The World as I Found It

by Bruce Duffy

  This is what heaven must be like, thought Moore, a tide where all of what was formerly, returns. God, but it was spooky to have so much come all at once, like those unaccountable presents covering the table, and all these people who eddied toward them like ghosts, grasping their hands in that grateful silence where words fail and fall away. In the face of such rampant joy, it was hard for Moore to imagine the promise of more joy to follow, and harder still to accept the fact that this joy would someday end. Their joy would be segmented, interspersed with the unhappiness or woes of which they had partaken with that brimming cup of vows. As through a telescope turned wrong end, Moore felt he could see it all, a chain of events linked hand to hand even as they were dancing. Circling dizzily, raising their hands to strain at something grand, straining and reaching before falling back to earth again — what more could he wish than that their love might be a chain of good and a gambol of gladness, begetting good, good people, good, plentiful life, and children, too, to carry on the dance. Let Good begin the dance. All that day Moore had prayed for the grace just to be, for the grace not to think, judge or criticize anyone — not even poor Bertie and his unfortunate toast.

  Moore got his wish, pretty much. Later, when he saw Bertie with Pinsent, it hardly crossed Moore’s mind what Bertie might be pouring in the young man’s ear. Nor would he think of how pleased Russell must be now that events had proved him right: sure enough, Wittgenstein had left the Apostles.

  Wittgenstein was the last person Moore wanted to think about. Moore especially wanted to forget the scene Wittgenstein had made two weeks ago, a few days before he went to Vienna for the summer. This was the day when North Whitehead (now off talking to that handsome woman not his wife) had challenged one of his pupils to a rowing race. The three of them, he, Russell and Pinsent, had been there. Russell was rooting for his old partner. The moment the gun went off, Russell was calling hoarsely through his cupped hands, Pull, North! Pull!

  Whitehead hove strong for the first two hundred yards — not bad for a man over fifty. But then he broke and his young opponent surged ahead, lunging to the finish in long, powerful strokes. North was badly beaten; it was painful to see him sagging over the oars, sucking wind. It was then that Wittgenstein erupted. He said they might as well have watched a bullfight; it was just as brutal and senseless. Russell should have known better than to argue — he said the same later — but instead he came back, You just don’t understand the virtue of competition.

  Virtue! Wittgenstein snarled. Dogs tearing out each other’s entrails — that’s what this is! Suddenly his eyes got small; his finger was like a cocked pistol at Russell’s nose. Great works! he railed. Only these have value. This is so vile we don’t deserve to live! It smells of the slaughter-house, your races!

  Russell was too thunderstruck to respond. Leave him, he ordered Pinsent when Pinsent started after him. Now, really, Russell repeated. Do you hear me?

  Leave off, said Pinsent with a glare, and with that, he went after him.

  Later, they all had different views of the incident. Moore thought it was the Society, that and the pressure of the three of them being together. Russell, on the other hand, thought it was a hysterical reaction to their latest battle over another one of his theories. Both explanations were correct, so far as they went. Only Pinsent knew what else lay behind it: Wittgenstein’s father was dying. Wittgenstein’s sister Gretl had written him a few days before, but he told no one but Pinsent. Even now, at Moore’s wedding, Pinsent was still the only one who knew.

  One thing was certain: Pinsent was looking quite prosperous on Moore’s wedding day. Moore wasn’t the only one to have remarked at this new blue worsted wool suit and the silk cravat fastened with a gold pin. Burnished brogues still squeaky from the bootmaker, buffed to a hue by the man in the loo. And crowning it all, a dark fedora tapped to a rakish tilt with the brim snapped down just so. Flo had also gotten some new togs and would soon get a settlement as well. The roof was fixed and the grocer had been paid — why, there was even a girl to cook and tidy. Flo was goose purple with excitement. They were rich! German money, you know, whole pots of it! Why, Davy was even taking her on a seaside holiday! Oh, it made her head spin to think of it, she did so love the sea. England was surrounded with it, you know.

  Much as Pinsent missed Wittgenstein, he was glad his friend was not there with him now. No, Pinsent was flustered enough as he searched the floor for a dancing partner. Oh, go on, he told himself, giving himself a mental push. If he could wear a vain hat, he thought, he could bloody well ask a girl to dance!

  For an hour Pinsent had had his eye on her, one of the bridesmaids, a girl about his height, with dark hair and green eyes. She looked shy, the way she kept adjusting her corsage. The soles of his new shoes creaked as he stole across the floor and asked a dance. She didn’t refuse! And pretty, too! But he was a clumsy oaf, feeling the heat from her perspiring back as he forced conversation, noticing the heavy smell of her corsage. Katherine, her name was, Dorothy’s cousin. Twice they danced before she thanked him, saying, with conspicuous politeness, that she wanted to speak to her uncle. Stiff as he thanked her. About face, his neck flaming. Same old story. The usual rot. And sure enough, he saw her dancing later with someone taller, better looking, more confident. Dratted new hat! Stupid vanity! For his penance, Pinsent left it sitting brazenly on the rack, too dwindled and shamed to wear it home.

  Russell was in a similar state. Pained about his toast and now feeling the sag of drink, he was just noticing how the flowers on the tables were beginning to brown at the edges. He could see Moore up on the dais, rubicund and doting, soaring with his bride over life’s largesse, gamely sucking the paps from that draining bottle. Ottoline would bloody well be sorry for her neglect, he assured himself. Indignant now, he thought he might even have himself an affair — perhaps this very afternoon! Who, then (since all were susceptible to his charm)? That woman over there, the one with the pretty mouth and promising-looking bosom? Or the more matronly one there with the bored look? A widow wouldn’t dally; she would know that life was short. He knew it, too, but for his penance he decided that for now, at least, he would remain the wronged, virtuous one. And couldn’t he smile to himself, thinking of old Moore fumbling through his wedding night. But then Russell’s mirth bit back, reminding him that the groom, unlike himself, would bring home much more tonight than a hangover.

  Then the bar was closed. The musicians were packing up, and a motorcar was waiting outside to whisk the weary couple to their hotel, when Moore’s younger brother, Bertie, cut off their escape. Ringing his glass with a butter knife, Bertie Moore announced that the groom would first serenade the bride.

  Sing! cried the delighted crowd. Mortified, Moore wanted to crown his brother, but then came the clapping chant:

  The-groom-shall-sing! Groom-shall-sing-and-bride-shall-play!

  Very well, said Moore with a wince. I’ll sing, I’ll sing. He looked at Dorothy. Foggy, Foggy Dew?

  Perfect! cried Bertie Moore. The groom will now sing Froggy, Froggy Dew!

  There was laughter, clapping and a gay tinkling of glasses as the couple were led to a piano in need of tuning. Arranging her long dress around the bench, Dorothy sounded a few chords while Moore, flushed and nervous, called for a glass of water, then turned to warm up with a sound like gargling. Tie cockeyed, cummerbund sagging, slightly drunk, the groom then turned his girth toward the audience and nodded for his wife to begin.

  In her nervousness, Dorothy played the opening chords too quickly, and he started too late, struggling like a rolling ship until at last they merged. Who else Moore’s age could have sung so achingly such a naive air? Several women clasped their breasts as he strained to reach the high, sweet, sharp notes, his eyes closed as he mournfully moaned:

  Song of my youth, song of my heart.

  She was a slip of a girl I kissed larking in the heather,

  But she skipped away singing,

  In the foggy, foggy dew,

  I
n the foggy, foggy dew …

  Eating Our Way Toward Cockaigne

  MOORE’S SUMMER was both an idyll and a shock — to suddenly find himself a husband and son-in-law shanghaied by meals, chores, budgets. Russell’s summer, by comparison, was one of doubt and drift. He fell heavily after that.

  For Russell, the feeling was like the outbreak of illness, mounting when he did not expect it, then bursting into fever when it seemed he was at last putting his life and wounded theories back together. The theory of types wasn’t the only casualty of Wittgenstein’s criticism. The latest casualty had been Russell’s newest, and perhaps boldest, construct, the theory of judgment.

  This, so far as Russell could see, had been the impetus behind Wittgenstein’s outburst at the rowing race. Guilt was the cause of Wittgenstein’s fury. To him, that image of Whitehead sagging over the oars was an all too gruesome reminder of how he had just savaged his own mentor’s work.

  In his better moments, Russell blamed himself for this. It was he, after all, who felt compelled to show Wittgenstein his judgment theory in those last hurried days before term ended and Wittgenstein left for Vienna. In his anxiety, Russell had invited the attack just as surely as if he had dangled fresh meat before a tiger.

  Russell was still reeling from that confrontation. And he had had such great hopes for this new theory, which he envisioned as a culmination of logic, physics and psychology. In the most basic sense, Russell meant for the theory to be a model of the act of judgment, of what occurs when we judge something to be true. But, as he well knew, this was tricky, because there remained the problem of accounting for how a person might judge as true what is not the case.

  But there was much more than this behind the theory. In it Russell was still pursuing his great objection to the idealists’ notion that we are never in touch with anything in the world outside our own minds. The task was to determine what we can truly know outside of ourselves, and it required a theory that might, so to speak, open the mind to China trade with the external world. Yet here again the philosopher felt the goad of science, the siren call of the Big Synthesis. Rising to Wittgenstein’s own example, Russell felt once more the desire to do something brave and unifying, to sound a chord that would even merge with the new fugues of physics. For lack of a better name, Russell now called his scientific philosophy logical atomism. And, much as Wittgenstein disliked isms, it was a course that they both were pursuing in their own respective ways, each breaking logical statements down to molecular and even atomic forms that it seemed must somehow correspond with the atomic facts of our sense perceptions — or at least the facts of the world.

  No, thought Russell, physicists weren’t the only ones doing exciting things nowadays. But, oh, it made his head spin to think how he might unravel this tangled skein. How was he to reconcile the concerns of physics with those of epistemology? Whereas physics exhibits sensations as functions of physical objects, epistemology demands that physical objects be exhibited as functions of sensations. And look at the sorts of things he would have to harmoniously bring together: perceptions, which are purely mental events; abstract properties, such as “greenness” and “softness”; and, externally, quite physical objects such as grass and earth. And even as he had begun plotting out this grand work of unification, he could imagine Wittgenstein cautioning him that names are not the names of things, that we don’t know what names are, except that they are ours to use, pears from a prickly tree.

  It was uphill work, but still the work had been progressing. So why, Russell would think in those confused days that followed Wittgenstein’s attack, why this acute need to show it to him? Russell knew what he had done the moment he thrust the critical pages in Wittgenstein’s hands and bade him sit down and read. Watching him, Russell saw all the danger signs: the foot tapping and chin rubbing, then the sudden irritability as Wittgenstein jumped up. Facing him then, Wittgenstein was trapped; Russell knew, just as surely if he had planned the whole thing, what Wittgenstein would say — that his theory was irreparably, impossibly wrong. Wittgenstein could not even say very clearly why it was wrong. He was groping and inarticulate as he explained — more or less — that the theory still could not account for how the mind might judge as true something that was nonsensical, such as, “This table penholders the book.” But this again was consistent with Wittgenstein’s vision of logic as something as perfect and aboriginal as truth, a thing held aloof from the mind with its carping judgments. Equally damning, Wittgenstein found the theory presumptuous. What need, he asked, had the world, or logic, of a subject mind who judges? This was nothing but a fiction belonging to certain primitive notions of psychology. As far as logic was concerned, mind was the proverbial tree that fell unheard in the forest: in the realm of logic, mind had no hegemony — none whatsoever.

  From his side, Wittgenstein was hardly unaware of the irony of Russell’s asking him to judge his theory of judgment within a poisonous atmosphere of compounding judgment. Here once more, Wittgenstein felt the mocking animus of logic mimicking their very conflicts. Again, it was this lie of fairness and objectivity — the deluded and, at bottom, mendacious notion that either of them could impartially judge the other’s work without regard for his own vision, values or self-interest. But for Wittgenstein the worst lie was Russell’s apparent blindness to their predicament. Russell wasn’t asking an innocent collegial question, and in judging him, Wittgenstein knew that he was rendering more than just an objective assessment of the truth as he saw it. Even the “truth” was a lie.

  Russell’s fledgling theory was crude compared to the web of judgments that were then in progress. Judgments of judgments. Judgments in fear of judgments. Judgments fending off further judgments, one’s own or another’s. Wittgenstein even saw his own grand lie — this pretense that he did not know what he was doing as he killed Russell’s theory, like some William Tell who closed his eyes in order to shoot straight.

  In the confused days that followed, there were times when Russell could hardly remember what Wittgenstein had said; in his despair, he could but dimly recall why he had even propounded the theory. Secluded in his rooms, Russell felt like a boy conjugating as he thought:

  Actually, the reason behind the theory was …

  Well, if the theory were true, it would enable us to …

  It was a grand idea, except…

  With work, my theory could become…

  But the most remarkable virtue of the theory, if it could be realized, would be to …

  They managed to patch things up before Wittgenstein left for Vienna. At the station, they both struggled to be cordial, the better to disguise this lie or what perhaps was the finer distinction: the impossibility for either to be honest without injury to the other. Friendly and hale, sad but mostly relieved, they expressed hope for the next year and future endeavors. Lingering there, shaking hands in that second before Wittgenstein boarded, they never dreamed that it would be seven years and a war before they’d meet again.

  But matters between them were far from settled, especially on Russell’s end. For Russell, there would be the burden of how Wittgenstein’s harsh verdict of his judgment theory would temporarily occlude Russell’s own sense of judgment. Russell never saw this train coming; it blindsided him. Why, he felt just fine. He wasn’t Icarus falling. As Einstein had opined, all was relative, since all was moving or falling at various speeds. Indeed, for all the moving and falling of one’s time, it was difficult and perhaps pointless to estimate one’s speed or trajectory. Rather, people were like particles in suspension, some floating up, ascendant, while others sank inexorably to the bottom. But, really, it wasn’t so bad, this topsy-turvydom. Eating one’s way into this Land of Cockaigne, m’lord, the bread is verily like cake, fleshly fresh and white. Behold, nuncle, how we burrow through this blighted loaf, through even the air holes and moldy portions, tunneling like weevils to that other, fabled side where one needs bring only his appetite — where, ’tis said, juicy roasted fowls and dainties fly right in
to one’s open mouth!

  No, Russell saw no need to despair; he wasn’t even near the bottom. And anyhow, there were milestones and diversions along the way — Ottoline for one.

  Several months before, in deference to Philip’s concerns about a scandal, Ottoline had let for their trysts (and hers with Lamb) a little flat in Maida Vale, a middle-class neighborhood located a few miles northwest of Bloomsbury. Their landlady, or jailer, was an older, ill-tempered widow. Mrs. Dood was her name.

  Russell hated the arrangement and he loathed Mrs. Dood for being a scrounger and busybody and, as he believed, a reformed prostitute. For him, even the down-at-the-heels Nabob was preferable to this.

  Darling, Russell would grouse. I would prefer filth and black beetles to this.

  Fine! Ottoline would reply. You find something reasonably clean and discreet for three guineas per month. Be my guest! I’ve tried.

  This would shut him up, but it still didn’t ease his discontent. Mrs. Dood insisted that they arrive and depart separately, and invariably it was Russell who would be there first. Ottoline was habitually late, sometimes by as much as an hour. Oh, he hated it. No sooner would he enter the reeking hallway than Alf, Mrs. Dood’s rat terrier, would start yapping. Struggling to open the door with his key, he would see the omniscient Mrs. Dood peeking through her eyehole while scratching, scrapping Alf stuck his snoot under the door and loudly sneezed, hoping to catch the intruder’s scent.

  Inside, the flat was stuffy and shut-up smelling, with the drafty acoustics of a place where nobody lived. The furniture was mismatched, secondhand stuff, the walls bare and the cupboards empty except for a jar of peppermints and the sassafras tea a doctor had prescribed for Ottoline’s digestion. A coiled douching apparatus was secreted in the bath, along with a jar of lubricant. Swallowed in a faded green armchair, peering through his arched fingers, Russell would wait and wait, his mood going from expectancy to anger, then to black despair.