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« Nietzsche was not a proto-Nazi, not a nihilist, not an anarchist. » (p.6)
« t 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. W hat 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. » (p.6)
« 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. » (p.7)
« He also hated intellectual corruption, manipulation and lies ; he abhorred pettiness, meanness, envy and vengefulness ; he loathed mediocrity. Though he could be de fensive, 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. » (p.9)
« 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. » (p.11)
« 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. » (p.12)
« 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. » (p.12)
« Loneliness was his destiny after he retired from Basel Uni versity 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. » (pp.12-13)
« 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. » (p.13)
« The books earned him nothing. Only the previous year he had paid for The Genealogy of Morals to be 13 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. » (pp.13-14)
« 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. » (p.14)
« 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 Salome, provided the words. The words then of his musical work-in-hand 14 dated from 1882. » (pp.14-15)
« After Wagner died and Elisabeth became engaged and the unfulfilled love affair with Lou Salome 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. » (p.15)
« 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 15 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, O tto 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. » (p.15)
« 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. » (p.19)
« 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, 20 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. ‘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. » (p.20)
« 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. It was about ten foot square and enjoyed good views in every direction. Nietzche looked directly out over the small, elaborate Piazza Carlo Alberto, where a large equestrian statue of the first Savoy king of Piedmont and Sardinia after Napoleon strutted pompously before his weak eyes. To the right stood the Carignano Palace, with its imposing municipal façade, while on the left stood another bureaucratic temple, housing the Finance and Tax Office. The older part of the Carignano Palace, a rather menacing dark grey building giving onto the adjacent Piazza Carignano, was built by Guarini, but Nietzsche’s view was of the new southeastern elevation, altered when the palace was ex panded to house the first United Italian Parliament in 1861. Since very quickly — in 1870 — the newly created Italian capital moved from Turin to Rome the palace’s original function was already redundant by the time of Nietzche’s visit. But it continued to house national state organizations and to look splendid. He loved this city instantly, and one reason why he did was its grandeur coupled with an effortless accommodation of nature. It was a matter for celebration that from the small strip of balcony outside his window he could also see la collina — the green Turin hills — to the southeast and, on a clear day, the Alps to the northwest. » (pp.21-22)
« Nietzsche had to live close to music. In Nice too his room had been a few hundred yards from the Opera House. Now the Fino house was within a stone’s throw of the Carignano Opera and Music Theatre. Via Carlo Alberto 6 was also only a few paces from the imposing, if hardly beautiful, early eighteenth-century Palazzo Madama, the Teatro Regio — the national drama theatre — and the seventeenth-century Royal Palace, all in the Piazza Castello. Nietzsche’s access to this vast square was through the newly built Galleria dell’Industria Subalpina, where the Carignano Theatre orchestra played at weekends, just beneath his window. The Galleria, an elegant, glass-roofed, two-storey arcade of shops and offices, with fountains, statuary and a splendidly tiled stone floor, is unchanged today. The soft chandeliers, polished wood and upholstery of the then Caffe Romano, now the Baratti and Milano, seen through generous ground-floor windows, offer an enchanting vision of urbanity. » (p.22)
« That first letter to Köselitz in which he reported his positive emotion. Turin! My dear friend, let me congratulate you! Your heart told you what to advise me! This is] really the town I can use now! [… what a dignified and serious city it is! It has nothing of the capital city, and nothing modern, as I feared: it is rather more a residence from the seventeenth century, which had the court and the nobility, and a single prevailing taste in everything. Aristocratic tranquillity is what has been preserved here in everything: there are no squalid suburbs; a unity of taste, which extends even to the colour (the whole city is yellow or reddish brown). And for the feet as for the eyes it is a classical place! What safety, what pavements, not to speak of the omnibuses and trams, which are so well run they evoke wonder! It seems to me cheaper to live here than in the other large Italian towns I know ; and no one has cheated me yet. I am regarded as ufficiale tedesco (whereas last winter in the Nice Visitors’ Directory I figured comme Polonais). No, what serious and splendid squares ! And an unpretentious palace style ; the streets clean and serious - and everything much more dignified than I had expected ! The most beautiful cafés I have seen. Such a changeable climate makes these arcades rather necessary ; but they are spacious, they don’t feel oppressive. Evenings on the Po Bridge : superb ! Beyond Good and Evil ! » (p.23)
« Soon, declaring ‘this is the only place I can be', he would change his plans for the autumn to spend all possible time in Turin. » (p.25)
« He liked to eat and he had to be economical. In the evenings he found himself under the same roof as military officers and university students in similar circumstances. There was also a trattoria in the Hotel Nazionale where the waitress liked him, he decided, because she appeared to keep back the best grapes for him. A typical meal began with soup or risotto followed by ‘a good piece of roast meat, vegetables and bread — all very tasty’. » (p.25)
« In Turin, restaurant prices were amongst the lowest he had come 25 across in Italy, and certainly compared favourably with the Riviera and Switzerland. » (p.25)
« He walked along the banks of the Po to left and right of the Ponte Vittorio, into the present-day Michelotti Park on the far bank, and through the Valentino Park on the near side as far as the medieval castle. The terrain is flat and the views of a civilized city, by the river so much rus in urbe, without traffic, without today’s dusting of exhaust fumes and an overhang of lead darkened foliage, excited a heart so susceptible to neo-classical pastoral. » (p.26)
« An odder thing about his life by correspondence was his insistence on having his letters sent poste restante, even after he secured a fixed address. Maybe he didn’t want even his friends to know where he was, maybe he feared having his letters read by the Finos. But I think he just liked hiding, for there was a childlike theatricality lurking in Nietzsche. » (p.27)
« He found waiting for him a letter from Resa von Schirnhofer, a young philosophy student with whom he had in recent years climbed mountains behind Nice, drunk a little vermouth and attended a bullfight. True, he would be rolling his trousers and eating a peach next, but he was such a nice man. Resa remembered him as a kind, impressive man who amongst much else urged her to read Stendhal. She loved his seriousness and relished his harmlessness. He evidently was touched. From the First days in Turin he wrote an engaging letter back to her about his new home and his latest ideas, the philosophy couched in the broadest terms and mixed with a note on his passion for Turin ice cream. Resa von Schirnhofer later recalled : ‘So unrestrained as a thinker, Nietzsche as a person was of exquisite sensitivity, tenderness and refined courtesy in attitude and manners towards the female sex, as others who knew him personally have often emphasized. Nothing in his nature could have made a disturbing impression on me.’ Nietzsche is infamous for the virulent verbal attacks on women which loom up like ugly sores on the fine body of his work. A number of them have been read out of context, including his much-quoted exhortation to men going among women not to forget the whip. Many other observations about women are tender and sensitive and suggest quite a different view.
It is true that his actual relationships with women were rare. He never went to bed with a woman of his own class. He never had an erotic friendship with a woman. His stiffness, his lack of emotional maturity, invited rejection and inevitably the whole complex of relations with women humiliated him. He tended to get himself involved in triangular situations with women where he was the loser. His sexuality was unfulfilled. But once he had put himself outside the Field of romantic possibility, as with Resa, he was tender and enlightened. He had a solid religious upbringing in a house which had seen three generations enter the Lutheran church, and he was a man of virtue. There were disadvantages to that household in that it was overwhelmingly female, but for the time being I bring together his religious upbringing and his tenderness in such reactionary conjunction because it was surely one of the great achievements of the Christian church to make the male more gentle, if also to cause him inhibitions. Freud declined to analyse post mortem a man who left so few clues to his sexuality. But I believe overall Nietzsche feared a lack of manliness. One of his most telling requirements for the true philosopher was that he show ‘rugged and unbending masculinity’.
Philosophy became his masculine tool, and took on what the psychologist Adler would have called a compensatory ferocity. Marked though was Nietzsche’s desire to preserve simple friendships — and especially relations with his mother and sister — from exactly this roughness, or the depredations of intellect. He hated alienating old friends through his books. » (pp.28-29)
-Lesley Chamberlain, Nietzsche in Turin. An intimate biography, Picador USA, 1998 (1996 pour la première édition britannique), 256 pages.
