Life Sentences (10 page)

Cate very capably carries us through Nietzsche’s early life, although he does not dwell on the wholly feminized environment in which the boy was brought up after his father (a Protestant vicar whom Nietzsche in retrospect decided to adore) died of “softening of the brain” when his son was four. Quite a few pages later he does say that Nietzsche had chosen to study classical philology “as a kind of pis aller in order to free himself from the coils of theology, with which his devout mother and his pious aunts and uncles had sought to trap and tame his intellectual energies.” Cate insists that Nietzsche’s rejection of religion was a purely intellectual matter, but it is hard to imagine any of this philosopher’s views not fueled by emotion, and by feelings very individually formed. Nietzsche was a lover of life but a hater of most of us who live it because we did not—do not—live it properly, fully, with appropriate abandon, with delight and with mastery, the way a dancer may leap and spin and even look askance, exulting in her total control of eyelash and limb.

Cate quotes Nietzsche’s own response to his father’s funeral—a memory made of tolling bells, organ music, and intoned words—but in a book distracted by data he does not dwell for a sentence’s length upon the father’s eleven-month illness, and the cries of pain that penetrated to the street. Soon after, Cate says, Nietzsche dreamed
that a white shrouded figure rose from his father’s grave, and, to tolling bells, after visiting a church, returned to the earth bearing something in its arms. “Soon after,” however, was six months. Soon after this dream—namely the next day—Nietzsche’s previously healthy two-year-old brother suffered seizures and died of his convulsions.

The early years of life were ones of constraint for Nietzsche, both because of the pious arms that held him and the regimen of schooling that the times and its institutions required. He found it easy to employ the effort needed to excel, so eager was he to break out into a wider world through any avenue of interest that offered itself. “It may have been a drawback,” Nietzsche wrote,

Though sectarian struggles were not absent from the wider world, Nietzsche’s immediate environment was one of complaisant Christian certitude. His father, who immediately became a mythological figure, was a Protestant preacher, and the boy’s family and friends
would naturally have nudged him in the direction of a righteous neighborhood, and filled his mind with their beliefs and their values without, at first, feeling any need to indoctrinate, only to be as they comfortably were. Moreover, the schools they chose for him would naturally reinforce, in the normal course of instruction and discipline, the same ideals: that is to say, the principal questions had been answered. You did not live your life
in search of
, but
according to
. Nevertheless, Nietzsche’s trapped intelligence found a way out to freedom through the classics: pagan texts that were supposed to teach Greek, not what Greeks thought; to make available their poetry and their theater without trying to answer Socrates’ searching questions or swallowing the sweet poison of Plato. They were certainly not expected to encourage the salacious disrespect prevalent in the satyr plays or recommend Aristophanes’ bawdy breaches of decorum. As for Latin, it was, of course, the language of the Church, but also that of the Roman gods; it was the tongue of Catullus as well as the halo of Aquinas. So if a profession was demanded of him when freedom was what he wanted, Nietzsche could choose the door marked “classical philology.” Beyond it, the one God would become many gods, quite a few of them lustful, some drunk.

In this way Nietzsche escaped the first circle of constraint: the family. The family was at the heart of hell. But having reached the next level, this inverted Virgil found himself inside the educational system. What would it make of the mind? A tame mediocrity. There would be mentors, not mothers, now; there would be pathways to power, obstacles one hurdled by practicing the right form and accepting the right help, but the struggle at stake was of the sort in which the waistcoat could claim victory by undoing the vest. At the boarding school where the young scholar began to learn the ways of the ruler and the switch, there was one mentor who set such a bad example Nietzsche was compelled to admire him. His name was Ernst Ortlepp, a sixty-year-old translator of Shakespeare and Byron; someone who borrowed the robes of a priest, adopting a sermonizing tone without any sanction, and who testified to his fondness
for Nietzsche, the prodigy sometimes in his care, by writing in his pupil’s poetry notebook: “Never did I think that I would ever love again.” (Quoted by Joachim Kohler in
Nietzsche & Wagner: A Lesson in Subjugation
, trans. from the German by Ronald Taylor, 1998.) Ortlepp was a figure out of Erasmus’s
Praise of Folly
. He sang blasphemous tavern songs, he recited Byron, and he drank like a medieval monk, often wandering from his saloon onto the weedy side of the road, which led to his incarceration once as a public nuisance. Ortlepp improvised improper tunes on the piano to entertain his flock, composed fiery defenses of the habitually put-upon Poles, and had met, consorted with, and favorably reviewed Richard Wagner.

Cate doesn’t breathe a word about it either.

In academic halls, one writes for one’s peers, and to satisfy their expectations—to win friends, to keep sponsors. Articles come first, small projects, research, translation—delicate nibbles at the hand that feeds. But an article is not an essay. Articles lie about the lay of their land. An article pretends to be clear about its objective and then must pretend to reach it. That objective will be minuscule though recondite. Moreover, the article does not halt at any point along the way to confess that its author is lost, or that its exposition has grown confused, or that there are attractive alternatives here and there, that its conclusions are uncertain or unimportant, that the author has lost interest; rather, the article insists on its proofs; it will hammer home even a bent nail; however, it does not end on a howl of triumph but on a note of humility, as if being right about
something was a quite customary state of affairs. Polite applause will be the proper response. And a promotion.

Philosophy was the path out of philology, and Schopenhauer was a Hermes whose hand Nietzsche could hold on the way out. But philosophy was also another stage for the performance of academic follies. Competing schools demanded the loyalty of their members, blocked any advancement by their opponents, attacked one another in their journals, and attached themselves to outside interests—loyalists to this or that religious tenet, racial group, aim of state—whose attractive aspects could be used to their advantage. Of course, they were also wrong, wrong about everything; even Nietzsche’s intellectual hero proved to be clay to his boot tops, and, as Cate observes, his devotees would blame the persuasive power of Schopenhauer’s rhetoric for misleading them.

In the meantime, though, Nietzsche would share his enthusiasm for
The World as Will and Representation
with Richard Wagner, who lived nearby in Tribschen and who extended the young professor an invitation to visit him, an invitation Nietzsche was eager to accept, since he had already examined a few of Wagner’s scores, and had been overwhelmed by the music, some of which he was able to play on the piano. Nietzsche quickly fell under the spell of the master of the house, but also under that of the great one’s charming and demanding paramour, Liszt’s daughter Cosima, the errant wife of the conductor von Bülow, who had brought her children to live with Wagner in Switzerland, and who took up Nietzsche with almost the same alacrity as her husband had. If the gods of the Greeks were supposed to be Apollonian, those of the
Nibelungenlied
were Dionysian from drum to trumpet, and Wagner was their realization. Nietzsche became a warm admirer and witty companion with whom Wagner could share his grand plans for German music and celebrate his numerous dislikes. In addition, Nietzsche not only composed music and then played it; he dared to do so in the presence of the master, who at first tolerated his disciple’s efforts but later wearied of these vanities, for, after all, he had so many of his own.

Nietzsche’s response to music, not only to the romantic masters, but to his own improvisations, was often ecstatic. He became transported, intoxicated, even visionary. Consequently, he might naturally see the same storms of feelings to be customary for the Greeks. Indeed Aristotle testifies to it, and Plato complains. Though Nietzsche is certainly aware of music’s formal component—its abstract, even mathematical nature—he does not weigh it as he should. It is the primitive and, one might say, vulgar component of music, a vulgarity Wagner makes an art of, that earns it the highest accolade, and the name
Dionysian
. But to be swept away is just a prelude to the dustbin.

Having given his heart to Wagner, Nietzsche found it easy to add the new German state to his small list of beloveds, for Wagner had made the identification of himself with the new Germany easy. Both men had bemoaned the decline of its music, now in the hands of Jews like Mendelssohn, sentimentalists like Schumann, or that imitative newcomer, Brahms, as if Wagner himself were not sufficient cause for celebration. Words like
degenerate
and
purity
surfaced like corpses in the flow of their diatribes.
Cleansing
was invoked, but only its necessity. In 1870, Germany had attacked France, and patriotism was a party favor. Though Nietzsche was a pro forma citizen of Switzerland, where he taught, he could not resist the lure of the fife and drum. He was not of a temperament to remain neutral. Cate obviously enjoys expressing Nietzsche’s distaste for what was seen then as the liberal (and neutral) point of view: “… a tepid philosophy for tepid souls devoid of any deep-rooted, personal convictions, ever ready to compromise, to swim with the prevailing current, to dilute whatever remained of their beliefs in a bouillon of tasteless ‘moderation.’ ”

In his youth, because the acceptable strength of a soldier’s glasses was enlarged to increase enlistments, Nietzsche had a brief obligatory stint as conscript in the Mounted Field Artillery; and he quickly became one of his troop’s best horsemen, only to be brought down so hard upon the pommel of his saddle by an unruly mount that his
sternum broke. For this second enlistment—because of his eyes, his past experience, and his present citizenship—Nietzsche was forced to join a medical unit, even though he knew nothing about tending the sick beyond the attentions he had given himself. Immediately, there was much to do. Behind the army, as it rapidly advanced, the wounded were left like dirty and divested clothing. Disease was also sweeping through the ranks. Rain fell and men fell; mud and maladies slowed the march. Nietzsche had to tend the sick and wounded in a drafty cattle car kept closed on account of the persistent rain, so that the consequences of dysentery, diphtheria, and festering wounds could be fully inhaled. Nietzsche soon came down with his patients’ infections, but coming down with an illness was something he had practiced until he was nearly perfect at it. Discomfort was a companion that would never leave his side, and one he would never renounce. But the glamour of war and pride in the new German state were now only mud, stench, and sickness.

He suffered from hemorrhoids and gastric spasms for much of his life, as well as prolonged spells of insomnia, but even more debilitating were the migraine attacks that appeared after stress or in the midst of travel, especially when the carriages were cold and the iron wheels noisy. In addition, there was the effect of light upon his aching eyes, which were steadily worsening despite drawn curtains, dark glasses, and soothing compresses. Nietzsche undertook numerous consultations with doctors, who unfortunately saw solutions and prescribed remedies that defied the motto “Do no harm.” Leeches were encouraged to feed on the lobes of his ears. He was often under his mother’s care, and he was frequently so sick he had to summon his sister to his side, though she was not at the time nearby. Ulcers were recurrent, his nerves made him nauseous, but stress came and went, while his eyes were always on the blink. Too shortsighted to find one suitcase in a crowd of strangers, Nietzsche would lose a valuable traveling bag at a station. Drivers failed to find his hotel and dropped him in front of a tavern or a boarded shop. He would call his subsequent outrage “colic” and retire to bed … when he reached
it. If Nietzsche tried traveling by boat, he became seasick, and again failed to locate his luggage when he landed. No wonder he would, like Tiresias—to compensate, and in self-defense—become a seer. Only Wagner could buck up Nietzsche’s spirits with a bedside visit and his hearty manner.