'He Knew Nothing Special But Himself'

A longtime reader in England writes: 

“I thought of you the other day. I was reading Trent’s Last Case published in 1913 by Edmund Clerihew Bentley. A description of one of the main characters reads:

 

“‘His austere but not unhappy life was spent largely among books and in museums; his profound and patiently accumulated knowledge of a number of curiously disconnected subjects which had stirred his interest at different times had given him a place in the quiet, half-lit world of professors and devotees of research; at their amiable, unconvivial dinner-parties he was most himself. His favourite author was Montaigne.’”

 

There’s not much about me that’s austere, nor am I at home among most academics,  but otherwise the passage is flattering. Montaigne is certainly on my short list of favorites. He’s the man who taught us how to write about the self and its place in the world without merely self-advertising. The self becomes a stand-in for the rest of humanity. The universal is rooted in the particular.

 

On Thursday my nephew and I visited Loganberry Books, the last remaining bookstore in Cleveland worthy of serious readers. I asked a clerk, a woman of roughly my age, where I could find the essay section (the sprawling floor plan requires a map). She explained that the closest section to what I probably wanted was called “Narrative Nonfiction.” There I found too much popular junk – Joan Didion, Mary Oliver, David Sedaris, et al. I refined my question and asked if they had a section corresponding to what used to be called belles-lettres. “Sadly, no,” she said, with what seemed like genuine regret. Then she led me to “Lit. Crit.,” where I found One Person and Another: On Writers and Writing (Baskerville Publishers, 1993) by the late American novelist Richard Stern. In an essay titled “Inside Narcissus,” Stern writes: “There is one maker who is driven to narcissism by his occupation. This is the writer,” which inevitably leads him to Montaigne:

 

“Centuries before Augustine, Horace praised his satiric predecessor Lucilius for laying out his whole life ‘as if it were painted on a votive tablet.’ It was, though, not till the late sixteenth century that a writer claimed that he wrote because he knew nothing special but himself. Montaigne puzzled over his self-assignment. ‘Is it reasonable,’ he asked, ‘that I, so fond of privacy in actual life, should aspire to publicity in the knowledge of me?’ He decided that this contradiction, like all others, was integral to his enterprise, which was revealing all of himself (mon être universel), or at least as much as decorum or caution allowed. ‘I speak the truth, not my fill of it, but as much as I dare speak.”