I had heard of Nietzsche, the wild German philosopher who averred that “God is dead!” when I was in my late teens.  My college roommate seemed to know about him (and Ayn Rand), but I considered anyone who would make such a stupid remark not worthy of further attention.  And Nietzsche was not among the philosophers studied in the Philosophy 101 course.

But he came to my attention about 10 days ago when there was an hour-long BBC program about the man and his life.  In the program, the “God is dead!” exclamation was attributed to the untimely death of his much-admired father at an early age from a horrible brain disease, and to his view of the culture in late 19th century Europe.  As Nietzsche saw it, the culture was wantonly secular, and self-serving.  People cared only about entertainment, pleasure, wealth, status, and image.  His view was that we had killed God (who had been alive).

The novel I am currently writing has a similar theme: society has turned its back on God.  So I bought a copy of Nietzsche by Walter Kaufmann to compare my views with those of the great German philosopher.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Walter Kaufmann (1921 – 1980) was professor of philosophy at Princeton University and a world-renowned scholar and translator of Nietzsche.  In fact, Nietzsche was first published in 1950, and has been through four editions, the latest appeared in 1974 in paperback.

It is clear from a mere perusal of the book that Kaufmann devoted much of his life to the study of Nietzsche, who was a difficult and somewhat opaque character, who fought with his mother and sister, and had a tendency to state his case in strong, sometimes extreme, language.  For these reasons, he was not well understood and attracted considerable criticism.  In fact, he became a hero of Nazi ideology, when some of what he said was either misunderstood or taken out of context.  Much of  this misunderstanding is owing to his sister who was an ardent Nazi, and who published re-written pieces of his work.  Nietzsche abhorred the German state and anti-Semitism.  His use of the term ‘blond beast’ was thought to praise Aryan purity, when, in fact, it had reference to the male lion.

The book begins with a history of  Nietzsche’s life: born 1844 and died in 1900, having slipped into insanity on about 1889.  He was made a full professor of classical philosophy at the age of 24; traveled extensively in Europe, and suffered from ill health.  He never married, but he proposed twice to Lou Salomé, a bright, strong-willed woman who was seventeen years his junior.

Nietzsche wrote fifteen books, there are also his lecture notes, his letters and his personal notes.  Rather than deal with each of his works one-at-a-time, Kaufmann addresses themes of Nietzsche’s work.  This is a better approach since Nietzsche made changes to his views from time to time.  Nietzsche was a doubter, a questioner, who took nothing at face value, yet he avoided the label ‘nihilist’ by attempting to establish pieces of a structure to replace what he had torn down.  He was anti-Christian because for him it placed too much value on faith and not enough on good works, and he called himself the Antichrist as a result of inconsistencies he perceived in Christ’s messages and actions, and because he refused to accept Christ’s divinity.  While he averred that ‘God is dead!’ because he thought people had turned their backs on God, it is not clear that Nietzsche was an outright atheist.  He seems to have had a belief in the possibility of God.

One of his better known ideas is that the basic human urge (more important than sex) is the Will to Power.  By this somewhat confusing term he meant striving to overcome the faults and weaknesses in ourselves to become as valuable human beings as we could be.  For Nietzsche there were three categories of humans which exhibited extraordinary value: artists, saints, and philosophers.  When one had overcome one’s faults and weaknesses, one became an ‘úbermensch’ – literally an ‘over man’, which has unfortunately been translated as ‘superman’, which wasn’t at all what Nietzsche had in mind: a sustained, an arduous, personal striving for self improvement which leads to happiness.  Coupled to Nietzsche’s concept of the úbermensch was the idea of ‘eternal recurrence’.  This latter was the unconditional and infinitely repeated circular course of all things; unfortunately, even if one assumes that time is infinite, this has been proven impossible.

Kaufmann is at his best shedding light on Nietzsche’s intentions, his values, and his thought processes.  As a result there is an enormous amount of detail in the book: footnotes and quotations from a wide variety of sources.  Occasionally, the logic of an argument becomes murky, but Kaufmann’s straightforward approach clarifies both the distinct character and the great contribution of this philosopher, and restores his stature in the face of unjust criticism, poor health, broken friendships and little happiness.

If one wants to understand Nietzsche as a whole philosopher, this book – rather that any two or three of his own books – is the one to read.

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,500 times in 2015. If it were a cable car, it would take about 25 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

This isn’t about who I think will win this year’s Booker Prize, but about a man who thinks he knows who will win and who won money last year on thirteen bets that The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan would win.

An article in The Daily Telegraph begins: “A mystery punter who correctly predicted the winner of last year’s Man Booker Prize using a formula based on ‘Sherlock Holmes deductive reasoning’ is at it again, this time staking his money on Sunjeev Sahota.  The man, who goes by the name of ‘Mr Smith’, has visited a string of betting shops in and around Darlington, Co Durham, and placed the maximum stake on the British author’s novel The Year of the Runaways.  Ladbrokes has reacted by cutting Sahota’s odds from 10/1 to 5/2, because ‘Mr Smith’ has form: his successful thirteen bets last year.

“The man, described as middle-aged, well-spoken and fair haired, later rang a local newspaper to disclose his methods – and the fact that he had not read any book on the shortlist.  After reading online reviews of the books he picked the winner by studying Wikipedia biographies of the judges and working out which novels they would favour.  ‘I never read any of the books because, quite frankly, fiction is not my thing,’ he told the Northern Echo last year.  ‘I had, therefore, to spend much more time reviewing the judges than the actual books themselves.  I did a case study of each judge, using Wikipedia and YouTube, and read as much as I could about the books they had written, their interests, their politics and religious beliefs and then, through a process of Sherlock Holmes deductive reasoning, tried to intuit which books they would go for.’

“His worry that female judges would not like a war story – Flanagan’s novel was about a survivor of Burma’s ‘Death Railway’ – was assuaged by the fact it ‘had a love affair inserted into it that I guessed would keep the female judges from recoiling in horror at some of the gruesome aspects of the book.’  This year, he believes the six judges will settle on The Year of the Runaways, a tale  of Indian immigrants struggling to make a life for themselves in Sheffield.  The string of bets, made in shops in the Darlington area and backed up by online betting, puts Sahota’s book second only to Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life in the Ladbrokes odds.

If you fancy taking a punt, better make it today.  The winner will be announced tomorrow.

As we now know the winner is A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James.  Let’s hope ‘Mr Smith’ didn’t ‘bet the ranch’ on Year of the Runaways.  2015 wasn’t the year to bet on the Ladbrokes favorites.

I was one of the 100,000+ readers who bought a copy of Go Set a Watchman on its first day of issue. For me To Kill a Mockingbird is a great work of literary, social and political significance. So, I was anxious to read Harper Lee’s second (or first) novel which apparently served as the draft which became To Kill a Mockingbird. The pre-publication reviews of Watchman, which were largely uncomplimentary, didn’t deter me.

Harper Lee

So, Lee submitted a draft of Watchman to publisher J B Lippencott, where an editor suggested that she re-write the book in the first person, from the perspective of Scout, a young girl. The re-writing took two years, during which Lee became so frustrated she threw the manuscript out the window of her New York apartment into the snow. Her literary agent persuaded her to retrieve it and carry on. Reportedly, during the re-writing, Lee’s editor was closely involved with her.

Two of the principal characters, Scout and her father Atticus, appear in both novels. But, in Watchman, Scout has become Jean Louise, a twenty-something, new York-based, adult, and Atticus is now in his seventies, still living in the rural Alabama town. Three new major characters are introduced in Watchman: Henry Clinton, a life-long friend and marriage prospect; Aunt Alexandra, her father’s sister, an arch, small-town, Southern traditionalist; and Dr John, her father’s brother, and eccentric but wise philosopher. Jem, Scout’s older brother, is strangely dead.

In Mockingbird, the plot focused on the trial of a black man who is wrongly accused of raping a white woman; he is defended by Atticus, the small town lawyer. This tightly-focused plot yields themes of justice, racial and sexual equality, love and duty.

In Watchman, the story follows Jean Louise’s relationships with Henry, her aunt, her uncle and her father. Race is again an issue, but less dramatic and compelling: the grandson of Jean Louise’s childhood black, nanny/mentor has killed an old white man in a car accident which was the grandson’s fault. This time, Atticus is revealed as a racist who wants to limit the freedom and political power which black people have acquired over the preceding twenty years. The message I get from the book is that how one acts on vital issues, such as race relations, is determined by our conscience (the Watchman), and our conscience is influenced by our context, which must also be respected. At the very least, Watchman seems to be a watering down of the clear, landmark message of Mockingbird. Disappointing!

The characters, the setting, and the context of Watchman are all well defined, credible and real. These descriptions rely on interesting, unique writing. Some of the dialogue comes across as contrived, rather than natural. Frequently, there are references to obscure literary figures: these references tend to confuse rather than illuminate. Apart from my concerns about the message of the novel, the plot seems to have been created ad lib. Too much text is devoted to setting the context, and exploring dead ends (Jean Louise’s relationship with Henry), and not enough effort is exerted on defining the role and implications of the Watchman.

One can’t help but wonder if the editor behind Mockingbird were still alive and involved with Watchman, what would the recent novel be?

I bought this book by Osamu Dazai at the Kaizosha Book Store at Narita Airport on the way back from Tokyo to London. It was one of perhaps a dozen novels available in English from the bookstore.

Osamu Dazai

Having never read the work of a Japanese novelist, I was eager to try one.

The translator, Donald Keene, has an introduction in which he explains that the literal translation of the Japanese title, Ningen Shikaku, would be “Disqualified as a Human Being”. Having read the novel, I don’t feel that either title does the work justice, but I can’t think of a better one. Keene makes the point that Japanese writers and literary intellectuals, in general feel isolated (as is Yozo, the protagonist in No Longer Human) from the West, where the perception may be that Japanese writers have nothing interesting to offer.

Dazai (June 19, 1909 – June 13, 1948) grew up in a small town in the remote north of Japan. His family was wealthy and educated; Dazai himself was familiar with European literature, American cinema, modern painting and sculpture. So he was very much aware of Western culture. Dazai’s earlier novel, The Setting Sun, was reviewed by Richard Gilman in Jubilee: “Such is the power of art to transfigure what is objectively ignoble or depraved that The Setting Sun is actually deeply moving and even inspiring. . . . To know the nature of despair and to triumph over it in ways that are possible to oneself – imagination was Dasai’s only weapon – is surely a sort of grace.”

No Longer Human is told in the first person by Yozo the youngest child of a large, well-to-do family in the north of Japan. In this regard, Yozo’s background (and perhaps his feelings about others) mirror those of Dazai. The story begins in childhood and continues until about the age of thirty. Yozo is a good-looking child, but he suffers from and extreme lack of self-confidence, and to put my own diagnostic on it: he also suffers from some form of autism in the sense that he has difficulty interpreting the emotions and the motivations of others. His father, a powerful figure, remains remote. He feels disconnected from most of the humanity around him. His coping mechanism is to be the clown: valued by others as a sort of entertainer. While Yozo is obviously intelligent, his disconnection means that he has no real identity or a goal in life. Instead, he is buffeted hither and thither by the forces he encounters.

This theme of disconnection is central to No Longer Human, and it is reinforced by contrast with supporting characters. Yozo’s wife, Yoshiko, is trusting of other people to a fault. Yozo’s companion, Horiki, has an entirely selfish method of dealing with other people. Flatfish, Yozo’s family-imposed guardian, is entirely logical. Given that Japanese society is tightly constrained by a complex web of un-written rules of interaction, it must be particularly interesting in Japan to consider the fate of someone who has never learned the rules, but is Japanese.

Yozo stumbles from one disaster to another, but one cannot help but feel some sympathy for this crippled human being. These feelings of sympathy are aided by the various women who fall in love with Yozo for the “good boy, the angel” that he is. It deepens the tragedy that Yozo is unable to see past the feelings of self-denigration the kind, even loveable character that he is.

If No Longer Human is representative of modern Japanese literature, I would say: “Seek it out!”

Sometimes there are evil characters in novels.  How do we create them and why?

To get at the answers to these questions, we first have to understand what we mean by ‘evil’.  My Chambers Dictionary defines evil as ‘something which produces unhappiness or misfortune’.  But suppose we are considering a situation where a love affair has ended.  Is the one who ended it evil?  Most of us wouldn’t consider a married person evil if s/he ended an extra-marital affair, but one (or both) parties to the affair may be very unhappy.  Or consider someone who went to Las Vegas and lost £10,000 in a night of gambling.  S/he may consider the event a real misfortune, but I doubt that most of us consider gambling to be ‘evil’.  ‘Foolish’?  Yes.  To be avoided?  Yes.  But not ‘evil’.

For me, ‘evil’ is the creation of sin, and ‘sin’ is the act of intentional harm to another human being.  Notice the use of the word ‘intentional’.  With the use of ‘intentional’, the person who ended the affair did not commit a sin in ending the affair if s/he ended it without intending to hurt the other person.  The other person may indeed be hurt, but causing hurt was not the motivation for ending the affair.  Similarly, the gambler did not intend to hurt himself by continuing to gamble and lose.

I think it is fair to say that I tend to consider ‘evil’ as a semi-religious term, and, as such, it has extra significance.  For me, things and actions which are ‘good’ are God-given, while evil things and actions arise from God’s antithesis – call him the devil, if you wish.  We human beings are in the middle, pulled in both directions, but having free will – the freedom to choose.

Two of my novels deal with these themes.  Sin and Contrition has six characters, three boys and three girls whom we follow from the age of 13 to about 52.   Amongst them, they commit most of the available sins, except such violent sins as rape or murder.  (One of the characters, however, does go to war.)  There is always at least a weak intention to commit the sin, and generally a certain amount of repentance, but the character and his/her motivation is viewed in the unique situation in which they are found, so that I, as the author, try not to judge them.  Rather, I let them judge themselves, with, of course, the input of the world around them.  My expectation is that the reader will judge them.  The point I’m trying to make is that sometimes evil and sin are very clear, but often ‘extenuating circumstances’ make them less clear, and that this is what life is: challenging, a bit foggy and uncertain, even though there may be a beacon – often barely visible – to show the way.

The other novel is Sable Shadow and The Presence, which deals more explicitly with the ‘beacon’.  Sometimes the beacon is a God-send, but often it is not.  Who guides us and why?  Part of the answer is who and what we are as people: our identity, over which we have a great deal more control than we sometimes like to believe. Henry, the principal character in Sable Shadow and The Presence, uses his identity and a particular beacon to achieve a great success.  When multiple tragedies strike, he must change both his identity and his beacon!