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

From now on, there would be no shortage of English personal essayists doing just that. They were all of what the critic Walter Pater called “the true family of Montaigne”: they showed “that intimacy, that modern subjectivity, which may be called the Montaignesque element in literature.” Among them was the popular essayist Leigh Hunt, who filled his copy of the Essays with underlinings and marginal comments — often rather fatuous. When Montaigne tells a story about seeing a boy lacking hands who wielded a heavy sword and cracked a whip as well as any cart-driver in France, Hunt carefully writes in the margin: “With his arms, of course. Still it is very surprising.”

An intellectually sharper admirer was William Hazlitt: he who praised Montaigne for not setting up for a philosopher. Hazlitt’s assessment of what makes a good essayist exemplifies what the English now tended to look for in Montaigne. Such writers, says Hazlitt, collect curiosities of human life just as natural history enthusiasts collect shells, fossils, or beetles as they stroll along a forest path or seashore. They capture things as they really are rather than as they should be. Montaigne was the finest of them all because he allowed everything to be what it was, including himself, and he knew how to look at things. For Hazlitt, an ideal essay

takes minutes of our dress, air, looks, words, thoughts, and actions; shews us what we are, and what we are not; plays the whole game of human life over before us, and by making us enlightened spectators of its many-colored scenes, enables us (if possible) to become tolerably reasonable agents in the one in which we have to perform a part.

In other words, the essay is the genre that — more than any novel or biography — helps us to learn how to live.

Hazlitt’s son, also called William Hazlitt, would edit Cotton’s translation together with copies of Montaigne’s letters, his Italian travel journal, and a brief biography, to produce a Complete Works in 1842. This became the standard edition in Britain over the coming years; it was revised yet again by his son in 1877—producing Hazlitt’s Hazlitt’s Cotton’s Montaigne. Between them, the Hazlitts defined the English Montaigne even more lastingly than Florio. This new Montaigne was loved, above all, for those Hazlittesque virtues: his alertness to everyday life as it really was, and his ability to write pleasingly about it without formal literary constraints.

This tradition has continued, from the nineteenth century through the twentieth, and it looks set to carry on into the twenty-first. Every era has produced fresh English Montaigneans; the tradition continues today through the countless ephemeral essayists and weekend newspaper columnists who, knowingly or not, keep the “Montaignesque element in literature” alive.

Of all Montaigne’s cross-Channel heirs, the one who deserves the last word is an Anglo-Irishman: Laurence Sterne, eighteenth-century author of Tristram Shandy . His great novel, if it can be so classified, is an exaggerated Montaignesque ramble, containing several explicit nods to its French predecessor, and filled with games, paradoxes, and digressions. Dedications and prologues, which ought to be at the beginning, appear all over the place in the wrong order. “The Author’s Preface” turns up in volume 3, chapter 20. At one point, a blank page is supplied, so readers can contribute a picture of a character according to their own imagination. Another page presents a series of line diagrams purporting to summarize the pattern of the book’s digressions so far.

The book teeters constantly on the edge of dissolution. Whatever plot had appeared to be promised at the outset evaporates; the breaks and detours in the narrative take over entirely. “Have I not promised the world a chapter of knots?” Sterne reflects at one point. “Two chapters upon the right and the wrong end of a woman? a chapter upon whiskers? a chapter upon wishes? — a chapter of noses? — No, I have done that — a chapter upon my uncle Toby’s modesty: to say nothing of a chapter upon chapters, which I will finish before I sleep.” It is like Montaigne on speed.

But of course, says Sterne, no story that really pays attention to the world as it is could be otherwise. It cannot go straight from its starting point to its destination. Life is complicated; there is no one track to follow.

Could a historiographer drive on his history, as a muleteer drives on his mule, — straight forward;—for instance, from Rome all the way to Loretto, without ever once turning his head aside either to the right hand or to the left, — he might venture to foretell you to an hour when he should get to his journey’s end;—but the thing is, morally speaking, impossible: For, if he is a man of the least spirit he will have fifty deviations from a straight line to make.

Like Montaigne on his Italian trip, Sterne cannot be accused of straying from his path, for his path is the digressions. His route lies, by definition, in whichever direction he happens to stray.

Tristram Shandy started an Irish tradition that would reach its most extreme point with James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake , a novel which divides into offshoots and streams of association over hundreds of pages until, at the end, it loops around on itself: the last half-sentence hooks on to the half-sentence with which the book began. This is much too tidy for Sterne, or for Montaigne, who avoided neat wrap-ups. For both of them, writing and life should be allowed just to flow on, even if that means branching further and further into digressions without ever coming to any resolution. Sterne and Montaigne both engage constantly with a world which always generates more things to write about — so why stop? This makes them both accidental philosophers: naturalists on a field trip into the human soul, without maps or plans, and having no idea where they will end up, or what they will do when they get there.

SOME WRITERS JUST write their books. Others knead them like clay, or construct them by accumulation. James Joyce was among the latter: his Finnegans Wake evolved through a series of drafts and published editions, until the fairly normal sentences of the first version—

Who was the first that ever burst?

became weird mutants—

Waiwhou was the first thurever burst?

Montaigne did not smear his words around like Joyce, but he did work by revisiting, elaborating, and accreting. Although he returned to his work constantly, he hardly ever seemed to get the urge to cross things out, only to keep adding more. The spirit of repentance was alien to him in writing, just as it was in life, where he remained firmly wedded to amor fati: the cheerful acceptance of whatever happens.

This was at odds with the doctrines of Christianity, which insisted that you must constantly repent of your past misdeeds, in order to keep wiping clean the slate and giving yourself fresh beginnings. Montaigne knew that some of the things he had done in the past no longer made sense to him, but he was content to presume that he must have been a different person at the time, and leave it at that. His past selves were as diverse as a group of people at a party. Just as he would not think of passing judgment on a roomful of acquaintances, all of whom had their own reasons and points of view to explain what they had done, so he would not think of judging previous versions of Montaigne. “We are all patchwork,” he wrote, “and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game.” No overall point of view existed from which he could look back and construct the one consistent Montaigne that he would have liked to be. Since he did not try to airbrush his previous selves out of life, there was no reason for him to do it in his book either. The Essays had grown alongside him for twenty years; they were what they were, and he was happy to let them be.