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I Am Dynamite! A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche

2020; Penn State University Press; Volume: 51; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/jnietstud.51.2.0281

1538-4594

Brian Domino,

Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel

With its list of awards received and one-word reviews, the paperback cover of Prideaux's biography resembles a movie poster. Along with the absence of “philosophical” or “intellectual” in the subtitle, this cover alerts the reader that this is a biography in the narrow sense. Barely halfway through the first chapter, one wonders how Prideaux will maintain the reader's interest, as she has already described the two most cinematographic episodes in Nietzsche's life—the comical preparations for his first meeting with Wagner, and his childhood dream of his recently deceased father emerging from the grave to reclaim his younger brother—yet she does. Like a well-made film, the book gracefully immerses the reader into the story.After the first chapter, the book proceeds chronologically, ending with Elisabeth's death in 1935. The chapter titles sometimes straightforwardly indicate a momentous event (“The Birth of Tragedy” and “My Father Wagner is Dead. My Son Zarathustra is Born”). Some are relatively obvious, if one knows Nietzsche's life, or are explained in the chapter. “Llamaland” is a good example of both. A few seem inscrutable, such as the early chapter “Naxos.” The title is never explained, although one assumes that the connection is to the postcard Nietzsche sends Cosima Wagner years later when he calls her “Ariadne” (quoted on 326). While this might be great fun while reading the book, it lessens its value as a reference later. It's also often unclear how the chapters are demarcated. For example, the first chapter ends with a quotation from Nietzsche that begins “When I was twelve years old …” (22). The second chapter—which one might assume would begin when Nietzsche was twelve or even thirteen—opens, “When Nietzsche was eleven” (23), and continues from there.There are less obvious temporal leaps. I mention three. While discussing his first year of teaching (1869), she misquotes Nietzsche's declaration (January 6, 1889), “I would rather be a Basel professor than God” (6, she quotes it correctly on 326). While discussing his writing of Z II in the summer of 1883, she gives an extended quotation from EH (238). At the other end of his productive life, Nietzsche's Turinese apartment was poorly located according to Prideaux: “Via Carlo Alberto has been described as a melancholy street, having the dark monotony of a car tire” (309). Although she does not cite it, the description comes from Karl Strecker's Nietzsche und Strindberg (Munich: Georg Müller, 1921, p. 42). Between the time when Nietzsche lived there and when Strecker visited, Fiat had gone from nonexistent to Italy's largest automotive company, which undoubtedly changed the city and inspired Strecker's analogy. Yet, even if not, we would expect Nietzsche, who was always sensitive to the sun, not to pick a brightly lit street.Unlike many biographies of Nietzsche, I Am Dynamite! provides minimal discussion of Nietzsche's philosophy or philosophy in general. This is by design, and helps to focus the attention on Nietzsche the person rather than Nietzsche the thinker. Of course it would be impossible to write a life of Nietzsche without discussing the ideas that made him famous, as well as for which he radically altered his life. Unfortunately, this is the book's greatest weakness. This is not the place to engage in a point-by-point disputation of the interpretation forwarded. There are enough errors, though, to suggest that the book not be recommended to beginning students, lest they start off with a passel of misunderstandings. To give an idea of these errors, I mention three and then turn to the connections Prideaux draws between Nietzsche's texts and his life.Among the more frequent misunderstandings is that Nietzsche's philosophical position is little more than naïve subjectivism (257, 258, 367). She uses the terms Übermensch and “superman” more than Nietzsche did, subsuming under them the well-turned-out person (EH “Wise” 2) and the wanderer (HH 638) (257). Similarly, when she misquotes (or perhaps mis-paraphrases, since there are no indications that she is quoting) Zarathustra as saying, “What is man? A hybrid between plant and ghost” (229), she misses that the description does not apply to humankind. Rather, Zarathustra says, “What is the ape to man? […] Whoever is the wisest among you is also a mere conflict and cross between plant and ghost” (Z Prologue 3).Prideaux suggests that Z is straightforwardly autobiographical. She equates the magician in Z IV with Wagner (319), the Island of the Blessed with Tribschen (53), “Lou and Rée are clearly identified as the tarantulas” (239) in the chapter of the same name, “The Tomb Song opens with the view from his window in Venice” (240), and more generally “Zarathustra IV reads like an extended revenge fantasy on all who had perturbed him throughout his life, from God to the leeches that were fastened by doctors onto his head to suck out his blood” (256). She provides no textual analysis to support these connections. She does cite a letter to Gast in which she claims Nietzsche is “surprise[d] to see how his own blood dripped from the pages” (240). What he writes is actually “manche Seiten kamen mir fast blutrünstig vor,” which might be translated as “some [or quite a few] pages seemed almost bloodthirsty to me” (KGB 6:443). Either way, the evidence seems lacking that Nietzsche saw the blood as his.She claims that Nietzsche's “late philosophy was vengefully misogynistic” (270), which she attributes to his experiences with women, especially Lou Salomé (231, 370) but also his sister and mother (201). Her evidence for this, aside from the infamous whip admonishment (to her credit, Prideaux notes that the advice is given by an old woman and not Zarathustra, much less by Nietzsche himself), is a quotation: “Is it not better to fall into the hands of a murderer than into the dreams of a lustful woman? he asks” (231). She fails to acknowledge that this is a quotation from Z I: “On Chastity,” that it's spoken by Zarathustra and not by Nietzsche, and that it continues: “And behold these men: their eyes say it—they know of nothing better on earth than to lie with a woman. Mud is at the bottom of their souls.” She provides no post-Z evidence for her surmise. Prideaux's analysis is particularly disappointing since she includes Carol Diethe's careful and nuanced Nietzsche's Women, Beyond the Whip (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1996) in her bibliography.She likes to say that Nietzsche suffered from “chain-sickness” (201, 223, 226, 241, 264, 287, 353), explaining that “Nietzsche would later baptize the feeling Kettenkrankheit (‘chain-sickness’) when he felt his mother or his sister yanking on his chain” (126). This fanciful etymology is at odds with Nietzsche's own explanation of its meaning. In WS 350 he argues that we are all burdened by chains of morality, religion, and metaphysics that were originally useful in pushing humanity beyond bestiality but that now are often deleterious. These chains, as he explains in detail in GM, have made humanity sick. Even in the letter that Prideaux later cites (222), Nietzsche uses the term in exactly the same sense.One of the frustrating aspects of Prideaux's book is this frequent lack of sources to support her claims. To take a trivial example, near the end of his time teaching at Basel, Nietzsche moved to an apartment further from the university to save money. Prideaux says that it was “a long walk to the university, but he still valiantly continued to make his way there to fulfill his teaching obligations” (180). In contrast, Curtis Cate writes, “The apartment's greater distance from the university, where he had to go for his lectures, was one of its notable advantages; it required a long walk (now for health reasons a daily necessity) to the old city center and back” (Friedrich Nietzsche [Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2005], 273); to support his claim, Cate cites a letter and telegram. In describing Nietzsche's fraternity dual, Prideaux never mentions what happened to Nietzsche's opponent. That his friends “laughed when he told them the story” (40), as she says, would suggest that Nietzsche was bested. Again in contrast, Cate, appealing to Paul Deussen's autobiography (Deussen was both the witness and the one who tended to Nietzsche's wound), writes that the duel “was brought to a halt when Nietzsche opened a gash in his adversary's forehead” (Friedrich Nietzsche, 49).A more psychologically revealing example concerns Resa von Schirnhofer. Nietzsche took Resa to a bullfight in Nice (249). Sometime later, she visited him in Sils-Maria, where they went for a hike. They were charged by cows, which Nietzsche shooed away. “He laughed, making Resa ashamed of her cowardice. She explained that when she was five years old, she and her mother had been charged by a bull and barely managed to escape” (251). In contrast, here is Resa's description: “As we were entering the woods, a herd of cows came charging merrily down the mountainside toward us in playful bounds. I tried to get away and Nietzsche, who saw my involuntary alarm, although very much amused by it, gallantly raised his famous constant companion, the gray umbrella, and leaped back and forth, waving it defensively, while the herdsman drove the scattered herd together and soon disappeared with it. These defensive gestures stood in such striking contrast to his external appearance, his otherwise so sedate and calm demeanor, that the comedy of the situation became apparent even to me and I joined in his laughter. This little scene reminded us of the sleepy, good-natured bulls of the arena in Nice which we had fun goading on, and we ended in joking conversation” (Sander L. Gilman, Conversations with Nietzsche [New York: Oxford University Press, 1987], 162). Resa then tells him of her childhood bovine misadventure. Perhaps Prideaux has a better source for this misadventure, but none is given.The back cover describes Prideaux's book as “myth-shattering” without clarifying what that (or those) myth(s) might be. One candidate would be the autobiography My Sister and I, which Nietzsche supposedly wrote in 1889 or 1890 while an asylum patient in Jena. The work alleges an affair with Cosima Wagner, as well as with his own sister. In the early 1950s, Walter Kaufmann demonstrated that the book was a forgery. Prideaux claims (without providing a source) that the author was revealed to be Samuel Roth, but he was the publisher. Kaufmann claims in Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, “In 1965, the late David George Plotkin came to Princeton to explain to me that […] he had written My Sister and I” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950 [1st ed.], 503n). The impetus for discussing this forgery is that “writings about Nietzsche often contain sentences such as ‘Brother and sister were almost too close,’ or ‘The siblings loved each other almost too much,’ sentences that pay tribute to the fact that sensationalist literary hoaxes die hard” (127). I was curious who the authors of such sentences might be, but searches on each phrase returned only Prideaux's book.That Nietzsche was syphilitic is not so much a “myth” as it is a claim that “is unverifiable one way or the other” (80). Prideaux laments that Otto Binswanger, “the Principal of the Jena Clinic for the Care and Cure of the Insane” (334), didn't examine Nietzsche to rule out syphilis (337), without noting that the real impasse is that the definitive test wasn't developed until several years after Nietzsche died.It is also not a myth that Nietzsche spent the last decade of his life insane, but precisely when his rationality began to decline remains a matter of debate. Prideaux believes that Nietzsche showed signs of mental illness for much of his adult life. Already in the first chapter she declares, “One can come to no definite conclusion but there can be no doubt that the Nietzsche family was indeed affected by a strong tendency to mental or neurological instability” (12). Sometimes the evidence is more tendentious. For example, the weather in Sils-Maria during the summer of 1881 was abnormal. July was miserably hot with thunderstorms, while mid-August brought snowfall and cold for which Nietzsche was unprepared. To his friend Köselitz he jokingly writes that he would be better off if he had gone to the Electricity Exposition in Paris where he himself could have been an exhibit (August 21, 1881). Prideaux avers that “today the notion of absorbing electricity from the atmosphere is considered a delusional symptom of mental illness, often associated with schizophrenia” (182). Thinking of electric machines, Prideaux connects this observation with a letter Nietzsche wrote to Köselitz the previous week where he describes himself as “one of those machines which can explode.” But what Nietzsche has in mind is almost certainly a steam-powered machine as he is describing his emotional response to the ideas he is working on. Some years later, when Nietzsche declines to attend Elisabeth's wedding, he beseeches her, “Do not therefore think me mad,” and Prideaux suggests that this evinces Nietzsche's concern that he was genetically predisposed to madness (260).Because the book is generally well-written, a number of unfortunate turns of phrase produce cinematic clunks as the story unfolds. Strangely, the majority of them are marine metaphors and similes: “The composer was fastening onto the philologist like a barnacle onto the hull of the flying Dutchman's ship” (60), “The plump red lips of her voracious sea-anemone mouth are permanently suggestively parted” (216), “Elisabeth's own resentment, her squid-ink jealousy had clouded his brain with ‘evil, black feelings’” (241). Others are simply unfortunate analogies: “Burckhardt saw Jewish culture as a universal leavening of European bread” (65), “As befitting an old artillery soldier, he was going to shoot the history of humanity in two, separating it into two halves” (322), and “His head was now perpetually held at an angle as he paced the stroboscopic light and shade of Turin's long stone arcades” (318). Unless Nietzsche were riding a skateboard, there would be no such effect, which he doubtless would want to avoid anyway.One of the reviews quoted on the cover comes from The Guardian. I was curious why that reviewer thought of the book as “a revelation.” Unfortunately, she offers little explanation. To quote: “Academic philosophers may feel that there is not much new to detain them here. For the rest of us, this biography is nothing short of a revelation, a sort of word made flesh.” While I would not use such overtly Christian rhetoric in describing Nietzsche or a biography of him, I did learn some important things from Prideaux's book and would recommend it to academics who study Nietzsche. Elisabeth is given fuller and more evenhanded treatment than she often receives. For example, I was unaware that she became “somewhat of a lady-in-waiting” (138) for the Wagners or that she was nominated for a Nobel Prize in literature four times (368). Prideaux's book was the first I had heard of Julius Klingbeil (285), who was so angry at the difference between the reality of the anti-Semitic community and its advertisements that he “published a two-hundred-page book, Revelations Concerning Dr. Bernhard Förster's Colony New Germany in Paraguay. It unmasked the Försters as fraudsters, liars, charlatans and tyrants” (286). Similarly, Prideaux mentions that Elisabeth commissioned Edvard Munch to paint a portrait of her brother and then later of her (366–67). That the portrait of Nietzsche is twice the size of that of his sister conveys his estimation of each. Prideaux, however, does not do readers any favors by keeping silent about her own well-received biography of Munch (Edvard Munch: Behind The Scream [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007]). Obviously, Prideaux is no apologist for the Llama, but it is important that we understand Nietzsche's sister as more than the dolt who set back Nietzsche studies by decades.Despite the errors mentioned, what comes through in Prideaux's biography is a supremely human Nietzsche. Her book is the personal or emotional companion to Thomas H. Brobjer's excellent Nietzsche's Philosophical Context: An Intellectual Biography (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008). If Brobjer focuses on the life of the mind, Prideaux zeros in on the social-emotional aspects of Nietzsche's life. One of her biography's most powerful sentences is this simple declaration: “The only greeting he received on his birthday was from his mother” (280). With Wagner dead and Elisabeth in South America pursuing a project that was anathema to Nietzsche, he was essentially alone in the world with a mother whom doctors would later describe as being “of a limited intelligence” (333). Anyone who is at least a little envious of the early retirement that allowed Nietzsche to write and travel in France, Switzerland, and Italy, or of his incredible productivity in 1888 alone, would do well to read Prideaux's biography, which reminds us that Nietzsche, the philosopher of will to power, in his own words, suffered from “years of lack of a truly refreshing and healing human love” and “absurd loneliness” (Letter to Overbeck, February 3, 1888; KGB 8:242).