Paper Friends

Not all the friends of our youth are people we have ever met. Some of them are artists, musicians, and authors with whom we have one-sided friendships. Some of them died before we were born: long before. One-sided relationships are called parasocial, but there is nothing para- about their influence. Hearing an old song or revisiting a favorite book evokes every bit as much nostalgia as the last high school reunion. Maybe more. It’s a feeling I get whenever reopening a novel by Wells, Asimov, Heinlein, or any of several other authors whose works already had claimed space on my shelves in my second decade.
 
It is just as well that, more often than not, we don’t ever meet the actual artists – except perhaps in some cases for a minute at a book signing or some similar event. Art says little about the character of the artist. They might be very much what they seem in their work or they might be radically different. They might be pleasant or they might be jerks. It makes little difference to the value of their books, but sometimes we can’t help but wonder.
 
For this reason the title When Nietzsche Wept by Irvin D. Yalom (Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at Stanford) caught my eye. Period novels with intriguing subject matter still can manage to disappoint, but this one did not. This is a well-written and extremely well researched historical novel set in the 1880s and featuring Friedrich Nietzsche, Lou Salome, Josef Breuer, Sigmund Freud, and other key thinkers of the day. Yalom conveys a real sense of the personalities and he has a firm grip on their ideas, which were sometimes stuck in the 19^th century and at other times transcendent.

Friedrich Nietzsche is one of my old parasocial friends. He shook up a lot of my preconceptions in my late teens and early 20s. I first read him while taking a college class of classical Greek tragedy – not as an assignment but just because I had seen him referenced and wanted to see what he had to say. Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (through the Spirit of Music) was a revelation not only for its deep insight into Greek drama but into human nature. The book also has a lot to say in a comparative way about Wagner. Truth be told, at the time I knew Wagner best from Bugs Bunny but I soon remedied that, though without becoming a Wagner fan. (Nietzsche himself later broke with Wagner over the latter’s anti-Semitism.) I soon followed The Birth of Tragedy with Thus Spoke Zarathustra [Also Sprach Zarathustra] and then with several of Nietzsche’s other books. The Walter Kaufmann translations were and are still the best. When called for jury duty for the first time, I spent the hours in the courthouse jury pool waiting to be chosen or not for a case by reading Beyond Good and Evil. I didn’t think about it at the time, but that title might have raised a few eyebrows in that venue.
 
Nietzsche’s writing career lasted only a decade, but he was prolific in that decade. His ill health and thoughts of mortality intensified his drive to produce. I understand the feeling: most of my short stories and my only novel were written in the space of a few years when my life circumstances caused me to be feeling my mortality. None of my writings is as deep as anything published by Fred, but we can’t all be mad geniuses. Nietzsche suffered a mental collapse in 1889 (tertiary syphilis is the usual diagnosis) and eventually ceased speaking. He was tended by his sister until his death. He remained obscure throughout his productive period but his fame rose as soon as he was no longer capable of being aware of it. His influence extended beyond philosophers to artists such as Strauss, who wrote the heavy-handed but impressive tribute Also sprach Zarathustra in 1896.
 
As noted, Nietzsche often failed to rise above his time, and on those occasions he induces most readers (including me) to shake their heads and sigh. But he more than made up for it the rest of the time. He and the existentialists who followed him caused me to engage in introspection of a kind that I had neglected until then. It was less a matter of showing the way than showing we all choose our own ways – even if most of us opt for well-trodden crowded paths. I owe him a lot.
 
The closer one looks at the life he actually lived, however, the more he looks like a taxing friend to have had. I’m happy to keep him at arm’s length via Yalom’s pages.
 

Strauss – Also sprach Zarathustra [initial fanfare]