Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Abridged

by Emma Laybourn

  Trim took his hat off the ground, put it upon his head, and then went on with his oration upon death.

  CHAPTER 9

  ‘To us, Jonathan, who know not want or care – who live here in the service of two of the best of masters (excepting his majesty King William the Third) – I admit that from Whitsuntide to within three weeks of Christmas is not long; – but to those, Jonathan, who know what death is, and what havoc and destruction he can make – ’tis a whole age. O Jonathan! ’twould make a man’s heart bleed,’ continued the corporal, ‘to consider how low many a brave and upright fellow has been laid since that time!

  ‘And trust me, Susy,’ he added, turning to Susannah, whose eyes were swimming, ‘before that time comes round again, many a bright eye will be dim.’ Susannah wept – but she curtsied too.

  Trim continued, still looking at her, ‘Are we not like a flower of the field – is not all flesh grass? ’Tis clay, – ’tis dirt.’

  – They all looked at the scullery maid.

  ‘What is the finest face that ever man saw?’

  ‘I could hear Trim talk so for ever,’ cried Susannah (laying her hand upon Trim’s shoulder).

  ‘What is it – but corruption?’ – Susannah took it off.

  Now I love you for this – ’tis this delicious mixture within you which makes you the dear creatures you are – and anyone who hates you for it – all I can say is, he has a pumpkin for his head.

  CHAPTER 10

  Whether Susannah, by taking her hand too suddenly off the corporal’s shoulder, broke the chain of his reflections–

  Or whether the corporal began to suspect he was talking more like the chaplain than himself–

  Whatever the cause, he went on thus:

  ‘For my own part, I declare that in battle, I do not care this for death.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Let death not take me in a cowardly way, like poor Joe Gibbins, in cleaning his gun. A pull of a trigger – a push of a bayonet – look along the line – see! Jack’s down! No – ’tis Dick. Then Jack’s no worse. No matter which it is; we pass on. In hot pursuit the wound which brings death is not felt. The man who flees is in ten times more danger than the man who marches up into the jaws of death. I’ve looked him in the face a hundred times, and know what he is. He’s nothing, Obadiah, on the battlefield.’

  ‘But he’s very frightful in a house,’ quoth Obadiah.

  ‘I never mind it in a coach-box,’ said Jonathan.

  ‘It must, in my opinion, be most natural in bed,’ said Susannah.

  ‘And if I could escape him there, I would,’ said Trim, – ‘but that is nature.’

  ‘Nature is nature,’ said Jonathan.

  ‘And that is why,’ cried Susannah, ‘I so much pity my mistress. She will never get over it.’

  ‘I pity the captain the most,’ answered Trim. ‘Madam will get ease of heart in weeping, and the Squire in talking about it, – but my poor master will keep it all in silence to himself. I shall hear him sigh in his bed for a whole month, as he did for lieutenant Le Fever. “Your honour, do not sigh so piteously,” I would say. “I cannot help it, Trim,” my master would reply, “’tis so sad, I cannot get it off my heart.” “Your honour fears not death yourself.” “I fear nothing, Trim,” he would say, “but doing a wrong thing. Well, I will take care of Le Fever’s boy.” And with that, like a medicine, he would fall asleep.’

  ‘I like to hear Trim’s stories about the captain,’ said Susannah.

  ‘He is a kindly-hearted gentleman,’ said Obadiah.

  ‘Aye, and a brave one too,’ said the corporal. ‘There never was a better officer, or a better man: for he would march up to the cannon’s mouth – and yet he has a heart as soft as a child for other people. He would not hurt a chicken.’

  ‘I would sooner,’ quoth Jonathan, ‘drive such a gentleman for seven pounds a year, than some for eight.’

  ‘Thank thee, Jonathan!’ said the corporal, shaking his hand. ‘I would serve him to the day of my death out of love. He is a friend and a brother to me, and if I was only sure my poor brother Tom was dead, and if I was worth ten thousand pounds, I would leave every shilling to the captain.’ Trim could not refrain from tears at this idea. The whole kitchen was affected.

  ‘Do tell us the story of the poor lieutenant,’ said Susannah.

  ‘With all my heart,’ answered the corporal.

  They formed a circle about the fire; and as soon as the scullery-maid had shut the door, the corporal began.

  CHAPTER 11

  I am a Turk if I had not forgot my mother! I don’t wonder at it; so often has my judgment deceived me, that I always suspect it, right or wrong.

  For all this, I respect truth as much as anybody; and when it has slipped away from us, if a man will but take me by the hand, and go quietly to search for it, as for a thing we have both lost, I’ll go to the world’s end with him.

  But I hate disputes, and therefore (apart from religious points, or those concerning society) I would almost agree to anything that does not choke me, rather than be drawn into one.

  Yet I cannot bear suffocation – and bad smells worst of all. For which reasons, I have resolved that if ever the army of martyrs was to be increased, I would have no hand in it, one way or t’other.

  CHAPTER 12

  But to return to my mother.

  My uncle Toby’s opinion, Madam, ‘that there could be no harm in Cornelius Gallus, the Roman praetor’s lying with his wife;’ – or rather the last word of it (for that was all my mother heard) caught hold of her by the weak part of the whole sex.

  – Do not mistake me; I mean her curiosity. She instantly concluded that she was the subject of the conversation; and every word my father said, she applied to herself.

  Pray, Madam, what lady would not have done the same?

  From Cornelius’s death, my father had gone on to that of Socrates, and was giving my uncle Toby an outline of his pleading before his judges; ’twas irresistible – not the speech of Socrates, but my father’s temptation to it. He had wrote the Life of Socrates himself the year before he left off trade, which, I fear, was the means of hastening him out of it.

  So no one was able to set out with so full a sail, and on so swelling a tide of heroic loftiness upon the subject, as my father. Not a line in Socrates’s speech ended with a shorter word than annihilation; there was not a worse thought in it than to be – or not to be – the entering upon a new and untried state of things, – or was it upon a profound and peaceful sleep, without disturbance? That we and our children were born to die – but not born to be slaves – no – there I mistake; that was part of Eleazer’s oration, as recorded by Josephus, which Eleazer had from the philosophers of India; in all likelihood Alexander the Great, in his invasion of India, stole that sentiment, amongst other things; so that it was carried, if not by himself (for we all know he died at Babylon), by some of his marauders, to Greece, then Rome, then France, and thence to England. So things come round.

  By land carriage; I can conceive no other way.

  By water the sentiment might easily have come down the Ganges into the Bay of Bengal, and so into the Indian Sea; and following the course of trade (the route by the Cape of Good Hope being then unknown), it might be carried with spices up the Red Sea to Joddah, or Sues, and from thence by caravans to Coptos, three days’ journey distant, and so down the Nile directly to Alexandria, where the Sentiment would be landed at the very foot of the great stair-case of the Alexandrian library. Bless me! what a trade was driven by the learned in those days!

  [Note: My father’s work on Socrates, which he never published, is in manuscript, with some other tracts which will be printed in due time.]

  CHAPTER 13

  Now my father had a way like Job’s (if there ever was such a man–

  – though, by the bye, just because your learned men find some difficulty in fixing the precise era in which he lived; whether before or after the patriarchs, &c. – to vote, therefore, that he never lived at all,
is a little cruel.)

  My father, I say, had a way, when things went extremely wrong, of wondering why he was begot, wishing himself dead – and sometimes worse.

  And when the provocation ran high – Sir, you scarce could have distinguished him from Socrates himself: every word disdaining life, and careless about its issues. For this reason, though my mother was not a woman of deep reading, yet the summary of Socrates’s oration, which my father was giving my uncle Toby, was not altogether new to her.

  She listened to it composedly, and would have done so to the end of the chapter, had not my father plunged without good reason into that part of the pleading where the great philosopher reckons up his alliances and children: ‘I have friends – I have relations – I have three desolate children,’ says Socrates.

  ‘Then,’ cried my mother, opening the door, ‘you have one more, Mr. Shandy, than I know of.’

  ‘By heaven! I have one less,’ said my father, getting up and walking out of the room.

  CHAPTER 14

  ‘They are Socrates’s children,’ said my uncle Toby.

  ‘He has been dead a hundred years,’ replied my mother.

  My uncle, not caring to argue, laid down his pipe upon the table. Rising up, and taking my mother most kindly by the hand, silently he led her out after my father, so that he might finish enlightening her himself.

  CHAPTER 15

  Had this volume been a farce, which, unless everyone’s life and opinions are regarded as a farce, I see no reason to suppose – the last chapter, Sir, would have finished the first act of it, and then this chapter must have set off thus.

  Ptr..r..r..ing – twing – twang – prut – trut – ’tis a cursed bad fiddle. Is it in tune or no? trut, prut – They should be fifths. ’Tis wickedly strung – twang. – The bridge is a mile too high – trut, prut – hark! ’tis not so bad a tone.

  Diddle diddle, diddle diddle, diddle diddle, dum. There is no problem in playing before good judges, but there’s a man there – the grave man in black – ’Sdeath! not the gentleman with the sword on. Sir, I had rather play a Caprichio to Calliope, than draw my bow across my fiddle before that man; and yet I’ll wager the greatest musical odds ever laid, that I will this moment go three hundred leagues out of tune upon my fiddle, without punishing one single nerve of his.–

  Twaddle diddle, tweddle diddle, – twiddle diddle, – twoddle diddle, – twuddle diddle, – prut trut – krish – krash – krush. I’ve undone you, Sir, but you see he’s no worse.

  Diddle diddle, diddle diddle, diddle diddle – hum – drum.

  Your worships love music – and some of you play delightfully yourselves – trut-prut, prut-trut.

  O! I could sit and listen whole days, to one who can make what he fiddles to be felt, who inspires me with his joys and hopes, and puts the hidden springs of my heart into motion.

  CHAPTER 16

  The first thing which entered my father’s head, after affairs were a little settled in the family, and Susannah had got possession of my mother’s green satin night-gown – was to sit down coolly, after Xenophon’s example, and write a Tristra-paedia, or system of education for me; collecting his scattered thoughts, and binding them together, so as to form an Institute for the government of my childhood and adolescence.

  I was my father’s last stake – he had lost my brother Bobby entirely; he had lost, he reckoned, full three-fourths of me – that is, he had been unfortunate in his three first great casts of the dice for me – my begetting, my nose, and my name – but there was this one left.

  Accordingly my father gave himself up to it with as much devotion as ever my uncle Toby gave to his study of projectiles. The difference was, that my uncle Toby drew his knowledge of projectiles from Nicholas Tartaglia. My father spun his knowledge, every thread of it, out of his own brain – or reeled and twisted what all other spinners had spun before him, which was pretty near the same thing.

  In about three years, my father had almost reached the middle of his work. Like all other writers, he met with disappointments. He imagined he should be able to fit whatever he had to say into so small a space that, when it was finished and bound, it might be rolled up in my mother’s pocket-case. Matter grows under our hands.

  My father gave himself up to it, however, with painful diligence, proceeding step by step with the same caution as was used by John de la Casse, the archbishop of Benevento, in writing his Galatea, on which he spent near forty years; and when the thing came out, it was only half the size of a Rider’s Almanack. How he managed it, unless he spent most of his time combing his whiskers, or playing at cards with his chaplain, would puzzle anyone not let into the true secret; and therefore ’tis worth explaining to the world.

  I admit, if John de la Casse, for whose memory (despite his Galatea) I retain the highest respect,– if he had been, Sir, a slender clerk of dull wit, he and his Galatea might have jogged on together to the age of Methuselah, and have not been worth a mention.

  But John de la Casse was a genius of fertile fancy; yet with the natural advantages which should have spurred him on with his Galatea, he was incapable of writing more than a line and a half in a whole summer’s day. This disability arose from his opinion that, whenever a Christian was writing a book with the intent of publishing it to the world, his first thoughts were always the temptations of the evil one.

  And, he maintained, when a person of high character and status turned author, from the very moment he took pen in hand – all the devils in hell broke out of their holes to cajole him. Every thought, however it came to him, was a stroke of one or other of these devils. So that the life of a writer was not so much a state of composition, as a state of warfare; and his success, like a soldier’s, depended not so much upon his Wit as his Resistance.

  My father was hugely pleased with this theory of John de la Casse. – How far my father actually believed in the devil will be seen when I come to speak of his religious notions: ’tis enough to say here, that he took up the allegory of the doctrine, if not its literal sense; and would often say there was as much good truth in John de la Casse’s description as was to be found in any poetic fiction or ancient record.

  ‘Prejudice of education,’ he would say, ‘is the devil – and the multitudes of them which we suck in with our mother’s milk are the devil and all. We are haunted with them, brother Toby, in all our researches; and if a man was fool enough to submit tamely to them, what would his book be? Nothing,’ he would add, throwing his pen away, – ‘nothing but a farrago of the clack of nurses, and of the nonsense of the old women (of both sexes) throughout the kingdom.’

  This is the best account I can give of the slow progress my father made in his Tristra-paedia; at which (as I said) he was over three years at work, and had scarce completed one half. The misfortune was, that I was all that time totally neglected and abandoned to my mother: and what was almost as bad, by the very delay, the first part of the work was rendered entirely useless – every day a page or two became outdated.

  – Certainly it was ordained as a scourge upon our pride, that the wisest of us should thus outwit ourselves, and eternally deny our purposes, in the intemperate act of pursuing them.

  In short, my father advanced so very slow with his work, and I began to get forwards at such a rate, that, if an event had not happened – which, if it can be told with decency, shall not be concealed a moment from the reader – I believe I would have outgrown it.

  CHAPTER 17

  –’Twas nothing, – I did not lose two drops of blood – ’twas not worth calling in a surgeon. – Thousands suffer by choice, what I did by accident. Doctor Slop made ten times more of it than he needed: and I am this day (August the 10th, 1761) paying the price of this man’s reputation. – O, ’twould provoke a stone, to see how things go on in this world!

  The chamber-maid had left no chamber pot under the bed:

  ‘Cannot you contrive, master,’ quoth Susannah, lifting up the sash window with one hand, as she spoke, and he
lping me up into the window-seat with the other, ‘cannot you manage, my dear, just once, to **** *** ** *** ******?’

  I was five years old. Susannah did not consider that nothing was well hung in our family, – so slap came the sash window down like lightning upon me.

  – ‘Nothing is left for me,’ cried Susannah, ‘but to flee the country.’

  My uncle Toby’s house was a much kinder sanctuary; and so Susannah fled to it.

  CHAPTER 18

  When Susannah told the corporal the misadventure of the sash, and its ‘murder’ of me, (as she called it), the blood left his cheeks – all accessories in murder being guilty. Trim’s conscience told him he was as much to blame as Susannah; and if this had been true, my uncle Toby would have had as much to answer for as either of ’em; so that neither reason nor instinct could possibly have guided Susannah’s steps to so suitable an asylum.

  It is in vain for the Reader to try to understand this: to form any theory that will explain it, he must cudgel his brains sore. Why should I torture him? ’Tis my own affair: I’ll explain it myself.

  CHAPTER 19

  ‘’Tis a pity, Trim,’ said my uncle Toby, resting his hand upon the corporal’s shoulder, as they stood surveying their works, ‘that we have not a couple of field-pieces to mount in that new redoubt; ’twould secure the lines along there, and make the attack on that side quite complete: get me a couple cast, Trim.’

  ‘Your honour shall have them,’ replied Trim, ‘before to-morrow morning.’

  It was the joy of Trim’s heart to supply my uncle Toby in his campaigns with whatever his fancy called for; had it been his last coin, he would have sat down and hammered it into a fire-arm, to please his Master. The corporal had already, – what with cutting off the ends of my uncle Toby’s leaden spouts – hacking at the sides of his lead gutters – melting down his pewter shaving-basin, and climbing on the church roof for spare ends of lead, – he had brought no less than eight new battering cannons into the field.