The World as I Found It Read online

  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 have—that we are, so to speak, related in our pain? For when I say that “Russell has a pain,” I am referring to a physical body—to Russell’s body. But when I say, “I have a pain,” I am not referring to my own physical body—“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), pain—the electric current of pain—is 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 questions—which Bruce Duffy asks but never answers—lie 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.

  —DAVID LEAVITT

  THE WORLD AS I FOUND IT

  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.—

  — Ludwig Wittgenstein,

  Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

  Preface

  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 possible—or 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 — and that of Moore’s and Russell’s — 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 — fiction.

  Prologue

  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.

  — Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

  Duck-Wabbit

  THE 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 — 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 — 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 —

  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 — A quick up-down look, amazed that a young man could be so removed as not to know this. Not Donald — Daffy.

  But then the philosopher wondered if the young man was instead making a veiled philosophical point about the indeed curious fact that these two excitable ducks spoke with sputtering lisps. Ah, thought the philosopher. His companion was pointing out that the two ducks were of ambiguous, even synonymous, identity, like the curious duck-rabbit he had shown in his lectures, a drawing that could be seen as either a duck or a rabbit before it dawned on the viewer that it was both or neither, or just one continuous line.

  Oh, brother! lisped the philosopher, this to immediately fix in mind the duck in question. But don’t you think it curious, he probed, pressing this obscure young man to make his point. I mean that neither of these ducks can speak without spitting. Assuming we could even understand a duck who could speak. But spitting —

  The young man, accustomed to the philosopher’s unorthodox mind, ogled around.
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  That is rather odd, isn’t it.

  On the screen, meanwhile, it was pure stage business — the usual boy-girl stuff before the next dance number. Dispense with the duck. Broadly hinting now, the philosopher said:

  And the rabbit. I like that rabbit. Or cwazy wa-bbit, as they say.

  Bugs? asked the young man carefully.

  It was quite hopeless. He didn’t get it. Ginger, meanwhile, was in another snit. Fred, crestfallen, was pacing in his dressing room, hands stuffed in his tuxedo pockets. Glancing around distractedly, the philosopher said:

  Bugs the rabbit, yes.

  The young man was squinting, looking troubled. Under the lapping light, the philosopher hardly heard him at first when he asked:

  But as art, Dr. Wittgenstein?

  Art? Suddenly, the magisterial Dr. Wittgenstein looked profoundly uncomfortable. Whatever do you mean?

  These films. Do you consider them art?

  Fred, by then, was chasing Ginger across a moonlit bridge. Bathed in that powdery light, Wittgenstein screwed up his nose as if he’d whiffed Limburger:

  To speak of these flicks as art? This I would view with the highest suspicion.

  At this time, in the later forties, Ludwig Wittgenstein, not unlike the duck-rabbit, was himself an object of ambiguity and suspicion in many philosophical circles.

  It came as no surprise to Wittgenstein that his ideas were misunderstood and misrepresented. In his shunning contempt for philosophy and philosophers, he almost consciously encouraged this reaction. Publishing his late work could have done much to boost his reputation and erase his mystery-man image, but despite his periodic waverings and the pleadings of his friends, Wittgenstein could not bring himself to bring out his new work — not in his lifetime. Instead, his ideas were repeated by word of mouth or passed around as transcripts of the shorthand notes that his students doggedly took down during his lectures.

  Lectures! Séances was more like it. Wittgenstein held these classes twice a week in his two small, bare rooms in Trinity’s Whewell’s Court. The door would be open, and his students would enter as into a chapel this room furnished solely with an army cot, a shelf of books and manuscripts and the folding card table on which he wrote. Seated near the window, deep in a funk of thought, Wittgenstein would be facing partly away, like a figure posing for a life study. They would not have dreamed of greeting him, much less of bothering him with questions or small talk. He wanted no tourists or gapers, and none dared come late. Perched on the folding gunmetal chairs on which he expected them to remain for two or three hours without squeaking, they were not to talk, smoke, raise their hands or, in short, do anything that might distract him. The session would “begin” promptly at four, but another ten or fifteen minutes might pass before, without warning, he erupted into words. Grimacing, grasping the metal seat of his own chair, cast in the forcing house of their expectant gaze, he might talk brilliantly for the entire session, without a single note. These were the good days. But there were also the slow, halting or bad sessions, when he would sit there mentally whipping himself for his torpidity, snorting, Come — on! Oh, this is intolerable. As you can see, I’m perfectly stupid today …

  People would watch him and wonder. Was he happy? Sad? A troubled man beneath? But what could the outer world know of the inner? Morning and evening, when the light was most intense, the most transitional, they would see him barging through the Cambridge Backs, a wild expanse of cattails and lilystems, impossibly green, through which the River Cam glides under ductile willows. Even then, late in his life, Wittgenstein looked a good ten years younger than fifty-eight. He was a trim man of average height, with a sharp nose, flat, literal lips, and curly brown hair graying at the temples. His eyes were dark and piercing, and he often carried a bamboo cane, not as a crutch, but as a foil and pointer. About him there was a vaguely martial air, a certain cleanness and sobriety, like that of a priest on an off Sunday. His dress was functional, meticulous and, above all, consistent: an old tweed coat or a worn leather jacket, a shirt open at the collar. The dark flannel trousers were worn but carefully pressed, and the cracked leather of his old oxfords was buffed to the burnished hue of an old pipe bowl.

  Often one of his young friends would accompany him on these walks. These were, as a rule, self-effacing, innocent young men from middle- or lower-middle-class families, the type who took the early school prizes and were duly brought under the wing of some lonely master who made it his cause to get the lad into Oxford or Cambridge. But besides being innocent and brainy, Wittgenstein’s young men were slender and good-looking. More beguiling still, for Wittgenstein, they were often as not quite unaware of their looks and indeed of sex in general. Oblivious to the pull of mirrors, they were themselves mirrors — deep, drowsing pools of innocence in which Wittgenstein could lose himself while feeling, in certain fundamental respects, more innocent himself.

  He craved their companionship. Like a possessive mother, he fussed over them and read their fate like tea leaves: to marry late, if ever, and be forever tied to him. A few years before, in fact, Wittgenstein had even taken one of these young men with him to Russia — for Wittgenstein the spiritual land of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky — with the idea of their emigrating there to study medicine in preparation for a life spent treating the poor. They went quietly, secretively, but of course stories got out that Wittgenstein was a Red or a Marxist, while others snottily said that the former aeronautical engineer had taken his young shadow to Russia so they might get their wings — their angel’s wings.

  But Russia was not what Wittgenstein wanted. Whatever its merits, philosophy wasn’t what he wanted either, not when life offered so many other useful pursuits. Certainly he did not advise his students to become philosophers; that was the last thing he would have suggested. No, he warned them to avoid at all cost the trap of academic life — at least if they planned to do any honest or original thinking of their own.

  On the surface, this might have seemed hypocritical, coming as it did from a man with a tolerably comfortable chair at a great university. But Wittgenstein was not advocating a path he had not himself followed, for he had done many things in life besides philosophy. After the First World War, where he fought with the Austrian army on the Russian front, Wittgenstein had even abandoned philosophy for ten years, dispensing with a sizable fortune he had inherited and going off to live a life of servitude and penury as a rural schoolmaster in a poor Austrian village. Hard as he tried, though, he was not cut out for life among stunted village folk, and he left a few years later. He then worked for a time as a gardener in a monastery and even considered taking vows until the abbot wisely talked him out of it. With that, he returned to his native Vienna, where he put his early engineering background to use designing and building for his wealthy older sister a splendid modernist home of angled steel and stone, whose chaste, rigorous lines suggested the ascending logic of a tone poem. In the Vienna telephone directory at this time, during the late twenties, he even listed himself as Ludwig Wittgenstein: Architekt.

  But architecture couldn’t hold him either. Philosophy, he was forced to realize, was his supreme gift, yet when he returned to philosophy in 1929, his mind never entirely settled there. Still, much as he hated Cambridge, he instinctively knew that college life, and the relative freedom it afforded him, was more conducive to his work than a life spent on the Russian steppes, tending an endless line of human misery. But because he couldn’t settle on anything, the young men around him couldn’t really settle, either. And so this, too, was his legacy: to leave them and, later, philosophy deluged with his huge, half-conscious will, which, like a sweeping flame, sucked up all the oxygen.

  This influence wasn’t an entirely conscious thing on Wittgenstein’s part. On the contrary; because it was so deeply rooted in his character — because it was not overtly selfish or deliberately manipulative — the bond he created was all the more powerful. And strong as this bond was in life, it was that much stronger after his death, when in the colle
ctive memory of those who knew him he would become a sort of splatched and angled concatenation of images, wishes, evasions, running feuds, regrets. For some who knew him, his name would evoke pains such as old men feel — sharp, bunionlike pangs that would shoot out at the mention of Witt-gen-stein, that fractious weather system of remembering and forgetting which finally consumes the life of the thing remembered.

  * * *

  For years, Wittgenstein had been engaged in a struggle with language, examining — and indeed exhaustively auditing — language in its variety to discern its endless games and guises. He was discouraged to hear of Einstein’s continued effort to bring the forces of gravitation and electromagnetism under a single law. How, he wondered, could so great a mind succumb to the will-o’-the-wisp of mere unity? The world, he was now convinced, defied reduction or summary, despite his own attempts in that direction as a young man. Philosophy needed no more dinosaurs, no more grand systems. His own intentions were as humble as the words “table,” “lamp,” “door.”

  As he saw it, the rightful course of philosophy was not the pursuit of elegance or the distillation of intoxicating mathematical essences. Our natural craving for generality, for the handy rule of thumb, was precisely the problem. Our crude rules were only hammers, when we also needed chisels and screwdrivers — when we needed a whole toolbox, as well as an encyclopedia and a taxonomy of the things we say, and what we think we mean by them. A language, he said, is nothing more than a collection, and to understand it, we must plow over the whole ground of language, examining it in all its particular crotchets and uses. For the philosopher, he felt, the problem was much like that of seeing the rabbit within the duck — that is, seeing with the freshness of second sight, holding in mind the image of what one first saw while yet bringing to it the force of what one saw later, since one was always seeing more in the picture. Still, in an age addicted to scientific leaps, he knew the ambiguous, ongoing, necessarily fragmentary nature of the search was not exactly a cheering prospect. Like many a stealthy thinker who presents something difficult and vaguely uncongenial, he was often at some pains to make himself clear, at times even dropping broad hints. Once, for instance, he told a friend that where the usual thinker wants to show unexpected resemblances, his task was rather to show many discrete differences among the various families of language, families that each have their own resemblances and eccentricities, their rules and disguises. Their duck-rabbits, so to speak.