Let’s return to that remark of Lawrence’s about not wanting to let anyone filch even his influenza. .
That Nietzsche had an influence on Lawrence is undoubted. Relying on an appalling travesty of Nietzsche’s ideas, John Carey holds the philosopher responsible for most of the novelist’s sillier ideas and his inclination towards a proto-fascist cult of the leader. The idea of the will to power certainly made an impact on Lawrence, and his reading of Nietzsche contributed, no doubt, to his distaste for democracy and his belief in a natural aristocracy or whatever nonsense it was he declared himself in favour of in the course of falling out with the aristocratic democrat Bertrand Russell. This, if you like, is first-order influence and I’m not concerned with it here.
But it is that remark about no one trying to filch from him his influenza that shows how at the level of his own life — and for Lawrence the ‘struggle inside oneself’ was ‘the only history’ that mattered — he had taken Nietzsche to heart. Not the ranting, posturing Nietzsche of Zarathustra, but, crucially, the Nietzsche of The Gay Science (which, rendered into French of a sort, became Lawrence’s preferred title — ‘Le Gai Savaire’ — for his Study of Thomas Hardy).
In Camus too there is a direct philosophical debt to Nietzsche but, even more strikingly than in the case of Lawrence, it is an affinity of the soul that is all-important. Unlike Lawrence, Camus never flirted with the political extrapolations of Nietzsche’s thought; instead, thinking specifically of the way in which Nietzsche’s writings had been distorted to provide philosophical underpinning for Nazism, he wrote that we would ‘never finish making reparation for the injustice done to’ him.
There is something very moving about Lawrence and Camus — one the son of a miner, the other poor and fatherless — discovering Nietzsche: the former in Croydon Public Library in 1910, the latter in a textbook at the lycée in Algiers. Where Lawrence was inflamed by Nietzsche, Camus, as it were, took him for granted, finding in his writing the same ‘intoxication’ that he felt while walking in the sun of Algiers.3 Algeria was a ‘strange country’ which gave the men it nourished ‘both their wretchedness and their greatness’. During the summers there Camus learned that ‘if there is a sin against life, it lies perhaps less in despairing of it than in hoping for another life, and evading the implacable grandeur of the one we have. These men have not cheated. They were gods of the summer at twenty in their thirst for life, and they are still gods today stripped of all hope.’ He learned too that ‘only one thing in life is more tragic than suffering, and that is the life of a happy man’. Testifying to the world that formed and nourished him, Camus’s essays celebrate the sensual embodiment of Nietzschean ideas. ‘If the Greeks experienced despair,’ writes Camus, ‘it was always through beauty and its oppressive quality.’ Camus strikes this note again and again (‘there is no love of life without despair of life’); it is the same mood as that evoked by Nietzsche: ‘in the most profound enjoyment of the moment, to be overcome by tears and the whole crimson melancholy of the happy’. This, according to Nietzsche, ‘was the happiness of Homer’ — and it is absolutely the mood of the young Camus.
Camus grew up in a world of poverty and sunlight, Lawrence in what Camus called ‘the double damnation of poverty and ugliness’. But both — Lawrence blazing, defiantly, Camus calmly, lyrically — were not so much transformed as formed by Nietzsche.
I discovered Nietzsche in Brixton, in the mid-80s. Never to wish anything different, not now, not through all eternity: I can still remember the rush I felt on coming across that ideal of amor fati, absolute affirmation in the face of the Eternal Recurrence. My God! What an idea to live up to, what a challenge! As it happens I’ve ended up wishing everything different, now and through all eternity, but in my way I’ve stuck with it even though my way has involved regretting practically everything.
At school a teacher warned that if I spent all my time playing football and not studying then I would regret it in later life. As it happens I regret wasting so much time studying when I could have been playing football, but he almost had a point. What he should have said was that whatever you do you will regret it. A boy at school, Paul Hynes, was nearer the mark when, as part of his pre-scrap intimidation, he threatened: ‘You do that and you’ll regret it.’ I did and I did. You’ll regret it: there are worse mottoes to live by. Successful people say that it is stupid to regret things but the futility of regret only increases its power. Even while regretting things you’re consumed with regret about doing so. Looking back, the tiniest regrets weigh heavily on me: the time I bought a Weekly Travel Pass and fell fifty pence short of breaking even; the day in February when I was too miserly to pay seventy-nine francs for a rare Yma Sumac CD which, when I went back to buy it two days later, had disappeared. Even now, ten months later, I can’t stop thinking about that Yma Sumac CD: I wish I’d bought it when I had the chance but since I didn’t buy it when I had the chance I wish I’d never seen it in the first place because then I wouldn’t be tormented by the thought that I could have bought it — but the reason I didn’t buy it, of course, is because I was thinking of how much I’d regretted buying my last Yma Sumac CD which turned out to be not worth buying. . Looking back through my diary is like reading a vast anthology of regret and squandered opportunity. Oh well, I find myself thinking, life is there to be wasted.
But this is an affirmative way of living. I accept the consequences of doing things which I will later regret. In a sense then I regret them before I do them. Instead of resolving to learn to cook I regret to inform myself that by the end of the year I will still not know how to cook (because I hate cooking) even though learning to cook would improve my life no end. Instead of doing the exercises which will save my right knee — and I will say more about my knees in a moment — I resign myself to regretting not having done something about what will, in a few years, be a debilitating, potentially crippling ailment. I resign myself to things: this is my own warped version of amor fati: regretting everything but resigning myself to this regret. However things turn out I am bound to wish they had turned out differently. I am resigned to that.
Take this book which is intermittently about Lawrence. Right now I profoundly regret ever having started it. I wish I hadn’t bothered. But if I hadn’t started it I would have regretted not having done so. I knew this and so I got on with it and now that I have got on with it I regret that I got on with it in the way I did. I regret that it will not turn out to be the sober, academic study of Lawrence that I had hoped to write but I accept this because I know that, in the future, when it is finished, I won’t want it to be any different. I’ll be glad that this little book turned out how it did because I will see that what was intended to be a sober, academic study of D. H. Lawrence had to become a case history. Not a history of how I recovered from a breakdown but of how breaking down became a means of continuing. Anyone can have a breakdown, anyone. The trick is to have a breakdown and take it in one’s stride. Ideally one would get to the stage where one had a total nervous breakdown and didn’t even notice. That, I realise now, is the lesson learned last winter after our abortive trip to Mexico, to ‘beastly Oaxaca’.