Nothing today marks us more than our self-congratulation on how modern we are. Our conformity on this subject seems to demand that everything we like or favour be somehow classified as modern, too. In literary terms, this means that the powerful influence of Laurence Sterne's magnum opus celebre ("undoubted progenitor of all the avant-garde novels of our century", as Italo Calvino, with uncharacteristic pomposity, described Tristram Shandy) is seen as proof of the miracle of Sterne's own modernity. How could this obscure Yorkshire parson, provincial Whig journalist and failed farmer have succeeded to such a point - not only battled his way to the summit of public fashion in the second half of the 18th century, when fashion was, as his contemporary Henry Fielding remarked, "the Governor of this World", but also bred a literary-genetic code that still quivers with freshness 200 years later?
Ian Campbell Ross's answer is an intriguing one. He views Sterne's literary activity as an early example of modernity's most self-seeking epiphenomenon - the marketing campaign. From the beginning, in December 1759, when as an unknown writer he published the first two slim volumes of a comic novel, Tristram Shandy, in a modest edition in York, Reverend Sterne did not entrust the success of his work to chance, devising "imaginative stratagems aimed at bringing his novel to the notice of influential arbiters of metropolitan taste". These included the admirable ploy of forging a letter in his own praise to David Garrick and hinting to Hogarth that an illustration by him for the second, London edition might be an interesting commercial possibility. And for the next eight years, until his death at the age of 54, Sterne's writing life, according to Ross, was divided mainly between supplying further volumes to what Christopher Ricks has called "the greatest shaggy dog story in the language" and pursuing new ways of publicising it.
Yet I am not certain that the image of the spindly, consumptive, 18th-century Sterne as a startlingly modern student of celebrity is central to our understanding of him. I would prefer to see his publicity-seeking as but a minor symptom of a far greater vanity. He was the centre of his own universe, unbearable, selfish and duplicitous without thought to his faith, his wife or his mistresses. His ambivalence was permanent and extraordinary.
He may have been a clergyman, but he had anarchy written all over him. His partings from his unloved wife, Elizabeth, often filled him with nostalgia (expressed in the same breath as his laments at how much his family cost him). He never let a joke go by: once rebuked by one of his audience for abusing marriage - "Jesus Christ once honoured a wedding with his presence" - Sterne replied: "But between You & I, Sir . . . that was not the best thing he ever did."
Ross's account is an expertly detailed, if occasionally dutiful, chronicle of a life that must have been hard-going through the almost trackless path of Sterne's first two adult decades. It shows him as only too indistinguishable from his characters - equivocal, unknowable - even though it doesn't reveal that it is probably not Sterne's modernity that we should acclaim. Because what looks like "modernity" is really his understanding that "not even the best actions are untouched by human fallibility". Altruism and selfish desire are inextricably entwined in most of us; in a strait-laced era, Sterne boisterously, inimitably exposed the degree to which human beings are equivocal. In short, what looks like modernity is actually freedom. And that is what we should celebrate in Sterne - his unconfined freedom.
