`The Sentences Have Hooks in Them'

I enjoy stories of readers reborn through encounters with books. Such literary epiphanies are rare and probably will grow rarer as fewer people are open to such experiences. Fewer read and fewer read books potent enough to elicit life-changing reactions. And fewer readers still, even when transformed by books, are equipped to adequately describe these unnoted miracles.

During the Great Depression, an unschooled migrant worker followed the harvests in California and collected library cards from towns up and down the state. Late in 1936, he resolved to try placer mining for gold near Nevada City. Suspecting he might become snowbound, he wanted to outfit himself with sufficient reading for the winter. “I had to acquire a taste for a good sentence – taste it the way a child tastes candy --” he says, “before I stumbled into writing.” He picks up the story here:

“I needed something to read, something that would last me for a long time. So I stepped over in San Francisco to get a thick book. I did not really care what the book was about – history, theology, mathematics, farming, anything – so long as it was thick, had small print, and no pictures. There was at that time a large secondhand bookstore on Market Street [in San Francisco] called Lieberman’s, and I went there to buy my book. I soon found one. It had about a thousand pages of small print and no pictures. The price was one dollar. The title page said these were The Essays of Michel de Montaigne. I knew what essays were, but I did not know Montaigne from Adam. I put the book in my knapsack and caught the ferry to Sausalito.”

The writer and reader is Eric Hoffer, in his essay “Automation, Leisure, and the Masses,” collected in his fourth book, The Temper of Our Time, published in 1967. That’s about the time I discovered Hoffer, through his syndicated column in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. This revelation -- a longshoreman writing clear, incisive prose that I not only read but clipped from the newspaper and pasted into a scrapbook – was the modest genesis of my career in newspapers. Now it occurs to me that I owe more to Montaigne than I realized. Back to Hoffer:

“Sure enough, I got snowbound. I read the book three times until I knew it almost by heart. When I got back to the San Joaquin Valley I could not open my mouth without quoting Montaigne, and the fellows liked it. It got so that whenever there was an argument about anything – women, money, animals, food, death – they would ask, `What does Montaigne say?’ Out came the book and I would find the right passage. I am quite sure that even now there must be a number of migratory workers up and down the San Joaquin Valley still quoting Montaigne. I ought to add that the Montaigne edition I had was the John Florio translation [published in 1603]. The spelling was modern, but the style seventeenth century – the style of the King James Bible and of Bacon’s Essays. The sentences have hooks in them which stick in the mind; they make platitudes sound as if they were new. Montaigne was not above anyone’s head. Once, in a workers’ barracks near Stockton, the man in the next bunk picked up my Montaigne and read it for an hour or so. When he returned it he said, `Anyone can write a book like this.’”

In 1955, Time reviewed Hoffer’s second book, The Passionate State of Mind, and the headline was “Dockside Montaigne.” The magazine’s anonymous reviewer, in fluent Timespeak, describes Hoffer as “a pink-faced, hornyhanded San Francisco dock worker who pays his dues to Harry Bridges’ longshoremen’s union and preaches self-reliance more stalwartly than Emerson.”

Just to round the circle, here’s a sample of what Emerson wrote in “Montaigne; or, the Skeptic.” Much of it goes double for Hoffer:

“The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to his sentences. I know not anywhere the book that seems less written. It is the language of conversation transferred to a book. Cut these words, and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive. One has the same pleasure in it that he feels in listening to the necessary speech of men about their work, when any unusual circumstance gives momentary importance to the dialogue. For blacksmiths and teamsters do not trip in their speech; it is a shower of bullets. It is Cambridge men who correct themselves and begin again at every half sentence, and, moreover, will pun, and refine too much, and swerve from the matter to the expression. Montaigne talks with shrewdness, knows the world and books and himself, and uses the positive degree; never shrieks, or protests, or prays: no weakness, no convulsion, no superlative: does not wish to jump out of his skin, or play any antics, or annihilate space or time, but is stout and solid; tastes every moment of the day; likes pain because it makes him feel himself and realize things; as we pinch ourselves to know that we are awake. He keeps the plain; he rarely mounts or sinks; likes to feel solid ground and the stones underneath. His writing has no enthusiasms, no aspiration; contented, self-respecting and keeping the middle of the road.”