'He Becomes Part of Your Soul'

A longtime reader last week sent me a Kaboom Books gift certificate for my birthday and I spent it Saturday on Thomas North’s (1535-1604) translation of Plutarch’s Lives. Shakespeare used this translation from the Greek by way of the French, first published in 1580, as a source for some of his Roman plays (Coriolanus, for instance). I found the handsome two-volume boxed set published in 1941 by The Heritage Press. This is the version I read many years ago:

 

In 1983, Guy Davenport wrote the introduction to a North Point Press reissue of Montaigne’s Travel Journal, later collected in Every Force Evolves a Form (1987). In that essay 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 a decades-old reading. It may say something about the nature of thoughtfully written biography. 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 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.

 

John Jeremiah Sullivan, the Kentucky-born author of Blood Horses and Pulphead, was an admirer of Davenport and wrote about him in passing several times. In 2012, in an interview he gave to Hotel Metal Bridge, the literary magazine at the University of Pittsburgh, Sullivan marveled that some people presume they can write without first being “compulsive readers”:

 

“That said, how do you get to be a better reader? I asked Guy Davenport this question one time, because talking to him could really make a person despair; he just knew so much, he’d read so much in many languages, but not in a pedantic or scholastic way, in a really passionate way. He gave me what I thought was very solid advice, which was: first of all, start reading and don’t stop. The other thing is to follow your interest. He said there ought to be a phrase, ‘falling into interest,’ to go with falling in love.

 

“Follow your interest; follow the writers who energize you, not the ones who exert a sense of obligation on you. The books that do the one or the other will change, as time gone on. The landscape shifts. Don’t adhere to systems unless that feels good.”

Sullivan might have been talking about my generous reader and other followers of Anecdotal Evidence, Davenport’s bookish offspring, reading what stirs, sometimes unaccountably, their interest. Sullivan adds:

 

“If you follow your interest, you’ll be adding to the store of things, examples, that make up your ideas. Read Plutarch because a list you read said he was important, and what if you get asked about him at a party, he’ll wash off. Read Plutarch because you’ve fallen in interest with him—because you’ve followed his successors back to him or his influences forward, or because you need him now to understand better some other writer whose work you love, however it happens, maybe a book of his falls open to a page and you’re fixed—in those ways he becomes part of your soul.”