Making an Elephant

by Graham Swift

  On my ideal desert island, as my introduction suggests, there would be both Shakespeare and Montaigne. In some ways it’s impossible to separate the two authors—though it would be a case of extracting Montaigne from Shakespeare rather than the other way round—while in other respects they are opposites. What do we know about Shakespeare? Virtually nothing. What do we know about Montaigne? Virtually everything. To read him is to feel you’ve known him all your life.

  Montaigne couldn’t have been a more ‘writerly’ writer, deliberately retiring to his tower to ‘consecrate his life to the Muses’, but no writer seems as unwithdrawingly close to us as we read him. This book began with the position that fiction isn’t, in my case, an autobiographical exercise. Montaigne is the shining example of an opposite or, rather, complementary position: a writer of non-fiction who was, in effect, a great and irrepressible autobiographer, a universal writer who embraces almost every subject, yet infuses almost every page he wrote with his personal touch.

  An Introduction to Florio’s Montaigne

  In 1571 Michel Eyquem de Montaigne took a self-effacing decision that would make him known for ever. He retired to his family estate in Périgord, recently inherited on the death of his father, with the aim of devoting himself to study. He was thirty-eight. Until then he had led the more or less active life of a well-educated gentleman with some scholarly leanings. He was a member of the parlement of Bordeaux, where his father had been mayor; he had visited Paris and the royal court and had military experience. But, plainly, a life of public ambition was not for him.

  Nor was there anything secretly ambitious about his retirement. The Essays might never have happened had not Montaigne in his new seclusion fallen into the state of ‘melancholy’ to which the essays themselves allude. They were begun in an ad hoc way as an antidote to his troubled mood. Gradually, they became the story of his life, they became him. By accident, Montaigne had found his theme: to present ‘my selfe unto my selfe for a subject to write, and argument to descant upon’ (II.8). Yet the Essays are far from being the work of a melancholy or withdrawn man. They address some of the most serious aspects of the human condition, but they are one of the happiest journeys of introspection ever undertaken.

  They have no apparent design. Montaigne writes about what seizes his interest—now it will be ‘Of Fear’, now ‘Of Thumbs’ —and part of the Essays’ huge charm is the sense of a man constantly saying, ‘Let’s take this subject and see where it leads us …’. Often it leads us far from the matter at hand. But for all the multiplying haphazardness, the unifying feature becomes more pronounced. By the eighteenth essay of the second Book, Montaigne can say: ‘I have no more made my booke then my booke hath made me. A booke consubstantiall to his Author.’ In the final essay of all he can write: ‘I study my selfe more than any other subject. It is my supernaturall Metaphisike, it is my naturall Philosophy’ (III.13).

  In Montaigne’s time, this dedication to depicting the self was almost unprecedented. On the face of it, it may also seem self-regarding in the worst sense. But Montaigne could hardly be more candidly, unassumingly honest about himself, or more exacting about the nature of the self in general. Though the candour can seem modern, he was fostered on the Aristotelian notion that any individual man embodies the characteristics of Man at large (‘my supernaturall Metaphisike’ is both an impertinence and a bow), which saves him from self-indulgence, as it can give even his most private revelations a universal context.

  In any case, the word ‘essay’ is significant. For Montaigne it retained its fundamental, experimental meaning: ‘assay’, ‘attempt’, ‘test’. My mind, he wrote, is ‘a Prentise and a probationer’ (III.2). Whatever the subject, Montaigne tests it against himself, himself against it. He sifts all received wisdoms through the filter of intimate experience. All the time he is saying, ‘But how does this square with what I’m actually made of?’

  In well over a thousand pages Montaigne never foists himself wearyingly upon us, because he typically looks even at himself with bemusement, confusion and, often, undeluded disappointment, and he presents the spectacle with apologetic frankness. He does not see himself as special, and so, spontaneously, he achieves the common touch. His famous motto, Que sais-je?, is extended to, ‘Do I even know what I am?’ ‘Where I seeke my selfe,’ he writes, ‘I finde not my selfe: and I find my selfe more by chance, than by the search of mine owne judgement’ (I.10). ‘I am most ignorant in my owne matters’ (II.17). And the ignorance is matched by a vivid sense of his own changeability. In by far the longest and in some ways most abstruse essay, ‘An Apologie of Raymond Sebond’, he pauses to offer a whole catalogue of personal inconsistencies:

  I dare very hardly report the vanity and weaknesse I feele in my selfe … If my health applaud me, or but the calmenesse of one fair day smile upon me, then am I a lusty gallant; but if a corne wring my toe, then am I pouting, unpleasant and hard to be pleased. One same pace of a horse is sometimes hard, and sometimes easie unto me; and one same way, one time short, another time long and wearisome; and one same forme, now more, now less agreeable and pleasing to me: Sometimes I am apt to doe any thing; and other times fit to doe nothing: What now is pleasing to me, within a while after will be paineful. There are a thousand indiscreet and casuall agitations in me. Either a melancholy humour possesseth me, or a cholericke passion swaieth me, which having shaken off, sometimes frowardnesse and peevishnesse hath predominancy, and other times gladnes and blithnesse overrule me. If I chance to take a booke in hand, I shall in some passages perceive some excellent graces, and which ever wound me to the soule with delight; but let me lay it by, and read him another time, let me turne and tosse him as I list, let me apply and manage him as I will, I shall find it an unknowne and shapeless masse.

  There is surely no one for whom this self-portrait cannot, in some respects, strike home—how delightfully he lets his reader know of his own lapses as a reader. This is Montaigne, but it is us: the very fickle stuff of everyday consciousness.

  The Essays are full of such recognizable immediacy. Montaigne may have literally retired to a tower, over the gateway at his house, where he kept his library and had the walls inscribed with favourite Latin and Greek sayings, but the Essays do not smack of the ivory tower. So much of what they contain comes not from a ‘life of the mind’, but just from life. They never pretend to be, or are simply unable to be, rarefied.

  They are certainly erudite. A list of Montaigne’s quotations from classical authors would itself make a book, and it is not encouraging for the modern reader to learn that Montaigne was brought up to hear and speak only Latin—French was his second language. But we are not in the hands of some advanced swot. Montaigne gleefully admits that he repeatedly works into his own text, without flagging them, the words of classical authors, so that, should his readers disagree with them: ‘I will have them to give Plutarch a bob upon mine owne lips, and vex themselves, in wronging Seneca in mee’ (II.10).

  He is often called a ‘philosopher’, but the term is somehow inadequate, like calling him an ‘essayist’. The long Apologie of Raymond Sebond is his most philosophically rigorous piece, attempting nothing less than to place in proper relationship a theology of faith and revelation with a ‘natural theology’ drawn from rational examination of the world. It reminds us that, for all his modernity, Montaigne was a staunchly conservative Catholic, which makes those other labels—‘humanist’, ‘sceptic’—not quite right either. But it contains some of Montaigne’s best observations on how we live in, with and by our bodies—on body-language, in fact. Where it dwells for several pages on the instinctive abilities of animals, the aim may be to chide the human presumption of superiority over the beasts, but what most comes across is Montaigne’s pleasure in creaturely life. Any philosopher who can write, ‘When I am playing with my Cat, who knowes whether she have more sport in dallying with me, than I have in gaming with her?’ is surely not a philosopher in an austere sense, but is expressing the common conjecture of us
all. An intellectual point is made, but the real joy is in the little gift of personality: we see Montaigne playing with his cat.

  Time and again, we get such glimpses. Without appearing to mean to, Montaigne offers us almost every unadorned facet of himself: his weaknesses and impracticalities, his illnesses (he suffered painfully from gallstones), his sexual failings, the way the smell of food stays on his moustache. We know he is forgetful, indecisive and ham-handed. He becomes real for us by listing what he can’t do: ‘I cannot very wel close up a letter; nor could I ever make a pen. I was never good carver at table. I could never make readie nor arme a Horse: Nor handsomely carry a Hawk upon my fist’ (II.17). His actual knowledge becomes more trustworthy when he tells us what he doesn’t know: ‘Since I must make ful shew of my shame and ignorance, it is not yet a moneth since, that I was found to be ignorant, wherto Leven [yeast] served to make bread’ (II.17). He redeems his shortcomings in the vividness of describing them: his mind, he says, has to go at things in fits and starts, ‘even as to judge well of the lustre of scarlet we are taught to cast our eyes over it, in running it over by divers glances, sodaine glimpses, and reiterated reprisings’ (II.10). And if he likes his cat, he does not forget his dog: ‘I am not ashamed nor afraid to declare the tendernesse of my childish Nature, which is such, that I cannot well reject my Dog, if he chance to fawne upon me, or beg of me to play with him’ (II.11).

  Montaigne, in short, needs no label, he is simply there. Few writers feel so present, so in the same room with you as you read them. Few offer themselves so persuasively as a mirror. Montaigne hardly believes he is peculiar. He reasonably suspects that we are all a little like him inside or, rather, that we all find it oddly hard to be inside ourselves. The very thing that we are, he repeatedly tells us, is the most elusive or the most evaded. ‘We are never in ourselves, but beyond’ (I. 3). ‘Every man runneth out and unto what is to come, because no man has yet come into him selfe’ (III.12).

  Those first experimental pieces, written as private therapy, grew over some fifteen years into three Books of more than a hundred essays whose range and profusion is evident from a glance at their titles. Though they never lose their idiosyncrasy and spontaneity—their capacity to let us just dip into them if we wish—they can be read as a single progress, a single, over-arching ‘assay’ of authority against actuality. It is no accident that the last essay of Book III is called ‘Of Experience’, or that it is preceded by ‘Of Phisiognomy’, a culmination of Montaigne’s observations on what our physical constitution has to teach us.

  If Montaigne is ‘there’, it can also be said of his work, as it is of Shakespeare’s, that all human life is there. Shakespeare’s and Montaigne’s attitudes are not dissimilar: the desire to apprehend the larger world through what Shakespeare called our ‘little world of man’; the urge, apparent in Shakespeare’s soliloquies, to link the biggest themes to an unsparing gazing-in. Shakespeare’s comedy constantly trips us up over the concrete, as does Montaigne’s. Shakespeare’s tragedy strips us bare, as do Montaigne’s most intense passages.

  Both men lived in the same violent times. The first complete edition of the Essays was published as the Spanish Armada sailed towards England. Montaigne is influenced, as much as by his reading of classical authors, by his direct experience of the French religious civil wars, which raged throughout his lifetime. He was also keenly aware, perhaps even more than Shakespeare, of the opening up of the New World of the Americas, an explosion of preconceptions hard for us, now, to imagine. The link between the New World and Montaigne’s old, war-torn one was cruelty, the title of one of the Essays and a recurring incidental theme. In ‘Of the Cannibals’, without elevating the New World natives into ‘noble savages’, he pleads that they should have their fair ‘assay’. What is their supposed barbarity against our own? The history of colonization, he well knew, was one of appalling slaughter; the mildly titled essay ‘On Coaches’ contains a vehement indictment of it. But he could look closer to home to see the same savagery. In 1572, on St Bartholomew’s Day, even as his first essays were germinating, two thousand Huguenots were massacred in Paris.

  The direct link between Montaigne and Shakespeare is the magnificent translation by John Florio. It is one of the great bridges of literature. Shakespeare would have read it in the later part of his career. He certainly raided it. The first full edition appeared in 1603, but it is probable that individual essays circulated before this, so Shakespeare may have ingested Montaigne even earlier. The Tempest is clearly influenced by ‘Of the Cannibals’, and while Shakespeare went to Holinshed or Plutarch for narrative material, Montaigne provided more meditative fuel. Hamlet seems imbued with Montaigne, and Montaigne lies behind the last great tragedies, behind Measure for Measure and behind the whole Shakespearean questioning of ‘man, proud man, / Drest in a little brief authority, / Most ignorant of what he’s most assured’.

  With North’s Plutarch, Florio’s Montaigne is one of the pillars of Elizabethan translation, and a great piece of English prose in its own right. Even without Shakespeare’s use of it, it has the Shakespearean physicality, energy and tang; which is only to say that Florio responded directly, as Shakespeare did at one remove, to the concreteness, the mingling of the mental and the bodily, in Montaigne. Montaigne’s preference in language was for the tactile: ‘upon the paper, as it is in the mouth, a pithie, sinnowie, full strong, compendious and materiall speech’ (I.25). Though Florio was of Italian stock, one might say he drew something Anglo-Saxon from his source.

  But the difference between Shakespeare and Montaigne is striking. Shakespeare is a standard ‘desert-island’ book—he would bring the world to you; but Montaigne would be my second choice, if not possibly my first. Montaigne too would bring the world to you. He would not bring the great Shakespearean glories, but he would give you something Shakespeare never gives: his presence, his implicit conversation. ‘What good company he is,’ wrote Madame de Sévigné, several decades after Montaigne’s death, and company would surely be what you would crave on a lonely island.

  One personal gift Montaigne never disclaimed was a talent for friendship. It is possible that his ‘melancholy’ on retirement rose from having leisure to reflect on the two great griefs of his life. His father, to whom he was close, had died in 1568. His good friend Étienne de la Boëtie, a fellow member of the parlement of Bordeaux, who had the leanings of a scholar too, had died in 1563. His friendship with La Boëtie seems to have been exceptional, a rare marriage of minds and hearts, and when it was truncated Montaigne might have thought he would never know such friendship again. Except with his reader. In all Montaigne’s gradual revelation of himself to us, something very simple is perhaps at work: the wish not to be alone; to share, to make mental friends. We read, too, it has been said, not to be alone. Few writers meet that need better.

  If Montaigne had his griefs, one of his inevitable subjects is the final solitariness of death. He was, in fact, fairly obsessed by it or, rather, by the act of dying, which he regarded as the last ‘assay’ of a life. He certainly observed it several times, and in ‘Of Exercise or Practice’ even rather wonderfully describes the experience of nearly observing it—‘practising’ it—in himself. But he is never morbid on the subject; he is often remarkably levelheaded and reassuring. One reason for reading him is the solace he offers on this universal prospect. If one had to die alone on a desert island, it would be a comfort to have Montaigne to hand.

  Several of the essays concern themselves with death and at least one (I.19) takes up the traditional notion ‘That to Philosophize is to Learne How to Dye’. But in ‘Of Phisiognomy’, the penultimate essay, Montaigne gives us in effect his last word on the matter. What is striking now is how the prop of philosophy has fallen away. No, Montaigne says, as he nears the end of his great, assaying journey, philosophy won’t help you in this case. What he offers us is something better; plain, sane, sympathetic and emphatically on the side of life—humanity speaking directly to humanity on how
to be mortal:

  If you know not how to die, take no care for it, Nature her selfe will fully and sufficiently teach you in the nicke, she will exactly discharge that worke for you; trouble not your selfe with it. We trouble death with the care of life, and life with the care of death. The one annoyeth, the other affrights us. It is not against death, we prepare ourselves, it is a thing too momentary. A quarter of an hour of passion without consequence and without annoyance, deserves not particular precepts. To say truth, we prepare ourselves against the preparations of death. Philosophy teacheth us, ever to have death before our eyes, to fore-see and consider it before it come: Then giveth us rules and precautions so to provide, that such foresight and thought hurt us not. So doe Phisitions, who cast us into diseases, that they may employ their drugges and skill about them. If we have not known how to live, it is injustice to teach us how to die, and deforme the end from all the rest. Have wee knowne how to live constantly and quietly, wee shall know how to die resolutely and reposedly. They may bragge as much as they please: Tota Philosophorum vita commentatio mortis est. The whole life of a Philosopher is the meditation of his death. But me thinkes, it is indeed the end, yet not the scope of life. It is her last, it is her extremity, yet not her object. Hir selfe must be unto hir selfe, hir aime, hir drift and her designe. Hir direct studie is, to order, to direct and to suffer hir selfe. In the number of many other offices, which the generall and principall Chapter, to know how to live containeth, is this speciall Article, To know how to die. And of the easiest, did not our owne feare weigh it downe.