The World as I Found It

by Bruce Duffy

  How often I’ve watched you scribbling in your idiotic little book. But you were right about one thing: everything you think is otherwise. As for the rest, logician — you might as well as put a big fat naught before all you think …

  Wittgenstein could only vaguely follow the rough outlines of Grundhardt’s masterly and intricate condemnation, which, like Luther’s complaint, ran on forever, far exceeding his own meager powers of reasoning. Every Jew, Grundhardt was saying, was a contradiction, which, like all contradictions, pointed in two directions and so came to naught. Every fairy, on the other hand, was a tautology, which was to say an empty copulation, arrow pointing to arrow — a vain cancellation.

  For Wittgenstein, there was of course no rational way to refute or deny this wizardry, but then of course he was quite out of his depth — Grundhardt must have read his mind. In his shame, Wittgenstein’s only wish then was to be crushed. But here again Grundhardt quite saw through him, sneering, Don’t presume to choose your own punishment — I’ll be the one to decide that, not you …

  This was pure capriciousness: commanders were always deciding to do what their subordinates had suggested, then presuming they had thought of it first. So, seizing Wittgenstein by the buttocks, Grundhardt flipped him over and straddled him, hissing like a King monkey as he rammed himself down into the roots of Wittgenstein’s molars, splitting him like a chicken with his throbbing malice, driving him down into the rich black mire even as Wittgenstein was ruefully acknowledging, finally, the sublime pleasure of his dominion.

  Grundhardt was saying, Your little book is not the least bit original — kikes are always unoriginal. Would you believe what fresh underwear could cost you? But of course not, etcetera. Just now Count Primkin, etcetera. And Pinsent, too, etcetera, etcetera. And Kurt and Ernst, and even Stize, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera …

  And holding him down, chattering in his ear like a ciphering cricket, Grundhardt kept monotonously repeating the word, which applied to everything, a string of deaths and failures of which he, Wittgenstein, was the natural conclusion — absurd, thought Wittgenstein, when he had denied the causal nexus.

  It was almost dawn when Grundhardt finally released his victim. Looking up at him as his ruptured bowels cohered, Wittgenstein saw that he had been suffering from a blind spot and that Grundhardt had spontaneously filled that void in the way that lightning fills lakes with scalding new life. For what seemed like ages, Wittgenstein stared into the black square where Grundhardt’s head should have been, stared at it even as Grundhardt, casting his malign shadow over the world, drifted away, a figure only slightly darker than the general darkness.

  * * *

  Again the late spring rains came. And with the rains, the Russian drive, like virtually every major offensive of the war, ground to a halt, the forces blocked by the very devastation that had enabled them to break through in the first place as mules sank to their shanks and wagons keeled over and feet sucked out of boots.

  As the Russian offensive lost steam, fresh Austrian divisions were brought up, stiffened by crack German divisions. Skirmishers on both sides threw up little mud furrows and began burrowing until, within a week, both sides found themselves living once more in trenches. Forty miles ahead or forty miles farther back — it didn’t make much difference to the man swinging a pickhandle. White flags appeared. The last wounded were hied away, and the dead were stacked like ricked wood on wagons and carted off while Russian and Austrian soldiers did some hurried trading. Obscurely, inexorably, bubbling to itself like an ulcerous oyster, the cannibal earth was slowly coating their leavings with a lustrous varnish of rot and rust, mulch and metamorphosis. Cherry and apple trees foamed with blossoms, and gusts of returning birds blew over the hills.

  Sent to the rear to rest and be reassigned, Wittgenstein was fed and deloused, then given a clean cot in a depot where he slept for thirty hours, rising near noon the second day. Walking around the village later, he felt human for the first time in weeks, his turmoil having subsided to weary grief and puzzlement as he noticed, as if for the first time, the outcroppings of this teeming spring, which seemed so sudden and unaccountable.

  Wittgenstein reported to his unit the next day, but the grilling he expected about the collapse of their lines never came for the simple reason that the army wanted to bury the incident. The only question Wittgenstein encountered was that of a wheezy sergeant suffering from hay fever, who pinched his fat, gurgling nose with a soaked handkerchief and impatiently asked for the names of the dead. Wittgenstein gave him the names — as many as he knew, anyway. But when he asked to see the list of those accounted for, Grundhardt’s name was not on it. Wittgenstein never heard of him again. In fact, the only person from that time he ever heard about was Prince Primkin, killed with his horse by a freak bolt of lightning on the parade grounds at Lemberg.

  Wittgenstein sent letters to the families of the dead, the longest and most truthful going to Ernst’s family, the shortest and most stretched to Stize’s. Ernst’s mother thanked him for befriending her boy and invited him, please, to visit sometime. Stize’s father, on the other hand, wrote him three turgid pages on his crested stationery, strongly suggesting that his son was deserving of a medal and urging him to attest to the fact.

  By then the Germans had taken over their lines, and Wittgenstein had another platoon, this time under a German lieutenant, a drop forge operator raised from the ranks who had the stomach of a hyena for the murder of that summer. Helpless to change what he saw, Wittgenstein could only change his attitude. So, as most front-line soldiers do eventually, he acknowledged the relative helplessness and insignificance of his lot — that he was indeed no different from the elephant or the wasp, as important, as insignificant.

  Then one day he was leafing through a badly written safety manual when he saw a photograph of an automobile accident, with skid paths drawn in and white circles marking certain significant objects: a broken road sign, a pair of smashed glasses, a lady’s glove. The objects in the picture, he saw, connected with objects in the narrative, just as words connect with the things in the world they pictured. The picture reached right out into reality, and reality was unutterably contained in what was pictured, hence connecting, in a true picture, the scheme represented with its representation.

  The picture grew into a theory of language and logical form, and this theory, in turn, was combined with other theories until it grew into a book. However, by inscribing a limit on what could be spoken about, Wittgenstein had also managed to isolate what could not be spoken about in any meaningful way: God, the mystical, ethics. But since, for him, these things were the most important things one could ever think about, there were actually two books. There was the written book, and then there was the larger, more ambitious work, which suggested the immensity of all the written book had left out. This was the book of silence, of silence and the awed resignation before silence.

  Wittgenstein was commissioned a lieutenant and sent to fight in the mountains of Italy. A few months later, when the war was nearly over and the Austrian army was again falling apart, he was walking down a road with two other men and the completed manuscript in his pack, when he was captured by a platoon of Italian soldiers and put in a prison camp.

  Ironically, Russell was himself in jail then, serving a six-month sentence for having made statements “likely to prejudice His Majesty’s relations with America.” This action stemmed from an article in which Russell had suggested that if American troops proved no good at fighting Germans, they still might be used to intimidate British strikers. It was not exactly the sort of transgression he expected to be jailed for, but he said, rather laconically, that he supposed it would do as well as any since the authorities obviously wanted to punish him. He made a ripping martyr. Jauntily, he told the press that prison would afford him some much-needed time for reading and relaxation — he thought he might even dash off a book. But this was just a pose. The truth was, Russell found prison life a misery, confiding to friends that he fel
t like a dusty book on a shelf. It was springtime and he was in love, longing for the slender thighs of Colette, who was then starring at the Piccadilly in Winnifred Takes the Cake. But cruelest of all for him was Colette’s naive honesty, which was so like his own. Wouldn’t Ottoline have smiled to hear Colette tell him about her latest lover, this young Bolshy who had come to England to spread the word about the Russian Revolution! Still, Colette said it was nothing — all very casual. She swore she’d make it up to him.

  Oh, please, Bertums, she wheedled. Don’t you know how hot for you I am?

  So deliciously naughty, his puss-pussums! So saucy and sly, nipping at his fingers through the speaking grate during her weekly pilgrimage to the Tomb. Well, she just had to tell him about it. And where was the harm? she asked, adding, I’m sure you’d do the same if the situation were reversed.

  I would not! he protested. And to tell me this here! Where I’m power-less!

  But darling, she pleaded, sounding so dainty and coquettish. This has nothing to do with us.

  But it has everything to do with us! he insisted. Have you no faith? Can’t you spend a night a-lone?

  Wittgenstein, then, was the very last thing on Russell’s mind when he received a card from an Italian prison camp. It was the regulation twenty-five words or less, the English rusty:

  I am prigionere in Italy but have written a book that, I believe, solves all our problems. Please write! It will shorten my prison.

  It was 1919. The war was over. The world was starting up again, but there they were, Russell in a cell reading Descartes and steaming over Colette, and Wittgenstein behind barbed wire, staring at a wall of blue alpine air, furious that such chaos should be loose in the world when he had written a book that he felt had solved all the fundamental questions of life and philosophy!

  In a way Wittgenstein found it anticlimactic, and somewhat bitter, seeing these photographs in the newspapers of jubilant enemies posing together after the armistice. Despite his relief, he felt he would be years thawing from this. And there was something dispiriting in it — to see men suddenly reconciled, embracing in the satiety that seems to come only after a period of vast bloodshed.

  Yet even the war, as Wittgenstein remembered it, had had its brief moments of peace, including one he would never forget. This was the Easter peace of 1916, not long after that battle in which Ernst had been killed. Sweet buns and liquor had been promised that day, and some said there might be colored eggs — maybe even ham. It was early morning. Breakfast and inspection were over, and he was getting ready for the open-air mass, thinking that it would do him good to take part in a peaceful act with others.

  From the Russian lines, meanwhile, drifted smells of baking bread and roasting joints of meat, along with the tentative toots and lumberings of some band. He could see a towering dais and atop it an altar surrounded by religious standards — red and yellow silks on long poles that swirled and eddied in the wind. Tired of the weeks of heavy fighting, the Russians were feeling restless and playful. Some were hollering over good-naturedly and waving, while others, exalting in their new freedom, basked in the sun in plain view. Then the mischief started. Someone snatched an officer’s hat from his head and sailed it over the trench to delighted hoots. Soon, two then three hats were sailing back and forth, and then the hat throwing stopped and a surging, riotous cheer went up as over the Russian trenches rose a giant bedsheet banner proclaiming in German: CHRIST HAS RISEN!

  Wittgenstein was still staring at the banner, wondering what they were up to, when several Russians broke from their trench and went cavorting down their lines, waving their arms and shouting. An officer jumped up and ordered them back, then made a fool of himself by chasing them, drawing taunts and whoops as others ran out and joined the melee. And then the gates opened: knots of men swarmed out of the trenches, whooping and dancing, waving branches and flinging their hats into the air. Wittgenstein saw a man being tossed on a blanket, smiling as he turned lazy somersaults in the sky. There was a man juggling, another dragging a shaggy white mascot goat, and what appeared to be a circus troupe — Gypsies and fakirs, monkeys and a bawling bear. Soon everyone was into it. With a flourish and a beating of drums, the band struck up and started marching down the hill. Then, in windy white robes and miters, bearded Orthodox priests climbed over the berm of the front-line trenches. Lifting their golden staffs in blessing, they slogged down the hill, followed by an unruly mob of worshipers carrying icons, tall crosses and standards emblazoned with thorned crowns and hearts of flame.

  Down the hill swept the Russian army. Down in droves they came, carrying crossed Easter buns, seed cakes, vodka, balalaikas and accordions as others ran ahead with wire cutters, chopping lanes through their own entanglements. Then midway they stopped: the band struck and all fell silent, leaving only the sound of the wind and the giant clouds plowing over like archangels in the sun. For one interminable minute, the two armies stood face to face, studying each other like a far oasis. As he eyed the round, sunburned faces of his enemies, Wittgenstein thought that army looked like a ripe brown wheat field sweeping up and down. In his hands, Wittgenstein was holding the gifts he would give that day, his copy of Tolstoy’s Gospels, picture postcards, a bar of soap — anything at hand. In return, he would be given seed cakes and painted eggs, a small broken doll and a coin, swigs of vodka — tokens redeemable for some measure of his broken faith.

  Two vast armies facing each other, two extreme poles of existence. And the next thing he knew, the dam was broken: the Austrians let out a cheer and he was charging down that hill, where he suddenly found himself engulfed, the two armies meeting like the swollen headwaters of two rivers. Russians were grappling on his arms and energetically patting him on the head. Thousands had risen from the earth. Wittgenstein felt as if he were present at the Day of Judgment, differences and alliances alike suspended as Jews frolicked with Cossacks and honest men with thieves and murderers. Talking was useless on such a day; with no recourse to speech, they could only touch, gesture, point. Adrift in that walking amnesia, they couldn’t keep their hands off each other or ward off each other’s piquant human strangeness. Wittgenstein could see men mutely nodding and moving their arms with tears in their eyes, the spell broken only when they tried to speak. It was nearly dark before order was restored and dawn before the wire was repaired and the carousing stopped. Until then, they sang, clapped, waltzed, bawled, exchanged addresses, beat drums, howled like dogs and hung together in knots, atrociously drunk and wearing one another’s hats while pictures were taken. One Russian told Wittgenstein that stoves could have flown on such a day, but in the forests and on the roads, refugees were eating cooked weeds and dying like little flies, and a few hours later, the revelers were falling as well. Like the corn and the seasons they fell, but still this work, necessary or not, could not be called beautiful or complete. Christ had not risen high or for long, nor had he risen for everyone that Easter Sunday.

  BOOK III

  The World Revisited

  BEACON HILL, 1931

  With their eyes all creatures gaze into

  the Open. Only our eyes, as though turned in,

  on every side of it are set about

  like traps to circumvent its free outgoing.

  What is without we know from the face

  of animals alone, for even the youngest child

  we turn around and force to see the past

  as form and not the openness that

  lies so deep within animals. Free from death,

  we alone see death; the free animal

  has its destruction always behind it

  and before it God, so when it moves, it moves

  into eternity like a running spring …

  — Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies

  Reunion: Summer 1931

  THERE HE IS, said Dorothy Moore, hurrying down the station platform. That’s him over there, isn’t it? With the cane? You never told me he walks with a cane. Is he lame from the war?


  Lame? asked Moore, who frankly had never noticed. I don’t know. No, not lame. I have no idea why he carries that thing.

  It’s so annoying, remarked Dorothy with a sideways look. You never tell me the interesting things about people.

  That’s because I so dread the interesting things about people, said Moore, returning her look. As I am dreading this weekend.

  The man with the cane was Wittgenstein, and Moore and Dorothy were meeting him at Cambridge Station to take the train to Petersfield, on the South Downs, where Russell and his wife, Dora, lived with their two children at Beacon Hill, the progressive children’s school they had started four years before. It would be a reunion of sorts, but it wasn’t a social visit. The next day, at Russell’s, Wittgenstein was to stand for his doctorate, with Moore and Russell as his examiners.

  It had been a good two years at least since Moore had seen Russell, and probably ten years since Russell had seen Wittgenstein; and it had been at least seventeen years since the three of them had been together. The prospect of examining Wittgenstein at this Viva was reason enough for Moore to be uneasy, but he had others, one being the perhaps volatile chemistry among the three of them, and another being Russell, who for him was still persona non grata. Ever since their row during the war, when Russell had accused Moore of not understanding Wittgenstein’s work, Moore and Russell had studiously avoided each other. Moore guessed he had not seen Russell more than a handful of times during those years, and then typically in some unavoidable public context. A few bland pleasantries and he and Russell would quickly move on. They had little to say to each other.