The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal (31 page)

He deplored the codpieces of the previous generation, which drew attention to and exaggerated the unmentionables. He had had sex at so early an age that he could not recall just when. Like Abraham Lincoln, he contracted syphilis (“a couple of light anticipatory doses”) (III 3). For this vileness, American universities would erase him from the canon, if they could, since no great man has ever had syphilis or engaged in same-sexuality. On Greek love, Montaigne understood exactly what Achilles and Patroclus were up to in the sack and he found their activities “rightly abhorrent to our manners” on the novel ground that what was not equal in body-mind could not be love, much less “perfect love.” The man chose not another man but a boy for his looks. It was Montaigne's view that true love, sexual or not, meant the congruence of two men as equals. This was the highest form of human relationship. He does note that “male and female are cast in the same mould: save for education and custom the difference between them is not great” (III 6). Theoretically, if a woman was educated as a man and met her male equal, this could be the “perfect love”: but he gives no examples. Odd, since Plutarch had filled him in on Aspasia and Pericles. But then he did not place Pericles very high; thought him a tricky orator. Of course, he had not read Thucydides.

On “Some Lines of Virgil,” he has a good time with sex, as both necessity and madness. “The genital activities of mankind are so natural, so necessary and so right: what have they done to make us never dare to mention them without embarrassment…? We are not afraid to utter the words ‘kill,' ‘thief,' or ‘betray'” (III 5). Yet “The whole movement of the world tends and leads towards copulation. It is a substance infused through everything; it is the centre—towards which all things turn.” He comments on the uncontrollability—and unreliability—of the male member. “Every man knows…that he has a part of his body which often stirs, erects, and lies down again without his leave. Now such passive movements which only touch our outside cannot be called ours” (II 6). (Screech thinks that Montaigne never read Augustine's
Confessions
.) Montaigne notes priapic cults in other lands and times. Finally, all in all, he favors arranged marriages: “A good marriage (if there be such a thing) rejects the company and conditions of Cupid; it strives to reproduce those of loving friendship” (III 5). Incidentally, nowhere does Montaigne mention his wife. There is one reference to his daughter Léonor, and a mysterious panegyric to a sort of adopted daughter that, Screech thinks, may have been written by herself in a posthumous edition, which gives rise to the agreeable notion that there may have been some sort of Ibsen plot unfolding in old Périgord. Rousseau thought that Montaigne ought to have told us a lot more about his private life, but then Rousseau was no gentleman.

On politics, Montaigne was deeply but not dully conservative. That is, he did not, figuratively or literally, believe in witches:

I abhor novelty, no matter what visage it presents, and am right to do so, for I have seen some of its disastrous effects. That novelty (the wars of religion) which has for so many years beset us is not solely responsible, but one can say with every likelihood that it has incidentally caused and given birth to them all…. Those who shake the State are easily the first to be engulfed in its destruction. The fruits of dissension are not gathered by the one who began it: he stirs and troubles the water for other men to fish in (I 23).

A nice presage of France's revolution two centuries later, though not particularly applicable to the American adventure that actually turned the whole world upside down. But in the midst of a civil war over religion, the absolutist must appear more than usually monstrous: “There is a great deal of self-love and arrogance in judging so highly of your opinions that you are obliged to disturb the public peace in order to establish them” (I 23). Plainly, he was not the sort of conservative who would have admired that radical British prime minister who, for a decade, so strenuously disturbed the death-like peace of those sunnily arid North Sea islands.

Montaigne was very much school of the-devil-we-know: “Not as a matter of opinion but of truth, the best and most excellent polity for each nation is the one under which it has been sustained. Its form and its essential advantages depend upon custom. It is easy for us to be displeased with its present condition; I nevertheless hold that to yearn for an oligarchy in a democracy or for another form of government in a monarchy is wrong and insane” (III 9). He regarded any fundamental change as “the cure of illness by death…. My own contemporaries here in France could tell you a thing or two about that!”

Since I want Montaigne on my side in the great task of reworking my own country's broken-down political system, I must invoke him—like Scripture—in another context. “The most desirable laws are those which are fewest, simplest and most general. I think moreover that it would be better to have none at all than to have them in the profusion as we do now…. When King Ferdinand sent colonies of immigrants to the Indies he made the wise stipulation that no one should be included who had studied jurisprudence, lest law suits should pullulate in the New World” (III 13), causing endless faction and altercation. Since
our
New World is entirely paralyzed by lawyers hired by pullulating polluters of politics as well as of environment and put in place to undo many thousands of laws made by other lawyers, I cannot think Montaigne would be so cruel as
not
to want us to rid ourselves of such a government, but I suppose he would echo mockingly his young contemporary Shakespeare's final solution for lawyers, while suggesting that it might do us Americans a world of good if each took a course or two in torts and malfeasances since, from the beginning, we were intended to be a lawyerly republic and must not change.

Common sense is a phrase, if not a quality, much revered in the bright islands of the North Sea. Montaigne is often accused of possessing this rare quality, but what most strikes me in his meanderings is the
un
commonness of his sense. He turns a subject round and round and suddenly sees something that others had not noticed. He is also inclined to humor, usually of the dead-pan sort: “Herodotus tells us of a certain district of Libya where men lie with women indiscriminately, but where, once a child can toddle, it recognizes its own father out of the crowd, natural instinct guiding its first footsteps. There are frequent mistakes, I believe…” (II 8).

Of literary style, he wrote: “I want things to dominate, so filling the thoughts of the hearer that he does not even remember the words. I like the kind of speech which is simple and natural, the same on paper as on the lip; speech which is rich in matter, sinewy, brief and short” (I 26). As for “the French authors of our time. They are bold enough and proud enough not to follow the common road; but their want of invention and their power of selection destroy them. All we can see is some wretched affectation of novelty, cold and absurd fictions which instead of elevating their subject batter it down” (III 5). He delighted in Boccaccio, Rabelais, and the
Basia
of Johannes Secundus. Of poets, he put Virgil highest, especially the
Georgics
; then Lucretius, Catullus, and Horace. He finds Aesop interestingly complex. “Seneca is full of pithy phrases and sallies; Plutarch is full of matter. Seneca inflames you and stirs you: Plutarch is more satisfying and repays you more. Plutarch leads us: Seneca drives us” (II 10). He seems to be looking ahead at our own scribbling time when he writes, “There are so many ways of taking anything, that it is hard for a clever mind
not
to find in almost any subject something or other which appears to serve his point, directly or indirectly. That explains why an opaque, ambiguous style has been so long in vogue” (II 12).

         

From 1581 to 1585, Montaigne served as Mayor of Bordeaux: “People say that my period of office passed without trace or mark. Good!” In 1582, the Pope dealt him a grievous blow by replacing the Julian calendar with the Gregorian, which lopped eleven days off everyone's life. “Since I cannot stand novelty even when corrective. I am constrained to be a bit of a heretic in this case” (III 10). He enjoyed his fame as a writer but noted “that in my own climate of Gascony they find it funny to see me in print; I am valued the more, the farther from home knowledge of me has spread…” (III 2). In the Frame translation, there is a “How true” in the margin next to what could be the mark of a tear, if it did not still smell of whisky. In a variation on Aesop, he notes, “A hundred times a day when we go mocking our neighbour we are really mocking ourselves; we abominate in others those faults which are most manifestly our own, and with a miraculous lack of shame and perspicacity, are astonished by them” (III 8). Perhaps this universal failing is why “I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics; that is my physics” (III 13).

In a comment on Montaigne's most celebrated essay, “On the Education of Children,” Sainte-Beuve remarked that “he goes too far, like a child of Aristippus who forgets Adam's fall.” He is “
simply
Nature…Nature in all its Grace-less completeness.” The clarity—charity, too—with which he saw his world has made him seem a precursor of the age of Enlightenment, even that of Wordsworth. But Screech does not allow us so easily to appropriate him to our secular ends, and Montaigne's Epicurean stoicism is more than balanced by his non-questioning—indeed defense—of the traditional faith. For him, his translation of the
Theologia Naturalis
of Raymond Sebond was to be regarded as a prophylactic against the dread Luther.

Incidentally, Screech's own translation is as little ambiguous as possible; it is also demotic. Where Frame writes “ruminating,” Screech writes “chewing over,” “frenzied” becomes “raging mad,” “loose-boweled” becomes “squittering,” a word that I was obliged to look up—“to void thin excrement.” We are all in Screech's debt for giving us back a word so entirely useful that no critic's portmanteau should ever again be without it. On the other hand, Frame's “this bundle of so many disparate pieces is being composed” becomes the perhaps less happy phrase “all the various pieces of this faggot are being bundled together…”

“The writer's function is not without arduous duties. By definition, he cannot serve those who make history; he must serve those who are subject to it.” Montaigne would not have agreed with Albert Camus. In a sense, Montaigne is writing for the rulers (Henry IV was particularly taken by his essay “On High Rank as a Disadvantage”). Educate the rulers, and they will not torment their subjects. But Montaigne's political interests are aside from his main point, the exploration of self. Once he had lost Étienne, he was all he had; so he wrote a book about himself. “I am most ignorant about myself. I marvel at the assurance and confidence everyone has about himself, whereas there is virtually nothing that I
know
I know…. I think that I am an ordinary sort of man, except inconsidering myself to be one…. That I find my own work pardonable is not so much for itself or its true worth as from a comparison with others' writings which are worse—things which I can see people taking seriously” (II 17).

Vanity of any sort amuses him. Even the great Julius Caesar is ticked off: “Observe how Caesar spreads himself when he tells us about his ingenuity in building bridges and siege-machines; in comparison, he is quite cramped when he talks of his professional soldiering, his valour or the way he conducts his wars. His exploits are sufficient proof that he was an outstanding general: he wants to be known as something else rather different: a good engineer” (I 17).

Montaigne begins his essays (first thought of as
rhapsodies
—confused medleys) with a pro forma bow to Cicero–Plato: “Cicero says that philosophizing is nothing other than getting ready to die. That is because study and contemplation draw our souls somewhat outside ourselves keeping them occupied away from the body, a state which both resembles death and which forms a kind of apprenticeship for it; or perhaps it is because all the wisdom and argument in the world eventually come down to one conclusion which is to teach us not to be afraid of dying” (I 20). In this way “all the labour of reason must be to make us live well.”

Montaigne's reigning humor may have been melancholic, but he is hardly morbid in his musings on that good life which leads to a good death. He is a true stoic, despite occasional obeisance to the Holy Spirit, a post-Platonic novelty now running down. He is even a bit sardonic: “Everybody goes out as though he had just come in. Moreover, however decrepit a man may be, he thinks he still has another twenty years.” But “I have adopted the practice of always having death not only in my mind but on my lips. There is nothing I inquire about more readily than how men have died: what did they say? How did they look?” Like me, when he read a biography, he first skipped to the end to see how its subject died. As his book—and life—proceed, he is more than ever aware of the diversity within the unity of things and the inability to know very much of what came before us because, “Great heroes lived before Agamemnon. Many there were: yet none is lamented, being swept away unknown into the long night.”

After the arrival of kidney stones, Montaigne occasionally strikes a bleak note: “I am on the way out: I would readily leave to one who comes later whatever wisdom I have learnt about dealing with the world…. At the finish of every task the ending makes itself known. My world is over: my mould has been emptied; I belong entirely to the past” (III 10). But before self-pity could spread her great fluffy wings, he then makes a joke about being cruelly robbed of eleven days of life by the Pope's new calendar. Meanwhile, “Time and custom condition us to anything strange: nevertheless, the more I haunt myself and know myself the more my misshapenness amazes me and the less I understand myself” (III 11). Finally, “We confuse life with worries about death, and death with worries about life. One torments us; the other terrifies us” (III 12). Yet,