How to Live: A Life of Montaigne

Sarah Bakewell – How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer

What drew me to this book was both that Montaigne is a figure I feel I should know more about (as somebody who has pretensions to a broad knowledge of the modern Western canon), but also because I had heard that Bakewell had not produced a straightforward biography.  As befits her subject, this is a rather idiosyncratic book — the book skims over Montaigne’s almost four hundred year-long cultural afterlife nearly as much as it deals with his fifty-nine years on earth, as well as dealing in some depth with Montaigne’s philosophy of life and his literary productions.  It is undoubtedly a biography, a very solid and thorough one, but by way of cultural theoretical history, close literary readings and a layman’s primer for various strands of philosophy too.

This is a very successful mixture, and a clever way, I would guess, of getting round the problem of writing the life of anyone predating the start of the nineteenth century, and many after that — the fact that there simply isn’t a great deal of evidence left (and I say that thinking only of the reasonably rich and literate, who certainly would leave some kind of record; I don’t imagine any sort of book-length study could be constructed about a poor and illiterate person of the same period).  This is certainly the case for Jane Austen, much of whose correspondence was destroyed on her death, and who didn’t move about in the world enough to leave many other documents apart from that body of letters.  As a result, her biographies are more than most a tissue of speculation and hearsay (coughDavid Nokescough), and she lived nearly twenty years into the nineteenth century.  For Montaigne, who died in 1592, there is far worse difficulty in getting the bare facts of his life.  He simply disappears, as far as the record shows, for some years between his adolescence and his term as a magistrate at Périgueux.  ”He must”, as Bakewell says, “have studied law somewhere” (75), but it is not known.  Such gaps must be a frustration to a conscientious writer, but Bakewell takes them in her stride.  (How many of us, in the modern West, will disappear off the record for future generations?)

The book really comes into its own in the discussions of philosophy, which I think Bakewell pitches just right for a wide readership.  She lucidly explains Montaigne’s relationship with three branches of ancient philosophy (Stoicism, Epicureanism and Pyrrhonian  Scepticism, for those of you taking notes), observing how elements of each are synthesised into his particular worldview.  She also makes him sound fantastically attractive as a writer, and one I am now keen to discover more thoroughly for myself.  It must be said that Bakewell does this without becoming too overbearingly fannish in her writing about him — unlike his contemporary devotee and eventual editor Marie de Gournay, who excoriated his critics and even poured scorn on those readers who praised Montaigne only faintly (“Whoever says of Scipio that he is a noble captain and of Socrates that he is a wise man does them more wrong than one who does not speak of them at all” [299]).

In spite of Bakewell’s admirable even-handedness, though, Montaigne undoubtedly shines in comparison to René Descartes, a passage which is particularly educational — you learn more about both in the comparison than you would if either were treated in isolation.  Descartes regarded all creatures other than humans as mere machines, incapable of thought; Montaigne, by contrast, was able to make a leap of intuition, seeing that when he looked at his cat, his cat looked back at him too: “When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?” (136)  As Bakewell delightfully glosses it, “Descartes cannot truly exchange a glance with an animal.  Montaigne can, and does” (136).  Descartes, at least in this instance, sounds like a stick, and Montaigne deeply humane, able to see other perspectives, constantly aware of his own fallibility.  That’s a man worth investigating further.