\I
ARI Err
Walter Kaufmann
NIETZSCHE AND
THE SEVEN SIRENS
Thomas Mann's Goethe novel,
The Beloved Returns,
may have
created a new genre: half of
the volume was given over to a
recreation of Goethe's stream of
consciousness, authenticated in very
large measure by profuse allusions
to his published works, and made
interesting in part by the ex–
ploitation of a few might-have–
beens. The transfer of this techni–
que to other literary figures, with–
out the scrupulous restraint of
novelistic form - an attempt to
forge a great writer's work as has
often been done with great paint–
ers-suggested interesting, if dan–
gerous, possibilities. The risk, of
course, could be greatly reduced
by offering such a work not in the
writer's own language, but in an al–
leged translation of a mysteriously
recovered manuscript. And if the
stylistic demands could be greatly
lessened in this manner, the in–
tellectual standards, as well as the
requirements of factual accuracy,
could be relaxed equally by finding
a writer who had become insane,
and by ascribing the work to his
last years.
If
this should deprive
the fabrication of much interest, it
need merely be hinted (inconsistent–
ly, but nonetheless sensationally)
that the author may not really
have been mad and that his
mental disease might have been
faked. Whatever the inspiration or
authenticity of
My Sister and I
may be, this new book (which is
not by Betty MacDonald but, we
are told, by Nietzsche) fulfills all
these conditions to perfection.
Published by Boar's Head Books
and distributed by Seven Sirens
Press, Inc., this volume (256 pp.)
was, according to the title page,
"translated and introduced by Dr.
Oscar Levy,
Editor,
the complete
works of Friedrich Nietzsche." The
eleven-page Introduction is dated
March, 1927, but "the publishers
had to wait many years before it
was safe to offer it to the world–
a whole four years after Dr. Levy's
death." Why? Nietzsche's sister
died in 1935, and surely no Ger–
man could have sued the pub–
lisher during the war. Did the pub–
lisher have to wait until not only
Dr. Levy, but those close to him,
too, had died? Or was the whole
book written quite recently? I do
not know; but such assertions in
the Introduction as that Nietzsche
had not yet read Schopenhauer
when he published
The Birth of
Tragedy,
or that he wrote
Zara–
thustra
later than the
Genealogy
of Morals,
certainly suggest less
familiarity with Nietzsche than Dr.
Levy had. And while the presence
of many similar errors in the book
itself might be charged to Nietz–
sche's madness, it raises the ques–
tion whether the whole work was
not written by the author of the
Introduction.
