44
PARTISAN REVIEW
again It makes it so difficult for me to say goodbye.
It
is beller here but
when one can still do something to help and here I can."
When Elisabeth is the subject, the insane ventriloquism is unam–
bivalently hostile. She had been living in Paraguay with her anti–
Semitic husband, Bernhard Forster, who had founded an Aryan colony.
"As mother of the colony
I still have so much to do for all the colonists!
That is the main pleasure for Fritz I am monstrously good. I do not
know whether I am leaving my husband's work in the lurch." And
Nietzsche, whom she still called Fritz, is probably mimicking her when
he writes: "For me everything was over a long time ago, what I have
lost I have lost. Only if my private property increases in value will I be
able to recover the greater part of my capital. Money is nothing to me!
God has always helped me! And I am very
glad
to give."
On these four pages all the references to himself are in the second
person or the third. "Always great things expected from you." "Loyal,
loyal, loyal." "He is very pleased to have visits He is often livelier, it
varies Today is a quiet day ... He recognises voices from old times.
Always kindly and pleasant." "He has always been so
noble."
No one could seriously doubt that these are the words of a
madman, but onl y two years earlier his two closest friends, visi ti ng hi m
at the Jena clinic, had both entertained serious doubts about whether
he was really mad. "I almost had the impression," wrote Peter Gast,
"that his mental disturbance consists of no more than a heightening of
the humorous antics he used to put on for an intimate circle of
friends ... it seemed-horrible though this is-as if Nietzsche were
merely feigning madness, as if he were glad for it to have ended in this
way." And a month later Franz Overbeck wrote: "I cannot escape the
ghastly suspicion ... that his madness is simulated. This impression
can be explained only by the experiences I have had of Nietzsche's self–
concealment, of his spiritual masks." Apparently neither of them
remembered what he had written in
Dawn
about ancient Greeks who
feigned madness or prayed for delirium. Perhaps there is a histrionic
element in all madness and a voluntary element in all breakdowns, and
even if a twenty-three-year-old syphilitic infection was the
cause
of
Nietzsche's madness, Overbeck was not wrong when he said that his
friend had "lived his way towards it."
