The World as I Found It (97 page)

Another letter comes from a woman who was actually there when Wittgenstein dictated his Blue and Brown Books. She writes, “I wonder at how little I came to know of Wittgenstein personally, considering how many hours I spent with him. We were close, but distant.”

The ultimate unknowability and undecidability of anyone. If you've ever used maps and compasses, you know there is an error one must correct for in order to find true north. It is much the same with a novel, which quickly establishes an unspoken contract with the reader. One important part of this unspoken contract is how far the book deviates from reality: It may deviate a lot, even magically so, but the idea, always, is to find true north, or at least a possible true north, or multiple norths.

In this respect, my Wittgenstein — my character, I should say — represents many norths, or so I hope. I say this because he is in ways a composite. In his youth, for instance, I found myself imagining the brilliant and precocious poet, Rimbaud. I thought of the Rimbaud who wrote at the age of sixteen, “It is wrong to say: I think. One ought to say: People think me. I is someone else.”

How like Wittgenstein, who writes in 1916, “The I, the I is what is deeply mysterious! The I is not an object. I objectively confront every object. But not the I.”

On the Russian-front sequence of the novel I thought of Ezra Pound's friend and hero, the great sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska, dead at twenty-three, in 1915. With the force of a wave, with almost Homeric abandon, the French sculptor died in yet another fruitless assault against German machine guns. Like Wittgenstein, here was another young man who badly wanted to prove himself. Again I found the story of one who sought to test ideas and flesh and beliefs against brute steel. Several months before his death, Gaudier wrote — chiseled — in the brutal capital letters he used in his sculptured manifestos: “
HUMAN MASSES
teem and move, are destroyed and crop up again …
WITH ALL THE DESTRUCTION
that works around us,
NOTHING IS CHANGED, EVEN SUPERFICIALLY.
LIFE IS THE SAME STRENGTH
, THE MOVING AGENT THAT PERMITS THE SMALL INDIVIDUAL TO ASSERT HIMSELF
.”

Now hear Wittgenstein. On the Russian front a year later, powerless before this same impersonal will, Wittgenstein writes: “A stone, the body of a beast, the body of a man, my body, all stand on the same level. That is why what happens, whether it comes from a stone or my body, is neither good nor bad … I am my world.”

Then there's the Tolstoyan Wittgenstein that we find during and after World War I. In his “What Is Art” phase, Tolstoy longed to give up vice and meat, to write stories anyone could understand and make shoes for the humblest peasants. Under this same spell, Wittgenstein, after the war, publishes his
Tractatus
, renounces philosophy, gives up his vast fortune, then goes off to teach peasant children in a poor Austrian village. Was Wittgenstein repeating the life of Tolstoy? Is history, as Nietzsche said, endless recurrence?

I don't scorn the truth — or the biographer's art. I respect the biographer's great tact and judgment, probity and intuition. But, you see, my instincts are radically different: They tell me to mix up, forget, bury and burn — to recombine and fuse disparate elements in what perhaps was a more confused and deliberately irresponsible attempt to create a kind of universal life. By “universal life,” I mean a life that finally goes beyond its seeming subject, or subjects. For me, you see, this is not finally a book “about” Wittgenstein or philosophers, but rather a creation story examining the very forms of life in this world I had found. That is, the world that
all
of us have found — the world we found and doubtless will find again only in more disguised forms, as we end this dark century and begin the next.

At the end of his short story, Borges tells us that Menard managed to add several chapters to the saga of Don Quixote. Maybe I lost a few. Finally, I feel I lost my Wittgenstein. True, I knew only a character, but for me that character died, as characters do — as a friend and hero and guide, that character died four years ago, disappearing for me as mysteriously as the real Wittgenstein who died in 1951, the year I was born. Hence the title of my novel, which of course is Wittgenstein's title. For me, it could almost serve as the great philosopher's epitaph. Or anybody's epitaph, I suppose:

Wait, where did Wittgenstein go in this troubling statement? He disappears. Here while proposing to report on his life, Wittgenstein simultaneously seems to erase himself out of the picture. You'll say he meant this purely philosophically, but for me it is a poet's song of origins and disappearances, of words and then word-covering silence.

Silence: Yes, it is very strange indeed for me to look back at this book four years later. But it's especially strange now as I try to finish another, very different novel. Or, should I say, as it finishes me.

But again this old haven of mine,
The World As I Found It
. Flattening like a wave, the picture stills, and then, for better or worse, you, the author — well, you're irrevocably out of that picture, that fictional space you've created. You're apart from it, and in a very real sense you're quite irrelevant to it. The
I
is indeed another, and the subject remains forever elsewhere. This spent wave splashes and falls away, leaving me to wonder at its vanishing face — at what, or whom, I saw in this world that I left.

—BRUCE DUFFY

THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

Copyright © 1987 by Bruce Duffy

Introduction copyright © 2010 by David Leavitt

All rights reserved.

The author gratefully acknowledges the editors and publishers of the following magazines, in which chapters of this novel have appeared:
Formations, Conjunctions
, and
The Antioch Review
. Thirteen lines on page 359 from
The Duino Elegies
by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Garmey and Jay Wilson. Translation copyright © 1972 by Stephen Garmey and Jay Wilson. Reprinted by permission of Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. >Epigraphs on pages 17 and 257 from
Herakleitos and Diogenes
by Heraclitus of Ephesus and Diogenes, the Cynic, translated from the Greek by Guy Davenport. Reprinted by permission of Grey Fox Press.

Cover image: Gustave Klimt,
The Great Poplar II
, 1902–1903; The Bridgeman Art Library International

Cover design: Katy Homans

The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:

Duffy, Bruce.

 The world as I found it / by Bruce Duffy ; introduction by David Leavitt.

  p. cm. — (New york Review Books classics)

Originally published: New York : Ticknor & Fields, 1987.

ISBN 978-1-59017-360-2 (alk. paper)

1. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889–1951—Fiction. 2. Russell, Bertrand, 1872–1970—Fiction. 3. Moore, G. E. (George Edward), 1873–1958—Fiction. 4. Philosophers—Fiction. 5. Great Britain—Fiction. 6. Austria—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3554.U31917W6 2010

813'.54—dc22

        2010022562

eISBN 978-1-59017-565-1
v1.0

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