a twenty-pound loan from Mr. David Garrick. Did he really get into bed with that long procession of shadowy ladies, from Catherine Fourmentelle early to Eliza Draper late, or did he just think and talk and write about it and make a great display of sentiment and then back out more or less gracefully at the right, or wrong, moment? Exactly how diabolic were those nightlong frolics at Skelton Castle with his old friend Hall-Stevenson and the other demoniacs, squires and parsons as they mostly were? Were they imitating feebly the goings-on of the Medmenham Monks, from which now and then John Wilkes strayed over to Skelton? Did he actually leave his mother to die in the workhouse (Byron thought so, and many before him and since), or did he care for her last days? Was his wife’s belief, for a time, that she was the Queen of Bohemia due to his neglect and infidelities, or was it a strain of paranoia in that ill-starred mind? Was his mother really low Irish as he said, or member of a respectable Lancashire family? Just how deeply in love is a man who writes, through the years, substantially the same letters to a series of women, sometimes keeping copies for himself? Just where does truth end and fiction begin in Sterne’s account of himself in Tristram Shandy and The Sentimental Journey?
Mr. Hartley wrestles manfully with these and a hundred other trivial or dubious or off-color questions of Laurence Sterne’s career with a discretion and strait regard for the records that might surprise his subject, who, being a novelist, was hampered by no such scruples. An immense amount of devoted study and trained research appears to have gone into this fairly short book, which handles with ease a baffling complexity of detail and carries the story along swiftly and with concentration on several planes at once. It is only the tone I find a little troublesome at times; such a balancing of the evidence for and against, such a leveling down of both the good and the evil in the history of Sterne, almost succeeds in smoothing the man away. There is a smack of prudishness at times, small biased hints of moral disapproval dragged in by the ears as if under some compulsion not the author’s own. Mr. Hartley confesses that one of his aims was to make the book palatable to the lay, or general, reader in the hope that this mysterious being may be encouraged to seek out Tristram Shandy and read it for himself. I never saw a general reader, but I am convinced he exists, so many books are written for him. It is a mistake, just the same; general reader should not be pampered in any such way; Laurence Sterne should not be arranged to advantage or disadvantage for his view; he should be made to take his chances along with the rest of us, not only with the available truths of life but also with the very best work the author can do. For this book, in spite of its placating foreword, will be a stiff introduction indeed to a reader who does not already know something of the period.
For one who knows Tristram Shandy, This Is Lorence may bring to mind again how melancholy a cloud lies over all the recorded life of Laurence Sterne, even his triumphs and frolics, and how clear and merry the light shed by Tristram Shandy. That book contains more living, breathing people you can see and hear, whose garments have texture between your finger and thumb, whose flesh is knit firmly to their bones, who walk about their affairs with audible footsteps, than any other one novel in the world, I do believe. Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, Yorick and Mrs. Yorick, the Widow Wadman, Bridget, Dr. Slop, Susannah, Obadiah, the infant Tristram hovering between breeches and tunics, all live in one house with floorboards under their boot soles, a roof over their heads, the fires burning and giving off real smoke, cooking smells coming from the kitchen, real weather outside and air blowing through the windows. When Dr. Slop cuts his thumb real blood issues from it, and everybody has a navel and his proper distribution of vital organs. One hangs around the place like an enchanted ghost, all eyes and ears for fear of missing something. The story roams apparently at random all over creation, following the living thoughts of these human beings in their infinitely varied experiences, memories, points of view. Sparks of association flash in showers at the slightest collision of temperaments. Every word spoken gets its instant response in the hearer; they are all intensely interested in each other and everything else under heaven all the time. Little clashes of wills lead to the most complicated roundabouts of personal history, anecdotes, opinion; a mere gesture is enough to set up a whole new train of thought and deed in these people, who live and go about their affairs every instant, not just at moments chosen by the author when it suits his convenience. Meanwhile, steadily, like time passing visibly before your eyes, Uncle Toby’s unbroken devoted occupation with his campaigns, and the building of his fortified town, go on, accompanied by the most remarkable theories of military strategy and a running comment on the science of warfare, full of deep and sly satire. The celebrated comic improprieties go on too, a running fire of double talk punctuated by episodes such as that of the hot chestnut, the Abbess and the Novice who divided the sinful words which move a balky mule, the courtship of the Widow Wadman, the accidental circumcision of the newly born Tristram. It all has the most illusive air of having been dropped upon the paper by a flying pen which never stopped long enough for the author to read what he had written. Sterne drew on a page a few little graphs of his progress in Tristram Shandy; they are amusing but also accurate. That lightness was achieved with the intensity and painstakingness of a spider spinning its web, during those twenty obscure years as parson, along with the farming, and the philandering, and the wife driven distracted with jealousy, and the breaking blood vessels in his lungs, and the rows among his large family connection, and the local politics and the jollifications at Skelton Hall and the hunting and the August racing season at York.
Then his life work was published, a book or so at a time, and he went up modestly to London in the wake of Squire Crofts, a local worthy who paid the expenses of the trip, and there found scandalous fashionable success and enjoyed it enormously. Dr. Johnson thought his sermons “froth,” Oliver Goldsmith found him dull, the Bishop of Gloucester called him “an irrecoverable scoundrel,” but Sir Joshua Reynolds painted his portrait, David Garrick carried him into the orbit of the theater, the extremely mixed society around the Duke of York found him fascinating, for there was nothing they liked better than the cloven hoof peeping from beneath a cassock; he was in the dear tradition of the worldly abbé, and could write it all down, besides. Religion in any formal sense, and I greatly doubt any sense at all, he had not, and with some relief he ceased to feign it. He took some pains to be cultivated by respectable society, but what he loved best among even that was the fringe of wealthy young rakehells and their desperate sports. The rest is flight from death and pursuit of fame and pleasure: he “met” most of the great of his time, but his happiest days seem to have been a few weeks (when he had already the look of a dancing skeleton) of rioting around Paris with John Wilkes, interrupted, alas, by another blood vessel breaking at the height of the fun. As for women, to whom he gave so much attention, and who responded infallibly in their various ways, there is no fathoming his feelings or his motives. He appears to have squandered his whole available fund of human love upon his daughter Lydia, a headless, flighty creature ruled by her mother; judged by her story, she was the fine flower of all the weaknesses of every branch of all his families, a notably faulty lot. Even the highfalutin affair with Eliza Draper died, as all his fancies died, of his own weariness with his own role in them.
Mr. Hartley makes all the ladies rather duller than they may have been, even, but his wife must be admitted as a total loss. She was a homely woman whose husband made cruel caricatures of her, and wrote to a friend that he grew more sick and tired of her every day. She loved pleasure too, and had had a dull dog’s life of it for years. She was delighted to get to France, and her ruses, and stratagems to be allowed to stay on there, with her daughter and without her husband, would have been pitiable if they had not succeeded. But they did. Sterne died in lodgings in London with the nurse and landlady present, and a footman sent to inquire after him by John Crauford of Errol, who was giving a dinner to Garrick, Lord Ossory, David Hume, the Earl of March, Lord Roxburgh, the Duke of Grafton, and Mr. James, husband of Anne—the gay and good-hearted, who visited Sterne almost constantly in his last days. The footman reported to the waiting guests: “He was just a-dying. . . he said: now it is come. He put up his hand as if to stop a blow, and died in a minute.”
His friends were saddened, but went on with their dinner. His wife and daughter and Eliza Draper were severally bitterly inconvenienced by his death. This and much more is in the book, but where is the real Laurence Sterne, the one who wrote Tristram Shandy? That wingèd skull seems to have made his getaway again, taking his main secret with him.