Tuesday 2nd September, 1913: Pinsent gets up at 6 am, packs, and has breakfast at 6.30. After paying the bill he and LW then set out in a taxi to the station, register their luggage to Bergen (visitbergen/en/ ), and catch the train there at 7.35. They travel Second class, there being no First class carriages on the line in question. Pinsent then mentions that on the previous evening and this morning there has been ‘a terrific business between me and Wittgenstein’ which thankfully is now reconciled. To LW’s suggestion that they had ‘got on splendidly so far’, Pinsent had responded flippantly, thereby offending LW, who did not say another word all evening. Pinsent finds him ‘sulky and snappish’ this morning, too. On the train they have to change their seats because LW insists on keeping apart from other tourists. Pinsent reports that a very genial Englishman came along, talked to him, and insisted that they join him in his carriage, but that LW refused to move. Pinsent, considering it would have been rude to refuse, goes for a short while but returns to find LW in an awful state. He then has to force LW to ‘have it out’, thereby bringing him around to a normal state of mind. He remarks that LW ‘is a chaotic person. I have to be frightfully careful and tolerant when he gets these sulky fits’ He is – in his acute sensitiveness – very like Levin in Anna Karenina, and thinks the most awful things of me when he is sulky. The only other person in the world whom he knows as intimately as me – is Russell: and he has the same scenes periodically with Russell. I know that both from Russell and himself’. Pinsent reports that he and LW go along to the restaurant car and have a second breakfast, and that they spent the whole day in the train. He calls it ‘the most wonderful railway journey I have ever made’. The train takes 14 hours to travel 320 miles, stopping frequently. LW and Pinsent have lunch in the dining car at 2 pm, tea around 6, and supper at 7.30. After supper they talk about how they get on together, and this diary entry, one of Pinsent’s longest, continues with more thoughts on their relationship. LW distresses himself very much with his sulky fits, Pinsent gathers, and ‘he is very anxious that we should have less friction this time than last year in Iceland’. Pinsent, who himself thinks they got on very well on that previous trip, reports LW as saying that at that time he was uncertain whether to like Pinsent or dislike him. To LW saying that he enjoyed their Iceland trip ‘as much as it is possible for two people to do, who are nothing to each other’, a rather bruised Pinsent adds in a footnote ‘I certainly enjoyed it more than that’. They reach Bergen at 9.15 pm, and take the hotel bus from the station to Hotel Norge, where they take two single room for the night. They leave the hotel for a short stroll later, then return and go to bed (Pinsent, pp.63-5).
Posted on: Mon, 02 Sep 2013 07:20:38 +0000
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