A time of gaudy pens

The question is this: what do you go looking for when you read? Do you read for the sentences? Or do you read for the themes?

Michel de Montaigne’s essay, “A Consideration Upon Cicero,” befuddled me. He criticizes Cicero and other famous writer-statesmen for leaving behind literature that they might be known for their writing. All the way through, I felt as though I must be missing something.

I should mention that I don’t know Cicero, but this essay doesn’t really go into Cicero much at all. I think he ranks about 3 paragraphs out of its three pages. Montaigne writes of Cicero (and also of Pliny):

Is it not a fine thing for two Roman consuls, sovereign magistrates of the republic that was empress of the world, to employ their leisure in arranging and dressing up a pretty missive, in order to gain a reputation for a good knowledge of the language of their nurse?

His sarcasm struck me because it is that of writer that doesn’t think much of writing. A few paragraphs later, he says he’s known men who could write but acted as if they couldn’t because it was such a common faculty. It’s like a swordsman who makes fun of the martial life. It doesn’t compute.

As I read on, though, I think I got some clues about the literary context in which he wrote. He sounded as if the time he wrote in had been filled with flowery and ornate language, a time of gaudy pens.

I know well that when I hear someone dwell on the language of these essays, I would rather he said nothing. This is not so much to extol the style as to depreciate the sense; the more galling for being more oblique.

So, if Montaigne wrote at a time when the typical writer had “sown his materials more substantially or at least more thickly,” he might have felt somewhat defensive or even insecure about the qualities that his writing lacked. Those being vain descriptions and needless eloquence. Verbal decoration.

Maybe, in fact, Montaigne was a bit of a rebel, for his time? Maybe he was trying to bring a spirit of clarity and simplicity to the written word? He says, for example, that he tends only to write about the high points of his topics, rather than dwell in all the details. But, he says, he writes of such complex and important subjects that a reader should be able to see where he’s going and follow him with a hundred more compelling essays on the same topic.

Montaigne’s distaste for all that’s overwrought comes home as he treats the writing of letters, specifically.

I have a naturally humorous and familiar style, but of a form all my own, inept for pubic negotiations, as my language is in every way being too compact, disorderly, abrupt, individual; and I have no gift for letters of ceremony that have no other substance than a fine string of courteous words. … I dislike saying much of anything beyond what I believe.

If Montaigne wrote at a time when people expected writing to be filled with impotent verve rather than substance, at a time when no one expected a writer to get to his point very quickly, then it’s no wonder that he felt a need to defend his style. Maybe my guesses about his context are all wrong. I don’t think so, though. The whole first half of this essay concerns writing as a lesser endeavor. It’s weird to think about literature that way today, but if writing in his era came primarily in diplomatic or flowery forms, then his class would not see it as a noble calling.

Perhaps, Montaigne couldn’t embrace the aesthetic of writers at his time, but he couldn’t quite reject it, either. Perhaps that’s why he wrote this essay.

It’s a feeling I find familiar. I think we are in a similar time now, a time of showy ostentation that trumps content. Until I read B.R. Myers’s “A Readers’ Manifesto,” I didn’t think I’d ever be able to write in a way that would interest anyone because I wasn’t much interested in anything new I found to read. I assumed that the stuff that was getting published was “right” and my tastes were “wrong.”

It’s unsettling to be on the right track when all your colleagues and competitors have it wrong. Montaigne befuddled me, but that might be because his own insight had him confused.