Wittgenstein's Nephew (10 page)

I
had deserted everyone—that is the truth—because I no longer wanted anyone. I no longer wanted anything, but I was too much of a coward to make an end of it all. It was probably at the height of my despair—a word that I am not ashamed to use, as I no longer intend to deceive myself or gloss over anything, since nothing can be glossed over in a society and a world that perpetually seeks to gloss over everything in the most sickening manner—that Paul appeared on the scene at Irina's apartment in the Blumenstockgasse. He was so different from anyone I had ever met, so new to my experience (and with a name, moreover, that for decades I had revered like no other), that I at once felt him to be my deliverer. Sitting on the park bench, I suddenly saw it all clearly again, and I was not ashamed of the pathos I succumbed to, of the fine words that I allowed to flow into me for the very first time; they suddenly made me feel tremendously good, and I made no attempt to tone them down. I let them all descend on me like a refreshing rain. And today it seems to me that we can count on the fingers of one hand all the people who have really meant anything to us in the course of our lives, and very often this one hand protests at our perversity in believing that we need a whole hand in order to count them, for to be honest we could probably make do without a single finger. There are times, however, when life is endurable, and at such times we occasionally
manage to count three or four people to whom in the long run we owe something, and not just something but a great deal—people who have meant everything and been everything to us at certain critical moments or certain critical periods of our lives. Yet we know that as we get older we have to employ ever subtler means in order to produce such endurable conditions, resorting to every possible and impossible trick the mind can devise, though it may be stretched to the limits of its tolerance even without having to perform such unnatural feats. Yet at the same time we should not forget that the few people in question are all dead, that they died long ago, for bitter experience naturally inhibits us from including the living in our calculation—those who are still with us, perhaps even at our side—unless we want to risk being totally, embarrassingly, and ludicrously wrong, and hence making fools of ourselves, above all in our own eyes. I would certainly have no such inhibition with regard to Ludwig Wittgenstein's nephew Paul. On the contrary, this man, to whom I was linked for years, until his death, by every possible passion and disease, and by the ideas that were constantly engendered by those passions and diseases, was one of the people from whom I derived so much benefit throughout those years, who did so much to enhance my existence—in a way that accorded with my aptitudes, abilities, and needs—and very often made its continuance possible. This is now clear to me beyond all question, two years after his death, as I face the January cold and the January emptiness of my house. Now that I have no living person left, I tell myself, I will face the January cold and the January emptiness with the help of the dead, and of all these dead there is
none closer to me, at this time and at this moment, than my friend Paul. I stress the word
my
, for what is set down in these notes is the picture that
I
have of my friend Paul Wittgenstein, no other. We gradually discovered that there were countless things about us and within us that united us, yet at the same time there were so many contrasts between us that our friendship soon ran into difficulties, into ever greater difficulties, and ultimately into the greatest difficulties. Yet I now see that throughout these years my whole being was in some elemental way controlled by this friendship, consciously or unconsciously—controlled by a friendship which neither of us found easy and to which we had to devote the most strenuous effort if it was to remain useful and profitable to us both, while at the same time taking the utmost care never to lose sight of its fragility. Sitting on the park bench, I recalled that at the Sacher he always preferred to sit in the right-hand lounge, because he found the chairs there more comfortable but above all because he judged the paintings on the walls to be better executed, while I naturally preferred to sit in the left-hand lounge, because of the foreign newspapers, especially the English and French newspapers, that were always available there and because of the more wholesome air. When we went to the Sacher, therefore, we would sit sometimes in the right-hand and sometimes in the left-hand lounge. When I was in Vienna (and in those years I spent most of my time in Vienna) the Sacher was our favorite resort, since it was ideally suited to our speculations; it therefore went without saying that we would meet there or, if for some reason the Sacher was out of the question, at the Ambassador. I have known the Sacher
for nearly thirty years, since the time when I used to sit there nearly every day with friends belonging to the circle of the brilliant composer Lampersberg, who was also as mad as he was brilliant. At this time, around 1957, I had just completed my studies, and it was the most difficult period of my life. These friends introduced me to the refined world of the Sacher, Vienna's premier coffeehouse—not, I am thankful to say, to one that was frequented by the literary folk, whom I have basically always found repugnant, but to one frequented by their victims. At the Sacher I could get all the newspapers, which I have always had to have since the age of twenty-two or twenty-three, and could spend hours studying them in one of the comfortable corners of the left-hand lounge without being disturbed. I can still see myself sitting there for whole mornings, scanning the pages of
Le Monde
or
The Times
and never having my enjoyment interrupted for a moment; as far as I recall I was never disturbed at the Sacher. At a literary coffeehouse I could never have devoted myself to the newspapers for a whole morning without interruption; before so much as half an hour had passed I would have been disturbed by some writer
making his entrance
, accompanied by his retinue. I always found such company distasteful because it deflected me from my real intentions, rudely impeding what I considered essential and never facilitating it, as I would have wished. The literary coffeehouses have a foul atmosphere, irritating to the nerves and deadening to the mind. I have never learned anything new there but only been annoyed and irritated and pointlessly depressed. At the Sacher I was never irritated or depressed, or even annoyed, and very often I
was actually able to work—in my own fashion, of course, not in the fashion of those who work in the literary coffeehouses. At the Bräunerhof, above which my friend had lived for years before we met, I am still put off by the foul air and the poor lighting, which is kept down to a minimum—doubtless from perverse considerations of economy—and in which I have never been able to read a single line without effort. I also dislike the seating, which is inevitably damaging to the spinal column, however briefly one sits there—to say nothing of the pungent smell that emanates from the kitchen and very soon gets into one's clothes. Yet at the same time the Bräunerhof has great merits, though these do not suffice for my peculiar purposes. They consist of the extreme attentiveness of the waiters and the unfailing courtesy of the proprietor, which is neither exaggerated nor perfunctory. But at the Bräunerhof a dreadful twilight reigns all day long—a boon to young couples or old invalids but not to someone like myself, who wishes to concentrate on studying books and newspapers. I attach the utmost importance to reading books and newspapers every morning, and in the course of my intellectual life I have specialized in reading English and French newspapers, having found the German press unbearable ever since I first began to read. What is the
Frankfurter Allgemeine
, for instance, compared with
The Times
, I have often asked myself, what is the
Süddeutsche Zeitung
beside
Le Monde
? The answer is that the Germans are just not English and certainly not French. From my early youth I have regarded the ability to read English and French books and newspapers as the greatest advantage I possess. What would my world be like, I often wonder,
if I had to rely on the German papers, which are for the most part little more than garbage sheets—to say nothing of the Austrian newspapers, which are not newspapers at all but mass-circulation issues of unusable toilet paper? At the Bräunerhof one's thoughts are immediately stifled by cigarette smoke and kitchen fumes, and by the twaddle that is talked by the semi-educated and the demisemi-educated of Vienna as they let off their social steam at midday. At the Bräunerhof people talk either too loudly or too softly for my liking, and the service is either too slow or too fast. The Bräunerhof is inimical to all my daily requirements, yet this is precisely what makes it
the
archetypal Viennese coffeehouse—like the Café Hawelka, which became fashionable not so long ago but is now completely downmarket. I have always detested the typical Viennese coffeehouse, famous the world over, because I find everything about it inimical to me. Yet for many years it was at the Bräunerhof that I felt at home, despite the fact that, like the Hawelka, it was always
totally
inimical to me, just as I felt at home at the Café Museum and at the various other establishments I frequented during my years in Vienna. I have always hated the Viennese coffeehouses, but I go on visiting them. I have visited them every day, for although I have always hated them—and
because
I have always hated them—I have always suffered from the
Viennese coffeehouse disease
. I have suffered more from this disease than from any other. I frankly have to admit that I still suffer from this disease, which has proved the most intractable of all. The truth is that I have always hated the Viennese coffeehouses because in them I am always confronted with people like myself,
and naturally I do not wish to be everlastingly confronted with people like myself, and certainly not in a coffeehouse, where I go to escape from myself. Yet it is here that I find myself confronted with myself and my kind. I find myself insupportable, and even more insupportable is a whole horde of writers and brooders like myself. I avoid literature whenever possible, because whenever possible I avoid myself, and so when I am in Vienna I have to forbid myself to visit the coffeehouses, or at least I have to be careful not to visit a so-called literary coffeehouse
under any circumstances whatever
. However, suffering as I do from the coffeehouse disease, I feel an unremitting compulsion to visit some literary coffeehouse or other, even though everything within me rebels against the idea. The truth is that the more deeply I detest the literary coffeehouses of Vienna, the more strongly I feel compelled to frequent them. Who knows how my life would have developed if I had not met Paul Wittgenstein at the height of the crisis that, but for him, would probably have pitched me headlong into the literary world, the most repellent of all worlds, the world of Viennese writers and their intellectual morass, for at the height of this crisis the obvious course would have been to take the easy way out, to make myself cheap and compliant, to surrender and throw in my lot with the literary fraternity. Paul preserved me from this, since he had always detested the literary coffeehouses. It was thus not without reason, but more or less to save myself, that from one day to the next I stopped frequenting the so-called literary coffeehouses and started going to the Sacher with him—no longer to the Hawelka but to the Ambassador, etc., until eventually
the moment came when I could once more
permit
myself to go to the literary coffeehouses, when they no longer had such a deadly effect on me. For the truth is that the literary coffeehouses do have a deadly effect on a writer. Yet it is equally true that I am still more at home in my Viennese coffeehouses than I am in my own house at Nathal. I am more at home in Vienna generally than I am in Upper Austria, which I prescribed for myself as a survival therapy sixteen years ago, though I have never been able to regard it as my
home
. This is no doubt because right from the beginning I isolated myself far too much in Nathal and not only did nothing to counter this isolation but actually promoted it, consciously or unconsciously, to the point of utter despair. After all, I have always been a townsman, a city dweller, and the fact that I spent my earliest childhood in Rotterdam, Europe's biggest seaport, has always had an important influence on my life; it is therefore not without reason that once I am in Vienna, I find that I can breathe freely again. On the other hand, after a few days in Vienna I have to flee to Nathal to avoid suffocating in the loathsome Viennese air. Hence, in recent years I have made a habit of switching between Vienna and Nathal at least every other week. Every other week I flee from Nathal to Vienna and then from Vienna to Nathal, with the result that I have become a restless character who is driven back and forth between Vienna and Nathal in order to survive, whose very existence depends on this strictly imposed rhythm—coming to Nathal to recover from Vienna, and going to Vienna to recuperate from Nathal. This restlessness is inherited from my maternal grandfather, who was forced to spend his
whole life in just such a state of nerve-wearing restlessness, which in the end destroyed him. All my forebears were afflicted by the same restlessness and could never bear to stay in one place for long. Three days in Vienna and I have had enough—three days in Nathal and I have had enough. In the last years of his life my friend adopted the same rhythm and often accompanied me to Nathal and back. Once in Nathal I ask myself what I am doing here, and I ask myself the same question when I arrive in Vienna. Basically, like nine tenths of humanity, I always want to be somewhere else, in the place I have just fled from. In recent years this condition has, if anything, become worse: I go to and from Vienna at diminishing intervals, and from Nathal I will often go to some other big city, to Venice or Rome and back, or to Prague and back. The truth is that I am happy