The Best American Essays 2014

By John Jeremiah Sullivan

The acclaimed author of Pulphead collects “21 of the year’s most urgent and at times painfully truthful pieces of nonfiction published in the U.S.” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
 
In our age of trigger warnings and jeopardized free expression, The Best American Essays 2014 does not shy away from shocking extremes, ambiguities, or dualities. As guest editor John Jeremiah Sullivan notes, the essay assumes many two-sided forms, and these diverse pieces capture all the conceptions of what an essay can be: the loose and the strict, the flourish and the finished, the try and the trial.
 
Sullivan’s choices embrace the high and the low, the memoirist’s confession and the journalist s reportage, and all the gray area in between. From a hotel in Mongolia to a Clockwork Orange like Baltimore, from a Rome emergency room to Burning Man, these diverse pieces surprise and entertain, inform and titillate.
 
The Best American Essays 2014 includes entries by Kristin Dombek, Dave Eggers, Leslie Jamison, Ariel Levy, Yiyun Li, Barry Lopez, Zadie Smith, Wells Tower, Emily Fox Gordon, James Wood, and others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9780544309326

Book preview

Copyright © 2014 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

Introduction copyright © 2014 by John Jeremiah Sullivan

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Best American Series® and The Best American Essays® are registered trademarks of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system without the proper written permission of the copyright owner unless such copying is expressly permitted by federal copyright law. With the exception of nonprofit transcription in Braille, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is not authorized to grant permission for further uses of copyrighted selections reprinted in this book without the permission of their owners. Permission must be obtained from the individual copyright owners as identified herein. Address requests for permission to make copies of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt material to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhbooks.com

ISSN 0888-3742

ISBN 978-0-544-30990-6

eISBN 978-0-544-30932-6

v3.1220

A Matter of Life and Death by Timothy Aubry. First published in The Point, #I Fall 2013. Copyright © 2013 by Timothy Aubry. Reprinted by permission of The Point and Timothy Aubry.

Strange Beads by Wendy Brenner. First published in Oxford American, Summer 2013. Copyright © 2013 by Wendy Brenner. Reprinted by permission of the author.

The Final Day in Rome by John H. Culver. First published in The Gettysburg Review, Summer 2013. Copyright © 2014 by John H. Culver. Reprinted by permission of John H. Culver.

Letter from Williamsburg by Kristin Dombek. First published in The Paris Review, #205, Summer 2013. Copyright © 2013 by The Paris Review. Reprinted by permission of The Paris Review and Kristin Dombek. Excerpt from Love Calls Us To The Things Of This World from Things of This World by Richard Wilbur. Copyright © 1956 and renewed 1984 by Richard Wilbur. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

The Man at the River by Dave Eggers. First published in Granta, Summer 2013. Copyright © 2014 by Dave Eggers. Reprinted by permission of Granta and the author.

At Sixty-Five by Emily Fox Gordon. First published in The American Scholar, Summer 2013. Copyright © 2013 by Emily Fox Gordon. Reprinted by permission of Emily Fox Gordon.

On Enmity by Mary Gordon. First published in Salmagundi, Winter 2013. Copyright © 2013 by Mary Gordon. Reprinted by permission of the author and Salmagundi.

Letter from Greenwich Village by Vivian Gornick. First published in The Paris Review, #204, Spring 2013. Copyright © 2013 by The Paris Review. Reprinted by permission of The Paris Review and Vivian Gornick.

Slickheads by Lawrence Jackson. First published in n+1, Winter 2013. Copyright © 2013 by Lawrence Jackson. Reprinted by permission of the author.

The Devil’s Bait by Leslie Jamison. First published in Harper’s Magazine, September 2013. Copyright © 2013 by Leslie Jamison. Reprinted by permission of Leslie Jamison.

Thanksgiving in Mongolia by Ariel Levy. First published in The New Yorker, November 18, 2013. Copyright © 2013 by Ariel Levy. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life by Yiyun Li. First published in A Public Space, #19, Fall 2013. Copyright © 2013 by Yiyun Li. Reprinted by permission of The Wylie Agency, LLC.

Sliver of Sky by Barry Lopez. First published in Harper’s Magazine, January 2013. Copyright © 2013 by Barry Lopez. Reprinted by permission of Sterling Lord Literistic.

Someone Else by Chris Offutt. First published in River Teeth, Fall 2013. Copyright © 2013 by Chris Offutt. Reprinted by permission of Chris Offutt.

Joy by Zadie Smith. First published in The New York Review of Books, January 10, 2013. Copyright © 2013 by Zadie Smith. Reprinted by permission of Zadie Smith.

Little X by Elizabeth Tallent. First published in The Threepenny Review, Spring 2013. Copyright © 2013 by Elizabeth Tallent. Reprinted by permission of the author.

The Old Man at Burning Man by Wells Tower. First published in GQ, February 2013. Copyright © 2013 by Wells Tower. Reprinted by permission of Wells Tower.

How to Make a Slave by Jerald Walker. First published in Southern Humanities Review, Fall 2013. Copyright © 2013 by Jerald Walker. Reprinted by permission of Jerald Walker.

On Being Introduced by Paul West. First published in The Yale Review, January 2013. Copyright © 2013 by Paul West. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Becoming Them by James Wood. First published in The New Yorker, January 21, 2013. Copyright © 2013 by James Wood. Reprinted by permission of James Wood. Excerpt from How Shall I Mourn Them? by Lydia Davis from The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis. Copyright © 2009 by Lydia Davis. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

Legend: Willem de Kooning by Baron Wormser. First published in Grist, #6, 2013. Copyright © 2013 by Baron Wormser. Reprinted by permission of Baron Wormser

Foreword

In recent years we’ve heard a lot about the issue of truth in nonfiction, the impetus for this topic deriving mainly from a stream of disingenuous memoirs. By truth—and I’ll avoid the customary nervous quote marks—we generally mean how honestly and accurately the writing represents the actions and events the writer depicts. Is the writer telling us exactly what happened? Is he embellishing, fabricating, making things up, in an attempt to tell a compelling story (ah, that potentially deceitful narrative arc!) or to characterize himself as attractively virtuous or appealingly naughty? Sounding frank, honest, and sincere is, of course, a rhetorical strategy in itself, known from ancient literature as parrhesia. It’s often employed by liars.

I’ve addressed the topic of truth in nonfiction in several talks and essays (including the foreword to the 2008 edition of The Best American Essays), maintaining essentially that unless the incidents or factual references are in some ways verifiable, we usually—short of confession or recantation—have no way of knowing whether a nonfiction writer is telling the truth, especially when details remain unconfirmed, utterly private, or trivial. No one has ever verified the now famous deaths of George Orwell’s elephant or Virginia Woolf’s moth, though the passing of E. B. White’s poor pig can actually be documented.

But truth in nonfiction involves more than accuracy, sincerity, documentation, or verifiability. Not all essays take the form of personal narratives that recount a string of events in a candid tone of voice; many offer personal opinions on various topics, whether general (growing old) or topical (health care). Most such nonnarrative essays pose a different set of criteria for assessing truth. In the territory of argument and exposition, we look at claims, evidence, consistency, and logical coherence. If all we can hope for in nonfiction narrative is verifiability, in opinion essays we demand validity. We want to see at the minimum that conclusions follow from premises. But testing the premises is another matter. Three essays, all demonstrating dramatically different opinions, can all be grounded in valid arguments.

So, as useful as they are in establishing degrees of truth and truthfulness, verifiability and validity do not always take us very far. And, of course, they have little to do with the literary value of essays and creative nonfiction in general. I remember in college courses we made a rough distinction between the essay as a literary genre (whether belletristic or experimental) and the essay as functional prose that explained, proposed, persuaded, or argued. In my writing class we were asked to write both. I distinctly recall one assignment requiring a stylistic imitation of Addison and Steele’s Spectator papers, and another asking us to express an opinion about whether teachers should unionize. One instructor along the way called the later type purposeful prose. To appreciate the literary essay required the application of aesthetic criteria similar to those used for works of the imagination; to appreciate the purposeful essay it helped to know the rules of rhetoric.

A useful rough distinction, but it’s not that simple. Too many essays emerge out of a blend of rhetoric and poetics, and the line between aesthetics and purpose can be blurry at best. When purposefully engaged in a topic, a talented essayist will still offer fresh observations and even surprising conclusions, and do so while attending closely to style and voice. The problem with most topical essays—especially those caught up in current controversies—is that from a literary standpoint they are usually predictable: the conclusions predictable, the prose predictable, the perspective predictable. By a stretch, we may still call these essays, but they don’t behave like essays that want to engage in the struggle of ideas, attack stale thought, or suggest new insights.

I’ve come to think that one reason for the oppressive predictability of polemical essays can be found in today’s polarized social and political climate. To paraphrase Emerson: If I know your party, I anticipate your argument. Not merely about politics but about everything. Clearly this acrimonious state of affairs is not conducive to writing essays that display independent thought and complex perspectives. Most of us open magazines, newspapers, and websites knowing precisely what to expect. Many readers apparently enjoy being members of the choir. In our rancorously partisan environment, conclusions don’t follow from premises and evidence but precede them. Some classical fallacies I once learned and respected—ad hominem, hasty generalization, either-or reasoning, slippery slope, guilt by association—appear to be no longer flimsy fallacies but fundamental strategies of argument. It’s worrisome to think that we may be approaching a writing situation that worried Robert Frost: that thinking would become equivalent to voting.

Such an opinionated, partisan atmosphere makes essaying a risky and endangered method of communication. The essay genre, as Montaigne invented and nurtured it, thrives on the attempt to see the multiple sides of issues and conflicts, to suspend judgments and conclusions, to entertain opposing opinions. That’s why he modestly called the work he was doing essays, that is, attempts, trials, thought experiments (but see John Jeremiah Sullivan’s introduction for a brilliant in-depth examination of Montaigne’s tricky term). For Montaigne, truth was essential, but it lived only in its quest. He perfectly describes his project in a late essay, Of the Art of Discussion: I enter into discussion and argument with great freedom and ease, inasmuch as opinion finds in me a bad soil to penetrate and take deep roots in. No propositions astonish me, no belief offends me, whatever contrast it offers with my own. There is no fancy so frivolous and so extravagant that it does not seem to me quite suitable to the production of the human mind. He goes on in the same essay (I’m relying on the Donald Frame translation) to condemn the self-satisfied stupidity of those who cling stubbornly and happily to their beliefs and opinions: Nothing vexes me so much in stupidity as the fact that it is better pleased with itself than any reason can reasonably be. It is unfortunate that wisdom forbids you to be satisfied with yourself and trust yourself, and always sends you away discontented and diffident, whereas opinionativeness and heedlessness fill their hosts with rejoicing and assurance.

For Montaigne, wisdom was not the product of accumulated knowledge—a convenient set of all the conclusions we’ve reached in life. Au contraire: wisdom instead meant developing the habit of continually and rigorously testing that accumulated knowledge. Some writers and readers today, I’m sure, still endorse Montaigne’s radically open-minded disposition, but how many would agree with John Stuart Mill’s even more radical way of assessing public opinion? In Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion, an essay once well known and respected in academia, Mill famously wrote: If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. Yet we see in the news nearly every day someone censured for offensive, objectionable, inappropriate, unacceptable, or insensitive remarks. Lately, each spring as I work on this annual foreword, I come across reports of commencement-day speakers who have had their campus invitations rescinded, usually because one group or another is offended by a speaker’s comments, beliefs, opinions, or affiliations.

And as I write now, I see in the New York Times an item on a new college trend, trigger warnings. These, the Times explains, are explicit alerts [to students] that the material they are about to read or see in a classroom might upset them. I imagine these triggers would be boldly noted in a syllabus, like warnings on a pack of cigarettes. For Moby-Dick I see the following: Caution: this classic American novel depicts no women characters, graphically portrays the inhumane treatment of ocean wildlife, and features an obsessive amputee intent only upon pursuing and slaughtering a majestic sperm whale. Or Henry David Thoreau’s Walden: Caution: This noted work of nonfiction, though it shows respect for the environment, nevertheless may promote a life of self-reliance and antisocial behavior. Or Montaigne’s Essais: Caution: These essays may cause you to think about things you shouldn’t, which in turn may result in a disturbing sense of mental disorientation and ideological tolerance. Potentially upsetting incidents or information, of course, can be encountered not just in literature but in all kinds of reading. In Someone Else, Chris Offutt recalls feeling uneasy after reading an article in a psychology class about victims of sexual abuse, he having been one of them.

One hopes that trigger warnings—however well-intentioned or psychologically prophylactic they might be—don’t indicate an American society becoming increasingly censorial and overly protective. I recall, growing up in the Catholic Church, how many educated people used to sneer at the index of forbidden books that endangered faith and morals. In my parochial high school the sisters told me that I could not read The Brothers Karamazov for a book report (I chose a safer book but sinned and read Brothers anyway, and my mind exploded). Will trigger warnings simply be a way of establishing a new secular index, a cautionary list of books and other works dangerous not for religious reasons but because they may offend or upset certain groups or individuals or that contain material which can be viewed as insensitive or inappropriate? Would Grapes of Wrath be upsetting to someone with bad memories of rural poverty? Will the near future necessitate warning labels in front of all published material? Will future editions of The Best American Essays, for example, include a trigger warning in front of each selection so readers can avoid material that might upset them? And will trigger warnings in themselves eventually cause upsetting reactions, just the words and images sufficing to evoke unpleasant memories or anxious responses? Says our impressionable liberal arts student, Why did you even mention cruelly harpooning sperm whales? Now I can’t sleep at night.

Until the censors control the day, I hope our intrepid readers will enjoy the essays collected here, despite their many unsettling subjects and themes. So, caution: you might feel your skin crawl as you read Leslie Jamison’s vivid depiction of a demonic disease; or completely shaken up by what happens in Ariel Levy’s hotel room during a Thanksgiving trip to Mongolia; or discomfited by John H. Culver’s visit to a Rome emergency room; or distressed by the vicious and systematic sexual abuse Barry Lopez suffered as a child; or wholly on edge with Jerald Walker’s tense dialectics of racism; or grossed out by the antics of Wells Towers’s unembarrassed old father at a drug-enhanced Nevada festival; or shocked by Kristen Dombek’s sexual candor; or disoriented by Lawrence Jackson’s dangerous trips through a Clockwork Orange–like Baltimore. Also in store are recurring nightmares, obsessive behavior, the fears and anxieties of aging, suicide, and—as they say in those infomercials—a whole lot more.

The Best American Essays features a selection of the year’s outstanding essays, essays of literary achievement that show an awareness of craft and forcefulness of thought. Hundreds of essays are gathered annually from a wide assortment of national and regional publications. These essays are then screened, and approximately one hundred are turned over to a distinguished guest editor, who may add a few personal discoveries and who makes the final selections. The list of notable essays appearing in the back of the book is drawn from a final comprehensive list that includes not only all of the essays submitted to the guest editor but also many that were not submitted.

To qualify for the volume, the essay must be a work of respectable literary quality, intended as a fully developed, independent essay on a subject of general interest (not specialized scholarship), originally written in English (or translated by the author) for publication in an American periodical during the calendar year. Today’s essay is a highly flexible and shifting form, however, so these criteria are not carved in stone.

Magazine editors who want to be sure their contributors will be considered each year should submit issues or subscriptions to The Best American Essays, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 222 Berkeley Street, Boston, MA 02116. Writers and editors are welcome to submit published essays from any American periodical for consideration; unpublished work does not qualify for the series and cannot be reviewed or evaluated. Please note: all submissions must be directly from the publication and not in manuscript or printout format. Editors of online magazines and literary bloggers should not assume that appropriate work will be seen; they are invited to submit printed copies of the essays to the address above. Because of the increasing number of submissions from online sources, material that does not include a full citation (name of publication, date, author contact information, etc.) will no longer be considered.

I would like to dedicate this book to a very close friend who died as I was at work on this foreword, Bruce Forer. Bruce and I edited several books together, and he helped me conceptualize this series back in 1985. This will be the first foreword he didn’t get a chance to read. As always, I appreciate all the assistance I regularly receive from my editors, Deanne Urmy and Nicole Angeloro. I was fortunate that Liz Duvall once again handled copyediting. I’d like, too, to thank my son Gregory Atwan for calling my attention to a few of the outstanding essays that appear here. It was a great pleasure to work with John Jeremiah Sullivan, whose 2011 essay collection Pulphead has helped revitalize the genre and sent the essay spinning in new directions. The prose energy that can be found in Pulphead—the way Sullivan brilliantly maintains the momentum of a story while casually slipping surprising information into traditional forms—can also be seen in this impressively diverse collection of essays, one that is simultaneously intense, intellectual, and inventive.

R. A.

Introduction: The Ill-Defined Plot

For Scott Bates, 1923–2013

A BIT OF ETYMOLOGICAL TRIVIA noted in certain dictionaries is that the word essayist showed up in English before it existed in French. We said it first, for some reason, by not just years but a couple of centuries. France could invent the modern essay, but the notion that someone might seize on the production of these fugitive-seeming pieces as a defining mode was too far-fetched to bear naming. Rabelais had written Pantagruel, after all, and people hadn’t gone around calling themselves Pantagruelists (in fact they had, starting with Rabelais himself, but the word meant someone filled with nonjudgmental joie de vivre). Had a Bordelais born with the name Michel Eyquem titled his books Essais in the 1580s? Fine—Montaigne was Montaigne, a mountain in more than name. One didn’t presume to perpetuate the role. France will cherish his example, but the influence it exerts there is partly one of intimidation. In France the essay constricts after Montaigne. It turns into something less intimate, more opaque, becoming Descartes’s meditations and Pascal’s thoughts. It’s said that even a century and a half after Montaigne’s death, when the marquis d’Argenson subtitled a book with that word, Essays, he was shouted down for impertinence. Not a context in which many people would find themselves tempted to self-identify as essayists. When the French do finally start using the word, in the early nineteenth century, it’s solely in reference to English writers who’ve taken up the banner, and more specifically to those who write for magazines and newspapers. The authors of periodical essays, wrote a French critic in 1834, "or as they’re commonly known, essayists, represent in English letters a class every bit as distinct as the Novellieri in Italy." A curiosity, then: the essay is French, but essayists are English. What can it mean?

Consider the appearance of the word in English—which is to say the appearance of the word—in the wintertime of late 1609 or early 1610, and most likely January 1610. A comedy is under way before the court of King James I of England, at the Palace of Whitehall in London, or maybe at St. James’s Palace, where the prince resides, we’re not sure. The theaters have been closed for plague, but there must be diversion for the Christmas season. Ben Jonson has written a new piece, Epicœne, or The Silent Woman, for his favored company, the Children of the Whitefriars, boy actors with unbroken voices, several of whom have been pressed—essentially kidnapped (sometimes literally off the street, while walking home from school)—into service for the theater. For most of them it’s an honor to number among the Children of the King’s Revels. They enjoy special privileges.

January of 1610: James is forty-three. The biblical translation he has sponsored is all but done. John Donne holds a copy of his first published book, Pseudo-Martyr, and gives it to James, hoping in part to flatter him into forgiving past wildnesses. Of my boldness in this address, he writes, I most humbly beseech your Majesty to admit this excuse, that, having observed how much your Majesty has vouchsafed to descend to a conversation with your subjects by way of your books, I also conceived an ambition of ascending to your presence by the same way. Galileo squints at Jupiter through a telescope he’s made and finds moons (he can see them so faintly they look like little stars) that evidently obey no gravity but Jupiter’s own, proving that not all celestial bodies circle the earth, a triumph for proponents of the still-controversial Copernican theory of heliocentrism, but one suggesting an important modification to it as well, for Copernicus had placed the sun at the center of the world, whereas Galileo was sensing that there might be no center, not one so easily discerned. James receives a dispatch about it from his Venetian ambassador. I send herewith unto His Majesty the strangest piece of news, it reads, that he has ever yet received from any part of the world, for a mathematical professor at Padua had overthrown all former astronomy. What is opening is the multiplicity of worlds. Sir Walter Raleigh sits in the Tower writing his Historie of the World, begging to be sent back to America, saying he’d rather die there then to perrish in a cell. We’re at the court of the Virginia Company, which days before has published a pamphlet, a True and Sincere Declaraccion, extolling the virtues of the new colony, that fruitfull land, and struggling to quiet horrific accounts that are starting to circulate. Across the Atlantic in Jamestown it’s what they’re calling this starveing Tyme. Of roughly five hundred settlers, four hundred and forty die during this winter. Survivors are eating corpses or disappearing into the forest.

James draws our notice here not for being king—not as shorthand for the period, that is—but because he plays a significant if unmentioned part in the evolution of this slippery term and thing, the essay. All his life he has loved learning. We may imagine him as a stuffed robe-and-crown who gives a thumbs-up to the Authorized Version and fades into muffled bedchambers, but James was a serious man of letters. He fashioned himself so and was one, in truth. Not good enough, perhaps, to be remembered apart from who he was, but given who he was, better than he needed to be. He held scholarship in high esteem, while himself indulging certain sketchy ideas, among them the power of demons and witches. In his youth, in Edinburgh and at Stirling Castle, he’d been at the center of a loose-knit and blazingly homoerotic band of erudite court poets, dedicated to formal verse and the refinement of the Middle Scots dialect, his native tongue. Most of what King James wrote had to be translated into plain English before being published, but one text—because it took for its subject partly the use of Middle Scots for poetic purposes—got published in the original language. It consisted mainly of poems but contained also, in the most remarked-upon part of the book, a nonfiction Treatise of twenty pages, laying out some reulis and cautelis—precepts and pitfalls—to be obseruit and eschewit in Scottis Poesie. The title of James’s book? Essayes of a Prentise.

This book was first published in 1584, a full thirteen years before the appearance of Francis Bacon’s famous 1597 Essayes, traditionally held to mark the introduction of the essay as a formal concept into English writing. Granted, Bacon doesn’t quite hold up as the first English essayist even when we do omit James: some person—we’re not positive who, but almost certainly an Anglican divine named Joseph Hall—had published a collection of essays a year before Bacon, titled Remedies Against Discontentment,¹ and it’s likely that one or two of the later writers—William Cornwallis or Robert Johnson or Richard Greenham—had already begun writing their pieces when Bacon’s book came out. Even so, Bacon is the greatest in that little cluster of late-sixteenth-century English essayists and would seem to possess the clearest claim to the word in English. Yet King James’s book had preceded them all by more than a decade. Indeed, when James published his Essayes of a Prentise, Montaigne was still publishing his own Essais (the Frenchman was in between volumes I and II).

The most available conclusion for leaping to is that James is using the word in a general sense. An essay, we’re frequently told, means an attempt, a stab. Perhaps King James had been saying, self-deprecatingly, "I’m a mere prentise [an apprentice] here, and these are my essays, my beginner’s efforts." It makes sense.

A problem is, essay wasn’t supposed to be used that way either in the 1580s. If we were to impute that meaning to James’s use of the word, it would mark the first occurrence of that particular sense in English (or Middle Scots), which is not proof that we shouldn’t do it. That may be precisely what’s going on. But whatever James means by essay, he means something new by it, new in English. That we know.

Could James have meant something closer to what Montaigne did? On the face of it, the idea seems far-fetched. Montaigne’s book had been published just a few years before James finished his. An English translation would not appear for another twenty years. Doubtless there existed English men and women who’d already heard about the book, perhaps even seen it, but what are the odds that one of them was the eighteen-year-old king of Scotland?

Rather good, believe it or not. James’s tutor in the 1570s, the years during which Montaigne was composing his first volume of pieces, happens to have been a man named George Buchanan, a Scottish classicist and Renaissance giant who’d spent part of his life in France, where his poetry was much admired (Easily the greatest poet of our age, said his French publishers, an opinion echoed by Montaigne, among others). Buchanan was placed in charge of young James’s education and made on his pupil a lifelong impression of both respect and fear, deep enough that decades later, when James saw a man approaching him at court who looked like Buchanan, he started to tremble (Buchanan had drunkenly beaten the hell out of the boy James on at least one occasion).

Why does this matter? Because James was not the only pupil of Buchanan’s who never forgot him. There had been another, in France, in the 1530s and early ’40s. For several years George Buchanan had taught at the Collège de Guyenne, in Bordeaux, and one of his students there, a young boarder who also came to him outside of class for private instruction, was a local boy named Michel Eyquem. The boy, whose precocity in Latin astonished his professors, was also a talented actor and performed in a few of Buchanan’s plays. Buchanan even considered him something of a favorite student and, running into Montaigne at the French court many years later, honored him by saying that their time together had inspired certain of Buchanan’s subsequent theories of humanistic pedagogy. Montaigne returned the compliment by praising his former teacher more than once in the Essais. They were well aware of each other, these two men, and remained so. And precisely as the younger was starting to publish in France, the elder became the tutor in Scotland to King James. Who, four years after Montaigne’s Essais were published, published his own Essayes.

What was it, then?