A Chaos of Clarity

VOLTAIRE by Theodore Besterman. 637 pages. Harcourf, Brace & World. $12.50.

What can the Age of Reason possibly have to say to the Age of Aquarius? Certainly Voltaire, with his brisk faith that enlightened common sense could solve all problems, is hardly the voice to which we tune our orgiastic electric guitars. Quite the contrary. Emancipated from religious "superstition," living in a world where science is the final arbiter, we have inherited the pragmatist's Utopia that Voltaire more or less prescribed--and thanks just the same, we know all too accurately the price we have paid.

An adulatory biographer like Theodore Besterman is just the further aggravation that a resenter of Voltaire's cocksure reformism does not need. Mercilessly detailed, Besterman's book is a scholarly but unabashed case of hero-worship by the English founder and director of the Institut et Musee Voltaire in Geneva and editor of the 107 volumes of Voltaire's Correspondence. Besterman's zeal can nearly do the impossible: make his scintillating subject dull. Yet Voltaire survives even his sedulous admiration--perhaps because no age can help finding a man fascinating who himself was so fascinated by life.

Born Franc,ois-Marie Arouet on Nov. 22, 1694--his father quite possibly not his mother's husband--Voltaire soon decided* that a man's main choice in life was to play the hammer or the anvil. Zozo, as he was nicknamed, had no doubts about which role he intended to take. Blessed with a middle-class background, a sound Jesuit education, a phenomenal memory and a wit to match his impudence, Voltaire hammered on every anvil in sight with an exuberance no enlightened common sense could quite explain.

"A bourgeois poet with the instincts of a grand seigneur" as Besterman puts it, Voltaire set out none too scrupulously to guarantee himself financial security. Before his 24th birthday, he had become an instant success with his first and most famous play, Oedipe, in which he used Greek tragedy to give vent to his lifelong hatred of absolute monarchy. A special lottery, which he manipulated to his advantage, was his first financial killing.

Once he had money and independence, Voltaire settled down to a cautious but often brilliantly effective guerrilla war against France's ancien regime. He was, Besterman suggests, the first man to recognize and mobilize that new creature, public opinion.

Voltaire was most nearly heroic in his stand against the church. In 1762, he fought to exonerate the name of a Protestant shopkeeper named Jean Galas, who had been tortured and killed on the false charge of murdering his son to prevent the boy's conversion to Catholicism. But Voltaire's pattern in criticizing both church and court was to attack and then back off. Though he is generally credited with being the intellectual architect of the French Revolution, he was not inclined to be a martyr.

"I blush to be so philosophical in theory, and such a wretched creature in practice," Voltaire admitted. "All tastes at once have entered my soul." Among them: the taste for rebelling and the taste for survival--rather splendid survival at that. Living with his mistress, Madame du Chatelet, in the chateau of Cirey, Voltaire powdered and dressed as if in Paris. She and Voltaire dined in elegance "with lots of silver," gave glittering balls, and inveigled house guests into amateur theatricals. Cirey had its own theater; and between noon and 7 o'clock the next morning, 21 skits and 21 operas were presented.

When Madame du Chatelet died, Voltaire, by then in his mid-50s, did not noticeably absent himself from felicity. He was already having an affair with his niece, Marie Louise Denis, who in cited him to write letters praising her "round breasts" and "ravishing bottom." Less enthusiastically, Thomas Carlyle described Marie Louise as a "gadding, flaunting, unreasonable, would-be fashionable female."

For the last two decades of his life, Voltaire lived in celebrated retreat with his niece at Ferney. Chronically grumbling about his health, he wrote prodigiously in six languages, expanded his farms, established watchmaking and lacemaking workshops, and built more than a hundred houses as a kind of 18th century real estate developer.

An exuberant traveler, Voltaire spent two happy years exiled in England, almost three as court intellectual in Prussia. And wherever he went, he tirelessly conducted his guerrilla warfare against royal and ecclesiastical superpower, not excluding the Church of England and, finally, his failed Philosopher-King Frederick II.

He simply overwhelmed his age with his will, energy and versatility. Yet out of the 10 million words that Besterman estimates he wrote, how many are read--how many are readable--today? Certainly not his dated verse tragedies about Frenchified classical heroes. Nor his special-pleading history. Nor his philosophical tracts like Traite de Metaphysique which placed him, in Besterman's phrase, only "the tiniest possible step away from atheism."

In the end, we are more likely to read Pascal, whom Voltaire hated, or Rousseau, who hated Voltaire, than Voltaire himself, who lives today mainly through Candide. In this black-comedy response to the evils of history, he seems closest to the modern reader, as in his conclusion: Cultivate your garden (modern translation: Do your own thing).

Voltaire failed from a kind of perfection. Everything came easily to him except a certain divinely vulgar excess. He was, as one critic complained, a "chaos of clear ideas." He accused Shakespeare of being "barbarous," "unbridled," "low" and "absurd." Exactly. And that coarse strength is what we miss at last in Voltaire. By his masterly demonstration of the farthest reach of reason, he finally showed how much lies beyond it.

* Voltaire was probably an anagram developed from Arouet L. J. (le jeune) using the u and the j in their 16th century forms, v and i./

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