'Never to Gain an Advantage'

The closest I came to having a genuine argument with my late friend D.G. Myers, as brilliant a literary critic and scholar as I have known, was over his insistence that I too was a critic. I’ve never thought of myself that way, even though I’ve written hundreds of book reviews. My analytical skills are modest. I read for pleasure, which includes learning things. Like any practiced reader, I know what I like and what I dislike, and generally prefer to write about the likes. I am, in short, a writer who chooses to write about books, which is not the same things as being a critic. I don’t work for Consumer Reports. Theodore Dalrymple describes me by way of Montaigne in “Montaigne’s Humanity”: 

“Not being a systematic thinker, Montaigne offers only philosophical hints or suggestions. His mind is allusive rather than analytic; we find in him thoughts that prefigure later developments but nothing that resembles a doctrine more than a general attitude.”

 

That’s me. I have attitudes, general stances toward books and other things, but no doctrines, unless a preference for good prose is a doctrine. Being called a critic irritates me because I believe the least interesting thing I can know about you is your opinion of anything. Too many people have turned themselves into opinion-factories, and not just when it comes to politics. I’d rather hear what you know, what interests you, your “general attitude.” Critics are a very small and parasitic part of literature, nearly an after-thought. When I hear someone gearing up to set me straight, I’m tempted to turn off my hearing aids.

 

Stefan Zweig rediscovered Montaigne in Petrópolis, Brazil, of all places, finding a “dusty old copy” of the Essais in the basement of the bungalow where he and his wife lived after fleeing the Nazis. His own library, like much else, had been lost in Hitler’s Europe. Zweig’s monograph Montaigne (trans. Will Stone, Pushkin Press, 2015) was not published (in German) until 1960, and Stone’s translation is the first into English. His introduction is excellent. He tells us Montaigne was “the crutch that Zweig, with waning fortitude, reached for over that final winter, as any prospect of a future in which a scrap of magnanimity might be salvaged seemed lost to a brutalizing present.”

 

The parallels with our own day can’t be ignored. The times are just as savage, but fewer people can read. What’s most moving about this brief monograph is the centrality of books in the lives of Montaigne and Zweig, and the effort to sustain civilization. Zweig does not write as a critic but as a literary brother. One reads a muted elegy between his sentences:

 

“His relationship with books is like everything else, for here too he guards his freedom. With them too he knows no obligation to duty. He wants to read and learn, but only so far as he can savour the experience. As a young man he had read, he states, ‘ostentatiously’, merely to show off his knowledge; later, to acquire a measure of wisdom, and now only for pleasure, never to gain an advantage.”