Will Stone

A Beaker Full of the Warm South

Nietzsche’s Journey to Sorrento – Genesis of the Philosophy of the Free Spirit, Paolo d’Iorio (translated by Sylvia Mae Gorelick), University of Chicago Press 2016, 168 pp. (Hardcover)

‘The snake which cannot shed its skin perishes. Likewise, those spirits which are unable to change their concepts are no longer spirits.’ - Nietzsche

In October 1876, at the age of thirty-two, Friedrich Nietzsche, then an established professor of classical philology at Basel University, embarked on his first journey to southern Italy. The trip was instrumental in changing the trajectory of Nietzsche’s existence and thought, becoming ‘the metamorphosis of his metamorphoses’ as Stefan Zweig wrote in his monograph on the philosopher ( Hölderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche: The Struggle with the Daemon 1925). From the impact of this first sojourn in the south, the region would occupy Nietzsche’s mind as a longed-for paradise, a beacon of potential health and a haven of reflection and renewed creativity after the cold ossified north.

This sense of necessary escape from the north was nothing new in German letters. Goethe referred to it in a letter from Trento on his own flight south, to take leave of ‘that evil sky’, but for Nietzsche the south was also a counterweight to an academically trained, militarist and increasingly nationalist Germany. Italy was the inexhaustible giver of extraordinary light warmth and the harmonious properties of the landscape appeared to accord perfectly with its indigenous human element – a land in short that could support a new sense of freedom. The professor was sick, dogged by bouts of nausea, agonising headaches and failing eyesight. After twelve years in his post at Basel, assumed at the precocious age of twenty-four, Nietzsche was weary of the strictures foisted on him by his academic role, and found

it increasingly difficult to meet his responsibilities given his precarious state of health. Stagnant and restless, sensing the stage had been set for a crucial break out, Nietzsche leapt at the opportunity to spend the winter of 1876-77 in slow-paced Sorrento. He sensed a chance to engage in the more ‘free spirited’ state of the wayfarer, the explorer, the lonely observer and most delicious of all, the prospect of hunting down his next philosophical quarry. Nietzsche’s Journey to Sorrento by Paulo d’Iorio is the fascinating account of this period which draws on all available testimonies, including Nietzsche’s notebooks and letters and the reminiscences of diverse friends, visitors and travelling companions.

For a protracted journey the ailing philosopher needed company, support, friends to watch over him. Fortunately, a well-heeled aristocrat and writer from Wagner’s circle, Malwida von Meysenbug, who still mistakenly saw Nietzsche through the prism of the metaphysics inherent to The Birth of Tragedy (1872), invited Nietzsche and his close friend Dr Paul Rée to join her in Sorrento. The party also included one of Nietzsche’s students, Albert Brenner, also in poor health. Fatefully the Wagners, whose ethics and world view Nietzsche had now firmly rejected, happened to be staying close by. For Nietzsche, these six months in the south, as skilfully articulated by D’Iorio, constituted a moment of absolutely necessary transformation, a rejuvenating hiatus which allowed Nietzsche to shed the load of the recent past, finally casting off the twin ankle bracelets of the Wagnerian and the Schopenhaurian, that were hampering his individualist forward thrust. There in the scented orange groves above Posillipo, this great mind successfully slipped the moorings of others and moved off alone, into uncharted ever more perilous waters.

Although Nietzsche was to return to Italy during the next dozen prolific years until his final breakdown; Orta, Venice, Genoa etc. and finally at the end for a last grasp at the coveted light in Turin, it was the initial Sorrento period which was his happiest and most hopeful, coming at a time when he was poised on the threshold of his major works, impatiently waiting to chisel his name into the rock of the future. It was in Sorrento, D’Iorio argues, that Nietzsche abandoned the metaphysics of art encapsulated in

The Birth of Tragedy, the book which had so thrilled the Wagnerians, and became a philosopher in the most complete sense as his ambitious notion of the free spirit gained crucial momentum. D’Iorio sensibly quotes a poignant notebook entry from the autumn of 1881 revealing what the allure of the south of Italy meant to a beleaguered Nietzsche at the time:

Posillipo and all the blind whose eyes will be opened. I don’t have enough strength for the North: awkward and artificial souls reign there, who work as constantly and necessarily at the measures of prudence as the beaver at his dam. And to think I spent my whole youth among them! That is what overcame me when, for the first time, I saw the evening come up, with its velvet grey and red, in the sky over Naples – like a shudder of pity for myself, that I had started my life by being old, and tears came to my eyes and the feeling of having been saved at the last moment. I have enough spirit for the south.

Nietzsche’s journey to Naples is fascinating in itself. On the leg from Geneva to Genoa, Nietzsche shares a train carriage with one Isabelle von der Pahlen. The latter writes later of her lone encounter with this ‘great stranger’ whose presence overwhelmed her. Late in the evening, struggling gamely to inflate a travel pillow, Pahlen becomes aware of a presence beside her, ‘I suddenly catch sight of a finger approaching the rubber monster’. And responding to the lady’s request for assistance, the noble Nietzsche attempts to blow air into the contraption, in vain. Abandoning the pillow, the two strangers enter into a conversation which lasts into the small hours. Pahlen calls what follows ‘an orgy of thoughts’ and goes on ‘I was literally intoxicated by the power and novelty of the ideas that sprang from the lips of the man who sat facing me... a Croesus of thought who had worlds to give and who was in just the right mood to do it...’ Pahlen was experiencing a Nietzsche in the throes of change, an urgently forward propelling Nietzsche, a powder keg in the making.

On his arrival in the south Malwida von Meysenbug recalls Nietzsche was ‘as if drunk with ecstasy... he laughed for joy.’ And later. ‘Nietzsche’s

face lit up with joyful astonishment that was almost childlike, how he was overcome with emotion...’ The omens then were good as the foursome took up their lodgings in the Villa Rubinacci two days later. In a letter to his sister on October 28th Nietzsche writes ‘The air here is a mixture of mountain and sea air. It is truly beneficent for the eyes: just in front of my terrace, I have a great green garden below me (which stays green even in winter) and behind it the very dark sea, and behind that Vesuvius. Let us hope...’ The hope was not in vain. Nietzsche steadily appears to improve both mentally and physically in this ‘new homeland’, he takes regular walks amongst the cypresses and fig trees, rides on ponies along the narrow mule tracks through the orange groves and bathes in the warm sea water, a regime which soon lends him a healthier hue. Rée writes to Nietzsche’s sister ‘... I will tell you about the greatest curiosity in Sorrento, namely your brother. At the moment he is sitting in the only heated room, dictating his fifth ‘Untimely’ ( Untimely Meditations 1873-1876) to Brenner, he looks good (tanned) and has improved remarkably over the last eight days.’

Nietzsche feels a weight has been lifted. The group settle into a pattern, forming a micro-community of sorts, the long winter evenings pass with book sessions by the fire. Rée reads Voltaire, Plato, Diderot, Goethe, Michelet, Daudet, Turgenev, Lope de Vega and others, but most often they relish the notes on Greek civilisation by Jakob Burckhardt, the renowned historian of Basel. They read the French translation of the fourth Untimely Meditation and pick wild flowers from the meadow to send to the translator. The little community of Malwida and her ‘gentlemen’, her ‘three sons’, seems content and self-contained. On December 16th 1876 Nietzsche writes to the staunch Wagnerian Louise Ott ‘Our little circle brings together much meditation and friendship, many aspirations and hopes – in short a great deal of happiness.’ Malwida later tells a friend that Nietzsche is finally finding out what health might be like and that he senses he will probably never feel this good again.

In Sorrento Nietzsche kept a slate tablet by his bed on which he recorded the thoughts that came to him on sleepless nights. His Sorrento notebooks are alive with observations made on the hoof. As D’Iorio states: ‘thoughts

are jotted down in their nascent state, when the philosopher grasped them between the sea and the mountains, between the aroma of orange trees and that of sea salt along the narrow paths between the olive trees.’ The first couple of weeks the group pay regular visits to the Wagners at the more sumptuous hotel Vittoria with its splendid terrace overlooking the bay. The relationship is cordial but increasingly strained. After the Wagners leave in November the group consolidates further, melding Meysenbug’s notions of emancipated idealism with Nietzsche’s burgeoning thought around the free spirit. The friends foster the fantasy of establishing a ‘school of educators’, a place of instruction for higher minds who will guide a future European race towards a new enlightenment, to be sited in a romantic old Capuchin monastery nearby. Nietzsche and Rée were naturally to take the role of teachers. This much vaunted ‘Monastery of Free Spirits’ was never to be realised.

From the terrace of the Villa Rubinacci Nietzsche could gaze out across the bay to Vesuvius and between the famous volcano and Capri, his gaze settled on the volcanic island of Ischia. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85), as D’Iorio explains, Ischia would serve as the ‘Blessed Isles’, the haven where the free thinkers can assemble and live a spiritually ennobled existence in solitude. Nietzsche planned to go and live on his beloved Ischia with his sister in the summer of 1883, but it was devastated by a massive earthquake that July. Nietzsche was overcome by the terrible symbolism of this event. ‘I have hardly finished my poem when the island collapses.’ Vesuvius became in Nietzsche’s imagination the gateway to the underworld, a diabolic destructive obverse to the Ischia dream. In Zarathustra, Vesuvius, which had erupted violently in 1872, appears as ‘the fire hound’, or ‘the fire spewing mountain’. Nietzsche contrived Ischia and Vesuvius as two opposing poles reflecting on the one hand freedom of the spirit and change and on the other violent destruction and ultimate stasis. In the words of D’Iorio:

Each of them is volcanic: except that on the Blessed Isles the volcano is an instrument of gradual transformation that serves to set in motion and accelerate a process of development. Contrastingly,

on the isle of the fire hound, the volcano’s eruption destroys the city, mummifies its inhabitants (Pompeii) overturns statues and changes everything, so nothing changes.

But a shadow looms over the Villa commune in the spring of 1877, due to their increasing awareness of Nietzsche’s radical shift in thought. His draft of Human, All Too Human – A Book for Free Spirits, published in 1878, confirms a major transformation which is horrifying to his Wagnerian friends since they had imagined the extreme thoughts Nietzsche had been recently espousing were merely a phase, a temporary period of mental upheaval which would culminate in a more lucid reinforcement of The Birth of Tragedy. The Wagner situation is the crucial backdrop to Nietzsche’s time in Sorrento. By then the severance with the once revered composer is terminal. The dream of a Hellenistic civilisation in lederhosen that dominated the Tribschen era dissolved in the society window dressing of the Bayreuth festival in the summer of 1876. The blessed isle of Tribschen is irrevocably replaced by that of Ischia six months later. We gain an insight into the gravity of this abandoned friendship from Nietzsche’s letters. From Genoa, in February 1882, Nietzsche wrote to his sister:

Certainly those were the best days of my life, the ones I spent with him at Tribschen . . . But the omnipotence of our tasks drove us apart, and now we cannot re-join one another – we have become estranged. I was indescribably happy in those days, when I discovered Wagner! I had sought for so long a man who was superior to me and who actually looked beyond me. I thought I had found such a man in Wagner. I was wrong. Now I cannot even compare myself to him – I belong to a different world.

Six months later, Nietzsche revisited the site of Tribschen with Paul Rée and Lou Salomé. To Salomé, Nietzsche confessed:

I have suffered so much because of this man and his art. It was a long, long passion; I find no other word for it. The required renunciation, the necessary return to myself belong to the hardest

and most melancholic experiences of my life.

In later years Nietzsche dreams of returning to the bay of Naples, to nostalgically reclaim the state of harmony he acquired there, but at each attempt, as if fate had decreed otherwise, he is stymied. In 1887, ten years on, Nietzsche remembers the part Sorrento had played in his ‘becoming’. With Brenner dead from tuberculosis, Rée estranged after the Lou Salomé incident, there is only Malwida left and to her he writes:

Yet another winter in your company... that is indeed the highest and most alluring prospect and perspective, for which I could never thank you enough... Preferably once again in Sorrento. Or in Capri, where I will play music for you again, but better than before! Or in Amalfi, or Castellammare... I have retained a kind of yearning and superstition from our stay down there, as though, if only for a couple of moments, I had breathed more deeply than anywhere else.

But it is Malwida who will later return to Sorrento alone, Nietzsche will never return. Sorrento had already played its part in the drama of his life.

The winter of 1876-77 on the bay of Naples is significant because it was a catalyst to delivering the transubstantiation of values for Europe Nietzsche so ardently sought. Sorrento was a stage in Nietzsche’s life journey of physical restoration and radical scene change, a sensory jolt which enabled the thinker to switch gears more effectively, to find ready symbols for his new ideas, jettison older components of his thought and arrive closer to his true self. Life in Sorrento in the cultured company of the Villa Rubinacci seems a far cry from the later solitary reticent figure depicted by Zweig ‘haunting the comfortless dining room of a 6 francs a day pension in the Alps or on the coastline of Liguria...’ For Sorrento should not be likened to those desperate Alpine waystations of the future, where Nietzsche maniacally insisted solitude was the required passport to renewed health. It was rather the unexpected springboard to his post-Basel existence as a free operator, divested of academic responsibility and ready to assume the mantle of guide to the oncoming ‘aeronauts of the spirit’.

His philosophy aside, we surely need Nietzsche’s wisdom more than ever, like a welcome lit window in the unimaginably dark fir forest of our time. For after Sorrento the ultimate poet thinker could casually lay this pearl at the door of the future. ‘It is the stillest words that bring on the storm. Thoughts that come on doves’ feet guide the world.’