by Bruce Duffy
But of course I like it! she protested, giving him a peck. It’s lovely, lovely. And I shall think of you when I wear it. But still he could see it was wrong, tugging like a burr at her bodice. Worse, it was more than he could afford, what with Alys demanding money for the doctor and repairs to the house.
Ottoline sensed his mood but was determined not to succumb to it. Now, she said in a spritely voice as she stubbed out her cigarette. Now you must open your gift!
With that, she watched with anticipation as he tore off the wrapping and opened a felt-covered box containing — what? A gold-nibbed pen? She could think of nothing better than this?
Why, a pen! he said weakly. Obligingly, he held it in his writing hand.
It’s engraved, too, she prompted, turning the pen over in his hand. See there, on the barrel? And he looked, hoping to see their initials coyly entwined, but found only his own scripted name.
He didn’t know what struck him then. Seeing these gifts, he started inwardly to pine, thinking of their poor human hopes, pinned to such trivial things. And he was desperately trying to be gay — he had to be gay, he thought, if he didn’t want to drive her off. But looking at these offerings, then considering as well their two bodies, the meager bottle of wine and the two filmy glasses the old porter had brought up — seeing all this, he turned away, surprised and ashamed as tears sprang to his eyes.
I did-not-want-this, he gulped, pinching the bridge of his nose. I did not —
Huffing, out of breath, he was staring out the window as she came from behind and gave him a squeeze, doing her best to console him. But she had a dinner engagement with Philip and their time was running out.
I hate leaving you like this, she said, coaxing him toward the bed. Please, darling.
But all he heard was, Look! Here it is — here’s what you want. So ready to offer herself up, he thought cynically. A little Christmas charity between the sheets. No, he thought resolutely, he had principles, he was much too heartbroken for sex. Instead, he told her he wanted only to lie together, to talk and hold each other. He genuinely believed this, but once she had calmed him his penis gorged like a tulip bulb and, lo, he wanted sex, too.
But I can’t now! she pleaded, her voice turning scratchy. I wanted to — you saw that I did — but now we haven’t the time. Honestly! I cannot …
He had his way finally, but he hurt her. She was not ready, and he was too jabbing and eager. And then she fell apart, too, softly crying as she bent beside the rusty sink, slapping water up into herself. And not just washing herself, he felt, but washing him out. And failing again. Mightily failing.
He endeavored to apologize. Straining, he tried to suggest how it might be better next time — as if there would be a next time, he thought, as he looked out the window onto the steep, icy street where even the draft horses were struggling in their harnesses, even the horses.
* * *
Having little to look forward to, Russell was hoping to derive some vicarious pleasure from Wittgenstein’s holiday plans when he asked several nights later, So … I expect you’ll be going home for Christmas?
Evidently, Wittgenstein did not relish the question. I will be here, he said, with the same reticence and rigidity he had shown when Russell had asked about his family.
Pretending not to notice the look that darkened Wittgenstein’s eyes, Russell persisted. Any plans in particular?
I may travel to Scotland. I have not thought about it.
Ah. Russell brightened. Then I take it you will be here part of the time? In that case, we might see each other.
Yes. Wittgenstein nodded as if this had just occurred to him. This would be good. He nodded again.
Probing once more, Russell asked casually, You just decided this? To remain here for the holidays?
No. Wittgenstein held back as before. I have for some time decided.
Oh. Raising his eyes, Russell broadly affected to be content with this answer, but there was mutual discomfort, the conversation slowly sinking like a punctured tire, bringing them to what, by now, was a familiar impasse. Their relationship had reached the point where they could be neither formal nor entirely familiar, where it was not clear if their association was that of student and don, budding colleagues, friends or accomplices. As the don, Russell was uneasy as to the nature of his role and obligations; or rather, he was queasy about the more basic question of who was on top. But obscuring this was the increasingly confusing matter of who was who. Wittgenstein was such an impenetrable thicket of character that Russell couldn’t put him in any apparent context. Even Wittgenstein’s most ordinary gestures — the way he slapped his forehead, his figures of speech, recurring images he used — struck Russell in a weird and distant way as an uncanny translation of himself: a translation of a translation. Wittgenstein’s English further confused matters. At times, when Wittgenstein was struggling to make a point, Russell would insist, Speak German. Yet hearing this other voice, so elegant and clear, Russell would stop cold, as if he had glimpsed his own sunstruck image in a shop window: one’s appalling otherwise.
But the problem was not just Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein was merely the catalyst for something else Russell felt stirring within him. Other selves — discarded ideas — were rising to the surface, showing their silvery undersides like startled leaves in a warm wind mouthing rain. But there was also the fear of seeing unearthed what one had so assiduously smothered, the inchoate confusion of the new in its unprecedented raiment. And so, while watching Wittgenstein perform some ordinary act, Russell would find himself thinking, Who are you?
If only Russell could have struck some balance, a truce of some kind. He didn’t want to pry, but now he felt no more comfortable inquiring than he did keeping silent. And wittingly or unwittingly, Wittgenstein was tantalizing him. For the last month, Wittgenstein had been steadily enticing him with a trail of crumbs. His two older brothers, for instance. Wittgenstein was briskly, oppressively matter-of-fact when he mentioned them, saying that they were dead but offering no other details. Russell wouldn’t stoop to pick it up, not then. Yet he resented Wittgenstein’s silence, which nagged at him for days until in an anxious moment he said, If I might inquire, Wittgenstein, what happened to your two brothers?
Eyeing him, Wittgenstein replied disdainfully, They had their lives taken.
Took their lives, you mean?
Russell didn’t mean to correct his English. But then as he saw Wittgenstein’s black look of affirmation, Russell found himself emotionally back-pedaling. I’m very sorry …
No need to be sorry, retorted Wittgenstein, correcting in turn Russell’s emotional grammar. They have not died yesterday.
This stung but Russell took it, not saying another word. And absurd as this apology was, it was no less absurd than Wittgenstein’s need to imply that his was a great and otherwise normal family. Not, Wittgenstein seemed to hastily add, that their greatness had in any way rubbed off on him, the most unworthy of their subjects. Nor, Lord knows, was this to imply any criticism of his august father. At the mere mention of his father’s name, Wittgenstein’s voice would drop to the muted tones of a courtier anxious that his sire appear in the best possible light — meaning, so far as Russell could see, in no light whatsoever.
There was something else that nagged Russell: the nature of Wittgenstein’s character.
Specifically, he was mystified by this insular, fugitive quality in Wittgenstein. Russell could see it wasn’t mere reserve, nor the manner of a young man who invests himself with a false air of tragedy. Without being able to explain how or why, Russell sensed that Wittgenstein’s beliefs and character were all of a piece. After all, for Wittgenstein to refuse to admit the existence of anything except spoken propositions — this, as Russell saw it, went beyond the stubbornness of the usual self-styled solipsist or nihilist. Another young man might have said this to be bizarre or fanciful, to butt horns with authority. But in Wittgenstein it seemed part of a deeper rupture. Wittgenstein didn’t just argue, he argue
d for his life.
But why all this thrashing to arrive at new ideas? Russell wondered. It was a question Russell might as easily have asked himself. In logic, there is the law of identity, by which whatever is, is. There is the law of contradiction, by which nothing can both be and not be. And there is the law of excluded middle, by which everything must either be or not be. Besides these laws, there is also Ockham’s razor — more a practical aesthetic than a law — by which logical entities are not to be multiplied more than necessary. But for the thinker, Russell saw, there is what might be called Willy-Nilly’s law, by which the act of seeking or desiring, like a kind of propulsion, is accompanied by a simultaneous avoidance or dread. Seeking, Russell knew, was never simply seeking in itself; it was not only that one blessed thing in the distance but also the momentum behind it, adding exponentially to the eventual impact.
Whatever else, Russell sensed danger, and yet he found it oddly thrilling. But here Russell forgot the corollary of Willy-Nilly’s law, namely, that this condition was far more thrilling for him, the observer, than it was for Wittgenstein, for whom this necessity was something else, something else entirely.
There was another capacity in Russell, however, that was antithetical to Wittgenstein’s character — namely, his sublime ability to ignore certain unpleasant areas of his life.
This was not a mere difference in temperament; it was also a function of their difference in age. Unlike Wittgenstein, Russell had attained that age at which men are adept at psychically treading water, treading for days and sometimes weeks on end. Emotionally, he might be lost in the middle of the North Atlantic, but it wasn’t so bad. Cozily bobbing along as a wave hits … pfffftttt — gasping. Then another wave. And another.
At times it was hardly a dog paddle, barely keeping his head above water. And lately, Russell was so busy swimming along that he hardly noticed this new current that was slowly sweeping him out to sea. Besides, it was this fear, this heroic struggling in the foam of experience — this was the fatal discharge whereof life is created. This was what he lived for. And, blast it, the point was, he was swimming. Yes, in a pinch all Noah’s critters swim, but none tread water better than shipwrecked, middle-aged men.
Wittgenstein was a different story. He was a ghost who would appear at Russell’s door late at night, unable to sleep.
For two and three hours at a stretch, sometimes, the ghost would talk and pace. During these vigils, Wittgenstein could be brilliant, both in what he said and in that passion and excitement that Frege had first noticed. Just as often, though, he would be slack and boring — depleted. But never did he drift contentedly. He was too young not to fight the current.
Russell would be struggling not to nod off, his eyes watering as Wittgenstein endlessly paced the floor, locked on some idea or other. Russell had never seen the like of him. He himself had worked with logic, but until Wittgenstein he had never had the sense of someone locked inside logic, struggling to escape like Houdini shackled inside a trunk. For Wittgenstein, logic was not merely a problem, it was the problem of his life. Sometimes Russell would try to prod him out of it, saying in a kindly voice, I’m not sure what you expect, Wittgenstein.
But of course I expect everything.
And again, Wittgenstein would raise his eyes, flashing that bitter little smile, so fatal and dark. Wittgenstein was daring him, Russell thought, and again he would feel that thrill, and pfffftttt — another wave. Carrying him out farther still.
But then Russell was approaching the task from another angle, one of British liberal parlor empiricism mixed with an Enlightenment sense that most things in life could eventually be explained or justified by virtue of reason. The skepticism was there, of course, but it was a comparatively sober skepticism leavened with a quipping practicality that blew away so much moon dust while accepting the not unreasonable premise that, at any given time, fully nine-tenths of the world’s business was pointless lunacy in the cause of general employment. For this world view, Russell could thank the Russell legacy and in particular his paternal grandmother, who on the flyleaf of the Bible she had given him as a boy had written the injunction, Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil.
In Russell’s character, there was also the agnostic, freethinking tradition of his parents, especially that of his father, Lord Amberley, who knowingly scotched his political career by supporting birth control. Russell was very much a man in his father’s mold, and had he not been orphaned, he certainly would have grown into a much different man. But first his mother and sister died of diphtheria, and then a year and a half later, his quietly inconsolable father, prematurely aged and depressed, followed them into the ground.
Russell was three then, not yet old enough to fully understand but old enough to remember in the way that sorrow remembers. His father left Russell and his older brother, Frank, in the care of a tutor who shared his unconventional views, but their grandmother’s solicitor soon put an end to that. Instead, Lady Russell took the boys to Pembroke Lodge, a grace and favor house outside London that the queen had granted to their grandfather, Lord John.
Twice prime minister under Victoria, Bertie’s grandfather had counseled Napoleon at Elba and shot grouse with Bismarck. The old earl was also the same slippery politician whom Henry Adams remembered as such a liar and intriguer, soothing the American legation in London while conspiring with Gladstone to aid the Confederate cause. But those days were far behind Lord John. Lost in the forests of bewildering, compounding age, the old man paid scant notice to the boy, who best remembered him either immersed in his old parliamentary papers or dozing as a footman perambulated him down the garden path in his rickety bath chair.
The force in the family was Lady Russell, a hardtack puritan who eschewed ease and derided joy for its vanity and transitory nature, advocating cold baths, plain food and service to men who, like the beasts, needed to be governed. God for her was impersonal, but for a Russell the British government was anything but impersonal. It was through his grandmother that Russell learned to think of England as his England and to speak of the government in the royal We.
For some reason, Lady Russell felt it critical to the boy’s moral development that she disguise her love, and she was very, very good at it. He was too clever by a deuce, she said, and she kept him in line with dry ridicule, that sovereign sport of adults. What is mind? she would ask with a prim and joyless smile when he first evinced an interest in philosophy. What is mind? — sniff — no matter. What is matter? — sniff — never mind.
Life, she seemed to say, had been duly debated and decided by elders who knew far better than he, a callow boy, what bore serious examination. For Lady Russell, even words were an extravagance to be parceled out parsimoniously, as if each day one was granted a hundred, of which ten were worth anything. The boy felt like a snuffed candle in her house. Brought out in tumbrels like the condemned, ideas rumbled down that long dinner table to the old woman’s docket, there to be duly affirmed or denied, then forever banished with a little catch phrase, a hollow nugget meant, so far as the boy could see, to spare the trouble of further thinking. Yes, Lady Russell once said distastefully, Darwin was indubitably correct, punctuating this pronouncement with her off-with-his-head sniff; subject closed.
Being of the opinion that public schools were morally corrupting, Lady Russell kept the young boy home under the instruction of governesses and tutors — mediocrities whose main qualifications were solemn adherence, or at least lip service, to Her Ladyship’s religious views. The tutors were quite unnecessary. Her Ladyship’s joyless prig of a grandson soon required no supervision, and with an inward sneer he learned nothing from them. Lord Russell’s vast library was the boy’s school, and this too took its toll. Cold, clever, solitary, the budding polymath kept a diary and even developed a sort of mathematical code to hide his teeming inner life from his grandmother’s prying eyes. In this code, the boy recorded his first impure thoughts, analyzing his emotions in much the way that Galvani used electrodes to st
imulate the legs of dissected frogs. In code, he plumbed the laws of dynamics and the ontological argument; in code he despaired and fell from faith; and in code he began to seriously contemplate suicide, deciding, after due deliberation, that he most preferred the idea of throwing himself under a train. Her Ladyship’s visitors did find the boy a bit unreal, but they approved of his tireless industry as he sat at his grandfather’s big bureau, working away at his trifling boy’s doings. Dour, diligent Bertie — one more product of a sentimental education at home.
* * *
Still, Russell was learning not to always take Wittgenstein’s pronouncements at face value — that is, he was learning to listen not merely for what Wittgenstein said but for what he implied.
For instance, at one time or another, Russell had seen most of his philosophy students flirt with the idea of solipsism as an extreme metaphysical possibility. He had done so himself. But it was not until he met Wittgenstein that he had heard anyone argue it as a deeply felt predicament.
Several nights when Wittgenstein was in a bad way — raw and restless, distracted — Russell saw it: nothingness made palpable. Russell had long felt that there was something fearful and disfiguring in solipsism, a willful blinding, like Oedipus dashing out his eyes. And it pained him to see Wittgenstein clawing to get a foothold on something, a crevasse of life or logic — himself. At night in his rooms sometimes, Russell could see Wittgenstein’s eyes welling up with the doubt and drift of that murky ocean. They told one story, and they also suggested the other, unspoken part of the story: the part about death, the ultimate solipsism.
What the solipsist says — that the world is his world — this seemed to Russell disagreeable and somewhat boring; above all, it was lonely. But still it contained more than a grain of truth about the nature of our lives, of how we view life from the inside, peering out through crabstalk eyes. Wittgenstein talked and talked about this, but that he spoke at all, Russell thought, gave the lie to his contentions. If he spoke at all, it seemed to Russell, then he must believe there are ears to listen. For Russell it was an article of faith: despite what the solipsist says, people’s hopes and sensations must somehow be connected, however haphazardly, like beads on the slenderest of threads.
