'The Rarest of Achievements'

“According to his own statement it was as an escape from the boredom begotten by retirement that the idea of meddling with authorship occurred to Montaigne. What doubtless confirmed him in the idea, however, was the satisfaction which every born literary artist feels in communicating himself to others. As he read the moralists who were most admired, he must have become conscious of a strength that could march abreast of theirs.”

Writing is a reliable antidote to boredom. A well-crafted sentence, an elegantly framed argument, a neatly arranged set-up and punchline focus our attention and feel substantial, even permanent, even when we know otherwise. In addition, every act of writing is a reply to a predecessor, one half of a conversation – a lesson taught by Guy Davenport. Literature is a vast kinship network of precursors. Readers and writers have no excuse for feeling alienated, apart from self-pity.

 

The author quoted above is Jacob Zeitlin (1883-1937), a professor of English at the University of Illinois who in 1934-36 published a three-volume translation of Montaigne’s Essays. The passage is taken from Zeitlin’s introduction to his translation, published as a separate volume and republished online by Isaac Waisberg at IWP Books.

 

In retirement from public life (as mayor of Bordeaux, etc.), Zeitlin tells us, “. . . Montaigne looked forward to living the brilliant, unencumbered life of the châtelain, cutting a fine figure among the gentlemen of his neighbourhood, ruling over his domain like a little king, and imparting to this life the distinction of an intellectual and studious application ‘in the bosom of the learned Virgins.’” Not exactly how I foresaw my retirement, beginning last year. Mostly I took it to mean more time to read and write. The moralists cited by Zeitlin above include Seneca, Plutarch and Lucretius, among others I’ve been rereading thanks to Montaigne.

 

In 1983, Guy Davenport wrote the introduction to a North Point Press reissue of Montaigne’s Travel Journal (trans. Donald Frame), collected in Every Force Evolves a Form (1987). He writes: “It has been said of Montaigne, and can be said of Plutarch, that in reading him we read ourselves.”

 

That’s my lingering impression, based on decades of reading and rereading. Humans are innately interested in other humans. Knowing them, we come to know ourselves in small ways, assuming we are attentive, reflective readers. Clearly, Plutarch and Montaigne made a lasting impression on Davenport. In the same essay he writes:

 

“We all lead a moral inner life of the spirit, on which religion, philosophy, and tacit opinion have many claims. To reflect on this inner life rationally is a skill no longer taught, though successful introspection, if it can make us at peace with ourselves, is sanity itself. The surest teachers of such reflection, certainly the wittiest and most forgiving, are Plutarch and Montaigne.”

 

Davenport likewise revised accepted literary history: “Plutarch invented the essay, and wrote seventy-eight of them; Montaigne invented its name in French and English.” Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary defined essay as “a loose sally of the mind; an irregular indigested piece; not a regular and orderly composition.” Which, in the cases of Plutarch, Montaigne, Johnson and Davenport is not derogatory.

 

One of the enduring attractions of reading Montaigne is the way he eludes academic pigeonholing. He can’t be reduced to an ideology or philosophical category. This is because he writes as a man, with all the contradictions implicit in that identity. He is like us, only more so. Zeitlin writes:

 

“One wonders if there ever was another writer like Montaigne, who, while avowing the utmost sincerity in the expression of his feelings and opinions and offering an almost transparent honesty of character as his guarantee, nevertheless created such contradictory impressions in the minds of his readers concerning both his ideas and his character.”

 

Again, another sign of Montaigne’s essential humanity. Zeitlin concludes the introduction with a long, masterfully organized two-sentence paragraph:

 

“The essential core of Montaigne’s wisdom remains in the doctrine that the meaning and beauty of life consist in an inner quality of consciousness that brings to its owner the greatest satisfaction and serenity of which a human being is capable, and not in the external signs by which the world commonly appraises us. In this spirit he keeps proclaiming that to live for the sake of living is not only the most fundamental but the most eminent part of our occupation, and that he himself has no other trade and art than to live; that to live for the sake of one’s real being is very different from living for appearances; that the road of those who aim at honour is not the same as that which is held by those who profess order and reason for their good;  that our duty is to compose our characters, to win not battles and provinces, but regularity and tranquillity in our conduct; that the soul shows its greatness not so much in mounting high and pressing forward, as in knowing how to control and circumscribe itself, and shows its elevation by preferring a moderate level to eminence; that the life he praises is one that glides soberly and silently, with goodness, moderation, equability, and constancy, and without bustle and ostentation; and that life well-regulated even in its most private recesses is the rarest of achievements.”

 

Montaigne was born on this date, February 28, in 1533, and died in 1592 at age fifty-nine.

'I Don't Think Much of It'

Many of us share a fascination with last words, the final utterances especially of people we admire or detest. Do such words distill the wisdom of a lifetime, spew braggadocio, beg forgiveness or signify cerebrum-atrophied gibberish? 

Deathbed gems inspire skepticism. We’re told the last words of William Hazlitt, a brilliant essayist and notably difficult human being, were, “Well, I’ve had a happy life.” Is that mythology? Would so cranky a man, in effect, repudiate the thrust of his own life? Could a man tell a lie at the moment of death? Could the immanence of death so chasten him? Was he feeling guilty? Or do we have Hazlitt all wrong? Or take Walter de la Mare, who is quoted as saying “Too late for fruit, too soon for flowers.” Sounds just too pat and polished, a little like Rodney Dangerfield on a mediocre night. I’m especially fond of Wyndham Lewis’s swan song. When dying he was asked about the condition of his bowels and replied, “Mind your business!” Good man.

 

Robert Phillips has written a poem, “Famous Last Words” (Circumstances Beyond Our Control: Poems, 2006), composed entirely of the exit lines of well-known figures and dedicated to Dana Gioia. Most cryptic is Henry James: “So it has come . . . The Distinguished Thing.” Most predictable is Lytton Strachey’s final hiss: “If this is dying, I don’t think much of it.” How’s that for life-affirming gratitude?

    

Mainly on the Air (1946; rev. 1957) is mostly a collection of Max Beerbohm’s radio broadcasts. The volume concludes with a lecture Beerbohm delivered in 1943 devoted to Strachey, whom he knew and about whom he has reservations. He writes:

 

“It takes all kinds to make a world, or even to make a national literature. Even for spirits less fastidious than Strachey's, there is, even at the best of times, a great charm in the past. Time, that sedulous artist, has been at work on it, selecting and rejecting with great tact. The past is a work of art, free from irrelevancies and loose ends. There are, for our vision, comparatively few people in it, and all of them are interesting people. The dullards have all disappeared—all but those whose dullness was so pronounced as to be in itself for us an amusing virtue. And in the past there is so blessedly nothing for us to worry about. Everything is settled. There's nothing to be done about it—nothing but to contemplate it and blandly form theories about this or that aspect of it.”

 

Beerbohm’s final words are reported to have been, “Thanks for everything.”

'There Is No Wisdom Here; Seek Not For It!'

A reader objects to my frequent dismissal of nature mysticism. I say this as someone who has spent much of his life tramping through woods and fields, collecting insects and plants and studying biology. I’m happiest among trees and one of their byproducts, books. I just find mushy paeans to nature naïve and tiresome. Somone capable of responding to the natural world only by way of New Age “spirituality” might as well be blind. My professor of English Romanticism distinguished Shelley and Keats like this: If the pair of poets were walking together in the woods, Shelley would be effusing about spirit and sensitive plants, and Keats would frequently pause to study a flower or a butterfly. 

I’m no hardcore adherent to scientism. The world remains a mystery and our knowledge is forever limited. I’m with Keats, the one-time medical student, in his “Negative Capability” letter: “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” No admirer of Keats or Shelley, Yvor Winters writes in his chief critical work, In Defense of Reason (1947):

 

“The Romantic theory of human nature teaches that if man will rely upon his impulses, he will achieve the good life. When this notion is combined, as it frequently is, with a pantheistic philosophy or religion, it commonly teaches that through surrender to impulse man will not only achieve the good life but will achieve a kind of mystical union with the Divinity . . .”

 

Such themes are frequently present in Winters’ poems. In “On Rereading a Passage from John Muir,” he writes:

 

“This was my childhood revery: to be

Not one who seeks in nature his release,

But one forever by the dripping tree,

Paradisaic in his pristine peace.”

 

And in “The Manzanita,” about the arbutus or madrone, a tree common on the West Coast, Winters writes:

 

"This life is not our life; nor for our wit

The sweetness of these shades; these are alone.

There is no wisdom here; seek not for it!

This is the shadow of the vast madrone."

 

I’ve recently happened on a poem with a similar theme by a very different sort of poet, John Wain. Here are the final lines of “Reason for Not Writing Orthodox Nature Poetry”:

 

“To moderns who devoutly hymn the land.

So be it: each is welcome to his voice;

They are a gentle, if a useless, band.

 

“But leave me free to make a sterner choice;

Content, without embellishment, to note

How little beauty bids the heart rejoice,

 

“How little beauty catches at the throat.

Simply, I love this mountain and this bay

With love that I can never speak by rote,

 

“And where you love you cannot break away.”

'Seven Books'

“Decline and Fall is still worth reading, not just for historiographical, literary, and psychological reasons, but also for what we still learn from it about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire through the eyes of a highly talented person who spent long years reading and thinking about it.”

Nicholas Tate refers not to Evelyn Waugh’s first novel but to Edward Gibbon’s six-volume History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88). Tate is the stubborn sort of reader who sees no reason why we shouldn’t read the books that nourished our forebears, who kept them in print for centuries.

 

Last month I wrote about a friend who is reading Gibbon’s masterwork for the first time, and he has sent along an interim report on the experience. “I’m reading the book in the [David] Wormsley edition, as you suggested,” he writes. “I’m going about it systematically and reading 10 pages or so every evening, after dinner. I’m taking notes and looking up a lot of information on the internet as I’m reading. I look forward to this time every day.” Precisely the sort of news I like to hear.

 

I stumbled on a pdf of Tate’s Seven Books That Everyone Once Read and No One Now Does, published last year by Ludovika University Press in Budapest, Hungary. I know nothing about Tate but I suspect there’s a story behind his choice of that imprint. I’ve only skimmed portions of the book but already I admire his resolve and scholarship. Here are the other books he devotes chapters to:

 

On Duties (44 B.C.), Marcus Tullius Cicero

 

Parallel Lives (early second century A.D.), Plutarch

 

The Consolation of Philosophy (524-525 A.D.), Boethius

 

Le Morte Darthur (1469-70), Thomas Malory

 

The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), John Bunyan

 

Waverley (1814), Walter Scott

 

Nothing exotic or arguably obscure. The only volume I’ve not read is Malory’s, mostly because I’ve never had much interest in the Arthurian legends. To his credit, Tate several times refers to Theodore Dalrymple’s These Spindrift Pages (Mirabeau, 2023), which he refers to as “a book about the thoughts that spring from looking through the books in the author’s library, reminisces about second-hand bookshops and books he has bought with traces of their previous owners.” Tate is never scolding or snobbish. He loves these books, of course, but more importantly he knows our ancestors did as well. Their endorsement speaks to us. I plan to read Seven Books in its entirety. In a chapter titled “Why the ‘Great Unread’?” Tate writes:

 

“We have also moved away from a society with an educated class associated with the fostering of a ‘high culture’, and permeated by the Aristotelian idea that the superior life is the life of thought, to one that Mario Vargas Llosa has described as a ‘civilisation of spectacle’, in which cultural objects are assumed to be ephemeral (como el popcorn), exist solely for purposes of entertainment and are evaluated in terms of their financial success, and in which the old notion of cultural hierarchies has largely been lost.”

 

[Tate refers to Vargas Llosa’s La civilización del espectáculo (2012).]

'Ignorance, Madam, Pure Ignorance'

Like any reasonably honest but not too honest person, I hate making mistakes in print. It’s embarrassing and sloppy, often implying a lazy contempt for readers and the truth. 

While covering the corruption trial of a city official in Indiana more than forty years ago, I got something significantly wrong. The story was played on the front page and was avidly read by a lot of readers. Complaints and demands for retraction and correction flooded in. So did accusations that I had done it on purpose to slander the accused. I had to write a fairly lengthy correction and apology, which the editors had “lawyered” (a common verb among journalists), and it was published in the next day’s editions. I felt face-burningly embarrassed for a long time.

 

I recently misdated a literary event in a blog post. It was a silly, careless slip (actually, a mathematical error) which I have since corrected. By now I ought to be accustomed to the ferocity of online fault-finding, especially when the matter is trivial. An anonymous reader noticed my goof and delivered a strident sermon on my idiocy, followed by several other overheated emails. I encourage readers who detect legitimate errors to inform me immediately. A blog is strictly an amateur operation when it comes to quality assurance. I want to get it right, so readers’ help is always appreciated.

 

I’m reminded of a passage in The Lyttelton/Hart-Davis Letters, published in six volumes between 1978 and 1984. George Lyttleton (1883-1962) was a longtime housemaster and English teacher at Eton. Rupert Hart-Davis (1907-99) was a publisher and editor probably best remembered for editing the Collected Letters of Oscar Wilde (1962). Hart-Davis had been Lyttleton’s student at Eton in 1925-26. The men met again at a dinner party in 1955 and started a regular correspondence that continued until Lyttleton’s death in 1962. Here is Lyttleton, in a passage that reminds me of my mistake and my perturbed reader:

 

“Do you ever get things quite wrong? Because here is the perfect defense: ‘What is obvious is not always known, what is known is not always present. Sudden fits of inadvertency will surprise vigilance; slight avocations will seduce attention. And casual eclipses of the mind will darken learning.’ Isn’t it perfect? Johnson, of course.”

 

Lyttleton is quoting from the “Preface” to A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), with its characteristic tone of mingled humility and audacity. Lyttleton’s letters are peppered with casual references to Johnson’s life and work. In this context, such allusions are never stuffy or deployed in a show-off manner. They amount to the small talk of civilized men.

 

Johnson himself was not immune to error. In the first edition of his Dictionary he defined pastern as “the knee of a horse.” In fact, that definition refers to the fetlock. Boswell tells us that some years later, when a woman asked why he had made such a careless error, Johnson replied, “Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance.”

'Amused Sympathetic Affection'

“He was not at all put off by the spectacle of human imperfection.”

 

That’s what keeps us amused, right? As a species we’re an inconsistent mess. We’re angry when we don’t get our way and when we get it we’re disappointed. That’s the engine that drives human affairs, our rapacious vanity and intolerance. Above, Lord David Cecil is writing of his friend the critic Desmond MacCarthy (1877-1952) in the preface to the latter’s posthumously published Humanities (1954).

 

I happened to be reading MacCarthy (an old-fashioned lover of books, prose and ideas) again when someone sent me a compilation video of various young Americans calling, in unambiguous language, for the murder of their fellow imperfect humans (a redundancy) – that is, people with whom they disagree. It was shocking to see such lip-smacking relish for homicide. They reminded me of the nihilists in late-nineteenth-century Russia, when murder became fashionable and members of the middle class and students endorsed and practiced killing. As Gary Saul Morson, the historian of that time and place, puts it in Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter (2023):

 

“For those addicted to the thrill of danger and the intensity of the moment, familiar violence soon becomes routine and ceases to have the desired effect. As with addictive drugs, larger and larger doses are needed. The war on boredom grows boring; repeated violence soon seems almost peaceful; and the struggle against everydayness turns into an everyday affair that one must struggle against.”

 

Times change. Human nature doesn't. Good writers are more scarce and less valued. Cecil goes on to describe MacCarthy as a grownup blessed with a sense of humility:

 

“The worried, undignified animal called man, bustling about with his unwieldy bundle of inconsistent hopes and fears, virtues and weaknesses, stirred in him the amused sympathetic affection of one who feels himself akin to him and, therefore, has no reason to look on him with dislike or contempt. Or even disrespect: there was nothing of the sentimental cynic about Desmond MacCarthy.”

 

Consider how MacCarthy treats Sydney Smith (1771-1845), Anglican minister, advocate for Roman Catholic rights and one of the greatest wits in the English tradition. MacCarthy finds much to admire and much to dismiss in Smith:

 

“Like many of the great wits, like Voltaire himself, he was a champion of bourgeois sense and rational philistinism. Like Voltaire he was intensely social and only lived intensely when he was busy or in company; like the greater man he was an admirable friend. He could hardly have been more benevolent, but he was also kinder than that prophet of eighteenth century bourgeois morality. It did not make him chuckle to give pain, though he loved a scrap. He was good-natured – in fact an English Voltaire. Not such a good writer – Heavens no! But still he could say with truth, 'I never wrote anything very dull in my life.'”

 

[Isaac Waisberg at IWP Books has republished Humanities and five other titles by MacCarthy.]

'Look for the Ridiculous in Everything'

“Thirty years old today, and all around me I feel the waters of melancholy recede.

“Thirty years old! Now I’m convinced I shall not escape death.”

 

Two statements written by the same man on the same day and, according to popular understanding, utterly contradictory. Awareness of our mortality makes us pensive if not clinically depressed. But that doesn’t take into account the roughhewn, commonsensical genius of Jules Renard. He is writing in his Journal on February 22, 1894, with a peasant’s pragmatism and the gift of dry irony. He has just turned age thirty and two-thirds of his life has already passed; though, of course, he doesn't know that. On February 22, 1904, he writes:

 

“Forty years old! For the sage, death is perhaps merely the passage from one day to the next. He dies as others turn forty.”

 

Renard here is cagier. Does he deem himself a sage? He seems never have taken himself too seriously – a rare and essential virtue. He never whines. Here, just two years later:

 

“Forty-two years old. What have I done? Next to nothing, and now I do nothing at all.

 

“I have less talent, money health, fewer readers, fewer friends, but more resignation.

 

“Death appears to me as a wide lake that I am approaching, whose outlines I begin to make out.

 

“Am I any better a person? Not much. I have less energy to do wrong.”

 

A minor sinner’s self-assessment. Not bad enough to be evil nor good enough to be a saint. Pride in both directions kept within uneasy boundaries. The entry for February 22, 1908:

 

“Forty-four is when you begin to give up hope of doubling before quitting.

 

“I feel old, but would not wish to be younger by as much as five minutes.”

 

Signs of genuine, hard-earned maturity. The opposite of Yeats and his monkey glands or the male Boomer with a gray ponytail and Grateful Dead tattoos. Finally, the Journal entry from February 22, 1910:

 

“Forty-six today. How much longer do I have? Until the autumn?”  

 

He didn’t make it. Renard was born on February 22, 1864, and died on May 22, 1910, of arteriosclerosis – a condition readily treatable today -- at age forty-six. As he wrote in his Journal on February 17, 1890, “Look for the ridiculous in everything and you will find it.”

 

[All quoted passages are taken from Renard’s Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]