by Gore Vidal
From 1581 to 1585, Montaigne served as Mayor of Bordeaux: “People say that my period of office passed without trace or mark. Good!” In 1582, the Pope dealt him a grievous blow by replacing the Julian calendar with the Gregorian, which lopped eleven days off everyone’s life. “Since I cannot stand novelty even when corrective. I am constrained to be a bit of a heretic in this case” (III 10). He enjoyed his fame as a writer but noted “that in my own climate of Gascony they find it funny to see me in print; I am valued the more, the farther from home knowledge of me has spread…” (III 2). In the Frame translation, there is a “How true” in the margin next to what could be the mark of a tear, if it did not still smell of whisky. In a variation on Aesop, he notes, “A hundred times a day when we go mocking our neighbour we are really mocking ourselves; we abominate in others those faults which are most manifestly our own, and with a miraculous lack of shame and perspicacity, are astonished by them” (III 8). Perhaps this universal failing is why “I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics; that is my physics” (III 13).
In a comment on Montaigne’s most celebrated essay, “On the Education of Children,” Sainte-Beuve remarked that “he goes too far, like a child of Aristippus who forgets Adam’s fall.” He is “simply Nature…Nature in all its Grace-less completeness.” The clarity—charity, too—with which he saw his world has made him seem a precursor of the age of Enlightenment, even that of Wordsworth. But Screech does not allow us so easily to appropriate him to our secular ends, and Montaigne’s Epicurean stoicism is more than balanced by his non-questioning—indeed defense—of the traditional faith. For him, his translation of the Theologia Naturalis of Raymond Sebond was to be regarded as a prophylactic against the dread Luther.
Incidentally, Screech’s own translation is as little ambiguous as possible; it is also demotic. Where Frame writes “ruminating,” Screech writes “chewing over,” “frenzied” becomes “raging mad,” “loose-boweled” becomes “squittering,” a word that I was obliged to look up—“to void thin excrement.” We are all in Screech’s debt for giving us back a word so entirely useful that no critic’s portmanteau should ever again be without it. On the other hand, Frame’s “this bundle of so many disparate pieces is being composed” becomes the perhaps less happy phrase “all the various pieces of this faggot are being bundled together…”
“The writer’s function is not without arduous duties. By definition, he cannot serve those who make history; he must serve those who are subject to it.” Montaigne would not have agreed with Albert Camus. In a sense, Montaigne is writing for the rulers (Henry IV was particularly taken by his essay “On High Rank as a Disadvantage”). Educate the rulers, and they will not torment their subjects. But Montaigne’s political interests are aside from his main point, the exploration of self. Once he had lost Étienne, he was all he had; so he wrote a book about himself. “I am most ignorant about myself. I marvel at the assurance and confidence everyone has about himself, whereas there is virtually nothing that I know I know…. I think that I am an ordinary sort of man, except inconsidering myself to be one…. That I find my own work pardonable is not so much for itself or its true worth as from a comparison with others’ writings which are worse—things which I can see people taking seriously” (II 17).
Vanity of any sort amuses him. Even the great Julius Caesar is ticked off: “Observe how Caesar spreads himself when he tells us about his ingenuity in building bridges and siege-machines; in comparison, he is quite cramped when he talks of his professional soldiering, his valour or the way he conducts his wars. His exploits are sufficient proof that he was an outstanding general: he wants to be known as something else rather different: a good engineer” (I 17).
Montaigne begins his essays (first thought of as rhapsodies—confused medleys) with a pro forma bow to Cicero–Plato: “Cicero says that philosophizing is nothing other than getting ready to die. That is because study and contemplation draw our souls somewhat outside ourselves keeping them occupied away from the body, a state which both resembles death and which forms a kind of apprenticeship for it; or perhaps it is because all the wisdom and argument in the world eventually come down to one conclusion which is to teach us not to be afraid of dying” (I 20). In this way “all the labour of reason must be to make us live well.”
Montaigne’s reigning humor may have been melancholic, but he is hardly morbid in his musings on that good life which leads to a good death. He is a true stoic, despite occasional obeisance to the Holy Spirit, a post-Platonic novelty now running down. He is even a bit sardonic: “Everybody goes out as though he had just come in. Moreover, however decrepit a man may be, he thinks he still has another twenty years.” But “I have adopted the practice of always having death not only in my mind but on my lips. There is nothing I inquire about more readily than how men have died: what did they say? How did they look?” Like me, when he read a biography, he first skipped to the end to see how its subject died. As his book—and life—proceed, he is more than ever aware of the diversity within the unity of things and the inability to know very much of what came before us because, “Great heroes lived before Agamemnon. Many there were: yet none is lamented, being swept away unknown into the long night.”
After the arrival of kidney stones, Montaigne occasionally strikes a bleak note: “I am on the way out: I would readily leave to one who comes later whatever wisdom I have learnt about dealing with the world…. At the finish of every task the ending makes itself known. My world is over: my mould has been emptied; I belong entirely to the past” (III 10). But before self-pity could spread her great fluffy wings, he then makes a joke about being cruelly robbed of eleven days of life by the Pope’s new calendar. Meanwhile, “Time and custom condition us to anything strange: nevertheless, the more I haunt myself and know myself the more my misshapenness amazes me and the less I understand myself” (III 11). Finally, “We confuse life with worries about death, and death with worries about life. One torments us; the other terrifies us” (III 12). Yet,
If we have not known how to live, it is not right to teach us how to die, making the form of the end incongruous with the whole. If we have known how to live steadfastly and calmly we shall know how to die the same way…. death is indeed the ending of life, but not therefore its end: it puts an end to it, it is its ultimate point: but it is not its objective. Life must be its own objective, its own purpose…. Numbered among its other duties includedunder the general and principal heading, How to Live, there is the subsection, How to Die.
Thus, Montaigne firmly reverses the Cicero–Plato notion that “to philosophize is to learn how to die” and enjoins us to meditate not on unknowable, irrelevant death but on life which can be known, at least in part. Sixteen years of observing himself and reading and rereading the thousand books in the round library had convinced him not only that life was all there is but that “Each man bears the entire form of man’s estate” (III 2). At the end, Montaigne had met himself at last; and everyone else, too. On September 13, 1592, he died in bed while listening to Mass. What one would give to know what he said, how he looked, just before he, too, entered the long night.
Meanwhile, Screech now replaces Frame at my bedside. Anglophones of the next century will be deeply in his debt. Despite his insistence on the Catholicism of Montaigne, the good Screech does note that Montaigne uses the word Fortune—in the sense of fate—350 times. That is satisfying.
The Times Literary Supplement
June 26, 1992
RABBIT’S OWN BURROW
A decade ago, thanks to the success of America’s chain bookstores with their outlets in a thousand glittering malls, most “serious” fiction was replaced by mass-baked sugary dough—I mean books—whose huge physical presence in the shops is known, aptly to the trade, as “dumps”: outward and visible sign of Gresham’s Law at dogged work. In spite of this, the fact that John Updike’s latest novel, In the Beauty of the Lilies, briefly made it to the bottom of the New York Times best-seller
list is remarkable. As it is a rare week when any “serious” novel is listed, one is usually so grateful that there are still those who want to read an even halfway good novelist, one ought never to discourage those readers whom he attracts. Also, what is the point of attacking writers in a period where—save for prize-mad pockets of old London—they are of so little consequence?
In observance of this law of a dying species, I have hardly mentioned, much less reviewed, Updike in the past, and he has observed the same continence with regard to me. But, lately, as I turn the pages of The New Yorker, where his poems, short stories, and book reviews have been appearing for so many years, I note an occasional dig at me. Apparently, I do not sufficiently love the good, the nice America, is the burden of his épingles. In sere and yellow leaf, Updike is now in superpatriot mood and on the attack. For instance, apropos the movie star Lana Turner (whom, to his credit, he appreciates): “Fifty years ago we were still a nation of builders and dreamers, now whittlers and belittlers set the cultural tone.” O vile Whittlers! O unGodly Belittlers! Of whom, apparently, I am one.
Although I’ve never taken Updike seriously as a writer, I now find him the unexpectedly relevant laureate of the way we would like to live now, if we have the money, the credentials, and the sort of faith in our country and its big God that passes all understanding. Finally, according to the mainline American press, Updike has now got it all together, and no less an authority than The New Yorker’s George Steiner (so different from Europe’s one) assures us that Updike now stands alongside Hawthorne and Nabokov, when, surely, he means John P. Marquand and John O’Hara.
Prior to immersion in next year’s Pulitzer Prize novel, I read Updike’s memoir, Self-Consciousness (1989), written in the writer’s fifty-seventh year. Self-consciousness is a good theme, if meant ironically. After all, save to self, we are, none of us, worth much fussing about, run-of-the-mill poor, bare forked animals—or was it radishes?—that we are. Anyway, I hoped that he would make some self-mocking play on his own self-consciousness as opposed to Socrates’ examined life. Hope quickly extinguished. There is no examination of the self, as opposed to an unremitting self-consciousness that tells us why he was—is—different—but not too much different—from others and what made him the way he is—always is, as he doesn’t much change in his own story, a small-town Philoctetes whose wound turns out to be an unpretty skin condition called psoriasis. “Yet what was my creativity, my relentless need to produce but a parody of my skin’s embarrassing overproduction?”
John Updike’s father was of Dutch-American stock; his mother German. He was born in 1932, in modest circumstances at Shillington, Pennsylvania. The mother was a would-be writer, constantly typing away and sending out stories that returned to her like so many boomerangs. The son would soon outdo the mother, his stories returning home in the pages of The New Yorker.
The Shillington that he describes is a sunny place, despite the Depression of the 1930s and some labor strikes; more than once, Updike edgily refers to the election by the nearby city of Reading of a socialist mayor. Happily, for his school of Biedermeier novels, the world outside himself seems never to have caught his proper interest until the dread 1960s, when “bright young men who are born with silver spoons in their mouth…were selling this nation out.” But that was long after he was a “plain child, ungainly youth. Lacking brothers and sisters, [he] was shy and clumsy in the give and take…of human exchange.” Of contemporaries who did not care for school, “I could not understand how anybody could rebel against a system so clearly benign.” But then he is always true to his “docile good child nature.”
Yet under all this blandness and acceptance of authority in any form, there is a growing puzzlement. “Social position in America is not easy to be precise about,” he notes; then, warily, he tries to place his high-school teacher father: “My family sold asparagus and pansies for odd money, embarrassing me.” But unlike a Fitzgerald or an O’Hara (most Irish Catholic writers in America are born with perfect radar on how to make it all the way to the blue light at landing’s end—or pass out at the bar in the attempt), Updike seems to have missed whatever gentry there may have been in the neighborhood. All he knows is that his mother says that we are much “nicer” than a lot of other people, which is important if not very useful, as his father is a definite nonsuccess, and so Updike concludes that:
Life breeds punchers and counterpunchers, venturers like my father and ambushers like me: the venturer risks rebuff and defeat; the ambusher…risks fading away to nothing…. All those years in Shillington, I had waited to be admired, waited patiently…burrowing in New York magazines and English mystery novels for the secret passageway out, the path of avoidance and vindication. I hid a certain determined defiance…. I would “show” them, I would avenge all the slights and abasements visited upon my father—the miserly salary, the subtle tyranny of his overlords at the high school, the disrespect of his students, the laughter in the movie house at the name of Updike.
Not exactly Richard III. Rather the inner rebellion of a shy, ambitious, small creature—a rabbit?—preparing to abandon its nice safe burrow for a world elsewhere, for a place across the water in nearby sinful Manhattan.
Shillington was to remain central to Updike’s intense consciousness of self. In footnotes to his memoir, he solemnly quotes from his own work to show just how he has used the “real” life of his small town in fiction. Over and over again he writes of the Lutheran Grace Church, the elementary school, the post office, of youthful revels at Stephens’ Luncheonette. Not since Sinclair Lewis has a naturalistic writer been so merciless to his reader as Updike. Endlessly, he describes shops and their contents, newspaper advertisements, streets that go here, there, and everywhere except into the—this—reader’s mind. Places and people seem to interest him only when reduced, as cooks say, to receipts not dishes. Certainly all the words he uses are there on the page, but what they stand for is not. Only he himself is recorded with careful attention, as he notes his aim of “impersonal egoism,” and “always with some natural hesitation and distaste” when it comes to memoir-writing; yet he soldiers on, and we learn that only after the family moved from Shillington does he masturbate—and so a lifelong adhesion to heterosexuality begins, at least in the mind. With jouissance, he comes into his kingdom, love in hand.
As a fellow New Yorker writer, S. J. Perelman, puts it in a letter to Ogden Nash in 1965, “J. Updike…read extracts from three works of his to the assembled scholars, which I didn’t personally hear as I was overtaken by the characteristic nausea that attacks me when this youth performs on the printed pages. But Cheever brought me tidings that all dealt with masturbation, a favorite theme of Updike’s.” Of course, Perelman was a bit of a grouch; and who could have foretold that in three years’ time this onanistic “youth” would write Couples, a celebration of marriage and its saucy twin, adultery, the only important subjects of middle-brow fiction, saving God Himself and His America? It should be noted that Christianity seems always to have been a fact for Updike, starting with the Grace Lutheran and other churches of Shillington; later, as an outward and visible sign of niceness and of belongingness, he remains a churchgoer when he moves up the social scale to Ipswich, Massachusetts, where he achieves that dream of perfect normality which is not only American and Christian but—when in the company of other upwardly mobile couples—ever so slightly bohemian.
Although Updike seems never to have had any major psychic or physical wound, he has endured all sorts of minor afflictions. In the chapter “At war with my skin,” he tells us in great detail of the skin condition that sun and later medicine would clear up; for a long time, however, he was martyr to it as well as a slave to his mirror, all the while fretting about what “normal” people would make of him. As it proved, they don’t seem to have paid much attention to an affliction that, finally, “had to do with self love, with finding myself acceptable…the price high but not impossibly so; I must pay for being me.” The price for preserving me
certainly proved to be well worth it when, in 1955, he was rejected for military conscription, even though the empire was still bogged down in Korea and our forces were increased that year from 800,000 to three million—less Updike, who, although “it pains me to write these pages,” confesses that he was “far from keen to devote two years to the national defense.” He was later to experience considerable anguish when, almost alone among serious writers, he would support the Vietnam War on the ground that who am I “to second-guess a president?” One suspects that he envies the clear-skinned lads who so reluctantly fought for the land he so deeply loves.
“I had a stammer that came and went.” But he is ever game: “As with my psoriasis, the affliction is perhaps not entirely unfortunate.” Better than to be born with a silver spoon in one’s mouth is to be born at the heart of a gray cloud with a silver lining. The stammer does “make me think twice about going onstage and appearing in classrooms and at conferences,” but “Being obliging by nature and anxious for approval, I would never say no if I weren’t afraid of stuttering. Also, as I judge from my own reactions, people who talk too easily and comfortably…arouse distrust in some atavistic, pre-speech part of ourselves; we turn off.” Take that, Chrysostom Chatterbox! Characteristically, he is prompt to place a soothing Band-Aid on his own wound: he quotes Carlyle, who observes of Henry James: “a stammering man is never a worthless man.” Whatever that means. (Also, pace Carlyle, the Master did not stammer; he filibustered elaborately, cunningly, with pauses so carefully calculated that if one dared try to fill one, he would launch a boa-constrictor of a sentence at the poor mesmerized, oh, dear, rabbit! of an auditor.) Finally, Updike confesses to unease with certain groups that your average distinguished author must address. He is afraid of New York audiences especially: “They are too smart and left wing for me….” This seems to mean politically minded Jews, so unlike the nice Southern college audiences with whom he is most at home.