by Bruce Duffy
Did it bother you, that story I told about Collie?
Moore looked around at her. You never told me that before, did you?
I thought it would upset you. Dorothy waited a beat, then said, We still haven’t sat down, the two of us, and drafted a new will.
Moore stared ahead uncomfortably. There are things I’d rather do. No, he admitted after a moment, it was not a terribly happy story. Grasping the bench, Moore stretched out his trousered legs and surveyed them, like a carpenter eyeing a pair of crooked beams. Then he asked, Would you mind if we talked about something else? It’s not an especially good time for it.
If you wish, she said. But there is never a good time for it.
He sighed and rested back. They’d let that string dangle for now.
Knowing Moore’s sensitivity to what he considered gossip, or at least malicious gossip, Dorothy felt she had to move slowly in broaching her next topic, the subject of Max and Wittgenstein. Dorothy was no gossip, she was just more open and direct than Moore in her opinions of people. Still, there were unspoken rules between them, rules governing gossip and countless other matters. Hence, while Dorothy might discuss with Moore the matter of Max and Wittgenstein (at least so far as was seemly), it was understood that she mustn’t do so too soon, or with too much relish. So, after waiting a decent interval, she said quite by the bye:
Wittgenstein hardly seems to have aged. He must be — what? — over forty now, I guess. They years seem not to have been too hard on him, for all that. He looks closer to thirty, I’d say.
Moore knew as well as she did what she was getting at, but he hung back until she said:
Well?
Well, what?
You know perfectly well what I mean. I mean Max. What do you make of Max?
I guess I don’t know what to make of him, said Moore carefully.
Well, what do you make of that business about the Jews and the Negroes?
Moore sighed. I don’t know, it was one of those things you wish you hadn’t heard. I remember Wittgenstein looking at me then, begging, I think, my indulgence — I was certainly very embarrassed for him.
Moore trailed off, rubbing his hands, then continued, But with Max, you’re tempted, I don’t know, to make some recourse to reason — as if the problem were a simple matter of understanding. Or of overcoming some powerful misapprehension. But it’s not a matter of proof or instruction, I don’t think … Moore trailed off, then said by way of amplification, And it’s all the worse when its roots are religious. You heard what I started to discuss with Max. And I don’t mean to suggest that he is by any means stupid or unsubtle —
On the contrary, I think he’s extremely acute.
Well, he is. But as I say, I didn’t think talking would be any use. Nor, apparently, did Wittgenstein. I can’t tell you how often this seems to happen to me. Someone will say something. And — and it’s so miserably wrong, and so — Moore reached with his arms — odious, well, my mind just blackens, and I see there’s absolutely nothing to be said. People talk of epiphanies, but that — when absolutely nothing can be said — that, for me, is a kind of small death. And it is a shame, because for all that, Max is likable and, I think, rather extraordinary — if extraordinarily misguided.
Moore looked up at her, and she knew that he wanted to drop this discussion, too. And so they fell back to the day at hand, to the neutral, ordinary things — the grass bent like wires in the sun and the fidgeting sparrows washing themselves in the dust by the roadbed. For five minutes then they sat in silence. Then Dorothy said:
Tell me this much. Can you quite … see the two of them together?
Moore shrugged. As ideologues, I suppose. There is that kind of, I don’t know, zealousness about them. Moore glanced at her suspiciously, then asked, That is what you meant by “together,” isn’t it?
Well, I didn’t mean it that way. Which way did you think I meant?
I didn’t think, he said with a scowl.
Oh, you did, too, think. If it wasn’t on your mind, you wouldn’t have asked.
Moore puffed out his cheeks. What do you mean! It most emphatically is not on my mind, and I don’t wish to discuss it!
She saw this would lead them nowhere. Oh, all right, she said after a minute, touching his arm. I don’t want to quarrel. Loath as you are to admit it, we might just enjoy ourselves, you know. I’d like us to enjoy ourselves this weekend. So don’t be putting yourself in a mood. Lightly then, peering into his clouded face, she said, Come on now, Bill. Give us a smile.
This was a game between them when he was feeling grumpy. Oh, quit now, he said with a wince. Like an unwilling bear, he pulled his head away, trying not to smile.
Dorothy coaxed. Oh, come on now. Give us that charming smile. Smile for us like you’re going to smile for your good friend Bertie Russell. Don’t be coy.
Moore knew she wouldn’t relent. Looking around then to see that no one was looking, he gritted his yellow teeth into a grimacing smile and emitted a low growl.
There we go, she said merrily. There’s my good bear. Now, don’t you feel better?
No!
Even to the South Pole
OUTSIDE THE STATION, meanwhile, Max was making a beeline for the pub, with Wittgenstein in pursuit.
Max! warned Wittgenstein as his friend pulled open the pub door. Max, I’m not going in there with you. I’ll not have a repeat of last night, either.
Oh, come on, said Max, who, like Wittgenstein, had fallen back into German. I’ll only have a couple. We’ll be back in plenty of time. You’re not coming? Well —
Max!
The heavy door swung shut, and Wittgenstein was left standing there like a fool, stiff shouldered and red faced, tensely tapping the cane. Max was so expert at manipulating him! And as usual Wittgenstein saw he had no choice. Either he could stand outside, impotent and angry, or he could go in and vent his anger, in which case he would still be playing right into him.
When Wittgenstein did go inside, he found Max berthed by the taps in the low afternoon darkness, draining one pint while the barmaid drew another, watching him like a robbery in progress. This was another side of Max. In Trattenbach, Max had always been deeply abstemious, never touching a drop of alcohol. But now it seemed there was a deeper rupture between Max’s beliefs and what he did, as if all that mattered, in the end, was the sheer will to believe. Wittgenstein went up and stared him in the face.
Have you forgotten your promise from last night? Or were you too drunk? Because if you want to be an ass and carry on, you can stay here. I’ll not have you embarrassing me.
Oh, come on, groaned Max, giving him an affable paw on the arm. Get down off your high horse, will you? I told you I’m only having a couple. Who are you? My wife?
Max knew this last remark would sting Wittgenstein, and it did. With that, Max changed his demeanor. Here was sober Max — God-fearing Friar Max.
Come on, Ludwig, he said after a minute. Just give me twenty minutes. I’ll be fine. Was I not fine today?
No, said Wittgenstein with a glare. You were not fine. Why must everything be an article of faith with you? Don’t give me that wronged look. You know exactly what I mean. I mean your jag about Jewish Charakter. Or that story about the American Negroes. What were the Moores to say to that? What was I to say?
Hunkered down on his elbows, Max glowered at him. It was true, it was a true story.
You needn’t convince me of that. Wittgenstein watched the glass tilt up, then asked, Would it be such a betrayal if you put your beliefs aside for a day — a week? You’ll say we will not agree on this. Very well. Then we will not agree. But why can’t you accept it in others? Russell’s an atheist and a socialist. If you can’t accept that, stay here. Russell advocates infidelity. If you want to fight with him about infidelity, stay here. It’s very simple.
But now Max was nodding. His feelings were hurt. So I won’t shame you — sure, I understand. Max is fine pal when you’re with the yokels. But around your big-s
hot friends —
Oh, shut up, groaned Wittgenstein, looking away. Either you’re making something more than it is or you’re making it less. Shame is not the point.
Then what is the point? asked Max, signaling the barmaid for another. Admit it. You’re ashamed.
Wittgenstein snorted with disgust, but again, as the night before, he found himself looking into those hard little eyes, seeing that same mixture of goodness, intolerance and brute intransigence. They were back ensconced in their native language, enclosed within this other culture. Yet from what Wittgenstein could see, his friend made no better sense in German than he did in English. Max said he had come to England wanting to talk, but they had done no honest talking — none at least of any duration or consequence, and none of it very calm, either. But Wittgenstein was now thinking that Max, whether he knew it or not, wanted it this way. Ever since he had arrived, Max had seemed to want to stay in public situations, the better to avoid Wittgenstein’s relentless gaze. Wittgenstein had been quite unprepared for his arrival. Alone in his room at Whewell’s Court at Trinity the night before, Wittgenstein had heard a loud knock. But no sooner had he opened the door than Max leapt out and seized him in a bear hug, shouting, Surprise! Surprise! Surprise! as he bounced him up and down.
Max had then dropped his pack on the floor and announced he was starved. Wittgenstein suggested Woolworth’s, the lunch counter, where the food was cheap and good. But Max wanted no Woolworth’s — it was beer he wanted. And so he pulled Wittgenstein into the Green Mask, a working-class pub down the lane, where he wolfed down two fish dinners, carrying on simultaneous conversations with Wittgenstein and men at two other tables as he mashed, shoveled and chewed, washing it all down with two glasses of milk and three pints of ale. When they finally left three hours later, they were on different planes — the wet and the dry. Standing upstream of him, Wittgenstein waited in exasperation while Max drunkenly straddled the alleyway, talking in a rush amid his own healthy spurting and splashing. Then came the affable arm, locked like a horse collar around Wittgenstein’s neck. Time for the Big Confession jag.
Max always finds his pals, he’d said in beery German. Always! No mat — no mat-ter what! If you were in South America — even the South Pole — Max would find you …
Drink may have dulled Max’s mind, but it only exacerbated his already deep sensitivity to imagined slights. He grew argumentative. Did Wittgenstein doubt the lengths he would go to for a friend? Sucking and stammering, dryly clacking his tongue, Max backed Wittgenstein against a brick wall with a heavy forearm, saying, Do you think I take friendship lightly? Do you think friendship for me is just talk? Just the farting and rumbling of beer?
Wittgenstein was fed up by then. He told his friend to calm down. But not being a drinker, Wittgenstein didn’t know how to talk to a drunk.
To Max, Wittgenstein only sounded punctilious and disgusted, and the big man gibed back at him, mimicking Wittgenstein’s precise German phrasing:
Oh, I know what you say. You say, But Max, you are not acting reasonable. And he sneered the word, saying, reeeesonable, so that the spittle flew.
Wittgenstein couldn’t move. Max’s raging jack-o'-lantern face was pressed into his as he blathered, You are right, Lurr-wig. Gretl is right. Sure, I am animal — is a fact! I am not too reee-sonable! Reasonable man would stop. But Max is not reasonable and does not stop. Oh, but you. You can be so ver' superior now, huh? Sure, in Trat — bach you tell me, Don’t hurt those men, Max. Let them speak lies and filth. And the boy, that Franz. Sure, let them take him — let him roll with the pigs with his father. It is all right, your poor hands are tied. But Max, see, he does not like, and his hands are not tied! His head is too hard!
Wittgenstein could still remember how Max had watched him with those black little eyes. It seemed as though a film of ice had formed over the dank pond of their past, and Max now wanted to smash through it — wanted to smash it just as he had smashed the faces of those men in Trattenbach. Until then, Wittgenstein had never known that Max held such resentment against him. He had seen Max’s anger unleashed, but never against him, and certainly never like this. Doubtless, Trattenbach was part of it. But influence was also mixed up in here. This, Wittgenstein could see, was Pinsent’s legacy: the disciple’s compulsion to settle accounts and declare his immunity to further influence.
Max! Wittgenstein shouted, shaking him by the shoulder. He felt as if he were calling across a gorge. It seemed as though Max could hardly hear him, but then something else took over. Suddenly, Max’s anger broke. Wittgenstein didn’t know what had happened; it was as if Max had had the wind knocked out of him. His arms flagged, and his will seemed broken, as if he had suddenly seen something in his rage. But what Wittgenstein most remembered were Max’s little eyes, so glazed and frozen, like the stunned stare of an animal killed unawares. And then there was the way Max had lumbered home, here like a driven beast, there like a child begging forgiveness.
Wittgenstein wasn’t having this again. When the barmaid brought Max another, he put his foot down:
That’s enough. No more, do you hear me?
One more.
You already had that one. Why must you fight me?
Max stood there open-mouthed, goggling at him. Fight you? That’s a laugh! Oh, you like to think I’m a hard man, Wittgenstein, but you’re harder — much harder. Frau Beck — I remember she once said to me, He thinks he’s Jesus Christ, doesn’t he? He thinks he is Jesus Christ among us peasants.
Wittgenstein whirled around in a fury. That’s enough from you!
Max caught him by the arm. All right. I’ll stop if you will.
I want to go, said Wittgenstein, seeing other drinkers staring at them. I think you ought to stay here. I can meet you here Tuesday.
But Max was wise to his threats. Oh, come off it, he said, waving him off. I told you, I’ll be all right. Look! Max stood back from the bar with his arms extended. Am I not all right? Do you see me weaving? Forget Russell — I won’t bother him. I’ll keep my trap shut. I promise.
I mean it!
And I told you, I promise.
Max was standing at bum’s muster. Of course Max would go to Russell’s. Max’s arms were outstretched like an aerialist, and he was smiling. For a moment then, he was the old, irrepressible Max, Wittgenstein’s former guide and translator, the intermediary between Wittgenstein and the people he wanted to haul up from the muck. Or so it was until the Trattenbachers dragged the schoolteacher and his impressionable disciple down with them.
Back in Trattenbach
IT HAD BEEN the other way around in Trattenbach, that sodden toadstool sitting between two sloven mountains. There, it was Wittgenstein who had been in bad shape, and it was Max, a beefy boy of twenty-one, a year out of the English prison camp and just back, disillusioned, from revolutionary Russia, who had pulled him out of his trough. Without Max, Wittgenstein never would have stayed as long as he had in Trattenbach, hanging on for almost five years. Then again, without Max, Wittgenstein might have had the sense to leave before the villagers had turned completely against him.
Wittgenstein wasn’t the first would-be reformer the villagers had driven away. Before him, there had been Father Haft, Wittgenstein’s friend and ally and Catholic Trattenbach’s sole clergyman. Tall, big-boned and gaunt, with an acne-pocked horse face, Father Haft was a gruff and inflexible ascetic who fasted on Fridays and feast days and gave away most of his pitiful living allowance. The priest was the type who was unable to keep a crumb for himself while others were in want, and he wore himself down to no purpose. Few could have emulated or equaled Father Haft in self-denial, least of all his poor parishioners, who thought a priest ought to have more dignity than to tramp around in worn black gabardines and broken-down boots, without even an umbrella to stave off the rain or a pot to piss in. Father Haft couldn’t have cared less — he had nothing but contempt for his parishioners. Like Wittgenstein, the priest was an educated man from a good family, but having come from
people of some means, he had no interest in hobnobbing, as had his deceased predecessor, with the mill owner and the more prosperous villagers and outlying farmers. To Father Haft, these were piddling fish in a piddling pond, and they now found themselves battling the zealous young priest for control of the crumbling church, which they seemed to feel was a God-granted concession for their own benefit.
From the day Father Haft arrived, they had hated him, this fierce bearer of bad news. From his black gallows of a pulpit in the gritty church he contemptuously called Our Lady of Perpetual Disrepair, Father Haft was forever berating his grubbing parishioners for the peevish smallness that left them growling and scrapping at each other like hungry dogs, then circling like a pack at the approach of outsiders or the threat of progress.
These were the days, soon after his awakening but before the fervor, when Max would still enter a church. Every Sunday, in fact, just after the Epistle, Wittgenstein and Max used to slip into the empty choir loft, where they would sit for the next half hour, cackling with delight at Father Haft’s jeremiads against his parishioners. On deaf ears the priest’s sermons rained; in resounding silence they suffered him, this threadbare rich man’s son from Linz. (For them everyone outside Trattenbach was thought to be rich.)
Why, Father Haft wanted to know, why were these people so blind to the good in others and so unconscious of the good in themselves? A camel sooner could have passed through the eye of a needle than a Trattenbacher could have been gathered into Father Haft’s nutlike ascetic’s heart. Only Wittgenstein, Max and a handful of others seemed to meet with Father Haft’s grudging approval, and even they regularly fell from grace. Every week, Wittgenstein and the priest met for discussion and mutual criticism, groping together for higher states of the good that, in the villagers' jealous eyes, made them too good, thereby preventing them from doing much good at all. Father Haft claimed that man must be a moral witness, but he didn’t know where to stop in his moral denunciations. One of his most memorable and histrionic sermons concerned a drunkard who had frozen to death in plain view of the village’s main street. Showing himself weak with hunger and exhaustion, his voice low and tremulous, then growing staccato, Father Haft described the Lord’s pain as He died in the snow with that drunkard. Kneading his fingers into a clove of rhetorical essence, drawing out his attenuated words as if he were pulling a needle through Christ’s still quivering Sacred Heart, Father Haft claimed that Christ had suffered a second Calvary with his poor son Alois, the toeless, babbling drunkard. Yes, said Father Haft, looming down from his pulpit, there was left and right, and right and wrong; there was life and death, heaven and hell, Good Samaritans — and Trattenbachers! The priest rose up to smite them, his vestments flapping, they would say, like the devil’s wings. And so it was at every sermon. Father Haft would lean down from his pulpit as from a fiery hell chariot, heaping them with abuse, begging for an outpouring of Charity and Spirit and receiving in return only a torrent of hatred. At times even the self-styled evangelist Wittgenstein thought his friend and cellmate had finally pushed them too far.
