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biography Ways With Words 25 25 25 25th Festival of Words and Ideas Dartington, Devon 8 – 18 July 2016 Juliet Barker Jonathan Bate Melvyn Bragg Helen Dunmore Mark Haddon A.L. Kennedy Anna Pavord Fay Weldon and many more 01803 867373 wayswithwords.co.uk brilliant, especially at classics and literature, though not before his teenage years, never in mathematics, and not without occasional shameless plagiarism. His poems, letters and essays are pretentious, though not all that pretentious for a teenage Nietzsche. Indeed, the future author of ‘Why I am a Destiny’ succumbed to bouts of humility: describing a photograph of himself, he noted: ‘My stance is hunched, my feet somewhat crooked, and my hand looks like a dumpling.’ It seems the Dionysian barely made an appearance in Nietzsche’s youth. He got drunk at school and afterwards apologised to his mother, calling it ‘one of the most unpleasant and saddest incidents I have ever been responsible for’. There is no mention of romantic or sexual stirrings of any kind. As he chooses which university to attend, childhood friends write to encourage him to join them at Heidelberg, where there are great parties with beautiful women. Nietzsche goes to Bonn. If not his life, what about his times? Blue and Nietzsche both suggest that the 1850s were dull years in which to come of age. The 1860s saw the birth pangs of the German nation. The associated upheavals certainly did touch the young Nietzsche, who was drafted into a Prussian cavalry artillery unit. But Nietzsche saw no fighting during the period covered by the book and, while serving, he lived at home with his mother. A serious but unglamorous injury interrupted the military service of the man who idolised Caesar and Napoleon: he tried to jump onto a horse and missed. Where Blue attempts to provoke interest beyond the antiquarian is in Nietzsche’s works of the period, specifically in his attempts at understanding his own life and the extent to which the individual is shaped by, or is independent from, his or her context. For Blue, the autobiographies reveal a change in Nietzsche’s attitudes. Sometimes his emphasis is on the individual as the driving force, with the environment as mere scenic background. Elsewhere, Nietzsche worries that environmental influences shape the individual, undermining any meaningful project of self-development. An attempted resolution lies in the idea of a fit between character and environ- ment: the environment influences you in some respects, but only when you have the sort of character that can be influenced in just these respects. Character is in charge after all. It is doubtful whether this – and the related twists and turns sketched by Blue – adds much to the question of whether and how self-authorship is possible. I might still experience the fact that my character is susceptible to influence in some respects as just one more ‘environmental’ factor restricting my self-authorship. I might, for example, wish I weren’t the kind of person who is so responsive to peer pressure or who becomes so easily addicted to drink, much as I might wish I was born in a different time or place. I might even wish I weren’t the kind of person who was so self-critical regarding my own malleability and addictive personality. Drawing a clear line between ‘me’, my ‘character’ and my ‘environment’ is never going to be easy. It would certainly bother Nietzsche throughout his writing career, so it is enlightening to see his interest emerge so early on. One could hardly criticise the teenage Nietzsche, or his biographer, for not clearing up the mess. It is worth saying, though, that Blue appears to have a horse in the race. For him, Nietzsche ‘did not become the Nietzsche known today “naturally,” through the graceful maturation of some inborn character. He engaged rather in a self-conducted and self-conscious campaign to follow his own guidance’, in part through his autobiographies, which resulted in a successful act of self-authorship. Thus, Blue’s Nietzsche is engaged in the activity of self-authoring, the very possibility of which he is questioning in some of his self-authoring writings. Indeed, Blue’s Nietzsche eventually abandons autobiography, perhaps precisely because of the dangers he comes to think are inherent in self-conscious self-authorship – the sort of thing Blue says Nietzsche was successfully doing all along. To my knowledge, this fourth wall is never explicitly broken in Blue’s text. One is left with the intriguing question: what would Nietzsche – pre-early, early, or late – have made of Blue’s account? To order this book from our partner bookshop, Heywood Hill, see page 19. Literary Review | june 2016 8
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biography jonathan romain One Nation, Dual Identity Disraeli: The Novel Politician By David Cesarani (Yale University Press 292pp £16.99) What is it about Disraeli that continues to fascinate over a century after his death in 1881? Was it his extraordinary journey from dandy novelist to European statesman? Was it the fact that someone born a commoner and a non-Christian should eventually lead the Conservative Party, bastion of nobility and the Church? Perhaps it was the remarkable ability he needed to achieve such a leap. Or perhaps his unlikely ascent to the office of prime minister reflects the changing social climate of 19th-century Britain. It may also be that, though it was not realised at the time, he was a political prototype in a variety of respects. His brand of ‘One Nation’ conservatism is a concept still invoked by today’s Conservative prime minister. He also paved the way for Jews as party leaders. Had the aspiration of Michael Howard to become prime minister at the 2005 general election succeeded, many would have seen it as completing the entryism begun by Disraeli: a Jew occupying the highest office of state, but this time one who was still practising as a Jew. Part of Yale’s Jewish Lives series, which ranges from Kafka to Einstein to Bob Dylan, the late David Cesarani’s book is a specifically Jewish biography of Disraeli, analysing the extent to which his Jewishness defined his life and policies. Was Disraeli a Christian who happened to have Jewish origins but had no Jewish identity, or was he a thoroughly Jewish Jew who was able to rise to the premiership only because of the fig leaf afforded by his father’s decision to have him baptised at the age of twelve? This is a question that long predates Cesarani’s book. Lord Beaconsfield, written by Disraeli’s contemporary J A Froude in 1890, presents his Jewishness as central to his career, albeit in a positive light, enabling him to tackle issues in an innovative way and freeing him from the prejudices of those born into the ruling class. Froude concludes, ‘Though calling himself a Christian, he was a Jew in his heart.’ Conversely, disparagers such as the Earl of Cromer in Disraeli (1912) saw his ‘oriental’ character as the reason why he was so quick-witted and able to degrade English political life. Jewish biographers also highlighted his Jewishness, but in excessively praiseworthy terms. In Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield (1950), Cecil Roth declared that the social legislation passed during his second term as prime minister, from 1874 to 1880, ‘expressed that Jewish craving for social justice which is one of the heritages of the Bible, and that Jewish sympathy for the underdog which is one of the results of his history’. Against this backdrop, Cesarani tries to steer a more unbiased course. He shows, for instance, that from the very start of his career Disraeli was characterised as a Jew by others. When he first stood for Parliament, unsuccessfully, at High Wycombe in 1832, The Times reported that a candidate in a neighbouring constituency remarked that, unlike in Buckinghamshire, the voters of Berkshire ‘were not troubled by any Jews’. Disraeli’s Jewishness was to remain a central feature of the way others perceived him throughout his life. Even in the aftermath of his greatest triumph at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, his detractors complained of the ‘Hebrew policy’ of the ‘Jewish premier’. His parliamentary enemy William Gladstone legitimised the much more unsavoury tone of others by inveighing against ‘that alien’, whose purpose is to ‘annexe England to his native East’. In many ways, though, Disraeli himself gave scope to those who wished to see him as different by constantly drawing attention to his Jewishness. His novels feature prominent Jewish characters, such as Alroy and Sidonia, through whom he lauds the noble ancestry of the Jewish race. His pride in his roots was openly expressed in his political speeches too. Disraeli may have wanted to provoke admiration rather than invective, but he was certainly not shy in highlighting his origins. Cesarani is at his most forensic when he leaves aside the question of Disraeli’s personal sentiments and traces his actions with regard to Jewish matters. He points out that when Disraeli travelled to Jerusalem in 1831, he did not visit the Jewish Quarter, the Western Wall or even a synagogue. It was a personal odyssey, not a Jewish one, and was used to provide a backdrop for his novel Tancred, not to explore his heritage. More tellingly, he took no part in the series of debates in Parliament over Jewish emancipation during the 1840s. He did play a role in engineering a compromise in 1858 that allowed Jews into the Commons, but Cesarani sees it more as ‘a triumph of political tactics rather than the fulfillment of a cherished ideal’. Similarly, he took no interest in the Mortara Affair (which involved the abduction from Bologna of a Jewish boy who was subsequently sent to the Vatican to be raised as a Catholic) or the Damascus Blood Libel, despite the outcry far beyond Jewish circles. If he was hailed as a hero by Jews for obtaining civic rights for Balkan Jews in the Treaty of Berlin, for Disraeli this achievement was incidental to his larger plan and not an object per se. Despite the disparate and often confusing Jewish currents that flowed through Disraeli’s life, Cesarani plausibly suggests a pattern. Disraeli had no Jewish allegiance in a religious or cultural sense, but did set great store by his Jewish racial identity. It is debatable whether this was a tactic to pre-empt prejudice and celebrate what he knew others would condemn, or a means of putting himself on a par with the English aristocracy by asserting that he had an ancestry just as noble as theirs. In the transition period from the ghetto to assimilation, Disraeli differed from many other Jews who totally embraced their new identity to the exclusion of their former one. In this respect, Disraeli was unique in accepting his dual identity and even flaunting it. To order this book from our partner bookshop, Heywood Hill, see page 19. june 2016 | Literary Review 9

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biography

Ways With Words

25 25 25

25th Festival of Words and Ideas Dartington, Devon

8 – 18 July 2016

Juliet Barker Jonathan Bate Melvyn Bragg Helen Dunmore Mark Haddon

A.L. Kennedy Anna Pavord Fay Weldon and many more

01803 867373 wayswithwords.co.uk brilliant, especially at classics and literature, though not before his teenage years, never in mathematics, and not without occasional shameless plagiarism. His poems, letters and essays are pretentious, though not all that pretentious for a teenage Nietzsche. Indeed, the future author of ‘Why I am a Destiny’ succumbed to bouts of humility: describing a photograph of himself, he noted: ‘My stance is hunched, my feet somewhat crooked, and my hand looks like a dumpling.’ It seems the Dionysian barely made an appearance in Nietzsche’s youth. He got drunk at school and afterwards apologised to his mother, calling it ‘one of the most unpleasant and saddest incidents I have ever been responsible for’. There is no mention of romantic or sexual stirrings of any kind. As he chooses which university to attend, childhood friends write to encourage him to join them at Heidelberg, where there are great parties with beautiful women. Nietzsche goes to Bonn.

If not his life, what about his times? Blue and Nietzsche both suggest that the 1850s were dull years in which to come of age. The 1860s saw the birth pangs of the German nation. The associated upheavals certainly did touch the young Nietzsche, who was drafted into a Prussian cavalry artillery unit. But Nietzsche saw no fighting during the period covered by the book and, while serving, he lived at home with his mother. A serious but unglamorous injury interrupted the military service of the man who idolised Caesar and Napoleon: he tried to jump onto a horse and missed.

Where Blue attempts to provoke interest beyond the antiquarian is in Nietzsche’s works of the period, specifically in his attempts at understanding his own life and the extent to which the individual is shaped by, or is independent from, his or her context. For Blue, the autobiographies reveal a change in Nietzsche’s attitudes. Sometimes his emphasis is on the individual as the driving force, with the environment as mere scenic background. Elsewhere, Nietzsche worries that environmental influences shape the individual, undermining any meaningful project of self-development. An attempted resolution lies in the idea of a fit between character and environ-

ment: the environment influences you in some respects, but only when you have the sort of character that can be influenced in just these respects. Character is in charge after all. It is doubtful whether this – and the related twists and turns sketched by Blue – adds much to the question of whether and how self-authorship is possible. I might still experience the fact that my character is susceptible to influence in some respects as just one more ‘environmental’ factor restricting my self-authorship. I might, for example, wish I weren’t the kind of person who is so responsive to peer pressure or who becomes so easily addicted to drink, much as I might wish I was born in a different time or place. I might even wish I weren’t the kind of person who was so self-critical regarding my own malleability and addictive personality.

Drawing a clear line between ‘me’, my ‘character’ and my ‘environment’ is never going to be easy. It would certainly bother Nietzsche throughout his writing career, so it is enlightening to see his interest emerge so early on. One could hardly criticise the teenage Nietzsche, or his biographer, for not clearing up the mess. It is worth saying, though, that Blue appears to have a horse in the race. For him, Nietzsche ‘did not become the Nietzsche known today “naturally,” through the graceful maturation of some inborn character. He engaged rather in a self-conducted and self-conscious campaign to follow his own guidance’, in part through his autobiographies, which resulted in a successful act of self-authorship. Thus, Blue’s Nietzsche is engaged in the activity of self-authoring, the very possibility of which he is questioning in some of his self-authoring writings. Indeed, Blue’s Nietzsche eventually abandons autobiography, perhaps precisely because of the dangers he comes to think are inherent in self-conscious self-authorship – the sort of thing Blue says Nietzsche was successfully doing all along. To my knowledge, this fourth wall is never explicitly broken in Blue’s text. One is left with the intriguing question: what would Nietzsche – pre-early, early, or late – have made of Blue’s account? To order this book from our partner bookshop, Heywood Hill, see page 19.

Literary Review | june 2016 8

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