Sarah Bakewell

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Transcript

Ramona Koval: Sarah, welcome to The Book Show.

Sarah Bakewell: Hi, thanks very much.

Ramona Koval: Your enthusiasm for Montaigne is clear from the verve in your writing of his life and works, and I'm sure we're going to hear all about that soon, and the way you approached him was completely original, it seems to me. But first, you say he was not only the father of the essay but that 21st-century bloggers owe him too. Why?

Sarah Bakewell: Other people before me have spotted that there is something a little bit like blogging in the way that he writes, which is that he tended to, as far as we can tell, just throw ideas in as they came to him. So instead of planning the book out in a logical way and then adding things according to a structure, he seems to just have a thought and he'll write it down, and then sometimes in later editions he'll have a second thought which maybe might even be contradictory compared to the first, but he'll just throw that in and keep both versions in the same book.

So you get this huge, developing...it seems to me actually that it grows a little bit like a coral reef by just adding and accreting more and more ideas rather than being planned and progressing in some sort of orderly way. So what we end up with in the end is about 1,000 pages worth in most modern editions of just the most incredibly rich mass of thoughts about all sorts of things under the sun, and really a map of how his mind has developed over...it took him about 20 years writing the book. So we see him developing and thinking and questioning things. That creates an incredible impression of aliveness.

Ramona Koval: 'How to live' is not the same as saying 'how should one live', is it.

Sarah Bakewell: It's not even a statement or an instruction really, it's a question, it's definitely a question, and it should really have a question mark after it but just in English that would sound a bit strange. But how to live is the question that he was always asking himself and looking for possible answers in books that he read and experiences that he had in talking to other people and just reflecting on his own life. And he never came up with any definite conclusions really, and he certainly never came up with any instructions that we're supposed to follow because really the only...

Ramona Koval: But sometimes he comes up with a kind of instruction and then he comes up with the opposite instruction.

Sarah Bakewell: Yes, exactly, so again you're more struck by the questioning than you are by any consistent kind of an answer.

Ramona Koval: You came across him on a train trip 20 years ago. What happened?

Sarah Bakewell: Yes, I was travelling back from Budapest to London and I'd completely run out of reading matter so I went into a second hand bookshop and really I was looking for something that would just be a good story, keep my attention, a nice fat book called something like Destiny or Love.

Ramona Koval: And you found it!

Sarah Bakewell: Well, it did have a one-word title and it was a big fat book, but it wasn't quite the one I was expecting, and it was the only English-language book in the shop. It was a translation of course from the French, but of just a few selected essays. So I bought it, not really expecting that it would be that entertaining, but it was. Immediately I started reading it I was...I had the impression that I had just Montaigne himself sitting opposite me on the train and just engaging me in conversation. It was like meeting somebody that seemed already familiar

Ramona Koval: Because he was talking about the personal, he was a stranger on a train.

Sarah Bakewell: Yes, exactly, and in fact that would have been a good alternative title, thinking about it, for the book.

Ramona Koval: Your book is a life of Montaigne, but you tell it by asking this one question, how to live, and answering it 20 ways. And in each answer, which is sort of the chapter heading, you tell us of his life and ideas and of the things that happened to him that might have fed his answer to how to live in that particular chapter. How did you come to tell the life like this, because a lot of biographies would begin 'He was born in 1533, his mother and father were X,' you know. Why did you eschew this? And it's a relief that you did, I should say!

Sarah Bakewell: Yes, that is so standard and it just didn't seem to work very well for him because the real interest in his life is in his thought and his writing, and even the way that he read other writers too and mulled over and then re-imagined them for a new generation. So there was a sense of continuity. And then I was soon very struck as well by how people had read him over the years, over the centuries, and intellectual fashions had come and gone and so people had interpreted him in different ways. You know, the Romantics wanted to make him into a Romantic Montaigne interested in nature and spontaneity, and they even did pictures of him with flowing hair looking like Byron. So there was this sense that his life extended way beyond his death in this way that he lived on in people's minds. But it also went back way before his birth because so much of his thinking was informed by people who had gone before. I started to think that really the interest wasn't so much in figuring out the minutiae of his day-to-day life, when he did what and who he met and who his parents were, so much as tracing this story of him almost as a book or as a set of ideas or a way of writing about himself. So it ended up becoming a bit more free-form.

Ramona Koval: You start really with a discussion of death, which is very unusual for a biography, and the first question is how to live and the answer is don't worry about death. And you start at a moment in his life when he has a near death experience, a riding accident. And really it causes a sea change in his life, doesn't it. What happened when he fell off his horse?

Sarah Bakewell: He was in his mid-30s when that happened, and through his 20s I think he had, like maybe quite a lot of us do, gone through a bit of a morbid late adolescent phase in which he was very obsessed with death and the fear of death. He also had quite a few people close to him die, so it's understandable. But he felt that he needed to prepare himself for death spiritually and to read about it and think about it, and the more he did that, the more anxious he got.

But this experience of the riding accident changed that because he actually did very nearly die. He was thrown from his horse, knocked unconscious, quite badly injured, and he drifted in an out of consciousness, right up to...he brushed death with his lips, or his life was just hanging on by the tip of his lips, as he put it, and then he gradually came back to life again. But what he discovered from that experience was that far from being this terrifying thing that you could prepare for, that that close brush with death was actually a pleasurable experience. He described it as a voluptuous sensation, it was like drifting off to sleep. And he came to the conclusion that if that's what it's like it's not something that you could prepare for or should prepare for, it is just nature would take its course when the time came. And he became more interested in life rather than death, so there was a turn away from thoughts of death and towards an interest in exploring not just life in general but his own conscious experience. And I think that's when the idea of the essays probably started to come to him.

Ramona Koval: Let's talk a little bit about his context. So he has this sea change at 38, he leaves his job in local politics, doesn't he, in Bordeaux. What's going on in the area and in the country at the time?

Sarah Bakewell: It was a terrible time for France. We're talking about around 1570 that that happened, and it was right in the middle of civil wars over religion. This is not long after the Reformation. But in France the split between Catholic and Protestant took a particularly violent form, and on and off they had civil wars for a lot of Montaigne's adult life and they were still going when he died, they didn't end until a few years later. So he lived out his entire life amid a catastrophe really because even when there was supposedly an interlude of peace, there would maybe be no actual fighting but there would be famine, they would be gangs of unemployed soldiers roaming the countryside and looting wherever they went. There were outbreaks of plague fed by the general disorder and fear. And everybody lived in fear.

And there was just a sense as well that the end of the world was nigh because everything seemed to be falling apart, everything seemed to be just falling into chaos. He was very moderate, he was a Catholic but he tried to keep to a very moderate position, not being drawn into either one of the extremes. And his political life actually led to him having to find ways of negotiating and finding common ground between some of the extremist positions. So he tried to keep a middle path and really just tried to preserve his integrity in the middle of these terrible times. And that's an idea that I found very compelling, very inspiring really.

Ramona Koval: So he almost went inside, because going outside and sallying forth was very dangerous. I mean, he went inside to his study and to himself.

Sarah Bakewell: He did, he decided to look into himself and spend more time on his estate, because he owned a winegrowing estate near Bordeaux, sort of meditating, reflecting and writing. But he actually continued to be very involved in public life because even after he gave up his job as magistrate in Bordeaux he later was called on to become mayor, and he was mayor of Bordeaux for four years during very difficult times. He took part in diplomatic missions to try and foster peace between some of the different factions. So he actually remained very active, but...

Ramona Koval: But that was sort of a family tradition too, wasn't it.

Sarah Bakewell: Well, I think they sought him out particularly because his father had been mayor, although his father had practically ruined his health, Montaigne always thought, by taking his job too much to heart. Montaigne preferred to keep it just to one part of his own life and not let it take over. One of the chapter titles which is my invention not his is that we should do a good job but not too good a job, not to let your public life and your work distract you too much from yourself and from reflecting on life.

Ramona Koval: Sarah, you talk about Montaigne's generation and their passions and interests and inclinations, and I thought that's right, every time has a generation, it is not just 1968 or the mid-1990s. What was his generation on about?

Sarah Bakewell: Yes, it was a very interesting one, and I think it is one that we can...it's quite interesting to think about today because his father's generation, the once before them were really the product of the Renaissance in Europe. They were hugely inspired by Italy, by the Italian Renaissance, by Erasmus, humanist ideas that you could make life better, that you could become ever more wise, ever more artistically excellent, ever more scientifically knowledgeable, there was this great optimism.

Montaigne's generation saw that turning sour in all sorts of departments of life, and the civil war in France and really the religious schism throughout Europe was one of the major reasons for that because suddenly instead of this sense that we were getting wiser and more peaceful all the time, there was a feeling that everything was just heading towards the apocalypse, and nation was divided against nation, family was divided against family. There was a sense that everything was falling apart into a kind of chaos, which was very to the other extreme. Montaigne tried to find a more moderate position, as usual, between those two ways of looking at things.

But he certainly had a darker vision than his father's generation. He had a sense that we are very chaotic, but we can't really know ourselves. One of the things he said was we are always double within ourselves, we are pulled this way and that by different impulses, different aspects of our psychology, and we can't ever really know ourselves. We can certainly try and look inward but we can't find any definite consistent sense of who we are. So it's a dark and quite fascinating vision.

But he actually had quite a cheerful disposition himself, I think he was just blessed with a fairly sunny way of looking at the world. So although he looked at all these difficult aspects of his own psychology, he would then quite often just conclude, oh well, that's the way I am and I accept that and I can't change that without changing myself, so let's just get on with life.

Ramona Koval: You talk about his father Pierre and the unusual way Pierre had of bringing up his young son. His father wanted him to speak only Latin. Of course that was the language of the courts and the high intellectuals I suppose. But he sort of engineered a whole lot of Latin speakers around the child. He wasn't taught French, was he, at first?

Sarah Bakewell: No, it was a really bizarre experiment because Montaigne's father isolated him from all French speakers. So he brought in a German tutor who didn't speak any French but did speak perfect Latin, so that was the only medium of communication. But he also forbade everybody in the household from speaking French. So they had to speak Latin. The servants learned a bit of Latin, which was something they would never normally have done, and Montaigne's mother learnt a bit of Latin, which again is something that women normally didn't do at the time. Even Montaigne's own father, his Latin was very rusty because he hadn't studied it since he was a schoolboy, and he brushed up on it. So this was all part of that Renaissance dream I think to give the boy a direct pipeline straight back to the ancients who were the highest that human civilisation had ever known, and also to give him advantages in court.

Ramona Koval: What do you think the effect of this was on him? Did this mean that he...there weren't too many kids who were speaking Latin around the place, were there, what about playmates?

Sarah Bakewell: I think it would have isolated him rather, and on the one hand it would have given him a sense of being a bit set apart, it would have made it hard for his parents to just show him spontaneous natural affection and communication. So it was a rather lonely experience, I should think. It only lasted until he was six because then he went off to school, and funnily enough all the boys there were studying Latin so his was much better than anybody else, but after about a year of school his had degenerated back to the point where he was the same as everybody else, which he thought said a lot about school as an experience.

But there was this other aspect of his early upbringing as well, which is that his father wanted him not to be pushed into learning things, just to discover things through his own curiosity and a sense of pleasure in learning, and to learn from everyday life and to learn from people around him and to read as he pleased. So he was even woken up in the morning...instead of being pulled out of bed by an alarm clock as most of us are now, or dragged out of bed with a shock, he was awoken by somebody gently strumming a lute by his bedside so that he...

Ramona Koval: Which is a good idea.

Sarah Bakewell: I would love that, I wish somebody would do that for me.

Ramona Koval: You say that he had a sunny disposition. He was a short man who rode a horse to disguise it, you say.

Sarah Bakewell: He always complained that people...he was quite short and not very imposing-looking in any way. When you see the portraits that exist of him he does look like quite an ordinary guy, and he always complained that if he went anywhere with his servants that usually people would address him as though he was the servant and one of them as though he was the master, somebody that looked a bit taller and more formidable. But actually in a sense I think that was his strong point as well. When it came to some of the work that he did, diplomatically and negotiating with princes and warlords and things like that, he would get away with a lot because he did look quite unassuming, and I think he had a natural easy-going manner which wasn't particularly threatening but which was also quite confident. So it was a nice combination.

Ramona Koval: He had a very special friendship with his friend Etienne, and the early loss of his friend through the plague really changed his life and began him writing essays. In a sense, are the essays partly directed to his friend?

Sarah Bakewell: I often get that feeling. Yes, they only had a few years of friendship. They were colleagues in the Bordeaux parliament and they felt they had found each other's soul mate. They communicated, as Montaigne writes in the essays, told each other everything, they discussed books and ideas and everything that happened. They sort of poured into each other. Etienne de La Boetie died of the plague, with Montaigne at his bedside. And really Montaigne mentions in the essays that he never found anything like that again, he had never found that kind of companionship, that sense of having somebody...he said that he longed for somebody to share experiences with, that something that you experience, if you can't communicate it there is no pleasure in it. So there is a sense in which he probably started writing the essays almost as a substitute for that, because I think he probably was quite lonely. He certainly felt the loss of somebody that he could be that close to.

Also just on a practical level one of the first things he did was to edit some of the manuscripts of work, translations and poems and things like that left behind by La Boetie, so he became his friend's posthumous editor, and that probably helped to start him on the road to writing. But yes, I definitely think that we benefit from the fact that he was looking for somebody to communicate his thoughts too.

Ramona Koval: So he basically left the life he was leading and came home, consecrated his life to freedom, tranquillity and leisure, and took to his library. What did his library look like and what can it tell us about him?

Sarah Bakewell: The location of the library was wonderful, it was in one corner of his chateaux estate, and wonderfully it is still there today, although the rest of the chateaux burnt down in the 19th century, but the tower was left untouched. So you can still go to it, you can walk up. The library was on the last but one floor, so there was a chapel on the ground floor, he had a little extra bedroom on the middle floor, and then the library on the top floor.

The books aren't there any more today. So you can still get a feeling of what it was like when you go there but without the furnishings, without the books...I mean, there are exhibits, but it's not the same. He had about 1,000 books, which is a fairly good library for its day. And he described his shelves, he had a wonderful circular bookshelf made which must have been wonderful. So you could sit there and look at the whole eyeful of his books around the room.

Ramona Koval: He was fond of writing things on the walls in the little room next door, wasn't he?

Sarah Bakewell: Yes, there are murals on the walls in a little room just off the library. But he also had favourite quotations and sayings from the classical authors and various other sources, poets and things, inscribed on the wooden beams on the ceiling of both rooms. And you can still see those today.

Ramona Koval: Like what?

Sarah Bakewell: Things like 'Nothing human is alien to me', these famous sayings, one or two things from the Bible but not very many. There were things from some of his favourite classical authors, Plutarch, Seneca, things like that. So he could look up and see some of the bits from his reading that spoke to him most closely. It's quite an amazing experience walking under them today because you feel as if you are almost walking literally under the bits and pieces of his mind, the things that he thought about.

Ramona Koval: You talk about him as being a kind of perfect poster boy for the slow movement that we hear about today, slow food, slow reading and that sort of thing. What do you mean?

Sarah Bakewell: He always complained...well, it sounded like a complaint, he said that he wasn't very quick-witted. It took him a long time to get his head around things and understand things. Once he did grasp something he grasped it very deeply, he really took it into himself, he made it a part of himself and tried to exercise good judgement. He always thought it was more important to him than just a lot of superficial knowledge. So he complained that he was a bit slow on the uptake, which is unusual, it's not something you often read authors saying about themselves.

He also complained that he had a terrible memory and funnily enough that's one of the things that first got my attention when I was reading it on this train journey when I first read him because I always felt my memory is terrible, I certainly do now, and even 20 years ago I thought I just would forget anything and as soon as it popped into my head it would fall out again. And he complained of exactly that. But again, he said that what did stick in his mind went more deeply then just a superficial grasp of detail.

Ramona Koval: You've summarised it as 'Read a lot, forget most of what you read and be slow-witted'.

Sarah Bakewell: Yes. He didn't necessarily think that we have to be that bright or that quick or that fast on the uptake or that we have to study a lot, remember all that we read, what is more important to him is to encounter a wide range of ideas and think about things, reflect on things in an intelligent way but not necessarily in a fast way. So sort of take them within yourself and let them almost percolate within, would be the phrase that we would use today.

Ramona Koval: And pay attention.

Sarah Bakewell: Yes, give your full attention to what's going on around you and what you encounter, people that you meet, little details of life around you, and pay attention to your inner self as well. There's an almost Zen-like quality to that. I think Zen is always...there is this tradition of striking the student with a stick to make them aware of the here and now, to keep their mind in the present, as I understand it, I'm sure that's a travesty of the complexity of the Zen. But there is a lot of that in Montaigne, and that's something that he picked up from some of his classical philosophers as well. But I think it's something that...it doesn't matter how many times you remind yourself to do that, it is easy to just get distracted from the here and now I think.

Ramona Koval: I love that Twenty Attempts at an Answer, it's so Montaigne, isn't it, to essay, to attempt.

Sarah Bakewell: Exactly, yes. It's funny because we hear the word 'essay' all the time and we have to write essays at school or university, and it sounds like such a dull thing to do, but the original meaning, and Montaigne was the first person to use the word in this way, is literally to try something, to try something out, 'essayer' is 'to try' in French. And he was trying out ideas, trying out thoughts, but above all he was trying out himself, he was assaying himself would be another variant of that. So yes, they are attempts at an answer, they are very definitely not answers because really the attempt is more interesting than the answer itself, I think.

Ramona Koval: A couple of things that I wanted to illustrate...I said before that often you will have one line of thought which is contradicted by another, but not necessarily completely contradicted but just rattled up a bit. On the one hand he wants us to accept everything without wanting to change it, and on the other hand he wants us to question everything. I find that a little bit contradictory. If we have too accepted everything, we wouldn't want to question...I mean, what's the point of questioning things unless you want to change things?

Sarah Bakewell: It's an amazing paradox really, and I think that goes to the heart of his thought. Above all what he wants to question is himself, his own received ideas, his own first impressions when he looks at a subject. So he wants to keep on throwing that into question, moving beyond it and looking for other ways of looking at a situation. But what he doesn't do is try and force his own opinions into some kind of a box. So I guess that's where the self acceptance comes in, so he will say 'I've got a bad memory but this is who I am'.

Or he even says that he is prone to petty vanities. He looks within and sees himself foolishly delighted at something like being made an honorary citizen of Rome, for example, and he actually transcribes the whole of the document in the essays because he is so proud of it. And then afterwards he comments, 'I know this is vanity but what can I do, this is a vanity in me, and if I took it out of myself I would have taken myself out of myself, so what can we do.' And there is something very liberating about that, but I don't think that leads to certainties, I think that leads to a willingness to keep on being honest with himself and to keep on looking for levels of motivation and levels of his responses to things without settling with something that actually makes sense necessarily to himself.

Ramona Koval: You describe him as attractive to women. He did marry, but you also said that between his mother and his wife they drove him to an early grave. I wanted to ask you about his attitude to women, but just before I do I want to ask you about so many other things, but just coming on that question of questioning everything and you say he questioned everything except his religious faith, so coming back to the beginning of that, my question which was...I mean, given that he wrote about sex and all kinds of things like that, what did the Church think of the essays, what did the Catholic Church think of him?

Sarah Bakewell: In his own day the Church were really quite happy with him. There weren't bothered by his habit of questioning everything. He did say that one thing he didn't throw into question was his faith and the dogma of the Catholic Church, which is a real surprise to come across that in Montaigne, it is the last thing you expect him to say. We don't really know, there is a lot of disagreement about what he really thought, was he covering up secret doubts, did he really feel that way? My feeling is that we don't know what he thought, but I have the feeling that he didn't seriously question it, he wasn't an out and out atheist because for his day that would have been very unusual indeed, but that he just wasn't really very interested in things to do with spirituality, religion, faith, the Church, it just didn't engage him very much. He was much more interested in life on Earth and human psychology as we actually are, rather than in transcendent spiritual matters.

But yes, he didn't attack the Church, he didn't question it in a radical way in the essays particularly. They were not at all bothered by his scepticism on other matters. In fact they quite liked it because it implied that if human beings couldn't trust their own knowledge or their own impressions of things to be absolutely true, then there wasn't much basis for Protestantism which was what the Catholic Church was mainly worried about at the time because that involved separating yourself from the received dogma and looking into your heart to find a deeper truth.

Ramona Koval: To find a complete mess.

Sarah Bakewell: Yes, that's because Montaigne said if you do that you do find a mess and that's fine, but you don't find some deeper access to God necessarily. So that actually suited the Catholic Church very well. They had no problems with him. At one point officers of the Inquisition had a look at his essays, that was when he was going into Rome on his travels in the 1580s. Just one of the officers drew attention to about five little points that could do with improvement, but it wasn't a condemnation. And they were points that today seems a little odd. It was things like the fact that he used the word 'fortune' instead of 'providence' for example. So they were really niggly little points it seems.

What did get him into trouble was long after his death in the 17th century there was a shift of the prevalent theology in the Catholic Church, and suddenly things that had never bothered theologians in his own day began to become very problematic, and his scepticism was one of them, his habit of doubting everything, even doubting his own knowledge and so on, that was suddenly seen as being a problem. And also his tendency to consider other animals as having a perfectly valid consciousness of their own. So he wrote about animals as if they could see the world really much as humans did or they had abilities that...

Ramona Koval: And his own cat was very important to his mode of thinking.

Sarah Bakewell: Yes, there is this lovely line where he was looking at his cat and reflecting, who knows when I play with my cat whether it is rather that she is amusing herself with me rather than me with her. So he was able to leap across the divide between himself and his cat and think of the relationship between them as it would have appeared to her instead of to him, which is quite an amazing leap of the imagination.

Ramona Koval: Well, another 'her' was his wife, and he was married. They had six children, five of whom died.

Sarah Bakewell: That's right, so they had only one surviving daughter.

Ramona Koval: So on the one hand he practised denial of attachment, he sort of removed himself, detached himself from his family. On the other hand he wanted to be convivial and he thought that conviviality and friendship was really important to a good life.

Sarah Bakewell: Yes, he did, he had this saying that you must keep a private room behind the shop, so you must keep some part of yourself which is entirely yours and which doesn't really engage with the world. But at the same time he loved company and he often spoke of how he loved not only having deep and meaningful conversations with friends about things that he was interested in but also just the casual repartee among friends, easy-going chat over the dinner table and laughing with people that you're close to.

He also really enjoyed meeting people who perhaps had some expertise that he didn't know about, and so he'd ask them about their profession or ask them about the things that they knew about. That is particularly evident when he went off travelling to Italy and Switzerland and Germany. He would go and talk to people wherever he could. As soon as he came into a town he would immediately find the most interesting people that he could talk to. So he loved being with people.

He also loved having affairs and sexual encounters, he liked women, he liked the company of women. What he did have was a very conventional Renaissance marriage, which meant that his relationship with his wife doesn't seem to have been particularly close. You don't ever get a sense that he was really in love or anything like that, but they sort of respected each other's territory. She seems to have been a much more practical and much more capable person in many ways than he was. He really didn't like the responsibilities of managing the estate or responsibilities around the home, developing the property for example and things like that, which she was quite keen that he should do more.

Ramona Koval: It's a fantastic book, Sarah Bakewell, it's a real pleasure to read it, it's a really marvellous introduction to the essays of Montaigne, and I just heartily recommend it. Sarah Bakewell, thank you so much for being on The Book Show today.

Sarah Bakewell: Thank you very much.

Ramona Koval: Sarah Bakewell's book is called How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer and it is published by Vintage Press

Publications

Title: How to Live: A Life of Montaigne

Author: Sarah Bakewell

Publisher: Vintage