The World as I Found It (96 page)

My thanks go to others who helped in various ways: Tommy Caplan, Ken Ludwig, Lillian Kowitch, Mòniek Engel, Laurie Parsons, Gwen North Reiss, Frances Padorr Brent, Slaton White, Michael J. Weiss, Steve Fennell, Dr. Robert Anthony, Harry Liebersohn, Dorothee Schneider, Heidi Glang, Gabriele Glang, James Glass, Jack Duffy, Muffy Stout, Robert Sherbow, Marge Binder, Ken Nesper, Sid Gudes, Clarissa Chapman, Bill Maly and the other understanding folks at Labat-Anderson, Inc. Finally, thanks to Steptoe & Johnson and Washington Area Lawyers for the Arts.

An address delivered in spring 1991 at the American Literature Today series: Stichting John Adams Institut, Amsterdam

W
ITTGENSTEIN
found facts, and pictures of facts, immensely mysterious. I must say I do too. Like him, I'm puzzled by how facts and words refer to actual things in the world. And I'm equally puzzled by facts, or statements of fact, that do not refer to reality — by this I mean fictions.

Consider the phrase “the present king of France.” France, of course, has no present king. The words make sense, but they conjure a nonexistent person, a linguistic unicorn. Yet how strange when you think about it, that we can talk about this royal personage, can even play with his nonexistence. For instance, we can say, “The king of France is wise.” Or, “The king of France is wild about the American actor Mickey Rourke.”

I can see why apparently meaningful nonsense like this so intrigued Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell. But what truly haunts me are the names of people who once actually lived — names for whom there once were living faces. Among other things, my novel
The World As I Found It
(1987) reflects my puzzlement — my hauntedness, I guess — with names and facts and faces.

Take Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Who is this person — this name, I should say — in relation to the historical personage Ludwig Wittgenstein? And who is this historical person relative to the legends and memories (good or bad or faulty) of the various people who actually knew him? How do we even remember a man like Wittgenstein, who went through so many radical changes in his life? For that matter, how do we speak of “Wittgenstein's philosophy” when that philosophy also changed so dramatically — at times almost constantly? How, in short, do we think of a human spirit over time? Oh, and one final question: How does our memory of a person consort, or coexist, with the reality of what it was like to actually
be
that person — assuming, of course, that anyone but God or the person himself could ever know such a thing?

These questions were on my mind when I began
The World As I Found It
. Seven years later, when I finished the book, they continued to trouble me, and they still do. I guess they've been with me from the time my mother died when I was a child.
How does anybody just disappear?
And if they do disappear, never to return, where, for instance, does love go? I was eleven years old when my mother died, but that's when I began to see how memories get distorted and carved up. We don't just fight over who gets the family silver and Mama's sacred ring: these are just physical manifestations — stigmata — of a deeper form of human dislocation and suffering.

No, it's memory that we contest so bitterly. With my mother's disappearance, I began to see who memories serve. I began to see how memories tell truths, and likewise how they elude, refute, disguise, and even lie. But above all, I began to see how memories constantly change, coming as they do, like starlight, from vast distances — and coming then with inevitable distortions under the inconstant light of the present. But here: the final page of
The World As I Found It
bears on these very problems.

But
WHY
? That's the question people always ask me. Why did you ever do such a weird thing? Why a novel about Ludwig Wittgenstein?

Well, it was an eccentric undertaking. In fact, it reminds me of an outrageous short story by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges that you may recall. I refer to “Pierre Menard, Author of the
Quixote
.” In it, we find one Pierre Menard, a French writer who strives not to create another
Quixote
but Cervantes's masterpiece itself: as if through some crazy inductive logic, Menard sets out on a quest to recreate every word of
Don Quixote
.

But how is Menard to reimagine — and finally write —
Don Quixote
in 1934? As the narrator of the story dryly observes, “The first method Menard conceived was relatively simple. Know Spanish well, recover the Catholic faith, fight against the Moor or the Turk, forget the history of Europe between the years 1602 and 1918,
be
Miguel de Cervantes.”

In this sense, Menard's project somewhat reminds me of my own odd task in beginning to write
The World As I Found It
. How was I to
be
Ludwig Wittgenstein? And if I were to do that, what Wittgenstein — or should I say
which
Wittgenstein — would I be? Talk about jousting at windmills!

Pierre Menard at least had the advantage of being European. Whereas Menard had nearly three hundred years of history to forget, I had some one hundred years to learn. I likewise had to steep myself in modern philosophy and logic, in fine points of European custom, and even in principles of trench warfare. Also to immerse myself in works that deeply influenced Wittgenstein — books such as Tolstoy's
Hadji Murat
and Otto Weininger's
Sex and Character
.

But even wider cultural and historical gulfs separated me from Wittgenstein. Born into a family of great wealth and culture, Wittgenstein was a Catholic of Jewish extraction, who came from an enormous family, spoke High German and fluent English, was musically trained and studied philosophy at Cambridge. By contrast, I majored in English and only minored in philosophy. An only child from an Irish Catholic, thoroughly middle-class family, I can't read or speak German, am not even remotely musically trained, and at the time I wrote my novel had never set foot in England, much less the Continent.

Ignorance … overall unsuitability for the task … I was ready to begin!

Twelve years ago, when I stumbled upon the idea for
The World As I Found It
, there was no biography of Wittgenstein. In those days, the facts were scattered. Even fragmented, you might say, with big holes that looked to me like freedom.

Today this has changed. Now we have two major biographies: the 1988 book by Brian McGuinness and the Ray-Monk biography that appeared in 1990.

Nearly forty years this took — forty years of declassification before we had a biography of the man who is arguably this century's greatest philosopher! You could blame Wittgenstein's estate, I suppose, but the real reason is Wittgenstein himself, and no wonder. Here was a man who stood like the Day of Judgment over those who knew him. Worse, here was a man who rejected virtually every interpretation of his work, even by those intimate with his thinking. In fact, to know anything about Wittgenstein is to acknowledge that he would have rejected most, if not all, of what has been written about him and his work. In this long roll of the condemned I certainly include
The World As I Found It
.

Then there's the continuing controversy over Wittgenstein's sexuality. When I first began my research, this deeply constrained, this muzzled quality was what most struck me in the various memoirs I read. Their efforts to put across a plain, unvarnished account of what Wittgenstein said and did had precisely the opposite effect: if anything, these reminiscences struck me as gospel stories, hushed, reverential, proprietary. In fact, his disciples reminded me of the early Christians, running through the catacombs with their sacred relics, one step ahead of the Romans. Indeed! Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God, well …

In their almost ritual apologies and self-abasements, in their deep discomfort with even
presuming
to speak about Wittgenstein, these books showed more compellingly than they ever could have described the pall Wittgenstein cast over those who knew him. Fortunately, I was not saddled with this burden. I felt like a boy with new boots atop a hill of unblemished snow! Here before me was a whole life that so far no one had dealt with in a comprehensive way.

Was it moral, what I did? Was it moral of Max Brod not to burn Kafka's manuscripts and papers as Kafka had instructed? I can't really answer this question except to say there are different forms of homage. As I saw it thirty years after his death, Wittgenstein was nobody's moral property. Like a man buried at sea, he was rightfully consigned to history.

But let me be plain here: I was disgusted — no,
outraged
is the word — that to some, Wittgenstein's life
was
clearly considered off-limits, was considered a form of intellectual, professional, and even national property. Except of course to the duly initiated, and even then with palpable constraints.

A revealing question for me now is whether I would have written the novel — if there would have been the same
reason
to write it — had there been a biography. No, I suspect not. But does this mean, then, that it was my aim to write essentially a fictionalized biography?

Not at all. As I saw it, being “first,” if you will, put me in prime fictional territory. By leaving most readers no other single authority to turn to for the truth, the book would raise a lot of difficulty. Difficulty in reading it. Difficulty in deciding what it was and difficulty in deciding what was true and what wasn't.

While taking me to task for the “accountability of my sources,” one critic blunders onto this tension in the book. He writes: “It is difficult not to be distracted by the wealth of historical detail [Duffy] has incorporated to guarantee that his Wittgenstein will be confused with the real Wittgenstein.”

Ah! That liberating word
confusion
.

To further confuse things, I rejected the advice I was given several times, namely, to observe the wryly tactful tradition of the roman à clef. A writer whom I greatly respect found my failure to do this a grievous aesthetic error. So be it. In Shakespeare's time to write plays about Julius Caesar or Prince Hamlet was not a bothersome thing, but today it is, I'm afraid. In an era of experts and unprecedented specialization — in a time when I should say we cripple ourselves by ceding far too much to the wisdom of experts — a book like mine is bothersome, for some to the point of being disorienting. For all our self-conscious poses, for all our irony and formal sophistication, not to mention our exposure to the strategies of modernism and postmodernism, many of us still like our categories straight. We are greatly bothered by confusions of fact and fiction. We are bothered by a novel that, say, in its prologue adopts the seemingly trustworthy voice of a biography only to monkey with the facts: This is unsportsmanlike, like impersonating a rightful officer of the law. Be more radical and experimental! says one camp. Be more conventional! says the other. When they rap my knuckles, critics seem to hold out these two shining alternatives, often seemingly at the same time. But again, their advice enshrines what too many naively expect nowadays. Straight categories. Fiction as some literary substitute for the old Classic Comics. Above all, the epic, churn-'em-out complacency of that form I almost uniformly detest — “historical fiction.” These by now are old tactics that do not trouble anyone.

While we're at it, why didn't I use footnotes? Believe it or not, in an early crisis with the book, my publisher's editorial board wanted me to fill the back of the book with them. Footnotes! I hit the roof! Does a general give away his battle plans? Does the heretic recant? To me, footnotes
would
have been a profound aesthetic error, not to mention an act of cowardice. Happily, though, I convinced my wonderful editor, and as a compromise, I added the preface.

But then came another small crisis. Apparently a fact-checking copy editor called my editor almost in tears, exasperated to find pages covered with truths and errors … and, yes, even the troublesome king of France. What a mess. Much like life,
mais oui?

Look, I hope this doesn't all sound too pat. For an author to say he always knew exactly what he was doing — now that's real fiction.

Of course I got it wrong. Still, some people feel that I got an uncanny amount right, an impression that frankly surprises me when I realize in how many cases how little I knew and how much I made up. David Pinsent's diaries. Wittgenstein's father's letters, and most of Wittgenstein's letters, too. Wittgenstein's family — his sisters, brothers, his father. Wittgenstein's friend Max and the entire World War I sequence. All this and more I made up. In fact, writing the book has taught me this: No one knows, not even those who knew Wittgenstein. Maybe especially those who knew Wittgenstein.

At the risk of being indiscreet, let me share portions of two letters I've received. One comes from a niece of Wittgenstein — actually, a very nice woman, who wrote to chastise me, saying, “Who ever really knew him? Who could presume to describe this man's inner self, even in a fiction-coated novel?”