London prostitutes, it is said, approached potential customers for a time by asking them if they wanted their clocks wound up. And while Sterne may have written for fame, not money, he got both, selling his copyrights for a lucrative sum. If it is strictly true that the mild prosperity Sterne enjoyed from -156- his clerical livings meant he didn't need this money to survive, he would undeniably enjoy spending it.
What is striking about this success story is what it reveals about Sterne's ambition to be 'famous.' Fama is a goddess that writers have always worshiped, but, in Sterne's case, the emphasis is different. For the fame he achieved in the early months of 1760 seems to have had little to do with the traditional idea of artistic immortality, the desire that his powerful rhyme should outlive the gilded monuments of princes. The voice that touched Sterne's trembling ear was not that of Phoebus, but of a living, laughing body of admirers, pressing him with invitations to dinner, huddling to warm themselves by his aura. Sterne may well have had traditional notions of writerly fame in mind when he made his remark, but by the time he found himself at the center of London's admiring gaze, he had fervently embraced a more immediate role as that characteristically modern phenomenon, the celebrity: someone whom people want to know (or know about) now.
Sterne's celebrity, while it originated in the popularity of his novel and is therefore in part a creation of the marketplace, cannot be explained in terms of sales alone. From a modern point of view, an eighteenth-century writer did not have to sell very many copies in order to enjoy status as a best-seller. Fielding once defined «Nobody» as 'All the people in Great Britain, except about 1200,' and by that yardstick, Sterne-as well as fellow best-selling authors like Fielding and Richardson-could be said to be read by almost no one. (England's population in 1761 was a little over six million.) The various installments of Tristram Shandy-after the initial two volumes in 1760, he brought out further two-volume continuations in 1761, 1762, and 1765, and he brought out the last volume, the ninth, in 1767- had press runs of four thousand, and that figure appears to be close to the final sales for each. Richardson's sales were comparable, and even Tom Jones, a blockbuster by the standards of Georgian England, did not exceed ten thousand copies sold. The new kind of writing, the novel, was «popular» only in a special sense; even taking into account the existence of lending libraries, it was entertainment only for a small portion of the populace. The small size of the audience is brought into sharp focus by an extraordinary statement by Arthur Cash, Sterne's most recent biographer: '[Sterne] had probably been introduced personally to about half the people who bought his books, and many had become his personal friends.' -157-
If the most popular novelists had comparable-and by our standards, relatively small-sales, what separates Sterne from his contemporaries? Why is he the first literary celebrity in England? Neither Fielding nor Richardson, to take the two most prominent examples, became celebrities in the way Sterne did. Fielding was well known, but as a novelist was never the focus of public attention and curiosity as Sterne was. Richardson was notoriously vain about his work; he is, after all, the one Samuel Johnson summed up so memorably: 'That fellow Richardson could not be contented to sail quietly down the stream of reputation, without longing to taste the froth from every stroke of the oar.' But Richardson was a shy man, who generally preferred letters to face-toface encounters. What he wanted- and plenty of it-was praise. Sterne's contemporary fame, what I am calling his celebrity, seems to be a function neither of his sales nor of the public evaluation of his work (the good reviews of the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy gave way to generally unkind notices thereafter). What the historical record shows, rather, is a remarkably personal bond between Sterne and his devotees, as Cash's comment above suggests. They wanted not just the book but the man behind the book (one reader said, 'I'd ride fifty miles just to smoak a pipe with him'); he desired not just an audience with the money to buy what he wrote and like what they read, but faces, individuals, who wanted to know him.
Bishop Warburton, a lion of letters who liked Tristram Shandy on its first appearance and a man who tried hard to make himself Sterne's patron (an overture Sterne rebuffed with little grace), dismissed the novelist at the time of his death in a revealing way. Sterne was, he said, 'the idol of the higher mob.' Warburton was clearly bitter that Sterne had refused the velvet collar of patronage, but the comment is revealing in other ways, too. It shows one influential but conservative literary figure's incredulity in the face of the new image of the writer that Sterne embodied-impatient with patrons and intoxicated by the spotlight of wider attention. But the intended insult falls flat. Sterne would have embraced Warburton's remark, the essence of it anyway, if not the tone. To be such an «idol» was exactly what he wanted, and it is that desire that separates him from his popular contemporaries. But one important question at the heart of this issue is still hanging: how did Tristram Shandy-a novel, words on a page-make all this happen? (A Sentimental Journey was not published until very shortly before Sterne's death.) Sterne's vanity and ambition did not make him a celebrity; a book did. How? — 158- The simple answer is that, in Tristram Shandy, Sterne was being perfectly honest when he described the work as 'a portrait of myself.' Sterne wrote about himself, and many of those first readers, such as the man who would ride fifty miles to share a pipe, liked what they read. But the whereabouts of Sterne's self are harder to determine. There is plenty of evidence, on the one hand, to suggest that those first readers freely associated Sterne with Tristram, and even the briefest look at contemporary accounts of the author reveals that he was most often referred to, not as 'Laurence Sterne,' but as his character. As Johnson reports his one meeting with Sterne: 'Tristram Shandy introduced himself; and Tristram Shandy had scarcely sat down,' and so forth. Sterne apparently liked being called Tristram, but-to complicate matters-he also encouraged the identification of himself with Yorick, who is, after all, the clergyman in the novel. When Sterne published his sermons in the wake of his initial burst of fame, he titled them Sermons of Mr. Yorick, and he went on, at the end of his career, to make Yorick the narrator of A Sentimental Journey. Clearly, he promoted the identification of his narrator/characters with himself, but he did so in a complex way.
The situation is further muddied if we try to specify more precisely the nature of the connection between the novelistic lives of Tristram and Yorick and the real one of Sterne. To put it simply, there is almost no connection. Yorick is a clergyman to be sure, and both Yorick and Tristram travel, as Sterne did, on the continent; Sterne seems to have pilloried real people of his acquaintance; the sermon Trim reads in volume 2 of Tristram Shandy is one Sterne actually preached. But such autobiographical gleanings are few. Nothing important that happens to Tristram-not the tribulations of his birth and naming, not the constellation of family and servants, not the incidents of either his or Yorick's travels-ever happened to Sterne. Moreover, surprisingly little of Tristram Shandy is even about Tristram; it's about Walter or Toby, and much of the action (even the last incident in the book) takes place long before Tristram is born.
Thus, the harder we look, the odder things get. Sterne is not, in the usual manner of autobiographical novels as we have come to know them, writing about himself, fictionalizing however superficially his own experiences. Instead, he has imagined a world, populated it with people, and invented incidents and conversation out of airy nothingness. And yet, stubbornly and undeniably, both of his fictions are pro-159- jections of Sterne, and not just in the narrow sense that all novels are expressions of a peculiar individual reality. Even Flaubert, after all, the theorist of the artist-god who remains wholly removed from the fiction he creates, admitted in a very Sterne-like way that Madame Bovary was just himself. But that was a deathbed confession; Sterne's readers all knew that Tristram «was» his author, but in what sense?
We will look more closely at the texture of Sterne's fiction in the next section, but for now it will perhaps suffice to say that what Sterne conveys of himself is his voice, especially if we take «voice» to be one of our culture's principal metonyms of 'personality.' Tristram Shandy is largely made up of talk, characters telling stories, arguing with each other, passing the time; but, far more than this, it consists of a voice, Tristram's, talking to us. Listen to two passages, chosen more or less at random:
As for the clergy-No-if I say a word against them, I'll be shot.-I have no desire, — and besides, if I had, — I durst not for my soul touch upon the subject, — with such weak nerves and spirits, and in the condition I am in at present, 'twould be as much as my life was worth, to deject and contrist myself with so sad and melancholy an account, — and therefore, 'tis safer to draw a curtain across, and hasten from it, as fast as I can, to the main and principal point I have undertaken to clear up. (Volume 3, chapter 20)
'It is with Love as with Cuckoldom'-the suffering party is at least the third, but generally the last in the house who knows any thing about the matter: this comes, as all the world knows, from having half a dozen words for one thing; and so long, as what in this vessel of the human frame, is Love-may be Hatred, in that-Sentiment half a yard higher-and Nonsense-no, Madam, — not there-I mean at the part I am now pointing to with my forefinger-how can we help ourselves? (Volume 3, chapter 4)
The voice is urbane, yet vulnerable, apparently spontaneous, amusingly disjointed, running always close to the edge of one scandal or another, ready at all times to embrace innuendo. Above all, it is a performing voice, and
