Mrs. Wittgenstein left her youngest son some money in her will but Ludwig, true to form, refused to accept any of it. On leaving the school at Otterthal, he accepted, once again, a job as assistant gardener, this time at the monastery of the Brothers of Mercy at Hutteldorf on the outskirts of Vienna, where he pondered two options: to become a monk or to commit suicide. Aware of his distress, Gretl offered him a chance to work with the architects Paul Engelmann and Jacques Groag on a luxurious modern-style palace that she was building for herself on the Kundmanngasse. Fearful that he might quarrel with her and with his coworkers Ludwig initially refused, but subsequently changed his mind. Proudly describing himself as "Ludwig Wittgenstein, Architect," he proceeded to make exacting demands, haggling over every millimeter of every lock and radiator fitting, insisting that a recently plastered ceiling be undone and raised by a few centimeters, so that by the time the task was completed it had run overtime and over budget and everyone involved was thoroughly depressed and exhausted. A locksmith "jumped with fright" when Ludwig bawled at him and Jacques Groag wrote a letter complaining, "I come home very depressed with a headache after a day of the worst quarrels, disputes, vexations, and this happens often. Mostly between me and Wittgenstein." When Gretl eventually refused to pay for any more of Ludwig's expensive adjustments, he went off and bought himself a lottery ticket ("a tax on unfortunate, self-conceited fools" as Sir William Petty once described it) in the vain hope of winning enough to pay for the work himself.
The house, from the outside, consisted of three stark, unadorned rectangular blocks. Hermine, who disliked it intensely, recorded in her memoir that "two great people [Ludwig and Gretl] had come together as architect and client, making it possible to create something perfect of its kind." She claimed that it fitted her sister like a glove, but when her nephew Tommy Stonborough came to sell it after his mother's death he did so on the grounds (since contested) that Gretl had always loathed it.
The plain right-angled contours of Gretl's new house were certainly not to everyone's taste. Paul thought it was abysmal, and so did Jerome. The work was completed in 1928 and on Christmas Eve of that year the family gathered there to celebrate. Gretl felt the Christmas had been "shit" and "a dismal failure." Jerome ostentatiously handed presents to everyone except the Zastrow boys, whom he still refused to acknowledge. The next day he accepted Paul's invitation to dine at the Palais in the Alleegasse (now renamed Argentinierstrasse), which alarmed Gretl, as she knew that the atmosphere there irritated him and usually sent him crazy. She was right to have worried. All through dinner Jerome railed against her pretentious new house and with "Ludwig Wittgenstein, Architect" sitting directly opposite, she found herself twisting in agonies of embarrassment. On the way home in the car she confronted him: "How could you have said all that!" The effect was like throwing a lighted match into a can of petrol, she explained to Tommy: "all the anger that he felt against himself exploded on to me and the world. I felt my mistake but was too exasperated to hold myself back. Poor Ji struggled to control his tears."
Ludwig was sensitive. His dislike of family contention (even though he was often the cause of it), and the siren call of the philosophical brotherhood, finally persuaded him to return to Cambridge to work on "visual space and other things," and so he left Vienna in early January 1929. At the same time Paul, with whom he was now on excellent terms, went to Munich to give a performance of the Bortkiewicz Concerto. Gretl stayed in Vienna living the high life, befriending important people, planning private concerts and receptions at her new house. For ten months things went smoothly for her until, in late October, a telegram arrived from New York informing her that her American stock portfolio had imploded and she had lost most of her fortune in the Wall Street Crash.
Of course it was all Jerome's fault--or so Gretl's brothers and sisters told her. He was inept and incompetent with money and should never have been allowed near her fortune. They expected her to take a tough line with him--to give him one of her famous " tickings-offs." Instead she insisted: "He is my husband and I cannot destroy a human relationship over money." She calculated that she would be left with an income of around $30,000 a year, that she would have to rent out the new house in Vienna, dismiss all but three of her servants, sell some pictures of Paul and Hermine to pay off the rest, and move into a smaller flat. At first she announced that she would refuse offers of help from her siblings but in the end accepted from Paul, Hermine and Helene a share of the fortune that Ludwig had given them in 1919, from which she was originally excluded.
At the time Gretl claimed "not to be unhappy at all." She said she had too much money anyway, "more than I should have." She enjoyed a challenge and this was certainly one. "Don't ask for life to be easier if you are capable of being strong," she would say. Jerome, however, was not made of the same mettle, nor was he capable of such strength as hers, and the loss of his wife's fortune--which forced him to consider giving up his flat and luxurious lifestyle in Paris--sent him, once again, into a spiral of mental decline. Gretl put him into the Cottage Sanatorium on the Sternwartestrasse, where he was subjected to several weeks of Dr. Wagner-Jauregg's shock treatments. After that she took him to Egypt to recu perate.
Everyone was nervous about the following Christmas (1929). It had all gone so badly wrong the year before. As early as November, Ludwig wrote to Hermine and Paul suggesting they each bring a friend to dilute the tension. Nobody wanted Jerome to come as he was in double disgrace, for losing his wife's fortune and for behaving like a pig last time round. Gretl was traumatized by her family's naked hostility toward him, but eventually she succeeded in persuading Ludwig to get him invited. Under instruction from his wife to be on his best behavior Jerome acquitted himself well. Christmas, for once, was peaceful and intimate, and Jerome had the grace to say hello to the Zastrow boys for the first time in his life.
MORE ON PAUL'S CHARACTER
Once or twice a year, every year, Paul visited a friend in England, Marga Deneke. They were close, though unlikely to have been lovers. She kept a framed silhouette of Paul on her desk, which he had sent her with the comment "I think I look very stupid." Marga was five years older than Paul, of German extraction but brought up in England. She was a musicologist as well as a fine pianist who had played for Clara Schumann and studied with Eugenie Schumann in her youth. She and her sister Helena, a German scholar, had inherited a small fortune from their father, who had been a rich merchant banker, and lived their adult lives together in a Gothic villa called Gunfield, near Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford. There, in the spacious music room, Marga and Helena hosted the concerts of the Oxford Chamber Music Society.
There were many lines of connection between the Denekes and the Wittgensteins, any one of which may have accounted for Paul and Marga's first meeting. There was, of course, the Eugenie Schumann-Marie Fil-lunger connection. Marga was also a collector of Mendelssohn manuscripts (of which Paul owned several), her mother was a friend of Karl's cousin the violinist Joachim, and she was a friend of the clarinettist Richard Muhlfeld and violinist Marie Soldat-Roeger, regular guests and performers at the Wittgenstein Palais.
For many years Paul joined her and a small group of close companions for holidays of music and nature walks at Overstrand, at St. Mar-garets-at-Cliffe, near Dover, and at Southwold on the North Sea coast. He was sensitive to nature and very knowledgeable about it. He could name flora and fauna in German, English or French. He adored sunsets and the sea and was observant of the smallest detail. According to Marga, walks calmed his nerves. In this respect he differed from his brother Ludwig, who walked not for exercise or for love of nature, but to discuss his ideas. Ludwig required his companions to participate, not just to listen. "I remember," wrote one of his friends, "how mentally difficult and tiring such walks could be." Paul, on the other hand, did not like to dilute his enjoyment of nature with idle chatter and refused to walk with more than one person on the grounds that "talk for three is tiresome."
Rain was disregarded [Marga recalled].
He held in contempt any able-bodied person who let it foil plans. Off we set for Dover Castle and completely drenched, on the windswept cliffs far from home, he declared we had talked enough. It was a long way to St. Margaretsat-Cliffe, he walked ahead and I followed like a dripping dog.
Paul insisted on a long walk every day and if anyone was brave enough to accompany him, be it three miles to a restaurant in Manhattan, marching up the White Mountains of New Hampshire, or clambering to the top of the 6,500-foot Schmittenhohe mountain at Zell am See, his companion was obliged to keep pace and to keep quiet. If the opportunity availed itself, he would also go for a swim in the morning. On Tuesdays he denied himself food and usually went to the cinema, to the theater or to a concert, to distract himself from sensations of hunger. During the film he sat still and absorbed until a few minutes before the end, when he habitually got up and left, regardless of how much he had been enjoying it.
He was what the Germans call weltfremd--he lived in a world of his own, quite detached from the details and needs of everyday life and with little idea how everyday living was conducted.
He was like no one else I have ever known [recalled one of his students]. Shortly after his arrival in New York, I had a lesson in the mid-town hotel where he was temporarily staying. After the lesson we left at the same time. On the way down in the elevator he told me that he was desperate because he needed another pair of shoes and the Vienna Sekretariat [the Wittgenstein staff] had been slow in sending anything. When I asked him "Why don't you buy a pair here on 5th Avenue?" he looked at me in utter astonishment and said "What a wonderful idea. I never thought of that."
There are many stories that attest to Paul's impracticality: his trying to use his front-door key to operate the lift and refusing to understand why it wouldn't work; tangling himself in the string from which a learned book was hung around his neck; walking out into the street in a hat unaware that it was still attached to the hatbox in which it came; being greeted at the airport in Montreal by his American agent, Bernard Laberge, not looking at him properly and wandering off with a member of the public--chatting to him about the evening's concert and trying to get into his car, while Laberge ran frantically round the airport looking for him. At a dinner party in Paul's honor the hostess came into the dining room with a large casserole of goulash. "This," she announced proudly, "has been cooked especially for you." Paul thanked her kindly, put the dish in front of him and proceeded to eat the lot as the rest of the company--too polite to remonstrate--watched in anguished astonishment. He was a serious man but not without a sense of humor. He had a gift for delivering rapid unannounced sentences in a nonsense tongue of his own creation. Leonard Kastle, one of his American students in the late 1940s, remembers him as "the most charming man ... he was my artistic and spiritual father, and undoubtedly the greatest influence on my life."
Paul was incapable of dissembling. He always spoke his mind and this often led to problems. Marga, who was not afraid of him and took each of his eccentricities in her stride, conceded that he was "difficult... but between him and me acquaintance mellowed into good friendship. He was loyal to his friends and I was older than he and could hold my tongue when he lost his temper." It was never easy to guess when or why Paul would lose it, but storm clouds were never far off and, as his confidante and chief appeaser, Marga found she had "much to do." She smoothed over misunderstandings between Paul and his hotel manager, Paul and a bus conductor, or Paul and any number of her friends. One such saga is recounted with humor:
One evening at Southwold I asked Paul to play to the Congregational Minister who had kindly lent me a piano so that Paul could use mine. When the minister and his wife came Paul hardly took his eyes off his book and, looking very cross, he hurled himself on the piano stool and gave an almost savage rendering of the Chopin-Godowsky Warsaw Study. Then he left the room abruptly without further ceremony. My sister was horrified: "This was the acme of rudeness!" she said. The next day Paul answered my rebuke by saying he had played as I requested, he never promised to join our futile gossip. In my role as placator I called at the manse with a bunch of carnations from Paul. I was received with great friendliness. They would not accept an apology. The evening had been most enjoyable, the playing marvellous. They took it for granted that such behaviour was just a way of showing off.
Paul was aware of his inability to get on easily with other people and it forced him, despite his charm, erudition and energy for life, to seek a solitary existence. He would never stay in other people's houses but insisted on booking himself and his valet, Franz Kalchschmidt, into a nearby hotel, having a piano brought in, and seeing his friends only when it suited him. When traveling by train, even with his family, he would insist on booking a private carriage for himself. One of his pupils, conductor Steve Portman, remembers Paul having "a shell around him, like a suit of armour that did not permit him to interact with other people-nobody would challenge him for he had an authority that very few people possess." Portman came from a poor and troubled New York background. His lessons with Paul were free. One Christmas he was given an expensive tie. "Oh I've never had anything like this!" Portman exclaimed. "I don't give rubbish!" Paul replied. "My memories of Paul Wittgenstein are absolutely positive," Portman recalls. "He could not have been more forthcoming or helpful."
Paul invited Marga to accompany him on a tour of Holland in April 1929. She asked if she could bring a friend, Michael Lindsay, the Master of Balliol (later Lord Lindsay of Birker), which Paul accepted. On the whole they had a very good time until Marga, thinking that Paul's valet looked lonely and bored, asked him if he would like to come to the cinema.
Paul was indignant; facing me in real anger he told me it was irksome enough that I had brought Michael but that I should now make friends with his valet was clearly impossible. He shouted "You can choose, I admit, between Franz and me." I interrupted hurriedly, "If it comes to that I shall have you as my companion."
It is easy to understand how many people took against Paul and his brother Ludwig for their outspoken manner, but both had magnetic personalities, and both had their own claque of ardent admirers. In a letter recommending a friend to call on Paul and Ludwig during a visit to Vienna, the distinguished composer and critic Donald Francis Tovey wrote:
Both of them are, I think, really great people; about as bristling with vitality as Dickens (whose complete works Paul Wittgenstein could probably recite). Ludwig I have only once met. Paul I hope I am not mistaken in thinking to be a close friend; I speak cautiously only because people of my age ought not to presume upon the confiding enthusiasms of the younger generation.
Those who befriended Paul and who could see beyond his neurosis and quick temper found him loyal, generous and warmhearted. He had a habit of sending his friends surprise presents through the post of musical instruments, precious manuscripts, food parcels and money. He never charged any of his pupils for the dedicated lessons that he gave them and in one case gave several thousand dollars to a student in order that he might attend the Spoleto Festival in Italy.
In a 1944 school essay Leonard Kastle, his star student at the time, wrote: "He still makes me shudder when I commit the slightest mistake. But behind that temper is the kindest heart ever to be found," and in her diary four years earlier another student, Philippa Schuyler, commented, "I wept a little at his loud voice. Then he said 'Darling, you must not mind if your teacher shouts a little. He can't help it!' Then when you are ready to leave he kisses you." In her fond recollection of Paul, written shortly after his death, Marga concluded:
Paul's personality is unforgettable. Those who met him felt it instantly; frequently the impression warded off contact. Highly sensitive to his physical disability, he made self-contained independence his rule of life and met tragedy with fortitude. For those whom he admitted to friendship he was the staunchest of friends.
RUSSIA AND RAVEL
Marga went to New York in September 1927 to raise money for Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford, and took with h
er some records of Paul playing music by Josef Labor with the violinist Marie Soldat-Roeger, which had been made under the auspices of Clara Wittgenstein. Clara (who was three years younger than Karl) was an outstanding maiden aunt who took a special interest in the well-being of her nephews and nieces. Like Gretl she entertained composers and artists and staged private concerts in her spacious flat on the Salesianergasse, at an old Imperial shooting lodge at Laxenburg, and at her summer farmhouse in Thumersbach. Phonograph records, she insisted, were extremely important to an artist's career.
In New York, Marga succeeded in sowing the seeds for a U.S. tour for Paul during which the highlight would be a performance of Strauss's Panathenaenzug at Carnegie Hall with the Beethoven Symphony Orchestra under the baton of its founding conductor, George Zaslawsky. On October 31, 1928, Paul performed the Bortkiewicz Concerto in Bucharest, expecting to leave for America two days later, but when news reached him that a sold-out concert of the Beethoven Orchestra at the Carnegie Hall had been suddenly dropped, he decided not to travel. Two reasons were given for the cancellation in New York. On the one hand, Zaslawsky claimed to have suffered a heart attack and on the other his featured violin soloist, Paul Kochanski, was said to have pulled out because his fee had not been paid. The two may have been related. In any case Zaslawsky refused to pay any refund to disgruntled ticket holders and within a few weeks he and his orchestra had filed for bankruptcy.
The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War Page 19
