The World as I Found It (2 page)
But Moore, Moore went these eaters one better. It was not enough to merely empty dishes. Moore must have
Moore
, went the joke, Russell's line. Having polished off two plates, Moore would snag a trout or waiter or would go back himself into the steamy, dark recesses of the kitchen, past the scullions toiling over the stacked havoc of the mealâ¦. Happily, Moore would examine the cuts in their bloody brown paper and smell the melon bungs in season. Brushing away the shaved ice, he would prod the stacked cod, reeking and slimy, checking for the color of the scales and the clearness of the eyes. Moore knew the correct saffron hue of a good fresh pullet, and he likewise loved to appraise the leanness and savoriness of the bacons, bringing his nose down so close that he could see the little black stubs of unshaved bristle visible under the brownish skin.
Now consider Duffy's rendition of a family dinner at the Palais Wittgenstein. As the courses arrive and are placed before the Master of the House, he attacks them and his youngest son, lately arrived from Cambridge, with equal gusto:
There was, in short, little Wittgenstein could have told his father about England. But still the old man continued with these circling questions as he worked away at an enormous welcoming meal that featured
Jungschweinsbraten
, a young roast pork loin covered to its crackling with a thick cream sauce, and that culminated some five courses later with a snowy meringue
Spanische Windtorte
âfour pounds of sugared egg whites that he couldn't look at when it appeared, vaguely polar, through the lapping candlelight.
Wittgenstein's refusal to partake of this dessert then impels his father to hold forth on English cooking:
Well! he said. For myself, I really do think English food is amply deserving of its reputation for dreadfulness. At least in the main. The wealthy, of course, do not really eat English food. They still lick the boots of the FrenchâFrench cuisine is the rage. Even their menus are in French, though they do persist, especially at breakfast, in serving grilled lamb kidneys, herrings and other solidly English offal.
Out to charm his family now with observations far more picturesque and amusing than any his son could have made, Karl Wittgenstein added with a look of astonishment: But do you know what? The English do not know how to bake! Oh, there you would find nothing like this magnificent
Spanische Windtorte
, and certainly none executed so beautifully.
By way of a retort, Wittgenstein agrees with his father, adding that in their badness British baked goods are comparable to “Jewish baked goods”âa not so veiled allusion to the fact that the Wittgensteins, despite various acts of religious conversion, are themselves Jewish: the stalwart hamantashen, not the mystic
Windtorte
, is their legacy, just as Cambridge (if we follow the metaphorical trail of crumbs to its inevitable conclusion) is more like the shtetl than the palais, with Moore, of all people, cast in the role of the rabbinical father figure, gorging himself on the fruits of the crude earth even as Karl Wittgenstein rides the Spanish wind.
As the twentieth century progresses, the paths of Duffy's three heroes diverge. Just as Russell predicts, Moore cocoons himself in domesticity, rarely leaving the ambit of his Cambridge routine. Just as Moore predicts, Russell abandons the rigors of mathematical logic in favor of the public life, becoming a denizen of the American speaking tour circuit and a regular contributor to the popular press. (“No subject was too daunting and none too trivial. If the Hearst papers or
Vanity Fair
wanted an article on the morality of kissing or the social implications of bobbed hair, they would quickly have it.”) In the end simple jealousy undoes Russell's labored efforts to live a life uninhibited by such outmoded values as monogamy, leaving him with “a sense of incredible disbelief at what was otherwise a given: that he should be himself, a presence named
Russell
, and that this fast-unraveling skein of sensation should actually be his lifeâthat life should have slipped to this point.” Nor can he contend with the whirling dervish that is Wittgenstein, whoâfollowing a peripatetic journey of a lifetime that leads him from the perpetual daylight of a Norway summer, to the unspeakable violence of the Russian front, to an Italian prison camp, to the grim poverty of the Austrian village of Trattenbachâends up back at the one place where he has felt anything approaching a sense of belonging: Cambridge.
All this Duffy chronicles in a narrative that is alternately spare and spilling over with detail, abstract and carnal, relentless in its portrayal of pain and rhapsodic in its hymning of beauty. We see Vienna, over the course of two wars, smashed and partially rebuilt and smashed again. We see Cambridge, in its very resistance to change, providing a haven. We see Russell going at it with his mistress, the sturdy Miss Marmer (“a familiar dish: throat of pearls and lipstick, the clop of her black mules and the silk kimono that he liked to spread over her perfumed buttocks like a peacock's fan”), and Moore, in his lovely tenor voice, singing “Foggy, Foggy Dew,” and Wittgenstein, in a moment of panic, hurrying to the toilet at the Vienna Opera only to discover that he has stumbled into the ladies' room. Nothing is off-limits, nothing sacrosanctânot even the once taboo subject of Wittgenstein's sexuality, of which Duffy writes with refined candor. Here, for instance, is Wittgenstein making one of his occasional forays into the sexually charged woods of the Prater:
No, it was not
you
, Wurstel Prater, nor you, Ferris wheel. It was not you, Herr Vendor, selling bags of stale crumbs to feed the wintering geese on the chill pond, nor, heaven knows, was it you, innocent children, out today for a walk with your nannyâ
No, it was you, scowling Herr Kollege, saber scarred and swaggering with vituperative cane, away for a few hours from your brothers in the dueling fraternity. It was you, Game of Strengthâyou, the burly sausage maker or bricklayer. And it was, too, away for an hour from your wife and family, away from the privation and anxiety of Christmas. Yes, and if you weren't so slightâif you were darker, rougher, more menacingâit might well be you, young man, swatting your leg, mystically nodding about something that could be had, and had fast, among these shrouding firs.
And here is Wittgenstein trying to explain to Moore and Russell, in the viva voce portion of his dissertation defense, his efforts to pin down the language by which, as he grows older, he finds himself increasingly beset and baffled: the language of pain.
We all have had pains, aches, sadness. We know how these things feel. But how do we express them? How, linguistically, am I to suppose that you, Russell, have the same pain that I haveâthat we are, so to speak, related in our pain? For when I say that “Russell has a pain,” I am referring to a physical bodyâto Russell's body. But when I say, “
I
have a pain,” I am not referring to my own physical bodyâ“I” does not denote a possessor.
Russell misses the point, which Wittgenstein struggles to clarify:
This pain was a séance, of sorts. Pain was a medium of human exchange, like body heat or love; it was a sort of litmus test that could be used to detect the human presence, tracing how it learned and grew, and the way it remembered. Pain, Wittgenstein strove to explain, was an as yet uncharted territory, a wide and various language with a kind of anthropology. Consider its wide variety, with grief, sorrow, anger and anxiety, and distinct languages for each. Indeed, pain seemed a kind of vault for the psyche, much as in polar regions one may find whole frozen mastodons, perfectly preserved.
The men were speaking. Electrically, if imperceptibly, the pain was flowing.
It's that last line that gets me: the idea that, even as Wittgenstein labors to find an analogy for pain (ectoplasm, litmus, prehistoric fossil), painâthe electric current of painâis in the room. It is pain that undermines his effort to taxonomize pain; pain that inhibits his Forsterian attempt to “connect” with Russell; pain that leaves him, in the end, at a loss for words.
Is the artist's role, as Chekhov claimed, to ask questions, not answer them? If so, what is the philosopher's role? These questionsâwhich Bruce Duffy asks but never answersâlie at the heart of
The World As I Found It
, a novel about philosophers that manages, to its credit, never to be a “philosophical novel.” At once audacious and austere, panoramic and intimate,
The World As I Found It
proves that not even Wittgenstein is beyond the novelist's ken. If fiction can do this, it can do anything.
âD
AVID
L
EAVITT
For Marianne
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 method 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.â
â Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
This is a work of fiction: it is not history, philosophy or biography, though it may seem at times to trespass on those domains. Although the book follows the basic outlines of Ludwig Wittgenstein's life and character, it makes no attempt at a faithful or congruent portrayal, even if such were possibleâor desirable for the aims of fiction.
Fiction cannot, by definition, be completely factual or historically accurate. “True fiction” is a contradiction in terms. But there is one very practical reason why fiction that makes use of real life and history cannot usefully serve the prevailing standards of biography or history. This is fiction's inherent need for narrative compression. Fiction that shrinks from changing fact, that dilutes itself in an expository effort to faithfully duplicate factual circumstance and chronology in all its detail, cannot help but lose narrative force and acuity, if not its very claim as fiction. So my aim is not to usurp the rightful place of history or biography, or to somehow mimic the work of the historian or biographer. Fiction must do its work differently, making up its own rules and moving the fence line where necessary to suit its own special purposes.
For example, I have Wittgenstein meeting Bertrand Russell one year later than he did, I give Wittgenstein two sisters rather than three, and I have G. E. Moore marrying three years earlier than he actually did. Fiction also allows the author to fill in holes and even largely make up the personalities of certain obscure real-life figures, and this I have done as well. Nevertheless, the book does basically follow the trajectory of Wittgenstein's life and work â and that of Moore's and Russell's â in pretty much the sequence of events and basically within the broader frame of history.
As I have come to realize, one has to be fairly well versed in the facts before one can effectively change them. To freely write about historical figures one also must be willing to borrow. Those familiar with Wittgenstein's work will readily recognize my debts and misunderstandings, not to mention my periodic use of his words and ideas. The same will be true for my debts to the thinking of Russell, Moore and others who appear in the book, or who influenced me in the writing of it.
The hole, too, is part of the doughnut, and so I would hope the witting and unwitting holes in this account will infuse it with a necessary fictional space. We are all composite lives and minds living in a composite world so fraught with times, claims and voices that it seems we are forever in the process of forgetting. But forgetting is also the work of memory. Truly we forget in order to remember, and in memorializing this unruly world, I have scrupulously forgotten and mixed up the facts so this book will not be mistaken for anything but what it is â fiction.
I once said, perhaps rightly: The earlier culture will become a heap of rubble and finally a heap of ashes, but spirit will hover over the ashes.
â Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Culture and Value
T
HE PHILOSOPHER
loved the flicks, periodically needing to empty himself in that laving river of light in which he could openly gape and forget.
Following one of his three-hour lectures, exhausted by his own ceaseless inquiries, he would hook one of his young men by the arm and ask with a faintly pleading look:
Care to see a flick?
The Tivoli was just down the street from Trinity College, Cambridge, rarely crowded. Wanting to avoid chance meetings in the queue, the philosopher would let the film start before he went stalking down the darkened aisle, audibly saying in British English with a German accent:
For this you must get
up close
â fourth aisle at least.
They were watching
Top Hat
. Craning back, spellbound as Fred twirled Ginger “Cheek to Cheek” under a temple of sound stage moonlight, the philosopher turned to his companion and said delightedly:
Wonderful
, how the light empties over you. Like a
shower bath
.
The young Englishman, precise in inflection, his top button buttoned, carefully smiled in the affirmative as his mentor continued:
Now, no one can dance like this Astaire fellow. Only Americans can do this sort of thing â the English are entirely too stiff and self-conscious. Astaire always gets the girl and of course it's utterly
without pretense
. Oh, it makes no sense whatsoever. Like the antics of that American mouse and his animal acquaintances â
The young man perked up. Mickey Mouse, you mean?
Yes, that one. Entirely creditable and charming. Also the duck. I very much like the duck. A
wise guy
, as the Americans would say.
Donald Duck, you say?
No, no â A quick up-down look, amazed that a young man could be so removed as not to know this. Not Donald â
Daffy
.
