Marjorie Perloff | Davy Crockett's Hat || Close Out of Inclusion || 90 Lines || The Redeeming Word

marjorie perloff

davy crockett's hat

 

 Marjorie Perloff The Vienna Paradox (New York: New Directions, 2004).

 

 Anyone who even leafs through the pages of this volume will run across the name of Marjorie Perloff, perhaps the most influential person other than my husband Howard N. Fox on my life. As I note below and elsewhere, Perloff taught me how to love poetry as much as I did fiction and drama, and she prodded me into not only writing poetry but also publishing the work of others in my journals Sun & Moon: A Journal of Literature & Art and Là-bas and my publishing ventures, Sun & Moon press and Green Integer. She helped me to define my poetic taste and, although I was already moving toward what was then called “postmodern” studies through my interests in fiction, Perloff helped me make the leap from US Southern Literature to everything else I have written and helped to influence ever since.

    Over our now almost five decade-long friendship she has continued to have along influence on my thinking, helped to promote my press and poetic and dramatic writing—interviewing me and writing about my poetry in her book The Dance of the Intellect—and I, in turn, claim some influence upon her, introducing her very early on several of the poets whose work she would later embrace and arguing for sometimes poets whose work did not initially move her. Together through her multitude of large dinner parties and I through my literary salons and publishing parties we developed a wide range of sometimes mutual friends, among them David Antin, Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, John Ashbery, and Bruce Andrews among the numerous poets, as well as artists, actors and dramatists Alan Mandell, Peter Riegert, and Mac Wellman, etc.

      As with such very long friendship there were surely times when we absolutely drove one another crazy, and there were short periods of backing off the intensity of our friendship on both of our parts. And there are many, many things upon which we will never agree. But my love and admiration for her is as boundless as is her enthusiasm for the arts and her numerous friends, for life itself.

      It is as if from early youth when I had already developed a keen interest in Austrian literature—I read some von Hofmannstahl, Broch, Musil, and von Horváth even High School and my early university days—I was merely waiting for an Austrian-born, but very American mentor like Perloff.

      The essays, poems, and statements below relate a great many of our important interchanges, her revelations to me and my reactions to and celebrations of her own writings and important moments in her life.

 

 

*

 

 

At dinner one night at Marjorie Perloff’s house—an event with just a handful of couples as opposed to her usually larger affairs—the conversation turned to the subject of what those around the table, all quite renowned in our fields, had done before embarking upon our current careers. I can’t recall large parts of this friendly dinner conversation—which I believe included the artists Susan Rankaitis and Robert Flick, Marjorie’s daughter Nancy, a curator at the Getty Museum, and her husband Rob, scholars Renée Riese and Judd Hubert, and Howard and me—but I do remember reminding Marjorie that she had once told me that early in her career she had been so desperate for a job that she had applied at small colleges such as Beaver College (now called Arcadia University). Knowing of Marjorie’s erudition, her brilliant writing and teaching abilities, and gift of language(s), the idea of her teaching in that self-advertised pastoral place of peace and quiet in the Philadelphia suburbs was unthinkable for everyone in the room.

     Marjorie laughed, admitting that as a young housewife she’d had numerous jobs, even producing German titles for American films. “You can’t imagine how difficult it is to translate the humor of Lucile Ball and Desi Arnaz’s The Long, Long Trailer into German. How do you say, as Lucy does, “turn left right here, which leads Desi to swerve right?” “I also worked on Davy Crockett,” Marjorie admitted, “I still have a coonskin cap!” We broke into delighted laughter, while she went to find it in a nearby closet.

     The very thought that this great woman of academic renown had once worked on the very movies that I had attended as a child with my entire family was a revelation. As a family unit we shared perhaps only four movies (the other two being White Christmas and The Ten Commandments), and the idea that Marjorie had in any way had been connected to the other two films seemed almost miraculous; I remember feeling at the time that it may have been the only thing in our backgrounds, outside of the classroom camaraderie of teacher and student, that connected us!

     Soon after, the conversation turned to Marjorie’s childhood. We all knew that she had been born in Austria, the daughter of highly educated parents, and that she had escaped with her family via train on the night of March 13, 1938, the day the Anschluss (Austria’s political annexation by Germany) took effect. “My parents simply could not believe that the Austrian government could possibly submit to the Germans,” she reported. When asked to describe that shattering event, Marjorie demurred. “I can hardly remember anything. I was just a child at the time. I can only recall my mother telling my brother and me to be very quiet.”

     The publication of her memoir, The Vienna Paradox, accordingly, was more than just an event of interest for those of us close to this remarkable woman; it seemed a sort of personal answer to our dinner time questions.

     That book’s reproduction of the first two chapters of her childhood travel journal, “Die Areise” (“The ‘A’ Journey”) poignantly reveal the mixed feelings of a six year-old girl experiencing the excitement of events, but perhaps not recognizing their intense danger and significance; she translates:

 

 

“On the Train”

 

“On the train, we went to sleep right away. But my cousins, as is typical of them, complained they didn’t sleep all night. In Innsbruck, we had to get up and go to the police station where they unpacked all our luggage and my poor Mommy had to repack everything. There was such a mob and we had to wait so long that Mommy said she would unpack a book and I sat down on our hatbox and read. When we finished, we went to the station restaurant where we had ham rolls that tasted very good. And as I was sitting in this restaurant, I didn’t yet have any idea that later in America I would write a book. Well, I hadn’t experienced much yet but, just wait, there will be more!”

 

     Perloff compares that charmingly innocent view of the family’s circumstance with a letter from her mother sent two days later to her sister in London, in which the family’s terror is quite clearly elucidated: the intense planning and packing up of family possessions, the sleepless night of March 12th, the “incessant shouts of ‘Sieg Heil!,” the sound of bombers flying overhead and vehicles rumbling through the streets, the hurried goodbyes, the tears. The same events of the young daughter’s travel journal are far more dramatically detailed in her mother’s recounting:

 

     So we finished packing and left in the evening: my father-in-law, Stella, Otto, Hedy and Greta, and Aunt Gerti. Those who didn’t have the same last name had to pretend not to know one another. This applied to the children as well: they were not allowed to speak and in fact didn’t speak. We traveled comfortably second-class as far as Innsbruck. The children slept. In Innsbruck, there was passport control: for Jews, the order was, “Get off the train with your luggage.” Aunt Gerti was allowed to continue. Evidently, they took her for Aryan although no one asked. We were taken by the S.A. to the police office, across from the railway station. There, we were held in a narrow corridor, heavily guarded. One after another, we were called into a room where our passports were examined, our money confiscated (since the rules had been changed overnight). They took 850 marks and the equivalent in schillings. We didn’t care the slightest. Our thought was only: will they let us travel further? Will we be arrested? Then all of our luggage was unpacked piece by piece. Finally, we were allowed to leave. …Back on the train, we passed one military convoy

after another going the other way. At 10 in the evening, we arrived [in Zürich]. …Here we are deciding what to do next.”

 

     This letter alone might have been a scenario for a film.

     But Perloff’s profound memoir is more than another story of escape from Nazi control. For Marjorie is less interested in how her family escaped, than she is in why they and others like them had waited for the very last moment to leave their beloved home; how their seeming assimilation as Jews into the anti-Semitic Austrian culture so completely misled these brilliant individuals; and, just as important, how these assimilated Austrians readily adapted themselves to their new American situations.

     Gabriele Mintz was born to Ilse Schüller Mintz and Maximilian Mintz in 1931. Her early childhood took place in the comfort of the Ninth District of Vienna near the University and Votifkirche (the neo-Gothic cathedral built in the mid-19th century on the sight of the attempted murder of the young kaiser Franz Joseph), the neighborhood she herself describes as “Austrian upper-middle-class.” Their apartment on Hörlgasse contained a high-ceilinged nursery painted white, heated by a large porcelain stove; a dining room and adjacent salon with floor-to-ceiling bookcases; and a maid.

      Gabriele’s father, Maximilian was a lawyer with a passion for poetry and art, which he shared with a circle of friends known as the Geistkreis, which included noted economists Friedrich Hayek (the group’s founder and a major influence on American Libertarianism), Gottfried von Haberler, Oscar Morgenstern, and Fritz Machlup, legal scholar Herbert Fürth (also a partner in Maximilian and his father’s law firm), art historians Otto Benesch and Johannes Wile, musicologist Emanuel Winernitz, political philosopher Erich Voegelin (with whom the father continued to correspond from 1938 to the late 1950s), the phenomenologists Felix Kaufmann (also a member of the famed “Vienna Circle”) and Alfred Schütz, the historian Friedrich Engel-Jansi, and the mathematician Karl Menger (former tutor to Archduke Rudolf von Habsburg and, later, founder of the Austrian School of Economics). The group, in Perloff’s words, devoted “evenings to the theater, opera, concerts, and their own areas of reading.” But the group’s influence—with its interweaving memberships with other such Vienna groups: the earlier “Menger circle,” the first “Austrian school,” and the “Vienna Circle”—made it influential to 20th century thinking.

      It must have been difficult for Gabriele’s mother, Ilse, to accept the role of silent hostess, serving coffee and cake before discreetly leaving the room at the Geistkreis meetings in Hörlgasse 6. For she, like her husband, was a “proud intellectual,” with a doctorate—a degree also attained by her two sisters—in economics. Some of the reviews of Perloff’s memoir refer to her mother’s role in her later life in the United States as a “housewife.” But in fact, she took a second doctorate in economics at Columbia University, later combining teaching at Columbia with a position, alongside noted economists Martin Feldstein (later president of that organization and chief economic advisor to President Reagan) and Milton Friedman (winner of a Nobel Prize) at the National Bureau of Economic Research. A search of the NBR website still calls up several essays by Ilse Mintz on such subjects as “Determination in the Quality of Foreign Bonds,” “American Exports During Business Cycles, 1879-1958,” and “Cyclical Fluctuations in the Exports of the United States Since 1879.” I recall Marjorie’s humorous dismay in our early friendship in Washington, D.C., when, after discussing Pound, O’Hara, and David Antin, she observed, “Of course, my mother is distressed that I’m not reading Goethe.”

      The young Gabrielle’s grandfathers were even more illustrious figures in Viennese culture. Her maternal grandfather, Richard Schüller, born in Brno in what is now the Czech Republic, traveled to Vienna to study law with Karl Menger, later serving as the Austrian representative to the League of Nations. In the Austrian government, he served first in the Department of Commerce and later in the Foreign Office under chancellor Dollfuss (and the successor upon Dollfuss’s murder, Kurt Schuschnigg), a position from which he negotiated major trade agreements and foreign loans for the Austrian government (including a trade agreement with Mussolini). Schüller escaped Nazi-controlled Austria at the age of 68 by hiking through the Alpine pass into Italy. Her paternal grandfather, Alexander Mintz, was an eminent Justitzrat (King’s counsel) who, in his youth, was a member of the noted literary coterie meeting at the Café Griensteidl that included Arthur Schnitzer, Hermann Bahr, and Peter Altenberg.

      In short, one could not imagine a family more involved in Austrian cultural life. How could they be so oblivious to the problems—particularly after Dollfuss’s murder? Perloff analyzes the problem first within the perspective of her own family: Richard Schüller was asked by his government superiors to allow himself to be baptized (he refused “the honor”); his brothers Hugo and Ludwig became Lutherans, the latter committing suicide in 1931 upon the collapse of his bank; and a distant cousin, Robert, was a devoted Nazi who after the Anschluss was sent to his death in Auschwitz. Perloff then considers these issues in the context of accounts such as that of art historian Ernst Gombrich (colleague of Perloff’s uncle, Otto Kurz) of the physical assault against Jews in the university, long before the Anschluss, where it became increasingly common for Nazis to beat up Jewish students, sometimes defenestrating them so that upon the sidewalk they might be charged (if they survived) with disturbing the peace (an incident also described in Lillian Hellman’s Pentimento story, “Julia”). How could they tolerate these assaults and still describe themselves as Austrians? she wonders, a question reverberating, quite obviously, back upon her own family’s acceptance of their disintegrating Viennese life.

     Ultimately, she suggests that they saw their assimilation through a cultural lens that did not include ethnic and racial concerns. Since they shared cultural interests such as their love of Goethe, Stefan George, and others, they perceived themselves as Austrians without realizing that for their countrymen in general they remained racially “outsiders.” Their allegiance to the Germanic tradition blinded them, in a crucial way, to the religious and ethnic differences embedded in German and Austrian thought.

      Gombrich’s statement that he doesn’t “believe that there is a separate Jewish cultural tradition” may signify his failure to comprehend the deeply ingrained ideas of his countrymen, but it simultaneously points to the reason why many Austrian Jews, including Perloff’s parents, were able to quickly readjust their lives to their new American experience, were able to reinvent themselves as émigrés. While recognizing and disdaining the anti-intellectualism of their new home, Perloff’s parents quickly adapted to their now “lower middle-class” situation. Her father abandoned law to become an accountant, and despite now having to cook all meals by herself in their one-bedroom apartment, Marjorie’s mother still found time (and energy) to return to university studies.

      Gabrielle, moreover, like young immigrants everywhere, adapted to her life at an even faster rate. Within a month of her arrival in a new country, she switches from German to English in mid-sentence of an autobiographical entry:

 

Abe rim September musten [sic] wir angemeldet werden. Ich und

eben der Hansi [the son of Professor Felix Kaufmann, of Geitskreis

fame, and his physician wife, Else] kamen erst in de erste A, mein

Bruder in die drite [sic] A und meine Cousinen in die vierte B.

But my Kronstein cousins went to another school. After three days

I and George [as Hansi is now called!] skipped to 2A.

 

She has not only skipped a whole grade in three days, but crossed the language barrier as well. When Gabriele graduated high school, she changed her name to Margie, and later Marjorie.

     Much of The Vienna Paradox recounts the education and transformation of its author from an Austrian-born child to a professor of contemporary poetry—answering some questions we had begun to ask at that dinner-time conversation years earlier. She recounts her education at P.S. 7 and at The Fieldston School—sponsored by the New York Ethical Society—as well as her later graduate education at Catholic University. She mentions also her early employment at the Bettmann Archive and her short-lived job as an M-G-M title writer, which included her work on The Long, Long Trailer and Kiss Me Kate. But Davy Crockett and his hat has disappeared from the narrative, replaced in her memoir by her recollection of composing rhymes for Nelson Eddy’s “Indian Love Song” of Rose Marie, a job which earned her a “trapper’s hat.” Was my memory wrong? Had my desire for connections been so strong that I had transformed Nelson Eddy into Davy Crockett? It hardly matters; as we know, memory is often unreliable, and the story was the same. Most likely Perloff’s research of the events of her life had revealed something different from what she herself had recalled that long-ago night.

     Over time perspective changes. As she relates of her 1955 return to Vienna, the city “looked like a set for The Third Man,” “I tried to find Hörlgasse 6…but something got mixed up and [we] took a photograph of the wrong house.” “From my vantage point in 1955, none of this seemed very real.” Perloff, accordingly, has little patience with those who perpetually tout the superiority of pre-war Viennese life over their new American lives in the present. The young Gabrielle clearly grew up more involved in American popular culture, perhaps, than her Iowa-bred student—and with the advantage of a cultural heritage that deepens and enlivens her observations on American literature and art. And in that sense Perloff is herself a “Vienna paradox.”

 

*

 

I first met the adult Marjorie in a classroom at the University of Maryland in 1975. I was a Ph.D student in American fiction, and, although I disliked poetry, I knew that I had better take a course in this mysterious genre before graduation. Word around the student-teacher bull-pen—as the large, open room containing over thirty desks was called—was that Perloff was an excellent but “difficult” teacher, by which I presumed my colleagues meant that she was “demanding.” Without any background in poetry, I felt it prudent to take another poetry course before enrolling in Perloff’s. With professor Milne Holton (who three years later would translate a book of Polish poetry with my close friend Paul Vangelisti), I studied Robert Lowell and Hart Crane. Lowell merely reinforced my belief that poetry was simply a chopped-up symbolic narrative, but, despite the sometimes heavy-handed symbolism of The Bridge, I was able to write a convincing-enough essay on Crane that it was published by a Canadian journal (see My Year 2007). So, I felt, I was now ready for Perloff.

      The moment this enthusiastic woman entered the room on the first day of class, I was spellbound. Her voice has something in common with the effusive croak of Jean Arthur’s vocal instrument, a voice I simply cannot resist. She brought just three poems with her, one by Frank O’Hara, a second by John Wieners (a poet of whom none of us, I am sure, had ever heard), and a third by Richard Wilbur.

     She read the first poem, “The Day Lady Died,” and asked for our reactions. We were slow in responding, gradually coming forward with only a few obvious observations. Unknown to me, she was completing a critical book at the moment on O’Hara’s poetry (Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters), and since my classmates and I seemed unable to say anything original about the work, she brilliantly demonstrated its charms, elucidating the poem line by line.

     I was flabbergasted. Could a poem be so simple and yet complex, so rich in association without a symbolic structure to support it? I still remember my unspoken feelings as she read the poem. The “I did this, I did that” pattern of this work seemed at first like something out of an amateur writer’s journal; but gradually, as the references moved from simple acts–getting a shoeshine, eating a hamburger and malted—to the literature of the day. Then, things began to shift, the subjects changing from mundane actions in the American landscape to cultural experiences of significance (the new poets of Ghana [I had purchased the same volume a few years earlier], Verlaine, Bonnard, Hesiod, Brendan Behan, Genet’s Les Nègres [the book version of which I had stolen—as I describe in another essay in this volume—from an Iowa City bookstore]) before returning to more ordinary versions of things from around the world with the bottle of Strega purchased in a liquor store and the cartons of Gauloises and Picayunes bought with the The New York Post. Suddenly, as the narrator/poet walked into the 5 Spot with Mal Waldron at the keyboard, I recognized that the “she” who whispered a song—somehow related to these exotic beings and things (many of whom and which had Black or “outsider” associations)—was even more exalted by the fact that her voice literally stopped this seemingly endless catalogue of things and events, as “everyone”—the narrator and presumably the reader as well—stopped breathing. The current of this seeming narrative had been suddenly severed, leaving me with an image of her breathlessly stunned audience, an image, as well, of myself upon hearing the poem.

    My reactions to the second poem, “Long Nook,” can be found in the second issue of my journal, Sun & Moon: A Quarterly of Literature & Art, published a year later, written originally for the course:

 

There she took her lover to sea

and laid herself in the sand.

………………………………

 

He is fast, was down the dune

with silk around his waist.

Her scarf was small.

 

She opened her clothes to the moon.

Her underarms were shaved.

The wind was a wall between them.

Waves break over the tide,

hands tied to her side with silk,

their mind was lost in the night.

 

The green light at Provincetown

became an emerald on the beach

and like stars fell on Alabama.

 

     The poem begins with a direct narrative statement in the past tense, with the vague “There” hinting at a world beyond time, like a “faraway country” of children’s tales. However, we are immediately made to question these expectations. The construction of “to sea,” because there is no article, makes us think of the infinitive “to see,” which changes the whole tone of the line and urges us to move to the second line to discover what it is that she wants him “to see.” But we are not told. The poet simply describes the process of her lying down in the sand. The word “laid” is wrong here, however, and the object of the verb, “herself,” makes no sense. Even as a sexual pun it is, at first thought, ludicrous. Yet, when we think back to the previous line we recall that it was she who took her lover to “sea,” and, thus, we see the connotations of the pun. As the seducer, she encourages her love to have sexual intercourse by seductively lying down in the sand, a seduction which is reflected by Wieners’ use here of the l and s sounds (lover, laid; she, sea, herself, sand); but, in so doing, she is also taking the male role (as we shall see there are reasons for the stereotyping of roles) and, thus, in sexual slang, is “laying herself.”

      Suddenly, in the next line, there is a shift. A command is whispered in the present tense, ostensibly her command: “Go up and undress in the dark.” But, in in its short, clipped iamb with a labial ending followed by two anapests, we are told more about the upward movement of the male than about her….”*

 

This goes on for three more pages!

     My point in reproducing this passage is to demonstrate that suddenly upon hearing these poems I discovered what poetry was; and, although my graduate student eagerness to pin down the meaning of each and every word clearly belabors my writing, it is equally obvious that I could now talk about poetry in a meaningful way.

    I can’t recall which poem Marjorie selected by Wilbur. It hardly matters; his poetry represented a direction different from one in which the course would proceed. By hour’s end, my life had changed! It was as if a cabinet containing rows of dusty objects d’art had been opened up, the objects taken out, inspected, and revealed to be pulsating beings ready to spring to life.

      Motivated as I suddenly had become, I undertook a class report of the theories of Ezra Pound. I’m still amazed at my youthful vigor: I think I read every prose work of that poet, including his Selected Letters, learning, in the process, the concepts behind much of modernist American poetry. I still recall my frustrations in attempting to describe the Vorticist image—as opposed to what Pound described as Amygism—outlined in Pound’s Gaudier Brezska: a record of an interchange between nature and the mind, an instant “when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective.”

      “It’s sort of like when it’s raining,” whined one of my classmates, “and you’re listening to a certain song, and it makes you think of….”

     “No, no, not at all,” I interrupted. “It’s not an association; it’s more like music, an abstraction that represents the objective thing.”

      “Like when you feel sad and it rains all over your windshield.”

      “No,” I began again. “It’s not like Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite, where the trombones imitate a donkey. His emotion carries the essence in the mind, where, like a vortex, it is purged of all ‘save the essential or dominant or dramatic qualities,’ emerging ‘like the external original,’ but as something new, something different.”

      “Oh, like when you’re thinking of….”

      Marjorie recalls that I grew angry, but I don’t remember feeling anything other than the frustration of attempting to explain something to my classmates that perhaps not even I completely understood.

      Soon after that event, a few individuals in the class began to show their hostility to Perloff’s choice of the poets we read (Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Pound, Williams—and other figures who would ultimately become the subjects of her important critical study, The Poetics of Indeterminacy).

      I had already published three of my classroom papers in academic journals, and I was, I now painfully recognize, rather cocky. One day, I knocked on Perloff’s office door, head down in embarrassed determination to apologize about my peers’ classroom demeanor. I believe she recognized my apology for what it was, not a representation of my superiority, but simply an expression of my fears that she might take their obstinate opposition as evidence that she was failing to communicate. Perhaps it was at that moment that we became something more than simply teacher and student, that we became friends.

    I took one more course with Marjorie, a study of Yeats and Pound. I was not, I admit, a model student in this instance. I found Yeats boring. And I felt I had already learned everything there was to know about Pound. By that time, moreover, I had begun writing poetry myself, and was editing the first issues of Sun & Moon. I had other things on my mind.

 

     Both Marjorie and I were reviewing, during this period, for The Washington Post Book World upon the invitation of the Pulitzer-prize winning editor, Bill McPherson. And I was reading poets in little magazines—an interest that grew out of my study of John Wieners—such as Roof, Big Deal, and United Artists, all of which presented the works of poets my mentor had not yet read. As I began to develop friendships with Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein and other younger poets, Marjorie and I often had heated debates—that is, when I could get a few words in between her remarks. Anyone who has met her will tell you, and Marjorie herself will be the first to admit it, she is an artful conversationalist, able to listen to someone speaking while simultaneously expressing her own sentiments. A shy person would have little success in communicating with Marjorie.

    Some of the poets I found most interesting, she felt were not worth her attention. But, although she may sometimes be quick to judgment, Perloff is seldom closed-minded. Gradually, she began to read these poets and developed an interest in some of their writing, culminating in numerous essays, including her book-length study, The Dance of the Intellect. She always encouraged my own writing, moreover, in those days when I was still meekly imitating the methods of collage I’d discovered in the work of O’Hara and Ashbery.

     In the midst of this developing friendship, Marjorie’s husband Joe, a prominent cardiologist and author of the most established textbooks on the subject, became head of that program at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Perloff family moved from Washington, D.C. to Philadelphia. Upon finishing my Ph.D., I was hired in 1979 by Temple University, located in the same city. So while Marjorie commuted back and forth between Philadelphia and Washington, I traveled in the opposite direction.

      I recall visiting their Germantown home with Howard during my first year of teaching. Their daughter, Carey (who today is the director of the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco) was still in high school and Nancy was home from Princeton University. A huge dollhouse dominated one of their rooms. As we sat down to dinner, however, they began a discussion light-miles away from what one might have heard from teenage girls in any other home. Much of the work of Derrida had not yet even been translated (Of Grammatology, a work I had attempted to read without success, had been published in English only five years before), and postmodernism, let alone “post-structuralism” was not yet a term readily applied to literature. Carey and Nancy, however, had read Derrida’s work in French and brilliantly debated his theories over the roast chicken.

    Soon after, the family moved to Los Angeles, where Marjorie became a professor at the University of Southern California, and over the next several years our discussions and debates were continued through the mails and telephone talks. The Perloffs were immediately delighted by their new surroundings, and Marjorie joyfully reported on her new cultural experiences, including a performance by actress Beatrice Manley of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy—in her own bed! Upon my first visit to Los Angeles for a reading, I stayed in the Perloff’s Almafi Drive house—alone, since they were traveling. Marjorie’s continued expressions of love for Los Angeles helped me adapt quickly upon our move to the same city in 1985. I jocularly admitted to all reports that I was following her around the country!

    I had, in fact, moved to Los Angeles on account of my companion’s job. But sometimes I wonder if there wasn’t, after all, an ineffable force behind our friendship. How else to explain my utter fascination with a large German-language novel I’d spied in the Fifth Avenue New York shop of Brentano’s by the Austrian novelist Albert-Paris Gütersloh, Sonne und Mond; several times I asked for that glass cabinet to be unlocked so I might turn its pages, just to glimpse the book which, had I had any money, I most certainly would have purchased—despite the fact I did not read a word of German! Not even my previous pleasure in reading Robert Musil and Hermann Broch could not have explained my obsession. It is no coincidence that my literary and art magazine and publishing house had taken its name from that lost treasure. What led me one day, I now wonder, to telephone the Knopf rights editor (the very first year of my book-publishing activities) and make an offer for the rights to reprint Heimito von Doderer’s great two-volume opus The Demons, a fiction recounting many of the events leading up to the Anschluss? Von Doderer’s Every Man a Murderer was the second book for which I purchased rights, and, when an unknown woman living in Austria, Vinal Overing Binner, wrote me to report that she translated von Doderer’s The Merovingians, I readily published that book as well (of which I think we sold something like 200 copies). Why did I suddenly choose to read Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle, soon after reprinting it as well? Another Schnitzler novella, Lieutenant Gustl, followed. How did such a small American press as Sun & Moon come to publish Friederike Mayröcker and Ingeborg Bachmann (the tale of that acquisition is worthy, someday, of recounting)? I cannot remember Marjorie suggesting any of these titles to me. From my youth on I simply have been inexplicably drawn to Austrian literature and history.

      As Perloff has made clear, however, although she was shaped in many respects by her Austrian heritage, she is most definitely a product of the USA. And, although I often describe her as my mentor, my inborn sense of individuality combined with what The Music Man composer-writer Meredith Willson has described as “Iowa stubbornness,” has made me a difficult disciple. Fortunately, Marjorie never sought devotees, and our special friendship has remained. As her poignant memoir has reminded me, moreover, we have far deeper links than any frontiersman’s hat.

 

*For the complete essay, see my entry on John Wieners in this volume.

 

Los Angeles, August 23-24, 2006

 

 

*

 

 

closed out of inclusion

 

Marjorie Perloff Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

 

In her newest critical work Marjorie Perloff, as she did a few years back in her autobiographical study, The Vienna Paradox, again hones in on her Austrian roots; but this time her focus is not on family—although her grandfather, Richard Schüller, pre-World War I Austrian Sektionschef for commerce, does make a brief appearance—but is an intense study of the transition after World War I from the former Habsburg Empire to the small country of today’s Austria.

        The former Empire, Perloff makes clear, while providing a solid German-language education to its citizens, was a multi-lingual world with a wide-range of languages; accordingly the writers we now perceive as some of the most noted German-language figures of the century—Perloff centers her study on Karl Krauss, Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, Elias Canetti, Paul Celan, and, as a “coda,” Ludwig von Wittgenstein—spoke several languages, coming as they did from the far corners of that empire, none of them born or raised in Vienna. What these writers have in common, the author makes clear, is a sophisticated education within a multi-cultural perspective that allowed for intellectual perceptions that, in their erotic, linguistic, and, most importantly, ironic viewpoints, were far different from the more analytical and political concerns of authors of the German Weimar Republic.

 As Perloff expresses it:

 

“Weimar was the workshop for radical ideas, from Marxist theory to Heidegger’s ontological exploration of being-in-the-world to the film theory of Kracauer, Rudolf Arnheim, and Benjamin himself. But that is not to say that Austro-Modernism, from Freud and Wittgenstein and Kraus, to Musil and Roth, to Celan and Bachmann, is to be understood as a weaker version of the strong intellectual formation of the Weimer Republic. It was merely different. Given the particular situation of the Habsburg Empire and its dissolution, given the eastern (and largely Jewish) origins of its writers, it developed in another direction, its hallmark being a profound skepticism about the power of government—any government or, for that matter, economic system—to reform human life. In Austro-Modernist fiction and poetry, irony—an irony linked less to satire (which posits the possibility for reform) than to a sense of the absurd—is thus the dominant mode. The writer’s situation is perceived not as a mandate for change—change that is always, for the Austrians, under suspicion—but as an urgent opportunity for for probing analysis of fundamental desires and principles.”

 

     The writers she explores, all assimilated Jews (some of whom were even anti-Semitic) had been given, no matter whether they grew up in Czernowitz in Bukovina (later Romania, now part of Ukraine), Brody in the former Galicia (later part of Poland, now Ukraine), Brno (now the Czech Republic), Ruse (now in Bulgaria), or even as a London schoolboy, were classically educated in the German tradition; but their rich cultural backgrounds, along with their sudden sense of exile after World War I, made them far different writers than those who came of age in Germany itself, producing what Perloff hints, and I would more forcibly argue, a richer and denser, and certainly far more erotic sense of experience.

      These writers’ works may often seem, on the surface, less experimental than the European Dada, Futurist, and Surrealist writers; Kraus, Perloff argues, was often an early conceptualist, using (a bit like the American writer John Dos Passos) found materials; both Musil and Roth created highly plotted fictions whose stories interwove characters and events that, sometimes like musical symphonies, repeated and reiterated literary themes; Canetti used the autobiographical form to explore his literary concerns; Celan, in an argument by Perloff which surely might raise some hackles, wrote several of what she describes as “love poems” (she also offers us her own translations, which are fascinating for rendering his often clotted poems in translation much more clearly); and the philosopher Wittgenstein who, as we know, did not so much postulate philosophical concepts as question and challenge ideas in his notebooks, dialogues, and propositions. 

       Perloff engages us in separate chapters on every one of these important writers, exploring their differences in terms of their cultural Habsburg Empire backgrounds rather than the more standard approaches of their religious or other later national identities. It is important, the critic reminds us, to comprehend even Kafka’s work in the context of the Empire, rather than simply describing him as a German language Czech fabulist and absurdist.

       Although Perloff is clearly better on writing about Kraus, Roth, Canetti, and Wittgenstein (on whom she previously devoted an entire book in Wittgenstein’s Ladder) than the always difficult and encyclopedic Musil—I’m convinced it is nearly impossible to write a simple essay on Musil’s vast and unfinished fiction which, like Proust, simply is best read than talked about—and the word-packed Celan (Perloff, to give her credit, does perceive him as a dense Holocaust poet, but simply features his not as dense love poems), all of her insights are memorable, and, to me, explain why I myself have always preferred Austrian literature (including pre-World War I writers such as Arthur Schnitzler, as well as post-World War II writers such as Heimito von Doderer, Albert-Paris Gütersloh, Ingeborg Bachmann—to whom a great many of Celan’s poems were written), Thomas Bernhard, and Peter Handke—many of whom I have published and also written about—as opposed to Bertolt Brecht, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Günter Grass, Heinrich Böll and other Germans.

     Obviously, one doesn’t need to state a preference for one group of German-language authors over another, since all of these are important figures in world literature (and I have also more recently published a great many former East German poets, who wrote out of their own sense of exile). It is simply that the post-Habsburg world of desire and ironic loss is, for me, far more appealing. And thanks to Perloff’s brilliant new study, I now understand why.

 

Los Angeles, September 8, 2016

Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions (September 2016).

 

 

 

*

 

90 lines

 

In celebration for Marjorie Perloff’s 90th birthday in September 2021, I wrote the following poem working through Perloff’s scholarly and other books, associating certain of her images and lines with other elements of what I had experienced and known of her life. I’d already done this, less successfully I think for her 80th birthday in the form of a mock interview. But in this poetic form it seemed finally to come together, expressing subliminal aspects of her life and thought.

 

Ninety Lines

                            for Marjorie Perloff

 

 

My parents simply could not

like a vortex purge

the cyclical fluctuations

of the japanise pavilion

where you see silk spinning.

 

In China the bat

is a symbol of happiness.

 

I mean the line between

sense and nonsense is of course

a narrow one. Rocks are emitted

by sentences to the eye.

 

My mean my parents went on

occasional trips into

the countryside which is what

every Austrian does on a dreary day.

 

And sentences pile up so high

you need at times to drill into

them to discover the existing modes

of representation.

 

Molly Bloom is on her bed.

To tell a story is to find a way

of knowing how to reach

the world. Philosophical analysis

does not give us any new facts.

 

I mean, I wore my Davy Crockett hat.

I opened my clothes to the moon.

I negotiated with Mussolini.

Anyone can deal with a set of

“disgusting old rags.”

 

Sentences are sometimes digested

by the rocks of civilization.

 

What time the next train leaves

or doesn’t doesn’t

matter. I tried to find the hourglass

but something got mixed up.

We took a photograph

of the wrong house.

 

To deny the normal

syntactic integrity

of arcane vocabularies

confuses reference.

 

To mime the coming awareness

of the mind is to face the

glut of impossible wrong turns.

 

Eyes are often encapsulated

into rocks like little steins.

And we grow weary of the trip

toward the necessary confusion

of the destination we know

we have started out for too late.

 

What time is it?

Molly Bloom is on her bed.

Yes, and the integrity

of the spinning is growing

ragged. I can give you only gossip.

 

Since in the view of many

of our poets the world doesn’t

truly make sense, we have to mime

the mind awakening each morning

to realize we took the wrong turn

in the middle of the night.

 

You can’t negotiate with a dictator.

And civilization generally rocks

its way back to sleep despite

the vortex into which it has been

thrust. I still have it in the closet.

My Wittgenstein to tell me

what I can never ever know.

 

There was a japanise lady to selling sings.

And the noise was overwhelming.

My mother brought us several cakes

and books to keep us calm. We were

so very quiet that we slipped

into Italy. Time stood still:

I had no thought for the next day, week,

or year. I don't recall wondering what

our new house would be like,

where I would go to school.

 

Molly Bloom was my first teacher.

Yes, she was. Gertrude Stein my second

grade teacher in the new American school

where I could no longer negotiate

with the handsome cowboy I would

soon discover at my side. He was so

very charming and so beautiful I said

and I said and I said, yes, and I said.

 

The world does not truly make sense.

Rocks are nothing more or less than stones.

Philosophical analysis does not give us any new facts.

To call the bats "disgusting" is to neutralize their force.

 

 

Los Angeles, September 28, 2021

 

 

 

*

 

 

the redeeming word

 

Ludwig Wittgenstein Private Notebooks 1914-1916, Edited and Translated by Marjorie Perloff (New York: Liveright, 2022)

 

I never reviewed Perloff’s Wittgenstein’s Ladder (1996), but when I discovered that she was translating the philosopher’s Private Notebooks which further revealed his personal life, in particular, his homosexuality at a time when I had become so very involved in LGBTQ concerns in relations to my large multi-volume work on My Queer Cinema, I couldn’t resist taking time out to write on her Wittgenstein translation, the first time we are able to read Wittgenstein’s Private Notebooks in English.

 

 

What was the important 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein really like as a human being? Although we have a provocative film by Derek Jarman about him (1993), a fine fiction concerning the man by Bruce Duffy, The World As I Found It (1987), and we have numerous observations from the many students, biographers, admirers, detractors, and acolytes who met him or simply report second-hand, describing him in various terms—"He was very impatient and easily angered” (Norman Malcolm); at times he is "absolutely sulky and snappish"(David Pinsent); Wittgenstein was a tormented soul who made little effort to be liked (Ray Monk); “Both he and his setting were very unnerving. His extraordinary directness of approach and the absence of paraphernalia were the things that unnerved people” (Iris Murdoch); “he used his power over people to extract worship” (Alice Ambrose), while others describe him as somewhat affable at moments, a man who loved popular films and reading detective stories.  Although Ambrose also noted that there was “a very great deal in him to love, there were as many others such as Elizabeth Anscombe who apparently believe that all that truly matters is the philosophical writing itself, even though much of Wittgenstein’s thinking was left unpublished at the time of his death since his was a commitment to an ongoing revelation of thought that could never be entirely completed except with death.  Other than his   first book, Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus (1922), he produced, as Marjorie Perloff tells us, “approximately 20,000 pages of manuscript and typescript,” some of it almost ready for publication. The final volume that was assembled by his former students, disciples. and editors became Philosophical Investigations. Yet, for Anscombe the entire focus on Wittgenstein should necessarily be on these philosophical writings with no attention at all to his corporeal being, an argument arising, it appears, from the solipsistic position that since she does not fully understand Ludwig, no one else should attempt to:

 

“If by pressing a button it could have been secured that people would not concern themselves with his personal life, I should have pressed that button.... Further, I must confess that I feel deeply suspicious of anyone’s claim to have understood Wittgenstein. That is perhaps because...I am very sure that I did not understand him.”

 

    Surely there is a certain logic to Anscombe’s thinking. I myself have noted that among my friends a person of special genius produces various contradictory reactions in others, some finding this remarkable writer and raconteur to be off-putting and dismissive, others angry that their brilliant acquaintance doesn’t allow them equal time in conversations to express their own views; some outrightly hate the intelligent friend, demeaning any expressed viewpoints more out of envy it appears than actual logic; and still others sit quietly at the feet of my genius friend in dumb admiration. None of these reactions seem appropriate to the person I know well and love. But that is always the way with individuals of genius or any kind of notable eccentricity.

     Does it truly matter that the philosopher was also a living, breathing being who had sometimes very ordinary habits and desires? Other than our fascination in any celebrity’s ordinariness isn’t it the art, writing, dance, music, acting, or thinking that is paramount?

     Of course it does very much matter. We want our gods always to be slightly fallen messes of human frailties so that we are not made to feel that their gifts were out of reach for us ordinary human beings. And we like to imagine how someone very much like us might also have been able to accomplish all the other things he or she did. Perhaps if, like Charles Dickens or Leo Tolstoy, the latter a writer who Wittgenstein very much admired, the philosopher had simply had a wife whom he deeply loved, cheated on, or maltreated no one might make an issue of Wittgenstein’s private life once a biographer a biographer had provided us with all the juicy tidbits.

       But so much of Wittgenstein’s private life remains unknown and unexplored, and as we have begun to discover in the years since his death, much of this was not his own doing as it was a series purposeful acts by those to whom he entrusted his manuscripts and others who have kept still in their biographical studies, it clearly becomes even more important that we need to know as much about the man as we can, even if that is highly selective and limited information.

      This particular genius, moreover, was not only a queer human in the sense of being an odd fellow, something we might well expect of a great intellect, but was queer in the 20th century use of that term, a homosexual, which has been well documented in his commentary and remarks.

       And as Marjorie Perloff suggests, without putting it as bluntly as I now do, the Austrian-born philosopher who spent most of his days in England was the subject of homophobia and the resistance to the revelation of his sexuality that always travels along with that state of mind. In 1954 the editors of what came to be called The Nachlass—the collection of Wittgenstein’s unpublished notebooks, ledgers, typescripts, and collection of clippings—decided to publish his notebooks written during his service in World War I from 1914-1916, what was left along with three of four other such notebooks of the same period which were missing, “lost or destroyed.” But as Perloff notes, “they chose only those sections they regarded as philosophically relevant,” excluding the entries of the verso side of the notebooks which were coded, acceding perhaps the master’s suggestion of “Keep Out,” although the code was an easy one that Wittgenstein had used as a child with his sisters in which a is replaced by z, b by y, etc. The 1961 edition, published by Blackwell (later by the University of Chicago Press in 1979) contains only the right-hand pages, without giving any evidence of what is missing.

      When later in the 1960s the executors were trying to decide what to do with the coded remarks for a new Cornell microfilm edition of the Nachlass, another of the three executors, Rush Rhees commented:

 

“I wished (and do) that W. had not written those passages. I do not know why he wanted to; but I think I do understand in a way, and I understand then also why he chose this ambiguous medium. I fear especially that if they are published by themselves—not in the contexts (repeat: contexts) in which they were written; so that what was a minor and occasional undertone to Wittgenstein’s life and thinking, will appear as a dominant obsession.”

 

      The phrase “minor and occasional undertone,” Perloff perceptively argues refers to Wittgenstein’s expression of “sexual (specifically, homosexual) desire.” To solve their dilemma, Perloff tells us, quite shockingly, first a microfilm of the entire manuscript was produced, and then a second was made in which the coded remarks were blacked out. Scholars saw the expurgated copy only.

      The third of Wittgenstein’s literary executors, G. H. von Wright, however, took a different tack and published a book of 1,500 remarks from different manuscripts of Wittgenstein to express the philosopher’s views on “culture and value,” published in German as Vermischte Bermerkungen in 1977. The bilingual, German/English edition of this book has gone through several printings, and Perloff finds it inevitable, accordingly, that given this focus on Wittgenstein’s cultural values that his private notebooks might also draw, as it did, the attention of readers. The Private Notebooks were finally published—transcribed from the code cracked by Alois Pilcher and fellow scholars— by Wilhelm Baum under the title Geheime Tagebūcher, published in Vienna in 1991.

       Elizabeth Anscombe immediately sued, which basically banned the book until in 2014 Baum changed the title to Wittgenstein im Ersten Welkrieg along with new introductory material explaining the context of his book. But by this time, after major biographies by Brian McGuinness and Ray Monk, the actual edition of the private notebooks was basically ignored. And in his comments about them Monk downplays any essential significance, suggesting that Wittgenstein was not as uneasy about homosexuality as he was about sex itself. “Sexual arousal, both homo- and heterosexual, troubled him enormously. He seemed to regard it as incompatible with the sort of person he wanted to be.”

      Yet for the years after Wittgenstein’s death, his most private and personal of works remained unavailable in English until this year’s wonderful translation of Private Notebooks 1914-1916, by Perloff, published in a bi-lingual by Liveright.

       That does not mean that we suddenly have a true revelation of the “gay” Wittgenstein, if there was ever such a being. Even uncoded, Wittgenstein’s notebooks are written in a kind of code, a decorum that simply refuses to fully discuss many things, and not just of the sexual kind. But certainly this is not the sort of daily diary that any straight doughboy might have kept—or even a homosexual one such as Wilfred Owen.*

        First of all Wittgenstein, who might easily have been given a medical exemption and because of his family wealth and social standing surely could have served as an officer, chose instead to enlist as an ordinary foot soldier in the Austro-Hungarian Empire Army serving as a searchlight orderly on a boat, the Goplana, crawling up and down the Vistula River from Kraków to Gdańsk, almost always under the watch and gunfire of the Russian enemy. Wittgenstein had no political allegiances and at one point in the notebooks even proclaims that the British will surely win being a superior people. And he had previously given away most of his inheritance to poets and writers selected by an agent, having little knowledge of contemporary poetry.

          It is clear, given these strange decisions, that the young thinker saw the experience as a kind of crucible in which to examine his own life to see if he might survive the kind of moral intensity he would have to undertake in order to truly examine meaning as he intended to. Accordingly, he wrote a personal record of that experience while simultaneously attempting to get to the heart of issues in which his philosophy would take him: “What cannot be said, cannot be said,” later expressed in Tractatus as “Of what one cannot speak, of that one must be silent.” He hoped that by the end of his service, if he survived, that he might be made over into another man, which he finally comes to realize by the Notebook’s end, which he has indeed become simply as a survivor.

        That does not mean that he does not express the pain he suffers. Like any soldier, for much of the time he is simply worn out from the terrible sleeping accommodations and the long nights he is made to stand duty, usually alone without a properly working searchlight. And the vast majority of the entries are devoted to the “pack of rogues,” tough, uneducated thugs from the far reaches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire such as, Perloff suggests, “the provinces of Serbia or eastern Hungary” all too ready to make fun of the somewhat effeminate book-reading effete (his voice was described as a “ringing tenor”) who probably was equally dismissive of and aloof from them. Given the intensity of their torment it is also apparent to any gay individual who has been bullied that they knew he was a homosexual.

       Indeed, any gay reader will recognize in passage after passage of these strange notebooks an understated representation of gay bullying and determined denigration. No matter what his opinion is of them, it clearly hurts, and ultimately ends in his deep depression, having perhaps never before encountered so many coarse beings who he describes as seemingly “non-human.”

      Just a few random passages from Private Notebooks makes it clear how much this becomes a repeated theme. He begins good naturedly enough, recognizing how ridiculous his position is:

 

10.8.14

 

“I’ll need a great deal of good humor and philosophy to feel at home here. When I woke up this morning, I felt as if I were in the middle of one of those dreams in which, for no reason at all, you are suddenly sitting in a schoolroom. Given my position, there is of course much to laugh at & I perform the most menial tasks, smiling ironically.”

 

     But quite soon, the complaints show his inability to keep either humor or philosophize about the situation.

 

13.8.14

 

“Day before yesterday at the captain’s. I was quite rattled & didn’t appear appropriately military to him. He was a little sarcastic toward me and I didn’t find him very likeable.”

 

16.8.14

 

“Again: the stupidity, insolence and malice of this bunch knows no limits. Every job turns into torture.”

 

25.8.14

 

“Yesterday a terrible day. In the evening the searchlight would not function. As I was trying to fix it, I was interrupted by my shipmates with shouts and catcalls etc.”

 

15.9.14

 

“Night before last, terrible scenes: practically everyone drunk.”

 

20.9.14

 

“Yes. again: it is infinitely hard not to take a stand against the malice of human beings! For the malice of beings inflicts a wound every time.”

 

     A year later things have obviously gotten even worse:

 

4.13.15

 

“Am morally blank; but I see the enormous difficulty of my position and so far, it is entirely unclear to me to how to correct it.”

 

5.3.15

 

“Talked to Gürth today about my humiliating position. No decision yet.”

 

6.3.15

 

 “My situation is still not resolved. My mood very variable.—.”

 

     And for days after, he repeats again and again, “Situation unresolved.” Indeed we wonder at moments whether or not some of the problems stem from his own sexual responses to the other crew members; at one point later in the Notebooks Wittgenstein suggests that things have become very tense with a Lieutenant and that it may come to a duel. Interestingly, in the midst of these cries for help, he still expresses his sexual feelings, an odd placement for them.

 

9.3.15

 

“Situation unresolved! = . Mood wary but dark.—”

 

     The very next day:

 

10.3.15

 

“Strongly sexually aroused. Undecided. Restless in spirit.=.

 

     And the following days he writes still of an unchanged “situation.” That this “situation” and his sexual arousal is somehow connected is made even more clear when a few days later he receives a letter from his beloved friend and student David Pinsent:

 

18.3.15

 

“Lovely letter from David yesterday!— ....Replied to David. Feeling very aroused.” (Compare this with the entry from 21.12.14.: “A letter from David!! I kissed it.”)

 

And his feeling of arousal continues over the next few days.

      In short, the pattern is quite clear: like so very many bullied gay school boys, the torture  appears to alternate with sexual desire, perhaps even for one of his bullies, a kind of early S & M syndrome, which would explain, if true, what William Warren Bartley’s biography of Wittgenstein claims, to have unearthed evidence of the philosopher’s taste for “rough trade” in a Viennese park.

      The tension between these two forces as expressed in these notebooks is not dissimilar from the pulls between his belief in God and a denial of religion that is very much at the heart of Wittgenstein’s philosophical undertakings—characterized in these notebooks as “my work” meaning his writing, not his activities as a soldier—that activity itself being generally expressed in an alternating pattern of progress and a complete breakdown, days of good work followed by an inability to move on. One might be tempted, in fact, to describe Wittgenstein as being somewhat like a manic depressive, with a pattern of remarkable achievement before collapsing into near despair.

      If these personal expressions, however, still seem ambivalently expressed even with the code broken we must also ask ourselves how could they not be so at a time when homosexuality was outlawed in both England and Germany (paragraph 175 of German penal code was not abolished until 1994, and despite the later openness of homosexuality in Weimar Germany after the War, British law required imprisonment and other punishments until section 28 was abolished in 2000). One need only to recall the evident suicide of another Cambridge University genius, Alan Turing to realize the consequences of openly expressing one’s homosexuality.**

       In fact, Wittgenstein appears to be quite open about his homosexuality with regard to his trip to Vienna with his commander. Returning to his home city, he mentions his mother and family only in passing, but makes an important note to himself: “Let me note here that my moral standing is now much lower than it was at Easter.” (2.1.15), which to me reads as an obvious statement of having had some sexual encounters while in the city. One can only wonder, moreover, if his “moral standing” has anything to do with Gürth, who in describes in the entry from 10.1.15, “Had many very pleasant hours with Gürth. Am very curious about my future life.—.” Or, perhaps, it is more connected with his repeated trips to the baths, which even though were universally used by men and women to get a thorough cleansing of the body in the days before some had indoor plumbing, were even then a place where one could engage in same-sex activities in the gender-separated sweating rooms and pools.

    And, finally, any gay male would recognize that it was highly unlikely that a heterosexual doughboy would note again and again throughout the Private Notebooks every time he masturbated. If a straight soldier were even to keep such a diary it might surely be full of the visits he made on return to Krákow to the brothels or a woman’s apartment, but surely would not record for himself his masturbatory habits as does Wittgenstein. I may be mistaken, but appears to me that young heterosexual males don’t like to even talk about masturbation since it presumes that they are unable to find sex with a female, and might hint of sexual abnormality.

     Far from Monk’s assertion that sexual arousal “troubled him enormously,” this Wittgenstein seems very much fascinated by it, perhaps by the fact that he even could continue to fantasize a sexual object successfully enough to masturbate; despite the tortures his fellow “rouges” put him through, he still could get aroused, or today as we might describe, he still remained quite sexually horny.

     This is clearly not a record of his humiliations or misdemeanors but almost a listing of his abilities to retain his sexual identity despite what he describes in these self-reflective works, which up until the end of these writings haunt him: “Not in the best of health and sick to my soul as a result of the bigotry and meanness of my compatriots” (6.18.16). To the very end Wittgenstein is aware of his being queer, different and hated by those around him for simply who he is. But he has survived and by the end of the Private Notebooks seems to have answered his question of 1.6.15, “Is there a priori an order in the world, and if so, of what does it consist?”

       On 12.8.16, answers: “The ‘I’ makes its appearance in philosophy by means of the idea that the world is my world. / This is connected with the fact that none of our experience is a priori. / Everything we see could be otherwise.”

       19.8.16: “Surrounded by viciousness. God will help me,” he closes with a sense of hope, even if as he earlier comments: “The redeeming word...has not yet been articulated.” (p. 149), which I can only imagine, if such a word does exist, to be “liebe, love.” 

       In the end, accordingly, Wittgenstein’s personal life does very much matter, not only because it has helped lead him to his philosophical revelations, but shows us a suffering yet enduring and even resilient individual battling the sexual bigotry around him. It angers me when I am told by others, accordingly, that these issues don’t matter in the life of a thinker I so very much admire. I am not interested in his sexuality for prurient reasons but for the fact that he did think it worth his keeping a record of his personal engagement with a world which he had been ill-raised to confront but with which he obviously deemed it necessary to engage.

      The fact that even a “god,” as John Maynard Keynes (himself a gay man) described him, had to endure harassment for being gay in his own life, and suffered yet more homophobia by his beloved followers and admirers, and now even after Perloff’s important contribution, is still being denied the truths he himself recorded*** reveals that homosexuality is still a troubling topic for many in our society. The advances many gays have made in the last several decades is being threatened anew in the US and throughout the world.

      

*Owens wrote back from the war:  “There are two French girls in my billet, daughters of the Mayor, who (I suppose because of my French) single me out for their joyful gratitude for La Déliverance. Naturally I talk to them a good deal; so much so that the jealousy of other officers resulted in a Subalterns’ Court Martial being held on me! The dramatic irony was too killing, considering certain other things, not possible to tell in a letter.”

 

**Three of Wittgenstein’s brothers committed suicide, which helps to explain some of his final entries about suicide in Private Notebooks. In two instances, the reasons for the brothers’ deaths seem vague, but in his brother Rudi’s case, he was known, before his drinking a glass of milk and potassium cyanide in a Berlin bar, to have what a friend described as a “perverted disposition.” Shortly before, he evidently sought advice from the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, an organization campaigning against Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code, which prohibited homosexual sex.

 

***An anonymous reader on Amazon wrote almost as much as Perloff has in her short section introductions and final essay to this book in an attempt to browbeat the critic and deter any potential reader for her having even suggested that Wittgenstein was a homosexual. His or her running thesis is “This book is mostly Perloff’s attempt to conjure and reify Wittgenstein as a homosexual. She does this without evidence and by implication, inference, insinuation, leaps in logic, fake causality, association, and by saying “no doubt” and “of course” a lot. What she lacks in evidence, she attempts to make up for by brow-beating the reader into submission and agreement. For some reason she wants Wittgenstein to have been a homosexual. Her narrow personal agenda, in this regard, casts a pall over this book. She abdicates her responsibility. She disrespects the reader and she disrespects Wittgenstein and his legacy.”

      I laughed heartily at these comments since most readers have now long know of the philosopher’s sexual preference, the subject even of a movie by note director Derek Jarman. The homophobia of this review is so obvious that it is quite frightening.

      Does he or she imagine that the Wittgenstein’s coarse military compatriots are mocking and abusing him for his proper use of German or his ability to speak English, for his refined manners, or something similar? These are generally not the sources of the kind of bullying he implies.

 

Los Angeles, May 15, 2022

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (May 2022)