Another Life of Montaigne

I've just ordered Sarah Bakewell's How to Live:  or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. It's not that I need to read another book about Montaigne. And I can't believe that any life of Montaigne will improve on Donald Frame's magisterial work. But I expect Sarah Bakewell's book will be something different, more an encounter with Montaigne, and those sorts of books can be interesting. Besides, this fits well with my current project of reading biographies, memoirs, and various forms of life writing. Plus, it's about Montaigne, whom I never grow tired of reading or thinking about.

One thing Bakewell does is try to account for Montaigne's enduring appeal, and I think she's right to suggest that every reader will find something of himself in Montaigne's essays. He was quintessentially human in his curiosity and zest for life among the other humans. Bakewell mines the Essays for her own book, but they remain themselves the best source for anyone who wants truly to know Montaigne. Among other things they are his own autobiography, although he leaves out most of those personal details we usually expect. For example, he hardly a mentions his wife or other members of his family, with the exception of his father, who does play a minor part in the formation of Montaigne's subject, himself.

In his Essays he explores himself and his thoughts about life and the world he lives in. Most readers are struck by how desultory and disorganized his essays seem. Sometimes the title is a clue to the subject, but sometimes not, or not entirely. He follows his whims. He also was an inveterate editor and reviser of his own writing. He obviously reread and reworked his essays many times, publishing them in three editions, with each subsequent edition growing larger both in number of essays and length of earlier essays. His habit was to add but almost never subtract, with the result that readers and scholars have sometimes found it difficult to sort through what may appear to be contradictory statements.

But for Montaigne the Essays were a record of his thoughts, and his thoughts were alive, they responded to his life and experience, and to his reading. Montaigne was a great reader, and he filled his essays with quotations from what he read, primarily, but not exclusively, the ancient classical authors. He was a humanist, made by his father, in one of the most unusual educational experiments on record, to learn Latin almost from birth, surrounded only by those who could speak that language in his presence. Nevertheless, he was a master of French, and a champion of plain prose style and vernacular writing.

Sarah Bakewell seems alert to all of this. You can get a taste of her approach on her website. I'm looking forward to her responses to Montaigne.