Life Sentences (9 page)

When the world is remembered in writing, it alters almost utterly in its density, in its absence of detail. “It, my body,”
M
says about waking, subsiding, waking up again, “would recall from each room in succession what the bed was like, where the doors were, how daylight came in at the windows, whether there was a passage outside, what I had had in my mind when I went to sleep, and had found there when I awoke.” And the Master makes certain that the reader has
M
’s sense of fullness, as if nothing has been or will be overlooked. “… and my body … brought back before my eyes the glimmering flame of the night-light in its bowl of Bohemian glass, shaped like an urn and hung by chains from the ceiling …” Yet it is only the suggestion of completeness that is given, not its reality, for those chains are darkening their brass with dust, the blue in the flame is rhythmically retreating before the orange, and in the chimneypiece of Siena marble that
M
mentions, there is a noticeable nick that I just put there—in short, no description possesses as much “this and that” as a camera might catch in the flicker of a finger, not to omit the states of mind that furnish a room from time to time with longing, appreciation, and panic.

Things and creatures in the real world buzz and blossom by the billions and we know to beware of their brevity, because decay and death are as continuous as being born or burgeoning. Reading Proust we are constantly sadly, guiltily, reminded of the paucity of our own recollections: life went on around us and we missed it; we might have pondered our place but we did not; we might have discerned connections, for they were there in Jamesian numbers, yet we failed
to follow; we might have indulged an obsession, but we were too distracted by the trivial; we might have retained a fond touch, a glimmer of insight, a bit of wit; we might have; we might … have …

If the distance between what happens and what we have understood about it is dismaying, what of the difference our memory makes on the third day thence, the fifth week after, the seventh year just passed? A habitual victim of his body, Proust knew how great the chasm between the mind and body was. Outside Monsieur Teste’s and Paul Valéry’s theater of the head, there was a reality indifferent to the plays put on by consciousness. We knew that world in part; it supplied our senses; it gave us occasion for concern, for delight, for desire; it gave us our place—Balbec, Paris, Combray—yet of us that world of matter in motion remained utterly unaware. Our lungs knew their air, but not our aspirations. Speaking of his grandmother’s failing health,
M
says, “It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.”

To remember, to imagine, to dream (all specialties of this house) is to depart the body for a land through which the body cannot travel. To read is to leave the library. Yet it is the body, as it stirs restlessly through the opening pages, that remembers
M
’s rooms; it is the body that prompts him; it nudges him without knowing he is there; its posture reminds him; his stiffened side reminds him, but his muscles do not feel the cramp they bear. So when we assume the position we habitually assume when we read, we ready our departure; our body must know, like a pet from the smell of our luggage, that we are off, and our eyes will see no more floor or wall or ceiling, because we, as the true Proustian performer always does, will adopt another body, that of the type-furrowed field—the conceptual page—and become its syllabic music.

The real world is full of pointless purpose, inattentiveness, confusion, pain, and perplexity, as well as the hazards of its satisfactions.
Yet in Proust’s pages it is perceived, it is felt, it is contemplated, in a manner so utterly satisfying that those pains, in their depiction, become pleasures; confusions are given an order only we are permitted to understand; defeats are now worth every word of their accounts; failures victories if only in their voicing.

That is why … to live for a while as we ought, in a fully realized world—though its understanding will be forever incomplete and quite beyond us … that is why we read Proust.

Perhaps it is the fate of intellectuals who incautiously trust their thoughts to a wider public that those thoughts should be abducted and abused like a child of rich parents; or, because these ideas are sometimes attractive to the intellectually ambitious, they are subjected to obfuscation and misuse: defended by their friends, but traduced, lied about, and maligned by their enemies as if theories were politicians campaigning for office. Maybe no such thinker gets picked on more than another, Walter Kaufmann politely wondered at the beginning of the third edition of his book on Friedrich Nietzsche; nevertheless he found it necessary to whack many a knuckle on the philosopher’s behalf for just those depredations and incursions that any fertile but defenseless intellectual territory invites, especially when it displays, as its ideas develop, one threatening or inviting aspect after another.

The opinions of philosophers are not always greeted with yawns. Socrates was expected to execute himself, Bruno was burnt, Spinoza’s life threatened, a fearful Descartes seduced to Sweden, where he froze. David Hume’s name, famously demonized by Samuel Johnson, was used by pestered parents to cow their children, and his grave on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill was expected to burst open at the devil’s summons some dark and stormy night so that the notorious
disbeliever’s soul could fly to its master. For many, Nietzsche has always been a bugaboo, though some regard him as a heroic destroyer of idols, the invigorating voice of skepticism, and a revealer of those embarrassing actualities that the pieties and protestations of the bourgeois have customarily concealed. Others said that behind the bug there was no true boo. Nietzsche doubted, as Descartes did, only to restore an honest ethic to its radiant place; he embraced a genuine spirituality, and wished for a kind of—a sort of—illuminated grace. Whatever their persuasion, Nietzsche’s devoted followers are like followers always are: they deplore their leader’s revisions of mind and falls from faith; consequently they reinterpret or ignore his changes of heart, while what are felt to be weaknesses of character are concealed. Bertrand Russell regularly left his fellow aerialists grasping air and hoping for a net; Ludwig Wittgenstein made a huge U-turn in midcareer, thereby creating rival factions representing the Early or the Late; and Friedrich Nietzsche sometimes recolored his mind between tea and Tuesday. This is tiresome. A single unified system is required if one is to propagandize for it properly. At least there must be a final, definitive position for the mind, as though the writer were fighting a last-ditch action and was willing to die before surrendering a yard of argument. But in Nietzsche, if such a thing were to be found, it would have to be skeletal, submerged, in code, because the body of his work certainly dips up and down and turns around enough to bear a coaster full of riders who have paid mostly for the thrill. A tone of jubilant acrimony is perhaps its most consistent quality. My teachers saw no reason to speak of Nietzsche at all. In his early biography (1940) Crane Brinton suggested that, apart from his contribution to an evolutionary account of ethical ideals, he would have “a continued use among adolescents as at once a consolation and a stimulus” (
Nietzsche
, New York: Harper & Row, 1965).

Gnomic utterances, poetic outcries, hectoring jibes, oracular episodes, diatribes, and rhapsodic seizures—personality—style: these are not characteristics which are usually thought to suit the philosophical temperament, and add to them the habit of attacking the
profession and then reason itself, especially on behalf of primitive urges, instinct, or animal vitality, and they shall be quickly scraped from any academician’s plate as if a passing bird had despoiled the serving.

Anthologies of essays allegedly representing the most recent opinions of their elusive subject seasonally appear. There is
Nietzsche: A Collection of Critical Essays
, edited by Robert Solomon: “Our first encounter with Nietzsche typically offers us a caricature of the ‘mad philosopher,’ a distant yet myopic glare of fury, leaden eyebrows and drooping moustache, the posture of a Prussian soldier caught out of uniform by a French cartoonist of the 1870s”;
The New Nietzsche
, edited by David Allison (1985): “Nietzsche’s biography is uninspiring, to say the least. Nonetheless, this subject appears to have been the principal source of inspiration for the tiresome array of books that has followed him”;
Why Nietzsche Now
? (1985) compiled by Daniel O’Hara in the same year, and the year I stopped collecting them: “Friedrich Nietzsche is not a serious writer” … but his playfulness is profound, O’Hara is careful to add; while there are explanations of these conflicting opinions in George Morgan’s
What Nietzsche Means
(1941): “Can anything be good which attracts so many flies?” a judgment well put, I think (3); Arthur Danto tries to straighten the paper clip that describes the philosopher’s course of thought with
Nietzsche as Philosopher
(1965), while
What Nietzsche Really Said
(2000) written by Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins, would keep the curves but set the record straight: “What Nietzsche really said gets lost in a maze of falsehoods, misinterpretations, and exaggerations” including, I might add on their behalf, scholarly slurs such as that of George Lichtheim in his
Europe in the Twentieth Century
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972): “It is not too much to say that but for Nietzsche the SS—Hitler’s shock troops and the core of the whole movement—would have lacked the inspiration to carry out their programme of mass murder in Eastern Europe.” It is, in fact, more than too much to say, and in a more honorable time might have provoked a duel.

David Krell, who translated the two volumes of Heidegger’s
Nietzsche
(1961), and who therefore ought to know, says, at the beginning of his own slim volume,
Postponements: Women, Sensuality, and Death in Nietzsche
(1986), that “Big books are big sins, but big books about Nietzsche are a far more pernicious affair: they are breaches of good taste.” Authors with axes to grind, agendas to push, or slants to slide on are as numerous as stars—at least as many as one can see most nights. Biographies such as Ivo Frenzel’s brief
Friedrich Nietzsche
(1967), Alexander Nehamas’s
Nietzsche: Life as Literature
(1985), Ronald Hayman’s
Nietzsche: A Critical Life
(1980), or Rüdiger Safranski’s
Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography
(2001) dutifully march by, but not in this review.

Curtis Cate tells us, in the introduction to his new life of Nietzsche (2002), that he is writing it, not for the professional philosopher, but for the intelligent layman, for those who may not have read a word by this notorious blasphemer, in order to

There is no concluding question mark, but these are carefully chosen flags of warning. Nietzsche has told us, and his own practice has offered evidence, that the conclusion of an argument—a belief as briefly put as a shout in the street—is almost as empty of meaning as the nearest social gesture, unless it is accompanied by the reasons that are supposed to support it, because leaving Vietnam, for
instance, might have been a good idea if we believed it was an unjust war, but an equally sound recommendation if we thought we were not going to be allowed to bomb the place back into the Stone Age.
Collective anarchy
and
egalitarian virus
can be give-away phrases—if anyone wants to accept them.

Cate continues, a few pages farther on, to pose his questions.

It is the mounting anger here that is interesting, although the idea that Nietzsche has flooded us with traditional morality has a certain perverse attraction: is Curtis Cate going to claim that Nietzsche is really a Republican?

In the literature about our subject, it is true that all the angles are argued, and the philosopher who preached of multiple perspectives must now suffer each passing point of view, as saints are supposed to have suffered their thorns, spears, arrows, and swords in the side. In this respect, writing a life of Nietzsche is far simpler and more straightforward than giving an account of his opinions, because, except for Nietzsche’s worship of Wagner, there is little hyperbolic about the course of Nietzsche’s friendships, studies, classes, travels, ailments, forest walks, or mountain hikes—well, perhaps the latter undergo some of awe’s inflation—because he simply writes or he composes; because he’s deep in a round of visits; he talks or teaches; he reads or rides from Naumburg to Basel in ice-cold railcars; he practices the piano; because, though he falls ill often, it is not from any height at which health may have held him; he’s nervous, frail
despite appearances, and easily discombobulated by bad news, by disappointment, and even if a series of precocious successes has marked his professional progress, Nietzsche nevertheless feels that an opposition to his person or his aims is everywhere active and nefarious; consequently, he is pestered by low enrollments and other academic issues, poor reviews, inadequate salary—routines of little drama and states of mind for which there is small public; and finally because what really matters to Nietzsche is what we started this list by citing—music, or better yet writing: they constitute the fiery center of his life, especially when paper is pierced by the pen … for in that place he may smite his enemies … yes, smiting his enemies is his profoundest pleasure … and he always sits down to do that.