What's an underrated/unknown novel or series that you think deserves more attention?
07.06.2025 03:54
In 2010, The World As I Found It got republished as a NYRB Classic, with an introduction by David Leavitt. I think it is a bit of a modern classic.
In a similar way, Russell is almost subliminally associated with air and emptiness. He talks a lot, very fluently, and his talk is described as a form of combat—he ‘fends’ and ‘stabs’ with words—because he’s more concerned with asserting his superiority over others than he is about the search for truth, and he can’t help wounding people just out of habit.
One of the great pleasures of the book is the triple characterisation of the three main philosophers in it: Wittgenstein, Russell and G.E. Moore, who is now the least famous but who was enormously influential in his day, and friendly with both of them.
Max serves as a sort of fulcrum around which the concerns of Wittgenstein, Russell and Moore revolve: to Wittgenstein, he begins as an example of someone who Wittgenstein perceives as sort of naturally good, except that Max has undercurrents of anger and more than a hint of violence. To Russell, Max is the guy who has sex with a young woman he’s got his eye on, Lily, which infuriates him. And to Moore and Dorothy, he is simply this inexplicable, hulking guest who they have to deal with because he’s Ludwig’s friend. (Max shows up later in the book in a much more sinister capacity.)
Bruce Duffy only wrote two other novels. The last one, Disaster Was My God, was about Arthur Rimbaud, and I actually had a copy of it at one point, but somewhere between flats, it got lost. Pity, as I am a big Rimbaud fan as well as a Wittgenstein fan.
A memorable episode happens about halfway through: Russell comes to realise that his student Wittgenstein has the insight and energy as an original thinker that he no longer has, and that his treasured theory of judgement is no good, because Wittgenstein doesn’t like it (Wittgenstein can’t even articulate exactly why he doesn’t like it, but Russell has so lost confidence in himself that he trusts Wittgenstein’s mistrust of the theory.) On being told by his dentist that he may have cancer of the gums, an end-of-his-tether Russell sits down to write a letter to his mistress, but it morphs into first a sort of Socratic dialogue, and then an incredibly cheesy philosophical novel called The Perplexities of John Forstice, which he nevertheless greatly enjoys writing and feels certain is a masterpiece. For several weeks he is buoyed up by this sense of becoming a whole new author, but then he rereads the manuscript and is mortified to see that it’s actually garbage.
Inside the Spectacular Downfall of UnitedHealth and Its CEO - WSJ
The World As I Found It, by the late Bruce Duffy.
Wittgenstein proceeds on his lonely journey, while Russell and Moore negotiate their own never tremendously solid friendship, which fractures irreparably when Russell pulls a characteristically passive-aggressive trick on Moore concerning some notes of Wittgenstein’s conversation that Moore had passed to him.
But also, there’s the suggestion that Russell, the great rationalist, is the emptiest of them: he’s unable to stop chasing women, for example, and he rationalises his own skirt-chasing tendencies as a joint commitment by himself and his second wife Dora to free love, ignoring the fact that she’s a lot less free to indulge in it than he is because he sticks her with raising the kids while he’s off giving lecture tours and shagging women who attend them.
Bruce Duffy (1951–2022) only wrote three novels in 35 years, and I’ve read only one of them, his first, the subject of this answer, but it had a huge impact on 20-year-old me.
Throughout the novel, and subtly, so that I didn’t notice until my third or fourth reading of it, Wittgenstein is associated with images of light and darkness. When we first meet him, in the opening pages, he’s at the cinema with one of the young male students who used to function as his disciples, practically bathing in the reflected light from the cinema screen. Wittgenstein is constantly seeking light and clarity, and is constantly confounded by finding darkness and inconsistency, especially in people. He is haunted by lots of things, and driven by impulses that the people around him don’t really understand.
This may make Moore sound rather prissy, but one of the other great stories in the book is his comically bumbling courtship of, and ultimately happy marriage to, a woman twenty years younger than him: Dorothy Ely, one of his students. The proposal almost goes sideways when, he having proposed to her, she confesses that, yes, she does love him, but she can’t marry him because she really dislikes his first name, George. (‘You don’t even look like a George,’ she observes, to his considerable bafflement.) Desperate for her to say yes, he perseveres, and after some thought she decides that she’ll just call him ‘Bill’ instead, and accepts his proposal.
Will you share your wife? Can she take both of us at the same time?
The fictional Wittgenstein’s sexuality is a bit more tortured than that of the real man, I think. This is a Wittgenstein who, from time to time, helplessly can’t do without sex, but I think the real man found sexual desire to be more of an irritating inconvenience than anything else, as well as something he could periodically feel vaguely guilty about. I don’t actually mind the fictional Wittgenstein having a rather dramatic sex life, though, because it makes the novel more vivid and, well, visceral than it would otherwise have been.
Moore, the least sparkling of them but the most likeable, is associated with images of earth, water and food and drink. He’s a basically decent, uncomplicated, highly intelligent man with a great gift for analysis, and there’s a fantastic episode early on when he’s a young student at Cambridge and Russell decides that he’s simply too naive for his own good, and needs to be shown what the world is really like. They go on a walking tour in the Lake District, and in the pub one night, Russell deliberately tries to school Moore by striking up a conversation with a middle-aged man, a cynical Classicist with a love of naughty Roman literature and raffish stories. The man tells them a particularly sleazy anecdote about having rather kinky sex in a Hong Kong brothel, but rather than be shocked at human depravity, Moore instantly sees through what Russell was trying to do and explodes with contempt at him for having the presumption to think what he, Moore, ‘needed’: What has filth to teach?, he shouts at Russell.
The basic shape of the book mostly follows the basic shape of Wittgenstein’s life, growing up in a rich and immensely cultured family in Vienna, with a father, Karl, who is one of the great, monstrous patriarchs of fiction. Karl Wittgenstein was the son of a successful businessman, but he rejected the education his father bestowed upon him and ended up in New York City in his late teens, with hardly any money and only a violin to make more with. He worked a variety of odd jobs before coming back to Austria aged 20 and studying engineering, thereafter working his way up to being a major steel tycoon. Given such a self-made background, fictional Karl is understandably immensely self-confident and sure of himself, to the ruin of at least some of his children (two of his sons committed suicide and another one probably did).
What would you change in Rings of Power?
The World As I Found It has been described as a fictionalised account of the life of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, but I think it’s more useful to think of it as a historical novel about mostly real people. Wittgenstein is the principal character, but he’s a fictional version of Wittgenstein, and the novel is organised more by narrative rhythm and associations and themes than by strict accuracy. It’s both rich in detail, and extremely fleet and readable.
Ludwig is understandably intimidated by his father, who seems to have an opinion on literally everything, including the superiority of Viennese baked goods to those of other countries. Young Ludwig makes his way to Manchester to follow his father and become an engineer, but while he’s there, he gets the bug for mathematics and then philosophy, and he rather quickly turns into into the frighteningly uncompromising philosophical hunter-killer that so spooked his original tutor, Bertrand Russell.
The Beacon Hill episode does, however, contain the bit where Russell’s more human side comes out: the schoolchildren are off on a school outing while he and Moore are interviewing Wittgenstein, and a storm is brewing, and Russell becomes more and more anxious that something bad will happen to the kids.
A good chunk of the latter part of the novel is an extended episode set in 1931, when Wittgenstein is obliged to go through the formality of passing the oral examination for his PhD so that he can be a Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge. This takes place mostly at the school Russell and his wife had founded, Beacon Hill, and it features afaik a wholly invented character, a German ex-soldier friend of Wittgenstein’s named Max, who’s all brawny and outdoorsy and so Christian that he refuses to accept money in return for hard labour.