by Bruce Duffy
In their almost ritual apologies and self-abasements, in their deep discomfort with even presuming to speak about Wittgenstein, these books showed more compellingly than they ever could have described the pall Wittgenstein cast over those who knew him. Fortunately, I was not saddled with this burden. I felt like a boy with new boots atop a hill of unblemished snow! Here before me was a whole life that so far no one had dealt with in a comprehensive way.
Was it moral, what I did? Was it moral of Max Brod not to burn Kafka’s manuscripts and papers as Kafka had instructed? I can’t really answer this question except to say there are different forms of homage. As I saw it thirty years after his death, Wittgenstein was nobody’s moral property. Like a man buried at sea, he was rightfully consigned to history.
But let me be plain here: I was disgusted — no, outraged is the word — that to some, Wittgenstein’s life was clearly considered off-limits, was considered a form of intellectual, professional, and even national property. Except of course to the duly initiated, and even then with palpable constraints.
A revealing question for me now is whether I would have written the novel — if there would have been the same reason to write it — had there been a biography. No, I suspect not. But does this mean, then, that it was my aim to write essentially a fictionalized biography?
Not at all. As I saw it, being “first,” if you will, put me in prime fictional territory. By leaving most readers no other single authority to turn to for the truth, the book would raise a lot of difficulty. Difficulty in reading it. Difficulty in deciding what it was and difficulty in deciding what was true and what wasn’t.
While taking me to task for the “accountability of my sources,” one critic blunders onto this tension in the book. He writes: “It is difficult not to be distracted by the wealth of historical detail [Duffy] has incorporated to guarantee that his Wittgenstein will be confused with the real Wittgenstein.”
Ah! That liberating word confusion.
To further confuse things, I rejected the advice I was given several times, namely, to observe the wryly tactful tradition of the roman à clef. A writer whom I greatly respect found my failure to do this a grievous aesthetic error. So be it. In Shakespeare’s time to write plays about Julius Caesar or Prince Hamlet was not a bothersome thing, but today it is, I’m afraid. In an era of experts and unprecedented specialization — in a time when I should say we cripple ourselves by ceding far too much to the wisdom of experts — a book like mine is bothersome, for some to the point of being disorienting. For all our self-conscious poses, for all our irony and formal sophistication, not to mention our exposure to the strategies of modernism and postmodernism, many of us still like our categories straight. We are greatly bothered by confusions of fact and fiction. We are bothered by a novel that, say, in its prologue adopts the seemingly trustworthy voice of a biography only to monkey with the facts: This is unsportsmanlike, like impersonating a rightful officer of the law. Be more radical and experimental! says one camp. Be more conventional! says the other. When they rap my knuckles, critics seem to hold out these two shining alternatives, often seemingly at the same time. But again, their advice enshrines what too many naively expect nowadays. Straight categories. Fiction as some literary substitute for the old Classic Comics. Above all, the epic, churn-’em-out complacency of that form I almost uniformly detest — “historical fiction.” These by now are old tactics that do not trouble anyone.
While we’re at it, why didn’t I use footnotes? Believe it or not, in an early crisis with the book, my publisher’s editorial board wanted me to fill the back of the book with them. Footnotes! I hit the roof! Does a general give away his battle plans? Does the heretic recant? To me, footnotes would have been a profound aesthetic error, not to mention an act of cowardice. Happily, though, I convinced my wonderful editor, and as a compromise, I added the preface.
But then came another small crisis. Apparently a fact-checking copy editor called my editor almost in tears, exasperated to find pages covered with truths and errors … and, yes, even the troublesome king of France. What a mess. Much like life, mais oui?
Look, I hope this doesn’t all sound too pat. For an author to say he always knew exactly what he was doing — now that’s real fiction.
Of course I got it wrong. Still, some people feel that I got an uncanny amount right, an impression that frankly surprises me when I realize in how many cases how little I knew and how much I made up. David Pinsent’s diaries. Wittgenstein’s father’s letters, and most of Wittgenstein’s letters, too. Wittgenstein’s family — his sisters, brothers, his father. Wittgenstein’s friend Max and the entire World War I sequence. All this and more I made up. In fact, writing the book has taught me this: No one knows, not even those who knew Wittgenstein. Maybe especially those who knew Wittgenstein.
At the risk of being indiscreet, let me share portions of two letters I’ve received. One comes from a niece of Wittgenstein — actually, a very nice woman, who wrote to chastise me, saying, “Who ever really knew him? Who could presume to describe this man’s inner self, even in a fiction-coated novel?”
Another letter comes from a woman who was actually there when Wittgenstein dictated his Blue and Brown Books. She writes, “I wonder at how little I came to know of Wittgenstein personally, considering how many hours I spent with him. We were close, but distant.”
The ultimate unknowability and undecidability of anyone. If you’ve ever used maps and compasses, you know there is an error one must correct for in order to find true north. It is much the same with a novel, which quickly establishes an unspoken contract with the reader. One important part of this unspoken contract is how far the book deviates from reality: It may deviate a lot, even magically so, but the idea, always, is to find true north, or at least a possible true north, or multiple norths.
In this respect, my Wittgenstein — my character, I should say — represents many norths, or so I hope. I say this because he is in ways a composite. In his youth, for instance, I found myself imagining the brilliant and precocious poet, Rimbaud. I thought of the Rimbaud who wrote at the age of sixteen, “It is wrong to say: I think. One ought to say: People think me. I is someone else.”
How like Wittgenstein, who writes in 1916, “The I, the I is what is deeply mysterious! The I is not an object. I objectively confront every object. But not the I.”
On the Russian-front sequence of the novel I thought of Ezra Pound’s friend and hero, the great sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska, dead at twenty-three, in 1915. With the force of a wave, with almost Homeric abandon, the French sculptor died in yet another fruitless assault against German machine guns. Like Wittgenstein, here was another young man who badly wanted to prove himself. Again I found the story of one who sought to test ideas and flesh and beliefs against brute steel. Several months before his death, Gaudier wrote — chiseled — in the brutal capital letters he used in his sculptured manifestos: “HUMAN MASSES teem and move, are destroyed and crop up again … WITH ALL THE DESTRUCTION that works around us, NOTHING IS CHANGED, EVEN SUPERFICIALLY. LIFE IS THE SAME STRENGTH, THE MOVING AGENT THAT PERMITS THE SMALL INDIVIDUAL TO ASSERT HIMSELF.”
Now hear Wittgenstein. On the Russian front a year later, powerless before this same impersonal will, Wittgenstein writes: “A stone, the body of a beast, the body of a man, my body, all stand on the same level. That is why what happens, whether it comes from a stone or my body, is neither good nor bad … I am my world.”
Then there’s the Tolstoyan Wittgenstein that we find during and after World War I. In his “What Is Art” phase, Tolstoy longed to give up vice and meat, to write stories anyone could understand and make shoes for the humblest peasants. Under this same spell, Wittgenstein, after the war, publishes his Tractatus, renounces philosophy, gives up his vast fortune, then goes off to teach peasant children in a poor Austrian village. Was Wittgenstein repeating the life of Tolstoy? Is history, as Nietzsche said, endless recurrence?
I don’t scorn the truth — or the bio
grapher’s art. I respect the biographer’s great tact and judgment, probity and intuition. But, you see, my instincts are radically different: They tell me to mix up, forget, bury and burn — to recombine and fuse disparate elements in what perhaps was a more confused and deliberately irresponsible attempt to create a kind of universal life. By “universal life,” I mean a life that finally goes beyond its seeming subject, or subjects. For me, you see, this is not finally a book “about” Wittgenstein or philosophers, but rather a creation story examining the very forms of life in this world I had found. That is, the world that all of us have found — the world we found and doubtless will find again only in more disguised forms, as we end this dark century and begin the next.
At the end of his short story, Borges tells us that Menard managed to add several chapters to the saga of Don Quixote. Maybe I lost a few. Finally, I feel I lost my Wittgenstein. True, I knew only a character, but for me that character died, as characters do — as a friend and hero and guide, that character died four years ago, disappearing for me as mysteriously as the real Wittgenstein who died in 1951, the year I was born. Hence the title of my novel, which of course is Wittgenstein’s title. For me, it could almost serve as the great philosopher’s epitaph. Or anybody’s epitaph, I suppose:
If I wrote a book called The World As I Found It, I should have to include a report on my body, and should have to say which parts were subordinate to my will and which were not, etc., this being a way of isolating the subject, or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject; for it alone could not be mentioned in that book. —
Wait, where did Wittgenstein go in this troubling statement? He disappears. Here while proposing to report on his life, Wittgenstein simultaneously seems to erase himself out of the picture. You’ll say he meant this purely philosophically, but for me it is a poet’s song of origins and disappearances, of words and then word-covering silence.
Silence: Yes, it is very strange indeed for me to look back at this book four years later. But it’s especially strange now as I try to finish another, very different novel. Or, should I say, as it finishes me.
But again this old haven of mine, The World As I Found It. Flattening like a wave, the picture stills, and then, for better or worse, you, the author — well, you’re irrevocably out of that picture, that fictional space you’ve created. You’re apart from it, and in a very real sense you’re quite irrelevant to it. The I is indeed another, and the subject remains forever elsewhere. This spent wave splashes and falls away, leaving me to wonder at its vanishing face — at what, or whom, I saw in this world that I left.
—BRUCE DUFFY
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
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Copyright © 1987 by Bruce Duffy
Introduction copyright © 2010 by David Leavitt
All rights reserved.
The author gratefully acknowledges the editors and publishers of the following magazines, in which chapters of this novel have appeared: Formations, Conjunctions, and The Antioch Review. Thirteen lines on page 359 from The Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Garmey and Jay Wilson. Translation copyright © 1972 by Stephen Garmey and Jay Wilson. Reprinted by permission of Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. >Epigraphs on pages 17 and 257 from Herakleitos and Diogenes by Heraclitus of Ephesus and Diogenes, the Cynic, translated from the Greek by Guy Davenport. Reprinted by permission of Grey Fox Press.
Cover image: Gustave Klimt, The Great Poplar II, 1902–1903; The Bridgeman Art Library International
Cover design: Katy Homans
The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:
Duffy, Bruce.
The world as I found it / by Bruce Duffy ; introduction by David Leavitt.
p. cm. — (New york Review Books classics)
Originally published: New York : Ticknor & Fields, 1987.
ISBN 978-1-59017-360-2 (alk. paper)
1. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889–1951—Fiction. 2. Russell, Bertrand, 1872–1970—Fiction. 3. Moore, G. E. (George Edward), 1873–1958—Fiction. 4. Philosophers—Fiction. 5. Great Britain—Fiction. 6. Austria—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3554.U31917W6 2010
813’.54—dc22
2010022562
eISBN 978-1-59017-565-1
v1.0
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