Written Lives

by Javier Marías

  Things did not go entirely to plan. Mishima went back into the office and prepared to commit hara-kiri. He had asked his right-hand man and possible lover, Masakatsu Morita, to curtail his suffering by decapitating him with the precious sword as soon as he, Mishima, had disembowelled himself. But Morita (who was also going to commit hara-kiri afterwards) failed no fewer than three times, cutting, instead, deep into Mishima’s shoulders, back and neck, but failing to sever his head. Another of the acolytes, Furu-Koga, more skilled and less nervous, snatched the sword from him and carried out the decapitation himself. Then he did the same with Morita, who hadn’t been up to the task in the first place and had only managed to make a shallow scratch across his own belly with his dagger. The two heads lay on the carpet. Mishima was forty-five and, theatrical to the last, had, it is said, delivered his latest novel to his publisher that very morning. On one occasion, he had said that hara-kiri was “the ultimate act of masturbation”. His father found out what had happened from the television. When he heard the news of the attack on Ichigaya, he thought: “Oh, no, now I’m going to have to go and apologise to the police and everyone else.” When he heard about the rest, the hara-kiri and the decapitation, he confessed later on: “I didn’t feel particularly surprised: my brain just rejected the information.”

  Laurence Sterne at the End

  ALTHOUGH HE CAME from a good enough family, with an archbishop among his forebears, it was Laurence Sterne’s fate to be the son of one of its most unfortunate members, Roger, who, having chosen a career in the army, never rose above the rank of standard-bearer. Roger Sterne travelled ceaselessly with his battered regiment, accompanied by his wife and their variable number of children: variable because some were always being born and others were always dying; Laurence, who came into the world in Ireland, was one of the few permanent ones. His father, then, left him almost nothing but the undeniable sense of humour which he possessed and displayed to the end: during the siege of Gibraltar in 1731, he got embroiled in a duel with a comrade, provoked, apparently, by some absurd argument over a goose. The fight between Captain Philips and Roger Sterne took place in a room, and the former lunged at the latter with such force that not only did he run him through, but the tip of his sword remained stuck fast in the wall. Showing remarkable presence of mind, the poor standard-bearer asked very courteously if, before withdrawing the blade, his colleague would be so kind as to clean off any plaster that might be clinging to the tip, as he would find it most disagreeable to have it introduced into his system. He lived on for a few more months after this incident, long enough for him to be dispatched to Jamaica, where he died of a fever which his broken body was unable to withstand. Laurence was seventeen at the time.

  With the help of some wealthier relatives, he was able to study at Cambridge and subsequently entered the church, less out of devotion than tradition and convenience, and for many years, led a modest and anonymous life as a vicar in Yorkshire. He married a rather ugly woman, Elizabeth Lumley, whom, nevertheless, it took him two years to woo. On receiving the (false) news that her son had married an heiress, his mother, who had lavished little care on him and lived, anyway, in Ireland, tried to force him to lavish some care on her, without, incidentally, much success. The truth is that her son had very slender means, which did not, however, prevent him from having fun, especially during the periods he spent at Skelton Castle (re-named Crazy Castle by its visitors), the property of his indolent and affluent friend John Hall-Stevenson. In provincial imitation of the Monks of Medmenham Abbey—a group of aristocrats in the south of England, famous at the time for their scandalous goings-on—they created the Demoniacs. This club was even more innocuous than its model, which is, perhaps, why it lasted longer, for the Medmenham “monks” disbanded shortly afterwards, when one of their members, in the middle of a black mass, had the unfortunate idea of releasing a baboon which, to the great alarm of all those present, leapt onto the shoulders of the celebrant, Lord Sandwich, and was assumed to be the Devil himself, who had, to everyone’s horror, finally deigned to visit them. Sterne and Hall-Stevenson’s Demoniacs, on the other hand, simply drank burgundy, made music (Sterne’s preferred instrument was the violin) and danced sarabandes. The favourite pastime of the jolly vicar and his idle friend was, however, to drive in their chaises to Saltburn and run races along the five-mile stretch of beach, with one wheel in the sea.

  The first piece that Sterne wrote was a sarcastic pamphlet, provoked by a terrible row over local politics involving a ridiculous midwife from York. Its unexpected success was such that only then did it occur to him that he could perhaps write something for publication, his incomparable Tristram Shandy. This belated beginning belies the fact that Sterne had long nurtured a passionate interest not only in literature (he adored Cervantes, Rabelais, Lucian, Montaigne and Robert Burton, all of whom he now and then openly and blatantly plagiarised), but in all manner of eccentric books; in his library there were treatises on fortifications and on obstetrics, studious surveys of long noses as well as one of his favourite books, Le Moyen de parvenir, by the Canon of Tours, Béroalde de Verville.

  His whole life changed with the publication and unforeseen success of the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy: at the age of forty-six, Sterne started leading the kind of life most guaranteed to please him, a life of fun and generous hospitality. From then on, his visits to London became more frequent, and there he formed immediate friendships with some of the most influential people of the day, notably with that prince of actors, David Garrick, and with the artist Reynolds, who took the trouble to paint his elongated figure three times, although the last of these pictures remained unfinished. Sterne was the object of enormous curiosity, everyone wanted to meet him and Sterne duly met everyone, with the astonishing result that many people spoke well of him and no one spoke ill. Sterne, it seems, was not only exceptionally amusing, capable of coming up with jokes and digressions on any given subject, regardless of whether he knew anything about it or not, he was also, by nature, a very cordial and amiable fellow. This did not, however, prevent him from getting annoyed when his barbed comments were not understood or enjoyed or from taking on pompous fools with a gentle sarcasm that only wounded when it was too late for the belatedly irate victim to react. He even dined with the Duke of York, brother of the Prince of Wales, and it was perhaps not so very odd that this Duke should seek out his pleasant company, bearing in mind that the Duke died a few years later in France from a bad cold and a fever brought on by having spent the whole night dancing. Sterne’s fame reached such heights that he once received a letter addressed simply to: “Tristram Shandy, Europe.”

  However, not everyone liked the novel or the man, and among the most disdainful was Horace Walpole, the man so loved by Madame du Deffand. Perhaps that was why Sterne, on one of his many trips to Paris, went not to her salon, but to that of her rival, Julie de Lespinasse, and to the no less famous salon of Baron d’Holbach, where he became great friends with Diderot, whom he used to keep supplied with English books. The first time he crossed the Channel, he did so, in his own words, “in a race with Death”, from which, on that first leg, he would emerge victorious: his health was never very good, and, ill with tuberculosis, he suffered frequent haemorrhages which again and again brought him very close to the edge. It may be that, like so many of his best compatriots, he was also escaping a little from England: the eminent and powerful Dr Johnson had turned his back on him, not just because of his writings, which he despised, but because, at a gathering in Reynolds’ house, Sterne had dared to display in his presence “a drawing too indecently gross to have delighted even a brothel”. Given the state of Sterne’s he
alth, it is not perhaps surprising, therefore, that while he was in Paris, the rumour in London was that he had died, indeed, obituaries were published and, in the village of Coxwold, where he lived when not in the capital, his parishioners duly mourned him. A few weeks later, Sterne said only that the news was “premature”. On the Continent, on the other hand, he won the admiration of Voltaire, attended performances by the Comédie Française (which bored him) and heard sermons by the King of Poland’s private preacher, a priest who, it seems, outdid even Garrick in his interpretations. He also went for long walks, and his long, black-clothed body and his long nose never failed to attract attention, so much so that, on one occasion, he apparently obliged the crowd following him to kneel down with him on the Pont-Neuf before the statue of Henry IV.

  He described his wanderings on the Continent in his masterpiece, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, and the Sternes took such a liking to these countries and their climates that his wife Elizabeth and their daughter Lydia settled in the south of that first-named country, thus sanctioning the unofficial separation of husband and wife. Later on, a French Marquis and aspiring son-in-law wrote to tell him briefly of his love for Lydia, going on to ask the fundamental question: “What fortune would you give your daughter at present and how much at your death?” Sterne replied: “Sir, I shall give her ten thousand pounds the day of marriage. My calculation is as follows—she is not eighteen, you are sixty-two, there goes five thousand pounds—then, Sir, you at least think her not ugly, she has many accomplishments, speaks Italian, French, plays upon the guitar, and as I fear you play upon no instrument whatever, I think you will be happy to take her on my terms, for here finishes the account of the ten thousand pounds.” Sterne never panicked, and when his house in Yorkshire was burned to the ground, what most upset him was not the loss of the house, he said, “but the strange unaccountable conduct of my poor, unfortunate curate, not in setting fire to the house, for I do not accuse him of it, God knows, or anyone else either; but in setting off the moment after it happened, and flying like Paul to Tarsus, through fear of persecution from me.”

  Indeed, it is difficult to imagine Sterne pursuing anyone. He was a kindly, easy-going man, who once tried to “inherit” two children left behind by a poor widow on her death, and he also, at the request of a slave called Ignatius Sancho, included a few pages speaking out against slavery in the later volumes of Tristram Shandy. He made it fashionable in the society of his time to follow the lead of his character Uncle Toby and brush bothersome flies gently away, rather than kill them. He had several love affairs and, in a letter to Eliza, his last and most idealised lover, he showed good humour in the face of the death that was fast gaining on him: “I’m going,” he wrote by way of farewell (she was with her husband in India); but as the day progressed, and finding that he did not feel quite so bad, he added: “I am a little better, so shall not depart as I apprehended.” An acquaintance of his described his character thus: “… everything is rose-coloured to this happy mortal, and whatever appears to other eyes in a sad or melancholy aspect presents to his an appearance of gaiety or laughter. He pursues only pleasure and he is not like others who, when they are tearful, no longer can enjoy life, for he drinks the bowl to the last drop even though it provides not enough to quench a thirst like his.”

  Judging from his letters, he battled to the end in that race that had begun while crossing the Channel years before. To a woman friend he wrote: “I am ill—very ill—yet I feel my existence strongly, and something like revelation along with it, which tells I shall not dye—but live, & yet another man would set his house in order.” Shortly before he died, he started writing a “most comic romance”, and saw in this an advantage: “… when I am dead, my name will be placed in the list of those heroes who died in a jest”, a list headed by Cervantes and followed by Scarron and his beloved Verville. Nothing remains of that “romance”, and in London, at four in the afternoon, on March 18, 1768, at the age of fifty-four, Sterne finally lost his race.

  The vicissitudes suffered by his corpse are worthy of his two novels. He was buried with little fuss at the cemetery of a church in Hanover Square, but his body was stolen from there a few days later and sold to the professor of anatomy at the University of Cambridge, the place where he himself had studied. Apparently, when the dissection of the corpse was nearing its end, one of the two friends whom the professor had invited to witness the session accidentally uncovered the face of the dead man and recognised Sterne, to whom he had been introduced not long before. The guest fainted, and the professor, when he realised the illustrious nature of the person he had submitted to the scalpel, took care, at least, to preserve the skeleton. Various people have tried and failed to identify Sterne’s skull among the Cambridge collection of bones, and so no one knows where lies the body of good Laurence Sterne. He probably would not have cared, for when death was almost upon him, he said: “I should like another seven or eight months … but be that as it pleases God,” and in Tristram Shandy he had expressed his desire to die not in his own home, but “in some decent inn”, without worrying or bothering his friends. He got his wish in London, where a witness described his last breath: “Now it is come,” said Sterne and put up his hand as if to stop a blow.

  FUGITIVE WOMEN

  * * *

  Lady Hester Stanhope, the Queen of the Desert

  LADY HESTER STANHOPE paid dearly for her satirical talent, although one might also say that she owed both her legend and her reputation to it. The most satisfying period of her life were the years when she lived in and managed the house owned by her uncle, William Pitt the Younger, Prime Minister under George III. Apparently, she proved indispensable, with her arguable beauty, her brilliant, albeit exhausting conversation, and her ability to organise important political supper parties and make them enjoyable. However, her penchant for satire made her so many enemies that when Pitt died in 1806, she found herself surrounded by a great void, though with a full purse: the State gave her a generous life pension, presumably to reward the niece for her extremely loyal uncle’s patriotic efforts.

  William Pitt wasn’t the only man, whether related by blood or not, to have been subjugated by Lady Hester. Although, for her time, she was a giant (she was nearly five foot nine tall), her vitality and talent made her irresistible in her young and not-so-young years, to the extent that it allowed her not to get married. She denied that she was beautiful and claimed that she was possessed, rather, of “a homogeneous ugliness”, She was unfortunate in the love of her life, for the famous general, John Moore—upon whom, on the death of her benefactor, her nights and days came to depend—perished in La Coruña during the Peninsular War, or what we Spaniards call the War of Independence.

  It was partly this and partly the unbearable loss of power and politicking that drove her to leave England when she was thirty-three, an age which, for a single woman two centuries ago, meant resignation and withdrawal. From that moment on, however, she began to forge the legend of an extremely wealthy woman who travelled incessantly throughout the Middle East with an extravagant and ever-growing entourage—a genuine caravan at certain particularly fruitful periods of her life—with no set goal or aim. Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria saw her pass or stay, dressed in Eastern fashion and as a man, surrounded by servants, secretaries, lady companions, hangers-on, French generals fascinated by her personality, or by Dr Meryon who recorded her escapades, and by her various lovers who were almost always younger and better-looking. Her prestige among the sheikhs and emirs allowed her to travel as far as Palmyra, a place entirely inaccessible to Westerners at the time. She settled down among the Druses i
n Mount Lebanon and there, by her own means, exercised the kind of influence which, in her own country, she had failed to inherit from her relations.

  It is true that in her witty letters—the main record of her adventures, along with the biographical volumes written by the devoted Meryon—Lady Stanhope was not at all modest or, perhaps, reliable. In one letter, she proclaimed: “I am the oracle of the Arabs and the darling of all the troops who seem to think I am a deity because I can ride.” And she rode ceaselessly, travelling non-stop and without any apparent objective, plus she sat astride, a style not normally permitted for women in those lands. Lady Hester, however, was a special case, and, in time, she became in part what she claimed to be, for there is nothing like being convinced of something to persuade other people of it too. In her latter years, she was considered to be a fortune-teller or a soothsayer, and her neutrality was immediately sought in any conflict, the adversaries knowing that if she took sides, she could easily take with her many as yet undecided tribes.