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much better reception in Italy when it was premiered in Milan, and after that Pirandello’s reputation was made. As did Eliot’s, his wife descended into madness and Pirandello later formed a relationship with the Italian actress Marta Abba. 20 Unlike Eliot, whose art was forged despite his personal circumstances, Pirandello several times used madness as a dramatic device. 21
Henry IV
tells the story of a man who, twenty years before, had fallen from his horse during a masquerade in which he was dressed as the German emperor Henry IV, and was knocked unconscious when he hit his head on the paving. In preparation for the masquerade, the man had read widely about the emperor and, on coming to, believed he was in fact Henry IV. To accommodate his illness his wealthy sister has placed him in a mediaeval castle surrounded by actors dressed as eleventh-century courtiers who enable him to live exactly as Henry IV did, though they move in and out of their roles, confusingly and at times hilariously (without warning, a costumed actor will suddenly light up a cigarette). Into this scene are introduced old friends, including Donna Matilda, still beautiful, her daughter Frida, and a doctor. Here Pirandello’s mischief is at its highest, for we can never be sure whether Henry is still mad, or only playing a part.Like the fool in earlier forms of theatre, Henry asks his fellow characters penetrating questions: ‘Do you remember always being the same?’ Therefore, we never quite know whether Henry is a tragic figure, and aware that he is. This would make him moving – and also sane. It would also make all the others in the play either fools or mad, or possibly both. But if Henry is fully sane, does it make sense for him to live on as he does? Everyone in the play, though real enough, is also desperate, living a lie.
    The real tragedy occurs when the doctor, in order to ‘treat’ Henry by facing him with a shocking reality, provokes him into murder. In
Henry IV
no one really understands themselves completely, least of all the man of science who, so certain of himself and his methods, precipitates the greatest calamity. Devastated by the wasteland of his life, Henry had opted for a ‘planned’ madness, only to have that backfire on him too. Life, for Pirandello, was like a play within a play, a device he used many times: one can never be entirely sure who is acting and who is not. One cannot even be sure when one is acting oneself.
    Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus,
discussed in chapter 9, was actually published in the annus mirabilis of 1922. So too was
The Last Days of Mankind,
the great work of Wittgenstein’s Viennese friend Karl Kraus. Kraus, who was Jewish, had been part of
Jung Wien
at the Café Griensteidl in the early years of the century, mixing with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, Adolf Loos, and Arnold Schoenberg. He was a difficult and slightly deformed man, with a congenital abnormality in his shoulders that gave him a stoop. A satirist of almost unrivalled mordancy, he earned most of his considerable income from lectures and readings. At the same time, he published a magazine,
Die Fackel
(The Torch), three times a month, from 1899 until his death in 1936. This made him a lot of enemies but also earned him a wide following, which even extended to the troops on the front line in World War I. Punctilious to a degree, he was no less interested in language than his philosopher friend and was genuinely pained by solecisms, infelicitous turns of phrase, ungainly constructions. His aim, he once said, ‘is to pin down the Age between quotation marks.’ 22 Bitterly opposed to feminine emancipation, which he regarded as ‘a hysterical response to sexual neurosis,’ he hated the smugness and anti-Semitism of the Viennese press, together with the freewheeling freemasonry that, more than once, led him into the libel courts. Kraus was in effect doing in literature and society what Loos was doing in architecture, attacking