by Bruce Duffy
Deflected Russell, And to some, like ourselves, he gives both.
Lytton snorted. He wasn’t fooled by this dodge. Pointing to a drawing on the wall opposite, he said, There’s the one Henry did of Ottoline.
Russell was noncommittal as he idled over. Umm…
Russell had known Lytton Strachey for over ten years, yet for all the young man’s frivolousness in certain company, Russell never mistook for a moment his intellect, wit or social cunning. At thirty-two, Strachey was eight years younger than Russell, but they knew each other fairly well, both belonging to the Cambridge Conversazione Society, better known as the Apostles. Having numbered among their members the likes of Tennyson, Whitehead and Moore, the Apostles had, since 1820, secretly elected to their brotherhood Cambridge’s most brilliant undergraduates. The brothers had no hesitation whatsoever in electing Lytton, nor in electing his good friends Leonard Woolf and Maynard Keynes. For a time, Russell hoped Strachey might become a protégé, but the appearance of Moore’s Principia Ethica in 1903 burst that bubble. In a single stroke, most of the younger brethren went over to Moore, taking up his ethics just as resoundingly, it seemed to Russell, as they ignored his logic, which sought to assault the same mountain from the other side.
As a result, Russell was inclined to feel chafed around Strachey, not only because of Strachey’s allegiance to Moore but because of his now egregious homosexuality, which he and other Apostles of similar leanings, having taken Moore’s Platonic aesthetics at the expense of his morals, had redubbed the “Higher Sodomy.” Left alone, with none to ignore or impress, Strachey could have given Russell hours of remarkable conversation, but amid the excitement and distraction of these young men it was hopeless: Strachey was like a stallion set loose among the mares.
Russell could feel Lytton probing as he studied Lamb’s pencil sketch. Skillfully executed, with brassy, etchinglike strokes, this one was not mocking or cynical. This time Ottoline was transfigured, with a nimbus of dark hair setting off the prowlike chin and large, sensuous lips. Beyond flattering, thought Russell, wondering if it didn’t suggest more than the usual involvement of a painter with his subject.
Carefully setting the hook, Lytton remarked, Excellent draftsmanship, don’t you agree? God, he was a scandal at dinner last night. Oh, what a romp we had.
Who’s that? asked Russell, affecting not to have heard.
Why, Henry, chirped Lytton.
The faint constriction of Russell’s face told the fisher what he had been fishing for. With that, winsome Lytton drifted out through the french doors, saying moonily, Ahh, Lamb, Lamb. Who made thee?
Lytton didn’t have to complete the line; Russell’s mind did the rest, only his emending brain changed Blake’s refrain from “God bless thee” to “God damn thee, Henry Lamb.”
Ottoline was stunned when Russell found her just after this and said to her accusingly, Lamb stayed down at my cottage, didn’t he? He was just here, wasn’t he?
Ottoline’s eyes widened, as if to ask what the problem was. Yes, of course he did. I told you. He stayed there all last winter.
Right. But you neglected to say he was just here last night. In the place you reserve for your special guests —
Ottoline eyed him with pity. I think you’re reading much more into it than is there. If I neglected to tell you, that’s because Lamb isn’t so important next to you. With a wronged look, she added, I’ve never taken you for the jealous type. You’ve certainly no reason to be.
Russell was asking for reassurance, and by now she knew exactly what to say. Russell was like a child, as grateful and relieved as Philip was when she told him the same tales.
Russell felt much better then. And for that next hour until they sat down to dinner, he was fine, fine. But as they were taking their places at the table, he found his seating card, not two or three, but five places down from Ottoline’s, the more to emphasize that he was no one in particular—and this while that Cheshire, Lytton, sat to her right, opposite her cousin Adelaide.
Ottoline, disguising her trail, flashed him a sympathetic glance, but it did no good. She was not there for him, not now. Ottoline was her hard public self tonight, having strapped on not a dress but a mailed suit of social armor. This dinner was not mere play, it was her occupation, dead in earnest. Holding court at the head of the table, flushed and slightly sunburned, Ottoline was a dark, flashing sapphire, wearing a long blue velvet dress with a dove-colored panel and a mantilla of black lace. The cooks and serving maids had been deployed and given their instructions, and when she rang her diminutive brass bell, out with its accompanying sherry came the first course, consommé froid à l’Indienne. For her centerpiece that artist of life had arranged around her a bunch of young flowers, including Philip Ritchie, Jules Coolcomb, the young painter Duncan Grant and Lytton’s latest, the crapulous first son of the earl of Farnsworth, who plucked his eyebrows and insisted on being called Eddie.
Down the table, meanwhile, trying to strike a youthful air, Russell was defiantly dressed in a new and, as it seemed under candlelight, glowing pink shirt. Despite his anxieties, he was trying to be gay, but in this ill-chosen shirt, with his neck funneled up in a high celluloid collar, he felt like a target in a penny-a-pitch stall. Lytton was the first to have a throw, saying, Well, aren’t we looking colorful tonight.
Eddie, drinking since noon, went into titters, crumbs of bread sticking to his lips.
Trying not to smile, but delighted in spite of herself, Ottoline said, I think it’s very becoming, Lytton. If you can wear a cape, Bertie can certainly wear a pink shirt if he likes.
Eminently fair, said Lytton, raising his glass as Eddie, smirking, whispered something behind his artfully drawn napkin. A nice choice.
Well, on that account, replied Russell icily, I thank you.
On any other night, Russell would easily have fended this off, but instead he fought back with brute intellect. Current expenditures for dreadnoughts in relation to German naval expansion? Home rule for Ireland? The failure of Robert Scott’s polar expedition? Was there anything under the sun he did not know or did not have an opinion on? He was brilliant, but it was the brilliance of anger—the light he gave off was too hot and white for people who had drunk several glasses of wine. They didn’t want a tutorial; they wanted to be merry. Besides, Russell was a hopeless latecomer to Ottoline’s life. Oh, said the looks, such a crashing bore he was! Tiresome how he missed the private jokes and references. Irritating how he had to be filled in on names and nicknames and old stories, when the party was straining to hear the latest morsels from London. Russell was jealous not just of Lamb but of Ottoline’s past. In his urge to consume her, to internalize her as his creation, he chafed at the idea that she had a whole life prior to him. Anxiously, he remarked — he thought terribly aptly — I feel as if I’m in the midst of a Russian novel where everyone has three names! But this was greeted with looks of genteel incomprehension and the conversation turned elsewhere.
For the life of him, he couldn’t get his footing with these people. Where his own jokes ignominiously misfired, theirs were thought wildly amusing. No sooner would he sink his teeth into a topic than Ottoline would say, But Bertie, we’re talking about suffragism now.
Soon, he was grabbing at straws. When Lytton — someone — mentioned Nietzsche, that then fashionable subject, he jumped on it, launching off on a discussion of “Homer’s Contest”:
Even early on, we hear Nietzsche talking about the generative, life-giving properties of conflict. Envy, for the Greek, is a virtue — it spurs him on to greatness. But Socrates, you see, is just too much for the Athenians. Because he towers above the rest — because he ends the contest—they scotch him, feed him the hemlock. Oh, yes, Nietzsche does raise an interesting point. But what I detest is how he revels in the contest, especially at this rather advanced stage of history. And it’s anything but generative or life giving — it merely feeds this hateful Darwinism of contending peoples and nations, militarism and all the rest. If yo
u ask me, it’s exceedingly savage and destructive.
As is life, chided Lytton. Nietzsche’s raising laurels, not distributing alms to the ordinary. Besides, he’s really speaking of individuals, not nations.
Oh, yes, added Eddie, looking up sloppily from his port. The Superman and so forth.
True, said Russell, directing his comment solely to Lytton, since it was only Lytton he was contesting. This may be true of Nietzsche’s intentions, but what of the results? People do not read so discriminatingly. The egotist will find his truth, and the militarist his. The result in both cases is predictably brutal. Not only do the strong subjugate the weak, but the strong grapple with the strong to the general destruction of all. And of course for Nietzsche the weak don’t count anyway. For him, millions of ordinary lives are not worth one Napoleon — or, I presume, one Nietzsche. Hateful, megalomaniacal thinking. It only justifies the idea that the great feed upon the ordinary, that history, like an infernal factory, is designed to produce certain great products — Christ, Beethoven’s Ninth, the aeroplane.
Sensing the general restlessness, Lytton spoke for the table as he remarked with a dry smile, Speaking of great products, we may have to banish you, old man, if you persist in being much more brilliant tonight.
Oh, hardly! scoffed Russell. And then he laughed, hoof hoof. But he was gored. Sitting at the head of the table like Helen herself, even Ottoline, the prize of this contest, was staring him down as he gulped from his goblet, wanting to die.
It was downhill after that. He remembered them playing charades, starting with Lytton, who did a rakish Leda and the Swan. Gloriously beating the air with his wings, Lytton had them thinking he was not Zeus buggering Leda but Christ impaled on the cross. Eddie was shrieking with laughter. Russell could not bear it. Pleading sleep, he left, but not before seeing Ottoline as Marie Antoinette. Here was a cozy image to take to bed — this one rivaled Lamb’s fresco of Whore Mary. Ottoline gesturing. Eating yards of cake, then merrily cradling her severed head as they called out:
Mary Queen of Scots!
The Headless Horseman!
Cronus eats his young! Or was it Rhea?
Eats his young? gasped Eddie, catching his chest. Eats his —
And with that, Eddie cut loose with another shriek.
Russell’s Paradox
BUT WHY would you concern yourself for three years with a paradox about a Cretan who said all Cretans were liars?
Oh, more than three years, said Russell, delighted with Ottoline’s incomprehension. Five years I spent—God, more, once I started wrestling with such nonsense as the round square and the present king of France. The problem with these last two, the king and the square, is how denoting phrases like these can describe, with seeming verisimilitude, nonexistent squares and monarchs. To the layman, it sounds silly, wasting one’s time on puzzles like this, but you see such absurdities are the experiments of the logician. A theory can’t hold if it works only part of the time or works only in certain isolated cases. The absurdity, the exception, no matter how trivial, belies the crack in the theory that sends the good ship Ars Logica to the bottom …
It was a warm, overcast day, and they were sitting on the sand, talking as the waves coughed and sloughed to their feet. Things between them were better now that the two last guests, Lytton and Eddie, were gone. That morning, Russell had left on the same train with them, traveling as Eddie’s guest in his first-class compartment. Ottoline’s house staff were on the same train, third class. Russell didn’t travel far. When they reached Winchester he got off, saying he was stopping there to visit an aunt. It was an indifferent story — Lytton certainly didn’t swallow it — but Russell didn’t care. It was enough for decorum’s sake.
Before noon he was back at Studland, and now, except for Ottoline’s personal maid, Brindy, they were alone. Better yet, they were feeling that sense of repose that comes after having made love — once urgently in his cottage, and then again outside, this time against a tree, his trousers round his ankles as he struggled to roll a condom over his plumb bob before she changed her mind or thought she heard someone coming. Russell was still picking bark from his palm.
They both agreed it was better, infinitely better. With less than a day left, they were now working hard at putting a gloss on the weekend, both eager to forget the tension and remember instead this one perfect day. Sitting there, Ottoline felt she saw with fresh eyes this brilliant, difficult man whom, for all her doubts, she still loved. With marked detachment, and some pleasure, she had watched him suffer at dinner the night before, but now, having purged herself of resentment, she was nursing him so he could withstand those barren weeks without her in his Cambridge bachelor rooms. Yet even here, her impulse was not entirely selfless: as she well knew, the happier he was when they parted, the less demanding he would be when she turned her attentions once more to Lamb.
As for Russell, he was determined to be cheerful and optimistic. He would not dwell on his imminent departure, nor on thoughts of Lamb or other petty jealousies. He very much wanted to be diverted, and he was flattered when Ottoline asked for her first lesson in logic so she might better understand his mind and work. Even if it was a bit of a sop to assuage his bruised ego, she was genuinely curious. He, on the other hand, was anxious to improve her mind, and he wasn’t starting from nothing. Some years back in Edinburgh, much to her brother Arthur’s annoyance, Ottoline had spent a year in college, where she had taken a general course in logic. Unfortunately, Ottoline had done badly in the course, further diminishing her already precarious sense of her abstract mental abilities. But here Russell was quick to put her at ease, promising to be simple and clear and to start at the beginning. So saying, he began by telling her that the logic she had studied was of the old, Aristotelian kind, no doubt employing syllogisms of the sort called Barbara:
All men are mortal.
Russell is a man.
Therefore Russell is mortal.
Russell was saying: This kind of reasoning dominated Western logic for two thousand years, and in some quarters, especially church quarters and the schools, it still dominates logic and severely hampers it. Aristotle employed many other types of syllogism besides Barbara, and if all logic were syllogistic, this would be splendid. But real progress came only with the modern recognition of asyllogistic processes, which of course confound syllogistic reasoning. Leibnitz made some progress, but even he had too much respect for Aristotle to break his hold. So the real modern period of logic dates from the publication of Boole’s Laws of Thought in 1854. But Peano and Frege, working independently, were the ones who made the biggest contribution to modern logic.
And not yourself? asked Ottoline cattily.
Well, he said with an embarrassed smile, I’m getting to my place in things. But to return to Peano and Frege: one great contribution they made was to show that propositions that traditional logic thought to be of the same form were in fact quite different. Take the propositions “Socrates is mortal” and “All men are mortal.” Aristotelian logic would say they are of the same form. But consider: “Socrates is mortal” has Socrates — a single man — for its subject, whereas “All men are mortal” takes as its subject a universal class consisting of all men. The persistent failure to grasp fundamental logical distinctions like these made for all manner of bad metaphysics and generally bad philosophy. Modern logic has finally uncovered many of these problems, and one way it achieved this was through the development of logical notation.
So saying, Russell took a stick and drew on the wave-smoothed sand:
stands for not
stands for or
stands for and
stands for therefore
Hence, he said, you might write in signs:
Meaning: either p or q; and not p; therefore q.
Ottoline rolled her eyes. And for you this is as simple as one, two, three.
One gets used to it, he demurred. I can’t use it to order supper.
Mmmm … Or to mind your p’s and q�
��s.
In any event, he resumed, silently drawing other signs in the sand, as you can see, there are other symbols and more complex propositions. The advantage here is that the signs are more easily taken in at a single sweep. Avoiding the connotations of words, they isolate the sheer logic — the bones — of a statement, showing something that is at once simple and highly abstract.
I see, I see, said Ottoline, rubbing her arms. It is getting abstract, isn’t it.
No, not so abstract, soothed Russell. Just listen, please … Now, where was I? Right! Frege and Peano came to logic through mathematics. I also came to logic through mathematics, but with a more philosophical bent. You see, mathematics is most philosophical in its beginnings, when we ask such general questions as how we can deduce one thing from another, or what logic even is.
Anyway, I had long wanted to systematically reduce mathematics to logic. Even as a boy I can remember asking my brother why a mathematical axiom was so, only to hear him reply, Because it is so. In college, I found this lack of a foundation in mathematics even more bothersome. Hegel’s Greater Logic I thought was muddled nonsense. I found Kant’s contention that mathematics and logic are independent of experience equally unsatisfactory. Why was I to believe that arithmetic consists of empirical generalizations that somehow work? I couldn’t tolerate it. What I wanted to establish was a way of deducing mathematics that was rigorous, defensible and scientific. At the Paris conference in 1900, Peano and his students very much impressed me — their discussions were so extraordinarily precise! Well, part of the reason was the logical notation that Peano used. So taking Peano’s notation, I invented my own, more extensive notation for logical relations. It was like a microscope. Suddenly, I was able to see to the root of questions that hitherto had eluded me. Russell sighed. What I didn’t know then was that Frege had already covered much of the same ground.