On January 29-30, 2014, the English Department will sponsor a Marathon Reading of Laurence Sterne’s novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. For details, or to sign up to read, contact Mike Kowalewski (mkowalew@carleton.edu)
Xmas Shandy, Tim Raylor
York, England; December, 1981: a dark winter afternoon (*1). I had come home from university for the Christmas break and went into town to visit my old English teacher, David Hughes, to talk about books, about what I was studying, and about his latest mountaineering trip.
David Hughes was one of those classic English public-school teachers who would spend the term leading boys through Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Edward Thomas and would then, in the vacations, lead them on perilous trips up Welsh peaks, Lakeland fells, and Scotch mountains, in the most dire conditions—wind, rain, sleet, hail, snow, often all at the same time (*2).
He was an insatiable reader and a fanatical bookman, and on that dark winter afternoon he was brimming over with enthusiasm for a new novel he’d just finished called Midnight’s Children. It had won the Booker Prize. He urged me to read it, telling me it was, inter alia, a fabulous homage to Tristram Shandy.
I knew what he was referring to, but had no very clear idea what he meant. He’d been talking up Sterne’s famous novel for years. We were, after all, in York—where Shandy was first printed, in 1759, and just a few miles south-east of Coxwold, where Sterne was parson (*3). And as a budding student of Eng. Lit. the idea of the book was interesting. But the truth was that I’d tried Tristram Shandy a couple of times as a schoolboy and had, on each attempt, bailed in confusion and dismay. It seemed all dashes and asides, coming from who knew where. I could make neither head nor tail of it. And so I had my doubts about Midnight’s Children.
But when David Hughes told you to read something you didn’t ignore him. I strode down to Godfrey’s (the old bookshop on Stonegate, in the heart of the medieval city) and pondered how an impecunious undergraduate might justify shelling out several pounds for a crisp new copy of this hefty Jonathan Cape hardback. It was then that an ingenious and discreditable scheme came to mind: It was almost Christmas; I had to buy presents for my family . . . .
And so it was that my mother came to acquire a first edition of Midnight’s Children (third printing) (*4). But even so unscrupulous a tergiversator as I couldn’t quite come up with a rationale for reading someone’s present before giving it to them. Which left me with the problem of what to read before Christmas. It was then that I turned, once more, to my all-too pristine Penguin copy of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.
What a difference a couple of years made! —Though maybe the opening of the prior year’s Sloe Gin had something to do with it (*5). Either way, things that had once seemed obscure now leapt off the page. The narrator laughed and button-holed, gabbled and tickled, skipped from points of absurd metaphysics to the filthiest sophomoric cock jokes. Who else would think to begin his life history not at the moment of birth, but at the moment of conception—the very moment, at which his mother interrupts his father by asking a most untimely question?
And from there he moves not forward into a neat, sequential life narrative, but backwards, sideways, upside-down. He plays tricks with the form of the novel and with the physical artifact of the book: a black page mourns the passing of one character; a page is left blank for you to draw your own picture of another. There’s a chapter that lasts only a sentence, and another that goes missing, making the pagination go haywire.
But the book is not cold-heartedly clever; it’s generous and humane, with a cast of endearingly lunatic characters going about their business with genial misapprehension. There’s Walter Shandy, with his fixation on grand names and large noses, whose son, by a series of mishaps, ends up with no nose and the worst name in the world. There’s Widow Wadman and her attempt to find out where, exactly, Uncle Toby was wounded (she knows it’s somewhere in the groin, but is his equipment still in full working order?); and then of course there’s Uncle Toby himself, who spends his days innocently demolishing the Shandy household to find suitable pieces for his scale models of the battlefields of the Nine Years War, and who mistakes the thrust of the Widow’s interest and attempts to show her exactly where: by way of a map of the town of Namur, beneath whose walls, in 1695, he received the wound.
It felt like finding the source for everything I thought funny: Monty Python, Dickens at his zaniest, The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy. Had I been a little less callow I might also have realized that I was reading the progenitor of the postmodern novel (e.g., Beckett, Joyce, Kundera, Calvino, and—yes—Rushdie, who made this very point in his Q&A with Arnab in October). In any event, I was hooked; and I’ve been a keen, if amateur, Shandean ever since.
Nor am I alone. The English Department at Carleton has a strong tradition of Shandyism, both general—our love of quirky humor, our delight in poking fun at pomposity—and particular—the course on Eighteenth-Century Fiction once taught by Vern Bailey, and that on the Rise of the Novel now taught by Jessica Leiman, in which Sterne is properly prominent.
And next term the wider Carleton community will get better acquainted with the world of Sterne because on January 29-30, 2014, the English Department will sponsor a Marathon Reading of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy in honor of the author’s 300th birthday (November 24, 1713—O.K., so we’ll be a couple of months late; but could you really have handled a Marathon on Sunday of finals week? And a bit of temporal slippage is only apt for this novel of stopped clocks and misplaced time.)
So prepare for Shandy! Read the novel. Watch the movie (starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon). Sign up to read a chapter. Or just look forward to hearing, on a cold winter night, the best Cock and Bull story ever.
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*1. York is quite northerly (Lat. 53.9583°); in mid-December the sun sets at about 3:45pm. But the dark starts closing in right after lunch.
*2. My most vivid memory of these trips is of a day in late-December of, perhaps, 1977. We were stuck in an icy gulley on the way up Glyder Fach in Snowdonia and caught in a raging blizzard. I remember watching from below, at the end of a ragged line of around twenty shivering, bobble-hatted boys, as David hacked steps with a wooden-hafted ice-axe: hair frozen into a white brillo pad, a woolen tartan shirt (sleeves rolled to the elbows), and gaily intoning Pooh’s “hum,” “The more it snows | (Tiddely-pom),” against the wind. He died late in 2011, of bowel cancer, having suffered from stomach pains for some time but neglected to see a doctor. He was, we would now say, “Old School.” There’s a nice tribute to him by the novelist Justin Hill, and a text of one of his Audenesque poems (itself a tribute to our school chemistry teacher, Barry Daniel, who died in 1986 trying to pull a pupil out of a crevasse on a Norwegian glacier), at http://justinhillauthor.blogspot.com/2012/01/stairlift.html
*3. Coxwold is notable for Sterne’s parsonage, Shandy Hall; for its parish church with a preposterous triple-decker pulpit and communion-rail shaped like a protuding tongue; and for what used to be a particularly fine pub, The Fauconberg Arms. See: http://www.laurencesternetrust.org.uk/shandy-hall.php
*4. I had hoped to get it signed by the author on his recent visit to campus; but on returning to Yorkshire last summer and ransacking my mother’s bookshelves I found she had given it away, along with all her other hardbacks. I hope the librarian of the York District Hospital NHS Trust takes good care of it.
*5. We used to make Sloe Gin every winter by soaking sloes picked from our blackthorn hedge in Gordon’s, adding sugar. The longer it’s left, the better it gets: see http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2011/oct/12/how-to-make-sloe-gin