Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives by John Sutherland Page A

his inherent ‘negativity’. He is always demonstrating what fiction
can’t
do. This negativity is hilariously bemoaned by Tristram in his famous rumination on progression and digression, in Book IV:
I am this month one whole year older than I was this time twelve-month; and having got, as you perceive, almost into the middle of my third volume [i.e. according to the original editions] – and no farther than to my first day’s life –’tis demonstrative that I have three hundred and sixty-four days more life to write just now, than when I first set out.
     
    He is living 364 times faster than he can write. The novel, any novel, is epistemologically impossible. It’s like putting a number on eternity.
    Negative as his fictional boundary-marking may be, Sterne has become in the twentieth century the darling of theorists. Like Charlie Chaplin in
Modern Times
, his failure defines the strangeness and essential wrongness of machines; even the machines we call novels – and, in so doing, creates not merely comedy (any clown can do that) but English literature’s greatest comic novel. Out of its impossibility, perversely.
     
FN
Laurence Sterne
MRT
Tristram Shandy
Biog
A. H. Cash,
Laurence Sterne
, 2 vols (1975, 1984)

9. Oliver Goldsmith 1728–1774
    We read the Vicar of Wakefield in youth and in age – we return to it again and again, and bless the memory of an author who contrives so well to reconcile us to human nature.
Walter Scott
     
    Goldsmith is the despair of biographers. Little of his life is recorded, and that little is largely anecdotal and rendered dubious by his own incorrigible propensity to gilding the lily. ‘He was’, says his most authoritative biographer ‘an inveterate liar.’ He published only one novel. Why he even did that is not clear since, despite chronic penury, he did not, apparently, feel inclined to publish it. In fact he proclaimed a scorn for fiction. None the less
The Vicar of Wakefield
has diffused into the mainstream of English fiction. No work was more influential on the novels of the succeeding century.
    Goldsmith was the fifth child of an impecunious Anglican clergyman in Co. Longford, Ireland. His father Charles Goldsmith is recorded as being amiable but feckless and is popularly supposed to have had much of the Revd Primrose about him. The family supplemented his curate’s stipend with a small farm. Goldsmithoffers a nostalgic picture of his childhood environment in the idyllic passages of his poem, ‘The Deserted Village’ – but it was not all idyll. Aged eight, Oliver contracted smallpox. It ‘ravaged the roses off his cheeks’ disfiguring him for life. He would grow up stumpy, ill-favoured and awkward in society, with a thick accent. ‘Monkey face’ was a hurtful insult thrown at him. As Johnson portentously put it: ‘Goldsmith was a plant that flowered late. There appeared nothing remarkable about him when he was young.’ His first schoolteacher declared him ‘impenetrably stupid’. It soon became apparent, however, that he had a remarkably absorptive mind. From priests (the Goldsmiths were relaxed on matters of faith) he picked in his schooldays a command of French which was the admiration of all who knew him. He similarly picked up his virtuosity with the flute – the inseparable partner on his nomadic path through life.
    It was his mother, Ann, who insisted he go to Trinity College, Dublin, which he did in 1745. The entrance examination – translation from the classics – caused him no difficulty. But he was obliged to enrol, to his disgust, as a ‘sizar’ – a student whose fees were remitted in return for acting as a servant to better-off fellows. Goldsmith was a desultory student. He roistered, gambled (a lifelong weakness), and attended the theatre more readily than the classroom. But he also read phenomenally. His father died during his time at Trinity College and his financial support dried up. He sold ballads for money in the streets and cadged