Wittgenstein's Nephew (7 page)

Neue Zürcher Zeitung
was not to be had there either. Since it
was just a stone's throw
, a mere twelve miles, from Bad Hall to Steyr, we drove to Steyr, but the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
was not to be had there either. We then tried our luck in Wels, but the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
was not to be had in Wels either. In all, we had driven two hundred and twenty miles just to get the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
, and all to no avail. As may be imagined, we were completely exhausted, and so we went to a restaurant in Wels to relax and have something to eat, the hunt for the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
having brought us to the limit of our physical endurance. It occurs to me now, as I recall this episode, that Paul and I were very much alike. Had we not been totally exhausted, we would certainly have driven on to Linz and Passau, perhaps even to Regensburg and Munich, and in the end we would have thought nothing of simply driving to Zurich to buy the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
, for in Zurich, I fancy, we would have been certain to get a copy. Since we failed to get the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
that day, because it is not taken in any of the places we visited, even during the summer months,
I can only describe these places as miserable shitspots, which thoroughly deserve this description, if not an even shittier one. I also realized at the time that no one with intellectual pretensions could possibly exist in a place where the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
is unobtainable. To think that I can get the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
all the year round in Spain and Portugal and Morocco, even in the smallest town boasting only one drafty hotel—but not in this country! And the fact that we could not get the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
in all these supposedly famous places, including Salzburg, aroused in us anger and indignation toward this small-minded, backward country with its backwoods mentality and its sickening
folie de grandeur
. We should live only in a place where we can at least get the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
, I said, and Paul wholeheartedly agreed. But then the only place left to us in Austria is Vienna, for in all the other towns where the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
is allegedly available it cannot in fact be obtained. At any rate not every day, and not when one wants it, when one simply has to have it. It occurs to me that I never got to see the article on
Zaïde
. I forgot about it ages ago, and naturally I survived without it. But at the time I believed that I just had to have it. And Paul supported me in my craving; indeed it was actually he who urged me on through half of Austria and as far as Bavaria in my quest for the article and the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung—
and, what is more, in an open car, with the inevitable consequence that the three of us had colds for a week and Paul had to spend a long time in bed. I spent hours walking with him along the Traun, starting from the Kohlwehr, upriver from Steyrermühl, just over a mile
from my house. The riverbank still exists, but thanks to the rapacity of its present owner, who, as I know, has parceled it all off, it will soon cease to be the unique park it is at present, stretching for eight miles down to the lake. We walked along by the river, which the famous Herr Ritz classified as having the best trout fishing in the world, and in the pleasant half-shade, with the wonderfully cool air coming up from the river, we suddenly began to have the kind of conversations we had had before, but naturally Paul's interests had developed in the meantime, so that he was concerned no longer with grand opera but with chamber music. Even in spirit he had dissociated himself from the big opera houses. He no longer talked about Chaliapin and Gobbi, about Di Stefano and Simionato, but about the art of Thibaud and Casals, about the Juilliard Quartet and the Amadeus Quartet, and about his beloved Trio di Trieste, about the differing techniques of Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli and Pollini, of Rubinstein and Arrau or Horowitz, etc. He now bore what they call the mark of death. I had known him for over ten years, and in all these years he had been gravely ill, bearing the mark of death. On the Wilhelminenberg, sitting on the seat where the only words he uttered were
Grotesque, grotesque
, we had set a permanent seal on our friendship, as they say, without speaking a word. It was difficult now to imagine that thirteen or fourteen years earlier he had been in love with an American soprano who played the Queen of the Night and Zerbinetta in nearly all the world's great opera houses and that he had followed her around the world, though in the end he had to give her up and be content to dream about her. It was
inconceivable that at that time, not so very long ago, he had attended the most famous motor races in Europe and taken part in them himself, and that he had been one of the finest yachtsmen—inconceivable that for decades he had spent most of his nights in Europe's most famous bars and never gone to bed before three or four in the morning, that he had even been a professional dancing partner at one time, in defiance of all the principles and precepts of the Wittgensteins—that this was the man who had once frequented all the best hotels of old-time Europe and fashionable Europe. And it was inconceivable now that this was the man who had shouted or whistled when the Viennese opera reached its most splendid heights or its most abysmal depths. During the last sad years of his life everything he had lived through became inconceivable. Sitting with me by the wall in the yard at Nathal as the sun went down, he tried to work out how often he had been in Paris, how often in London and Rome, how many thousands of bottles of champagne he had drunk, how many women he had seduced, how many books he had read. This seemingly superficial existence had not been led by a superficial person. Quite the contrary. There was hardly an occasion when he had any difficulty in following one's ideas and developing them further. In fact
he
often shamed me by putting me right in precisely those fields which were properly mine and in which I was convinced I was at home. Very often I would think:
He's
the philosopher, not me,
he's
the mathematician, not me,
he's
the expert, not me. And in the field of music there was hardly anything that he could not immediately call to mind and make the starting point for at least an interesting
musical debate. Moreover, he was a quite extraordinary coordinator as far as this particular intellectual or artistic discipline was concerned. On the other hand, he was by no means a voluble talker, let alone a blatherer, in a world that seems to be full of voluble talkers and blatherers. One day, probably impressed by one of his extraordinary accounts of his life, I suggested that he set down all the things he had told me, with so much philosophical stiffening, so to speak, rather than let it perish with time. But it took me years to persuade him to consider writing down these universally interesting experiences of his. To pursue this purpose, he said, he would have to quit his present surroundings and get out of the clutches of his stupid relatives, who were opposed to everything pertaining to the mind and art, and naturally he would have to get away from all the houses the Wittgensteins had built as bastions against the mind and art. Then, having bought a stack of paper, he would have to take a room somewhere where he could not be disturbed. And so he booked himself into a little hotel outside Traunkirchen. But he gave up after one attempt. Later, eighteen months before his death, he suddenly engaged a secretary so that he could dictate to her an account of his curious existence. But because he was kept so short of money during his last years, this attempt too was a more or less miserable failure. He had promised this secretary a
fortune
, as I heard both from her and from Paul, telling her that she would become enormously rich if she would let him dictate his curious existence to her, for he was convinced that his
parochial memoirs
, as he called them, would be a huge success worldwide. Nevertheless, he did manage to write ten or
fifteen pages. Basically, he was probably not wrong in believing they would be a
huge success
(this was his own phrase): such a book might well have been a huge success. It would certainly have been what is called a
unique
work, but he was not the man to isolate himself for upwards of a year in pursuit of such an aim. All the same, it is a pity that not more such fragments by him are extant. Where business was concerned the Wittgensteins always thought in millions, and it was quite natural that Paul, their black sheep, should also think in millions when it came to publishing his memoirs. I'll write about three hundred pages, he said, and there'll be no problem about finding a publisher. He believed he could find the right one for his manuscript. It was to be a thoroughly philosophical account of his life,
not just a rigmarole
, as he put it. In fact I often saw him carrying around a sheaf of papers containing a good deal of text, and he may well have written more than has survived. He may have destroyed large parts of his manuscript during one of his attacks, in an access of extreme self-criticism: from what I know of him this would have been quite natural. Yet it is also possible that his writings somehow got lost or were spirited away, as they say, by someone who did not care for art and philosophy. For it is hard to imagine that he spent two years or more on the same ten or eleven pages, carrying them around with him in Vienna or by the Traunsee. When he was back
in form
, he would tell his
circle of friends
that he was far superior to me as a writer, and that while he admired me and regarded me as his model, both as a writer and as a philosopher, he had long since surpassed me and my ideas and made himself
independent. When his book was published, he said, the literary world would not be able to get over its astonishment. Finally, toward the end of his life, when he was under extreme pressure as a writer and obviously found that verse came more easily to him than prose, he wrote a number of poems—with the left hand, as it were—which were really amusing, full of madness and wit. Just before being readmitted to one of his madhouses, he would read out the longest of them to anyone willing to listen. There is a tape recording of this poem, which centers upon himself and Goethe's Faust; listening to it, one is highly amused and at the same time deeply disturbed. I could recount not just hundreds, but thousands of Paul's anecdotes in which he is the central figure; they are famous in the so-called
upper reaches
of Viennese society, to which he belonged and which, as everybody knows, have lived on such anecdotes for centuries; but I will refrain from doing so. He was a restless character who always lived on his nerves and was perpetually out of control. He was a brooder, endlessly philosophizing and endlessly accusing. He was also an incredibly well trained observer, and over the years he developed his gift for observation to a fine art. He was the most ruthless observer and constantly found occasion to accuse. Nothing escaped his accusing tongue. Those who came under his scrutiny survived only a very short time before being savaged; once they had drawn
suspicion
upon themselves and become guilty of some
crime
, or at least of some
misdemeanor
, he would lambaste them with the same words that I myself employ when I am roused to indignation, when I am forced to defend myself and take action against the insolence of the
world in order not to be put down and annihilated by it. In the summer we had our regular places on the terrace of the Sacher, where we spent most of our time in accusations. Whatever came within range became a target for fresh accusations. We would sit on the terrace for hours over a cup of coffee, accusing the whole world, root and branch. Having taken our places on the terrace of the Sacher, we would switch on our well-tried accusation mechanism behind what Paul called
the arse of the opera
. (If one sits on the terrace in front of the Sacher and looks straight ahead, one has a rear view of the opera house.) He took pleasure in such formulations as
the arse of the opera
, even though this one denoted the rear elevation of the house on the Ring which he loved more than anything else in the world and from which he had for so many decades drawn virtually everything requisite to his existence. We would sit on the terrace for hours and watch the passersby. I still know of no greater pleasure—in Vienna—than to sit on the terrace of the Sacher in summer, watching the world go by. Indeed, I know no greater pleasure than observing people, and to observe them while sitting in front of the Sacher is a particular delight that Paul and I often shared. The
Herr Baron
and I had discovered a corner of the terrace that was specially suited to our purposes, where we could see everything we wanted without being seen by anyone. Walking with him through the center of the city, I was amazed to discover how many people he knew and how many of them were actually relatives of his. He seldom spoke of his family, and when he did it was only to say that basically he wanted nothing to do with it and that his family, for its part,
wanted nothing to do with him. Now and then he would mention his
Jewish
grandmother, who had committed suicide by throwing herself out of the window of her house in the Neuer Markt, and his aunt Irmina, who had been a so-called
Reich peasants' leader
in the Nazi period and whom I knew from several visits to her farmhouse on the hill overlooking the Traunsee. When he said
my brothers
he meant
my tormentors
. The only person he spoke of with affection was a sister who lived in Salzburg. He had always felt threatened and shunned by his family, which he described as a family that was inimical to the mind and art and choking on its millions. Yet it was this family that had produced Ludwig and Paul—and then rejected them at the most convenient moment. Sitting with my friend by the wall of the yard at Nathal, I reflected on the course his life had taken over the past seventy years. He had had as much wealth and protection as anyone could possibly have. He had grown up in the inexhaustible Austria of the monarchy and had naturally been educated at the famous Theresianum, but then he had quite consciously struck out on a course of his own which was opposed to the family tradition, turning his back on what were, to a superficial view, the Wittgenstein values—wealth and property