A Thousand Forests in One Acorn. Valerie Miles
Translated by Lisa Boscov-Ellen
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FROM EL MUERTE DE MONTAIGNE
[A NOVEL]
Michel de Montaigne, incidentally, was a marvelous reader. In the Latin American world there are only three or four writers who read, who connect with the history of literature, who converse with the dead (to quote don Francisco de Quevedo), in a comparable manner, akin to his. I think of Jorge Luis Borges, of the Brazilian Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, of Alfonso Reyes. I think of them and their origin, their relatives, more numerous than one would think, of their progeny. I don’t know which Spaniards we might cite: Cervantes, Quevedo, Gracián, Azorín, José Ortega y Gasset? In my adolescence and in my early adulthood, as some people know, I read Azorín with delight, whose short works quoted Montaigne once in a while. Brevity, by the way, was an intention or a weakness to which both writers confessed. Later I abandoned the reading of Azorín in a foolish, probably sectarian way. And now I come to the conclusion that there was an aesthetic itch in his prose, an affectation, a verbal coquetry, which wears thin over time. Even in Borges, suddenly a similar coquetry appears from somewhere. Not, on the contrary, in Alfonso Reyes. One could argue that Alfonso Reyes is the strongest prose writer of all, but this, perhaps, is an abuse on my part. Regarding the writing of the Lord of the Mountain, we might say that it’s an astonishingly natural, playful writing, of unparalleled rhythm, predisposed to somewhat disjointed digressions, fragmented almost by definition. Suddenly, without saying “heads up!” he inserts a note that’s crude, dissonant, sharp. In this respect, Montaigne is less formal, less cautious, than any of the writers I’ve referenced above. Furthermore, he frequently introduces dissonance, sets up the effect of surprise, through a quotation. Surreptitiously. As though an indiscreet muse might have whispered something in his ear. For example, he reminds us that Horace, one of his favorite Latin poets, raises the following question: does lack of literacy make one’s member less hard? Interesting question, which has a certain and definitive answer. In the opera by Dimitri Shostakovich, Lady Macbeth, the great provincial lady, in love with a worker at her husband’s factory, is, without knowing it, proof of what Horace suggests. The worker was less literate, but his manly attributes, as Montaigne would say, were more compelling.
Judging from my own journey through the essays, which often repeat themselves, which tend to relapse, Montaigne’s preferred readings are more or less known. Among essayists, ethicists, historians, in a prominent place, in the front row, are Plutarch and Seneca. Austerity and stoicism from Seneca; from Plutarch, the power of his depictions, sentences sculpted with a chisel. A language without fat, without appendages, of stainless steel. Successive and fragmentary writers, who one can start reading from any point. He didn’t feel the same identification with or the same affection for Ciceronian discourse. He had the impression that Cicero was bombastic, full of himself, and that his great verbal jabs usually fell a little wide of the mark. He loved, however, Horace’s concise, sharp verse, and deep prolonged harmonies, and he felt dazzled by Virgil’s lyric tirades. We, ignorant, read the Virgilian strophes cited by Montaigne, those marvelous strophes, and are left flabbergasted. He prefers the Georgics, and suggests that in certain passages of the Aeneid the author neglected to take it up a notch. He uses an ancient word, pigne, which I don’t find in my dictionaries, but the pignon is a cogwheel that serves to move another wheel. In short, another turn of the cogwheel, of the pigne or the pignon, valid advice for us all.
I have already said something about the literary succession of Michel de Montaigne and now I’m in a position to add some more detail, some detail that is more than a detail. Montaigne had a sense of nature, of the natural, which touched many things, which influenced his way of being, his style, his way of composing essays and even his manner of writing essays and well-structured, meticulously composed non-literary texts. He maintains somewhere that he is a “naturalist,” before that word was invented to apply to men of science dedicated to the study of the natural sciences. That said, what could be defined, essentially, as love for nature, respect for the natural, often leads our figure to express himself bluntly, with minimal affectation. His literary heirs, abundant, diverse, present in the most unexpected areas, did not always understand this aspect of Montaigne’s prose, which sometimes stemmed directly from the Latin and Greek classics, but which also related, in another way, by other means, to the rural world around him. We have already seen, for example, that when Montaigne criticizes the know-it-alls, the idolaters of knowledge, among whom, in his completely naïve opinion, figured Pierre Eyquem, his father, he references Horace without major bias, who pondered whether by being less literate a person would have a more flaccid member. In this respect, Azorín, fussy, skittish, lean in body and soul, wouldn’t follow the master in any way. Gustave Flaubert, who kept his essays as bedside reading, probably so. Guy de Maupassant, his spiritual—and perhaps corporeal (as some academic gossips suggest)—son as well. André Gide—elegant, aloof, modern, and classic—less so, but for different reasons than Azorín, given that his relationship with, let’s say, the male member, his awareness in that regard, his point of view, were different.
The side that’s dirty, mischievous, sensual, provocative, in the Lord of the Mountain’s prose appears in many of his anecdotes. The essays consist of interspersed, interwoven reflections and anecdotes, which emerge from the ardor of writing and which come, in many cases, from the personal memory of the author, and in others, from his favorite books, from the library on the third floor of his tower. He tells a story—I don’t know now whether regarding inebriation or some other matter—that took place in his region some years ago. A fairly young widow, a peasant, rural, with generous curves, went to a party in the countryside. She tried wines from the new harvest, she became quite animated, and on the way back she fell asleep under some bushes. She didn’t remember much the following day, but after a few weeks she realized that she was pregnant. We assume that she was spread out at the edge of the path and that her skirts, rumpled, hiked up, would have revealed the hint of some tempting thighs. The widow, wasting no time, issued a notice, that is, she posted papers on doors, in squares, town halls, in which she claimed she would marry the person who came forward and confessed to being the perpetrator of the crime. A young farmhand from the area around her village came forward, confessed, and together they lived as a happy couple for many years. I imagine that Michel de Montaigne would watch them go by from the vantage point of his tower, beneath beams engraved with phrases of his favorite Latin authors, arm in arm, speaking excitedly and he would smile, content, grateful for life. With a pen in his hand, perhaps.
Jules Michelet, the great nineteenth century historian of the French Revolution, of the History of France, of Joan of Arc, of Henry IV, of Louis XI, of so many things and so many people, passionate, ebullient, romantic, admired Michel de Montaigne’s prose, he couldn’t help admiring it, but he felt very little affection for the author. He argued that he, Michelet, was the historian of la foule, the masses, the multitudes, the people, and that Montaigne, on the other hand, was the historian of himself. In other words, Michelet was an epicist, a rhapsode, a visionary, a creator of worlds, while Montaigne (his Montaigne) was a subjectivist, an intimist, a dandy, completely indifferent to popular voices. I’ve heard arguments in this vein many times and referring to many writers. Of course, I always fare badly. To put it another way, the subjectivist, the intimist, the limited, is I. Do you think, from here on out, I’m going to maintain that I am Montaigne, as they say Flaubert declared, that Madame Bovary c’est moi? Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m not a madman who from remote, dreadful Chile (as the other said), believes himself to be Michel de Montaigne. You’re not going to catch me in this unspeakable weakness. No, gentlemen.
But the story about the young widow who got drunk at a party in the countryside, of the notice she issued, of their marital happiness over the years, opens up a whole new world to us. Not in the manner of Jules Michelet, the epicist: in another way. Michelet’s narrative prose moves enormous masses, human strength that suddenly seems more than human. When he describes the events of 1588 in France, during the decline of Henry III and the Valois dynasty, at the time of religious wars, on the eve of the arrival of Henry IV of Navarre and the Bourbons to the throne, and relates the steps that Philip