Can the artist’s retreat teach us how to live?

Ludwig Wittgenstein, David Jones and Simone Weil are, respectively, the saint, the hermit and the martyr. Three agonised, war-damaged 20th-century intellectuals or artists: none was born Catholic, but in different ways all were attracted toward that faith, and monastic retreat. All three sought deliberate poverty, and “suffering and the power to endure it”. None was obliged to work for a living as it’s commonly understood; indeed, Wittgenstein’s family was among the most wealthy in Europe. What kind of role models are these?

Guy Stagg is an earnest and sensitive young man. As a writer, he found the idea of “retreat” alluring, asking: “How much should a writer remain in the world and how much should they withdraw?” His question sounds almost quaint. It seems to be premised on an already quasi-religious definition of art. But he wonders if he can find the answer by exploring what religious seclusion did for Wittgenstein, Jones and Weil, a century ago. “All three spent time with religious communities and all three were changed by the experience.” He admits he was “bewitched by their self-destructive devotion”. He identifies three models for retreat: as “a moral project”, “a flight from society” and “a form of self-sacrifice”. The three religious houses concerned still exist, and Stagg spends time in each.

Wittgenstein’s was the moral project. He was looking to scourge himself. The philosopher spent the summer of 1920 at Klosterneuburg abbey, a huge pile near his native Vienna. He had seen war service and spent time as a PoW. He had written his masterpiece, the Tractatus, but hadn’t found a publisher. He had off-loaded his inheritance, and was about to embark on a disastrous career as a teacher. Already three brothers had died by suicide, and the idea haunted Wittgenstein. He had “an intense awareness of his own sinful state” and was moving toward religion. (In 1919, Bertrand Russell wrote of this former pupil and ace logician, saying: “He has become a complete mystic.”)

In pursuit of Wittgenstein, Stagg spends a week at Klosterneuburg. Architecturally, the place is sumptuous. The inhabitants are canons, rather than monks, and not thrillingly austere. There is an opera festival, and Stagg finds himself invited to go swimming and taken for lunch in town. As to his retreat, it made him fidgety: “It was hard to do nothing for hours on end.” He assumes, at first, that his “attempt to withdraw was a failure”. It might have been a mistake, he thinks, to seek Wittgenstein’s inner states by exploring his surroundings. The philosopher worked in the gardens, slept in a shed and soon removed himself to a more remote village. “He had come here to hide, and he was hidden still,” Stagg concludes, “and no trace remained in this absented place.”

Next: the hermit in flight from society. Poor David Jones had a dreadful war, seeing action at the Somme and at Passchendaele. He deliberately exposed himself to danger (as had Wittgenstein, and later Weil during the Spanish civil war; all three apparently courting death). Afterwards, “[he] withdrew to become an artist… he withdrew to discover himself.” He made his way to the monastery in Caldey, an island off the coast of Pembrokeshire. It was a Benedictine house in Jones’s time; the monks concentrated on skills and craftwork. Jones returned year after year for several weeks at a time throughout the 1920s, painting furiously and completing his extraordinary, book-length first world war poem In Parenthesis, which, in Stagg’s words, turned “the men’s sacrifice into something sacred”. It’s a strangely titled work, as if his war experiences could be bracketed off. They could not. Writing the poem reawakened the horror and brought about Jones’s complete collapse. His last stay at Caldey was in 1932. Thereafter, prone to panic attacks and diagnosed with shellshock, he spent his years “living with the habits of an invalid or recluse”, surrounded by his paintings.

Stagg hopes “some trace might remain” of the inspiration Jones found in the sea and landscapes of Caldey. The monastery is now Trappist, the buildings draughty and damp. Each door must be closed against the squirrels “that crept inside to search for food”. It’s so cold he sleeps with rugs pulled over himself, in hat and socks. (“I sympathised with those postulants who give up Trappist life rather than endure a whole winter here.”) But the monks are not silent, being “quick to laugh and make fun of themselves”. As at Klosterneuburg, Stagg finds men with insight and interesting backgrounds. One had been a solicitor, another involved with Formula One racing. Here, too, the doubts – like the squirrels – begin creeping in. “I had fallen for the myth of the artist as outsider, or the idea that great art requires an equal dose of misery.” Instead of finding inspiration, he frets that the mailboat might be delayed, leaving him stranded once his week is done.

With some trepidation we turn to the martyr, Simone Weil. Uncompromising, absolutist, a socialist of Jewish descent, she spent a fortnight in 1938 as a “secular pilgrim” at the abbey at Solesmes in north-west France. Weil had thrown herself briefly into the Spanish civil war, had spent time labouring on factory floors, and would soon be working for the Free French in London during the second world war – utterly ill-suited to any of it. And then there were the migraines. If she sought suffering, she didn’t have far to look. She wrote that her “whole existence was blotted out by physical pain”. But the Gregorian chant she heard at Solesmes helped her endure the pain – or rather showed her how beauty and suffering could be held together at once. She attended every service, huddled in the pew. It was Easter, and, she wrote, “the Passion of Christ entered into my being once and for all”. Five years later she was dead, at 34, of tuberculosis and self-starvation, leaving her parents to transcribe the works that would make her famous.

Stagg writes well and brightly about all he encounters: church architecture, monastic history, the people, landscapes and weather, and his own hesitancies. He is candid and flexible in his thinking. As to his three chosen figures, he is generous in his dealings with them, questing and explicating, never dismissive. But do we actually encounter them? Yes, in the sense that he can trace their biographies, and as he ponders what brought them to these monasteries and why. But one wonders if “retreat” really helped them, changed them, or whether it was another turn on their downward spirals. They are gaunt, haunting figures, but in truth, their brilliance seems a fate worth avoiding.

Thankfully, Stagg reaches this conclusion himself. Having been enamoured of seclusion and artistic suffering, he admits he missed his life. He writes: “Withdrawing was no substitute for love, nor the wild possibilities of experience. Retreat was no lesson in how to live.”

The World Within: Why Writers, Artists and Thinkers Retreat by Guy Stagg is published by Scribner (£20). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £18. Delivery charges may apply

Photograph depicting the abbey at Solesmes courtesy of Alamy; portrait of Simone Weil from Getty Images