BIOGRAPHY : How to live: A life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer,by Sarah Bakewell Chatto & Windus 387pp £16.99
IS ANY QUESTION more relevant in life than that of how to live? Now that recessionary times offer more opportunity to think, the big issues loom larger than ever: how to live life? How to deal with interpersonal conflict? How to cope with loss? How to steer clear of religious extremism? How to enjoy life to the full and feel happy? In these days of gurus and self-help manuals it is salutary to think that some of the neatest advice on life and the best answers to these questions may come from a book written more than 400 years ago by the French aristocratic landlord, lawyer, mayor and thinker Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-92).
Montaigne has always been a huge figure in French literary history; thanks to a new biographical study by Sarah Bakewell his pragmatic approach to existence will now resonate with a far wider audience. This innovative, highly accessible biography takes a holistic approach to Montaigne the man and to his huge life's work, known as the Essays. In How to LiveBakewell proffers 20 attempts to answer her question, with Montaigne's responses providing the chapter titles, ranging from "don't worry about death" to "wake from the sleep of habit" or "see the world" and "be ordinary and imperfect".
The impetus for the Essayscame from Montaigne's brush with death. As he was trotting along on horseback one day an attendant accidentally galloped a huge mount into him, knocking him and his horse to the ground. Montaigne nearly died. He lost consciousness and then had an out-of-body experience wherein he felt himself happily drifting into death as in an aimless reverie. Prefiguring Rousseau's similar collision with a Great Dane, this moment was an epiphany for Montaigne the Renaissance man, who had feared death. He decided henceforth to live every moment of life to the full. He imported some of death's "delicacy and buoyancy" into life itself and started writing an account of his own life, its sensations and experiences. These Essays, or attempts, were Montaigne's challenge to himself to write down what it felt like simply to be Montaigne.
Part of the innovation of the Essayslies in the very personal nature of Montaigne's material, an approach that was unusual in his day. It reads rather like a modern blog. He writes of his kidney stones and of the pain of internal blockage. He tells of his quirky and lonely childhood when his father insisted he speak only Latin, although few could understand him. He recounts his close attachment to best friend, Étienne de La Boétie, whose untimely death from the plague left him feeling bereft for decades. He muses on cannibalism. He describes his estate and his family. He explains his chateau's open-door policy, even in times of pestilence and war. He gives accounts of his close relations with French monarchy: Henri III, Catherine de' Medici and the great Henri de Navarre. He watches his dog dreaming. From all of these personal experiences Montaigne extrapolates a sort of modus vivendi.
Essentially, Montaigne espouses a scepticism known as Pyrrhonism, which Bakewell pithily summarises as: “All I know is that I know nothing and I’m not even sure about that.” Montaigne holds that the inability to know anything for certain obviates the need for worry or anxiety, and thus he lives according to the premise that nothing in life need be taken too seriously. The relief is, of course, enormous. Instead of trying to provide definite answers, he suspends judgment.
Montaigne's Essayswas a bestseller during his lifetime, and that success spurred him on to continue editing and adding to his text right up to his death, aged 59, from kidney stones. Bakewell traces the text's reception through the centuries in both France and England, noting that Montaigne's work has always inspired either virulent, dismissive opposition or the fierce loyalty of passionate defenders, from Marie de Gournay through Nietzsche and Virginia Woolf.
Bakewell is one of Montaigne’s latest fans, but her considerable achievement in this work is to organise and present him without being exhaustive or reductive. She relishes his anecdotes, yet her biography is solidly grounded in historical and philosophical terms. She echoes the author, often commenting in a chatty tone similar to his. Amid some eclectic modern comparisons she provides illuminating background material. Montaigne lived through the most divisive of French 16th- century civil wars, including the Massacre of St Bartholomew and its fallout. The reader cannot resist beaming at Montaigne’s Catherine de’ Medici, who appears more benign than usually portrayed, while the great Henri IV is sketched as being dirty and eschewing baths. In Bakewell’s hands the political turmoil of the time is more dispassionately conveyed.
In our sceptical age Montaigne is certain to enjoy a happy revival. For those who already know and cherish the Essays,Bakewell's work is a timely reminder of its richness and its immense legacy. For those tempted to delve into the cornucopia of Montaigne for the first time, reading Bakewell will help to guide and to situate the text, and should double the pleasure of discovery. Her biography ends with a Pangur Bán-like moment: Montaigne suspends urgent work to take time out to play with his cat, remembering the importance of what it is simply to be alive.
Síofra Pierse lectures in French and francophone studies at University College Dublin. Her last book, Voltaire Historiographer: Narrative Paradigms, was published by the Voltaire Foundation, University of Oxford, in 2008
Sarah Bakewell takes part in Dublin Writers Festival today, alongside Declan Kiberd and Ruth Padel, at an event chaired by Evelyn Conlon, at Project Arts Centre at 6pm
