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5.0 out of 5 stars
Portrait of the Artist as a Dying Man, October 24, 2003
This review is from: A Sentimental Journey and Continuation of the Bramine's Journal: Volume 6 of the Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne (Hardcover)
Laurence Sterne may have been one of the most peculiar authors who ever lived. Spending most of his life as a provincial Anglican clergyman (albeit a randy one) with a wife he didn't get along with and on whom he cheated compulsively, troubled by the tuberculosis that would eventually kill him, he became famous overnight in his mid-forties with the publication of the first volumes of Tristram Shandy in 1760. While Sterne has never lacked for either admirers or detractors (some of the former are Thomas Jefferson, Friedrich Nietzsche and Virginia Woolf; examples of the latter are Samuel Johnson and William Makepeace Thackeray), he has somehow survived as one of the magnificent oddities of English literature.
Since the 1970s, Sterne's greatest champion has been Dr. Melvyn New of the University of Florida, whose edition of Sterne's Works has become the standard texts of Tristram Shandy and his Sermons. Now Dr. New has added a sixth volume to the series, consisting of A Sentimental Journey and Continuation of the Bramine's Journal.
At the time Sterne began A Sentimental Journey in 1767 (he never finished it -- what we have are the first two volumes of a projected four), he was at a crossroads in his career as a writer. The later volumes of Tristram Shandy had not sold as well or caused the stir of the earlier volumes, and Sterne may have felt that he had taken its strain of satiric ribaldry as far as it could go -- at any rate, he decided to change course, and to indulge in the then-popular mode of fictional pathos. To elicit a furtive tear, rather than a sly guffaw, was now his aim, and whether this was simple careerism or a genuine change of heart is for each reader to decide (although the evidence of the Bramine's Journal, never intended for publication, indicates that the latter was most likely the case).
The text of A Sentimental Journey doesn't present insurmountable difficulties (Sterne, unlike Swift, always scrupulously prepared his works for the press, and in any event Dr. New has the precedent, graciously acknowledged, of Gardner Stout's 1967 University of California Press edition), but the Florida edition, as impeccable as its scholarship is, is more interesting for what it doesn't do than for what it does. Unlike the Stout edition, in which a tiny island of text can be overwhelmed by a tsunami of annotation, New's Florida text is unencumbered by its nonetheless impressive scholarly apparatus, which is printed in the back. Dr. New is that academic rarity -- a scholar who actually gives a damn about the non-scholarly reader. The result, as with the rest of the Florida Sterne, is an edition that manages to have it both ways -- impeccable scholarship that does not overwhelm a text that is presented in a way so that it can be enjoyed for its own sake. Would that there were more editors like him.
Sterne is the poet of nuance (although at times his more earthy side takes over -- at one point he asks a woman hidden from him by a curtain "if she wanted anything," and gets back the reply, "Rien que pisser," which means just what you think it means), and there are times when the more lachrymal sentiments of the late 18th Century, so trendy then, feel strained now. But he sometimes managed to combine his empathy for others with his appreciation of the odd and the grotesque, as when he notices, at the opera comique, a dwarf with his view blocked by a "tall, corpulent German, near seven feet high, who stood directly betwixt him and all possibility of his seeing either the stage or the actors."
Mostly, however, A Sentimental Journey is about the exhilarating minutiae of traveling, unencumbered (as Sterne was at times when he made the journeys in France and Italy that inspired the book) by either wife of child, and moving through, as he mentions several times, a country with which his own was, at that time, at war. "I seldom go to the place I set out for," Sterne comments at one point, and the unpredictability of his peregrinations make the book feel more like life, and less like literature, than most books of his time -- or even ours. He can manage a delicacy of feeling combined with an intricacy of expression that make him seem a precursor of Proust.
The other work contained in the volume, Continuation of the Bramine's Journal (one wishes that Dr. New had been a tad less pedantically accurate and chosen instead the less holographically correct but inarguably more effective title that Sterne biographer Wilbur L. Cross gave it: the Journal to Eliza) is a diary kept by Sterne in the last year of his life and intended for a 23-year-old married woman named Eliza Draper, with whom Sterne had become hopelessly infatuated (an infatuation all the more hopeless since the lady's husband was in Bombay, where Eliza would soon join him). At their parting Sterne began keeping a journal that he assumed would be reciprocated by Eliza, and that at some point they would meet again and share their respective sentiments. Never published during his lifetime, it makes Sterne seem either hopelessly romantic or more than a little pathetic -- depending, I suppose, on one's age and/or gender. At any event, Sterne never saw Eliza again.
Together, these two works of the final year of Sterne's life give us both an impressive and moving Portrait of the Artist as a Dying Man, and Dr. New and the University Press of Florida are to be congratulated for their persistence in putting out, over a period of three decades, so splendid an edition of a classic author. This latest volume more than lives up to the high standards of the previous five, and should be read by anyone even remotely curious about one of the most curious and brilliant authors ever to write in English.
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