Good as her Word: Selected Journalism. Lorna Sage

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СКАЧАТЬ goddesses partly because she was ‘nobody’, or worse. The first extraordinary thing about her is that she survived at all in the world of three dimensions, that she wasn’t just a vanishing ‘model’ sucked down into poverty and whoredom. It seems (the early years are very murky) that her beauty was so striking, as well as classically fashionable, that she brought out the Pygmalion in people.

      Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh plucked her out of Mrs Kelly’s brothel (a ‘nunnery’ in the style of the brothel in Fanny Hill) and passed her on to his friend Charles Greville, a dilettante and collector who set her up in domestic seclusion in the Edgware Road and began the process of educating her into a largeness of spirit that would match her splendid physique. She was a collector’s item, ‘a modern piece of virtu’ as he proclaimed her (‘ridiculous man’ says Ms Fraser with unusual sternness), and he watched over his investment. It was he who introduced her to Romney; it was he who, when his finances became chronically embarrassed, passed her on to a more kindly and civilised collector, his uncle, the British ambassador in Naples, Sir William Hamilton.

      This part of the story is always fascinating. Greville seems to have conned Emma into believing that her trip to Naples was part of her education, while to Sir William (recently widowed) he represented it as a mutually beneficial arrangement – he would be free to look for an heiress, his uncle would become the possessor of an enviable objet, who was also pleasantly domesticated and quite likeable in bed.

      Greville is here a study in himself, the quintessential dilettante—‘the whole art of going through life tolerably is to keep oneself eager about anything’. He also seems to have been hoping to distract Sir William from a second marriage, since he was his uncle’s heir. In the event (served him right) Sir William became so attached to Emma that he made her Lady Hamilton, and forced English society to acknowledge her, though at the convenient distance of Naples.

      Emma’s injured and statuesque innocence throughout the whole episode is (again) extraordinary. For a girl from Mrs Kelly’s she had already come a long way, and now she moved from a heroic passion of resentment against Greville (‘If I was with you, I would murder you and myself boath’) to a fervent attachment to Sir William in the grandest, most unhesitating style.

      To the astonishment of her protectors, she took herself seriously: the classical ‘Attitudes’ in which Sir William perfected her (and which she performed for the company after dinner) were reflected in an awesome personal straightforwardness that made people accept her as a brilliant exception, outside the rules. Greville had written to Sir William that she was ‘capable of anything grand, masculine or feminine’; and Sir William, justifying his marriage, described her as ‘an extraordinary being’ – ‘It has often been remarked that a reformed rake makes the best husband, Why not vice versa?’ Visitors to Naples saw in her classical antiquities brought to life. This is Goethe, one of the after-dinner audience:

      The spectator … sees what thousands of artists would have liked to express realised before him in movements and surprising transformations … in her [Sir William] has found all the antiquities, all the profiles of Sicilian coins, even the Apollo Belvedere.

      And so the stage was set for her apotheosis as Nelson’s consort. Here the sublime teeters on the edge of the ridiculous: he came along only just in time (she was getting dangerously large in her thirties) and few observers could quite take the real life enactment of a passion on the Olympian scale. Spiteful Mrs Trench was only one of many unbelievers – ‘She is bold, forward, coarse, assuming, and vain. Her figure is colossal … Lord Nelson is a little man, without any dignity.’

      Suddenly she is a Juno lumbering among sceptics, her grandeur turned to grossness like one of Swift’s simple-minded Brobdingnagians. With Nelson’s death, her claims to heroic stature fell away, and the story leads with a sad inevitability to the boozy death in Calais, embittered further by the clause in Nelson’s will which bequeathed her (as though she were indeed a great work of art) to the nation.

      Flora Fraser doesn’t moralise over the ending – not even over the nastiest part of it, Emma’s failure to acknowledge her daughter by Nelson, Horatia, who watched her die, repelled and mystified. ‘Why she should so fascinate is difficult to answer’ is the nearest we get to a conclusion.

      Ms Fraser lays out the evidence in a conscientious, noncommittal fashion that reminds one that she’s a third-generation biographer, following in the footsteps of mother, and of grandmother Elizabeth Longford, and so confident (perhaps a touch too confident) that 200-year-old gossip will prove sufficiently riveting. But she has chosen her subject well – deeper speculation, one suspects, would be out of place with a character so entirely public property from the start.

       Half of Shandy

      Laurence Sterne: The Later Years ARTHUR H. CASH

      ‘HE IS IN VOGUE. He is the man of Humour, he is the toast of the British nation.’ So reported Yorkshireman Sir Thomas Robinson from London in May 1760. Laurence Sterne, the vicar of Coxwold, was the hero of the hour, famous to a degree literary men seldom manage – like an actor, or a saint.

      The second volume of Arthur H. Cash’s Sterne biography covers the years when he became public property, following the publication of the first euphoric instalment of Tristram Shandy. Sterne and his creature Tristram merged into one tricksy and titillating ‘character’, larger than life and twice as odd, a prodigy, a ‘phenomenon’. Lapdogs and racehorses were named after Tristram; Garrick befriended him; Sir Joshua Reynolds painted him; 19-year-old James Boswell, looking for someone to hero-worship, tried him out for size in a ‘poetical Epistle’:

       He runs about from place to place

       Now with my Lord, then with his Grace …

       A budding whisper flys about,

       Where’er he comes they point him out.

      Boswell, though, went on to settle on someone quite different, soundly three-dimensional Dr Johnson, whose maggots and eccentricities were ballasted with moral authority. Sterne was slippery, skinny and ambiguous, his fascination tied up with his contradictions – the obscenity with the sentiment, the tears with the wit, the clergyman with the buffoon.

      Moreover, he had stage-managed his own début, ghosting a letter from his mistress to Garrick (‘The Author … is a kind and generous friend of mine’) and arranging for Hogarth to be shown another letter to a third party, in which Sterne wished – all innocently – for a Hogarth illustration for his book … and so forth. Small wonder it soon became the height of fashion to complain about how fashionable he was: ‘A very insipid and tedious performance,’ opined Horace Walpole enviously; and the classics tutor at Emmanuel, one Richard Farmer, solemnly predicted that ‘in the course of 20 years, should anyone wish to refer to the book in question, he will be obliged to go to an antiquary for it’.

      There was more to his respectable contemporaries’ distaste than fashion, however. One of Sterne’s most lasting friendships was with dangerous John Wilkes, atheist, rake, and proto-revolutionary; and his admirers included d’Holbach, Diderot and the Encyclopaedists. The philosopher David Hume pronounced Tristram Shandy ‘the best Book that has been writ by any Englishman these 30 years … bad as it is’. Shameless Shandy was a subversive, all the more effective because he posed as a humble jester (‘alas, poor Yorick!’), and threw off his jibes against authority with a whimsical air. He was profoundly, irretrievably indecorous – not just in the matter of doubles entendres, smut and playing with dirt (‘a naughty boy, and a little apt to dirty his frock,’ said motherly blue stocking Elizabeth Montagu), СКАЧАТЬ