Category: Biography

At the Existentialist Café (2016) by Sarah Bakewell

GoodReads meta-data is 440 pages, rated 4.24 by 12,819 litizens.  

Genre: Explanation.  

Verdict: Chapeaux!  

In which the author explains the mystery of life, or rather the way a band of daring layabouts made things so complicated no one could decide what to have for lunch.  Whereas philosophers in the past had tried to understand the world, their point was to obfuscate everything so completely that understanding was impossible.

It all started with the gigantic ego named Martin Heidegger who invented his own language, which bears in retrospect a startling similarity to Klingon, convincing every one who tried to read his books that he must be a genius, because his prose was unfathomable.  For him lunch was food-being.  In German that term is impressive in itself – Nahrungswesen – and when it comes in a sentence full of such portmanteau neologisms, it is masterful.  That impression is enhanced by the German practice of putting a capital letter on every noun, and in Heidegger’s prose nearly every word is a noun. By way, Nahrungswesen is preceded by Nahrungswnichtsesen.  See, impressive.

Jean-Paul Sartre was a bored high school teacher until he read Heidegger, then he became a boring high school teacher, one who had to tell everyone, in writing, about his sore feet, because philosophy was everywhere and everything, including bunions. This insight sustained him while he was a prisoner of war in 1940-1941 before he liberated himself.  Quite a story there.  

Bakewell is an amused tour guide who steers readers through the origin, development, narcissism, and decline of existentialism as a school of thought, drinking club, and celebrity coterie.  Both Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir emerge as serious people whose enthusiasms carry them off.  Bakewell does observe that though both were brilliant students, there was always another one who bested them in the rounds of competitive examinations of supreme importance in France, Simone Weil, who categorically refused to take them seriously.  Not sure what to make of that because Weil lived like a creature from another world, seldom eating, never drinking alcohol, sleeping on the floor in an unheated room, and working herself to death in a factory in solidarity with the underclass. She lived the and died talk. That is, however, another story.

The nova that cast off the field of energy called existentialism traces back to Edmund Husserl (1859 -1938), who appears in this story as refreshingly normal.  A quiet and introspective scholar who scribbled away without end.  He was Jewish and, well, he tried to ignore the world but it did not ignore him. He was abused by the Nazi regime and after his death from natural causes there is ripping yarn about hiding his archive from the Christian book burners. His surviving wife, Malvina, and one of his students risked their lives to conceal his unpublished manuscripts in Germany, then in France, and finally in neutral Belgium. The student smuggled the cartons of papers into neutral Belgium and hid them in the basement of the University Louvain Library. History buffs know what happened next.  The whole library was blown up (just as it had been in 1917) again. That is a library to avoid.  

Martin Heidegger’s betrayal of his mentor Husserl for worldly success has been much discussed, and is rehearsed here with an even hand, but there is no doubt that the opportunities the Nazi regime offered Heidegger blinded him to everything else.  The fact that he proved to be inept and incompetent in exercising those opportunities does not exonerate him. Bakewell also implies that his mangled prose, mystical thinking, suffocating egotism aligned with the apocalyptic Götterdämmerung of the Nazis, and if she doesn’t I do. Heidegger always banged on about freedom and found that ultimate freedom in abject surrender to Nazi cannibalism.  Of course freedom by submission makes no sense to a sane person, but did that number include Heidegger?  

I spent a summer once trying to read and understand Heidegger. Big mistake. There is nothing there to understand, except possibly the gymnastics of translators trying to translate the incomprehensible.  

While Sartre’s prose was never as deep and dark as Heidegger’s, reading it is no stroll in the park; it is saved by the novels which for all their self-indulgent brooding do tell stories of a sort.  Even more so for de Beauvoir whose prose is lucid in comparison and whose novels are spare and focussed (unlike Sartre’s).  

Sartre grew to like his celebrity status and cultivated it, and Bakewell certainly provides evidence for that cultivation. He was a public intellectual avant le mot, and loved it.  He could drop an opinion on any cause at any time, just as his public intellectual descendants today can switch from opinion on Covid to the War in Ukraine without missing a beat. That is  partly because the underlying motif is constant – ‘Everyone else is wrong!’  Irresponsibility is the ultimate freedom of the public intellectual or Fox journalist, two of a kind.

There were so many causes and many opinions, and so many contradictions. Long before John Rawls conceived the Least Advantaged Class, Sartre used the Least Favoured as his reference point. A good start, perhaps, but the concept was neither defined nor managed, and it simply became a rhetorical weapon just like those he despised others using.  While Bakewell’s judgement is Solomonic, mine is not. Too much truck with too many murderous dictators for my blind eye(s).   

During the Cold War, despite the Hungarian invasion, Sartre applied the label Least Favoured to the Soviet Union, and became an asset as Rupert Moloch is today.  Being blind in one eye, that was the orb Sartre turned on the Gulag, and ignored the Least Favoured there.  Ditto when he shook Comrade Number One’s hand in Havana, he did not notice the homosexuals in Cuban prison camps.  

Then there is the book Dialectical Reason (1960) in which – hocus-pocus videocus! – Sartre synthesised existentialism with Marxism.  It is all very Heidegger, the ultimate freedom is submission to an organic whole.  The more Sartre I read, the more sense I saw in Ayn Rand! However, that antidote was worse than the disease.  

In a parallel track Albert Camus decided life was absurd, having no meaning beyond itself – the unbearable lightness of being – while the firm of de Beauvoir and Sartre decided that we had to give meaning to meaningless life by signing up to a cause, or in their cases, causes.  

Then there was the only likeable one of the bunch Maurice Merleau-Ponty who tried first the de Beauvoir-Sartre recipe becoming a truculent communist for four years but finding that boring he then switched to Camus’s fatalism with a dopey smile. All the while he continued to dance the night away to jazz, had a normal home and family life, and enjoyed a good meal without once having to philosophise about his bunions. Moreover, he wrote a lucid French that anyone could understand.  No wonder he was nearly barred from the Existentialist Café.   

One of the character actors in these dramas was Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) whose prose was so inscrutable he surpassed master Heidegger in incomprehensibility.  No one understood what he meant – did he?- yet the publishers produced about forty of his books.  A coterie of PhDs has since made a living interpreting his runes in an even bigger pile … of books.  In the last generation Post Modernism has made this obscurantism into a totem and incomprehensible books are a career path. Levinas’s dauphin was Félix Guattari (1930-1992) whose prose is overgrown like a temple in a tropical jungle with no Indiana Jones in sight to cut it away. There are more than forty books bearing his name. He became the favourite whipping boy of critics of Po-Mo who quote from his overgrown, tangled prose in which no straight lines ever appear. His posthumous persecution by these critics has aroused spirited defences by the defenders of the indefensible in Wiki and Blog Wars far and wide. A nearby keyboard will reveal all.  Get clicking to find out more.  

There is much more in Bakewell’s book than these selective and acerbic comments cover, so read it!  

Mussolini 2d ed (2002) by Richard Bosworth

Goodreads meta-data is 584 pages rated 3.79 by 219 litizens

Genre: biography

Verdict: Measured, informative, and dense.

How did this itinerant contract school teacher from a backwater become Il Duce? Some of the ingredients to answer that question follow: he was accustomed to talking to audiences and writing as a teacher. He also moved around (albeit only in the middle of the peninsula) from one short-term contract to another and learned first some German and then some French. So far…so what?  His assignments were in peasant villages and prior to the Great War, Italian socialism was rural and many of the milieus in which he taught were socialist to one degree or another.  (Think of Ignazio Silone’s novels.) Young Benito was smart, ambitious, energetic, and social. He was literate and that soon saw him become a journalist for many small towns had their own weekly newspapers and many of them in his environs were socialist. He supplemented his pedagogical income with whatever they might pay, and from these came invitations to speak, and speak he did. (Though the author does not explore the point, I concluded that Benito loved an audience, a stager at heart.)

In that place and in those times, what did socialism mean?  Improving the lives of those who lived on the land was the goal, but figuring out how to do that was puzzling. Easier to rail against the alleged powers that be and call for their destruction. The message was essentially negative, and… international. Socialism was the international brotherhood of workers (yet Italy then had few urban factory workers).  

Then came the Great War and Benito, like many, but not all, others, shed the international skin and became a nationalist first and last, training his verbal guns on those wishy-washy socialist (like Antonio Gramsci) who were peaceniks because of the universal brotherhood of the working class. Mussolini, by the way, accepted induction into the army and served near the front, was wounded when a grenade exploded prematurely in a training accident, and hospitalised. The nationalism aroused by the War was partly irredentist to reclaim lands (Fiume, Trieste, Tyrol, and the other cites on the Adriatic Coast that had once been Venetian) from Austria, and those borderlands of the Veneto became a lifelong preoccupation with Mussolini. We travelled through some of this rugged terrain a few years ago.

After war, Italy’s territorial ambitions were not sated, and, moreover, the million plus returned soldiers were ignored by an impoverished and exhausted government in distant Rome. (Wherever you are Italy, went the saying, you are a long way from Rome.) They began to form self-help leagues (as the Ku Klux Klan started out to be) called Fascios and Mussolini became a self-appointed spokesman for one of these organisations, and began to meld several of them together with a torrent of words and anti-government vitriol. He came to the notice of Rome’s political elite and efforts were made to cultivate and co-opt him. Consistency was never a constraint for him, and he liked this attention, trimming his rhetoric. He was soon elected to the Chamber of Deputies where he led the Fascist bloc numbering about thirty among the six hundred. Though always irreligious he began to speak respectfully of the Church and the Pope. Always anti-monarchist he began to pay obeisance to the king. Always anti-Roman government he began to itemise its virtues. 

In the immediate post-war years the Rome government had been unstable. There were three major factions jockeying for position, and within each of them more than one aspirant leader with a personal following. Among the Fascistas there were several other leaders whom Mussolini had to out maneuverer, in so doing he learned to read men, promising one an ambassadorship, another a subsidy to publish anything he wrote, still another the prospect of being ennobled as prince, and he simply outlasted others because he had no alternative, whereas they did. The wealthy baron could retire to his property. The industrialist went to the counting house. The aviator took to the skies.    

The paralytic crisis of the government that occasioned the March on Rome was a result of the three factions blocking each other and closing down government; each faction was determined that neither of the other two should prevail. But an outsider might be expedient (and temporary) and members of all three factions began to see in Mussolini an acceptable interim prime minister. He was a mutual second choice for all three blocs. Commanding only thirty seats (of 600), none of the three major factions saw a threat in him. With this horde approaching Rome, the three party leaders stepped back so that the King could offer Mussolini the task of forming a government to put out this fire. By the way, he sat out the March in Milan. The march was largely organised like the 1932 Bonus Army March on Washington and 1936 Jarrow March in England by disaffected veterans.  Photographs of Mussolini with the marchers were later staged. When thus he appeared it was as a peacemaker.

Neither in this biography nor in Deakin’s Brutal Friendship did I learn why Mussolini’s long tenure was never disputed, especially in the seventeen years before World War II. Nor did I notice any reference to assassination plots and attempts. All the smart, ambitious people around him seemed content to jockey for second or third place, and there was a lot of that as described in both books. And there were long periods when ill health and ennui drained Mussolini of interest in the job of staying on top of the slippery slope. But stay he did. That endurance might be the product of a well-oiled machine but I rather doubt that. Another possibility is that despite all the son et lumière of the regime, politics was game played by a tiny portion of the populace, a few thousand out of forty plus millions, most of whose lives were untouched by it.    

Perhaps it should be stressed there was never an ideology in Mussolini, nor was there any ingrained anti-semitism. He had no grand plan apart from somehow Making Italy Great Again (MIGA). Most of rhetoric associated with that goal was negative about breaking with the past and being modern, the nature of which was never spelled out. In the years before he became PM he published the equivalent of sixteen volumes of newspaper articles, speeches and the like and there are no constant themes in them. He spoke, he wrote in many voices, chopping and changing with time and tide, ergo he stayed afloat, while many a consistent ideologue sank. 

There are many contrasts to Hitler shown through the book. Of course, over time as the situation deteriorated Mussolini changed, but for much of his career he differed. He had interests apart from politics. Chief among them were women and sports. He played golf, rode a horse, skied, walked vigorously for exercise, ate meat, and took the air on beaches when that was possible. He liked to drive a car himself, preferably open-topped on a nice day, while his appointed driver sat in the back with the body guard. He doted on his first born daughter. Took time off work when dictator to sit at home for a week with another sick child. At the office he was business-like. He worked at his desk, listened to reports, and often followed the recommendations of bureaucrats. His regime was more inclined to send enemies into internal exile (see Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi) than to murder them, though that did happen (see The Conformist by Alberto Moravia).  

In contrast Hitler had nothing but politics. Moreover, he was erratic, often rising late, ignoring the papers on his desk, seldom listening to or heeding the advice of others, like generals, obsessed by Jews, Bolsheviks, gypsies, Slavs, and countless other real and imagined enemies nearly every waking hour. Meetings often consisted of his monologues with no specific directions, programs, policies, or orders. On other occasions he talked about the weather and not the agenda. Subordinates, that is, everyone else, were left to act in conformance to the generalities he had spewed out, and those that did were later praised, promoted, and rewarded.  

The word ‘charisma’ is used in the text but unexplained. Its seems to mean merely personal rule.  Although the fascist propaganda machinery no doubt endowed Mussolini with the attributes of charisma, but the signs and wonders were few and far between as the years stretched on and on. Things were accomplished during his tenure but the author does not deal with the draining of the swamps, the running of railroads, laying of roadbeds for agricultural produce, the dredging of harbours for the fishing fleet, or other such humdrum matters of government.   

It is – what is the word? – pathetic to read of Mussolini’s meetings with Hitler, of which there were several. The early ones were marked by polite and ritualistic exchanges. Later during the war they became Hitler rants, with Mussolini barely having the opportunity to speak.  From say 1942 in these meetings, Hitler lectured and Mussolini put on a blank stare, and nodded from time to time. Still later when Fascists zealots began an Italian version of the Holocaust, Mussolini mostly dozed, letting it happen. See Primo Levi, If This be Man (1987). 

There is little discussion of the so-called Italian Social Republic of the last days established at Salo, and nothing about Mussolini’s efforts to secure Italian borders when the German Army in Italy surrendered. Deakin in The Brutal Friendship says that in these last, dark days Mussolini made several trips to Ticino in Switzerland to try to negotiate a German surrender that would retain Italy’s northeast border. Thus he took personal risk for what he perceived to be the greater and lasting good of Italy. It is hard to imagine Hitler doing something like that.  

On another point, it was news to me to realise that Mussolini tried to prop up Austria before the Anschluss as a buffer against Germany on the assumption that Austria was too weak to reassert its historic border with Italy, but a resurgent Germany would do so.  When Austria was devoured, the next alternative was to befriend Germany and try to direct its ambitions elsewhere. Strange but true. 

Mussolini had a painful ulcer for more than twenty years and with the stress of the circumstances it grew more and more painful, distracting, and enervating. Regarding this illness the book demonstrates a fair-mindedness showing the reader Mussolini the man without exonerating him of any of his crimes by commission or omission. The book also shows us the author’s pointlessly large and obscure vocabulary. I read it on the Kindle and looking up the oddments was easy, but pity the reader of the paper book.  

Goodreads meta-data is 912 pages in two volumes, rated 3.82 by 17 litizens.

Genre: History.

Verdict: Compelling.

The rapport of these two despots has a fascination about it. While we – at this distance – are inclined to lump them together, the author goes into great detail about their many differences through a magnifying glass applied to conference notes, letters, telegrams, police files, spy reports, diaries, briefing papers, memoranda, and unpublished journalism.  It draws the reader into the inner circle of Italian fascism.

In so doing, it undermines one of our preconception for there was in fact no inner circle orbiting Mussolini as there was Hitler.  Hitler’s satellites had come to him in the 1920s and stayed: Goering, Goebbles, Hess, Boreman, and others.  Mussolini had no such moons in orbit around him. He did not cultivate such a clan but made use of the talents around him and then made changes. A trusted colleague from the earliest days of the March on Rome would be sent off to Buenos Aires as ambassador, while another became Governor of Sicily, and so on. His clients circulated, and none, not even his son-in-law and partner in many crimes, Galezzo Ciano, was an intimate like Goering or Goebbles were to Hitler.

Nor did he have the same obedience from the army. While from 1937 onward all German army officers and men swore an oath of alliance to the man Adolf Hitler, in Italy the military oath was to the king. Victor Emmanuel was a very cautious and circumspect person, on this telling, who realised that his own position was artificial, but who nonetheless kept his distance from Il Duce, seeing him only on formal occasions with others present.  As the war developed into endless crises these formal meetings disappeared. But the king maintained an extensive network of contacts in the army and navy, but not the air force, the ranks of which were much more likely to include committed fascists than in the other two services.   

Il Duce had no enthusiasm for the Russian invasion, but cooperated to affirm the German alliance.  From mid-1942 he spoke to Ciano about a separate peace with the Soviet Union so as to concentrate on the Anglo-Saxons.  He also bruited this possibility once in person to Goering who laughed it off. Finally, at least once on Mussolini’s direct instructions Ciano raised it with Hitler who flew into a rage, making very clear his complete obsession with destroying the Communists.  

Mussolini’s penchant for moving his clients around eroded personal loyalty to him. Even the most able and dedicated acolyte might be sent off to Madagascar as a military attaché. Mussolini did this not because he felt threatened by rivals – Deakin makes it abundantly clear that he had none – but he was indifferent to others; they really were chessmen to him, pieces with certain abilities to be used and then shelved. Not even when he was toppled and imprisoned did a rival stake a claim on Fascist leadership the way Himmler and Goering each tried to do when the Third Reich disintegrated.   

Enjoyed the story of Pierre Laval travelling eighty hours by car to a meeting with Hitler, where he has only a few minutes to speak before Hitler went into one of diatribes about the vacillating French, drowning out the practical requests Laval wanted to make. In all Laval had about 20-minutes in which Hitler listened to him, eyes glazed, and then Laval got back into the car for the return of another eighty hours.  

The title comes from a remark of Hitler’s in his own last days when he lamented the fact that his esteem for Mussolini led him into a ‘brutal friendship with Italy’ that cost him the war. As usual with Hitler, someone else was responsible, not him. 

According to my marginalia, I read this book in September 1971 and have since retained the impression of its excellence.  When it came to light recently on the shelves while I was searching for something else, I put it aside and started to re-read, and then found it hard to put down.  

How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (2010) by Sarah Bakewell

GoodReads meta-data is 387 pages, rated 3.96 by 9260 litizens.

Genre: Biography

Verdict: Merveilleux!   

Michel Eyquem Montaigne (1533-1592), author of Essays, largely autobiographical. He is credited with coining the word ‘essay’ to refer to short written treatment of a single theme. After holding forth on subjects as diverse as vanity, certainty, torture, marriage, prayer, age, conscience, cripples, cannibals, anger, thumbs, sleep, liars, Cicero, clothes, nudity, early rising,  he was likely to conclude by saying, Mais alors, que sais-je? or ‘But then, what do I know?’  Few of the essays stuck to the title topic, and wandered through digressions and asides in a conversational tone. Most were between three and nine pages in print. He was a blogger avant le mot. These were the fruit of his mature years, but how did he come to that point? 

He had a hothouse upbringing even stranger than that of John Stuart Mill. 

At birth his father had him then and there separated from his biological mother (the wife) and deposited with a wet nurse and her peasant family, where he remained for two years with no familial contact.  Only on his second birthday was he taken home. According to his father this experience with the peasants was to imprint upon him an awareness of others. 

Once he was home his father had decreed and arranged that everyone speak Latin. There was a tutor who was fluent in the dead language and he taught the servants, and his father a few Latin phrases to use to and before the boy.  No one spoke French within his hearing. In this way, his father reasoned, he would learn Latin naturally as the Romans did. Latin was the language of the law, the church, the government, and the international language of the learned and that made it the bedrock of a successful career and life, reasoned his father, who knew no Latin until the tutor taught him a few phrases. By this time, his mother had other children and she ignored this eldest specimen child in his test tube.

On his sixth birthday he was sent to a residential boarding school sixty miles away where he stayed for ten years until age sixteen. He neither returned home nor was visited there by any members of his family, though there was the occasional letter in Latin from his father prepared by the tutor.  It was only then at six years old that he heard French. While the teachers knew why he ignorant, the other students neither knew nor cared and were cruel in taunting and teasing him where he was nicknamed Michau. Having no choice, he endured it and says little about it in his autobiographical musings.  At sixteen he returned to the home he barely knew.  

His father hoped that these experiences would prepare his son and heir for life. He was not following any theory of learning, for he was himself uneducated and had a distant awe and respect for knowledge. Père Montaigne had filled his library with books he could not and did not read as totems for such learning (like the wall of unopened books behind Craig Kelly these days). He was an energetic member of the lesser nobility who worked tirelessly to improve his properties.  However, he was better at starting projects – dams, bridges, retaining walls, weirs, levelling fields, clearing stones, fences, hen houses – than finishing them.    

Michau became a magistrate (part notary, part lawyer, part judge) in Bordeaux when he was about thirty.  Between sixteen and that age, not much is known of his life, though he learned to ride a horse and liked to do that.  He did not like the duties of managing the property, and when his father died, most of those unfinished projects remained unfinished. As heir and owner he turned over management of the property to an agent, confirmed a complete break with his birth mother, and ignored his six siblings whom he barely knew. When he married he had a similar distant relation with wife and his own children.  (There is an interesting explanation of the relevant manners and morēs of the time that is too detailed to summarise.  Read it.)

He travelled to and from Bordeaux and was a dutiful magistrate, thorough, patient, insightful, and bored by squabbles over chickens.  He wrote very clear briefs and rendered succinct judgements, which inevitably made him enemies because there was always someone disappointed at a result.  

The work might have been boring most of the time but the times themselves were not. It was in the midst of the Troubles, aka a 60+ year war of religion among Catholics, Protestants, and variations of each. While the main fault line was Catholic versus Protestant there were factions within each so that sometimes they attacked their own. Three- and four-sided conflicts were common.  One side would massacre several hundred of the other and retaliations would follow, until the blood lust abated and an implicit truce settled in. Then at an opportune moment, often when the victims were praying in a church, another slaughter would occur, and the dance of murder and mayhem in God’s name would begin again. God’s will, they shouted. (Starting to sound familiar?)  Murdering defenceless people at prayer has been the practice in the American south for years. Still is.) 

There was also an international dimension as Protestant England and Catholic Spain encouraged the conflicts in France so as to preoccupy it and reduce French influence in Europe. Consider contemporary parallels at leisure. 

The city of Bordeaux, though a long way from Paris, was contested as a rich prize with claret wine, agricultural produce, fishing, and sea port, and one reason Montaigne resigned and went rustic may have been to opt out of this endless, murderous conflicts.  

The Essays are not easy to read, though they are low key and can be amusing; they are also contradictory, vague, confusing, and stuffed with digressions and asides. Contradictions, there are more than a few.  He says he is solitary and he also says he is sociable.  He says he prefers books to people and he also says books are useless compared to a good talk with people.  He says he is lazy and he also says he rises at dawn to read and write and spends too much on candles after sunset to keep reading and writing. He reticent and talkative with strangers in the same sentence.   

Our author guides readers through the labyrinth of the stops and starts of Michau’s mental wanderings, often placing them in either his personal or historical context with a deft hand. The tone is informal and there are topical references to the contemporary popular culture. Most of these hit the mark. In none of them does the author try to supplant Michau, as some biographers sometimes do in shifting the focus from the ostensible subject to themselves.  (See the comments on The King of Sunlight elsewhere on this blog for an example of this Me-ism syndrome.)

There are some fascinating insights in the Sixteen Century attitudes to sex and family that are best read. We are a long way from that time and place. But it explains his distance from his own family.  

There are details, more than I wanted but which I perhaps needed, on the deadly influence of religion and Michau’s twists and turns to stay safe from condemnation from self-appointed, self-righteous apostles of one sect or another.  One of his fears was that a Savonarola would appear and burn down the tower in which his library and cabinet of curiosities were housed.  

Bordeaux was a Catholic city surrounded by a countryside of Huguenots. As a landowner and as a civic official Montaigne had frequently to navigate through these troubled waters.  One of his principles was to get along with everyone, and he was pretty good at that.  Though of course any time he was polite to a Protestant, a Catholic zealot would threaten his life, and any time magistrate Montaigne ruled in favour of a Catholic claimant, a Protestant fanatic would swear vengeance.  In this climate conflicts over butterfly farms escalated.  By and large Montaigne was more successful than many others at toning the conflicts down.  So successful was he at it that he ascended to a higher office as mayor of Bordeaux in which office he was the first ever incumbent to be re-elected.  He liked to say in later years that in his tenure nothing happened, and it took a great deal of work to ensure that.  

All of these efforts at putting oil on troubled waters made his name known, and his nearest neighbour in the countryside began to cultivate him. That was Henri de Navarre, a Huguenot champion, who saw in Montaigne an honest broker to communicate with the Catholic court in Paris. In this vexed situation the Queen Mother, Catherine d’ Medici, became an active negotiator and Montaigne was instrumental in keeping a channel of communication open between her and Henri who was to became Henri IV.  At times both Medici and Navarre offered Montaigne honours and positions which he steadfastly declined and ducked to stay out of the limelight. 

Of Montaigne’s many aphorisms, one that particularly appealed to me was his advice ‘to have a room behind the shop,’  by which he meant a wise man (and yes he assumed only men as readers) would do well to have an escape room away from the public and his family, too, a room of his own. Thus he is an exponent of the Man Cave, as some refer to my private office.  Montaigne recommended such a retreat as a place where everything is to your liking and no one else enters except by invitation. He trained a servant to clean the room in a way that did not disturb the papers on his desk, the piles books on the floor, the notes stuck to the walls, the curious oddments scattered on the shelves, and so on.  

Another of his aphorisms was to stay at home: If you want to know about the world, read a book. But he was as inconsistent about this as about much else. His poor health became an excuse to travel, rather than lie at home. Off he went in search of water treatments, clean air, cosmic balance, a miracle cure, and snake oil unavailable locally. Once he started travelling, there was no stopping him.  A two-week sojourn to a spa town two days away turned into a fifteen-month trip to Rome and back.  At each stop he sent scouts ahead to see what was on the other side of the next hill, and as soon as they reported back, he had to see for himself, and so gradually he found himself in Rome. Along the way he filled his notebooks with interviews, sights, descriptions, drawings, and collected books and curiosities just like the tourist he was.  By this time his name was known to the reading classes, and he was frequently feted along the way.  He claimed to dislike this attention but always turned up when invited, the first to arrive and the last to leave. He spoke native Latin, fluent French, and a passable Italian so he was in demand. 

Throughout his life he reworked the Essays in many editions,well, he added and added to the book, and it continued to sell well as it grew to three times its original length. He also violated his own rule of brevity and one essay is more than 250-pages long, with so many digressions and asides, not even this biographer can say with confidence what it is about.  

The collection was also translated (and abridged) into English and Italian where new audiences found it.  Over the years the Essays have been interpreted to death, the more so of late by the most dreaded of interpreters, Po-Mo PhDs in Cultural Studies. In the hands of some of these exponents the book has been taken to mean the opposite of what Montaigne said. The author skewers some of the most absurd of these sallies, though to be sure they are self-skewering, too. Reading her deadpan Stephen Colbert parodies of them is diverting.  

She also charts Montaigne’s posthumous popularity among readers and intellectuals over the centuries with an amused eye.  It is all in all a pleasant ride.  Recommended.