The World as I Found It (13 page)

The effect was that of pigeons bursting from a booming belfry. When Wittgenstein finished the letter, his ears were hot and his chest was constricted; he could not catch a good breath. It seemed so unjust! So unbelievable! They had been all through this before he left home. Little had been said directly — in that house, little was ever said directly. It was like an Oriental language, all intonations and silences.

As a man of transcendent technical understanding, Karl Wittgenstein was profoundly resourceful in this regard. He knew that, as with a hydraulic pump, only a little force need be applied to a subject mind: overburdened with the past, the mind would vastly magnify the original force, until it succumbed with the merest tap, a word, a look, a letter.

Yet
was
this actually what happened? As an engineer, Wittgenstein was forever trying to devise a kind of dynamic model for this relationship, something that might account for how it could be so compressed and reserved, then so shrill with all the bitterness and chaos of a long-interred silence. For years, Wittgenstein had wondered to what extent his father's behavior was intentional and to what extent it was just a blind aspect of his character, as unaccountable as a force of nature. By his fourth reading of the letter, in fact, Wittgenstein could hear, with a little straining of his captive mind, his father trying to
restrain
and even
temper
his language. With two more readings, Wittgenstein could even feel his poor father's palpable distress as he wrote out the word “FORWARD” in wobbly capitals in his otherwise heartlessly regular hand.

And, really, how could he blame his father for being himself? Wittgenstein did not want to prolong the agony, did not want to wound his father or further poison his last years on earth. Nor could he on any account bear the thought of seeing his proud father, such a shaker of a man, humbled. Yet what did his father want? To install him in his offices? To groom him so that he could eventually assume his place in the world? Surely, his father must have known they couldn't have worked a single day together. The idea was ludicrous.

So how were they to end it? Short of agreeing with everything his father said, Wittgenstein had no good response to this letter — certainly none that his father would have accepted. Not to acquiesce was to defy; and to acquiesce would be gnawing — killing.

His turmoil was all the worse for his being a stranger in Cambridge, where it seemed all were in a state of glad intoxication in those first days before term started. But there was another reason why Cambridge — any school — was strange to him. Wittgenstein had not been educated at the
Gymnasium
, nor at any other normal school where boys clack along well-greased rails, passing regular milestones toward careers and eventual manhood. No, like his siblings, Wittgenstein had been educated at home, cultivated like a hothouse plant with no classmates but his brothers and sisters, who by then were mostly grown anyway.

Karl Wittgenstein's reasons for doing this were not at all easy to discern. Education at home was, by then, an antiquated, somewhat antisocial idea, especially in the liberal tide that was sweeping Vienna at the turn of the century. But it was not politics that drove Karl Wittgenstein to keep his children at home. He had nothing against this state-run bureaucracy that stamped
Gymnasium
boys into budding bureaucrats who would fit like blocks into that byzantine edifice of patronage. On the contrary, Karl Wittgenstein highly approved of the
Gymnasium
system, where boys were, above all, thoroughly drilled in Latin and Greek classics and grammar in the belief that this would instill in them logical thought patterns, noble values and mental discipline. Built upon the useful principle of fear of one's superiors and a corresponding drive to strike fear into one's subordinates and social inferiors, the system was like life itself. All Karl Wittgenstein's subordinates were
Gymnasium
products, shrewd but thoroughly tractable men trained from boyhood to endure hours of stupefying memorization — finely honed, zealously detailed men who feared and revered the Direktor and passed his thinking down like the Eucharist.

No, Karl Wittgenstein educated his sons at home so he could be sure, as he did with his steel, exactly what materials and pedagogical processes had been used to mold the character and intellect. What he wanted was absolute, cartellike control of the quality, durability and ultimate destination of the product. That he kept his children at home also had to do with romantic but largely misunderstood and ill-executed ideas that he had gleaned from
Emile
. It was the idea of one teacher for one boy. Also that line from Rousseau he was so fond of quoting, that a father owes to his species men, to society sociable men and to the state
citizens
. There was, moreover, the classical ideal of the peripatetic school, wherein genius might achieve a strolling, Grecian repose, viewing the world as through the cool sanctum of a temple. Yes, Karl Wittgenstein's school would build true Greeks and Renaissance men, men born to rule and dispose of wealth in the furtherance of a city that would be, in the truest sense,
their
city, a tableau vivant of the mind.

Such plans were not to be left to chance, certainly not to a state-run system still infested with priests. Unfortunately, Karl Wittgenstein made one fatal miscalculation. Virtually all the tutors he employed were gifted
Gymnasium
products. Yet, clearly, had they been less whimsical and eccentric, they would have been
teaching
at the
Gymnasium
. It was odd that Karl Wittgenstein, a man much renowned for his foresight, did not anticipate this fairly obvious drawback to his plan. Tutored by gifted, independent-minded men, his sons were anything but the
Gymnasium
products that Karl Wittgenstein wanted in his heart of hearts. As Karl Wittgenstein put it, the genius of his sons was like water, running everywhere, and in all the wrong directions.

But the isolation of this education at home had another effect on Wittgenstein: having never been a boy among boys, he was ill prepared for life among young men, especially among young Englishmen. Wittgenstein had had a difficult time adjusting at Manchester, but here at Cambridge, where the traditions were at once more exaggerated and more obscure, his extremity was even more pronounced. Here he was thrust in among a race of public school boys who had been hazing, fagging, foot-balling and palling with each other since early boyhood at Harrow, Eton and assorted other forcing houses of the middle and upper classes. Among them, Wittgenstein's strange charisma counted for little, and his values counted for even less, stamping him as nothing but
queer
. He had none of that jaunty grace or pluck they loved, none of that shallow tone that marked their heroes. No power on earth could have made him English, or rather not foreign — why, even by Austrian standards, he was foreign.

Consciously, Wittgenstein had no interest in crashing their world, but all the same he suffered from it. The young Englishmen who lived on his hall were gay, athletic, clannish, smug — everything he was not. Among them, he felt old beyond his years; to him it seemed that Austrian years counted twice for English years. To them, on the other hand, this scowling Teuton (a German was German, after all) was an
odd duck
. More than odd — he was a damned recluse. They hardly saw him.

Through his window, Wittgenstein could hear the glad cries and nicknames, the happy horsing and talking. Looking out, he could see his fellow students in bunches trotting off to breakfast, and then off again to spend a few hours engaged in the sweaty, bullying athletics that he found as incomprehensible as he did fearful. At night, he could see them going off in evening attire to attend the dinners and functions given by the various clubs. And later, once the pubs had closed, he would hear them lumbering back in raucous knots, caroling down the lane.

He envied them, to be so charged and glowing, so increased by the same abrasive air that seemed to wear him down to nothing. Outside his room, he could feel them eyeing him, tentatively returning his own awkward nod. And then as he went down the stairs, he could imagine them smirking — bursting into laughter because he was so alien and forbidding, and not just on account of his accent.

In his state of mind, even the veilish, drizzly fall beauty of Cambridge failed him. Standing on King's Bridge — that pale stretch of stone that bows across the River Cam — looking at the punts gliding along under the willows, he felt it was a sin for such beauty to be lost on him and he on it. Why was he even here in England? His father was right. It was like aeronautics, another whim that would come to grief or nothing. For an hour, he would continue on this tack, and then he would turn about, telling himself that he must stay, if only for his own survival. And all the while he would be reproaching himself for not introducing himself to Bertrand Russell, who surely thought him intolerably rude for not making the requisite visit that advisers expected of new students. Yet how could he face Russell in his present state of mind? In those days before classes started, he avoided Russell like a contagious person.

At last then, after brooding over his father's letter for two days, Wittgenstein replied with a postcard. He wrote not to strike back, of course, but simply to give a good account of himself — by striking back:

As he expected, his father wasted no time responding, this time with a postcard, mimicking his son's favorite medium.

This time, Wittgenstein took his time responding. Three weeks later he replied, but he did so by letter.

The next round surprised him. Instead of responding himself, his father managed to draw Wittgenstein's sister Gretl into the fray. Gretl had long been the family mediator, simply by virtue of her being the only one left in the family willing to defy their father. But as Karl Wittgenstein also knew, Gretl was the one who could best penetrate the stubbornness of his youngest son.

Eleven years older than Wittgenstein, Gretl was for him something of a mother figure, doting, brilliant, gay, at times even a bit silly. Long had she told him to do as she did with her father — ignore him. Oh, don't be so serious! she would say in her throaty voice, mugging into Wittgenstein's eyes until he would have to laugh and turn away. At home, she took him out to the cafés, where it seemed that everybody — all the painters, writers and musicians — knew her. She was so madcap and brilliant, such a plump little whirlwind in her couture clothes of bronzelike fabrics designed by her friend Klimt for the house of Flöge. A formidable woman, some said admiringly. Entirely too bold, said others, including her own father. In the papers, Gretl had been the subject of more than one high-flown feuilleton and the butt of several more satires. It didn't daunt her, nor did it especially daunt her husband, Rolf, a wealthy industrialist and financier. Frau Margarete Stonborough cut a wide swath, quite unmistakable in pearl and diamond chokers, sharptoed French shoes, and hats with sprays of alert feathers that trembled with her laughing and talking, her broad gestures. Yet for all her barreling strength and heartiness, Gretl had her troubles. She, too, was her father's child, and so she was Freud's patient, seeing the doctor four mornings each week. But still, she was so very Viennese in her ability to kid her little brother out of his moods, to wink at those unpleasantries that from earliest youth they had both seen staring them in the face.

Ordinarily, Wittgenstein thrived on her letters, but this time, sensing he had shaken down a hornet's nest, he could feel his stomach gurgling as he opened the embossed vellum envelope and read: