The World as I Found It

by Bruce Duffy

  Despite his prodigious appetite, though, Moore was not really fat — or not except for his kangaroo’s stomach, which bowed out under a mis-buttoned vest lashed together with a heavy gold watch chain. Moore’s suit was always loose and rumpled, and his dark blue tie — one of the maybe three he owned — was greasy at the knot and bunched about his curling, fraying collar. At thirty-nine, he was an odd mix of a man, with a slack, middle-aged body and a boyish face, which still carried with it surprising sweetness and innocence. His cheeks were ruddy, and his smooth, cowlicky brown hair curled down like a comma over a high, strong forehead, which seemed not to have formed a single line of worry.

  He was extraordinarily unselfconscious, with none of that haughty reserve and guardedness that envelops many a man as he gets older. Around Russell, though, Moore had learned from hard experience to be cautious. So as he finished his dinner that night, Moore was frankly wondering why Russell, normally off like a shot once he had finished, was lingering over his second cup of tea. Moore was not wrong to wonder. Sure enough, Russell turned to him and asked the question that had been nagging him for the past thirty minutes.

  By the way, Moore, who told you about Wittgenstein?

  Moore wiped the grease from his lips. Lytton did. Several days ago I guess it was.

  No need for Russell to wonder where Lytton Strachey had heard it. Already, Russell was composing the wounded letter he would dash off to Ottoline.

  As for Moore, he sensed Russell’s irritation and resolved to face it squarely, asking, Is something the matter?

  Giving Moore an up-down look, Russell said with a trace of irony, No, merely curious.

  Oh. Moore nodded as if this were sufficient, but of course it wasn’t. And so they sat there, both inwardly glowering. No, it didn’t take much these days, not with these two.

  Two Hills

  MOORE AND RUSSELL frequently found themselves at this point, not openly warring but just vaguely dissatisfied, each sensing in the other some hard-to-define intransigence.

  Both would have shrunk from calling it a rivalry. The last thing either of them would have wanted was for anyone to feel that between them was envy or jealousy, not only because these were unseemly emotions but because it would have been tantamount to admitting that there was reason for jealousy.

  But of course it was not so simple. If asked, neither Moore nor Russell would have hesitated to say — and say truthfully — that the other was the greatest single influence on his work. Nor could either lose sight of the fact that they were very much tied to each other professionally. Besides reading, commenting on and supporting each other’s work, they exchanged ideas and watched each other’s flanks, each standing ready, when the need arose, to defend the other with a well-placed letter or review, or perhaps a few politic words in the right ear.

  It was a convenient if unspoken pact, and Moore, for his part, would have been most content to leave it be had Russell not always been jockeying for position. A modest man, Moore could not understand Russell’s need to vie with him. Moore had never understood Russell’s contentiousness, but he especially didn’t understand it now. Here while his fame was on the wane, if not long past, Russell’s fame, at least within philosophical and scientific circles, was steadily growing. After all, his own Principia Ethica was now nine years old; Russell’s Principia Mathematica was the new work now. Besides, Moore would have been the first to point out that of the two books (and ignoring their obvious differences in subject matter) Russell’s was indisputably the more ambitious and important.

  True, with those of Keynes and Strachey’s generation, Moore’s influence remained, but his ideas were hardly in vogue. Yet Moore did not especially seem to regret the fact. This in itself irked Russell: to Russell, Moore’s seeming lack of concern with fame and plaudits had always seemed unreal, if not faintly disingenuous. But perhaps what really rankled Russell was that Moore had been famous first, and famous young, when barely thirty. Harder still for Russell to take was Moore’s guise of never seeming to notice that, in a single sweep in 1903, the young men had flocked to the moralist, seeking his counsel perhaps for the very reason that he did not hunger for fame or disciples in the famished way that Russell did.

  What Russell also had trouble swallowing at the time was the irony of being the one who had first encouraged Moore to study philosophy. Russell had been among the first to recognize and promote Moore’s special gifts, and it was a great service he had done, too, since Moore would have been the last to suppose he had a special talent for anything, least of all philosophy. Moore had always been a slow starter, yet in a queer way his pokiness — his tendency to maunder and stare at ideas that others had glibly accepted and sped by — was a fundamental part of his genius for philosophy, which he took up only after his usual period of doubt and deliberation. Having come to Cambridge to read classics, Moore continued for some time in that vein, expecting nothing more than to one day join that bedraggled corps of rumpled, pipe-smoking bachelors who teach at the public schools — monastic men who spent August on the moors and perhaps a solitary Christmas in Switzerland, while despairing of ever having money enough to marry.

  No, in his first years at Cambridge, Moore didn’t have the foggiest idea who he was. Besides being a cox for a rowing team, he knew he liked to read, and he liked to talk with the other fellows and sing in the Trinity choir. Tobacco he had discovered. Also the pleasures of alcohol, with which one might get talkative and silly, spending a rousing evening round the piano with the fellows, singing Ta-ra-ra BOOM-de-ay and the raffish street tune Wot Cher. Later, as a coda to this rambunctiousness, Moore would do several solos for the lads, holding them all transfixed with each bugling note of Foggy, Foggy Dew and Missy Mine, singing so achingly about these misty lasses that one never would have guessed he didn’t have the faintest idea about women — not a clue. Not that Moore disliked girls; he just didn’t know any. For him women didn’t even seem to exist. But even more unbelievable to the other lads was the fact that Moore didn’t seem to suffer the slightest urge or pang.

  Russell did not fail to respond to Moore’s unearthly innocence during their early undergraduate days together. After all, as a man engaged to an older woman, Russell could not help but feel somewhat superior in experience to this brilliant but naive boy two years his junior in academic standing. Russell knew there was something otherworldly and strangely beautiful about Moore’s innocence; he really did feel that Moore was the blood incarnation of some Platonic type. Still, it seemed to Russell that if his protégé was ever to progress as a thinker, this Eden musn’t persist. Besides, it irked Russell to behold a soul so pure and unpurloined by bodily urges. For a man of ordinary drives like Russell, it was a sour provocation, like an unspoiled hill of snow before a boy’s new boots.

  Russell’s opportunity came one summer when he and Moore, virgins both, were on a walking tour of the Lake District. There they were, two hardy but both untried pilgrims, carrying their Wordsworth and talking the wafting truths of idealism as they walked over fields as glistening green as lily pads in the sun. Walking, Moore would talk and talk, his flushed young face rising like a balloon toward the evolving light. But it wore on Russell that one could be so free and untroubled, and finally one night at an inn, Russell saw a mirthful pair of eyes peering over a mug of porter and knew he’d found the man who could bring an abrupt end to Moore’s innocence. He was an older man of about forty-five, a former classicist, with bulgy eyes and a long, soft, raveling beard that he fingered like a waist. An underwriter for Lloyd’s, the man had traveled widely in India and the Far East. With a game grin, he said he had had some interesting experiences there. For the first two hours, Moore found him a charming companion, surprised and a little bewildered by the way the man laughed, throwing his head back so that his voice boomed off the ceiling. A born raconteur, the man loved the trick and taste of words, reveling in their spill and off-rhymes, their lingering odor. Waving his French cigarettes, drawing the words from his rather coarse lips,
he twatted them forth like outrageously large bubbles, gaily laughing as they blew high into the air, then settled with unseemly little pops on the noses of his mesmerized listeners. He also liked his wine and, to Russell at least, it was clear he had an ogle eye for the ladies, what with the way he fingered his beard and wound his almost prehensile mustache whenever a full bum bustled by. Content to talk about Homer and Ovid, Moore had no idea about the man, who had already co-opted Russell with sly little winks, implying that the two of them, as much wiser sorts, could draw out the youngster.

  Later, in Moore’s room, the innocent hardly noticed as the talk slowly began to change, turning to the bisexual Catullus, then to Petronius’s Satyricon and Apuleius’s Golden Ass, classics that Moore, flushing, said he had never read. Oh, but you should, said the man, giving him an insinuating pat on his knee. And with that, he launched off on an ode about the surpassing beauty and feline cleanliness of the Oriental woman. Moore did not quite get the point, or not consciously. With evident feeling, he began talking about the corporeal lines of horses.

  But sir, laughed the roué, so that his wooden chair gave a sharp crack. You must mean the mares! With that, he returned, allusively, to the most beautiful of all God’s burthened beasts, the ingenious ladies of the Orient. But hardly had he warmed to his theme than Russell surprised Moore even more by volunteering how long and hard he had looked on the ladies of Paris, particularly the trollops, who were so incredibly bold, mooning up out of the night of his venereal fears, saying, Tu viens? … Viens avec moi?…

  Moore was frozen in his seat; at first he didn’t quite seem to know what was happening. Emboldened by Russell, the roué gave Moore a goose on the knee as he hissed:

  But the whores of Paris must be paid more, you know, if you’ve a taste for novelty. I’m speaking here of their — and he looked at Moore the Latinist — their cloacal opening. Sewer? asked Moore, just to be sure he had heard the man correctly. Sewer! roared the man, throwing back his head in disbelief at one so live and green. Growing more animated, he leaned forward, almost lisping in his urgency as a little piece of dry white spittle jumped from lip to lip. You know, lad, the sweetest meat is the netherest. Oh, it’s cat clean when you slide it in, so slick and sweet…

  Moore’s cheeks were inflamed. He could not move as the roué, with his big face, bent closer, in a voice crackling like a freshly wrapped candy. Well you know, laddie, how in Hong Kong the girls take it? Well, as you pump and pump away, they busy themselves shoving a knotted string up your arse, then, when you’re ready to blow? RRRrrrippp — The antic roué tore his hand away. Why, they give it a Jack the Ripper! God!

  Moore looked as if he’d been stabbed. He gaped at the man, then at Russell, a film forming in his eyes. Russell remembered it struck him as funny, seeing his friend so pigstuck. Russell and the roué did not have long to smile. Jumping up, Moore bellowed:

  You’re both depraved! Get out! Both of you!

  What do you mean, boy? demanded the man, angrily. Sit down.

  I’ll not sit down! Out, do you hear me! shouted Moore, hauling him up by the sleeve. You’re not a man, you’re a filthy beast! You don’t deserve to live, to breed such rottenness! Nor you, Russell! Both of you! Out!

  Russell thought Moore was going to strike the man or start throwing things, he was so enraged. With oaths, the man left, but to Russell’s disbelief, Moore would not hear him out then, nor even the next morning, when Moore announced that he was continuing on alone.

  Why are you being this way? protested Russell. I’ve never in my life done or even dreamed such things as he described. I was only using him to draw you out as a lesson. You’re much too naive.

  Moore smacked his fists together. What right have you to presume what I need? Malice and depravity! Ignorance! That’s all I saw last night. And it’s a side of you I loathe, Russell, thinking yourself so superior! What has filth to teach? A sloppy raw egg! That’s your morality. Man of the world! A boy was all I saw, a puling milkfed boy hiding behind a false sheen of rationality. I’m off. I’m off, and not another word from you!

  In time, they managed more or less to put this behind them, but it was never the same — never as free or resilient, never with the same innocent trust. Actually, they came fairly early to a grim understanding, of sorts. One day before a group of their friends, Russell succeeded in demonstrating their moral objectivity — and in testing Moore’s already mythic honesty — when he pointedly asked:

  Moore, do you like me?

  Anyone else would have felt sorely put on the spot by this challenge. Moore felt no such awkwardness, however, and he treated it like any other question. Moore answered neither quickly nor painfully, but he did answer succinctly and with his usual candor when he replied:

  No.

  In a twisted way, Russell was pleased with his answer, which confirmed his anxieties and certainly proved his premise about Moore’s sometimes eerie honesty. The others present were highly uncomfortable, but Russell and Moore both took perverse pride in their ability to continue the discussion in seeming amicability. Still, this was a question that only unformed boys could have put to each other, before they were grown men with well-entrenched vanities and reputations to protect. This would be another injury, especially for Moore, who suffered to dispense honesty at another’s whim. Yes, this, too, would go down in his debit book on Russell.

  For his part, Russell had been able to see Moore with much greater clarity in those early years, in the 1890s, before contention and pride clouded his vision. Russell could readily see that Moore, with his clear, boyish freshness of face, was far handsomer than he. And despite his conflicting feelings, Russell promoted Moore. Championed by Russell and duly approved by McTaggart, Moore was easily elected to the Apostles. And then on the night of his initiation, when it was customary for the newcomer to give a speech, Moore stunned them not merely with his brilliance but with his uncanny ability to project the power and beauty of his character.

  They had been talking about the Cambridge life, whether the skepticism and cynicism they learned there wouldn’t later render them unfit for the normal round of offices and courtrooms, newspapers and government posts. Moore had done no preparation. It all just poured out of him as he took the stage, saying excitedly, On the contrary, gentlemen! Skepticism is what renders us most fit for life! Skepticism ought to be our religion! A permanent condition!

  They had all had some wine, and they thought at first he was drunk, to be so excited. No one, not even Moore, knew what came over him that night. He hadn’t felt this way since, as a boy of eleven, he had joined the Children’s Special Service Mission, the evangelical crusade then sweeping England. In those days, nothing could have been more beautiful to the boy than saving a soul. Even at Brighton for a seaside holiday — while other boys in boaters and sailor suits went for donkey rides or ate ices — there he would be, dressed in his hot, ill-fitting black suit and lugging his heavy black Bible. In his zeal to save souls, he was unstoppable, gladly suffering the pulled ties and bloody noses. Let them jeer him as a hake and a bum sucker, they could not break him. So mighty was the boy preacher’s passion that he even succeeded in converting older, cynical boys, reducing some to tears when he confronted them, demanding like God’s own Highwayman that they renounce sloth and tobacco and forthwith surrender their lives to Christ.

  That patently religious faith was now gone, but as he stood before the Apostles that night, the young agnostic could still feel that preacher’s power. In his exultation, Moore looked as if he would catch the air in his arms. It wasn’t a speech so much as a series of titanic outbursts.

  Yes! avowed Moore. Skepticism was the soul of truth — why, it was the most beautiful quality in the world! Truth could not be told simply. Truth could not exist in the mind unless it was examined personally and hard won — unless every statement was defended against its antithesis, like a gladiatorial contest! And not just every statement, he declared, but every single man — here Moore’s eyes got big — ever
y man must defend himself against HIMSELF! He must defend himself against his own proclivity for dishonesty! And if he does not, he swore with a gasp, if he does not defend himself against humbug, then he ought to be laughed at! Just, said Moore, taking another lunging breath, just as you are laughing at me! And as, indeed, I am laughing at myself! Oh, I know it, he laughed, wagging a knowing finger. I know I am a silly. I am an unholy ass! I know this, but you, my fellow asses, this you must also know of yourselves!

  They were all laughing, not at him but rather at the truth of this, swept up in all the Dionysian joy and exultation of truth that Moore seemed to embody like a young god. It wasn’t even so much what he was saying as the life and joy they felt swelling within him, fit to explode. Moore was laughing uncontrollably. He was so full and boiling with life that life was snapping off him. Like electricity, it was ripping across the room, this divine discharge.

  Moore was so infused with laughter, in fact, that they feared he would suffer an apoplectic fit. First his eyes got big. Then, like a cuckoo, his tongue shot out. And then he suddenly covered his mouth and, in his fullness, turned and pressed his blazing forehead against the cool marble of the mantelpiece behind him.