The World as I Found It

by Bruce Duffy

  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.

  What! he demanded. I hate your squeamishness. What is it?

  She was embarrassed to say, but with prodding she came clean, saying that it wasn’t just squeamishness. It was his breath.

  He was thunderstruck. My breath? Why did you never tell me?

  Ottoline smoothed his neck. I didn’t want to hurt your feelings. Besides, she hedged, it wasn’t always so bad.

  He chewed up one of her mints, then beckoned her to him.

  Smell your breath? Ottoline recoiled in horror. I’d rather kiss you!

  Then kiss me, damn it!

  She kissed him, then drew away, smirking.

  No better? Damn! Must be the pipe, don’t you think? Well, I shall see the dentist while you’re away — I promise.

  For all her kindnesses, Ottoline was never kinder than when she was leaving. Then she would revert to her Florence Nightingale self, valiantly striving to put him back together. Still, she could not undo the mark of her leaving — an extravagant kiss, then the rap of her sharp heels down that narrow hallway reeking of boiled mutton. Through the window, Russell would watch her wide plumed hat undulating as she sailed down Sooty Lane past ragged, scowling children and the shrill row house women who called after her: Will yer look at ’er! Miss Ta-ta! ’ Ey, yer Majesty!

  And later, fuming, Russell would be driven down the same public road, with the harpies throwing out their arms, cackling. ’Ere we are, Princey. Throw us a kiss, love! Awwww…

  Standing on the platform later, Russell would close his eyes as the shrieking 6:05 enveloped him in pulverizing darkness, dragging and mashing him before he awoke with a shudder, wreathed in steam, and quietly boarded. Second-class carriage — still pinched these days, what with the continuing drain of Alys. Traveling home, he would already be writing his next letter to Ottoline, another relentless analysis of what was wrong between them. And each trip, under the radiant darkness on a hill far out in the country, near Wenden, he would see a ruined stone cottage. Beside the cottage, dark as a shadow, was a fir tree. Standing like an upraised palm, it seemed to beckon or warn him, and with twisted mouth, he would avert his face, feeling, without a clue why, that he would suddenly start weeping.

  Then Ottoline left for the spa in Lausanne, where, in addition to the waters, she was given glasses of whole cow’s milk cut with brewer’s yeast and radium. “I now know why they call it radium,” she wrote. With a draught of this heavenly cocktail, she said, she felt like an icon of the Virgin surrounded by rays of hammered gold, her hidden passion. Open to receive were her aching arms — open as if, like the Blessèd Vierge, she had dropped the babe. But, oh, so melting she felt as she watched him fall helplessly to earth, poor dear. (She would pray for him.) “Dearest Bertie,” she wrote, “if only you could see the world from up here.” (I wasn’t invited!) “If only you could fling away the world with its dross and foolish cares.” (I’m busy and have no money!) “If only for once, my love, you could see inside my mind.” (Idle bitch! Give me a lamp!)

  Oh, they were torture for him, these psalms that wandered even more than Ottoline’s usual letters. In them, she was always reproaching herself for being a basically ignorant woman, while yet insisting, as if something had been denied her, that she had a poet’s feel for the voluptuousness of earth. Like a window, she had opened herself to the spirit, she said. Like a radiant window, she prayed that he, too, would open himself to it and quit his atheistic thinking. Really, her letter would continue, it was the most gorgeous summer, such a wonderful age was upon us. And Philip was such a dear, so understanding and undemanding, such a deeply spiritual man, actually. With Philip her mind was free, never weighed like dead fish on a scale. Through the swashing, radiant grass, they would walk down the mountainsides looking for purple gentians, the most intense of flowers, with deep, dark purple cups that reminded her of Christ’s passion. And looking down, she saw her mind was melting like the snowcaps. Like freshets, her happy tears were pouring down the valleys as a herdsman blew his alpenhorn. The cows were coming home.

  Then toward the second week, she met a Dr. Vittoz, who changed her life utterly and absolutely. For Dr. Vittoz, she kept a diary in which she was to practice eliminating unnecessary letters from words and unnecessary words from sentences, and finally whole paragraphs filled with unnecessary fears and habits of mind that for years had plagued her. By her third week, Ottoline was shedding whole books of fear. And such joyful tears she shed — as through a cloud spent of all thunder, they sieved clear through her. Really, she advised, he ought to try eliminating, ought to try jettisoning all the weight of intellect that only bogged him down and tortured his soul. Really, she said, he ought to try. It was so very lovely to forget — just to gaze out where the snow rested on the mountains and the fat cattle stood knee deep in the grassy meadows. She felt as she did when she was pregnant, full to the paps, like an enormous bulb germinating. It was an adventure to change, and she was changing ever so rapidly — even Dr. Vittoz said so. There were these young girls who danced for them at night in their dirndls, with their hair newly shorn and eyes so impossibly bright. They made her feel old, but then Ottoline eliminated that as well, writing old, then ol, then, o …

  By the third week she was sure of it: a momentous change was upon the world. There were so many of them up there, Swiss and German, English and French, Italians, Russians, even a Lithuanian. At night they spoke of outbreaks of influenza and said alarming things about money and politics that she did not understand, nor want to. And then one night they made a pact that if ever the world collapsed under a disaster or war, they would come to Lausanne with Dr. Vittoz, where they would work with their eliminating books, washing away dreadnoughts and greed, money and nationalities, so that all the world could partake of this eternal peace and blessèdness. She met so very many people. Among the guests there was a priest and an industrialist, a physicist and his wife. There was even a Hindu, who had given her the Bhagavad-Gita to read. But the Hindu book was so violent in places, like the Old Testament or mythology — why was it, she wrote, that the ancients were so tainted with thoughts of bloodshed and violence, with gods always smiting and breaking into different forms, appearing as burning bushes, swans and such? That was not her religion.

  She said she also met an Italian painter — a Futurist, he called himself, Vorno was his name. Fearfull
y beautiful, he was, powerful and dark, with a wolflike face and bad teeth. Every day, recklessly, he would race his bicycle down the mountainside, heedless of sudden turns, animals and drays, people. Vorno said the Futurists gloried in danger, speed and struggle; they loved brutal locomotives, aeroplanes and powerful automobiles spitting flames. Progress, Vorno said, was the sacred economy of life, forever destroying for the sake of onwardness. Yes, Vorno said, he and his comrades were anarchists and murderers, not toothless lap dogs, like these English painters painting nudes and bottles for the licentious rich. Worse were the French — except for Braque, he despised them, too. Sack the museums! Torch the past! Vorno said the human body must be painted in motion — must be shown streaked with savage force lines, like the hideous, blood-streaked face of an Indian warrior.

  The other guests thought Vorno would break his neck as he hurtled down the mountain roads, whisk whisk in the turns, his head inclined over the bars like a battering ram. Someone said it was a terminal illness that made him so reckless, but Ottoline thought it was his mind. Vorno took the waters, but he sneered at their eliminating. Throw down these idle worries! Rise up and murder the old world! Embrace the evernewness of high-production machines and factories! War was the world’s hygiene! War, Vorno predicted, was itself a ferociously beautiful machine, one that would propel mankind into revolutions more beautiful than The Victory at Samothrace!

  Vorno chilled them, he did. They were all much relieved when he left after a row. It was a scandal, Ottoline said. Missing billfolds, and one guest with both eyes blackened and a fractured skull. Unpaid bills and Vorno’s room a shambles, the walls painted with terrible war engines and dynamos and the legend VICTOIRE. The police were into it now. There were even whispers about the wife of the man with blackened eyes — apparently, she was but one of the women he had had, spitting them out, one man said, as a wolf does bloody hen feathers.

  With Vorno gone, the guests returned, like atoning monks, to their eliminating, a process that Dr. Vittoz likened to untying the knots they spent their whole lives tangling. Still, looking down from her mountain-top, beholding the world with its fragile lights, Ottoline was tormented by the way her nocturnal mind would busily reknit and knot what she had spent days unraveling. Dr. Vittoz assured her that this was natural. This mischief would pass, he promised. Nevertheless, Ottoline spent much of the night praying, fearful of this beauty that was upon them.

  Oh, it made Russell ill, this spirit muck and eliminating. But what Russell most feared was that Ottoline would eliminate him.

  Alone and adrift, Russell was then writing Our Knowledge of the External World, a series of lectures he was to deliver at Harvard the following summer. His theory of judgment was central to this unifying effort, but his theory, like his confidence, was broken, and his work took another dive.

  Wittgenstein’s letters didn’t help matters. Just prior to Ottoline’s departure, Wittgenstein had finally sent word about his father, saying that he would not survive the summer. Wittgenstein continued:

  In the afternoon I sit beside his bed, sometimes talking or playing a recorded symphony, but mostly in silence. It is hard to come to this point, when two humans have so little help for each other. I never expected to outlive my father, but now I see that even this will come to pass. It is terrifying, the kinds of mental torment there can be…

  Russell had replied with a sympathetic letter, but still he hadn’t been able to resist asking Wittgenstein if he might better explain his objections to his theory of judgment. Wittgenstein found this imposition enough; Russell did not help matters by adding that Wittgenstein’s criticisms had “paralysed” him.

  Wittgenstein complied with Russell’s request, but his answer was not much help: terse to the point of being telegraphic, he largely repeated his objections, capping them off with what seemed an even more draconian judgment:

  I am very sorry to hear that my objections to your theory of judgment paralyse you. I think it can be resolved only by a correct theory of propositions…

  This was no help. It was an insult. Immediately, Russell sent Wittgenstein another letter — this one distinctly irritable in tone — requesting additional details, or at least some context. Wittgenstein replied:

  Please! It is INTOLERABLE for me to repeat an explanation that I gave the first time only with the greatest possible repugnance. What kind of world we live in, or how we judge it, is not for logic to decide.

  Evidently, Wittgenstein regretted his harshness. The next day he sent Russell a second letter:

  I am sorry I was so abrupt in my last letter. I also want to add that your theory of descriptions is quite certainly correct, even though the individual primitive signs in it are not at all the ones you thought. Do not suppose that I take any pleasure in saying this. It is frightful to have destroyed so much and produced so little.

  Just now I am thinking of my reaction to you, the day Whitehead lost the race. My reaction was shameful; but the reason, it seems to me, was quite valid and important. Our quarrel was not caused by your sensitiveness or by my haste and inconsiderateness. It came from something much deeper — from the fact that, as you can readily see, our ideas are TOTALLY different.

  You may say that we ourselves are not so very different, but our ideals could not be more so. And that is why we shan’t ever be able to talk about anything involving our value judgments without either becoming hypocritical or falling out. I think this is incontestable.

  This cannot be cleared up in a conversation, let alone a letter. And this last quarrel was just one of many instances. Now, as I am writing this, I am completely calm. I can readily see that your value judgments are just as valid as mine, and that I have no right to catechise you. At the same time, I cannot impede my work by struggling to find a common mould for our concepts. Months ago I realised this, and I found it frightful, because it so tainted our relations; we seemed to be sitting side by side in a marsh. The fact is we both have weaknesses, but especially I have, and in spite of what you always say, my life is full of ugliness and pettiness. But if a relationship is not to be degrading for both sides, it must not be prey to the weaknesses on either side. Now you’ll probably say that things have been worked out, and will continue to be worked out. But you see I’m sick of the whole sordid compromise — on your end and mine. So far my life has been one nasty mess — but need that go on forever?

  I beg you to think this over and to send me an answer only when you can do so without bitterness. Feel assured in any case of my love and loyalty. I only hope you will understand this letter as it is meant to be understood.

  Russell was still thinking of how to respond to this letter when another arrived:

  Dear Russell,

  My father died yesterday in the afternoon. He had the most beautiful death that I can imagine, without the slightest pain and falling asleep like a child! I did not feel sad for a single moment during all the last hours as I sat by him, but was most joyful, and I think that his death was worth a whole life.

  I will be here two or three weeks more. Then I shall leave for Norway. I will not be returning to Cambridge next term, nor in the forseeable future. I doubt you will approve of this course, but please do not say things we will both regret by trying to convince me otherwise. I can say only that it is a course, and that I will follow it insofar as God permits me to see it.

  Despite our differences, your letters are a great boon to me, and I hope you will continue to write once I settle someplace. Until then, I remain

  Yours ever, L. W.

  * * *

  Not long before this time, Russell had finally seen a dentist about his halitosis. Bibbed and reclining in the wooden chair, he closed his eyes as rotund Mr. Geach focused the brilliant dial fixed to his forehead, then probed Russell’s gums with a fat finger.

  There we are … Em — hold there, please. Hold —

  Peering down, with the air whistling through his hairy nostrils, Geach registered a look of surprise, then disappeared into the othe
r room and returned with a medical book.

  Russell took a sip of the bile-colored antiseptic on the stand beside him, spat into the steel bowl and quipped, Is it that bad? He looked up anxiously but only got a finger in the mouth. Geeeth! he lisped. Whahtth ithh issht?

  The dentist exhaled loudly. You’ll want a second opinion. You must understand that I’m not at all expert in this.

  Russell sat up in the chair. Expert in what?

  I see several lesions on your gum. Geach steeled himself, then said it. It’s possible you have a cancer.

  Russell lapsed back in disgust.

  Remember, cautioned Geach, I’m not sure…

  But Russell wasn’t even listening. He thought, If it’s cancer, I’ll throw myself under a train.

  One specialist said possibly cancer and sent him to a second specialist, who said quite possibly. Both said it was still too early to tell. The second did remove the lesions, though, then gave his gums a thorough scraping that he thought would end his halitosis. As for the rest, they’d have to see how his gums healed. Eight weeks would surely tell the story.

  As a boy, Russell had lost his Uncle Mortimer to mouth and throat cancer. Russell could still see his uncle with a handkerchief, dabbing the ooze that issued like tobacco juice from the red ulcerations on his seared lower lip. Russell promised himself a quick dive under a train before it came to that. Gone in a roaring.

  In the meantime, he told no one about the news, not even Ottoline, grimly deciding to hug it close to him, for shame, for pleasure. He could not die, not really. For all his fantasies of death, he still didn’t believe he could part from this life, or it from him. Death, rather, was an idea he could explore in much the way his tongue anxiously probed this sore on his gum, rueful and smarting with its presence, like a sweet on a carious tooth. And maybe it was better he quit the field now, Russell thought. He knew what Wittgenstein was saying between the lines. Likely his best work was behind him. Well, if so, he thought, he must make room for the younger generation. Wittgenstein could take his place; Russell would still have his reputation. As for his darker thoughts, these, too, he stanched with fantasies of grief-stricken Ottoline, the line of mourners and the lengthy obituaries.