The World as I Found It (37 page)

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:

M
OORE'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 into 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.

Ottoline would arrive with profuse apologies and explanations — alibis no sooner made than she expected forgiveness, and woe to him if he showed any lingering resentment. Then she'd climb on her high horse, quick to remind him of what tremendous lengths it took to see him, and never mind the risk and expense. Anxious and apologetic, he was the guilty one then, all the while conscious of the time ticking away. By the time they got down to lovemaking — or bickering about lovemaking — there was no time, and their efforts foundered. Worse, Ottoline's migraines were acting up again, making it hard for her to bear his hobby-horsing.

He always brought wine, the libation no sooner uncorked than he was plying her small, upturned breasts through folds of bottle-green silk, fumbling with the buttons that Ottoline's maid, Brindy, had fastened that morning, wrapping her lady up for him like a pricey parcel. A small heap of discarded underthings fell to the floor: the silk slip and purple stockings, the lacy deckle-edged drawers and pointy black shoes shaped like Venetian gondolas. He so wanted to remember everything that he would greedily try to squirrel it all in his memory, so busy
looking
and
remembering
that it seemed he missed it even as it was occurring. Like a sweet held in the side of the mouth, he would try to hold these details in mind, sucking on them until at last they dissolved down to nothing.
But here she was in the flesh
, he would tell himself. Here was his chance and he must make the most of it. Oh! he'd gasp. Her lanky shanks! Oh, her rump!
He
was ready in an instant — the Burrower, she called him, always trying to jam himself in, ready or not. This was bad enough, but then in late June, not long before Ottoline took her migraines to a Swiss sanitarium, she averted her face from his kiss.