Sarah Bakewell - How to Live - A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

The journalist Bernard Levin, writing an article on the subject for The Times in 1991, said, “I defy any reader of Montaigne not to put down the book at some point and say with incredulity: ‘How did he know all that about me?’ ”The answer is, of course, that he knows it by knowing about himself. In turn, people understand him because they too already know “all that” about their own experience. As one of his most obsessive early readers, Blaise Pascal, wrote in the seventeenth century: “It is not in Montaigne but in myself that I find everything I see there.”

The novelist Virginia Woolf imagined people walking past Montaigne’s self-portrait like visitors in a gallery. As each person passes, he or she pauses in front of the picture and leans forward to peer through the patterns of reflection on the glass. “There is always a crowd before that picture, gazing into its depths, seeing their own faces reflected in it, seeing more the longer they look, never being able to say quite what it is they see.” The portrait’s face and their own merge into one. This, for Woolf, was the way people respond to each other in general:

As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror … And the novelists in future will realize more and more the importance of these reflections, for of course there is not one reflection but an almost infinite number; those are the depths they will explore, those the phantoms they will pursue.

Montaigne was the first writer to create literature that deliberately worked in this way, and to do it using the plentiful material of his own life rather than either pure philosophy or pure invention. He was the most human of writers, and the most sociable. Had he lived in the era of mass networked communication, he would have been astounded at the scale on which such sociability has become possible: not dozens or hundreds in a gallery, but millions of people seeing themselves bounced back from different angles.

The effect, in Montaigne’s time as in our own, can be intoxicating. A sixteenth-century admirer, Tabourot des Accords, said that anyone reading the Essays felt as if they themselves had written it. Over two hundred and fifty years later, the essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson said the same thing in almost the same phrase. “It seemed to me as if I had myself written the book, in some former life.” “So much have I made him my own,” wrote the twentieth-century novelist André Gide, “that it seems he is my very self.” And Stefan Zweig, an Austrian writer on the verge of suicide after being forced into exile during the Second World War, found in Montaigne his only real friend: “Here is a ‘you’ in which my ‘I’ is reflected; here is where all distance is abolished.” The printed page fades from view; a living person steps into the room instead. “Four hundred years disappear like smoke.”

Enthusiastic buyers on the online bookstore Amazon.com still respond in the same way. One calls the Essays “not so much a book as a companion for life,” and another predicts that it will be “the best friend you’ve ever had.” A reader who keeps a copy always on the bedside table laments the fact that it is too big (in its complete version) to carry around all day too. “There’s a lifetime’s reading in here,” says another. “For such a big fat classic of a book it reads like it was written yesterday, although if it had been written yesterday, he’d’ve been all over Hello! magazine by now.”

All this can happen because the Essays has no great meaning, no point to make, no argument to advance. It does not have designs on you; you can do as you please with it. Montaigne lets his material pour out, and never worries if he has said one thing on one page and the opposite overleaf, or even in the next sentence. He could have taken as his motto Walt Whitman’s lines:

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Every few phrases, a new way of looking at things occurs to him, so he changes direction. Even when his thoughts are most irrational and dreamlike, his writing follows them. “I cannot keep my subject still,” he says. “It goes along befuddled and staggering, with a natural drunkenness.” Anyone is free to go with him as far as seems desirable, and let him meander off by himself if it doesn’t. Sooner or later, your paths will cross again.

Having created a new genre by writing in this way, Montaigne created essais: his new term for it. Today, the word essay falls with a dull thud. It reminds many people of the exercises imposed at school or college to test knowledge of the reading list: reworkings of other writers’ arguments with a boring introduction and a facile conclusion stuck into each end like two forks in a corncob. Discourses of that sort existed in Montaigne’s day, but essais did not. Essayer , in French, means simply to try . To essay something is to test or taste it, or give it a whirl. One seventeenth-century Montaignist defined it as firing a pistol to see if it shoots straight, or trying out a horse to see if it handles well. On the whole, Montaigne discovered that the pistol shot all over the place and the horse galloped out of control, but this did not bother him. He was delighted to see his work come out so unpredictably.

He may never have planned to create a one-man literary revolution, but in retrospect he knew what he had done. “It is the only book in the world of its kind,” he wrote, “a book with a wild and eccentric plan.” Or, as more often seemed the case, with no plan at all. The Essays was not written in neat order, from beginning to end. It grew by slow encrustation, like a coral reef, from 1572 to 1592. The only thing that eventually stopped it was Montaigne’s death.

Looked at another way, it never stopped at all. It continued to grow, not through endless writing but through endless reading. From the first sixteenth-century neighbor or friend to browse through a draft from Montaigne’s desk to the very last human being (or other conscious entity) to extract it from the memory banks of a future virtual library, every new reading means a new Essays . Readers approach him from their private perspectives, contributing their own experience of life. At the same time, these experiences are molded by broad trends, which come and go in leisurely formation. Anyone looking over four hundred and thirty years of Montaigne-reading can see these trends building up and dissolving like clouds in a sky, or crowds on a railway platform between commuter trains. Each way of reading seems natural while it is on the scene; then a new style comes in and the old one departs, sometimes becoming so outmoded that it is barely comprehensible to anyone but historians.

The Essays is thus much more than a book. It is a centuries-long conversation between Montaigne and all those who have got to know him: a conversation which changes through history, while starting out afresh almost every time with that cry of “How did he know all that about me?” Mostly it remains a two-person encounter between writer and reader. But sidelong chat goes on among the readers too; consciously or not, each generation approaches Montaigne with expectations derived from its contemporaries and predecessors. As the story goes on, the scene becomes more crowded. It turns from a private dinner party to a great lively banquet, with Montaigne as an unwitting master of ceremonies.

This book is about Montaigne, the man and writer. It is also about Montaigne, the long party — that accumulation of shared and private conversations over four hundred and thirty years. The ride will be a strange and bumpy one, for Montaigne’s book has not slid smoothly through time like a pebble in a stream, becoming ever more streamlined and polished as it goes. It has tumbled about in no set direction, picking up debris, sometimes snagging on awkward outcrops. My story rolls with the current too. It goes “befuddled and staggering,” with frequent changes of tack. At first, it sticks more closely to the man himself: Montaigne’s life, personality, and literary career. Later, it diverges ever further into tales of his book and his readers, all the way up to very recent ones. Since it is a twenty-first-century book, it is inevitably pervaded by a twenty-first-century Montaigne. As one of his favorite adages had it, there is no escaping our perspective: we can walk only on our own legs, and sit only on our own bum.