by Gore Vidal
It has taken me one month to read every one of the 1,269 pages. (Montaigne, III 8: “I have just read through at one go Tacitus’s History [something which rarely happens to me, it is twenty years since I spent one full hour at a time on a book]….”) I enjoyed comparing Screech with Frame. Where Frame is sonorous and euphemistic, Screech is sharp and up-to-date, as readers of his Montaigne and Melancholy (1983) might suspect. Although my nature inclines me to enrol Montaigne in the relativist school of Lucretius and the Epicureans, thus making him proto-Englightenment, Screech firmly nails Montaigne within the Roman Catholic Church of his day, beleaguered as it was by the Reformation, which took the form of civil war in France between Catholics and Protestants, an ideological, that is pointless, war of the crude sort that has entertained us for so much of our own science-ridden century.
Michel Eyquem was born in 1533 at his father’s estate, Montaigne, east of Bordeaux. A family of fish and wine merchants, the Eyquems were minimally ennobled by the acquisition of Montaigne, which gave them their “de.” The mother’s family were Spanish Jewish, presumably long since converted. When schism came, Michel, his parents, two brothers, and a sister remained Catholic, while one brother and two sisters became Protestant. By the 1560s, there was an out-and-out civil war that continued to Michel’s death in 1592. The Montaigne family remained on amiable terms not only with the Catholic court at Paris but with that Protestant sovereign of nearby Navarre who so proverbially celebrated a Mass in order to become King Henry IV of France.
Montaigne’s education was odd but useful. As his tutor spoke no French, Latin became his first language, spoken and written, until he was six. Then he went on to spend seven years at a Latin school, where he was immersed in the Roman classics; but little Greek. He also learned the agreed-upon French of the day, as well as Gascon dialect. He was more or less trained to be a soldier, a lawyer, an estate manager, and what used to be called a “gentleman,” a category that no longer exists in our specialized time. As such, Montaigne naturally hated lying, and it was his essay on the subject that first drew me to him years ago. “Lying is an accursed vice. It is only our words which bind us together and make us human. If we realized the horror and weight of lying, we would see that it is more worthy of the stake than other crimes…. Once let the tongue acquire the habit of lying and it is astonishing how impossible it is to make it give it up” (I 8). As one who has been obliged to spend a lifetime in diverse liar-worlds (worlds where the liar is often most honored when he is known to be lying and getting away with it), I find Montaigne consoling.
Montaigne’s father became Mayor of Bordeaux, while his son spent thirteen years in the city’s legal council. It was during this period that he met a fellow public servant, Étienne de La Boëtie. Each was to become the other’s other self. “If you press me to say why I loved him, I feel that it can only be expressed by replying ‘Because it was him: because it was me.’…We were seeking each other before we set eyes on each other…” (I 28). Their relationship was an intense dialogue on every possible subject. De La Boëtie inclined to stoicism. He had written against tyranny. He died young.
Montaigne’s letter to his father on de La Boëtie’s last days is rather like that of Ammianus Marcellinus on the death of the Emperor Julian, something of a hero to Montaigne if not to the Holy Office. (Letter to father: “He gave up the ghost at about three o’clock on the Wednesday morning, August 18th, 1563, after living 32 years, nine months, and 17 days….”)
Certainly, we are all in poor de La Boëtie’s debt for dying, because Montaigne was never to find another soulmate and so, in due course, after marriage, children, the inheritance of the estate, “In the year of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, his birthday, Michel de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employment…”, retired to Montaigne, where he then began to make attempts at understanding everything, which meant, principally, the unknowable (so Socrates thought) self. In the absence of a friend to talk to or an Atticus to write to, Montaigne started writing to himself about himself and about what he had been reading which became himself. He made many attempts to try—essayer—to find his form. “If I had somebody to write to I would readily have chosen it as the means of publishing my chatter…. Unless I deceive myself my achievement then would have been greater” (I 40). At first, he wrote short memoranda—how to invest a city, or what one is to make of a certain line of Seneca. Later, he settled for the long essay that could be read in an hour. He did a lot of free-associating, as “all subjects are linked to each other” (III 5). Essentially, he wrote as a man of action, involved in the world both locally and nationally. He was personally esteemed by Catherine de Medici, Henry III, Marguerite de Valois, and Henry of Navarre, who twice visited him at Montaigne and would, as King of France, have made him a counsellor had the essayist not made one final attempt to understand death—life by dying.
The greatest action of this man of action was to withdraw to his library in order to read and think and write notes to himself that eventually became books for the world:
At home I slip off to my library (it is on the third storey of a tower); it is easy for me to oversee my household from there. I am above my gateway and have a view of my garden, my chicken-run, my backyard and most parts of my house. There I can turn over the leaves of this book or that, a bit at a time without order or design. Sometimes my mind wanders off, at others I walk to and fro, noting down and dictating these whims of mine…. My libraryis round in shape, squared off only for the needs of my table and chair: as it curves round, it offers me at a glance every one of my books ranged on five shelves all the way along. It has three splendid and unhampered views and a circle of free space sixteen yards in diameter (III 3).
Montaigne seems to have read every Latin author extant; he was also much intrigued with contemporary stories of the Americas and other exotic places where cannibals and realms of gold coexisted. Much of his writing starts with a quotation that sets him to ruminating on his own, buttressed by more quotations, making a sort of palimpsest. If nothing else, he was a superb arranger of other men’s flowers. He was particularly drawn to biographical anecdote, and it was lucky for him that not long after he settled in his tower room, Bishop Jacques Amyot published a French translation of Plutarch, who quickly became Montaigne’s most useful source and touchstone. In fact, one wonders what the essays would have been like without Plutarch. Would Montaigne have found so attractive those human titans, Alexander and Caesar? Or those paradigms of human virtue, Epaminondas and Cato the Younger?
Among the thousand books on the five shelves, Montaigne returns most often to Lucretius and Seneca. He reveres Homer, but he is happiest with those two worldly writers who appeal to his own worldliness. The first because of his sense of the diversity—even relativity—of things, the second as a wise counsellor, not only in the conduct of a life at home but at a dangerous court. He turns often to Cicero, but he is vaguely disapproving of the vanity of that politician, ever avid, especially in retirement, for glory. Cicero “said he wanted to use his withdrawal and his repose from affairs of state to gain life ever-lasting through his writings” (I 39). Then Montaigne, slyly, quotes Persius: “Does knowing mean nothing to you, unless somebody else knows that you know it?”
I thought of a chat with Robert Lowell at my Hudson river house forty years ago. Somehow, we had got on to the subject of Julius Caesar’s character. I mentioned Cicero’s letter to Atticus on how unnerving it was to have Caesar as a house guest. “But,” said Lowell, “remember how pleased Cicero was when Caesar praised his consulship.” Of course, each of us wanted the other to know that he had read the letter and that, if nothing else, we held, in common, a small part of the classical heritage—so etiolated! so testeronish! so Eurocentric!—that Montaigne had spent his life in communion with. I wonder what a poet and a novelist would have in common to talk about nowadays. After all, a shared knowledge of old books was probably the largest part of the “loving friendship”
between Étienne and Montaigne. Today they would share—what? Robert Altman’s films?
Montaigne disliked pedants. He notes that in his local dialect they are called Lettreferits—word-struck. He himself is after other game than words or “words about words”: “scribbling seems to be one of the symptoms of an age of excess” (III 9). “We work merely to fill the memory, leaving the understanding and the sense of right and wrong…. Off I go, rummaging about in books for sayings which please me—not so as to store them up (for I have no storehouses) but so as to carry them back to the book, where they are no more mine than they were in their original place. We only know, I believe, what we know now: ‘knowing’ no more consists in what we once knew than in what we shall know in the future” (I 24). He frets about his poor memory. “I am so outstanding a forgetter that, along with all the rest, I forget even my own works and writings. People are constantly quoting me to me without my realising it” (II 17). This is a bit swank. But writers often forget what they have written, since the act of writing is a letting go of a piece of one’s mind, and so an erasure. Montaigne’s first two volumes of essays were published in 1580: he was forty-seven. Eight years later, he revised the first two volumes and published a third. From the beginning, he was accepted as a classic in the Roman sense, or as a writer utile-doux, as the French styled the great works.
Montaigne was much concerned with his body and believed Sebond’s proposition that man is a marriage between soul and body. He hated doctors, a family tradition to which he not only adhered but attributed the long lives in the male line (he himself was dead at sixty, rather younger than father and grandfather). He feared kidney stones, which tortured his father and, finally, himself. To cure “the stone,” he visited spas everywhere and took the baths: “I reckon that bathing in general is salubrious and I believe that our health has suffered…since we lost the habit…. we are all the worst for having our limbs encrusted and our pores blocked up with filth” (II 37). Of himself, “my build is a little below the average. This defect is not only ugly but unbecoming, especially in those who hold commands…” (II 17), but “my build is tough and thick-set, my face is not fat but full, my complexion is between the jovial and the melancholic…. Skill and agility I have never had…except at running (at which I was among the average).”
He records without despair or even pride that he has almost no gifts for music, dancing, tennis, wrestling, and none at all for swimming, fencing, vaulting, and jumping.
My hand is so clumsy that I cannot even read my own writing, so that I prefer to write things over again rather than to give myself the trouble of disentangling my scribbles…. That apart, I am quite a good scholar! I can never fold up a letter neatly, never sharpen a pen, never carve passably at table, nor put harness on horse, nor bear a hawk properly nor release it, nor address hounds, birds or horses. My bodily endowments are, in brief, in close harmony with my soul’s. There is no agility, merely a full firm vigour, but I can stick things out.
Like his father, he wore mostly black and white. “Whether riding or walking I have always been used to burdening my hand with a cane or stick, even affecting an air of elegance by leaning on it with a distinguished look on my face” (II 25).
He deplored the codpieces of the previous generation, which drew attention to and exaggerated the unmentionables. He had had sex at so early an age that he could not recall just when. Like Abraham Lincoln, he contracted syphilis (“a couple of light anticipatory doses”) (III 3). For this vileness, American universities would erase him from the canon, if they could, since no great man has ever had syphilis or engaged in same-sexuality. On Greek love, Montaigne understood exactly what Achilles and Patroclus were up to in the sack and he found their activities “rightly abhorrent to our manners” on the novel ground that what was not equal in body-mind could not be love, much less “perfect love.” The man chose not another man but a boy for his looks. It was Montaigne’s view that true love, sexual or not, meant the congruence of two men as equals. This was the highest form of human relationship. He does note that “male and female are cast in the same mould: save for education and custom the difference between them is not great” (III 6). Theoretically, if a woman was educated as a man and met her male equal, this could be the “perfect love”: but he gives no examples. Odd, since Plutarch had filled him in on Aspasia and Pericles. But then he did not place Pericles very high; thought him a tricky orator. Of course, he had not read Thucydides.
On “Some Lines of Virgil,” he has a good time with sex, as both necessity and madness. “The genital activities of mankind are so natural, so necessary and so right: what have they done to make us never dare to mention them without embarrassment…? We are not afraid to utter the words ‘kill,’ ‘thief,’ or ‘betray’” (III 5). Yet “The whole movement of the world tends and leads towards copulation. It is a substance infused through everything; it is the centre—towards which all things turn.” He comments on the uncontrollability—and unreliability—of the male member. “Every man knows…that he has a part of his body which often stirs, erects, and lies down again without his leave. Now such passive movements which only touch our outside cannot be called ours” (II 6). (Screech thinks that Montaigne never read Augustine’s Confessions.) Montaigne notes priapic cults in other lands and times. Finally, all in all, he favors arranged marriages: “A good marriage (if there be such a thing) rejects the company and conditions of Cupid; it strives to reproduce those of loving friendship” (III 5). Incidentally, nowhere does Montaigne mention his wife. There is one reference to his daughter Léonor, and a mysterious panegyric to a sort of adopted daughter that, Screech thinks, may have been written by herself in a posthumous edition, which gives rise to the agreeable notion that there may have been some sort of Ibsen plot unfolding in old Périgord. Rousseau thought that Montaigne ought to have told us a lot more about his private life, but then Rousseau was no gentleman.
On politics, Montaigne was deeply but not dully conservative. That is, he did not, figuratively or literally, believe in witches:
I abhor novelty, no matter what visage it presents, and am right to do so, for I have seen some of its disastrous effects. That novelty (the wars of religion) which has for so many years beset us is not solely responsible, but one can say with every likelihood that it has incidentally caused and given birth to them all…. Those who shake the State are easily the first to be engulfed in its destruction. The fruits of dissension are not gathered by the one who began it: he stirs and troubles the water for other men to fish in (I 23).
A nice presage of France’s revolution two centuries later, though not particularly applicable to the American adventure that actually turned the whole world upside down. But in the midst of a civil war over religion, the absolutist must appear more than usually monstrous: “There is a great deal of self-love and arrogance in judging so highly of your opinions that you are obliged to disturb the public peace in order to establish them” (I 23). Plainly, he was not the sort of conservative who would have admired that radical British prime minister who, for a decade, so strenuously disturbed the death-like peace of those sunnily arid North Sea islands.
Montaigne was very much school of the-devil-we-know: “Not as a matter of opinion but of truth, the best and most excellent polity for each nation is the one under which it has been sustained. Its form and its essential advantages depend upon custom. It is easy for us to be displeased with its present condition; I nevertheless hold that to yearn for an oligarchy in a democracy or for another form of government in a monarchy is wrong and insane” (III 9). He regarded any fundamental change as “the cure of illness by death…. My own contemporaries here in France could tell you a thing or two about that!”
Since I want Montaigne on my side in the great task of reworking my own country’s broken-down political system, I must invoke him—like Scripture—in another context. “The most desirable laws are those which are fewest, simplest and most general. I think moreover that it would be better to have none a
t all than to have them in the profusion as we do now…. When King Ferdinand sent colonies of immigrants to the Indies he made the wise stipulation that no one should be included who had studied jurisprudence, lest law suits should pullulate in the New World” (III 13), causing endless faction and altercation. Since our New World is entirely paralyzed by lawyers hired by pullulating polluters of politics as well as of environment and put in place to undo many thousands of laws made by other lawyers, I cannot think Montaigne would be so cruel as not to want us to rid ourselves of such a government, but I suppose he would echo mockingly his young contemporary Shakespeare’s final solution for lawyers, while suggesting that it might do us Americans a world of good if each took a course or two in torts and malfeasances since, from the beginning, we were intended to be a lawyerly republic and must not change.
Common sense is a phrase, if not a quality, much revered in the bright islands of the North Sea. Montaigne is often accused of possessing this rare quality, but what most strikes me in his meanderings is the uncommonness of his sense. He turns a subject round and round and suddenly sees something that others had not noticed. He is also inclined to humor, usually of the dead-pan sort: “Herodotus tells us of a certain district of Libya where men lie with women indiscriminately, but where, once a child can toddle, it recognizes its own father out of the crowd, natural instinct guiding its first footsteps. There are frequent mistakes, I believe…” (II 8).
Of literary style, he wrote: “I want things to dominate, so filling the thoughts of the hearer that he does not even remember the words. I like the kind of speech which is simple and natural, the same on paper as on the lip; speech which is rich in matter, sinewy, brief and short” (I 26). As for “the French authors of our time. They are bold enough and proud enough not to follow the common road; but their want of invention and their power of selection destroy them. All we can see is some wretched affectation of novelty, cold and absurd fictions which instead of elevating their subject batter it down” (III 5). He delighted in Boccaccio, Rabelais, and the Basia of Johannes Secundus. Of poets, he put Virgil highest, especially the Georgics; then Lucretius, Catullus, and Horace. He finds Aesop interestingly complex. “Seneca is full of pithy phrases and sallies; Plutarch is full of matter. Seneca inflames you and stirs you: Plutarch is more satisfying and repays you more. Plutarch leads us: Seneca drives us” (II 10). He seems to be looking ahead at our own scribbling time when he writes, “There are so many ways of taking anything, that it is hard for a clever mind not to find in almost any subject something or other which appears to serve his point, directly or indirectly. That explains why an opaque, ambiguous style has been so long in vogue” (II 12).