A dead man in Bond Street.
That’s where we begin.
Not with a birth.
Not with a christening.
Not with a little pink infant in swaddling clothes,
blinking at the candles and wondering what in God’s name he’s let himself in for.
No.
We begin with a dead man in Bond Street.
March 18th, 1768.
A lodging house at 44 Old Bond Street, London.
And upstairs,
dying at the age of 54 – though somehow always seeming both younger and older than that – is one of the oddest,
funniest,
most wayward,
most gloriously unstraight-line writers
who ever put pen to paper.
Laurence Sterne.
Irish-born.
English by career.
London-made by fame.
And if ever a writer deserved a London ending,
he got one.
Because Sterne’s story ends in Bond Street,
is buried in Paddington,
is interrupted by grave-robbers, carted off to Cambridge to be anatomised,
recognised on the slab,
sent back again,
misplaced,
half-lost, and then,
like something out of one of his own books,
reassembled in the 20th century by a determined devotee who rescued what was believed to be his skull.
If that is not a Sterne plot,
I don’t know what is.
It’s untidy. It’s macabre.
It’s absurd. It’s blackly funny.
In other words, it’s perfect.
Now before London swallowed him up and
turned him into literary electricity, Laurence Sterne began life in Clonmel,
County Tipperary,
in November 1713.
An Irish beginning, then.
Which gives us a neat one-two, does it not.
St Patrick’s Day yesterday. Laurence Sterne today.
But his childhood was no soft-focus shamrock affair.
He was an army child.
Perpetually on the move.
Ireland mostly,
but never quite settled,
never quite planted.
A childhood of postings,
shifting ground, impermanence.
Which may help explain the writing.
Because Sterne writes like a man who never entirely believed life stood still long enough to be written down in proper order.
He writes like someone crossing a room full of mousetraps.
Springing sideways.
Doubling back.
Digressing.
Interrupting himself.
Wandering off.
Suddenly remembering something else.
Then, just when you think he’s lost the plot,
producing exactly the point he meant all along.
He’s the master of the digression.
No, more than that.
He’s the great high priest of the happy detour.
And London was made for him.
Because London is not a straight line either.
Nobody comes to London and proceeds tidily
from A to B in
an orderly moral fashion.
London doesn’t permit it.
London sidetracks you.
Distracts you.
Delays you.
Tempts you round a corner. Throws a story in your path. Produces a church,
a coffee house,
a scandal,
a dead queen,
a hanging judge,
a rogue bookseller,
a bishop,
a prostitute,
a prime minister,
a chimney sweep,
and a pie shop before you’ve reached the end of the street.
Sterne would have adored that.
And London adored him right back.
But not at first.
For years he was,
outwardly at least,
a country clergyman in Yorkshire. Sutton on the Forest,
later Coxwold.
A Church of England parson. Sermons.
parish duties.
domestic strains.
money worries.
the whole vicarage shebang.
Not, on the face of it,
the obvious prelude to
literary fireworks.
And then came the explosion.
His annus mirabilis.
Out came the first volumes of Tristram Shandy.
And London went berserk.
Not mildly interested.
Not politely approving.
Berserk.
Because this was not how novels were supposed to behave.
Novels were meant to get on with it.
Begin at the beginning,
proceed to the middle,
arrive at the end,
and not stop to juggle the furniture on the way.
Sterne had other ideas.
Black pages.
Blank pages.
squiggles.
interruptions.
opinions.
asides.
jokes.
bawdry.
philosophy.
mock-seriousness.
pathos.
absurdity.
the lot.
He was literary dynamite in a clerical collar.
And he came to London and became a sensation.
Think of it.
The author from York arrives in the capital and suddenly he’s dining with the great.
Seeing Garrick.
Being painted by Reynolds. Hogarth illustrating his work. Society doors swinging open.
The town talking of little else.
One half praising him to the skies, the other denouncing him as indecent,
improper,
outrageous.
Which, as every Londoner knows, is usually a very good sign.
He had become, in effect,
a literary celebrity
before the term existed.
A rock star in a clerical collar and shoe buckles.
And London was the amplifier.
Because London in the 1760s was where reputation became voltage. If the capital took you up,
you glowed.
If it spat you out,
you went dark.
Sterne glowed.
He dined at court.
He was lionised in drawing rooms. He became a figure.
A presence.
A name.
And not just for Tristram Shandy. His sermons sold too.
Which is delightful.
The naughty clergyman and
the serious divine, somehow inhabiting the same pair of shoes. Sterne was always a mixture. Reverent and irreverent.
tender-hearted and
wickedly suggestive.
sentimental and satirical.
solemn one moment,
sly as a pickpocket the next.
There is nothing unmixed in this world, he wrote.
And there was certainly nothing unmixed about him.
That mixture helps explain his afterlife as well.
Goethe admired him.
Nietzsche went further and all but hoisted him onto Olympus. Nietzsche called him the most liberated spirit of all time.
Which is not bad going for an Irish-born 18th-century clergyman who spent much of his career
in a Yorkshire parish
and finished up dead in Bond Street.
And perhaps that is because Sterne feels oddly modern.
No, scratch that.
He feels postmodern before modernity had properly put its trousers on.
Virginia Woolf loved him.
Joyce nodded in his direction.
So did Beckett.
So did Calvino.
Sterne keeps turning up later,
like a mischievous ancestor nobody can quite keep out of the family portrait.
He’s forever alive because he refused to march in a straight line.
And London, bless it,
is the ideal city for anybody of that persuasion.
Now to the ending.
The splendid,
grotesque,
unmistakably London ending.
On March 18th, 1768,
Laurence Sterne dies
in Old Bond Street.
He’s buried a few days later
in St George’s burial ground, Paddington.
And then,
because London never knows when to stop adding ornaments to a story,
his corpse is stolen.
Probably by resurrection men.
Why?
Because dead bodies were money. Medical schools wanted them. Anatomists needed them.
Graves were not always the peaceful full stop they pretended to be.
So Sterne,
who had spent his literary life being interrupted,
was interrupted one last time.
Snatched from the grave.
Taken to Cambridge.
Prepared for dissection.
And then –
deliciously, improbably – recognised.
As the story goes,
the anatomist
Dr Charles Collignon
identified him,
and the body was returned to London for reburial.
Even in death Sterne could not have a straightforward narrative.
And nearly two centuries later,
in another flourish worthy of the man himself,
what is believed to be his skull-top sawn off by anatomists, no less was recovered and reburied at Coxwold, opposite Shandy Hall.
You could not invent it.
Well, Sterne could have.
But the rest of us would be told it was far-fetched.
And that, I think,
is the point.
Laurence Sterne belonged in London
because London is the capital of the side-door entrance,
the digression,
the comic interruption,
the solemn absurdity,
the high-low mixture,
the wink in the middle of the elegy.
He dies in Bond Street.
He’s buried in Paddington.
He’s stolen to Cambridge.
He’s scattered through literary history.
And here we are,
on the anniversary of his death, still talking about him.
Still following his zigzag line.
Still getting happily,
gloriously,
Sterne-struck.
London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London.
Streets ahead.
Story time.
History time.
And tomorrow,
a very short cast,
but one with a whole lot of clout.
Because in the current issue of the New Statesman,
Andrew Marr says something about one of Stewart Purvis’s walks –
in fact, about London Walks itself – that’s not just praise.
It’s defining.
Until then, here’s to lots of great Londoning, one and all.
See you tomorrow.
Love this whoever wrote it has captured Sterne