James Klagge drew my attention to this essay on Wittgenstein's time in Swansea. I don't think I knew that Wittgenstein lived in Mumbles (at 10 Langland Road, which is just over half a mile from where I used to live when I studied at Swansea). It's one of the New York Times' 52 places to love in 2021 (the first one listed, so you won't have to scroll too much if you click on the link).
My mother also once lived about half a mile from Wittgenstein (as the crow flies). In 1938 he lived at 81 East Road, Cambridge and she was a baby, living at 57 Cromwell Road. Apart from the fact that he wrote this nine years earlier, she could have inspired this thought:
Anyone who listens to a child’s cry and understands what he hears will know that it harbors dormant psychic forces, terrible forces, different from anything commonly assumed. Profound rage, pain, and lust for destruction.
The famous picture of Wittgenstein below was taken at the Mumbles train shelter (not, I think, in Mumbles, but at the station nearest the university on the line that ran between Swansea and Mumbles). At least, the article linked to above says it was taken "in the, now demolished, Mumbles Train shelter on Swansea promenade, at the bottom of Brynmill Lane." My guess is that the shelter was at the Brynmill station. So this is Wittgenstein by the seaside.
So that's what gave its name to the Brynmill Press, whose short-lived journal The Human World (I have a complete set of 15 issues) published, besides a lot of Leavisite jeremiads, the first English translation of the Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough – as well as pieces by numerous Wittgensteinians (Rhees, Anscombe, Winch, Phillips...).
ReplyDeleteKnowing all these things about Swansea without ever having been there makes me feel like Kant, who could talk in detail about the bridges of London without ever having left Königsberg.
Wittgenstein's photo of Ben Richards is seen less frequently, but a nice complement.
I don't think I've ever seen that picture before. Thanks!
DeleteYes, the Brynmill Press must be named after Brynmill in Swansea, although on my copy of the Remarks on Frazer it says the press is in Doncaster (North East England, not south Wales). I suppose the printing doesn't need to be done all that nearby.
Well my copy of the pamphlet edition says Retford, Nottinghamshire. I think the imprint was liable to change based on where the proprietor Ian Robinson, sometime lecturer in English at Swansea, was living at any given time. I do remember he was not in Swansea, but probably somewhere in England, at the time I bought the Human World set directly from him 20 years or so ago.
DeleteAn afterthought on the anecdote about your mother: you win, but I'd never realised that when Wittgenstein stayed in Leningrad in 1935, my grandparents and uncle were living only 40 miles northwest, on the other side of the late lamented pre-1939 Finnish border. My father too was born there, but a year later.
You are a mine of information! The back cover mentions an Ian Robinson. Now I know who he is.
DeleteYou might explain to your readers what 'Mumbles' is the name of. To me, it is the name by which Frank Sinatra called Marlon Brando when they were making the movie of *Guys and Dolls*, but I gather from this piece that it is the name of a neighborhood or a district in Swansea. Wikipedia informs me that it is "a headland sited on the western edge of Swansea Bay on the southern coast of Wales. The name Mumbles is also applied to the district encompassing the electoral wards of Oystermouth, Newton, West Cross, and Mayals." Okay, fine. But it is irritating to read a piece talking about "Mumbles" without explanation as if everybody should know what it is.
ReplyDeleteSorry. It's a place, of course, but exactly what place still isn't clear to me. I think of it as a hilly area outside Swansea. But perhaps it counts as being in Swansea after all.
DeleteCora Diamond writes: "There is an excellent piece on Ian Robinson in Wikipedia. --- The address of the Brynmill Press in my copies of The Human World is 130 Bryn Road, Brynmill, Swansea. The successor journal, The Gadfly, was also published by the Brynmill Press, which had by then moved to Retford. The directors of the Press were Robinson and David Sims, who was, if I recall right, also a lecturer in the English Department at Swansea. Robinson was a good friend of the Philosophy Department. I met him only once; it may have been at the memorial conference for Peter Winch. I recommend his book, The Survival of English. "
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