HENRY McDONALD
396
Underlying James and Nietzsche's quest for art1st1c glory
are remarkably similar psychological profiles. They shared
family histories of madness or psychotic episodes and an affinity
for "psychic" experiences, an affinity reflected in James's fiction
and Nietzsche's letters. Both James and Nietzsche were
somewhat isolated during childhood and grew up in households
with strong female presences and weak or absent fathers
(Nietzsche's father died when he was a child and James's was a
cripple whom the novelist regarded, however tenderly, as a
weakly romantic Emersonian) . Nietzsche may have and James
almost certainly remained virgins throughout their lives. Both
were convinced that the artist or philosopher should be
unmarried and self-consciously molded their personalities on an
aristocratic model of kindness, graciousness, and modesty, going
so far as to invent an element of nobility in their ancestries. Both
men were at bottom domineering, yet possessed only one real
outlet for their aggression: art.
James and Nietzsche, in sum, were artistic megalomaniacs.
To an extent rarely equalled in literature, they channelled them–
selves into their work. Indeed, if the two writers are to be re–
garded as nonromantic, it must be admitted that there is some–
thing romantic in the force and energy with which they speak
to us, something unclassical and unrestrained in the devouring
intensity of their preoccupation with the phenomenon of self–
consciousness. In James, the tidal wave of this consciousness not
only surges through his late novels, stories, and essays but roars
with equal force through his treatment, in his
Autobiography,
of
the minutiae of his childhood and adolescence , as well as
through his casual conversations late in life with friends and ac–
quaintances. As for Nietzsche, all his books starting with
Human,
All-Too-Human,
bear witness to a man engaged in a sort of life–
and-death dialogue with himself, a dialogue that is intense, all–
absorbing, and stretched thin over turbulent waters.
As
Nietzsche
said, "Every art and every philosophy may be considered a rem–
edy and aid in the service of growing and struggling life... 'my
philosophy' .. .is another word for what persecutes me right into
the roots of my being." Similarly, James speaks of his task as
artist as "nothing less than [turning] myself inside out." The
works of both are possessed of the power of the personal; their
lives seem to be fashioned in the image of their labors.
