The World as I Found It

by Bruce Duffy

  In another man, such matter-of-factness might have seemed strange, a mere mechanism of avoidance. Yet Wittgenstein was so genuinely at peace that he put them at ease and left them feeling oddly hopeful, as if at last he had laid some hard things to rest. He told the Moores that he was leaving the next week with a friend for his hut in Norway. Red-faced and ailing, Moore was now seventy-seven. Dorothy was a healthy fifty-eight. Moore had long relinquished thoughts of travel, but he told Wittgenstein that it sounded magnificent, his plan to go north late in the summer. Yet even as he said this, Moore thought of the indescribable loneliness he had felt on that Norwegian mountainside thirty-six years earlier, reft from his wife. The memory of Wittgenstein shipwrecked in that hut as a young man reminded Moore of the loneliness that Christ must have felt when the devil took him on the mountaintop and showed him the world below in all its glory. But St. Luke, it seemed to Moore, had it wrong. It was not godliness that had made Jesus spurn the devil’s temptations. It was not mere goodness nor spite, nor had Christ been holding out for something higher. Rather, thought Moore, Christ spurned the devil because to accept what the devil offered was not in his nature. That was all. It simply was not his nature.

  Wittgenstein promised the Moores that he would see them when he returned, but it didn’t turn out that way. Moore missed the funeral, but several times he visited Wittgenstein’s grave in St. Giles’s churchyard, in Cambridge, where in 1958 Moore was himself buried, and where in 1977 Dorothy was buried beside him, just a few feet from Wittgenstein’s grave.

  In the intervening years, neither Moore nor Dorothy ever contributed, as Russell did, to the various memoirs or gospel accounts about Wittgenstein. But for Moore and Dorothy there were those odd, insignificant things one remembers about the last time one sees someone, things that only later take on significance. Thus they would recall how he took a second piece of cake on that last visit, and how, as if they had just then noticed it, he would sometimes gently slap his forehead when he thought of something. They likewise recalled watching him walk down the street afterward. Walking in quite his usual way, really. And yet in his step there was something, em, so telling or mortal, or so something (though he was just walking), as memory moved in and began its subtle redaubing of the thing remembered.

  * * *

  Before he died, Wittgenstein did make that last trip to Norway.

  A young poet named Tony accompanied him, the two of them arriving in August, when the nights were growing colder and the sky was still smoldering at midnight, still that same pooling, whorling red.

  Fourteen years had passed since Wittgenstein had last been there with Francis, but the hut was still in good repair, its tangled sod roof having been patched repeatedly through the years by a succession of hikers or hermits who had passed by or pilgrimaged there.

  A full set of pots and skillets were neatly stacked in the pantry, along with matches and scouring powder and a mildew-spotted note in English kindly asking the guest to clean out the ash box of the stove and leave wood and matches for those who came next. There was a peculiar human history about the place. On one wall hung an old guitar, on another, a set of binoculars. In the cubby they found cards and a chessboard, while behind the bunks there was now a long shelf lined with books in various languages, including a German edition of the Tractatus and an Agatha Christie that Wittgenstein, now addicted to detective stories, was pleased to see he had not read.

  It was almost eerie, the place was in such perfect order. Even the damp, smoky-earthy smell of the place was as Wittgenstein remembered it. Unwittingly, he and Pinsent had even begun a tradition in August 1914, when they had carved their initials on the beam above the door. Now the beam and door and sills, the eaves and rafter poles, were scarred with initials and dates, with limericks and formulas, stories and riddles, jokes.

  Here I am, Wittgenstein said excitedly to Tony, pointing to his L.W. above the door beside the D.P. And here I am again — with Max this time …

  They were all there — his initials with Pinsent’s in 1914, then alone in 1921; later with Max in 1925, 1926 and 1938; alone again in 1933 and then with Francis in 1934, 1935 and 1936. Over the course of an hour, while Tony sat tunelessly strumming the five-stringed guitar, Wittgenstein found them all, superstitiously running his finger over the deeply incised letters, then going out to walk, a little overcome.

  Wittgenstein had his morbid moments, but it was generally sweet for him in its way, the ragged end of this season. He had forgotten how small and concentrated in their essences the hardy mountain flowers are at that altitude — how they gouge the eye with their spectral brightness. In the distance, hot coils of golden red light slowly effused in the darkness over the glowing snow tips of the mountains, the bending sky pressing down over the earth like a wide bowl. Wittgenstein had the old sensation of having his hair slowly being pulled up by the roots. Under the hot magneto of that sky, it seemed the light did not refract or reflect, but rather extracted a color clear from the molten depths of the earth, drawing it up through the flossy tips of the grass heaped in the rocky meadows like a manna snow.

  There is a certain palette of approaching death, a vividness one sees in the late work of the great masters, when a last few things work themselves free and the colors come fluid and true without much effort. There was something of this radiant, brooding clarity in Wittgenstein’s late work. Wittgenstein was writing a series of remarks about the nature and perception of color — of colors as subtle as odors and as mysterious, in the discontinuous light, as the mind’s efforts to discern them. To discern: this finally is the holy work of the mind.

  In religion, Wittgenstein had once written, every level of devoutness has a certain form of expression that makes no sense at a lower level of devoutness. Beliefs, by virtue of being beliefs, are not reasonable. Faith, then, is not to be explained, or refuted, by reason, nor will faith of a higher order of devoutness always be properly understood by someone at a lower level. Wittgenstein did not think of himself as especially devout, but he was devout enough to realize that he had fallen short of what might be attained in this life, and he was still unreasonable or vain enough to thirst for something outside it. There is beauty outside the mind, and in spite of all evidence or reason to the contrary, there is a stream of life outside this one. Even in the darkness the mind moves. In the darkness the mind can move a long time, moving in almost the way sound travels at night, when an occasional star deigns to drip down. On that mountain, in the stealthy darkness, Wittgenstein liked the way his mind moved, and he was grateful to leave a few thoughts in good order in the modest hope that others might come after him to polish the humble skillets, sharpen the knives and carve something else above the door.

  * * *

  At the end of a life people assign it a weight or a general trend, a moral trajectory. They ask whether it was sad or happy, failed or successful, asking this just as if there can be some consensus after the self as remembered is safely consigned to the common estate of history, which is ultimately everyone’s destiny and thus everyone’s business. Like a willing weather, the spirit moves through time, and against its time. Thus the spirit is dry when all outside it is wet, cold when all is hot and confused while all others are certain. The spirit wonders at this difference, while those outside see the spirit coming in the guise of a man and try to form an opinion of what the weather must be like inside, some saying calm, others saying stormy, and still others saying that it is an impertinence to ask and better not to know, though in fact nobody really does.

  Just before he died, Wittgenstein said to Mrs. Bevens, Tell everyone that I’ve had a wonderful life. Of course, it wasn’t like him to exaggerate, and his friends found it troubling that he would say this. To them, Wittgenstein’s life seemed many things, but not wonderful, and in the end they did not know if he had merely been trying to put them at ease or if in fact he had found his troubled life wonderful. But this, in any case, is what he said.

  Acknowledgments

  I would
be ungrateful if I didn’t thank a number of people who helped with various aspects of this book.

  First, I want to thank, above all, my wife, Marianne Glass Duffy, without whom I likely wouldn’t have found this world or any other.

  I also wish to thank Marjorie Perloff, who was there to continue my wayward education when it really began — out of college. And I want to specially thank Tom Lachman, whose editing, blunt advice and enthusiasm were vital to the most formative stages of the book, and to my very development as a writer. My thanks also to Chris Zylbert for her copy-editing during the formative period, and for many fine comments that helped sharpen the book.

  Many people say no to a writer, so I’d like to thank those who were the first to say yes: my agent, Malaga Baldi; Jonathan Brent, editor of Formations; Bradford Morrow and Deborah Baker of Conjunctions; and finally, Katrina Kenison and Corlies Smith at Ticknor & Fields.

  I’d also like to specially thank Martin Morse Wooster for his excellent additional research and advice, and Timothy Dickinson, who offered many other valuable comments and saved the manuscript from some serious errors. My gratitude also goes to Janet Silver, whose manuscript editing, in conjunction with Katrina Kenison’s editing, has done much to improve the book.

  My thanks go to others who helped in various ways: Tommy Caplan, Ken Ludwig, Lillian Kowitch, Mòniek Engel, Laurie Parsons, Gwen North Reiss, Frances Padorr Brent, Slaton White, Michael J. Weiss, Steve Fennell, Dr. Robert Anthony, Harry Liebersohn, Dorothee Schneider, Heidi Glang, Gabriele Glang, James Glass, Jack Duffy, Muffy Stout, Robert Sherbow, Marge Binder, Ken Nesper, Sid Gudes, Clarissa Chapman, Bill Maly and the other understanding folks at Labat-Anderson, Inc. Finally, thanks to Steptoe & Johnson and Washington Area Lawyers for the Arts.

  The World As I Left It:

  or Revisiting The World As I Found It

  An address delivered in spring 1991 at the American Literature Today series: Stichting John Adams Institut, Amsterdam

  WITTGENSTEIN found facts, and pictures of facts, immensely mysterious. I must say I do too. Like him, I’m puzzled by how facts and words refer to actual things in the world. And I’m equally puzzled by facts, or statements of fact, that do not refer to reality — by this I mean fictions.

  Consider the phrase “the present king of France.” France, of course, has no present king. The words make sense, but they conjure a nonexistent person, a linguistic unicorn. Yet how strange when you think about it, that we can talk about this royal personage, can even play with his nonexistence. For instance, we can say, “The king of France is wise.” Or, “The king of France is wild about the American actor Mickey Rourke.”

  I can see why apparently meaningful nonsense like this so intrigued Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell. But what truly haunts me are the names of people who once actually lived — names for whom there once were living faces. Among other things, my novel The World As I Found It (1987) reflects my puzzlement — my hauntedness, I guess — with names and facts and faces.

  Take Ludwig Wittgenstein.

  Who is this person — this name, I should say — in relation to the historical personage Ludwig Wittgenstein? And who is this historical person relative to the legends and memories (good or bad or faulty) of the various people who actually knew him? How do we even remember a man like Wittgenstein, who went through so many radical changes in his life? For that matter, how do we speak of “Wittgenstein’s philosophy” when that philosophy also changed so dramatically — at times almost constantly? How, in short, do we think of a human spirit over time? Oh, and one final question: How does our memory of a person consort, or coexist, with the reality of what it was like to actually be that person — assuming, of course, that anyone but God or the person himself could ever know such a thing?

  These questions were on my mind when I began The World As I Found It. Seven years later, when I finished the book, they continued to trouble me, and they still do. I guess they’ve been with me from the time my mother died when I was a child. How does anybody just disappear? And if they do disappear, never to return, where, for instance, does love go? I was eleven years old when my mother died, but that’s when I began to see how memories get distorted and carved up. We don’t just fight over who gets the family silver and Mama’s sacred ring: these are just physical manifestations — stigmata — of a deeper form of human dislocation and suffering.

  No, it’s memory that we contest so bitterly. With my mother’s disappearance, I began to see who memories serve. I began to see how memories tell truths, and likewise how they elude, refute, disguise, and even lie. But above all, I began to see how memories constantly change, coming as they do, like starlight, from vast distances — and coming then with inevitable distortions under the inconstant light of the present. But here: the final page of The World As I Found It bears on these very problems.

  At the end of a life people assign it a weight or a general trend, a moral trajectory. They ask whether it was sad or happy, failed or successful, asking this just as if there can be some consensus after the self as remembered is safely consigned to the common estate of history, which is ultimately everyone’s destiny and thus everyone’s business. Like a willing weather, the spirit moves through time, and against its time. Thus the spirit is dry when all outside is wet, cold when all is hot, and confused while all others are certain. The spirit wonders at this difference, while those outside see the spirit coming in the guise of a man and try to form an opinion of what the weather must be like inside, some saying calm, others saying stormy, and still others saying that it is an impertinence to ask and better not to know, though in fact nobody really does.

  But WHY? That’s the question people always ask me. Why did you ever do such a weird thing? Why a novel about Ludwig Wittgenstein?

  Well, it was an eccentric undertaking. In fact, it reminds me of an outrageous short story by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges that you may recall. I refer to “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” In it, we find one Pierre Menard, a French writer who strives not to create another Quixote but Cervantes’s masterpiece itself: as if through some crazy inductive logic, Menard sets out on a quest to recreate every word of Don Quixote.

  But how is Menard to reimagine — and finally write — Don Quixote in 1934? As the narrator of the story dryly observes, “The first method Menard conceived was relatively simple. Know Spanish well, recover the Catholic faith, fight against the Moor or the Turk, forget the history of Europe between the years 1602 and 1918, be Miguel de Cervantes.”

  In this sense, Menard’s project somewhat reminds me of my own odd task in beginning to write The World As I Found It. How was I to be Ludwig Wittgenstein? And if I were to do that, what Wittgenstein — or should I say which Wittgenstein — would I be? Talk about jousting at windmills!

  Pierre Menard at least had the advantage of being European. Whereas Menard had nearly three hundred years of history to forget, I had some one hundred years to learn. I likewise had to steep myself in modern philosophy and logic, in fine points of European custom, and even in principles of trench warfare. Also to immerse myself in works that deeply influenced Wittgenstein — books such as Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat and Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character.

  But even wider cultural and historical gulfs separated me from Wittgenstein. Born into a family of great wealth and culture, Wittgenstein was a Catholic of Jewish extraction, who came from an enormous family, spoke High German and fluent English, was musically trained and studied philosophy at Cambridge. By contrast, I majored in English and only minored in philosophy. An only child from an Irish Catholic, thoroughly middle-class family, I can’t read or speak German, am not even remotely musically trained, and at the time I wrote my novel had never set foot in England, much less the Continent.

  Ignorance … overall unsuitability for the task … I was ready to begin!

  Twelve years ago, when I stumbled upon the idea for The World As I Found It, there was no biography of Wittgenstein. In those days, the facts were sc
attered. Even fragmented, you might say, with big holes that looked to me like freedom.

  Today this has changed. Now we have two major biographies: the 1988 book by Brian McGuinness and the Ray-Monk biography that appeared in 1990.

  Nearly forty years this took — forty years of declassification before we had a biography of the man who is arguably this century’s greatest philosopher! You could blame Wittgenstein’s estate, I suppose, but the real reason is Wittgenstein himself, and no wonder. Here was a man who stood like the Day of Judgment over those who knew him. Worse, here was a man who rejected virtually every interpretation of his work, even by those intimate with his thinking. In fact, to know anything about Wittgenstein is to acknowledge that he would have rejected most, if not all, of what has been written about him and his work. In this long roll of the condemned I certainly include The World As I Found It.

  Then there’s the continuing controversy over Wittgenstein’s sexuality. When I first began my research, this deeply constrained, this muzzled quality was what most struck me in the various memoirs I read. Their efforts to put across a plain, unvarnished account of what Wittgenstein said and did had precisely the opposite effect: if anything, these reminiscences struck me as gospel stories, hushed, reverential, proprietary. In fact, his disciples reminded me of the early Christians, running through the catacombs with their sacred relics, one step ahead of the Romans. Indeed! Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God, well …