by Bruce Duffy
Clearly, Wittgenstein told Russell, one could hardly disagree that it is either raining or not raining. This was intelligible but it was empty: it said nothing about the weather. But here Russell interjected that a Hegelian idealist might say it was neither raining nor not raining, but rather only drizzling — they so love a synthesis. Wittgenstein laughed — Russell was always breaking the tension with jokes — but then he was still lost in that drizzly parenthesis. Stumped.
Like a mountain pushed up from the sea, a wall will sometimes rise out of a life, rising to see the world arrayed below like paradise. But ultimately the wall prevails, while the life becomes at best a kind of residue — the mortar squeezed out between the wall’s blocks, or the lowly grass at its foot. Bang the wall. Talk to the wall. A wall remains. A wall that is a wall that is a wall…
Sleep
BENEATH A WALL is the life, and the life, unlike the wall, must sleep.
Russell hated putting Wittgenstein out late at night, but there was no point continuing. The wall wasn’t giving. Even Wittgenstein’s own mind had put him out. The life must sleep.
The suicide is sly, he is so secretive he hardly knows himself what the plotting mind has set in store. So many ways to make a hole in the dark, so many ways to slip out of the world. Dread of the razor. Dread of the length of rope or the tower. Lowering guilty eyes while passing the chemist’s shop, where a quietus could be had for a half bob and a fib.
They were both so coy about this, Wittgenstein and Russell. To himself each would wonder if the other shared the same shameful dream. One night, seeing Wittgenstein’s gloomy look, Russell asked, Are you thinking about logic or your sins? And he felt a thrill when Wittgenstein replied without a hint of irony, Both.
Nowadays Russell fell easily to sleep, the sand running swiftly out his ears; he slept more soundly than he had in years. Still, it was galling for Russell to feel that another must come and undo what he had done — to feel that in some fundamental way he had been reduced. Worse, Russell often could not quite see what Wittgenstein was getting at in his statements about logic, much less how they might agree on a point yet derive from it wholly different conclusions. But what most disturbed Russell was how Wittgenstein’s ideas would seem like ideas he himself had once had, dream ideas long discarded or forgotten but now brilliantly recast. It seemed unfair. With the imperviousness of something shattered, Wittgenstein spilled himself only to find himself replenished, brimming over with new thoughts.
But this was another instance of Willy-Nilly’s law: Wittgenstein didn’t at all see himself in such heroic terms. Breathless, sleepless, he would dream of death, of long-fingered Clotho stripping the life from him, a milty, guilty cloud billowing in the teeming dark. It was a fatal pill upon his lips, this life and its word. Explain, illogician, why loss and past is form, and forever fixed. Explain, please, why loss, which after all is about nothing, is still somehow something. And once you have explained this, then explain why — though we gulp experience whole and molt it as quickly, handling our past like slippery snakeskin — explain, if you can, why nothing is forgotten or forgiven, or why a wave scarcely recedes before there comes its repetition.
Dreams, like walls, do attain different sizes. Dreams do exceed our capacity to contain them. As so as a boy, and even now, Wittgenstein had imagined an acid so corrosive and pure that no vessel could contain it. Error was the sin. Suicide was the result and cause, and life was the first error, an infinite regress. He couldn’t stop it. Clear through his ulcerous heart the acid ate, burning through the bedding and dripping blackly on the rug, burning down through the floor and ages of coal, burning clear down to hell where devils dance, then falling through space and never cooling, and never ridding itself of the cutting virulence of truth, black heart, falling and falling and never stopping …
Logic is not forgiving.
Faith
THERE WAS a more benign variation of this dream. Lying in bed, Wittgenstein would think of how Jesus, standing like an apparition on the stormy sea, bade Peter to step from the boat and walk to him across the unquiet water. Wittgenstein would imagine himself stepping out on the waves, finding them first solid as planks, then mushy cold like a wet snow in which he sank to his knees, then, abruptly, to his Adam’s apple. But unlike Peter, he never cried out. His arms flew up, and he was sucked beneath the waves, blind as a stone and never caring, sinking and sinking and never sleeping because he had no faith, no faith.
The Making of a Scholar
BUT WHILE RUSSELL FRETTED, then put a nice face on things — declaring it all nerves, evanescent melancholia, unhappiness — in the meantime, David Pinsent, not unlike the Victrola fido, was pricking up his good ear and keeping a careful diary in a precise, piercing hand:
14.III.13
W. asks me today, & rather suddenly, about my past & family. Awfully nosy of him, I think; but I answer, & of course it is rather easy in the main, as there is only Mother. Don’t think much about it — tell him she’s rather dotty, frankly. Wittgenstein screws up his face; doesn’t know this English word. I say, “She’s, how should I say, crazy. Eccentric, if you like.”
W. thoroughly displeased at this. Very sudden: “This is not for you to say — a son.” “Why?” I ask. “She’s my mother, not yours. You’ve never laid eyes on her.” W. scolds. “This does not matter; it does not in the least!” “As you wish. But I’d venture to say you didn’t have to be a parent to your mother.” W: “What! Whatever do you mean?” I say, “I mean I was never left to be a child; I was always raising my mother.”
W. is abrupt, hushed; clearly, this comes at tremendous cost. “I am sorry,” he says. “I did not know. Still —”
W. silent then. So I tell him about myself. One would naturally assume W. would tell me about his family, but when I ask, he says, “I cannot burden you with that.” “Why should it burden me?” I ask. W: “It is burden enough.” I’m angry then: “Well, you know, I wouldn’t even ask if you hadn’t asked me first — I mean, we’ve hardly met. Still, fair’s fair, don’t you think?”
W. weighs this — irritatingly long pause — then says: “Very well, I should not have asked about your family. All the same, I will not burden you.”
Outrageous! Ought I to have pressed it? I was uneasy, rather. Suddenly he must go. I watch him hurtling off, his head cast down, as if he’s counting the pavement stones; & all the while I feel in him this tremendous compression. I see I do not understand my new friend at all.
* * *
While playing his own cards close to his chest, Wittgenstein meanwhile was learning a good deal about his new friend. Besides seeing anew Pinsent’s contrariness, Wittgenstein confirmed his initial impression that the young man was poor and a public school boy. Once the ice was broken, Pinsent told Wittgenstein all about life before Cambridge — how he’d bounced from school to school, preceded by a well-deserved reputation for taking school prizes, and making trouble.
I never did get on, said Pinsent with a shrug. Because I was so silent, the masters always thought me sneaky and arrogant. Coming in as a scholarship boy did me no good, either. The clever boy was always taken for a swot — anything intellectual was so much rubbish to the other fellows. All that mattered was athletics and tone and trousers of the right cut.
To the average public school master, brilliance in a boy was one thing, but brilliance mixed with originality was most troubling, definitely to be discouraged. More disturbing still to the school constabulary was this stubborn impudence, for which the lad was given many a vigorous birching, as when he refused to attend vespers. Like hangings, these floggings were public humiliations, with the school captain and other senior boys present to attest that the headmaster did not break the law by raising the freshly cut switch over his head.
Pitched over, forced to grasp his own trembling ankles, the boy was hardly the first miscreant to fear he might foul his breeches during a twenty-count. Ah, yes, Pinsent said, it gave one perspective to view the world upside-down. Peeri
ng between his outstretched legs, he did not miss the rapt, sometimes aroused grimaces of his mates as the master paused at sixteen to dab his fleshy forehead.
In every school there were dozens of written and unwritten shibboleths governing dress and deportment: the proper vocabulary to use, where and precisely how one was to walk in the hall and how one was to defer to prefects and the various “bloods,” those school heroes and Adonises who were adored by boys and masters alike. In this two-tiered jail system of master and boy justice, at least the masters were bound by civil code. The boy justice was worse, far worse, and soon Wittgenstein saw why, beneath it all, his bantam friend was so tough and unyielding.
Pinsent was funny and bitter describing these experiences, of which he was perversely proud, like one who has survived a war. He could tell about Cramburne, a school heavy on Latin, where he was caught writing satires and was compelled to conjugate in the pluperfect subjunctive while Mr. Caedmon spiritedly flogged him. Or about a master there who supervised rugger and combed his curly side whiskers like laurels over his temples. Lupus Dementia, the boys called him for the way he would foam at the mouth at football matches, shouting, Piger stulte! Dele plumbum, Higgins! Jugula! Jugula! rallying his toughs like Caesar to his cohorts, as in the mud they battled the pugnacious Gauls of Chigwell, Brighton and Leatherhead.
Once Pinsent got over his initial reluctance to speak of his life, he could laugh himself sick over these stories, telling them half to see Wittgenstein’s horrified expression. Less funny was the part about how Pinsent had been born with a twin a month premature; and how his brother Alfred died of the croup at three, while he himself nearly died of the fever that took his hearing in one ear. With Alfred’s death, his mother, always flighty and depressed, went to pieces. This was her first stint in the “loony bin,” as Pinsent called it. His father, who sold machine tools and traveled, wasn’t much for caring for children, and anyway, Pinsent said, he wasn’t much around. The boy was sickly pale and a picky eater. So while his mother was wheeled about in a bath chair, heavily sedated, he was left in the care of an old nurse who craw fed him like a goose, screamed in his deaf ear for being ill attentive and bound his left hand when he favored it, calling it “the devil’s hand.”
Still a lefty, Pinsent said, gamely holding up his hand.
Things didn’t get much better. When his mother returned from the sanitarium, she found the boy partially deaf and stuttering, though somehow along the way he had taught himself to read and do long sums in his head. Sent to a day school that next autumn, the boy was teased for his speech, which worsened, and also for his peculiar way of running. This proved another affliction: as a very young child, imitating a rider on a horse, Pinsent had learned to run by rhythmically patting himself on the rump, ti-tump, ti-tump, a habit for which he was called “Bumbeater,” “Switch,” and “Nickers.”
Still, the school was not bad. Things really might have been all right had not his father died of a brain hemorrhage a few years later. This loss paralyzed his mother, who suffered her third, and worst, breakdown. So, after dumping her in the asylum, the relatives collected some money and finally packed the little rotter off to Bondock, a third-rate public school rabid on football.
It was my uncle’s idea, said Pinsent. Guess he thought Bondock would toughen the little sissy up. Teach him to run proper, you know.
And your mother? Wittgenstein asked. For you, she could do nothing?
Her? Pinsent jerked his thumb. She couldn’t even dress herself.
The boy had always hated athletics. Worse, he arrived in the middle of term, a hopeless time for the newcomer, when all alliances have been forged and an inviolable pecking order established. Pinsent clutched his stomach even as he described it: the sickening smell of the greasy food, and for pudding always that boarding school standby, the cursed Spotted Dick. Worse were the dripping, gutterlike stalls of the lavatory, where pecker holes had been gouged by countless pent-up penknives.
Pinsent best remembered the first day, when, dressed in his enormous blue blazer emblazoned with Bondock’s golden crest, he was introduced to the schemers, dolts and bullies who were to be his new mates. They showed him good cheer, all right. No sooner did the master leave than a sneering inquisition began. Trapped under a circle of faces, the boy was asked a riddle that he naturally muffed — his first offense.
Oh-oh, said the smirking faces as a plate was passed forward. Hungry, was he? Ooops! Chucky pudding dribbled down his front. Then came a helpful hand, smearing it the length of his blazer.
Filthy scob! shrieked a towering senior boy with cracked teeth, the leader. Soiling the school colors! You’ll be firked for this!
So saying, he jacked the boy’s tie past his throat, watching his bulging eyes glaze over before he cut it off — a Bondock tradition that ended with whistling jeers, fists on the back and the unanimous decision that he should fag for four and pass along all desserts and home parcels or else be beaten senseless.
The boy couldn’t run or talk properly, knew nothing of fisticuffs; but they wouldn’t beat him, he promised himself that. Brought down to the playing field in his new cleats and jersey later that afternoon, he could see the lads waiting for him, furiously rubbing dirt and spit into their palms. He remembered standing there, feeling incredibly stupid and inert as a ball struck him hard in the ribs, a glancing blow that spun him sideways. The boy clutched his ribs but did not cry. Regaining his balance, he stood for a moment, watching the grinning, sniggering boys. And then at that moment, at age eleven, he made a decision that would dictate his entire life. He lay down in the cold mud and stared at the sky.
’Ey, scob! they screamed at the boy who would not play. Ge’ up before yer get a foot in the face. ’Ey, scobber!
It was amazing. For a moment, they didn’t know what to do. There was name calling and threats, then a kick in the back that finally flushed tears. Still he didn’t move. They stood him up, but when they took their hands away he fell in a heap. They threw him in the mud, dragged him by the hair; and then, with retching coughs of disgust, the spitting started, warm gobbers drooling down his face and muddy glasses. The boy felt the worst was behind him by then. Beyond terror, he realized that he had wet himself and wondered if his aunt had packed extra drawers. Also, there was God — he still believed in God — and as the jeering circle closed, he started to pray, thinking that soon it would all be over.
Had not the coach seen the pack closing and heard their blood chant, the Bondockers might have done the lad serious harm. But all this stopped with a groan like bagpipes as the football master punched his blood-red upside-down head through that bower of teeth and taunts.
Up! he barked. Up right now!
To the recumbent boy it seemed most strange that this enraged and powerful man did not simply haul him up by the arm. But no: the coach believed in rules; he wanted the boy to rise by his own volition. In a curious way the boy wanted to comply, but in him there was a stronger side, which clamped its jaws on his mind like a bulldog on a windpipe, choking off this impulse to survive at sufferance of another’s will. They’ll not make me. That was more or less what he remembered hearing, this accompanied by a distinct sensation of choking, as if by smothering himself he might destroy them as well.
And they were losing. As the football master began his second ten-count, the boy triumphantly saw it was not he but they who were powerless. It was an eleven-year-old’s revelation. They did not know what to do.
That afternoon, after being hauled by his muddy hair before the headmaster; after being ordered, then compelled, to grasp his ankles while the sap-laden whip softened his will; after being told that no boy had ever, ever done what he had, which was comparable to a king’s soldier deserting the field under fire; and after being assured by the headmaster that he would not disgrace his family or Bondock, and that he would, make no mistake about it, play — after all this, the boy was shut in the headmaster’s library for his own safety, with a vow that early the next morning he would
have one last chance to redeem his sullied honor.
This threat the headmaster did carry out. The next morning, after further warnings and before what seemed the entire school, the boy lay down again. This time there was not a sound, just the keening November wind and the feeling that he was present at his own funeral. Of that day, Pinsent especially remembered the silent, shamed expressions of the boys and how the headmaster then turned to the football master and muttered, This will not do.
The boy got his way. Two days later, he was packed back to his uncle, who sent him to another school, where he didn’t fare much better. And so came the pattern: the obstinate nose-thumbing at authority, and later the contempt even for God, finding himself in and out of the soup the way his mother was the loony bin. They were poor. Worse, they were beholden to relatives, to the church and the various charities. Since the boy had no pater and no reverence, it was his job to be brilliant. Thus he learned mathematics, taking prizes and scholarships in that and classics, and always making a point of being more brilliant than he was difficult. This pattern lasted until age fourteen, when he landed at Glengalerry, the first school loose enough to suit him and wise enough to basically leave him go his own way.
Wittgenstein lacked such wisdom. Overtly or covertly, Pinsent felt the same doughty need to fight Wittgenstein. For the boy who would not play, the circumstances had changed, but not the fundamental conditions of his life. For Pinsent, the question was how long he could hold his breath — suspend his life — while remaining submerged beneath another’s will.