The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (102 page)

C
ENTURIES
passed in Western literature before authors let themselves be themselves in what they wrote. Dominated by classical conventions, the literati found no forms in which to describe themselves freely and randomly. We should not be shocked, then, by Oscar Wilde’s paradox “Being natural is only a pose.” Saintly epiphanies and confessions like Saint Augustine’s had recorded the search for salvation. A letter addressed to a particular person, usually not intended for publication, was governed by the candor and the good manners of the writer. But how could an author show himself naked, unboastful and unashamed?

For literary self-portrait a new form was created by a French provincial landowner of the Renaissance. Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) christened his creation “Essays.” From the French
essayer
, “to try,” the name itself revealed that the task Montaigne had set himself seemed difficult and uncertain. He dared claim only that he had made some “tries” in this new exercise of self-revelation. Montaigne’s preface to his 1580
Essays
declared:

Despite this uninviting invitation the book survived to become a model for our most popular, most influential, and most widely imitated form of non-fiction.

Yet in contrast to the “forms” of rhetoricians, the essay was not really a form at all. Rather it was a way of literary freewheeling, a license to be random and personal. Aldous Huxley, himself a brilliant practitioner, explained: “By the time he had written his way into the Third Book he had reached the limits of his newly discovered art.… Free association artistically controlled—this is the paradoxical secret of Montaigne’s best essays. One damned thing after another—but in a sequence that in some almost miraculous way develops a central theme and relates it to the rest of human
experience.” The “central theme” that held his
Essays
together, Montaigne repeatedly reminds his reader, was nothing but Montaigne himself.

Personal reflections had previously been cast in certain recognized molds, tamed and domesticated into familiar paths. Some, like the
Moralia
of Plutarch (c.46–120), were treatises on moral conduct—“How to Discern Between a Flatterer and a Friend,” or “How to Restrain Anger.” Others, like the
Meditations
of Marcus Aurelius (121–180), offered aphorisms and moral precepts. Montaigne knew these works. And his focus, not on morality but on the elusive, ever-changing, contradictory self, was courageously new. Not as a prescription for the Good Life, but for the sheer joy of exploration and self-discovery. Offering not the Good, but the Unique. Here was a landmark in man’s movement from the complacency of divine certitude to the piquancy of experience and human variety.

How did Montaigne, who boasted only of his ordinariness, become the creator of a momentous new form of literary freedom and literary creation? Montaigne’s ancestry and education were well designed to sharpen his sense of personal uniqueness. His father, Pierre Eyquem, sometime mayor and prosperous merchant of Bordeaux, bore the name “de Montaigne” because Pierre’s grandfather had bought the Montaigne château and feudal territory that came with it. His mother descended from a Spanish Jewish family, the Lopez de Villeneuva, who lived in Aragon at the height of the Inquisition in the late fifteenth century. Three members of the family, including Michel’s great-great-great-grandfather Micer Pablo (in 1491) were burned at the stake. They were prominent marranos, Spanish Jews who had gone through the motions of conversion to escape persecution, but who continued to practice Judaism secretly. The marrano memory could not have been lost on Michel. He frequently expressed his sense of the injustice done to the Jews, which confirmed his doubts of force as an effective agent of persuasion. “Some turned Christians,” he wrote, “of their faith, or of that of their descendants, even today, a hundred years later, few Portuguese are sure, though custom and length of time are far stronger counselors than any other compulsion.” The marranos remained suspect in both the Jewish and the Christian world.

Michel was born in the Château de Montaigne, thirty miles east of Bordeaux. The oldest of eight surviving children, he yet enjoyed close attention from “the best father there ever was.” To widen the noble child’s sympathies, he “had me held over the baptismal font by people of the lowest class, to bind and attach me to them.” And Montaigne recalls in his
Essays
that, instead of bringing in a nurse, as many noble families did, his father sent Michel

Believing that the “tender brains” of children were shocked by being rudely awakened from sleep, “he had me suddenly awakened by the sound of some instrument’ and I was never without a man to do this for me.” As a painless way of teaching the boy Latin, still the language of European learning, his father hired a German tutor who spoke good Latin but no French, and decreed that no one should speak anything but Latin in Michel’s presence.

“Altogether we Latinized ourselves so much that it overflowed all the way to our villages on every side, where there still remain several Latin names for artisans and tools that have taken root by usage.” He was six before he knew French, his mother tongue and the language of the neighborhood. He was taught Greek “artificially, but in a new way in the form of amusement and exercise. We volleyed our conjugations back and forth, like those who learn arithmetic and geometry by such games as checkers and chess.” In this domestic Athenaeum, it is remarkable that Michel grew up to be even as normal as he was.

Sent off to school in Bordeaux, he completed the twelve-year course in seven. His teachers feared he would show up their imperfect Latin, and he declared himself lucky that at least they did not teach him the “hatred of books” that they somehow instilled in other noblemen. His own philosophy of education would be shaped by seeing the brutal discipline that made the school “a jail of captive youth. They make them slack, by punishing them for slackness before they show it. Go in at lesson time; you hear nothing but cries, both from tortured boys and from masters drunk with rage.”

After studying law at the university, Michel through family connections became a magistrate. For the next dozen years (1554–70) he experienced the world of affairs, the venality and injustices of the law. He saw one fellow judge tear a scrap from the paper on which he had sentenced an adulterer, to write a love note to the wife of a colleague on the same bench. Lawless France, he complained, had “more laws than all the rest of the world together.”

One crucial experience, not the kind that could be prescribed generally for the preparation of an author, marked Montaigne’s path to become an essayist. In 1559, soon after he had joined the Bordeaux Parlement, he met
a brilliant fellow magistrate two years his elder whose person would inspire and haunt him for the rest of his life. This was Étienne de la Boétie (1530–1563).

This friendship lasted till La Boétie’s death from dysentery in 1563. Since 1554 La Boétie had been happily married to an older woman of an eminent local family, the widowed mother of two children. She had no children with La Boétie.

Again and again, Montaigne described his intense relationship with La Boétie. But he does not detail the erotic element. Unlike the Greeks, he writes, “our morality rightly abhors” a homosexual relationship. Still, in the chapter “On Friendship” and elsewhere in his
Essays
he discloses feelings not usual in accounts of friendship between men. Taking his relationship with La Boétie as his prototype of friendship, Montaigne contrasts marriage. “Not only is it a bargain to which only the entrance is free, continuance in it being constrained and compulsory, and depending upon other things than our will, but it is a bargain commonly made for other ends.” Acquaintanceship can be enjoyed with many. “But that friendship which possesses the soul and rules over it with complete sovereignty cannot possibly be divided in two.…” For nearly five years, he tells us, communications with this alter ego satisfied his need to reveal himself.

The death of La Boétie, who was only thirty-three, hit him hard. On the wall of the entrance to the study he recorded his debt to “the tenderest, sweetest, and closest companion, than whom our age has seen no one better, more learned, more charming, or indeed more perfect, Michel de Montaigne, miserably bereft of so dear a support of his life … has dedicated this excellent apparatus for the mind.” He recalled with satisfaction “not having forgotten to tell anything” to his friend. The sudden deprivation of this uninhibited friendship and its opportunities for self-revelation left a vacuum. “Hungry to make myself known,” Montaigne sought a way to replace his conversations with his best friend. And later generations must be grateful for this premature death of La Boétie, for Montaigne himself
suggests that if La Boétie had lived, instead of the essays he might only have written letters.

But writing letters to imaginary correspondents, to “traffic with the wind, as some others have done,” would not satisfy Montaigne. With his “humorous and familiar style … not proper for public business, but like the language I speak, too compact, irregular, abrupt, and singular” he had to create a form of his own. And so came the
Essays
, which marked a new path for authors in future centuries.

This synopsis of Montaigne’s personal incentives to create the modern essay leaves out the broad currents of life in his time and the frustrations of public life that also played their part. From his grief at the death of La Boétie, Montaigne sought relief in marriage. “Needing some violent diversion to distract me from it, by art and study I made myself fall in love, in which my youth helped me. Love solaced me and withdrew me from the affliction caused by friendship.” The object of this factitious love was the twenty-year-old daughter of an eminent Catholic family of Bordeaux. He boasted that the decision was not made by himself. “We do not marry for ourselves, whatever we say; we marry just as much for our posterity, for our family.… Therefore I like this fashion of arranging it rather by a third hand than by our own, and by the sense of others rather than by our own. How opposite is all this to the conventions of love!” In 1565, two years after he lost his friend, he married Françoise de la Chassaigne. By conventional standards it seemed a good marriage, although of the six children she bore him only one survived more than a few months after birth. Montaigne still insisted that friendship, not love, should be the bond of marriage.

Meanwhile, life in Montaigne’s France did not encourage a firm religious faith. In religious wars tainted by political intrigue and dynastic feuds it was seldom clear whether the parties were fighting for their king or for their God, and they were inclined to confuse the two. Just as Montaigne’s relation to La Boétie had bred habits of honest self-revelation, so the spectacle of the “wars of the three Henrys” bred a skeptical frame of mind. The word “Huguenot” now entered the French language for the Protestant sect that
was widening its appeal, especially to the nobility of southwestern France. The year when Montaigne began writing his essays, 1572, was the year of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. The devious Catherine de’ Medici took advantage of the assemblage of nobles in Paris for the wedding of her daughter to Henry of Navarre (later Henry IV) to order the assassination of the Huguenot leader Coligny and many others. The butchery in Bordeaux, too, was terrifying, and nobody knows how many thousands were massacred across the provinces. For this bloody victory of the faith Pope Gregory XIII celebrated a thanksgiving Mass in Rome.

The volatile religious spirit was symbolized in Henry IV, a Protestant who vainly tried to pacify the country and save his life by his pretended conversion to Catholicism (1593). His conciliatory Edict of Nantes (1598) which offered Huguenots in some places political and religious freedom only sparked another cycle of civil wars, and led to his own assassination. Still, Montaigne’s father, an enemy of forced convictions, had been tolerant in the family, allowing his children to follow their own faiths. Two of Michel’s brothers were Protestant. Montaigne himself, though professing to be a Catholic, was a trusted adviser and chamberlain to Henry, the leading Protestant. The moderation of his faith made him suspect on both sides.