The World as I Found It

by Bruce Duffy

  The happy narcissism of death. For days Russell was in a sort of delirium, half anxious, half rapturous with the presence of this death, which lay against his life like a shadow against a hill. He could indulge himself now. He wrote brave, romantic couplets and read the life of Mozart. For the first time in years, he even allowed himself to routinely do the things that he supposed ordinary people do, dining out, going to concerts and taking long rides on his bicycle.

  One day he even decided he would get pleasantly tight. Bringing three bottles of wine with him, he went down to the Cam and took out a punt. Ah, the tang of dry, tart wine in the hot, hot sun! The sluggish water was cool. He let his wrist trail in it as he drifted along under the willows fluttering with their tentative green. With each sip, sweat sprang to his skin, flashing cool then hot with the wind’s refrain.

  Unused to drink in any quantity, he first thought himself crafty, but within an hour he was freely grinning as he rammed one punt, then accidentally splashed a lady with his pole while valiantly fending off a second collision. Oh, he was sorry! he cried to the spattered woman and the irate gentleman with her. Percolating his p’s as he blathered back, P-p-pardon me! … Is the laaady all — fine?

  Get off the water, you drunken idiot!

  As he raised his arms to plead forgiveness, it struck him as funny. He laughed in the man’s face and stumbled back, nearly capsizing as he sat with a splat in the dirty bilge water. The day declined. Bottoming the third bottle, he heard the twang of a guitar, then saw a boating party, young swains in cream whites and their young ladies. He stood and, rocking, waved farewell to that, too. Wan and nostalgic, he then lay back across the seat, noticing his feet spreadeagled before him, pointing as they would point for an eternity, useless and skewed. Looking up then, he saw a girl peering down at him from the arched stone bridge, smiling as the sun fanned through her hair. For a moment, he imagined her flame-red hair spreading in strands across his face, and then he saw himself pulling her open mouth to his. But then this image curdled; and, inserting his finger under his lip, he probed that rawness, stunned by the thought of a wild, weedlike growth that would clog his head and choke off his thoughts, even his immortal thoughts! Staring down his half-insensible length, scratching the shriveled nub between his legs, he felt like Gulliver tied by the threads of Lilliputians, dazzled, as blackbirds twittered overhead in a whir of wings …

  Back at his rooms he fell heavily to sleep, then awoke in stuffy darkness, hung over, thirsty and confused. It took him an hour to wash, eat, shave and settle himself. Shaky, penitent, he then opened Ottoline’s latest letter. More bad news. She was prolonging her stay in Lausanne. Another week eliminating.

  Enough! Sitting down, Russell dashed off a letter chiding her for frivolousness and selfishness and demanding that she come home. For three scathing pages he continued before a milder, more speculative tone crept in — a foreign voice, older and wiser than his own. By the fourth page, Russell realized he wasn’t even writing to Ottoline, he was writing to Wittgenstein. But he wasn’t really writing, he was speaking, and the person he was addressing wasn’t quite Wittgenstein, nor was he quite Russell. Rather, he was an older, haunted man speaking to a brilliant younger man — speaking in the manner of a Socratic dialogue.

  Russell hardly dared breathe for fear it would end. But it didn’t end; it only became more urgent. For twenty pages the older man answered the younger man’s questions and objections, all the while growing more confused.

  With burning eyes, Russell followed the curls of his scratching pen until three A.M., whereupon he fell heavily to sleep. But again at seven, as if jabbed by a current, he awoke and returned to his desk, watching as the phantom hand picked up the pen and resumed writing, transcribing this inner voice.

  His bed maker, Mrs. Phelps, was a motherly sort who fussed over him and the other bachelor dons. He usually chatted with her when she arrived, but that morning he dashed back to his desk, still furiously scribbling as she set to work, beating air into his pillows and sweeping.

  Why, Mr. Russell! she gasped the next morning when the door opened. ’Ave you been at work all this time?

  Paper littered the floor. Hunted, his eyes. Yes! he cried. And, by God, it’s good, good, good! Look at this! Eighty … eighty-five … ninety-five pages since yesterday!

  Well, sir, she allowed, surveying the disarray. That’s all very nice, but you ought to sleep, you should. Truthfully, you do look a bit pale and shaky, sir. ’Ave you eaten?

  Have I eaten? he asked, uprooting his hair. Who can think of food at a time like this!

  Just the same, sir, I’m going to send Mr. Prichert’s boy to fetch you something.

  Yes, do that, he said distractedly, scrawling another line. And pipe tobacco, please. He pushed some change into her hand. And tea and milk, Mrs. Phelps — and crackers. And thank you! God, look at this, will you? I’ve never had such a run, never!

  By the third day, it had grown into a full-blown novel called The Perplexities of John Forstice. Forstice, the protagonist, had grown younger and handsomer than the old man who began the dialogues. Nearing forty, prematurely gray and unmarried, Forstice was now a famous physicist, an atheist and freethinker known for his cynicism and cool brilliance.

  But then Forstice takes as his student Thomas Graf, a pure, clear-thinking German who debunks Forstice’s theory of electrogravitation, then runs off to Norway, leaving his teacher on the Jobian dungheap, plagued by doubts about physics, human progress, himself. Yet here Russell wondered: Was the story perhaps too familiar and self-indulgent, too centered on Forstice? All right, thought Russell, let the outer world mirror Forstice’s feverish state. Forstice must have conflict — a war, then, something biblical! And let’s, while we’re at it, make Forstice more vulnerable and human, not such a fire-breathing atheist. We’ll make him, say, a Quaker and man of peace, a sort of Emersonian believer in human progress and the transcendental wholeness of nature. More! ordered the Author. The book must have even more conflict, something splendidly mechanical and Wellsian. That’s it! thought Russell, who was, as it were, the Author’s secretary. Nature betrays Forstice! Nature plants a bomb. And not just a bomb but a gravitational bomb developed from the one theory that Graf hasn’t savaged — a bomb that can destroy ships and harbors! Oh, go on, said the insatiable Author, throwing caution to the wind. Let the bomb destroy whole cities!

  Russell could hardly stoop to pick up all the baubles popping from his teeming brain. Serve up one war. And one plague. And let’s put Forstice in a refuge, a mountain sanitarium or something. Right! He meets a nun, a tall, slender nun named Sister Catherine, who eats peppermints and suffers migraines. And let her also be suffering a spiritual crisis, what with the plague and God being such a beast, letting the world ride to ruin. On the verge of a breakdown, she’s taking radium and carrying on with some therapeutic regime called — what? Elimination? No, no, blot that, old boy, we must protect the innocent. All right, then — Subtraction!

  But it must be larger, the Author insisted. More characters, then! One Futurist. And a window-breaking feminist and a deranged misogynist like Strindberg. And a Madame Blavatsky and a Kiplingesque imperialist with a little brown Indian boy who calls him sahib. More! cried the indefatigable Author. Very well, then. A Prussian militarist and a deposed monarch, an anarchist, a plutocrat and a socialist named Shifsky.

  All right, old boy, Russell cackled to himself. The gluepot is simmering! Riots outside the sanitarium gates. London in flames. Swarming like ants across blackened plains, armies leave a tide of plagues, starvation and burning heaps of dead. And all the while in their mountain nest the characters are talking, talking, talking. But wait! cried the Author. What happened to Graf? That’s it! said the Author. Graf has the antigravity secret that can stop the gravity bombs.

  It was his Ecclesiastes, his Decameron and Masque of the Red Death. Would Russell ever forget the feeling when, twenty-three days later, he penned that last, poignant paragraph? All his authorial wishes ha
d been fulfilled. There was even a happy ending to ensure snappy sales. Graf had appeared with his antigravity formula, thereby ending the war. Forstice, meanwhile, had undertaken a whole new generation of theories that promised to change the course of physics. As for Sister Catherine, she had gotten off her priedieu and was now Catherine Belusys again. She had stopped her vain subtracting and had begun adding — yes, she had torn off her musty habit and become Mrs. John Forstice. Capping off those last pages of Forstice’s internal soliloquy, Russell wrote:

  Blindly and helplessly, going none know whence, going none know whither, men voyage across this lonely desert. Vainly, they reach for this or that, they snatch the cup of water from each other’s parched lips and spill the precious drops on the burning sands, but the infinite pain remains. Day after day, night after night, men look out upon the vastness of the world: the sea beats upon the shore, the sun rises and sets, the starlight reaches us only after years of lonely voyaging through space. But human existence, in spite of all its pain and degradation, is redeemed by any portion, short or long, great or small, of knowledge or beauty or love; and the greatest of these is love. Its sudden rays pierce the astonished darkness of the outer night, and the mirror of sense reveals the undreamed visions of the soul.

  It was too perfect. Sitting in his drawers, with a ravished look of locusts and honey, Russell closed his eyes as grateful tears streamed down his face. He felt like a cathedral filled with music, balanced, voluminous, ringing. Surely, this was the best he’d ever written, perhaps even his swan song. Promising himself not to look at it for at least a month, he tucked the manuscript in a drawer, then went out to walk into the early coolness.

  Good morning! he said somewhat impertinently to an old lady, who shot him a dirty look in return. He was not deterred. Buying a paper from the stumpy paperman, normally a three-second transaction, he paused to gab, then smiled at two children, who darted away, staring at their feet. Things ordinarily invisible to him — tradesmen, shopkeepers, idlers — all were transformed by his heroic act of imagination. Hello! Fine day! Splendid in his new spiritual feathers, the strutting author hailed them all, high or low, bent or straight, smiling with such intense beneficence that their first impulse was to flee.

  * * *

  Ottoline returned in late August, utterly transformed, to hear her tell it. But over the next weeks, her new life unraveled just as surely as Russell’s own postcompletion euphoria did.

  His philosophical work resumed and foundered, resumed again. Over the next months, he finished Our Knowledge of the External World, but he finished it because he was a professional — that is, because it was expected and not because he thought it was adequate. Harder still, he could not even say how the work might be remedied, except somehow to summon that lapsed sense of conviction. Wittgenstein had such conviction, that was what hurt. Russell could feel it in Wittgenstein’s letters from Norway, where it seemed something incalculable was happening.

  For the time, Russell pinned his hopes on Forstice. Ottoline was dying to read it, and he did nothing to dampen her expectations when he told her — and rather conservatively, he felt — that Forstice, if not outstanding, was at least quite solidly good. But still, Russell held to his original decision to let the manuscript breathe for a month before he or anyone else dipped into it. He was so excited. The truth was, he could hardly remember what he had written.

  Ottoline was even more excited when he said that her Lausanne letters had been the inspiration. Sly dog … Could he lure her home with a book? Apparently not. As it was, Russell did not see the radiantly eliminated Ottoline until the second week of September — two unconscionable weeks after her return, when she finally got around to inviting him down to Studland.

  This time, as part of her own new spirit, Ottoline was entirely frank. Straightaway, she said they would not be alone. But to her surprise he did not cavil or moan. This, he was at pains to show her, was part of his new spirit, part of the aftermath of Forstice, which he said had given him a more stoical, resigned attitude to life. Expecting little, Russell was gratified to see that he rather enjoyed himself during those three days. At bottom, he knew that his feelings for Ottoline had dimmed, but this, he felt, was to be accepted rather than regretted. He was not unhappy or happy; rather, he told himself, he was provisionally happy — content for now to see what life would bring, since life must bring something.

  Stoic that he was, he didn’t tell Ottoline about his possible cancer, though he did say he had seen the dentist. And she had to admit that his breath was better, even if sex was not. For her, the most insurmountable hurdle was still the cold buried mass of his intellect — this, like his views on religion, she would never eliminate. For the life of her, she couldn’t see the spiritual change he said he’d undergone. Oh, she could see he was changing, all right — and rapidly. Only he was not changing in quite the ways he thought.

  Not long after his return from Studland, Russell was relieved, but not very, to be told that he did not have cancer. He was far more anxious a few days later when Forstice returned from the typist and he sat down, with trembling hands, to read what he had wrought. Dwarfs had been set loose in the temple of Art — nothing was as he remembered it. Impatient within ten pages, he was pained after thirty, then wincing as he haplessly skipped from chapter to chapter. At last, deeply chastened, he slipped the manuscript into a drawer and went for a walk, this time not saying a word to anyone and indeed wishing to crawl off somewhere and die.

  Several people, including Ottoline, said they liked Forstice, but he knew, at bottom, that they were just being kind. Still, Russell would outlive Forstice and Wittgenstein; by growing steeply, hugely famous, he would survive them all. This was part of the transformation in him that Ottoline saw that summer. She saw it most clearly the day before he left Studland, while peering down through the viewing lens of her Kodak Graflex camera. Ottoline liked snapping her famous friends and guests — fodder for her photo album and the memoirs to come. She thought it immensely revealing, how a person faced the camera. Whereas some ignored or tolerated the lens, Russell clearly welcomed its intrusion. Canting his head, he would strike a triumphant grimace, his pipe poised like a pin to burst the world’s worthless bubbles. And yet the way he would draw his chin into his neck! Like a tortoise sucking into its shell, she thought, as he stared back with those cold, reptilian eyes. Yes, even then Ottoline could see that protective carapace forming. Russell was just becoming generally known, and there, peering down into the milky lens, Ottoline could see how the camera’s snout made him puff out his character. She could see him striving to show his best, most brazen side, and not the tentative one floating in that haze of light, shrinking from time’s judgments.

  Ottoline relished the power the camera gave her over him. There! Like that! she would order, and there he would stand, at full attention, trying to summon forth his posterity. Framing him in the jiggling lens, Ottoline would wait for perhaps a second longer than necessary, just to see him frozen there, waiting for the shutter’s jaws to snap.

  Red Sky, Red Water

  DEPARTING FROM BERGEN on the Sweimfoss, Wittgenstein had sent Russell a short card.

  27.8.13.

  Dear Russell,

  The coast of Norway is too congenial, so I am going up Sognefjord to someplace where I can think. They say that in this constant light birds fly till they fall from the air. May it make ideas germinate! Believe it or not, I am reasonably happy. Like the reindeer, I gorge myself on the summer for there will be longer nights. Despite my moments of Sorge (in Goethe’s sense of the word), I do not lose courage and go on thinking. Don’t you stop either, and do please write soon.

  Yours ever, L.W.

  The Sweimfoss was now about a hundred miles up the fjord, anchored for the night in a basin among a nest of mountains. Since they’d left Bergen, three days had passed — or four; in that endless daylight, it was easy to lose track of the time. Moored midway between dawn and dusk, the sky was filled with a deep, golden r
ed darkness, a pooling, whorling red like the heartwood of cedar. Peering up into that static Northern summer light, Wittgenstein had the sense of time suspended, floating in place, then resuming like those hypnotized birds above who, sinking, would suddenly remember to flap their wings.

  The Sweimfoss was an old, woodburning hauler eighty feet long and low slung in the middle, with a blunt bow that rose like the toe of a wooden shoe. Red cinders flew out her stacks, and oily rust and beads of pitch ran down her white wooden sides. In her hold was the sour, gamy scent of cheese, sour milk, dried halibut, half-cured reindeer hides and other cargo she carried. From the tall steeringhouse aft, the captain would blow his steam whistle as they made their endless stops at lumber camps, villages and outlying farms, where some dawdling boy would lead down a plow horse pulling a sledge to fetch groceries and mail-order tools from this floating post office and commissary.

  Wittgenstein wanted a slow, cheap boat where they’d put him to work, and the captain and the mate, who spoke some German, were happy to oblige. Chipping paint. Wiping and oiling the steam engine. Grilling ham and potatoes, salted herrings and easy eggs. It felt so good to be active — healthy, unthinking, physical. Coming around a bend in the fjord, he might see ten miles of glassy water, water sometimes five hundred fathoms deep under a faint gloss of mist. Wittgenstein wished now to be as still and deep as these glacier-carved canyons. Slowly, a peaceful vision sense was floating down over him, an empty-headed gazing, like crossing one’s eyes in order to see. Under the four-square light, he would hear the distant thunder of summer avalanches. Looking up, he would see misty flumes pealing down the fjord’s sheer rock walls, the water tearing to rags, then to mist that infused his nostrils with the smell of rain. As through clearest crystal, the light streamed through him, with nothing now to impede it. Like a slow rain, the sky was falling, light to air, air to light; like the sound of a single struck key, it left an afterimage that slowly burned on his closed eyelids. Red sky. Red Wittgenstein.