Artist Tom Phillips: ‘Illustrating Jane Austen would be a ridiculous idea’

“I don’t like illustrated books,” says Tom Phillips. “I’ve not liked them since I was a child.” It’s a surprising remark, coming from a man who has just illustrated a new edition of Tristram Shandy for the Folio Society. But Tristram Shandy is no ordinary book, and Phillips no ordinary illustrator.

The 82-year-old artist and Royal Academician is best known for A Humument, a labour of love he began in 1966 and finally completed 40 years later. Taking a copy of an obscure Victorian novel called A Human Document, Phillips covered each page with drawings, paintings and collages, leaving the few words still visible beneath to take on strange new meanings. It is an extraordinary blend of art, found poetry and sabotage; no book has ever been more beautifully defaced.

This deconstruction of the novel as a physical object was, in a way, exactly what the respectable Anglican vicar Laurence Sterne was up to in the 18th century when he shocked the literary world with Tristram Shandy.

Sterne’s book is a riot of visual invention: one page is black, another is marbled, another is left blank so the reader can draw their own picture of the beautiful Widow Wadman on it (“as like your mistress as you can – as unlike your wife as your conscience will let you”). When one character makes “a flourish with his stick thus –” half a page is taken up with a squiggle, showing the shape his stick traces in the air.

“It’s never been out-absurded,” Phillips remarks over the phone. “I felt like I had to compete with it.”

He knew from the outset that he would refuse to show the book’s characters: “I don’t want to be told what the people look like. I want the author’s idea of it.”

Instead, his illustrations take a slant approach: one nods to Magritte’s Ceci N’est Pas Une Pipe, and puns on “dada”. Tristram Shandy “was a precursor of dadaism”, he says, “and dada means hobby horse – that hobby horse plays a big part in the book. It’s also a big precursor of things like Monty Python – it’s very Pythonesque to have a book that starts with the writer not having been born.” Although the novel’s full title is The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, the distracted narrator’s circuitous style means there’s not much of the “life”.

Tristram isn’t born until volume three, and is given his name by accident, despite his father’s insistence that “there never was a great or heroic action performed since the world began by one called Tristram”. (I’ve always tried not to take that bit personally.)

Phillips was drawn to the project through a Shandy-esque series of misunderstandings and coincidences. “I have a close connection with Tristram Shandy, in that friends of mine run Shandy Hall [Sterne’s Yorkshire home], where I go and stay every year – I met them through the business of postcard collecting.

“So [Folio Society director] Joe Whitlock Blundell – which sounds like a village somewhere, doesn’t it? Whitlock Blundell. Or like something out of PG Wodehouse – he knew that I was keen, in a way, on Tristram Shandy. But that’s not quite true. I’d never actually read it.”

In fact, he had avoided it. “It didn’t seem a book that I would particularly like. I’m not very fond of comic fiction. If only I’d known that Goethe liked it, I’d have been more impressed.”

Since reading it, however, he’s “grown very fond” of Tristram and his misadventures.

Phillips picks his projects with care. Although he’s previously illustrated Waiting for Godot and Dante’s Inferno, and tells me he is working on The Waste Land, he says “the idea of illustrating Jane Austen would be ridiculous to me”. Even if the Folio Society offered him a princely sum to have a go at Pride and Prejudice? “I’d say no.” The problem is that Austen’s grounded characters are too fixed in our imaginations already. He would feel expected to “put them in the same clothes you imagine the people in the book wear – which is a bit too dogged for me.”

The appeal of Tristram Shandy was the freedom to make the art as surprising as the book itself.

“It can be absurd or ridiculous – or beautiful.”

The Folio Society edition of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne, illustrated by Tom Phillips RA, is available only from FolioSociety.com