Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives

by John Sutherland

  FN

  Samuel Johnson

  MRT

  Rasselas

  Biog

  P. Martin, Samuel Johnson: A Biography (2008)

  7. John Cleland 1709–1789

  A Book I disdain to defend, and wish, from my Soul, buried and forgot. Cleland’s description of Fanny Hill, his story of a ‘Woman of Pleasure’

  Cleland was, for a novelist (not to say, a writer of dirty books), exceptionally well born. His father, a former army officer of distinguished Scottish lineage, later a civil servant, was a friend of Alexander Pope’s. His mother’s family were wealthy Anglicized Dutch Jewish merchants who moved in high literary and political circles. Had Cleland done nothing in life he would probably have been passingly footnoted in biographies of the worthies of his time. Had he been himself luckier, or less indecent, he might even have been numbered among those worthies.

  Young John spent two years at Westminster School before being expelled. The offence is unknown; delinquency most likely. Over the years of his adolescence one surmises that he was no stranger to London’s ‘women of pleasure’, about whom he was later to write so knowingly. But there may well have been some serious disgrace. Aged twenty-one he was packed off to India, to serve for twelve years as a soldier, and later an administrator, in the East India Company. He returned to London in 1741, as his father was dying. The Clelands had once been well off, but during the 1740s, John Cleland’s fortunes waned. He had no luck in trade. In 1748, he was arrested for debts of almost £1,000, and spent a year in the Fleet prison.

  Debt drives the pen, and in jail he wrote Fanny Hill. The first volume of the ‘memoirs of a woman of pleasure’ was published in November 1748, the second in February 1749. The author was paid £20 for the copyright. Legend has it that the publishers gained as much as £10,000 by the bargain. Who sprung Cleland from clink is not known. The composition of Fanny Hill behind bars, as a kind of extended masturbation fantasy (a ‘Wanker’s Opera’), by a man denied his doxies, is a pretty anecdote. It may be prettier than true. Twenty years later, Cleland boasted to James Boswell that he had actually written the work in Bombay, in his twenties, as a wager to prove that one could write erotica without ever using a single item of foul language. It seems likely that he revised a pre-existing manuscript in the boring hours of his monastic incarceration.

  In late 1749, Cleland was arrested, along with his publisher, and charged with ‘corrupting the King’s subjects’ with his scandalous novel. In court, Cleland ‘from my soul’ wished the work ‘buried and forgot’. He got off. An authorised, ‘expurgated’ Fanny Hill came out in 1750; a pirate edition, in 1751, featured an interpolated homosexual scene (probably not from Cleland’s pen) which alarmed the authorities further. According to his obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine, Cleland was awarded a pension of £100 a year from the public purse, on condition that he wrote no more corrupting works. This is unlikely – although he may well have received financial assistance from his friends in high places, and some sage warning to mind his step. It was no longer a libertine age.

  Cleland was, for the remainder of his life, a productive, unpornographic and consistently unsuccessful Grub Street author. Riding on Fanny Hill’s notoriety, he published the novels Memoirs of a Coxcomb in 1751 and The Woman of Honour in 1768. They neither offended, nor amused, nor sold. He wrote plays (David Garrick was a friend), none of which made him a penny. The promisingly titled Tombo-Chiqui, or, The American Savage (1758) did not even make it to the stage. His verse satires failed, as did his eccentric treatises on medicine, language (he discerned a lexical connection between Welsh and Hebrew), and politics. He grew peevish in later life, falling out with friends. He accused Laurence Sterne of trading in pornography; which is rather like Larry Flynt taking a high moral tone with Hugh Hefner. All the while he could never shake off the unwanted fame of being the author of the infamous Memoirs. He lived by himself, never married, and had the reputation of being a ‘Sodomite’.

  Fanny Hill; or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, as published in 1748–9, takes the form of a confessional letter, describing the heroine’s ‘progress’, and was clearly designed to contradict the joyless moralism of Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress (1732) and to mock the timidly parsimonious reference to sex in Defoe’s ‘whore’s autobiography’, Moll Flanders (1722), both of which aims Fanny Hill achieves triumphantly. The name is a somewhat laboured pun on ‘Veneris mons’ – Venus’s hill. It is not clear whether ‘fanny’ was, then as now, street slang for quim. Fanny is born in a small village in Lancashire, ‘of parents extremely poor, and, I piously believe, extremely honest’. When they die of smallpox, the pubescent Fanny makes her way to London. Here she is taken under the wing of the procuress, Mrs Brown. She is introduced into the sensual pleasures of her body (which never fail to delight her more than her clients) by a fellow inmate of the house, Phoebe. Mrs Brown tries to sell Fanny’s maidenhead to an ill-favoured customer, but the girl declines to cooperate. Eventually (after a number of exciting voyeuristic episodes) she loses her virginity to a ‘young Adonis’ called Charles (a gentleman – well endowed financially and physically). Her ecstasies of pain and pleasure are recalled with a barrage of florid but ‘modest’ euphemism.

  Fanny becomes the mistress of a rich merchant, Mr H—. But, bored by the condition of kept woman, she seduces a manservant (even better endowed than Charles) and is cast out with fifty guineas. So ends the first volume. The second opens with Fanny now the occupant of a brothel run by the good-natured Mrs Cole. Finally she is enriched by connection with an old and grateful benefactor. Now prosperous, and just nineteen, she is united with the devirginating Charles and becomes a respectable wife and mother. As she informs her correspondent on the last page: ‘If I have painted Vice in all its gayest colours … it has been solely in order to make the worthier, the solemner Sacrifice of it to Virtue.’ Hypocritical minx.

  Fanny Hill sold steadily and clandestinely over the following centuries. The fact that the novel contains no four-letter words and is elaborately ‘polite’ in its descriptions of sex gave it a perverse underground respectability. As a schoolboy, I read a much thumbed copy, printed abysmally in Tangier. (‘I wanked over it four times last night,’ said the white-faced friend who passed it on to me.) The novel was successfully prosecuted in London in 1963 (following the Lady Chatterley acquittal in 1960), but subsequently slipped back into print where it now enjoys the respectability of a place in the World’s Classics and Penguin Classics lists. A BBC-TV version, adapted by Andrew Davies in 2007, attracted an audience of seven million.

  FN

  John Cleland

  MRT

  Fanny Hill

  Biog

  W. H. Epstein, John Cleland, Images of a Life (1974)

  8. Laurence Sterne 1713–1768

  I wrote not to be fed but to be famous. Sterne, in a letter

  The two most playful novelists in English literature, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and Laurence Sterne (i.e. Lewis Carroll and Parson Yorick) were clergymen of the national church. As a doctrine, Anglicanism has generally – unlike more severe theologies – been tolerant of secular literature, even novels. Sterne embarked on them late in life, as the easy-going holder of three livings. It might be said he was bounced into novel-writing, impelled by his desires to be both famous and mischievous. Sterne’s life was, in shape, one long ricochet – and, at the same time, a desperate race with the tubercular bacillus, that occupational hazard (and, arguably, occupational stimulus) of great writers from Keats to Orwell. In Tristram Shandy, Sterne will occasionally interrupt his gamesomeness to inform the reader how many dozen drops of blood his lungs have just expelled.

  Sterne’s father was a junior officer in the British army. His rank did not reflect his ability; senior commissions at this period had to be purchased, not earned. He saw action with Marlborough in that most pointless of conflicts, the War of the Spanish Succession. Roger Sterne (‘a smart little man,’ Laurence called him) was chronically im
pecunious but well connected, with family roots in the Yorkshire gentry and the Church of England. The grandest connection – one to be of great assistance to Laurence – was a grandfather who had been Archbishop of York in the late seventeenth century. Ensign Sterne married the widow of a fellow officer, Agnes Sterne (‘debt’ was involved, according to Sterne) and there were subsequently seven children. Sterne’s family life – natal and married – would be emotionally cold and his mother, a chronically improvident woman, the source of lifelong embarrassment. For a while in Dublin she ran a school for seamstresses. In later life (before her death, in 1759) she harassed her son – on one occasion, in 1751, from a debtors’ jail.

  Despite the end of the war in 1714, it was a lively time for the British Army. Sterne was born in Clonmel, Co. Tipperary, and his first ten years were largely passed in temporary quarters in Ireland, wherever his father was next posted. Stability and direction entered Sterne’s life at the age of ten when he was sent to live with his wealthy uncle Richard, in Yorkshire. Here he received eight years of excellent school education. His father, whom he had never really known, died in 1731, as his schooldays ended. He had served gallantly in the defence of Gibraltar but engaged himself on a foolish duel with a fellow officer (the argument, bizarrely, was over a goose, according to Laurence), sustaining a serious sword wound which led to his death.

  The tender depiction of Tristram Shandy’s father (by far the most described character in the novel) and Uncle Toby’s ‘obscure hurt’ may be filial memorials. Laurence’s principal bequest from his father – other than a useful surname – was a lifelong nostalgia for a military career he would never have. As Thackeray (a half-admirer) elegantly put it:

  Trim’s montero cap, and Le Fevre’s sword, and dear Uncle Toby’s roquelaure, are doubtless reminiscences of the boy, who had lived with the followers of William and Marlborough, and had beat time with his little feet to the fifes of Ramillies in Dublin barrack-yard, or played with the torn flags and halberds of Malplaquet on the parade-ground at Clonmel.

  As an adolescent Sterne already had those feet on the rungs of patronage – a tricky means of ascension at the period, but necessary for those without other advantages than ‘friends’. Physically frail, the army was out of the question. The Church was the only gentlemanly alternative – as a career, never a vocation (leave that to religious ‘enthusiasts’). In 1733, family connection secured him a place at Jesus College Cambridge as a sizar (a student whose charges were remitted in return for ‘fagging’ for more advantaged undergraduates). He was supported by the Archbishop Sterne scholarship, endowed in the name of his ancestor who had been Master of the College. At Cambridge he met the fellow Yorkshireman who would be his bosom friend through life, John Hall-Stevenson, ‘Eugenius’ in Tristram Shandy. In later life, Hall-Stevenson’s Skelton Hall (‘Crazy Castle’) would be a second home for Sterne. It was at Cambridge that he suffered his first forecast of early death. He woke one morning to find that a blood vessel had burst in his lungs. ‘I bled the bed full,’ he observed laconically.

  At university, in addition to steeping himself in the philosophy of Locke (the key, to perpetrate a feeble pun, to his novel), Sterne methodically absorbed the encyclopaedic store of miscellaneous learning which ornaments his later writing. On graduation and ordination family connections with another friendly uncle (Jacques Sterne, a high church dignitary at York) got him, in his mid-twenties, a living at Sutton-on-the-Forest, a village eight miles north of York. He would occasionally preach at the Minster, although his fame in that line was twenty years in the future.

  His first public writing was as a pamphleteer, writing in the Whig interest. It got him both liked and disliked (something that never troubled him). He married well in 1741, choosing as his wife Elizabeth Lumley, whose family, like his, was well connected with the Yorkshire gentry. The couple had one surviving daughter, Lydia, of whom Sterne was fond, but the marriage, after an idyllic few years, was brought to the point of breakdown (nervous breakdown, that is, on Elizabeth’s part) when he was discovered in bed with one of his wife’s maids.

  Why, in his late forties, Sterne should have embarked on his novel has never been entirely clear. What is clear is that it was a difficult time in his life. The first two books of Tristram Shandy were composed in Yorkshire the same year ‘under greatest heaviness of heart’. Sterne was pressed for money; his wife, maddened by his sexual delinquencies, had been temporarily committed to an asylum. His own health was poor, as was that of Lydia. The London publisher, Dodsley, to whom he submitted a sample of this speculative work, suggested fairly radical rewriting and something different from the initial Rabelaisian fantasia on encyclopaedism and more ‘Cervantick’.

  The first two volumes with no great expectation of continuation, were co-published at York and in London in 1759. Sterne himself picked up some of the expense. As sometimes happens, and is usually hard to explain, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman took off like a rocket. Sterne helped manipulate its word-of-mouth appeal, but the more likely explanation for its success is that the world, more specifically London, was ready for such a book. The reading public was bored and wanted novelty. If so, Tristram fitted the bill. As reprint followed reprint, Dodsley promptly quintupled his offer for two sequel volumes to £250. William Pitt, no less, was recruited as the dedicatee for the third volume – that which sees, at long last, the birth of the hero and the start (it is forlornly predicted) of the narrative.

  A literary lion now, Sterne was painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds and enriched his private life with a glamorous London mistress, the young French singer Catherine Fourmantelle (‘Jenny’ in the books). It was more wormwood for the maddened Mrs Sterne, who can have taken no pleasure in her husband’s overnight fame. On the strength of its earnings he was able to live in higher style in his new living at Coxwold, nicknamed ‘Shandy Hall’.

  Technically what Tristram Shandy bequeathed to English fiction was immediacy – ‘writing to the moment’. His sign manual is the ‘dash’ – typically a ‘5 em’ thing which lubricates the frictionless pace of narrative (speeding up one’s reading in the process). Tristram Shandy, with its expressive typography (super large capitals, different fonts, the creative use of white space and blocked pages) is a tribute to the growing skill of the mid-eighteenth century London printing trade. The fluidity Sterne aimed at was that of speech. ‘Writing,’ he wrote, ‘when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.’

  He did not have long left to converse with the world. While seeing the fifth and sixth volume of Tristram Shandy through the press, in 1761, he suffered his worst ever haemorrhage of the lungs. Recuperation in the warm climates of France and Italy was prescribed. Over the next few years these sunny excursions to nowhere in particular would solidify as Sterne’s second great book, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, by Mr. Yorick. Half-travel book, half-egotising, it codified the period’s cult of sentimentality – a vein even more lucratively exploited by Oliver Goldsmith in The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). Sentimentalism was one of the ways in which Sterne changed the psychology of his age. Whether his sermons (sell-out occasions when he delivered them in fashionable London pulpits) were as efficacious on the morality of his time is doubtful. But they proved another source of income.

  And he needed income. A life of grand touring was expensive, and Sterne’s style of life at home was now lavish. Tristram Shandy was in its ninth volume as his life drew to a close. His last months were consumed by consumption and a passionate late-life love affair with a married woman, Eliza Draper. The Journal to Eliza (modelled on Swift’s Journal to Stella) is his last work, an exercise in stylised ‘spiritual adultery’. He was unfaithful to Eliza, though, as to all the women in his life. He died after a trip to London on publishing business in the company of Hall-Stevenson. In a macabre postlude, Sterne’s corpse was stolen from its resting place and recognised – just before dismemberment – on a medical school dis
section table at Cambridge: the body was reinterred. The skull was then disinterred in the 1960s from the mass grave in which Sterne’s remains had been buried and reinterred, yet again in Coxwold. As was observed, it could be seen as payback for all the Yorick jokes Sterne had perpetrated.

  Critical opinion about Sterne will forever be divided. A novel which begins with coitus interruptus and features characters called ‘Kysarcius’ was not designed to please moralists. Samuel Richardson found the work ‘gross’ – although he granted it was not sexually ‘inflaming’. No maidenheads were put at risk by young bucks reading Sterne. F. R. Leavis, while banishing Tristram Shandy from the Great Tradition of English fiction, summed up a pervasive line of objection with his stern verdict: ‘irresponsible (and nasty) trifling’.

  The Victorians in general disliked him. Thackeray (who none the less learned some useful narrative tricks from Tristram) was harsh in his judgement on the unmanliness of Sterne the man: ‘he used to blubber perpetually in his study, and finding his tears infectious, and that they brought him a great popularity, he exercised the lucrative gift of weeping; he utilised it, and cried on every occasion. I own that I don’t value or respect much the cheap dribble of those fountains.’ Critics of a traditional mind find Sterne irritatingly eccentric. Hence Dr Johnson’s strikingly wrong prediction to Boswell: ‘Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.’ In his authoritative study, The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt excludes Sterne on the grounds of his inherent ‘negativity’. He is always demonstrating what fiction can’t do. This negativity is hilariously bemoaned by Tristram in his famous rumination on progression and digression, in Book IV: