To the Hermitage (23 page)

A PAPER THAT IS NOT A PAPER

How very kind of you to invite me to give this first paper, even though I wasn’t even present at the time to say I was happy to give it. So I do have to tell you that this paper isn’t really a paper. (
BO: Oh no, I don’t believe it . . .
) It would probably take several chapters of a novel to explain why I’ve not been able to write one. Let’s just say it was due to circumstances beyond my control, and maybe my self-control. But I think the best thing I can do is to tell you a story. (
AGNES: No, I thought so . . .
) Except the story is not really a story either – because it’s perfectly true, and starts from a real experience I had in Stockholm just two days ago.

Bo, you’ll recall that I chose to arrive one day early, before we set off on this fine scholarly voyage. And I decided to spend my extra afternoon, usefully and philosophically, hunting the tomb of the great René Descartes. It seemed the ideal way to begin any kind of philosophical pilgrimage. After all, Descartes had asked us nearly all the questions that disturb the modern mind, and he did more than almost anyone to make sure we actually had one. He’s surely a figure who lies behind our own philosopher, Denis Diderot . . . (
BO: I don’t think so, surely he rejected Descartes . . .
) Perhaps. But he did understand Descartes showed us a world divided into mind and matter, and gave us the world as a living, perceiving, enquiring machine.

Unfortunately when, just about 350 years before I did, Descartes arrived in Stockholm, his own living, perceiving, enquiring machine suddenly began to fail. He soon caught a chill and died of it, at the age of fifty-six. He was buried somewhere or other in the city, at the Queen’s command. And what followed next, as you explained, Bo, was a remarkable history – an odd history of posthumousness, which I’ve been thinking about ever since. I suppose you know the story, so it goes to say his corpse and coffin travelled widely – from Sweden to Denmark, Denmark to France. In France they went from abbey to abbey, church to church, and site to site. His bones were buried, disinterred, re-buried. He was dug up in the French Revolution, he almost made it to the Pantheon. Resting in the gardens nearby, he saw the rise of Napoleon, the advent of the Citizen King, the dawn of the Second Republic, and so on. And each time the clock of history ticked on a bit further, they moved him from here to there.

In short the dead philosopher was unquestionably much busier, better travelled, more argued over, more problematical, more celebrated, more entertained, in every respect far more attended to than he ever had been during his rather reclusive quiet life. He became a great posthumous power. In fact both he and his famous dilemma – the Cartesian dilemma – have been buried, disinterred, scattered, venerated, execrated and generally fought over by every generation of philosophers and writers from then to this very day . . . (
LARS: It’s quite true. Take Samuel Beckett for instance . . .
) And all these strange posthumous adventures, these lineages and homages and defacements, these complicated heritages and anxieties of influence began to shift my thoughts from the topic I’d first thought of for a paper (‘Diderot and Postmodernism,’ I have to admit), from Denis to another writer, and Postmodernism to Postmortemism. Or necrology, as the French nicely call it, the study of the dead.

Perhaps you recall that in another revolutionary year in Paris, 1968, another great philosophe, Roland Barthes, published a famous necrological essay, ‘The Death of the Author’. Necrologically speaking, Barthes is himself now dead, following an odd street accident in the rue des Ecoles, quite close to the place where Descartes’ remains are now buried, assuming that any remain after his endless travels. But what exactly remains of Roland Barthes, the author of ‘The Death of the Author’? I suppose you could say that what he’s achieved is a postmodern Posterity. That’s to say, in the modern way we admire him, but we’ve learned to think of him as he seems to have perceived himself, as a writing, a text – a teasing text, a text that both celebrates and denies the writer who may or may not have written it. Because, as I understand it, the whole claim of Barthes’ work is that a writer can only be exactly that: a text.

In other words, there isn’t a she that writes it, there’s an it that writes him. (
AGNES: Or mostly her . . .
) Meaning books don’t have authors, they just have destinations. That’s why, Barthes famously tells us, in accepting the Death of the Author we’re announcing the Birth of the Reader. A book’s a game, a tease, a seduction that comes from the other side of a grave. Whatever authors might think of their own purposes and intentions, the text can never become final nor the game be concluded. There’ll always be more readers, and more readers mean more meanings. A text’s simply a language. And language is slippage; it doesn’t fix or make real anything at all. Books float off into the great utopia of language, somewhere between writing and reading. And yet what’s interesting about this idea, of books as an open play of floating signs between writer and reader, isn’t new at all. I can find it in the eighteenth century. (
BO: In Diderot, of course . . .
) In Diderot, yes, but also in my own favourite writer. ‘Writing, when properly managed, is but a different name for conversation . . .’ he writes in the glorious pages of
Tristram Shandy
. ‘The truest respect you can pay to the reader’s understanding is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him (
AGNES: Or her . . .
) something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself.’

All this set my mind going on a process this writer always used to call ‘transverse zig-zaggery’ . . . (
BO: In other words, the Lockean association of ideas. ME: Yes, Bo, that’s quite right . . .
) And I began to turn my mind to this whole complicated question of literary mortality. Sweden and its graveyards certainly had something to do with it. So did our quest for a dead philosopher. So did Roland Barthes. I began to reflect that while in modern theory we pretend we have no need of an Author to explain our interest in books, the truth is we like to grant lives to our authors, and even view them as real persons just like all the rest of us. (
VERSO: That assumes you know what a person is . . .
) Even the critics and scholars amongst us are deeply interested in literary biographies and autobiographies, or what’s now fashionably called ‘life-writing’. Even Barthes finally wrote a book about this, called
Barthes on Barthes
(I admit he claimed to see himself as a total fiction). But ask any publisher and they’ll tell you there are plenty of readers out there who much prefer the pleasure of reading an author’s biography to the pain of reading his or her work.

(
VERSO: But biographies are fictions too . . .
) Exactly. Biographies are fictions too, and in fact they all have just one common plot and culmination. They tell us the life of the author, and then they usually tell us of the death of the author. Only when we reach the final weeks, the ultimate hours, the famous last words – Browning saying, ‘More than satisfied’, Henry James saying, ‘So here it is at last, the distinguished thing’ (
VERSO: He didn’t . . .
), Gertrude Stein saying, ‘What is the answer? What is the question?’ and so on – can we feel the plot’s complete. Yet according to my new theory of Postmortemism, the end of the story isn’t the end of the story at all. It’s simply the opening shot in the next story: the necrological sequel, the story of the writer’s after-life, the tale of the graveyard things that follow. Wakes and processions, cemeteries and dripping yews. Obituaries, eulogies, epitaphs, inscriptions, tombs, catafalques. Statues, plinths, busts, poets’ corners, writers’ houses, pantheons. Libraries, collections, lost manuscripts, translations, collected edited editions, complete works (they almost never are). In other words, all the things Denis Diderot (
BO: Oh good . . . something important at last . . .
) called ‘Posterity’: that is, the pregnant scene for which everything in life is staged, the place where literature becomes literary, a show by a dead writer in front of an audience of live readers. In short, the shadowy theatre where we all bury, disinter, translate, interpret, study, revise, amend, re-edit, parody, quote, misquote, traduce and transcend, in a wild anxiety of criticism and influence.

Which takes us into the wonderful world of ‘burlesque necrology’ – where some great gothic tale of deaths, corpses, tombs, monuments, anniversaries, retrospectives takes on far more importance than the life as originally lived. Think of the great English poets. Shelley: drowned at sea, body burned to ashes on the beach at Lerici, heart returned to England. Byron: dead for Greek freedom at Missolonghi, body returned to England, offered to Westminster Abbey but refused, sent off to Newstead Abbey, statues almost everywhere except in Britain. Browning: died in his son’s palazzo in Venice, still mourning Elizabeth Barrett forty years after her death in Florence, taken to the island of San Giorgio, then shipped home and offered to Westminster Abbey, application approved. Hardy: entombed in Westminster Abbey, heart buried next to spiky wife in Stinsford churchyard. And so on.

In fact the fates of writer-corpses have constantly been strange. Voltaire’s corpse was smuggled out of Paris in a postchaise sitting up, so he wouldn’t suffer an atheist’s funeral in quicklime. In the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, the tombs of La Fontaine and Molière are mysteriously empty. In a makeshift chapel on a ranch near Taos, New Mexico, D. H. Lawrence’s body, moved from Vence in France, has been plugged into the ground with thick concrete to protect him from necrophilic female admirers. Perhaps the greatest artists’ graveyard of all is on the island of San Giorgio in the Venice lagoon, where, for instance, Ezra Pound lies close to Stravinsky. Another’s in Saint Petersburg, where Dostoyevsky lies with Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. Of course we’re all obsessed with the Death of the Author.

Which, by more transverse zig-zaggery, takes me back to 1968, the same year Barthes published his essay. Because that year I was present at an important literary funeral – in fact the funeral of the author I probably admire most in the world. (
ALMA: But a moment ago you said he lived in the eighteenth century . . .
) It took place in Yorkshire, Britain’s largest and most literary county (the county I come from myself). If you ever go there, as you must, you’ll find another significant phenomenon of Postmortemism. For just as there’s literary necrology, there’s literary geography. You can start your Yorkshire tour in Brontë Country, where the signs are in Japanese, go on to Bradford, which is Priestley Country (signs mostly in Urdu), then head for James Herriot Country (no people, just animals). On to Castle Howard (Brideshead Country) and to the coast at Whitby (Dracula Country). Then if you head northward you’ll soon find yourself among the aspiring maidservants of Catherine Cookson Country. Go south to the Humber and you’ll find an area which consists of milkbars, fishdocks, huge civic cemeteries. This can be instantly recognized as Philip Larkin Country.

My particular funeral took place in the beautiful stone estate village of Coxwold, in the Howardian Hills, midway between Herriot and Brideshead Country. The deceased had been the vicar of the parish and a Dean of York. His name was Laurence Sterne. (
BO: Just like the author?
) It was the author. (
LARS: But he died a long time ago . . .
) Precisely two hundred years before I attended his funeral. He wasn’t just a very famous writer but a very famous preacher (
ANDERS: Parson Yorick . . .
) Parson Yorick, the parson from York, whom so many people came to hear they enlarged Coxwold church to fit them in. But his fame soared when he began writing a novel,
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
– so successful he was presented at court. He became famous in France, went there and to Italy. He came back and wrote a tale of his travels. (
ANDERS: A Sentimental Journey . . .
) The moment it was published he died, in March 1768, at his London lodgings in Bond Street, of the tuberculosis that always plagued him. His last words, incidentally, were, ‘Now it is done.’

Sterne died almost alone; at least, he was attended by one servant, and that was it. His wife, a ‘porcupine of a woman’, who’d turned out to be ten years older than she said, was heading off to France along with his fortune. His excellent mistress, Eliza Draper, had returned to her husband in India. He was out of favour with the church for his work. Which is probably why only three people attended his funeral: a sailor, his printer, and a lawyer. He was buried without a headstone at Archery Fields, an overflow graveyard of Saint George’s, Hanover Square. It sounds a good address; it wasn’t. The graveyard was guarded by a big mastiff dog because it was regularly robbed by grave snatchers. But the grave snatchers snatched the dog, and within two days they’d stolen Sterne’s body too. It was next seen at Cambridge University, on the dissecting table at a public anatomy lecture. A member of the audience recognized him, but didn’t say so until after the skull had been trepanned. (
LARS: Alas, poor Yorick . . .
) Of course the university didn’t wish to be embarrassed (
BO: The university never does . . .
) . . . so the remains were secretly returned to the grave snatchers, taken to London and secretly restored in the grave.

And there they stayed till the Swinging Sixties. In Britain this happened to be not only a time of Beatlemania, mind-enhancing drugs and body-enhancing sex, but a property boom. One of Britain’s biggest landowners, the Church of England, decided the best way it could serve its divine mission was to put the churchyard on the market for commercial development. Happily a good man I knew, Kenneth Monkman, remembered Sterne’s remains, went to the consistory court, and asked for an exhumation. When they dug the graveyard, they found bones and a trepanned skull. The problem was to be sure it was Sterne’s, so they called a forensic pathologist (Mr Harvey Ross of Harley Street, if you want to know). He came up with an ingenious forensic device. In Italy Sterne sat for his bust by the famous English sculptor Nollekens, who always measured his sitter’s heads with callipers. If they could match the skull with the bust, which Mr Monkman possessed, it would prove it was Sterne’s. The bust was brought to the graveyard. The head grinned at the skull, the skull at the bust. They matched exactly.