Tim Parks

– Introduction –

R emarking on a painter he had hired to decorate his house, a man whose habit was to fill in the empty spaces around his central painting with ‘odd fantastic figures without any grace but what they derive from their variety,’ Montaigne draws a comparison with his own writing, ‘And in truth,’ he says, ‘what are these things I scribble, if not grotesques and monstrous bodies, made of various parts, without any certain figure, or any other than accidental order, coherence, or proportion?’

By way of corroboration, he tosses in a line from the Roman poet Horace, Desinit in piscem mulier formosa superne (‘a fair woman in her upper form ends in a fish’), then winds up observing that while at least the painter begins with a strong, clear picture and only adds the grotesques around as fillers, he alas, as a writer, is incapable of providing ‘a rich piece, finely polished, and set off according to art’. Only the grotesques.

Does he mean it? Is this a promising way to speak of a collection of essays that in its unabridged version runs to 1,300 pages? Grotesques, without any other than ‘accidental order’?

Montaigne, the novelist Thackeray wryly observed,

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