According to this Introduction,
the manuscript of
My Sister and I
was smuggled out of the asylum in
Jena; but it contains ample refer–
ences to the years in Naumburg,
where Nietzsche lived
In
his
mother's care after his release from
the asylum in March, 1890, and
even to his final years, spent in
Weimar under his sister's watchful
eyes, when his mother had died.
One incident (p. 110) is explicitly
dated in 1898, by a quotation
from an article which appeared
on October 19 of that year. The
whole detailed account of the ori–
gin and importation of the manu–
script is thus untenable. We are
told in the Introduction that this
account stems from an American
who supplied Dr. Levy with the
manuscript-the American being
(according to a letter I have from
him) the publisher himself. He
could,
therefore, have himself writ–
ten the Introduction. And why
should Levy, who did not consider
his English good enough to do any
of the translating in the collected
edition which he supervised, make
a point of quoting the American
who offered him the manuscript:
"May I send it to you for transla–
tion, and necessary editing - at
your usual rates, of course?" A
forger, of course, might be in–
terested in thus covering himself
against financial claims from Dr.
Levy's potential heirs.
It
is certainly the book itself, and
not the Introduction, which should
be examined most closely. Was it
written by Nietzsche? And if not,
was it forged by a German and
then translated in good faith? Or
is there no German manuscript at
all? There are a number of plays
on words which seem possible only
in English: "sense and sensibility"
(p. 99) ; "he paralyzed the cosmos
and now he himself is in the grip
of paralysis" (206); "horses,"
"horse-sense," and "horse-play"
(167)-and the only passage
in
the
book which shows any wit at all:
"Wagner rewards his friends by
slandering them, as he slandered
Meyerbeer, thus reversing Job's
prayer:
Though he trusted me,
yet will I slay him"
(245). The
fact that all the other jokes fall flat
and utterly ,lack Nietzsche's
poignancy can, of course, be as–
cribed to his madness; but how
are we to account for this sole
flash-which depends on the mis–
translation of Job 13.15 in the
King J ames Version? Or how
could the following thought have
taken shape in the mind of a
German? "Wagner once told me
he placed me in his heart between
Cosima and his dog, in other
words, between two bitches"
(244) .
The references to Detroit (186),
to the "English Nietzscheans"
(224), to "Social Darwinists" (94
and 113), and to our "Faustian
age" (214) strike me as anachro–
nistic, as does the conception of
the "priestess of Isis" (223) which
apparently alludes to D. H. Law–
rence's
The Man Who Died.
There
