Saiu agora um livro escrito pelo neto de Evelyn Waugh sobre os Wittgensteins. Nada melhor que um gajo de uma familia problemática e genial a escrever sobre outra família problemática e genial. Excertos da recensão de Jim Holt no New York Times sobre o livro The House of Wittgenstein:
“A tense and peculiar family, the Oedipuses,” a wag once observed. Well, when it comes to dysfunction, the Wittgensteins of Vienna could give the Oedipuses a run for their money. The tyrannical family patriarch was Karl Wittgenstein (1847-1913), a steel, banking and arms magnate. He and his timorous wife, Leopoldine, brought nine children into the world. Of the five boys, three certainly or probably committed suicide and two were plagued by suicidal impulses throughout their lives. Of the three daughters who survived into adulthood, two got married; both husbands ended up insane and one died by his own hand. Even by the morbid standards of late Hapsburg Vienna these are impressive numbers."
"Yet the Wittgensteins, for all their Sturm und Drang, can be as funny as the Waughs. We are told, for example, that the first spoken word of one of the Wittgenstein boys was “Oedipus.”
"Ludwig’s subsequent career, familiar from numerous biographies and memoirs, is briskly told here. Renouncing his share of the family fortune (among the largest of war-ruined Europe, thanks to the Wittgensteins’ shrewd American investments), he pursued self-mortification as a schoolteacher in an impoverished Alpine village. But his pedagogical methods included slapping the children rather violently, and he got run out of town."
"Backed by the Wittgenstein family fortune, Paul set about commissioning piano concertos for the left hand from the leading composers of the day. His dealings with them proved comically tempestuous. He rejected Hindemith’s composition as unplayable and wrote to Prokofiev, “Thank you for your concerto, but I do not understand a single note and I shall not play it.”
“A tense and peculiar family, the Oedipuses,” a wag once observed. Well, when it comes to dysfunction, the Wittgensteins of Vienna could give the Oedipuses a run for their money. The tyrannical family patriarch was Karl Wittgenstein (1847-1913), a steel, banking and arms magnate. He and his timorous wife, Leopoldine, brought nine children into the world. Of the five boys, three certainly or probably committed suicide and two were plagued by suicidal impulses throughout their lives. Of the three daughters who survived into adulthood, two got married; both husbands ended up insane and one died by his own hand. Even by the morbid standards of late Hapsburg Vienna these are impressive numbers."
"Yet the Wittgensteins, for all their Sturm und Drang, can be as funny as the Waughs. We are told, for example, that the first spoken word of one of the Wittgenstein boys was “Oedipus.”
"Ludwig’s subsequent career, familiar from numerous biographies and memoirs, is briskly told here. Renouncing his share of the family fortune (among the largest of war-ruined Europe, thanks to the Wittgensteins’ shrewd American investments), he pursued self-mortification as a schoolteacher in an impoverished Alpine village. But his pedagogical methods included slapping the children rather violently, and he got run out of town."
"Backed by the Wittgenstein family fortune, Paul set about commissioning piano concertos for the left hand from the leading composers of the day. His dealings with them proved comically tempestuous. He rejected Hindemith’s composition as unplayable and wrote to Prokofiev, “Thank you for your concerto, but I do not understand a single note and I shall not play it.”
"For all their quarreling, madness and self-destruction, the Wittgensteins were at least spared one sort of dysfunction: there is no trace of incestuous impulses among them. The same, alas, cannot be said of the author’s own family. Evelyn Waugh freely avowed feelings of more than paternal tenderness for his daughter Meg. When she announced her intention to wed a young man, her father sadly wrote to a friend, “She wants children, and that is a thing I can’t decently provide for her.” Even Oedipus would blush."
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