The World as I Found It

by Bruce Duffy

  It took some doing, but after numerous complaints to the bishop about the Jesuit’s heresies and abuse, the villagers succeeded in booting the priest out of town. And later, much later, after Wittgenstein’s trial, they would proudly say that after they drove out the priest, they gave his crazy friend the schoolmaster the sack as well.

  And to think that Wittgenstein had once called Trattenbach “a peaceful little nest of a place”!

  Many times afterward, he would try to recall just how the villagers had seemed to him at first. Certainly, they were not as wicked as he thought in the end. Nor, for that matter, was he as blameless as he had thought all along.

  Quite objectively, though, Trattenbach was a poor and ugly town — even the Trattenbachers said so. Not far from Trattenbach was a place known as the Gates of Hell, an iron mine that for generations had killed and crippled the region’s men, at least while there was any profit in it. But now, as the joke went, the Trattenbachers were safe from damnation: the Gates of Hell were closed. Slammed behind them, was more like it. Those left behind mostly eked out a living as subsistence farmers or unskilled laborers. The more “lucky” worked at the little textile mill or at another local sweatshop, sewing cheap girdles. Among the women, a few even turned to prostitution — mostly of the seasonal or itinerant variety, often to feed the children while their husbands nursed the bottle.

  So hell was closed and heaven drifted along, never farther, never closer. The mountains brought nothing either; they only hogged the light and held the clotted clouds that drained the rain and hemmed in the fog, which hung for days like a blight over Trattenbach’s ashen hovels. Helmeted and turreted, with spearlike roofs, the houses were as dented and squashed together as the stunted fortress folk who dwelt within them, scheming, brooding, breeding, snarling at one another. It seemed that every wall in Trattenbach needed a coat of paint — paint or dynamite. Wittgenstein could remember slopping through the filthy slush during the winter, his eyes burning with the cheap soft coal they used. Slowly, like a web, the soot sifted over the town, caking everything, to the point he would feel he was scraping between abrasive sheets, his face sparking with the malice he felt seeping out from those scabby walls.

  Without the sense to leave and only his own inflexible pride to keep him there, even he could see he had outlasted his potential to do the place any good. But of course poverty was what had brought him to Trattenbach in the first place. Ugliness fell to the poor. After all, he had not renounced his wealth to minister to prosperous people in scenic surroundings. And it was the poor who needed him, he thought. But here, like Father Haft, Wittgenstein failed to see that while he had chosen poverty, the villagers had no such choice, and knew it.

  Later, when Wittgenstein had come to realize the extent of his arrogance, he saw that he had been bewitched by an image. This was the idea that poverty and misfortune were something that could be communally shared by assuming poverty’s outer manifestations. But poverty wasn’t brotherhood or comradeship; it wasn’t bread that might be broken and distributed like alms so that its hardships might thereby be diminished. Father Haft’s and Wittgenstein’s chosen poverty was nothing like the trapped hopelessness the villagers knew. But for the elect, for those philanthropists for whom poverty was a vocation, God had removed the meat but reserved the broth, the essence, of poverty; for Father Haft and Wittgenstein, unlike the ignorant villagers, there was poverty of the spirit in full knowledge of one’s condition. Knowledge also was a sickness, and Wittgenstein and the priest well knew this predicament, knew it in all its depth and breadth. Spiritual poverty or material poverty — which was the more painful, and painful for whom? At first, Wittgenstein was inclined to believe that for the person of superior intellect, the anguish of spiritual poverty was a far deeper anguish, grossly speaking, than that borne by an ignorant person in the face of hopeless material poverty. But later, when Wittgenstein became more sensitive to the pain of ordinary people, he realized that God, in His wisdom, had apportioned pain according to one’s lights, so that these two pains, while qualitatively different, were psychically equal, a bountiful table spread for all.

  And the truth was, Wittgenstein needed the poor then to assuage his own impoverished spirit, which at that time, just after the war, was immeasurably poorer than theirs. The aftermath of the war was crueler to Wittgenstein than ever the war had been. At least during the war he had been able to salvage a soupçon of self-respect. But now that the mobilization was over it seemed as if his spirit were mobilizing against him, reducing him, like the rest of Austria, to a state of complete rottenness and decay.

  Why had he ever come to Trattenbach? he wondered. Until the very end, Wittgenstein never dreamed that the feeling against him was so bitter and virulent, so deep-seated. Yet why had he come to the village but to debase the currency — to challenge the values of these poor farmers, mill workers and day laborers? And if he couldn’t rouse these troglodytes from their hideous ignorance and lethargy — if they were to continue their slavish allegiance to Austria’s hemorrhaging money and remain stuck in this stupefying wallow they mistook for a life — then he figured he could at least save their children.

  Wittgenstein knew the villagers found him forbidding and peculiar. How could they not? They had only to take one look at him, let alone hear his impeccable high German, to know he was a cultured gentleman from the city. They weren’t fooled for one moment by his conspicuous, aggressive poverty. They could spot him a mile off in his cast-off army coat, swinging that cane and carrying a notebook under his arm — that spying notebook in which it was said he jotted down misdeeds that Father Haft would blast them for on Sunday. Still, Wittgenstein felt it was inevitable, and probably healthy, that they fear him. And if, as Max said, they took him for a wealthy eccentric — a baron, no less — well, then so much the better. Every St. Paul wants his Ephesians to know that he was formerly a Saul.

  How Wittgenstein would have loved to have seen their greedy eyes gorge with the fortune he had given away before coming to Trattenbach! In the disastrous inflation after the war, when Austria’s fat blotter bills were devalued two and three times a day, when money was being carted and valued almost by weight, his wealth could have done much for the war orphans and the widows whose savings had been wiped out. For that matter, it could have done much for his former comrades, the maimed or unemployed veterans whom he would see sleeping in parks and doorways. Yes, Wittgenstein could have done many good deeds with his money, but he still heard Tolstoy counseling him that to give money to the poor was like spreading disease. Common people couldn’t be trusted with money; it went to their heads like cheap wine. Besides, though Wittgenstein could himself renounce the accumulated power, the hegemony, of this money, he instinctively felt the need to preserve it in his own people. In this respect, he would always harbor the instincts of a man of wealth.

  His family, in any case, was rich beyond corrupting. As a result of her highly successful wartime relief work, Gretl was now Herbert Hoover’s personal representative in Austria, charged with overseeing the efforts of the American Food Relief Commission. Frau Wittgenstein had died of a heart attack early in the spring of 1920. Freed from her mother’s care, Mining was again overworking herself, helping Gretl and running a grammar school for poor children. As for Paul, he was away most of the time, traveling across Europe giving highly acclaimed one-armed piano concerts.

  Wittgenstein was not so lucky. On his return from the Italian prison camp, he had found Vienna’s half-starved populace chopping down the city’s woods and hauling it off in rattling wagons and wheelbarrows. But the worst thing for him was realizing that he was now one of the wealthiest men in Vienna, the bulk of his fortune safely sheltered in America, earning vast sums in interest. It was hell for him to have so much while others had so little — to feel so indelibly the guilt and responsibility of old money, which had accumulated so long in the sun, concentrated in power like the bee’s honey. The weight of this stacked money only dragged down his drowning so
ul. Wittgenstein had hardly been home a week when the guilt of his wealth became unbearable. Amid their happy relief at being reunited with him, Mining and Gretl felt his anxiety rising like ripples on a lake. He talked not at all, then talked in a rush, with alarming, vertiginous complexity. He couldn’t think for thinking, couldn’t sleep for dreaming, which was thinking, too, since all was thinking and all thinking, dreaming. Music! He craved music, but music was also thinking and was always being played a hair too slow or too fast, like conversation, which made him, in his anxiety and impatience, want to speed to a point that was never forthcoming amid all the jabber. It was the house, he would think, it was the Palais Wittgenstein, that bloated pastry stuffed with dead dreams. He loathed the house. Steeped in the soil of an earlier culture, it was just like himself, an anachronism. If only he could have died in a moment of brilliance! If only he could have been a star in the sky! But now he felt himself being hurled into the furnaces of a featureless future, another useless war relic to be scrapped and melted down.

  The ripples mounted into waves. His nights were interminable. One night, hearing a dog howling, he remembered the scavenging, corpse-eating dogs during the war, how their cries carried for miles in the crystalline night air, amid the rumbling of the war trains laden with men, horses and explosives. His peasant soldiers said the barking dogs meant that someone had just died, a not unreasonable belief, since men were always dying and dogs were always barking. It was true what the peasants said, he thought, the dog did have the most intimate connection with death. Wittgenstein must have drifted off then, because later he awoke and heard the dog bark. Three times, distinctly, the dog barked. And then it stopped like the crowing cock that signaled Peter’s betrayal. For twenty minutes, Wittgenstein lay there in a sweat, praying that the dog would bark again to prove it was not a sign but a dog, not a curse but a simple cry. But the dog did not bark again, and Wittgenstein realized that he was furiously biting at the twisted end of his sheet, tearing at it like a dying man in his hateful big bed of money.

  That was the end for him. The next morning, Gretl received an urgent call from Herr Brundolf, the family’s solicitor, asking her to come to his office immediately. He said it was her brother Ludwig. He was in a state of great agitation, insisting that he be forthwith and forever relieved of his entire fortune.

  After much cajoling, Gretl managed to get her brother home from the solicitor’s office, but nothing could shake his resolve. Paul and Mining and other members of the family were hurriedly called and consulted. Sanitariums and temporary conservatorships were discussed. Wittgenstein was incensed by their questions. He insisted he was of sound mind and said he would go to court if necessary to be freed from this accursed, mutating money; when that didn’t work, he even hinted at suicide. Gretl told Mining that it would have made a great drawing room farce had it not been so tragic.

  For two weeks, Gretl managed to stave him off. Then early one spring morning, when the weather was rainy and gusty, Wittgenstein called Gretl to the window. Pointing to a man down the street who was struggling with his whipping umbrella, Wittgenstein said in a voice drained of emotion:

  You know, if you did not know there was a heavy wind outside, you might see that man tumbling along with his umbrella and think, How ungainly and clumsy. And so unnecessary, all this man’s vain twisting. But, big sister, your window is shut. In the end, you do not know, and cannot theorize, what forces drive the man. And look, he said, pointing. The man is being driven down the road.

  Since childhood they had spoken to each other in this way, using similes and parables. Wittgenstein had made his point. Gretl gave in to his wishes and followed them to the letter as quickly as possible. This was just as well. The truth was, he was then in no condition to see after his own affairs.

  With that done, there remained the larger problem of what Wittgenstein was to do with his life. Actually, he had given away two estates: having written a book that, to his mind, answered all the essential philosophical questions, Wittgenstein had literally worked himself out of a job as a philosopher; and having given away his fortune, he was bankrupt but no better off. As he saw it, if he could be of no further use to himself, it was only fitting that he make himself useful by doing something of service to others. Indeed, in following this path, he would be continuing a family tradition, pursuing a course of which even his father might have dimly approved. It was Mining, with her connections with the new school reform movement, who suggested teaching. Wittgenstein seized upon the idea and spent the next year in the teachers' training college, the Lehrerbildungsanstalt. The school had virtually nothing to teach him, and he hated it. Every day his face stung with the almost unspeakable humiliation of sitting at a little desk, submitting to the tutelage of various sincere but inferior minds whose thoughts he was expected to absorb and parrot without question or protest.

  Wanting to break with the past, he refused at this time to live with Mining in the Palais Wittgenstein. Nor would he accept Gretl’s clearly pro forma invitation to live with her and Rolf. Instead, he took a little room on the Untere Viaduktgasse, close to the teachers' college but, as he well knew, much too close to the Prater meadows, where toward dusk the young men would gather like feeding deer among the enshrouding trees.

  All that summer there was a siege in him as various moral props gave way. He was not a star in the sky but only a shallow vessel, a spittoon. Now there was only sex, wrenching spasms of uncontrollable, indiscriminate sex. Again and again, there he’d be, stripping and sucking the salty dog from some rimmed cock that stood bent like a swollen jugular in his mouth while some stranger’s strong legs strummed in the wind. Unwilling to rationalize his guilt, unable to forgive himself and start afresh, utterly glutted with his native rottenness, he had sunk to the very bottom. Sin reeked from his pores. Indeed, at times, the only sign of life he discerned in himself was his surging erections, uncoiling down his trouser leg on trams, in class and in other inappropriate places, quite mentally unattended, like a dog that had snapped its leash. There was no fighting it. Battling like an exhausted swimmer against the tide, his will would inevitably collapse before a torrent of anxiety that drove him into the Prater, there to kneel beneath the sucking stomach of some unemployed butcher or mechanic with nocturnal eyes, the type who’d no sooner finish than he’d be shaking himself off as if before a urinal while Wittgenstein delicately turned away, spitting the eggy spunk like poison into the bushes.

  There was another precedent in Wittgenstein’s decision to take up teaching the poor. Count Tolstoy himself had taught school for a time, instructing the little peasant children on his country estate, Yasnaya Polyana. But Trattenbach wasn’t Yasnaya Polyana. For all their backwardness, the Trattenbachers weren’t real peasants with red noses, nor was he a God on his own estate, teaching the fearful children of his humble servants.

  This was where Max came in. Max could deal with these people. Max could speak their language and so became Wittgenstein’s intermediary in the most ordinary transactions.

  They met at Trattenbach’s dank little cellar cinema about six months after Wittgenstein had arrived in the village. Wittgenstein had bought a bag of nuts and was sitting on one of the wooden seats, waiting for the show to begin, when this lunk with a broad calf’s face pounced down beside him and started talking in midstream as if he were resuming a conversation rather than starting one. Never before had Wittgenstein seen this young man. He thought he was some disturbed person, the way he was carrying on about cowboy pictures and Russia and full of impertinent questions. Ignoring him did no good; it only drove him on. Fumbling and gesticulating, sprawling into Wittgenstein and glaring into his eyes, the stranger would punctuate his jokes with an obnoxious laugh, then immediately goose Wittgenstein on the shoulder with an excited But listen to this! as he launched into another wild story. As the stranger continued talking and carrying on, Wittgenstein suddenly felt the bag in his lap rumble, then saw the fellow cram a dribbling fistful of nuts into his mouth. Gaggmmmm, the m
an mumbled approvingly, crunching and shaking his head like a feeding horse. Good and fresh, huh?

  Shock kept Wittgenstein from believing that this young hooligan had just helped himself — it was impossible. But then, sure enough, the bag rumbled again, and Wittgenstein plainly saw the freeloader’s ham hand haul out a second fistful of nuts and mash them into his mouth, chewing fitfully as the lights went out and the screen flickered. At this, the man jumped up in alarm and called back to the projectionist, Hold it! I’ll be right back! Then he barged down the aisle to fetch more nuts, not because he had devoured Wittgenstein’s bag, but simply because he had a tooth for nuts.

  Within a week, they were inseparable. At first, Max reminded Wittgenstein vaguely of his old corporal, Ernst. But he soon realized that Max was far more intelligent and perceptive than Ernst. There was something preternatural in him. He had an uncanny knack with people, an idiot grace that enabled him to get away with almost anything. Even those in Trattenbach who thought Max a wild good-for-nothing couldn’t help but like him. Children would bring Max home like a stray dog, and within minutes he would have their parents enthralled as well. Wittgenstein saw Max work his magic on many people during the tramps they took through lower Austria during those summers. Max’s way of addressing complete strangers in midstream, as he had done with Wittgenstein in the theater, was quite typical. But by Max’s ideal and inflexible logic, this made perfect sense: if all men were his brothers, then it stood to reason that they were all familiar to him. Wittgenstein remembered the way a farmer, a complete stranger, had once squinted into Max’s eyes, asking, Don’t I know you? And how Max had stood back like a prodigal whose image would shortly float into focus, mesmerizing as he said, Don’t you, brother? Don’t you? …