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

When Zweig first came across the Essays as a young man in turn-of-the-century Vienna, he admitted, the book made little impression. Like Lamartine and Sand before him, he found it too dispassionate. It lacked “the leap of electricity from soul to soul”; he could see no relevance to his own life. “What appeal could there be to a 20-year-old youth in the rambling excursus of a Sieur de Montaigne on the ‘Ceremony of interview of kings’ or his ‘Considerations on Cicero’?” Even when Montaigne turned to topics that ought to have been more appealing, such as sex and politics, his “mild, temperate wisdom” and his feeling that it was wiser not to involve oneself too much in the world repelled Zweig. “It is in the nature of youth that it does not want to be advised to be mild or skeptical. Every doubt seems to it to be a limitation.” Young people crave beliefs; they want to be roused.

Moreover, in 1900, the freedom of the individual hardly seemed to require defense. “Had not all that long ago become a self-evident matter, guaranteed by law and custom to a humanity long since liberated from tyranny and serfdom?” Zweig’s generation — he was born in 1881—assumed that prosperity and personal freedom would just keep growing. Why should things go backwards? No one felt that civilization was in danger; no one had to retreat into their private selves to preserve their spiritual freedom. “Montaigne seemed pointlessly to rattle chains that we considered broken long ago.”

Of course, history proved Zweig’s generation wrong. Just as Montaigne himself had grown up into a world full of hope only to see it degenerate, so Zweig was born into the luckiest of countries and centuries, and had it all fall apart around him. The chains were reforged, stronger and heavier than ever.

Zweig survived the First World War, but this was followed by the rise of Hitler. He fled Austria and was forced to wander for years as a refugee, first to Britain, then to the United States, and finally to Brazil. His exile made him “defenseless as a fly, helpless as a snail,” as he put it in his autobiography. He felt himself to be a condemned man, waiting in his cell for execution, and ever less able to engage with his hosts’ world around him. He kept sane by throwing himself into work. In his exile, he produced a biography of Balzac, a series of novellas and short stories, an autobiography, and, finally, the essay on Montaigne — all without proper sources or notes, since he was cut off from his possessions. He never achieved Montaigne’s attitude of nonchalance, but then, his situation was far worse than Montaigne’s:

I belong nowhere, and everywhere am a stranger, a guest at best. Europe, the homeland of my heart’s choice, is lost to me, since it has torn itself apart suicidally a second time in a war of brother against brother. Against my will I have witnessed the most terrible defeat of reason and the wildest triumph of brutality in the chronicle of the ages.

By the time he reached Brazil in 1941, he was at several removes from any sense of home, and, although he was grateful to the country for taking him in, he found it hard to maintain hope. Finding a volume of the Essays in the house where he was staying, he reread it and discovered that it had transformed itself out of all recognition. The book that had once seemed stuffy and irrelevant now spoke to him with directness and intimacy, as if it were written for him alone, or perhaps for his whole generation. He at once thought of writing about Montaigne. In a letter to a friend, he wrote: “The similarity of his epoch and situation to ours is astonishing. I am not writing a biography; I propose simply to present as an example his fight for interior freedom.” In the essay itself, he admitted: “In this brothership of fate, for me Montaigne has become the indispensable helper, confidant, and friend.”

His Montaigne essay did turn out to be a biography of sorts, but a highly personal one, unapologetically bringing out the similarities between Montaigne’s experience and his own. In a time such as that of the Second World War, or in civil-war France, Zweig writes, ordinary people’s lives are sacrificed to the obsessions of fanatics, so the question for any person of integrity becomes not so much “How do I survive?” as “How do I remain fully human?” The question comes in many variants: How do I preserve my true self? How do I ensure that I go no further in my speech or actions than I think is right? How do I avoid losing my soul? Above all: How do I remain free? Montaigne was no freedom fighter in the usual sense, Zweig admits. “He has none of the rolling tirades and the beautiful verve of a Schiller or Lord Byron, none of the aggression of a Voltaire.” His constant assertions that he is lazy, feckless, and irresponsible make him sound a poor hero, yet these are not really failings at all. They are essential to his battle to preserve his particular self as it is.

Zweig knew that Montaigne disliked preaching, yet he managed to extract a series of general rules from the Essays . He did not list them as such, but paraphrased them in such a way as to resolve them into eight separate commandments — which could also be called the eight freedoms:

Be free from vanity and pride.

Be free from belief, disbelief, convictions, and parties.

Be free from habit. Be free from ambition and greed.

Be free from family and surroundings.

Be free from fanaticism.

Be free from fate; be master of your own life.

Be free from death; life depends on the will of others, but death on our own will.

Zweig was selecting a very Stoic Montaigne, thus returning to a sixteenth-century way of reading him. And, in the end, the freedom Zweig took most to heart was the last one on the list, which comes straight from Seneca. Having fallen into depression, Zweig chose the ultimate form of internal emigration. He killed himself, with the drug Vironal, on February 23, 1942; his wife chose to die with him. In his farewell message, Zweig expressed his gratitude to Brazil, “this wonderful land” which had taken him in so hospitably, and concluded, “I salute all my friends! May it be granted them yet to see the dawn after the long night! I, all too impatient, go on before.”

It seemed — and this was how Zweig himself saw it — that the real value of Montaigne could be seen only when one had been pushed close to this extreme point. One must reach a state where one had nothing left to defend but one’s naked “I”: one’s simple existence.

Only a person who has lived through a time that threatens his life and that valuable substance, his individual freedom, with war, power, and tyrannical ideologies — only he knows how much courage, how much honesty and determination are needed to maintain the inner self in such a time of herd insanity.

He would have agreed with Leonard Woolf, when Woolf said that Montaigne’s vision of interlinked I’s was the essence of civilization. It was the basis on which a future could be built once the terror had passed and the war was over — though Zweig could not wait that long.

Does Montaigne’s vision of private integrity and political hope have the same moral authority today? Some certainly think so. Books have been written promoting Montaigne as a hero for the twenty-first century; French journalist Joseph Macé-Scaron specifically argues that Montaigne should be adopted as an antidote to the new wars of religion. Others might feel that the last thing needed today is someone who encourages us to relax and withdraw into our private realms. People spend enough time in isolation as it is, at the expense of civil responsibilities.