Montaigne has been on my radar—I’ve been encountering his name in articles and books for years. I was curious. But as a spoiled and lazy reader, I lack to fortitude to take on a 16th century nonfiction writer without some sort of assistance. Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live, or, a Life of Montaigne was the ideal stepladder. No less a scholar than Bruce Springsteen would endorse this assessment—he recently name checked Bakewell’s book in the New York Times—see for yourself (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/02/books/review/bruce-springsteen-by-the-book.html).
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (to give his full name) was a near contemporary of Shakespeare, and while there are indications of explicit borrowings from the French writer in the younger English writer’s work, it’s the sum of the intellectual inheritance that really counts. As Sarah Bakewell writes:
When Montaigne writes, “We are, I know not how, double within ourselves,” or describes himself with the incoherent torrent of adjective “bashful, insolent; chaste, lascivious; talkative, taciturn; tough, delicate; clever, stupid; surly, affable; lying, truthful; learned, ignorant, liberal, miserly, and prodigal,” he could be voicing a monologue from [Hamlet]. He also observes that anyone who thinks too much about all the circumstances and consequences of an action makes it impossible to do anything at all—a neat summary of Hamlet’s main problem in life.
No one with any sense would write a plain vanilla biography of Shakespeare today. The facts are too few and they have been out in plain sight for far too long—second-best bed, etc. More is known about Montaigne, but Bruce Springsteen does not want to use his valuable time reading anyone’s conventional biography of Montaigne either. What shrewd writers like Stephen Greenblatt (author of Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare) and Sarah Bakewell do is mix biography with a tracing of the author’s influence through history. The results are like catnip to semi-ambitious New-Yorker-reading persons like myself. Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (which I wrote about earlier in this blog ) rolls the Roman poet Lucretius together with 15th century Italian scholar Poggio Bracciolini and then shows how Lucretius’ ideas carried forward through Botticelli’s Birth of Venus to Giordano Bruno, and, yes, Montaigne. Bakewell’s book is every bit as lively and deft in spinning its web of connections; it’s a little bit crisper, too. It’s like that great college course you could never find in the catalog. Among the latter-day Montaigne enthusiasts identified by Bakewell are Friedrich Nietzsche and Virginia Woolf.
So what is the deal with Montaigne? His “essays” (a word originally meaning “tests” or “attempts”) are examinations of what he feels to be universal in his personal experience. It was not a new thing to write about yourself, but it was new to write about yourself not to document what makes you exceptional but rather what makes you typical. Bakewell says it better:
This idea—writing about oneself to create a mirror in which other people recognize their own humanity—has not existed forever… Montaigne created the idea simply by doing it… Montaigne presents himself as someone who jotted down whatever was going through his head when he picked up his pen, capturing encounters and states of mind as they happened. He used these experiences as the basis for asking himself questions, above all the big question that fascinated him as it did many of his contemporaries. Although it is not quite grammatical in English, it can be phrased in three simple words: “How to live?”
Montaigne writes about the everyday and the exotic: dreams, manners, customs, and cannibals. He even writes about thumbs.
I was so entertained by Bakewell’s book that I decided to tackle a bit of Montaigne myself: Book 1 of the essays (there are three), covering the first 300 pages of Donald Frame’s modern translation. The brilliant bits were there, but so were rather long, wheezy Polonius-like stretches of advice on piety and moderation.
But Montaigne is endlessly quotable. Here’s one that I flagged:
Fortune does us neither good nor harm; she only offers us the material and the seed of them, which our soul, more powerful than she, turns and applies as it pleases, sole cause and mistress of its happy or unhappy condition.
This is very close to Hamlet’s sentiment: “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” But then Montaigne reinforces the idea with a clever metaphor:
External circumstances take their savor and color from the inner constitution, just as clothes keep us warm not by their heat but by our own, which they are fitted to foster and nourish; he who would shelter a cold body with them would get the same service for cold; thus are snow and ice preserved.
He is full of anecdotes drawn from his reading:
Amasis, king of Egypt, married Laodice, a very beautiful Greek girl; and he, who showed himself a gay companion everywhere else, fell short when it came to enjoying her, and threatened to kill her, thinking it was some sort of sorcery. As is usual in matters of fancy, she referred him to religion; and having made his vows and promises to Venus, he found himself divinely restored from the first night after his oblations and sacrifices.
This is from a section in the essay “The Power of the Imagination” that deals with psychosomatic episodes of impotence. Throughout, Montaigne’s personality is very much in evidence. In this way he is the exact opposite of Shakespeare. They both wrote about what it means to be human, but with Montaigne the thought goes through himself, his mind and body are the lenses through which he sees the world. Whereas with Shakespeare, the method is purely dramatic—he creates people out of his imagination and uses them to tell us what he knows. Harold Bloom would have us believe that these fictional creations are so real that they no longer quite qualify as fiction. It’s a clever bit of hyperbole but in the end it’s like the theory of intelligent design: it says “this is beyond our understanding,” and uses that as an excuse for any kind of nonsense.
With Shakespeare, I tend to side with the critics who believe that even the one ostensibly autobiographical work, the sonnets, make more sense as a set of dramatic exercises than as a peek into his personal life. The dark lady is not more or less real than Viola or Ophelia, except she is a watercolor sketch, where they oil paintings.
We read different explanations for why we know so little about Shakespeare the man: for example, that his work was not seen as anything extraordinary, just the workaday output of a professional entertainer. People of his time might not have seen the point in writing about him any more than people of our time would see the point in writing about the people who create television scripts. Others believe the man never even existed, which certainly moots the matter of biographical detail, though only by replacing one mystery with an even bigger one; it’s amazing how far people will go just because they lack information—call it phantom author syndrome.
But I have my own theory, which is that Shakespeare had an aversion to being talked and written about and so avoided the limelight and discouraged others from writing about him. He wouldn’t be the last writer who ever tried to efface himself: Thomas Pynchon and J.D. Salinger come to mind. Part of the motivation for these later writers was no doubt to escape the distractions and distortions of fame, but they may also prefer to not have the work judged by its author—as we would certainly do with Shakespeare, if we had the chance.
