The World Within: Why Artists, Writers and Thinkers Retreat, Guy Stagg, Scribner UK, 320pp, £20

In the summer of 1920, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was struggling. A year earlier, soon after returning home from the prisoner-of-war camp at Monte Cassino, this scion of one of Vienna’s wealthiest families had renounced his inheritance to become a schoolteacher. His new career was not going well: teacher training proved gruelling, and a disagreement with his publisher meant that the recently completed Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus could not be published. His personal life was equally unhappy; three of his brothers had committed suicide, and his best friend had died in the war. Unsurprisingly, in the face of so much trauma, Wittgenstein became severely depressed. And so, the philosopher did something that had previously helped him through difficult times: he retreated from the world.

Wittgenstein sought refuge at Klosterneuburg Abbey, north of Vienna, where he worked as a gardener and slept in a potting shed; by September, he felt ‘slightly more hopeful’ and was able to embark on his first teaching job. According to Guy Stagg, author of the prize-winning travelogue The Crossway, this episode reflects the potentially life-changing impact of withdrawal from the world – a thesis he develops by considering Wittgenstein’s experiences alongside those of two early 20th-century thinkers who undertook monastic retreats. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the painter and poet David Jones (1895-1974) visited Caldey Abbey, a Benedictine community situated on an island off the Pembrokeshire coast, on no fewer than seven occasions. A few years later, the French intellectual and mystic Simone Weil (1909-43) made a brief but impactful Easter visit to Solesmes Abbey, in the Loire.

What exactly did these creatives gain by withdrawing from the world? Stagg’s ability to answer this question is somewhat hampered by a lack of close engagement with their work: key texts such as Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Weil’s essays are discussed only briefly, and none of Jones’ paintings are reproduced. The intellectual and artistic impact of retreat seems clearest in the case of Jones, who wrote much of his war poem In Parenthesis on Caldey, which also inspired the paintings he considered to be ‘in a curious way the best things I have done so far’. Being on the island, which had its own strong tradition of arts and crafts, including a monastic scriptorium in which he worked, seems to have given him the necessary space to experiment in the early years of his career.

The impact of Weil’s visit to Solesmes is more ambiguous: though important to her, this was only one of several retreats – and religious experiences – she enjoyed in the mid-1930s, all of which contributed to her deepening faith. At Klosterneuberg, Stagg admits that ‘the new gardener had little contact with the canons, and there’s no record of whether he attended mass’. Though the abbey offered Wittgenstein sanctuary at a difficult period of his life, his letters (or at least the passages quoted here) suggest that it was regular physical labour, more than religion, which gave him solace.

Though The World Within is framed as an exploration of a near-universal desire for retreat, it soon becomes clear that its subjects were driven by something more extreme than a need to take a break from the trials and tribulations of daily life. All three were prickly characters who struggled with personal relationships and repeatedly sought out solitude. Wittgenstein made multiple visits to the Norwegian village of Skjolden and worked for several years as a primary school teacher in remote mountain settlements – a career which ended when he beat a pupil around the head, leaving him unconscious. Jones, who once said that waking up with a woman beside him ‘would be revolting to me in some way’, spent his final years as a virtual recluse, filling his cell-like room with paintings – although he did agree to a meeting with Igor Stravinsky, who left feeling that ‘I have been in the presence of a holy man.’

Such unconventional behaviour reflects the fact that this trio was united not just by creativity, but by poor mental health, and an unusual (some might say unhealthy) preoccupation with suffering. Jones, who was permanently scarred by his experiences in the First World War, was seemingly the least self-sacrificing of the group, though even he, when forced into therapy by a serious breakdown in the 1930s, asked his psychologist ‘You’re not going to make me normal, are you, because I don’t want to be.’ In contrast, both Wittgenstein and Weil deliberately embraced suffering.

The former, who struggled throughout his life with depression, seems to have felt that testing himself was the best way to grow as a person, to which end he actively sought out danger during his war service, and renounced a substantial inheritance to experience poverty. None of this made him happy: his sister Hermine once described him as ‘an unhappy saint’, while he concluded that ‘we are not here in order to have a good time’.

Weil, a well-to-do Parisienne, was similarly preoccupied with suffering as the key to understanding, and, despite her ill health, she spent six months working in factories to experience the plight of the labouring classes. Though not everyone was convinced by the usefulness of such activities, her niece claimed that ‘Simone’s true plan is to feel the pain of poor people, not to provide them with bread or clothing. Her personal brand of charity is to become the beggar and then refuse any help.’ In her final years, Weil became increasingly preoccupied with martyrdom, declaring herself envious of Christ’s crucifixion. She died in a Kent sanatorium, aged just 34, having starved herself to death in a misguided act of solidarity with occupied France.

As in The Crossway, Stagg’s own experiences form an important part of the book, and accounts of his own stays at the monasteries visited by his chief protagonists are interwoven within. Unfortunately, these trips are mostly unrevealing. Though Stagg arrives in Klosterneuburg hoping to ‘understand how it saved him’, he finds few traces of Wittgenstein, whose potting shed is long gone, replaced by a robust outbuilding sandwiched between a busy road and a railway line.

While Stagg acknowledges the importance of religion to each of his protagonists, and is well-versed in the history of religious retreat, he struggles to engage with its spiritual aspect. In Solesmes, the daily liturgy proved transformative to Weil, who claimed that ‘the thought of the Passion of Christ entered into my being once and for all’; it also gave her a temporary respite from her chronic migraines. But when Stagg attends these services, he finds himself not just unmoved but bored.

Indeed, although he writes evocatively of the monasteries he visits, each of these trips proves somewhat unsatisfactory. At Klosterneuburg, a lavish establishment with close links to the Holy Roman Empire, the monks are too much in the world: they think nothing of popping out to eat in local restaurants and hobnobbing with cabinet ministers, and take their domestic comforts (including a private swimming pool) for granted.

Stagg, who expected ‘solitude, hardship [and] inner turmoil’, is left disappointed by a retreat that feels too much like a holiday. A winter visit to Caldey Island in Wales, where the monastery is so cold that he wears his coat indoors, and the lack of internet forces him to focus on his surroundings, provides greater austerity. But the bare, ugly church, with piles of gardening equipment in the aisles, reminds him of a village hall, and the monks, who enjoy gossiping about past visitors and telling jokes while washing up, prove as uninspiring as their Austrian counterparts. At Solesmes, Stagg dislikes almost everything – the sterile guesthouse, his eccentric fellow guests, the relentless services – and leaves feeling that he does not belong in this ‘monstrous’ place, but rather in the world.

Ultimately, having gained less than he expected from his long-dreamed-of retreats, Stagg changes his mind. Though he embarked on this journey wanting to be like these writers, and to share their experiences, he ends the book troubled by the price they – and those who loved them – paid for their originality, and increasingly convinced that ‘the world was not the enemy of creative and intellectual work, but its one sustaining source’. Consequently, though this readable book highlights the importance of retreat in the lives of three remarkable people, it also raises profound questions about both creativity and human nature, and provides a salutary warning against our tendency to romanticise the writer.