'He Also Did Not Hope'

Back to the theme of non-specialization, of writer as generalist: “Next to Montaigne, the rest of the great intellectual figures of the sixteenth century, the leaders of the Renaissance, of Humanism, of the Reformation, and of the modern sciences, the men who created modern Europe, were all, every last one of them, merely specialists.” 

“Merely” is priceless. The author is the great German philologist and critic Erich Auerbach, best known as author of Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946; trans. 1953). The passage is from his essay “Montaigne the Writer” (1932) collected in Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays (trans. Jane O. Newman, Princeton University Press, 2014). Like a good journalist, Montaigne could write about anything and make it interesting.  

 

Kingsley Amis formulated a similar thought in a more comic register: “Any proper writer ought to be able to write anything, from an Easter Day sermon to a sheep-dip handout.” And my friend Cynthia Haven quotes the wonderful poet and novelist Janet Lewis: “Whenever I’m writing, I’m interested in everything, because I’m still waiting for the next page.”

 

Go to the table of contents in Donald Frame’s translation of the Essays and skim his 107 titles for a sense of Montaigne’s range: sadness, liars, fear, imagination, Cato the Younger, smells, drunkenness, cruelty, thumbs, cripples and on and on. He was an expert in nothing (except himself). Curiosity is the essential quality for any essayist, starting with Montaigne and resumed by Dr. Johnson, William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Max Beerbohm, J.V. Cunningham, Michael Oakeshott, A.J. Liebling, Guy Davenport, Joseph Epstein . . . Auerbach describes Montaigne as “unsystematic and without method” – like any good essayist. Auerbach tries to distill Montaigne’s gift:

 

“It is, in fact, not easy to describe what his achievement actually was, even today. In his own time, what he did and his impact were nearly incomprehensible. For, as we know, every act needs to be addressed to someone who will find it of value; every effect needs an audience. For Montaigne’s Essays, this audience was in any case not yet present, and he could not have predicted that it would ever exist.”

 

What did his contemporaries make of this eccentric forever writing about himself? In a sense, he invented us, his true readers. Just last night I reread his essay “Of Repentance,” and it read like one man talking to another:

 

“If I had to live over again, I would live as I have lived. I have neither tears for the past nor fears for the future. And unless I am fooling myself, it has gone about the same way within me as without. It is one of the chief obligations I have to my fortune that my bodily state has run its course which each thing in due season. I have seen the grass, the flower, and the fruit; now I see the dryness—happily, since it is naturally. I bear the ills I have much more easily because they are properly timed, and also because they make me remember more pleasantly the long felicity of my past life.” 

 

Naturally, I thought of my recently dead brother and read Ecclesiastes again. At the end of his essay, Auerbach writes: “Full of desire, he immersed himself deeply in the thought of death. While he did not tremble, he also did not hope.”