wife suddenly discovered a carbon
copy of Levy's translation in an
old trunk in a warehouse. Roth
claims that in 1926, in his maga–
zine
Beau,
he had already an–
nounced serial publication of the
work, in an abridged version, for
the second year of another of his
magazines,
Two Worlds Quarterly.
And it is true that his announce–
ment included not only "The New
Unnamed Work of James Joyce,"
but also "The Dark Surmise: Con–
cerning Friedrich Nietzsche and
His Sister." But so far from prov–
ing his point, it would appear that
the thought of publishing a work
by
Nietzsche had not yet occurred
to him. And how could one, rob–
bed by one's arch-enemy of an
unpublished Nietzsche manuscript,
fail to publicize the fact until
twenty-four years later, in a letter
to a skeptical scholar?
And who is Samuel Roth? His
previous publications include
In–
side Hitler
(1941-reissued in 1950
as
I Was Hitler's
Doctor-allegedly
written by a mysterious German
psychoanalyst, Dr. Kurt Krueger,
who here reports the filth which
he uncovered when analyzing Hit–
ler in the twenties-a book, it
seems to me, justly ignored by
scholarly reviewers),
Lady
C
hat–
terley's Husbands: An Anony–
mous Sequel to the Celebrated
Novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover
(1931), and-among many other
titles-Jews Must Live: An Ac–
count of the Persecution of the
World by Israel on all the Fron–
tiers of Civilization
(1934), ad-
mittedly by Roth himself. Although
he often gets more famous writers
to pen introductions to his vol–
umes, he has almost always
been ignored by scholars
with two notable exceptions. Her–
bert Gorman, in his well-known
work on
James Joyce
(1939), char–
acterized Roth as a man "whose
hide was apparently that of a
rhinoceros" (306f.) , and said:
"Never, it would seem, was there
such colossal impudence from an
opportunist of suspect character
than from the amazing Mr. Roth"
(309). And in support, Gorman
cites, among other things, a pro–
test against Roth's conduct, of–
fered in 1927 and signed by "one
hundred and sixty-seven famous
authors and prominent figures in
letters and distributed to the
press." The signers included Rob–
ert Bridges, Croce, Einstein, Eliot,
Havelock Ellis, Gide, Hamsun,
Hemingway, Hofmannsthal, D. H.
Lawrence, Thomas Mann, Mau–
rois, O'Casey, Pirandello, Bertrand
Russell, Arthur Symons, Valery,
Jacob Wassermann and Yeats.
In the end,
My Sister and I
reminds me of a true story. In
their reaction against Hitler's au–
thoritarianism, German universi–
ties since the war are given to
punctilious observation of demo–
cratic procedures; and during the
past years the faculty of one great
university after another had to re–
ject by solemn vote an offer for
the sale of-Nietzsche's mustache,
allegedly severed from the corpse
before burial.
