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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
Reissue of the vividly lyrical biography of Nietzsche that John Banville called 'a major intellectual event' In 1888, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche moved to Turin. This would be the year in which he wrote three of his greatest works: Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, and Ecce Homo; it would also be his last year of writing. He suffered a debilitating nervous breakdown in the first days of the following year. In this probing, elegant biography of that pivotal year, Lesley Chamberlain undoes popular clichés and misconceptions about Nietzsche by offering a deeply complex approach to his character and work. Focusing as much on Nietzsche's daily habits, anxieties and insecurities as on the development of his philosophy, Nietzsche in Turin offers a uniquely lively portrait of the great thinker, and of the furiously productive days that preceded his decline.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Nietzsche in Turin:
The End of the Future
Lesley Chamberlain
Pushkin Press
Contents
NIETZSCHE’S LIFE AND WORKS
A Comparative Chronology
In England, for a long time they had discredited Nietzsche by giving out not only that he lost his reason after publishing his books, but that he had lost it even while writing the most important of them.
oscar levy
There are no philosophies, only philosophers.
nietzsche
Preface
This book is an attempt to befriend Nietzsche. Philosophers may smile, other readers may doubt the efficiency of my social behaviour. But it seems to me important to know, approximately, what it was like to walk down the road with this strained, charming, malicious and misunderstood thinker so important to the present age. He was perhaps the most original European philosopher of the nineteenth century. Despite being a closet metaphysician, he wrestled with problems ‘near at hand’, problems of pain and loneliness and joy and uncertainty, in a thoroughly advanced way. He wondered at the inadequacy of science and the Christian church to make everyday life meaningful. He hated everything from big towns to newspapers, from nationalism to mesmerizing and narcotic modern art: anything that compromised the freedom of the human spirit – and of course all these things you may see and may still want to weigh up in the street today.
Our late-flowering encounter, not the first but the most substantial, began in a Turin square where I was reading his direct, warm and surprisingly unsolemn letters of 1888. The square was small and shady, surrounded by the quiet back entrances of commercial buildings, lock-up garages and a few dwellings, not far from the cathedral which guards a piece of cloth absurdly identified as Christ’s shroud. A long low wall down one side of this tranquil triangle provides a familiar place for local people to gather. I happened upon it by chance and not caring to sightsee, I sat down on a bench and read the Turin letters (London Library copy, Schlechta edition). A madman entered and began jesting. The local audience, who knew him well, and waved at him dismissively for my benefit, showered him with laughter. Meanwhile another piece of theatre began. ‘Vieni a casa! Vieni a casa!’ called a tanned and wrinkled old-seeming man. ‘Come home with me for a few September sexual pleasures before lunch!’ Nietzsche wandered Turin, loveless, remembering love, dissecting culture, already mad in the vernacular sense. These mad, erotic charades might have been dedicated to him. They seemed like tantalizing symbolic distractions outside the theatre where I would eventually dramatize my interpretation of his life.
Nietzsche has long excited writers more than philosophers. Too long a question hung over him: was he indeed a philosopher? ‘You ask if I am a philosopher. Is that of any consequence?’ he blustered in one of those 1888 letters. Actually he had been asking himself that question for twenty years. It hurt him, and he often laughed over it. He was once a university professor of philology, lecturing on Plato and Aristotle and the pre-Socratic philosophers. A reputation for militant atheism precluded his success in obtaining any similar post in later years.1 His books were too original and too shocking for the philosophical and classical establishments to acknowledge him as one of their own. A thinker of exemplary moral high-mindedness and subtlety, he was indeed different.
As a philosopher, his fate was ghastly, though hardly untypical. No sooner was he dead in 1900 than all manner of non-philosophers poured in to plunder his intellectual creation and put it to non-philosophical uses. His sister Elisabeth, a queer mixture of intermittent loyalty, constant power-mongering and utter fatuousness, someone who entirely lacked self-knowledge, the way her brother entirely possessed it, was a famous culprit, inventing merits in Nietzsche to appeal to the National Socialists. As a writer his lot was gentler: writers loved him. They made what use of him they could.2
I would like to see Nietzsche known and praised widely for his real and lasting qualities. Not that I am alone. A Nietzsche reinterpretation industry exists at the end of the twentieth century to which perhaps some future intellectual historian will devote a study of our present weaknesses. For every idea expressed in this book there exist whole books to which the sufficiently fascinated reader may want to turn: on Nietzsche’s style, his view of art, the nature of his metaphors; his views on politics, history and morality; his relation to the German tradition of aesthetic play; his situation in relation to Hegel and Marx, and ultimately to any other philosopher you care to name; and his influence on writers and poets from Yeats to D.H. Lawrence and André Gide. The core attraction of Nietzsche at the end of a century ravaged by ideology is that he provides no positive doctrines nor answers, and even made a fetish out of so doing, or not doing. So we make a fetish out of him. The number of new books devoted to Nietzsche is dizzying. What to do about it? Keep reading Nietzsche himself, I suspect. He writes so well, and, despite being uncommon and disregarded in his own time, it is right that he has gradually emerged as the outstanding critic of the modern age.
His rebelliousness against all moral and religious and scientific absolutes and his radical desire to emancipate the body in thought have been provoking some readers since the beginning of the century. He has helped successive generations find their own way through the usual conflict of instinct versus self-preservation which brings such an abrupt and cruel end to youth. Yeats and Lawrence and Gide, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Mann, Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault all explicitly owe Nietzsche a creative debt, and there are many others. Instinct coupled with fresh intellectual discovery runs up against received pieties and stagnant institutions. The young perhaps ought not to read Nietzsche, who can be wild and seem recklessly violent, too soon. But so much Nietzsche is good, and looks even better from the standpoint of middle age. He is implicitly inimical to any form of political correctness or mass ideology. He always lacked that idealization of human nature and its ability to progress which variously underpinned socialism and imperialism and nineteenth-century positivism. Instead he was quite sure:
Man is something which must be overcome.
Everyone knows now: the ideas of the Übermensch (the Superman, the Over-Man) – the Will to Power, the exhortation: live dangerously! – all of them reduced to slogans, must be recovered within the whole Nietzsche corpus if they are to have any meaning in future. Extracted from it in the past, in the wretchedly ideological twentieth century, they have been pressed into service where they least deserved to go. Nietzsche was not a proto-Nazi, not a nihilist, not an anarchist. The truest things about Nietzsche the philosopher lie embedded in his method and style. It is probable that it was because those qualities are almost impossible to extract from the books that the adulterating simplifications took their place. Historical irony, he would have said.
He was a peculiar writer, of course, and probably more peculiar than most, though also kinder, at least in life. His isolation sometimes encouraged a manic sense of counter-determination to make himself effective. His downtrodden position in life encouraged pride and a sense of superiority, so much so that he recognized the affinity between himself and the oppressed protagonists of the Russian novelist Dostoevsky.
Yet Nietzsche was too ironic a spirit to see himself as a simple hero or rebel and he laid no claim to moral sympathy as an underdog. What is important is that he never wanted to become a leader, a figurehead, or an evangelist. He did not want a graven image of himself to form in the reader’s mind and the effect shines forth in a style replete with false trails and wordplay and notions of dreaming and conjuring. The tension between meaning and non-meaning, between picture and painter and perceiver, holds Nietzsche’s work together like an experimental novel.
I mean that as a vital pointer. To read Nietzsche one has to appreciate the way he writes; to follow him a little down his path of professional philologist, or as we might say, writer and critic. Writing is the medium through which Nietzsche claims to be a singer and a dancer, a philologist and a doctor. He creates verbal music, lightens burdens, undercuts the manipulative power of other men’s words and thoughts, and urges a too long repressed humanity to accept the body with pleasure. His attention to detail gladdens the heart. As he once said of Wagner, he is a great miniaturist.
Life for Nietzsche was the language he used to invent it, a language which was always musical and pictorial. Life itself was invented shape. The books, so close to that life, have an improvised feel; they are asymmetrical, discontinuous, tightly concentric while without an obvious centre. They are the product of a fierce mind and a divergent personality. They stand to be read for their flashing insights, sudden illuminations, patterns and fleeting pleasures. The style consists of elaborate and often brilliant mental snapshots.
What is deceptive though is the sudden leap from style to opinion. Suddenly the books strike out. Nietzsche abjured half of ancient and most of modern civilization, if I have not misunderstood Twilight of the Idols. He would have lived happily only in the Italian Renaissance or pre-Socratic Greece. How to say that entertainingly? The idea struck him in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, published when he was twenty-seven. He more or less invented the Greek god Dionysus to keep his eye on his self-appointed task: how to save life from the great and monstrous idealizers who came in between. From Platonists, Christians and German idealists, thinkers along a single devastating life-destructive line, might the god Dionysus save him! And perhaps he did. Nietzsche went mad believing he was that god, signing his name.
Nietzsche’s contribution to philosophy was in one sense devastatingly simple; he made the cathedrae tremble. He questioned whether Western philosophy since Plato had any meaning in the face of the absurd and irrational forces underlying human life, symbolized by Dionysus. See the beginning of Twilight of the Idols, under the heading ‘The Four Great Errors’, for the answer that there were no answers, only errors. They were interesting errors though, decorative dalliances with meaning along the way. That fact alone suggests why the philosopher must become a writer, an artist, a stylist, if he is to survive the collapse of truth around him. At least that is the way the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had to move.
For Nietzsche the history of Western thought was an ongoing fancy-dress party, attended by the dogmas and religions of the world dressed as harlequins. Now he was host, now wardrobe master, now guest. He dressed and painted the harlequins, playing with long-established truths like baubles. He waltzed with them to giddy music. Beyond Good and Evil seems like a costume jewel stuck onto the dying body of Christian Europe. I am allowing myself a little sub-Nietzschean bombast here to make the point. Philosophy for him was a vital, charming and desperate business, in which he far preferred writing metaphors than concocting footnotes to Plato. It was fun, for instance, to picture the solemn Immanuel Kant, purveyor of transcendental reason and absolute moral duty, in a Chinese hat. The alert reader will find many more such instances.
Nietzsche wrote as a lover of life and as a man with enough intelligence and humility to see that mankind was not necessarily the point and centre of life on this ‘pitiful little planet called Earth’. Any fixed beliefs filled him with distrust, for at base there were only two sensations: pleasure and pain. (This fundament Freud would borrow and build upon.) Nietzsche watched his feelings and analysed his thoughts for the psychology and physiology they revealed. What difference did it make to a man’s thoughts if he had a happy childhood or generally a sluggish metabolism? Rather a lot. That frankness which seems to us gratifyingly post-Freudian is one of the delights in reading Nietzsche today.
Another delight of Nietzsche’s style is its companionship, with which I come back to my initial aim. The style leads to the man, even if he insists he is wearing a mask. (He is like a child here: of course we can see him and the mask.) Love, gratitude and elegance shaped all he had to say together with immense, overriding pain and hurt. If ever you wished to love Wagner, you should read Nietzsche’s loving criticism of him in the original. If you ever doubted Nietzsche’s sympathy for the figure of Jesus then look again, in the original, at the unqualified love at the centre of The Antichristian, a book which would be best named ‘Against the Christian Church’. Nietzsche I feel was often acting out the wisdom of Christ, facing the whole world angrily, as if he had found the moneychangers in the temple. Indeed he loved to hate all ‘counterfeiters’. He also hated intellectual corruption, manipulation and lies; he abhorred pettiness, meanness, envy and vengefulness; he loathed mediocrity. Though he could be defensive, blunt, obsessive and quick to take offence, Nietzsche combined a high, austere intellect with a boundless religious need and a striking sweetness of heart. He was endlessly self-questioning and self-critical.3
Not least, Nietzsche aimed to be European, not German, in spirit, an absence of national narrowness we can delight in these days, and delight in with a timeless relish too, because a European style was part of Nietzsche’s campaign. His fierce criticisms of scientific, moral and religious certainty he set down with great economy, poetry and panache, in startling contrast to the classical German philosophers. Meanwhile he hammered away at the chauvinism of the new German Reich.
Nietzsche is well translated. And yet I must say I have never found him a joy to read in English. The vocabulary is too abstract and the continuity sometimes menacingly absent because so much is suggested by verbal nuance. But to read him in German is to feel oneself in the company of an acute, witty and passionate mind. Nietzsche never expresses himself long-windedly or inelegantly and his manner is always direct and down-to-earth, however learned and allusive. The ideas flow easily from one to the next. The books seem substantially shorter, more joyful and more gripping than their coldly modernist and fragmentary reflections in English. Nietzsche, unlike Freud, has not been mistranslated. But his essence, his Heiterkeit – a peculiar intellectual serenity which frequently breaks out into exuberance and anger, scorn and rhapsody – does not reproduce in any other medium but German. In that tongue he pioneered a refinement and psychological depth that would attract a century of German thinkers and critics and poets.
So much for verbal translation. An even greater problem opens up now as I translate from the letters of April 1888 to January 1889, the dramatic last ten months of Nietzsche’s sane life. But, as I say, I have tried to befriend him, and give a sympathetic rendering of his being and his thoughts.
ONE
Forty-three Years behind Me and Just as Alone as When a Child…
Nietzsche’s friend the composer Henrich Köselitz gave him the idea of Turin in the springtime. Nietzsche, who suffered from headaches, never knew quite where he wanted to live, only that he should avoid extreme sunlight, heat and cold. Summers he spent in the Swiss Alps, winters on the French Riviera. In April and May he knew of nowhere that particularly suited him. Köselitz thought the Piedmontese capital at the foot of the Alps an ideal station between seaside resort and high mountain. Others praised its mild, dry air, its grand regular perspectives and the long stone-covered porticoes which would allow sheltered walks in the open air. From Nice where he had spent the winter Nietzsche made up his mind at the last minute. He wrote a flurry of letters saying he would move on to Turin by train on Monday, 2 April.
It was a matter of less than a day’s transit, across what had only recently ceased being one country, the kingdom of Savoy. But true to Nietzsche’s neurotic fears, everything went wrong on the journey along the north Mediterranean coast, and inland via Alessandria and Asti. He lost his luggage, got into the wrong train at his one connection point in Savona, then felt so ill at the ensuing complications he had to rent a room in Sampierdarena, just outside Genoa, for two unscheduled nights. He made an unplanned visit then to the old centre of Genoa before finally proceeding to Turin on Thursday, 5 April.
In Savona he probably misread a platform sign, or the destination on the side of a train. He spoke only a few words of Italian and was three-quarters blind without his spectacles. He put himself and his hand luggage in the Genoa train, instead of the one bound for Turin. Hurt by his own incompetence he turned his rage on the Sampierdarena locals, accusing them of exploiting him with high prices he could neither afford nor avoid. The result was an immobilizing migraine attack. This, he told another old friend, Franz Overbeck, was his worst journey ever.
‘Apparently just a little trip, it was perhaps the most unfortunate I have [ever] made. A deep weakness overcame me on the way, so that I did everything wrong and stupidly… I ought not to risk travelling alone any more.’1 What was important here, for a philosopher who was going to make himself understood, was that he didn’t lack the gift of self-dramatization.
The drama continued when he arrived in Turin, tired and for the first few days in his new rented accommodation unable to sleep. Also the weather disappointed him. It was dull and raining and the temperature fluctuated uncomfortably. ‘Not even old yet! Just a philosopher, just someone on the fringe of things, compromisingly only on the fringe of things!’ he groaned. He was a terrible hypochondriac – within a week he was feeling almost normal.2
On the other hand what he had just rehearsed were the two experiences of pain which structured his inner life and by which he gave himself, Friedrich Nietzsche, shunned German writer, loveless professor, a profound meaning. The first was a melodrama of loneliness, compounded by a sense of himself as a genius and a prophet unheard. The second was the tragic cycle of sickness and recovery which would make Turin his last conscious home. He did feel shaken. He was living in a strange place, surrounded by strangers speaking a foreign tongue. Memories crowded in from the past.
Loneliness was his destiny after he retired from Basel University in 1879. He was only thirty-four. He cited sickness and lack of sufficient time to pursue his own work as reasons for inviting solitude. He had that Machtgefühl, a sense of what he must do with his talents and powers. Without severing himself from a demanding institution he probably wouldn’t have written the majority of the books – all those after Human, All Too Human – which made his mark in history. But he was also wretchedly ill, and therefore most vulnerable, when he took up the itinerant writing life. He had to be prepared to suffer.
To strike out alone was at least a way of life symbolically suited to his intellectual calling as a cosmopolitan Renaissance thinker. We might take a mental snapshot of him now, as a brilliant wanderer in search of passing princely patronage, somehow strayed into the modern world. As much as he was influenced by the tragic Greeks, Nietzsche, thanks to the renowned Swiss scholar Burckhardt, also loved Italian Renaissance culture. Jacob Burckhardt spoke of the quattrocento humanists living off ‘the abundance of neutral intellectual pleasure which is independent of local circumstances’. Nietzsche heard him with enormous pleasure in Basel and ever after loved and venerated a man who could see the intellectual joy in not belonging.3
Ubi bene, ibi patria. Before Turin, in almost ten years of wandering, Nietzsche had lived in Sorrento, Genoa, Venice, the Swiss Alps, Zurich and Nice. Becoming a Wanderer, talking to his Shadow, gave him common experience with exiles from Diogenes to Dante. What glory it was to be homeless and how it deepened his sense of being European! His unique, powerful attacks on Western tradition he framed sitting in small boarding-houses in fashionable European resorts and cities. Like Nietzsche’s life they are truncated, fragmentary and portable. Intellectually, except for their language, they easily cross borders. In that sense the wandering life made him.
But he was lonely and isolated and socially impotent. How can we take such pleasure in his plight? He turned on the Sampierdarena locals because he had a headache, because he was panicking over his inability to organize his life and because he was also desperately hard up. The books earned him nothing. Only the previous year he had paid for The Genealogy of Morals to be published and he had to borrow where he could. He depended on a small pension from Basel, the kindness of friends and the company of strangers. All these things, lack of money, isolation, lack of friends encouraged a sense of self-consciousness and powerlessness in Nietzsche’s inner world.
The pressures had all worsened too by 1888. His sister Elisabeth for seven years before her marriage had often acted as his housekeeper and travelling companion. Since she emigrated to Paraguay with her husband in 1886 Nietzsche had been doubly alone. His friendships depended on correspondence and he belonged to no institutions. As a writer he had no public to speak of. Indeed he felt positively hated or at least ignored by the German public – the standard way, he said, in which the Germans showed dislike, for it happened to Schopenhauer too. He could retreat into his imagination, and books, but to the sense of being outcast there was only one real counterweight: his memory of friendship with Richard and Cosima Wagner in the early Basel years. Nietzsche was never happier as a German, an artist and a man than when in their stimulating company. The memory of this great artistic and personal intimacy kept resurfacing through 1888. It lived on despite Wagner’s death in 1883, the great psychological and geographical distance and the passing of the years. To be sure, Nietzsche remembered the Tribschen – Bayreuth era as a time when he struggled to define his intellectual character against Wagner. Still the Wagners, their music, their personalities, their passionate relationship inspired him, because through all those means they brought him to experience love. That best felt life he kept rehearing in Wagner’s music, which he would play to himself wherever he found a piano.
In a similar, lesser vein of subconscious remembrance, Nietzsche also worked continually on a piece of music which had been with him through most of his compositional life, as a hymn to friendship, and to the joyful acceptance of life despite pain. Halfway through the career of what would finally be the Hymn to Life, Nietzsche’s greatest female love, Lou Andreas Salomé, provided the words. The words then of his musical work-in-hand dated from 1882. It was the case, contributing to the growing apocalyptic atmosphere of 1888, that now he could only live on memories.
He was never one to conceal or deny his loneliness. He had relished the sociable life with the Wagners and the celebrity his precocious brilliance as a classical scholar won him in Leipzig and, initially, in Basel. But he grew up, grew into his more difficult self, found his course. His conscience over religion, over art, over Bismarck’s Imperial Germany compelled him to dissociate himself from Wagner and what seemed like Christian nationalist humbug. In fact he had always shown originality and waywardness in his writings. The Birth of Tragedy, dedicated to Wagner and eccentrically combining his love of the Greeks with his hopes for German music, alienated the staid academic world even when it was published in 1872. Gradually his disruptiveness became more widely known and resented. He hardly helped his position by writing an essay on the mediocrity and servility of German universities. Then illness stepped in and cut him off still further. After Wagner died and Elisabeth became engaged and the unfulfilled love affair with Lou Salomé collapsed, three disasters which all happened in the years 1882–3, Overbeck feared for his friend’s well-being in such an emotional desert, when he was not yet forty.
Nietzsche himself felt it. In the autumn of 1887 he had tried to revive a relationship with Erwin Rohde, his closest friend as a student, with whom he had once shared his passion for the Greek world and Wagner. The letter ended with the pathetic words I have inscribed over this chapter: ‘I have now forty-three years behind me and I am just as alone as I was when a child.’ Yet the general tone of this letter was hectoring and uninviting. Nietzsche didn’t necessarily want friends. He had to get on.4
As for the drama of ill-health, it never left him after he reached his mid-twenties. Even in childhood he had suffered headaches and myopia, and the weakness seemed to run in the family since it also afflicted Elisabeth, and their father Carl Ludwig, who had died at thirty-six of a brain disease. Nietzsche gave out never to know quite what was wrong with himself, though he suspected a hereditary problem and congratulated himself on surviving beyond his father’s age. Yet how can he not have known he had syphilis, with a scar close to his foreskin and a history, albeit brief, of treatment? He surely lied to Wagner’s doctor, Otto Eiser. The syphilis caught from prostitutes in his student days was complicated by diphtheria and dysentery contracted as a medical orderly in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War. Nietzsche was left with a delicate stomach and poor digestion and a recurring migraine, with constant vomiting and retching maximizing the pain in his head and the disruption to work. For days he could do nothing but lie in a dark room, as now at Sampierdarena.
In Sampierdarena though, there is a double drama to examine: not only what happened to poor lonely sickly Professor Nietzsche who got into the wrong train, but how the whole experience became translated into ideas on the page. The combined pressures of sickness, penury and obscurity go part way to explain the frequency of such terms as power (Macht) and strength (Kraft), sickness (Krankheit), rottenness (Verdorbenheit, Verderbnis) and decay (décadence, Dekadenz) in his writing. But we come closest to Nietzsche in seeing how he transforms pain.
Sampierdarena one day signified illness and weakness and poverty; but the next day, which Nietzsche spent against his original intentions revisiting Genoa, brought a complete revaluation of his position. He felt better, his mind was working again, and it threw up quite a different set of ideas: love, pleasure, nobility, gratitude, personal fate, will, courage and cure. He had in ordinary terms something Wagner noticed about him: the power to bounce back; the physical and spiritual capacity to be an Übermensch. No one was better qualified to ‘overcome himself’. This I think is the physiological and psychological explanation of why revaluation lay at the heart of the intellectual project which dominated his maturity. He constantly discussed it in 1888 as the ‘transvaluation of all values’, Die Umwertung aller Werte. The very idea of transformation invited his best capacities and the qualities in himself he most cherished.
Genoa is a spectacular Ligurian port built into the steep hillside, with a warren of dark narrow alleys animated by the rituals of Italian life and made startlingly beautiful by churches and palaces from rich past ages of sea-trading. Christopher Columbus was born there, and has come to symbolize Genoa’s mystery, its mingling of peoples because of the proximity of the ocean, and its adventurous mercantile heart. Nietzsche absorbed the symbolism of Columbus, but for the rest was not a great external observer. Everywhere he went the inner life overwhelmingly concerned him. This or that place simply provided a backdrop. Thus Genoa, when he returned, principally evoked memories of the winter of 1880 – 81 when in a cold garret he wrote Daybreak, and souvenirs of the next visit when he conceived parts of The Science of Joy. His room had been on the top floor, in a row of houses descending steeply down the cobbled hillside, and very close to the Opera House. He recalled, retreading those high-sided narrow streets and steep alleys, ‘this hard and gloomy town’ and ‘a winter of incredible wretchedness, cut off from doctors, friends and relations’. He certainly had been hard and gloomy in Genoa, despite hearing there his beloved Carmen for the first time.
For half a day in April 1888 he was completely absorbed in that painful, still cherishable past. These were amongst the first words he wrote from Turin to Köselitz:
In Genoa I was so full of memories I went about like a shadow. What I used to love there, five or six chosen spots, pleased me even more this time; it seemed to me to be of an incomparable pale nobility, and far above anything the Riviera has to offer. I thank fate that in the years of décadence it sentenced me to this hard and gloomy town; every time you go out of it you go out of yourself too – the will extends itself again and one no longer has the courage to be cowardly. I was never so grateful as during that hermit’s existence in Genoa.5
These are enigmatic words but let me try to make sense of them. In letters from the winter of Daybreak he described himself as wanting death but feeling exuberance. The impulse to write that book, the first wholly new work since leaving Basel, emanated from a unique combination of misery and high spirits. ‘My spirit matured for the first time in those fearful days.’
That inner disposition he remembered now. The more extreme his pain, the greater his creative élan. He welcomed the scourge of illness which made romantic idealism and religious faith impossible. These were ‘sick’, ‘decadent’ cultural phenomena for him. The logic was, why should he want further to weaken his life? It was illness, therefore, which would give him his philosopher’s insights and set him on his unique course. He would oppose all forms of cultural debility.
Daybreak shows this happening. Nietzsche began to think from a beyond which was equally close to death and to absurd gaiety. He vomited questions. What did men need to live? What help was philosophy? For instance, was it helpful to believe certain things were good and others evil? Was there a happiness available to the mind no longer able to believe in God? He posed these questions with a devilish self-confidence which cannot be adequately translated from the German word Bosheit, a word which has a range of meanings from naughty to malicious and sits ominously alongside the related word böse, meaning evil. He was to be a thorn in everyone’s side, a naughty boy among the philosophers, a malicious dissident and apparent Antichrist amongst the men of the cloth.
Vomiting questions, Nietzsche sought remedies. Notorious for his amateur pharmacology, and his diets, he made himself physically strong in the face of essential weakness, and that was exactly what he did in philosophy too, with his fondness for Feuerbach and Schopenhauer. Ludwig Feuerbach, who declared the next life promised by Christianity a waste of the energy of the human spirit when this life alone demanded so much, and spoke of man’s need to take the divine back into himself, was a tonic to Nietzsche’s whole generation. They suffered from the inheritance of Idealism which Nietzsche believed drained the individual’s capacity to flourish. Arthur Schopenhauer though left a deeper and more problematic mark on the young men of the 1860s. He suggested life was essentially brutal and morality an illusion. Only art was available to compensate the clear-sighted soul forced into Buddhist-like retreat. Wagner took the view that reading Schopenhauer sapped Nietzsche’s spirits, and he was probably right, because Nietzsche by the time of Genoa had turned violently against this pessimism – this ‘courage to be cowardly’. He formulated what he called his ‘pessimism of strength’ in defiance. Still he remained a complex man who knew more pain than joy, and his ‘pessimism of strength’ is best understood as a tribute to the fine balance between the triumph and the collapse of the human spirit. His contribution to Schopenhauer was to assert that the perpetual illusoriness of the world was not a sufficient cause for despair.
That apparent paradox, therefore, about no longer having the courage to be cowardly, is explicable in terms of Nietzsche’s refutation of Schopenhauer. Self-overcoming was literally a ‘going over’, an übergehen, a way of gaining a high vantage over that human fallibility which demands an answer to eternal questions and a release from pain. After Sampierdarena Nietzsche spoke to Köselitz in just those terms, of his ‘going out of himself’ and no longer fighting an inner moral battle (because that in itself was debilitating). The letter was written in a kind of code, in which Genoa’s pale nobility stood for Nietzsche’s own sickly pallor after his collapse in transit. He set his pain outside himself, he admired it for what it was, and he moved on. It was an exemplary occasion for Nietzsche’s use of pain in his personal economy and his philosophy.
But what of solitude in the personal and the creative economies of this extraordinary man we have to meet today off an Italian train? At the same time as he courted solitude with the itinerant life, Nietzsche often complained about it in heartrending terms.
The year-in year-out lack of a really refreshing and healing human love, the absurd loneliness that it brings with it, to the degree that almost every remaining connection with people becomes only a cause of injury; all that is the worst possible business and has only one justification in itself, the justification of being necessary.6
In fact two different Nietzsches talked about loneliness. The one was his mother’s son and the close friend of Franz Overbeck and Heinrich Köselitz. The other was a fearless explorer and a military strategist on his philosophical quest, one for whom solitude was powerfully symbolic. Here the transition from experience to writing could be made in any instant of his creative life. Its potential has to be borne in mind every moment we follow Nietzsche about Europe, this oddly dressed, shabby fellow with an enormous moustache and a book in his pocket, sitting in the train. Nietzsche sometimes saw himself as a Columbus ready to sail uncharted waters and a Napoleon about to conquer the world. So yes, Genoa could be a resting place for him. It had the right historical nimbus. Also Corsica. The very winter of 1888 he had been hankering after the windy Buonaparte island, only deciding against it, and in favour of Turin, because he feared the weather. While lonely man simply complained then, the solitary philosopher plied an intriguing course of mental associations with every place he went, and that sustained him.
But I must finally let him arrive in majestic Turin. We have held each other up with our thoughts and complaints about the journey, which is such a simple one really. The train pulled into Turin Porta Nuova on Thursday at mid-morning. Nietzsche located the missing luggage and set off on foot, along one of the long straight parallel roads leading from the station to Piazza Castello, to find suitable accommodation for a gentleman. Bourgeois in the continental sense is what he meant. He wanted to live with a middle-class, educated family where appearances were cultivated, where cleanliness and good husbandry prevailed, and where there was time to read and play the piano. Davide Fino, who superintended the public writing room and kept a newspaper kiosk and bookstall on Piazza Carlo Alberto, was his man. Nietzsche may have had a recommendation to contact him from someone in the extensive Italian community he had known during the winter in Nice. Fino kept pleasant rooms at a modest rent and spoke French, which was doubly useful. So Nietzsche took a room in the Finos’ large house on the corner beside the Post Office. After that dreadful journey all was almost well.7
‘My courage for life is waxing again,’ he wrote to Franziska, his mother. She was still living in the Saxony town of Naumburg, where he grew up. ‘Your heart told you what to advise me! This is really the town I can use now! Just the sort of place I can get hold of and it was like that almost from the first moment’ were his effusive words to Köselitz. Thus it was that Turin stepped into Nietzsche’s life like a person. A kind of relationship began.
It looked then, thanks to the architect Guarino Guarini (1624–83), much as it does today, a model of urban dignity without pomposity, a Baroque metropolis laid out with geometric precision, yet still with a southern air. Over the whole towered the 165-metre Mole landmark, which in Nietzsche’s day had not long been built. He came to know it well, along with the name of its famous architect Antonelli. The vast domed structure with a towering spire was completed in 1878 as a synagogue but never used for worship. A not unlikeable folly, a sightseeing tower and an exhibition hall today, the Mole stands just southeast of the inner focus of the city, Piazza Castello. Almost adjacent to the vast square was Nietzsche’s lodging house in Via Carlo Alberto, No. 6, right on the corner. His room was on the top floor of the four-storey building.
