72 THENEWYORKER,M AY16, 2022
Viennese park; it elicited from An-
scombe a coldly furious missive to the
Times Literary Supplement. Anscombe
was, it should be said, a Catholic con-
vert who once wrote to condemn “the
rewardless trouble of spirit associated
with the sort of sexual activity which
from its type is guaranteed sterile: the
solitary or again the homosexual sort.”
Perloff is unsatisfied by the standard
account. To say that Wittgenstein was
not really homosexual comes up against
the fact that nearly all the people he loved
were male and conformed to a distinct
type—young, English, intelligent, and
entirely ingenuous. There was David
Pinsent (who died during the war), then
Francis Skinner (“Lay with him two or
three times. Always at first with the feel-
ing that there was nothing wrong in it,
then with shame”), and Ben Richards, a
medical student.
Briefly, there was talk of marriage to
a Swiss woman, Marguerite Respinger,
a relationship that appears to have in-
volved a considerable amount of kissing.
But he made it clear, during a prenup-
tial vacation that he decided should be
dedicated to solitary Bible study, that the
marriage was to be chaste and childless.
(She demurred.) Monk, Perloff con-
cludes, “cannot reconcile himself to his
subject’s queerness.”
P
erloff is, of course, talking here about
queerness in the sexual sense. The
Wittgenstein of these notebooks hints
at an earthier sexuality. At the crudest
level, they painstakingly record the oc-
casions on which Wittgenstein mastur-
bates: “Feeling more erotic than before.
Masturbated again today.” “Today I
fought for a long time against depres-
sion, then for the first time in ages mas-
turbated.” “At night masturbated again
(while half asleep). This is happening
because I am getting so little, almost no
exercise.” There is no indication of how
he feels about the activity, or of the fan-
tasies, if any, that might have fed it.
Every now and then, Wittgenstein
notes that he has just heard from his be-
loved David Pinsent, who was an under-
graduate at Trinity College, Cambridge,
when they met, in 1912: “Wrote to David.
Already longing for a letter from him so
as not to lose the feeling of contact with
my previous life.” “Also, wrote a card to
dear David. May heaven protect him and
maintain our friendship!” “A letter from
David!! I kissed it.” Even in code, Pin-
sent remains a “friend,” albeit a friend
whose letters one kisses.
Sometimes Wittgenstein mentions
his reading. Tolstoy’s “Gospel in Brief ”:
“A wonderful book.” He notes when he
has been productive: “The Russians are
at our heels.... I’m in a good mood,
worked again. I can think best right now
when I am peeling potatoes. Always vol-
unteer for it. It is for me what grinding
lenses was for Spinoza.” Often he ex-
presses his contempt for his boorish fel-
low-soldiers, many of them (as Perloff
helpfully points out) “from the distant
Serb, Croat, and Hungarian provinces
of the empire,” who speak little German
and reciprocate his disdain. Whatever
must they have made of the prissy, sissy
creature they were thrown in with?
Sometimes there are philosophical re-
marks that are familiar from “Culture and
Value,” a volume of miscellaneous obser-
vations which drew from the verso pages
of these notebooks. “When we hear a
Chinese man talking, we are inclined to
take his speech as so much inarticulate
gurgling,” he writes. “But someone who
knows Chinese will be able to recognize
the language inside the sound. Just so, I
often cannot recognize the human being
inside the human being.” As is the case
with many of Wittgenstein’s aphorisms,
it is a real question whether the observa-
tion is profound or banal.
On the vexed subject of his sexuality,
the journal entries only deepen the mys-
tery. Is the tantalizing declaration “In the
evening, the baths” evidence of a sexual
adventurousness that went beyond the
imagination? What sin is he confessing
when he announces, “My moral stand-
ing is now much lower than it was at
Easter”? And what has happened to ex-
plain why his “relationship with one of
the officers—Cadet Adam—is now very
tense”? Is the tension sexual? Need it be?
There is material here to feed specula-
tion but not to replace it with certainty.
As Perloff wisely declares, “The transla-
tor of the Private Notebooks, finally, has
to respect Wittgenstein’s own silences.”
S
he does not, alas, always do so. “Were
Wittgenstein alive today, he would
be questioning such buzzwords as sys-
temic and intersectionality,” she writes at
one point, proceeding to give us what
are indubitably her opinions on such
subjects, rather than any that might be
attributed to a resurrected Wittgenstein.
Whether they represent a translator’s
arrogance or a publisher’s demand for
“relevance,” they fall afoul of what we
might call Anscombe’s dictum. “Predic-
tions of ‘what Wittgenstein would say’
about some question one thought of
were never correct,” she insisted.
Anscombe was in a good position to
know. Resistant to acknowledging the
most obvious forms of Wittgenstein’s
queerness, she was nevertheless onto
something when she confessed, “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.”
These notebooks help bring out some
of the difficulty of understanding him.
Here is a man who loves boys for their
simplicity but hates his fellow-soldiers
for their boorishness. “Probably we will
be attacked,” he writes one day in Sep-
tember, 1914. “How will I behave when
it comes to being shot at? I am afraid,
not of being killed but of not fulfilling
my duty properly before that moment.
God give me strength. Amen. Amen.
Amen.” And again: “The situation here
is a test of fire of one’s character, pre-
cisely because it takes so much strength
not to lose one’s temper & one’s energy.”
Here is a man with an ambiguous
sense of patriotism who goes to war only
because it might be a crucible in which
he may show himself worthy by doing
his duty. Worthy of what? Duty to
whom? Only a draconian, unforgiving
superego. Notoriously, when Wittgen-
stein decided to give away his money, it
was not to the poor but to his siblings,
who were perfectly well provided for al-
ready. The sacrifice was itself a good. He
took the same attitude to much of life
as he did to thinking: it had to hurt for
it to count. In a discussion on religious
views of existence, he once said, “Of this
I am certain, that we are not here in
order to have a good time.”
A man so demanding of himself was
never going to be a tolerant soul. The
novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch,
who met him twice, spoke of him as she
might have done of a twentieth-century
Socrates: “Both he and his setting were
very unnerving. His extraordinary direct-
ness of approach and the absence of any
