Failing to face up to Fritz

This is the most old-fashioned new book I’ve read for a long time, something that I think Curtis Cate would regard as a compliment. In the Preface he writes, characteristically:

Perhaps, indeed, the day is not too distant when, new post-modern norms having imposed themselves through a process of Nietzschean ‘transvaluation’, marriage (even between ‘heterosexuals’) will be declared abnormal as well as deplorably ‘old hat’.

That letter-to-the-editor (most likely of the Daily Telegraph) tone consorts oddly with Cate’s largely favourable view of Nietzsche, though he does only report a smattering of the developing opinions of the author he indifferently refers to as ‘Fritz’ and ‘Nietzsche’. He indulges in neologisms at such a rate that they rub shoulders with the innumerable misprints, so numerous that I had to keep reminding myself that the publisher is not one of the ancient university presses. ‘Characteral’, ‘morosity’, ‘elogious’, ‘malinchonia’ – somehow the book’s style makes such words less surprising than they would be in most contexts.

Cate has produced the longest biography of the philosopher in English, taking us through his life, at any rate until the sudden onset of madness in 1889, when Nietzsche was in his 45th year, at a steady pace, basing his account on primary sources (letters to and from, works published and unpublished) whenever possible, in translations of his own, usually good ones. I find it hard to envisage what the impression may be on someone new to Nietzsche, and I’m not certain that anyone fairly familiar with him will welcome the amount of detail, for instance about the fuss surrounding the publication of The Birth of Tragedy, or the philosopher’s changing views of Wagner, central as they were to his life and thinking. I suspect that, with the very large cast, and without the help of a glossary of proper names or a set of mini-biographies, readers might get lost in the thickets of Nietzsche’s relationships with his family, friends, colleagues, enemies. Not that Cate doesn’t frequently remind us of who is who, but we never get to know them well, because Cate is determined, I think, to produce a ‘life’ that is superficial, in the sense that it goes in for very little interpretation and no speculation at all; and in that way is in the sharpest – and most welcome – contrast to the last biography of Nietzsche I reviewed, and indeed to the whole contemporary mode of writing about people’s lives.

Even on the ultimately puzzling matter of the aetiology of Nietzsche’s madness he remains silent, since nothing definite is known about it. He only refers to the possibility that Nietzsche went to a Leipzig brothel where he could have contracted syphilis, and says, ‘There is here a mystery that will probably never be elucidated, but which helps to explain Nietzsche’s later mental breakdown in his 44th [sic] year.’ It’s unclear how such a mystery could help to explain anything, but one admires Cate’s restraint; at the same time one can’t help feeling that a bit more is necessary both in relation to the huge body of writing about Nietzsche’s insanity, and also about his sexual activities or lack of them, a subject on which Cate does seem positively prudish – he can’t have overlooked the remark in Beyond Good and Evil that ‘the kind and degree of a person’s sexuality reaches up to the very pinnacle of his spirit’. Nor does Cate do more than chronicle Nietzsche’s appalling health, merely referring on almost every page to ‘nervous spasms/paroxysms’ and ‘vomiting fits’, with no indication of what a contemporary opinion might be of them.

Though one wouldn’t want a full-scale treatment of Nietzsche’s thought in a biography, more than Cate provides is needed. He is sketchy or worse on everything up to Thus Spake Zarathustra, becomes quite expansive dealing with that book, quotes from it at some length, and deals modestly with its successors. By now, however, when there is such a huge amount written about this perennially trendy thinker, it is hardly possible to skirt as many subjects as Cate contrives to. He scarcely mentions Eternal Recurrence, the