The Self-Assured Man

MONTAIGNE: A BIOGRAPHY by Donald M. Frame. 408 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $10.

No author perhaps more richly deserves a new appraisal than Michel de Montaigne. Four centuries have passed since, pent in his tower study outside Bordeaux, he set down the Essays that were to transport his name to literature's firmament. Immured in an age that was largely brutal, incurious and ignorant, he managed to convey a message and a spirit so lively and civilized that they have come down through the centuries virtually unscathed.

Montaigne's very motto--"What Do I Know?"--appeals to these inquiring times. His convictions have a contemporary ring. "How many condemna tions have I seen," he wrote, "more criminal than the crime!" He could ridicule pomp ("On the loftiest throne in the world, we are still sitting on our own rump"), pedants ("Won't they try to square the circle while perched on their wives?") and bigotry ("If she is a whore, must she also necessarily have bad breath?"). He had a psychiatrist's understanding of the mind: "Alas, poor man! You are miserable enough by nature without being so by art!"

Waked by Violins. Such rational thought becomes all the more impressive when measured against Montaigne's life. He was born to wealth and privilege, was waked as a baby by the music of violins (his indulgent father felt that any other method might upset his infant son).

He withdrew to his study at 38, with nothing more to show for his years than much high living, an undistinguished period of service in the Bordeaux Parlement, and a translation into French of a single, unimportant ecclesiastical text. For the next nine years, surrounded by his own library of 1,000 books, he wrote the first two volumes of the Essays. Before kidney stones killed him in 1592 at 59, he produced one more volume and a journal of his tour through Italy, Switzerland and Germany. And that was all.

It was enough. The Essays were the testament, as Biographer Frame says, of "A reasonable, truthful, reflective, self-possessed man of good will, loving life, convinced of the importance of the body, the legitimacy of pleasure, and the goodness of happiness." The age of skepticism--in the best sense of the word--can be said to have begun with this self-assured, self-centered man, and it is not over yet.

Scrambled Parts. Unfortunately, Frame is not equal to the task of writing a definitive biography. As professor of French at Columbia University, he has made Montaigne his life's study, and his translation of the Essays is the best since the Florio translation of 1603 and infinitely more readable than that classic antique. But this book does not so much define Montaigne as scramble him. It is as if someone given nothing but the picture of an assembled car and its disassembled parts had set to work, knowing only that each part has to go somewhere. The result is a book that is repetitious, overladen with extraneous scholarship, and stuffed with names cited without explanation.

The English-speaking world will have to wait for a biography that is worthy of the man. It can do worse, while waiting, than to browse in Frame's excellent translation of the Essays, whose subject is Michel de Montaigne.

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