taken from Literary Review article
Frederic Raphael
MAN FOR ALL SEASONS
How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
By Sarah Bakewell (Chatto & Windus 370pp £16.99)
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne was born in 1533 and died (following an attack of kidney stones, like his father) in 1592. His mother was of Marrano descent; her family had been Sephardic Jews, forced into Catholicism. Montaigne himself was always formally obedient to the Church. 'Otherwise', he wrote, 'I could not keep myself from rolling about incessantly. Thus I have kept myself intact, without agitation or disturbance of conscience.' In this respect, he was somewhat the precursor of Evelyn Waugh, who said that, had he not been a Catholic, he would scarcely have been human. Montaigne, however, was a genial man of no officious piety; a dutiful mayor of Bordeaux, unaggressive lord of his modest Périgordin manor, and a courtier without grand ambition.
His essays advocated good-humoured acceptance of the vagaries of human life. For all his formal orthodoxy, he was a manifest sceptic: 'There is', he observed, 'no hostility that exceeds Christian hostility.' In practice, he preferred the Stoic amor fati to religious absolutism and abominated the righteous cruelty of those with undoubting convictions: 'It is putting a very high price on one's conjectures to have someone roasted alive on their account.' Sarah Bakewell takes this to be an allusion to the spate of witch-hunting which accompanied the religious wars, but it is no great stretch to see in it a reference to the ongoing series of autos-da-fé on the other side of the Pyrenees. For those who choose to read him so, Montaigne was a bit of a crypto-Jew.
Fearing 'chimeras and fantastic monstrosities', he recruited reason, wryness and literacy to allay their hold on him. He declined to be engaged on either savage side in the religious wars which were the contemporary signs of that France 'divisée en deux' that first split Catholics from Huguenots, later Jacobins from Girondins, and then Socialists from the Droite classique. He played a key, but diffident, part in bringing the Protestant Henri of Navarre to the French throne and, one guesses, encouraged the king's view that Paris was worth a Mass. At the same time, Montaigne observed that, however lofty the throne, 'we are still sitting only on our own rump'.
If, in his mature years, he was happy to withdraw to the tower room - what he called his 'arrière-boutique' - in his chateau (the lintel of its doorway only a forbidding five feet from the floor), he was never aloof from the world's dangers nor reluctant to savour its pleasures. It is said that, as a young blade, he practised debauchery, but refrained from it with his beautiful wife, Françoise, whose naked breasts were never revealed to him: he saw only her hands and face uncovered. He made love to her, he dares to concede, 'with only one buttock'. Like his mother, Françoise outlived him, by many years. He gives neither woman a flattering press, but for Sarah Bakewell to say that they somehow drove him to his death is unworthy.
Montaigne's father, Pierre, played a key part in his formation. An opinionated, perhaps somewhat abrupt man, he insisted that 'Micheau' learn Latin as his first language and had small faith in formal schooling. While Ovid's Metamorphoses chimed with Montaigne's mutability and primed his imagination, Bakewell thinks him 'cheeky' for saying that Virgil's Aeneid 'might have been brushed up a bit'. In fact, Virgil himself (and not a few critics) thought the same thing; hence his wish for the poem to be destroyed after his death.
Pierre Montaigne triggered his son's literary life when, probably in 1567, he handed Micheau a 500-page Latin manuscript, the Theologia Naturalis, sive liber creaturarum, written over a century earlier by the Catalan Catholic apologist Raymond Sebond, and said (in Bakewell's words), 'Translate this into French for me when you get a moment, will you, son?'
Montaigne's almost book-length assessment of Sebond's work became the centrepiece of the second volume of his Essais. Sainte-Beuve regarded this seemingly deferential analysis as a covert attack on Christianity. As Joseph Epstein reminds us, in an elegant and succinct essay, Montaigne had a prescient word to say about such deconstruction: 'Once you start digging down into a piece of writing, there is simply no slant or meaning ... which the human mind cannot find there.' In our own time, as the Janus-faced Paul de Man would prove, bad faith and critical ingenuity often go hunting together.
How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer is a lively, well-sourced account of the man and the work. Bakewell is tellingly accurate when she comes to the savage instability of sixteenth-century provincial life. Catholics and Huguenots, neighbours and friends, were inspired to slaughter each other with pitiless self-righteousness. Bordeaux was the scene of exemplary massacres and vindictive repressions, in which Montaigne strove, with no little courage and some success, to play a reconciling role.
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Courageous but never pugnacious, except in self-advocacy, his sense of his own fragility and his innate tolerance warned him against what Byron (a somewhat kindred spirit, who also pampered his own inner divisions) called 'enthusymusy': over-keen religious partisanship. Two centuries later, Talleyrand (another Périgordin grandee) would counsel young diplomats to avoid 'trop de zèle' and played the Bishop of Bray, so to speak, with similar, but much more cynical, versatility.
Montaigne's want of dogmatic rigour, his willingness to settle for a good life this side of the grave, earned him the ardent reproaches of both Pascal and Descartes and, in time, the anathemas of the Church (once on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the essays were not reprieved until the mid-nineteenth century). He always did his duty, in pious and political terms, but his abiding pleasures were mundane and country-gentlemanly. His contemporary, Justus Lipsius, called him 'the French Thales'; but Montaigne would never, I suspect, have fallen into a well, as Thales supposedly did, while staring at the heavens. Micheau always watched his step with some care.
His eccentric schooling allowed him to pillage Latin literature with facility (if not always with precision) and to embrace Plutarch and Greek philosophy, although not in the language in which they were written. He indulged his cacoethes scribendi without restraint, but said that he would 'hate a reputation for being clever at writing, but stupid at everything else'. His essays were a reminiscential ramble around the estate of literature, issuing in what he termed 'des excréments d'un vieil esprit'. Self-portraiture and self-caricature regularly punctured his own seigneurial complacency.
Bakewell's well-sourced, spritely and anecdotal book does not benefit from being dressed as some sort of self-help manual. She gets off to a trendy start by recommending Theodore Zeldin's website The Oxford Muse (oh dear!), which invites self-revelation from 'all and sundry' as a means towards 'replacing national stereotypes with real people'. The site, we are promised (or should that be 'threatened'?), contains essays with 'titles like' - meaning, I suppose, such as - 'Why an educated Russian works as a cleaner in Oxford'. This preliminary digression may pay tribute to Bakewell's mentor, but it has little to do with Montaigne. I doubt if the exploratory self-centredness at the heart of his genius would choose to be associated with Zeldin's collation of brief lives.
Montaigne's shortest answer to the question 'how to live?' would probably be the banal recommendation to take it easy. His meandering answers are much more interesting and more diverting than any sound-bitten moral nostrum. Carpe diem, the Epicurean motto, is best honoured by caressing the quotidian details and appreciating the ordinary. Montaigne responded, prophylactically, to Heidegger's vision of man as living 'towards death' by advising against thinking too much about it. The variety of life on earth (not least that of the domestic animals with whom we play and who, Montaigne suspected, play with us) was an advertisement for unaffected pursuits, as against 'super-celestial' apprehensions or apocalyptic hopes.
Bakewell does not mention that he also said that, in the final confrontation with death, there was no sense in feigning. In extremis, Montaigne insisted, 'Il faut parler français.' The punning implication being that when it came to honest expression (franchise), the vernacular alone could provide a specific against cant. There is a sly hint here that the consolations of religion, which he received on his pain-filled deathbed, were not entirely to his taste.
Bakewell is properly dubious about the too clever notion that Etienne de la Boétie's precocious 'Discours de la servitude volontaire' was actually written by Montaigne himself and subsequently wished on his beloved friend (who died young, of the plague, with Micheau in close attendance), because he feared being taken for a dangerous revolutionary. La Boétie, under whose statue in Sarlat we often park our car, had a clear, brave voice of his own. His attack on tyranny and its spineless apparatchiks is a classic of virile provincial outspokenness.
Montaigne is, in truth, an entertaining companion rather than a therapist or a prototypical Miss Lonelyhearts. When Sarah Bakewell frees herself from the formulaic frame into which she has elected (or agreed) to be compressed, she is a generous, well-informed guide, not least to the afterlife of Montaigne's Essays, which leaked into Shakespeare, thanks to John Florio's English translation, and later inspired William Hazlitt. Montaigne's admirer Nietzsche's title 'human, all too human' is one that Micheau might have been happy to adopt. He (rather than the self-important Sir Thomas More) was, and remains, my man for all seasons.
Frederic Raphael is finishing a novel called 'Final Demands' (the third in his 'The Glittering Prizes' trilogy), to be published in the spring.
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