Wittgenstein & Norbert Davis

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WITTGENSTEIN & NORBERT DAVIS Hard-boiled Wit: Ludwig Wittgenstein and Norbert Davis Josef Hoffmann 1. Introduction: Wittgenstein read Davis Rosro Cottage Renvyle P.O. Co Galway Eire 4.6.48 Dear Norman, Thanks a lot for the detective mags. I had, before they arrived, been reading a detective story by Dorothy Sayers, and it was so bl... foul that it depressed me. Then when I opened one of your mags it was like getting out of a stuffy room into the fresh air. And, talking of detective fiction, I’d like you to make an enquiry for me when once you’ve got nothing better to do. A couple of years ago I read with great pleasure a detective story called Rendezvous With Fear by a man Norbert Davis. I enjoyed it so much that I gave it not only to Smythies but also to Moore to read and both shared my high opinion of it. For, though, as you know, I’ve read hundreds of stories that amused me and that I liked reading, I think I’ve only read two perhaps that I’d call good stuff, and Davis’s is one of them. Some weeks ago I found it again by a queer coincidence in a village in Ireland, it has appeared in an edition called ‘Cherry Tree books’, something like ‘Penguin’. Now I’d like you to ask

Transcript of Wittgenstein & Norbert Davis

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WITTGENSTEIN & NORBERT DAVIS

Hard-boiled Wit: Ludwig Wittgenstein and Norbert Davis

Josef Hoffmann

1. Introduction: Wittgenstein read Davis

Rosro Cottage Renvyle P.O. Co Galway Eire

4.6.48

Dear Norman,

Thanks a lot for the detective mags. I had, before they arrived, been reading a detective story byDorothy Sayers, and it was so bl... foul that it depressed me. Then when I opened one of your magsit was like getting out of a stuffy room into the fresh air. And, talking of detective fiction, I’d likeyou to make an enquiry for me when once you’ve got nothing better to do. A couple of years ago Iread with great pleasure a detective story called Rendezvous With Fear by a man NorbertDavis. I enjoyed it so much that I gave it not only to Smythies but also to Moore to read and bothshared my high opinion of it. For, though, as you know, I’ve read hundreds of stories that amusedme and that I liked reading, I think I’ve only read two perhaps that I’d call good stuff, and Davis’s isone of them. Some weeks ago I found it again by a queer coincidence in a village in Ireland, it hasappeared in an edition called ‘Cherry Tree books’, something like ‘Penguin’. Now I’d like you to ask

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at a bookshop if Norbert Davis has written other books, and what kind. (He’s an American.) It maysound crazy, but when I recently re-read the story I liked it again so much that I thought I’d reallylike to write to the author and thank him. If this is nuts don’t be surprised, for so am I. I shouldn’tbe surprised if he had written quite a lot and only this one story were really good.

Affectionately

Ludwig

This letter is quoted in Norman Malcolm’s book Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir. Malcolmadded the following footnote after Norbert Davis’s name: “As I recall, I was unable to obtain anyinformation about this author.”

The American philosopher Norman Malcolm was a student of Wittgenstein’s at Cambridge andlater became a much esteemed correspondence partner and supplier of the latest detective pulpsfrom the United States. It would appear, however, that Malcolm did not take his friend Ludwig’sdesire to read more by Davis all that seriously. In 1948 he could have got hold of some short storiesand books by Norbert Davis without much difficulty. After years of writing for the pulp magazines,Davis had managed in the 1940s to have his detective stories published in book form. Between

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1943 and 1947 four such books appeared: The Mouse in the Mountain (1943; the paperbackissues were called Rendezvous with Fear and Dead Little Rich Girl); Sally’s in the Alley(1943); Oh Murderer Mine (1946); Murder Picks the Jury (1947).

No more books followed. In 1949, at the age of 40, Norbert Davis took his life.

The fact that Wittgenstein’s attempt to get in touch with Davis failed is tragic somehow. Ifanyone could have helped Norbert Davis then, in my view, it was Ludwig Wittgenstein. He was aninfluential philosopher who managed throughout his entire life to rope his wealthy friends andrelatives into supporting hapless individuals, in particular writers and artists.

Wittgenstein’s enthusiasm for Norbert Davis’s first novel is understandable. This particularnovel betrays, as do other texts by Davis, a similar mode of thinking and writing, a kind of electiveaffinity to Wittgenstein’s own work. What is more, in his earlier years Wittgenstein had beenrepeatedly haunted by thoughts of suicide. Three of his brothers had ended their lives by suicide. In fact, suicide was part and parcel of the whole milieu in which he spent his earlier life in Austria .In his biography, Ray Monk refers to that milieu as a “Laboratory for Self-destruction.”

Today, a half a century later, it is impossible to make up for Malcolm’s neglect to inquire aboutDavis and so historically cancel out that non-encounter between him and Wittgenstein. It ispossible, however, to address the question of why Wittgenstein estimated Norbert Davis’s novel sohighly that he felt a need to thank him personally for it.

2. Wittgenstein as a culture lover and crime fiction reader

In 1948, three years before his death, Wittgenstein was a famous philosopher who was supportedby people like Bertrand Russell, George Moore, John Maynard Keynes, and not least, by his siblingsin Austria. He came from one of the richest and culturally most influential families in Vienna at theend of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Brahms, Mahler, Klimt, and Grillparzer were just some of theguests to visit the Wittgenstein home. Ludwig’s older brother Paul became a famous pianist. It wasfor him that Ravel composed his “Piano Concerto in D Major for Left Hand”; Paul Wittgenstein hadlost his right arm in the First World War.

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As a child already, Ludwig Wittgenstein had got to know and love the literature and music of theGerman speaking region, maintaining throughout his whole life a particular leaning towardsclassical music. As for literature, he was especially taken by the works of Goethe, Mörike, Keller,Hebel, Lenau, and Nestroy, though he also liked Tolstoy, Dostoievski, Sterne, Lewis Carrol,Dickens, and the young Joyce. In 1914, through the editor of the Austrian magazine Der Brenner,Wittgenstein had a donation of 100,000 Kronen (about €100,000 today) distributed among“penniless Austrian artists,” including, among others, Rilke, Trakl, Lasker-Schüler, Kokoschka,Haecker, and Däubler.

Between 1926 and 1928, Wittgenstein, together with Paul Engelmann, a disciple of the modernistarchitect Adolf Loos, supervised the construction of the so-called Wittgenstein Palais onKundmanngasse in Vienna for his sister Gretl. Both the exterior and the interior of the house weredesigned in a style similar to that of Loos and the Bauhaus. Once his tasks were completed,Wittgenstein liked to go and see westerns, above all Tom Mix films, together with Engelmann. Later, in Cambridge, he developed an enthusiasm for American review films which he preferred towatch from the front row of the cinema.

It cannot be established conclusively when exactly Wittgenstein began reading crime fiction,though it had definitely become a fixed component of his reading material after his return toCambridge in 1929. His preference was for Street & Smith’s Detective Story Magazine, amonthly pulp magazine which he read, more or less regularly, up until his death. Wittgensteinliked this magazine so much that he quoted it in the last lecture he gave as a fellow of TrinityCollege. That is not all. In his letters to Norman Malcolm he mentions several times how importantthe magazine was for him, much more important than the leading philosophy magazine of the time,

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Mind. In the context of paper rationing in England he wrote to Malcolm on 8.9.1945: “Thanks alot for the mags. ... The one way in which the ending of Lend-Lease really hits me is by producing ashortage of detective mags in this country. I can only hope Lord Keynes will make this quite clearin Washington. For I say: if the U.S.A. won’t give us detective mags we can’t give them philosophy...”

A letter dated 15.3.1948 contains the following lines: “Your mags are wonderful. How people canread Mind if they could read Street & Smith beats me. If philosophy has anything to do withwisdom there’s certainly not a grain of that in Mind, and quite often a grain in the detectivestories.”

Mind came off even more negatively in another comparison made in his letter of 30.10.1945: “IfI read your mags I often wonder how anyone can read Mind with all its impotence and bankruptcywhen they could read Street & Smith mags. Well, everyone to his taste.”

Wittgenstein’s preference in crime fiction was not exclusively for “hard-boiled detective stories,”as Ray Monk’s biography would have us believe. M. O’C. Drury, a close friend of Wittgenstein’s,recalled a conversation he once had about crime fiction with Wittgenstein in 1936 during whichWittgenstein praised Agatha Christie, claiming that it required a specifically English talent to beable to write such books. For Wittgenstein, Christie’s crime stories were a pure delight. Not onlywere the plots cleverly worked out, the characters too, were so well portrayed that they seemed likereal people. On once being recommended to read Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, Wittgensteinturned up his nose: “Oh no, I couldn’t stand the idea of a Roman Catholic priest playing the part ofa detective. I don’t want that.”

In light of that conversation with Drury in the mid-1930s, it can be safely assumed thatWittgenstein’s taste complied with that of his time, and that he therefore partook of all thedevelopments in crime fiction. His liking for the more modern literary style of the hard-boileddetective stories probably developed when they had made their way into almost all the crime storymagazines, including Street & Smith’s Detective Story Magazine – on the model of theBlack Mask. As Ray Monk points out, in the 1930s and 40s, Detective Story Magazinecarried works by Black Mask authors such as Raymond Chandler, Carroll John Daly, Erle StanleyGardner, Cornell Woolrich and Norbert Davis. Wittgenstein, however, always speaks of detectivestories, which would lead one to presume that the other sub-genres in crime fiction, such asgangster or action stories and psycho-thrillers, did not appeal to him as much. Most of the

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detective stories of the hard-boiled school had basic elements in common with the classicalwhodunits, so that the change in the reading public’s habits could take place gradually.

3. The characteristic features of Norbert Davis’ detective stories

Norbert Davis was no realist. He was not interested in depicting reality in the raw, nor inpresenting characters, scenes and dialogues that seemed as if they were borrowed from harsheveryday life. What characterises Davis as a hard-boiled writer is the cutting and curt linguistic andnarrative style he chose in order to portray a thoroughly corrupt and violent world. Often thevocabulary is bold and simple, the short, precise sentences stylistically well honed.

Occasionally he even uses internal rhyme and alliteration: “A Lady getsa Lift,” “Target for Teresa,” “A Break for a Bum,” “Give the Devil his Due,” and “Latin in Art” (fromThe Adventures of Max Latin). Davis’s dialogues ooze sarcasm. Pathos, sentimentality ornaivety‚ of any kind are averse to his hardened protagonists. The best example of this is his privatedetective Doan. In one scene in The Mouse in the Mountain the bandit Garcia lies dead on theground after an exchange of shots. A Mexican officer examines him:

“Dead,” said the tall man. “That is unfortunate.” “For him,” Doan agreed.

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Davis’s plots, characters, and basic character constellations betray a marked proximity to theclassical whodunits. Figures such as Max Latin or Doan represent a blend of the invariablyunequalled master detective and the hard drinking rough-shod private eye. Also borrowed from thetried and tested range of traditional forms are plot elements and scenes such as the configuration ofpotential perpetrators and victims in a ‘closed society’ (for example, in “Holocaust House”), or theconcluding summary by the detective who solves the case before an astonished audience.

Davis’s combination of elements from different narrative styles succeeds because he ironicallystretches the forms of both kinds of detective story to breaking point and seasons both plot anddialogue with a touch of humour. The humour of his verbal and situation comedy is often achievedby leaving out elements in customary forms of communication, and especially by taking whatpeople say (but do not necessarily mean) obstinately literally – like a reductio ad absurdum. As aresult, Davis’s humour takes on anarchic and bizarre features, similar to those of Marx Brothersfilms. Here is a sample from “Give the Devil his Due”:

“... You are Max Latin, and you call yourself a private inquiry agent, and you are theundercover owner of this restaurant.” “Well, how do I do,” said Latin. “I’m glad to know me.”

And another from The Mouse in the Mountain:

“Friend,” said Henshaw, “... I’m in the plumbing business — ‘Better Bathrooms for a BetterAmerica.’ What’s your line?” “Crime,” Doan told him. “You mean you’re a public enemy?” Henshaw asked, interested. “There have been rumors to that effect,” Doan said. “But I claim I’m a private detective.”

This clever, laconic, and sarcastic narrative style is surely the main reason why Davis’s novelappealed to Wittgenstein so much. Incidentally, a Davis comment such as “... ‘Latin,’ said Latin” isquite in keeping with Wittgenstein’s “Mr. Scot is no Scot” (in his Philosophical Investigations,part ii).

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4. The proximity of Wittgenstein’s mode of thinking, writing, and life to that of the‘hard-boiled school’

As in both the traditional and the more modern detective stories, the main concern inWittgenstein’s work is with transparency, with arriving at certainty about facts, at a correct viewand elucidation of the real connections by means of eliminating deceptions and apparentconstructs. Wittgenstein’s wish was to expose pretence, hypocrisy, puffiness, slovenliness andobscuration, which are as widespread in the realms of philosophy and science as they are in theavaricious world of commerce. He compared many contemporary philosophers to cheats andbusinessmen who capitalised on poor districts, and saw it as his task to put a stop to such activitiesby his colleagues.

Given that Wittgenstein’s philosophical work, like the typical detective story, dealt with theexposure of deception, he naturally approached facts in a way that was reminiscent of a detective’sapproach to solving problems. §129 of his Philosophical Investigations reads like a summaryof Poe’s “Purloined Letter,” a story in which a stolen letter remains concealed from the eyes of theinvestigators simply by being placed openly on a card-rack, visible to all at any time. Wittgensteinwrites: “The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicityand familiarity. (One is unable to notice something — because it is always before one’s eyes.)”

Individual sentences in §99 of his Philosophical Investigations may even contain an allusionto a typical element of crime fiction, namely, ‘the locked room mystery’: “... if I say >I have lockedthe man up fast in the room – there is only one door left open< – then I simply haven’t locked himin at all; his being locked in is a sham. ... An enclosure with a hole in it is as good as none.”

Are the following lines from §293 of Philosophical Investigations not almost a parodisticportrayal of the typical scene in which the master detective recapitulates the events of the crimebefore a confounded audience, eliminating a ‘red herring’ that had misled the investigations. “Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a ‘beetle.’ No one can look into anyoneelse’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. – Here itwould be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might evenimagine such a thing constantly changing. – But suppose the word ‘beetle’ had a use in these

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people’s language? – If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has noplace in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty. – No,one can ‘divide through’ by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is.”

§115 points in a similar direction: “A picture held us captive.” Wittgenstein devoted his repeated attention to the influence of our cultural surroundings on theway we view things. Davis too, refers to such influences again and again, in a particularly sarcasticmanner at the beginning of chapter 3 of Sally’s in the Alley:

The Mojave Desert at sunset looks remarkably like a painting of a sunset on the Mojave Desertwhich, when you come to think of it, is really quite surprising. Except that the real article doesn’tshow such good color sense as the average painting does. Yellows and purples and reds andvarious other violent sub-units of the spectrum are splashed all over the sky, in a monumentalexhibition of bad taste. They keep moving and blurring and changing around, like the colormovies they show in insane asylums to keep the idiots quiet.

In some of Wittgenstein’s writings on the task of philosophy, all that is necessary is to substitute afew words – those marked in bold type in the following – in order to illustrate their affinity to crimefiction:

“A detective’s problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about’ ” (§123 PI). “The work of the detective consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose.” (§127

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PI)

“What is your aim working as a detective? – To shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.” (§309 PI)

In his remarks on this statement, Wittgenstein expert Joachim Schulte further underlines itssimilarity, in form and content, to the attitude of a private detective à la Philip Marlowe to a femaleclient, as it were, the threatened ‘fly.’ In Schulte’s eyes, the fact that the fly has fallen into the trapmeans it is in considerable danger, not just because of a total lack of orientation, but because it hasbecome so completely entangled that it cannot free itself. The man who comes to the aid of such an‘imprisoned’ client is indeed a veritable saviour in her hour of need.

Not only did Wittgenstein distrust abstruse, mysterious sounding waffle in philosophy, he alsoregarded the equation of mathematical logic and science as a misconception. In this sense RayMonk may be correct in assuming that Wittgenstein was better able to identify with the approach ofthe hardened American private detective than with the methods of a Sherlock Holmes or HerculePoirot. And just as the new style down-to-earth private eye was opposed to the old style detectiveand his apparently logical deductions, Wittgenstein too was keen to distance himself from therepresentatives of a mathematization of philosophy and science. For him, the fundamentals ofmathematical logic were based on mere agreements, that is to say, human inventions, and werethus totally different from the laws of nature.

When writing his Tractatus, Wittgenstein had already come to the conclusion that science andphilosophy were far removed from those things in life which are of greatest importance to theindividual: “6.52 We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, theproblems of life remain completely untouched.” Norbert Davis seems to have shared thisviewpoint, as illustrated above all in the last chapter of Oh Murderer Mine. At one stage in thenarrative, Doan’s dog Carstairs, a Great Dane, chases the dim-witted arrest-happy campuspoliceman Humphrey into the swimming pool, completely ignoring Doan’s admonitions. In turn,Doan is also ignored by the two university lecturers Eric and Melissa, who are locked in passionateembrace.

Carstairs ignored him. Carstairs was contemplating the frothy, turgid water in the pool withthe remotely sadistic indifference of a scientist studying a pinned-down bug.

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And Eric and Melissa ignored him too. For the moment they were too occupied with each otherto have any interest in external affairs. Melissa’s arms were about Eric’s neck and he was holdingher so closely that no bio-chemist or meteorologist or physicist or psychologist or any otherscientist could have presented a logical explanation of how it was that she could breathe.”

The Tractatus puts it more succinctly, under 6.43: “The world of the happy man is a differentone from that of the unhappy man.”

Like the above mentioned fly bottle metaphor, Wittgenstein’s remarks on the work of thephilosopher betray a disillusioned and bitter, if tenacious and dogged attitude to his profession andone that is sometimes redolent of, among other things, the particular professional attitude andstreet wisdom of the private detective of the hard-boiled school. As the founder of so-called“ordinary language philosophy,” Wittgenstein was more likely to be sympathetic towards detectiveswho spoke the language of ordinary people and grappled, despite the hard knocks with, everydayproblems and real opponents, than towards the classical detectives who caught criminals on thebasis of their ingenious gift of association, or even their clairvoyant capacities.

Wittgenstein’s preference for the working methods of hard-boiled detectives can also be easilydemonstrated by the use of slightly modified quotations from his PhilosophicalInvestigations:

In the detective’s work we do not draw conclusions. (§599)

Here it is difficult as it were to keep our heads up, – to see that we must stick to the subjects of

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our every-day thinking, and not go astray and imagine that we have to reconstruct extremesubtleties, which in turn we are after all quite unable to reconstruct with the means at ourdisposal. We feel as we had to repair a torn spider’s web with our fingers. (§106)

We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and ... we are unable to walk. We wantto walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground! (§107)

I can look for him when he is not there, but not hang him when he is not there. (§462)

The results of a detective’s work are the uncovering of one or another piece of plain nonsenseand of bumps that he has got by running its head up against the limits prescribed. These bumpsmake us see the value of the discovery. (§119)

Could such terms not also be used to describe the ‘philosophy’ of the ‘tough private eye’? In “YouCan Die Anyday,” Max Latin puts it somewhat more bluntly and briefly: “ ... so I went right aheadanyway. I couldn’t wait to investigate. I had to poke my neck out.”

It is quite possible that some of Wittgenstein’s remarks on the theme of the rules of the game, on‘being guided,’ and on reading might well have been inspired by the narrative technique of crimefiction, by that subtle tactic of keeping the reader on tenterhooks until the finale. For example, in§652 of Philosophical Investigations we read:

>He measured him with a hostile glance and said ....< The reader of the narrative understandsthis; he has no doubt in his mind. ... But it is possible that the hostile glance and the words laterprove to have been pretence, or that the reader is kept in doubt whether they are so or not, and sothat he really does guess at a possible interpretation. – But then the main thing he guesses at is acontext. He says to himself for example: The two men who are here so hostile to one another arein reality friends, etc. etc.

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A central theme in Wittgenstein’s late writings is the question of what rules are, how they can berecognised, drawn up, and obeyed. This brings us to another reason why he favoured Americandetective stories such as those by Davis. It is a well known fact that private detectives like MaxLatin or Doan neither adhere to the rules of logical deduction nor to those of law or socialconventions. Instead, they think and act as the situation demands, breaking rules, changing them,or merely pretending to comply with them.

Wittgenstein’s deliberations on the theme of rules had their roots in internal developmentswithin philosophy. Yet they also have to be seen against the backdrop of the fundamental changethat took place in people’s consciousness in the face of the social turmoil of the first half of thetwentieth century, which had invalidated rules regarded as self-evident until then. One feature ofthe experience of the generations who lived through the First and Second World Wars and thecritical inter-war period was insecurity, lost certainty, as regards which values and rules could stillaspire to validity. Such an experience gives rise to a need for orientation, certainty, and security, forreliable rules for individual and social life which were worth keeping and defending unyieldinglyagainst attack. Yet in view of the myriad opinions, proposals, declarations and world viewscirculating and competing in the public arena in free societies, it was difficult even for intelligentpeople to establish binding rules and certainties. This intellectual state is reflected not only in thephilosophy of the time, but also in literature and films, and in particular in that narrative domainencompassed by the term ‘noir.’

It was common to consider the writers of those ‘black’ stories as having an intellectual affinitywith the French existentialists, though this is not always the case. Some ‘noir’ writers have closerties with other philosophies, for example that of Karl Marx, Charles Peirce, or LudwigWittgenstein. Wittgenstein’s view of his time was presumably more gloomy – and elitist – than

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that of many ‘noir’ writers, as is illustrated, for example, at one point in the foreword to hisPhilosophical Investigations: “It is not impossible that it should fall to the lot of this work, inits poverty and in the darkness of this time, to bring light into one brain or another – but, of course,it is not likely.”

Another possible point of identification for Wittgenstein with hard-boiled crime fiction could wellhave been the particular role that the new private detective assumed in society. He was a lonefighter caught between the fronts of the rich upper class and the desolate world of poverty, betweencity administration and the police force on the one hand, and the underworld on the other. Wittgenstein too saw himself in the role of the lonesome warrior, pitting his energies against boththe bourgeois academic life style and the narrow-mindedness and ‘meanness’ of normal people –against whom he had railed frequently, especially in his younger years. Like the modern privatedetective, Wittgenstein seemed to move in various social ‘camps’ or milieus without feeling at homein any of them.

Wittgenstein’s attitude to life, more precisely, the type of masculinity and the ideals oftruthfulness and honour he admired, betray common features with those of Dashiell Hammett andother writers of the hard-boiled school. Like Hammett, it was not enough for Wittgenstein tomerely prove his worth at that ‘battlefield in life’ that seemed to have been allocated to him, namely,his desk. Both men found it unbearable not to be active like other men at the real front, where whatwas at stake was life and death, and where they could demonstrate their bravery. In wartime theycould direct their aggressive impulses against real enemies, reaping recognition while at the sametime keeping under control, or covering up, their self-destructive potential. Although neitherWittgenstein nor Hammett enjoyed good health, they both managed to have themselves recruitedfor wartime service. During the First World War Wittgenstein refused military positions that wouldhave prevented him from doing gun battle with enemy soldiers. As a lone observer at the front, hewas persistent in battle, intervened in troop action directly where necessary, and was awarded amedal for bravery. During the Second World War he gave up his teaching post in Cambridge towork at Guy’s Hospital, thus making his contribution to the war against the Nazis. He justified hisdecision as follows: “I feel I will die slowly if I stay there. I would rather take a chance of dyingquickly.”

Hammett had contracted tuberculosis during the First World War and therefore could not fight atthe front, however, he only gave up his job as a Pinkerton detective when ill-health finally forcedhim to. Yet despite his advanced years and unfit state, he succeeded by all sorts of tricks in being

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despatched to the front as a soldier during the Second World War.

Another common element in the attitudes of Hammett and Wittgenstein to life in general wasthat they both despised the easy life and were not interested in money. For a time both of them hadstrong leanings towards communism. Wittgenstein travelled to Russia in 1935 with the intention ofworking there but returned to England disappointed. During the McCarthy era, Hammett chose togo to prison with his Marxist friends out of loyalty. After the First World War, Wittgenstein choseto stay on longer in a prisoner-of-war camp out of attachment to his comrades and refused an earlydischarge. Like Chandler or Davis, Wittgenstein and Hammett also had no illusions about the factthat people and things could be easily bought. Sally’s in the Alley contains some rather viciousstatements to this effect. On one occasion, when Doan gets into a tussle with Susan Sally, a good-looking Hollywood actress, her worried agent calls out:

“Hit her in the stomach!” “What?” said Doan, startled. The shadow jiggled both fists in an agony of apprehension. “Not inthe face! Don’t hit her face! Thirty-five hundred dollars a week!”

Towards the end of the story, Doan and Harriet, a patriotic but rather naive companion, engagein the following conversation with the Nazi MacAdoo:

“Goering is going to be hung after we win the war," Harriet told him. MacAdoo looked at her. “Don’t be silly. The Kaiser didn’t have much more than a hundredmillion dollars, and nobody hung him. Goering is worth two or three billion by this time, andbesides that he has heavy influence in England and the United States.” “How do you know?” Doan asked. “Read the papers. Who do you think is paying for all this bilge about Goering being a harmless,jolly fat man with a love for medals and a heart of gold? Stuff like that isn’t printed for free. Particularly not after the guy involved has murdered a half million civilians with his air force. Ishouldn’t wonder but what he’ll wind up as president of the Reich under a, pause for laughter,democratic government.”

In view of their socially privileged status, Wittgenstein’s and Hammett’s attitudes to life and work

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may seem ambivalent, which could also be one of the reasons for their unease, the dissatisfaction,and perhaps even their inability to produce one masterpiece after another, as other writers wereobviously able to do. From the publication of his novel The Thin Man in 1934 to his death in 1961,Hammett was never again in a position to complete another work despite desperate attempts. Inthe foreword to his Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein wrote resignedly that he would haveliked to produce a good book but that there was no time left to improve it. “After severalunsuccessful attempts to weld my results together into such a whole, I realized that I should neversucceed. The best that I could write would never be more than philosophical remarks ...” Thatreminds me of Chandler’s lament in a letter to Sandoe: “I am continually finding myself with scenesthat I won’t discard and that don’t want to fit in. ... The mere idea of being committed in advance toa certain pattern appalls me.”

A glance at Davis’s publications reveals that he drafted a considerable number of characters andwrote innumerable ‘novelettes and short stories’ but produced only very few novels, and they areextremely short. He too, was obviously lacking the ability to produce an extensive, well conceivedoeuvre. However, as very little is known about the conditions under which Davis lived and worked,all I can do is subscribe to John D. MacDonald’s evaluation of him as a typical pulp writer: “I nevermet Norbert Davis, but I have no reason to suspect that he was any less eccentric, or less anxious, inthat penny-a-word environment than any of the rest of us.”

5. Wittgenstein – a philosopher with a “hard-boiled” style?

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In many ways, Wittgenstein’s style of writing betrays an affinity to the prose of the Black Maskschool, especially to that of Norbert Davis. Wittgenstein had an abhorrence of what he called“waffle”, and was almost obsessed with a brief, precise, logical form of expression. He tormentedpeople around him by constantly correcting mistakes in their syntax. Both in his private texts andconversations, and in his dairy entries, letters, and philosophical writings, he tended towardscoarse, hard-boiled expressions and sarcastic humour. He had a preference for laconic turns ofphrase intended to illustrate a thought ‘in a flash.’ The term ‘wise crack’ might be used to put hisstyle of writing philosophy in an appropriate nutshell, were it not already reserved for the sharp-witted dialogues of Philip Marlowe and his colleagues.

Wittgenstein’s translators (from German into English and vice versa) were apparently sopainfully embarrassed by his provocative sarcasm that they occasionally went to great trouble tomellow the tone of the original text, transposing it into a more scholarly, bourgeois key, as I shallshow later. One reason for this procedure may have been that they did not wish to exposeWittgenstein’s work to the danger of being considered lacking in seriousness and thus not beingreceived appropriately. As one of the editors of the works published posthumously, Georg Henrikvon Wright, emphasises, Wittgenstein had acquired the reputation of being a cultural ignoramus –not least because of his Spartan way of life and his dislike for the Cambridge milieu. Furthermore,many contemporaries found him impolite, blunt, barefaced, even cruel. In view of such reproachesand prejudices, it may have seemed appropriate to the translators to soften or defuse those ofWittgenstein’s expressions that might have confirmed such prejudices against his person and hiswork. Thus for a long time, biographical works made no mention of, or at least ignored, the factthat in his later years he was a passionate reader of crime stories and even spoke about them in hislectures.

Let us now turn to some original texts by Wittgenstein that document his ‘hard-boiled’ style.

On 9.7.1916, that is to say, while serving in the war, Wittgenstein made the following entry in hisdiary in secret writing: “Don’t get worked up about people. People are black scoundrels.”

His diary entry of 19.8.1916 repeats the sentence: “Surrounded by meanness.”

In a letter to Paul Engelmann dated 16.1.1918 he writes: “I am clear about one thing: I am far toobad to be able to theorize about myself; in fact I shall either remain a swine or else I shall improve,

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and that’s that! Only let’s cut out the transcendental twaddle when the whole thing is as plain as asock on the jaw.”

In a later letter: “Perhaps I should first have to be shattered completely by a blow from outside,before new life could enter this corpse.”

On postcards sent to Gilbert Pattison, Wittgenstein resorted to particularly drastic phrases: OfChamberlain’s diplomacy in Munich he writes on one card: "In case you want an Emetic, there itis.” He concludes another postcard greeting with the words: “... I am, old God, yours in bloodyness,Ludwig”.

Both Wittgenstein’s private and philosophical notes contain phrasesthat could have come from a crime story:

“I see someone pointing a gun and say >I expect a report<. The shot is fired.” (PI §442)

“I watch a slow match burning, in high excitement follow the progress of the burning and itsapproach to the explosive.” (PI §576)

In December 1929 Wittgenstein reported a dream about a man called Vertsag: “He opens firewith a machine-gun at a cyclist behind him who writhes with pain and is mercilessly gunned to theground with several shots. Vertsag has driven past, and now comes a young, poor-looking girl on acycle and she too is shot at by Vertsag as he drives on. And these shots, when they hit her breast

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make a bubbling sound like an almost empty kettle over a flame.”

The hard-boiled crime stories of the 1940s frequently contain accounts of torture scenes and painendurance rites. A favourite plot element is the state of complete uncertainty in which the detectiveor the victim of the crime find themselves. In his way of examining philosophical problems,Wittgenstein succeeded in blending these two elements:

... several people standing in a ring, and me among them. One of us, sometimes this one,sometimes that, is connected to the poles of an electrical machine without our being able to seethis. I observe the faces of the others and try to see which of us has just been electrified. – Then Isay: “Now I know who it is; for it’s myself.” (PI § 409)

The following German sentence “Daß mich das Feuer brennen wird, wenn ich die Handhineinstecke: das ist Sicherheit.” is rendered as follows in the English version: “I shall get burnt if Iput my hand in the fire: that is certainty.” (PI §474) Were the German to have been translatedliterally, it would read: “That fire will burn me if I put my hand into it: that is certainty.”Wittgenstein’s German text makes a particularly sharp point due to the fact that the German word“Sicherheit” means both certainty and security. The second connotation is absent from the Englishword “certainty.” The syntactical alteration also diminishes the harshness of the expression.

Almost nothing is sacred to the hard-boiled private detectives. Their impertinence andunscrupulousness overwhelms not only their opponents and their competitors, but even theirclients. In Davis’s short stories, the detective figures play a particularly cunning game with thepeople they encounter. The following statement by Wittgenstein could also have been made by atrickster such as Detective Max Latin: “Someone says to me: >Shew the children a game.< I teachthem gaming with dice, and the other says >I didn’t mean that sort of game.<” (PI, note added to§70)

The same unsentimental, self-mocking humour with regard to his own profession can be found,expressed in equally mordant tones, in Wittgenstein’s statements on the philosopher: “I am sittingwith a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again >I know that that’s a tree<, pointing to atree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell them: >This fellow isn’t insane.We are only doing philosophy.<” (On Certainty §467)

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The relationship between life and death has always been a fundamental preoccupation inphilosophy, as in crime fiction. Davis’s novel The Mouse in the Mountain could well have beeninspired Wittgenstein to the following statement: “And so, too, a corpse seems to us quiteinaccessible to pain. – Our attitude to what is alive and to what is dead, is not the same. All ourreactions are different.” (PI §284)

Davis’s story contains a piece of dialogue that humorously illustrates Wittgenstein’s claim. Afterprivate detective Doan shoots gangster Bautiste Bonofile in a struggle, Doan’s companion Janetasks, worried: “Is he – hurt?” “Not a bit,” said Doan. “He’s just dead.”

A few pages later, Doan puts forward a variation on logical problem contained in the proposition,“A Cretan says, ‘All Cretans are liars’ ”:

“Yes, I lied to him.” “Well, aren’t you ashamed ? You involved me, too.” “You shouldn’t have believed me,” Doan said... “Why not ?” Janet demanded indignantly. “Because I’m a detective,” Doan said. “Detectives never tell the truth if they can help it. They lieall the time. It’s just business.” “Not all detectives!”

Doan nodded, seriously now. “Yes. Every detective ever born, and every one who ever will be. Honest.”

****

This article first appeared in CADS #44, October 2003. Copyright © 2003, 2006 by Josef Hoffmann.

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CADS is a British mystery fanzine published irregularly by Geoff Bradley, 9 Vicarage Hill, SouthBenfleet, Essex SS7 1PA, England. For a sample issue, send £5.50 (UK) or $11 (US/Canada,airmail). Please make checks payable to G. H. Bradley.

It should also be noted that Josef has a further article “PI Wittgenstein andLanguage-games from Detective Stories” in CADS 48, October 2005.