One of the many things I love about Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer is that it regards Montaigne’s life as a very small part of his biography - in other words, it’s about how he lived, and how he lived on. I have often thought that biographers miss a trick in this way: the rise and fall of postmortem reputations can be as interesting as the years a person spends on the planet. I am dying for someone to write an Elvis biography which begins in the last week of his life, because I want to understand what happened. How did a washed-up, overweight Vegas singer whom most people hadn’t thought about for years become the focus of so much grief, so much madness? It was hard to see it coming.
In How To Live, Sarah Bakewell - who has written a wonderful book about existentialism, and another wonderful-looking book (I own it but have’t read it) about humanism - tracks the growing influence of Montaigne through the centuries. And it’s been quite a journey: this, after all, is the man who more or less single-handedly invented the personal essay. You may have seen one or two over the last few years; if you’re on this platform, which you are, you may well have read one in the last thirty minutes.
How many other people can you think of who created an entire literary form? Indeed, how many people can you think of who created any cultural idiom? James Brown, maybe; before “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” there was no funk; and then, suddenly, there it was. Well, Montaigne was the James Brown of the 1580s. In his brilliant book A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599, James Shapiro says that Montaigne took “the unprecedented step of making himself his subject,” thus enabling Shakespeare to produce a dramatic equivalent, the soliloquy. Of course, you can overstate the case for Montaigne’s innovative genius. It’s hard to imagine that, in the five-hundred- odd years since the essays were first published, some other narcissist wouldn’t have had the idea of sticking himself into the middle of his prose. Montaigne invented the personal essay like someone invented the wheel. Why he’s still read now is not because he was the first, but because his thoughts are still our thoughts, and his agonized agnosticism, his endearing fumbles in the dark (he frequently ends a thought or an opinion with a disarming, charming “But what do I know?”), become more relevant as we realize, with increasing certainty, that we don’t have a clue about anything
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And the postmortem life of Montaigne has been a rich one: he troubled Descartes and Pascal, got himself banned in France (until 1854), captivated and then disappointed the Romantics, inspired Nietzsche and Stefan Zweig, made Substack possible. Montaigne achieved hundreds of years of cultural influence. My terrible confession is that I can’t read him. I get lost, become both itchy and scratchy. But this book is a joy, and Sarah Bakewell’s enthusiasm, spirit and love will guide you through. And yes, it really is a book about how to live.
Columbia College for many years included the Essays as part of the Core Curriculum course in Literature Humanities, including during my time there. We also were assigned to read and write a paper on Augustine’s Confessions. I could not come up with a coherent topic that could span the required assigned length so instead I wrote “Ten Random Observations on Augustine”. The instructor gave it top marks, explaining that it was a “brilliant parody” of Montaigne. Trouble was, I had not yet *actually* read the Essays. There is a lesson there, but don’t ask me to write up what it is. Or was.
I lived outside of Memphis in 1977, and we all thought about Elvis and had for years.