Failing to face up to Fritz

This is the most old-fashioned new book I’ve read for a long time, something that I think Curtis Cate would regard as a compliment. In the Preface he writes, characteristically:

Perhaps, indeed, the day is not too distant when, new post-modern norms having imposed themselves through a process of Nietzschean ‘transvaluation’, marriage (even between ‘heterosexuals’) will be declared abnormal as well as deplorably ‘old hat’.

That letter-to-the-editor (most likely of the Daily Telegraph) tone consorts oddly with Cate’s largely favourable view of Nietzsche, though he does only report a smattering of the developing opinions of the author he indifferently refers to as ‘Fritz’ and ‘Nietzsche’. He indulges in neologisms at such a rate that they rub shoulders with the innumerable misprints, so numerous that I had to keep reminding myself that the publisher is not one of the ancient university presses. ‘Characteral’, ‘morosity’, ‘elogious’, ‘malinchonia’ – somehow the book’s style makes such words less surprising than they would be in most contexts.

Cate has produced the longest biography of the philosopher in English, taking us through his life, at any rate until the sudden onset of madness in 1889, when Nietzsche was in his 45th year, at a steady pace, basing his account on primary sources (letters to and from, works published and unpublished) whenever possible, in translations of his own, usually good ones. I find it hard to envisage what the impression may be on someone new to Nietzsche, and I’m not certain that anyone fairly familiar with him will welcome the amount of detail, for instance about the fuss surrounding the publication of The Birth of Tragedy, or the philosopher’s changing views of Wagner, central as they were to his life and thinking. I suspect that, with the very large cast, and without the help of a glossary of proper names or a set of mini-biographies, readers might get lost in the thickets of Nietzsche’s relationships with his family, friends, colleagues, enemies.