by Bruce Duffy
Still bitter about his expulsion from Cambridge during the war, Russell had also been keeping his distance from Trinity. It was with deep reluctance, then, and in a purely official capacity, that Moore wrote to Russell asking if he would examine Wittgenstein for his doctorate. To Moore’s surprise, Russell agreed, though he said that, because of commitments at his school, they would have to conduct the Viva at Beacon Hill. Russell did add that Moore and Wittgenstein — and Dorothy, too — were most welcome to stay there. While not keen on the prospect of spending two or three days with Russell, much less a horde of children, Moore had to admit this was an exceedingly decent offer. Russell was under no obligation to examine Wittgenstein, nor at this point was Russell on especially good terms — or really on any terms — with Wittgenstein. This, Moore figured, was largely a result of frictions brought on by the book Wittgenstein had published after the war, though certainly there were other factors, not the least of them being time and distance.
Wittgenstein was another story. The war, it was said, had unmoored him. Other than his stint in the Italian prison camp, no one knew exactly what had happened to him, but for years word had it that he was slightly “off.” Moore discounted most of these rumors, but he had heard from fairly reliable second- and thirdhand sources that Wittgenstein had become quite religious. Russell was doubtless the source of these stories, and Moore, knowing Russell’s tendency toward exaggeration and his antipathy to religion, took them with a grain of salt. Still, Russell had been the first and, for many years, the only one from Cambridge to have seen Wittgenstein after the war, when they met in The Hague in 1919 to discuss Wittgenstein’s manuscript. From what Moore gathered, it had been a tense and difficult meeting. Apparently, Russell thought Wittgenstein was suffering from nervous exhaustion, and Wittgenstein was typically impatient with Russell’s questions about his manuscript — questions whose answers, to him at least, seemed obvious. According to Russell, Wittgenstein said he had undergone some sort of mysterious conversion. But then so, in a sense, had Russell, with his now outspoken sexual views and aggressive socialism. Certainly Wittgenstein must have disapproved of Russell’s politics and anti-Christian views, but then so did a good many other people. A few months after meeting with Wittgenstein in The Hague, Russell traveled to Russia to meet Lenin and see firsthand the fruits of the Russian Revolution. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, was apparently continuing to undergo some kind of internal revolution. It was all very murky, but Moore did know that, sometime prior to this meeting with Russell, Wittgenstein had given up his quite sizable fortune, apparently in the Tolstoyan belief that money was evil, or something to that effect. Moore knew this because he remembered hearing that Wittgenstein was so poor that he could not pay his train ticket to The Hague. Russell had to pay his passage, taking, at Wittgenstein’s insistence, some expensive furniture that Wittgenstein had left in England before the war.
The manuscript of Wittgenstein’s book had been passed around Cambridge. Moore had read and admired the book; in an appreciative letter to Wittgenstein around this time, Moore had even suggested a title for it. Moore had a poor recollection of dates and chronology, but it seemed to him that some time after his meeting with Russell, Wittgenstein renounced philosophy. The story got murky here as well, but apparently the decision was partly precipitated by Wittgenstein’s disgust with his book, which had been published after much difficulty and then only after Russell had promised the publisher that he would write an introduction to it. As promised, Russell wrote his introduction. Moore thought it was a rather good introduction, but evidently Wittgenstein felt it was completely wrong and misleading — so misleading that he finally tried to stop publication of the book. Fortunately, Wittgenstein was too late, however, and the book was published anyway, first in German in 1921 and then the following year in an English translation that appeared under the Latin title that Moore had suggested: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
Moore knew only the bare facts of what had happened next. Having given up his fortune and renounced philosophy, Wittgenstein virtually disappeared, going off to teach school in a little Austrian village called Trattenbach. A gifted young protégé of Moore’s named Frank Ramsey, who in fact had helped translate Wittgenstein’s book, made the journey to Trattenbach in 1923 in the hope that Wittgenstein might resolve some questions he had about his work. As far as Moore knew, Ramsey was the only one from Cambridge who ever saw Wittgenstein during that so-called lost period, and it was not an altogether cheering sight. Austria was in bad shape after the war, and so, apparently, was Wittgenstein. Ramsey told Moore the village was a poor and dreary place. Worse, said Ramsey, Wittgenstein was embroiled in tensions with the villagers. For the life of him, Ramsey couldn’t see why Wittgenstein chose to stay there — “intellectual suicide” was what Ramsey called it. Mysteriously, Wittgenstein one day remarked to Ramsey that he had undergone a painful but necessary operation on his character. It had been a kind of surgery, Wittgenstein said, a surgery of the most radical nature — certain limbs had been lopped off. But Wittgenstein maintained that he was better off for it, though certainly diminished and weakened. Wittgenstein told Ramsey that he harbored no illusions about himself or his talent. Six or eight years was about as long as anyone could expect to do this kind of logical work before being ruined by it, at least in the case of a marginal and basically derivative talent like his own. Not, Wittgenstein hastened to add, that this was any great loss to philosophy. In fact, he said, it was no loss whatsoever. Having said all he had to say philosophically, he had turned to the world of children, feeling that it was better to persist as a benign spirit among children than as a ghost among men.
With Wittgenstein apparently having consigned himself to silence, it was a great surprise when he returned to Cambridge in 1929, clearly as sharp as ever, with a mass of new written work. Wittgenstein told Moore he wanted to get his doctorate so that he might make a living teaching while he developed a new philosophy. At least, Wittgenstein said, this was what he planned to do if Cambridge would have him. Moore told him that it was not a question of Cambridge wanting Wittgenstein. The question, said Moore, was whether Wittgenstein really wanted Cambridge.
As for Russell, he had his own problems, one immediate problem being his need of money.
Married ten years now, Russell and his wife, the socialist and feminist writer Dora Black, had two children, a boy of ten named John and a girl of eight named Kate. Russell and Dora also had thirty-five pupils, nine teachers and a house staff, not to mention two cars and the upkeep of the school’s buildings and grounds. Certainly, Russell had not begun the school as a profit-making venture. On the contrary, he had begun the school for personal, social and experimental reasons, and in the full expectation of losing money, but not on a scale like this. At times, Russell’s life seemed to him like a sorry ledgerbook, with one debit row for employees, forever pinched and begging advances, and one for children, forever eating, getting sick, breaking bones and smashing things.
Even then, during the early years of the depression, America was where the money was, so every summer, just to meet the staggering costs of the school, Russell was compelled to leave his children and spend weeks on tour, talking himself hoarse in New York, Boston, Chicago and points west. Not that touring was completely bereft of rewards. Besides affording one a chance to exercise one’s fame and opinions, there were always eager, attractive women and, with them, exciting nights of dalliance and only slight pangs of regret in the morning. Russell had written that it was inevitable and probably healthy that husband and wife should have their occasional infidelities, at least so long as these episodes did not intrude on family life. Russell believed this a matter of reason, yet he also knew that for one of his Victorian-bred generation it was difficult to completely shake the deeply ingrained feelings of shame that society had implanted. In all likelihood, Russell thought, he would never entirely shake them. But he hoped that at least his children and the generations to follow might be free of these fears, there
by fostering a world less pent up and violent, or rather more happy, tolerant and humane.
In the meantime, though, in these seedy American hotels where he stayed, there was this unpleasant residue and the longing not so much for his wife, who could wait, but for his two children, who could not. The children were now the focus of his life, and he found it harder and harder to be separated from them. And increasingly he resented it, the loneliness and the frantic pace of his touring schedule, then the inevitable guilt and disorientation upon his return, when he saw how much his two children had changed even in that seemingly short interval.
Ironically, it was because of their children that Russell and Dora had begun the school that now kept him away twelve weeks every summer. For more than a year after John was born, Russell and Dora had researched schools and educational philosophies, reading, among others, Freud, Froebel, Montessori, Piaget and Margaret McMillan. They also looked with despair at the English school system, where coeducation was virtually nonexistent, where children routinely received religious instruction and where boys were typically given some form of military training. In its tendency to perpetuate class hierarchies, intolerance and aggression, the system was already bad enough. To someone like Dora, long active in the campaigns for birth control, sexual education and legalized abortion, the system seemed even more disastrous in its propensity for fostering repressive sexual attitudes. In their marriage, Russell and Dora had eschewed the possessive notion of husband and wife, but then marriage, at least as they viewed it, was not really the problem. It was the fundamental dishonesty of society’s patriarchal heritage that finally shackled and killed love, insisting on fidelity at the price of either frustration or dishonesty. They wanted both to be free, and they wanted nothing less for their children. After all, if boys and girls were not educated together, not taught from earliest childhood to work and play and cooperate in a miniature society of children, how could they ever grow into free men and women, living and loving as equals in a free society of adults?
Russell and Dora were in general accord on these principles. The problem was finding a school that could properly promote them. More liberal schools were of course closer to their liking, but after examining the situation more carefully they had concluded that there was not a school anywhere, not progressive, Quaker, Montessori — not even Summer-hill — that could give their children the humane, nondogmatic, practical education that, in their view, was crucial to peace and social progress.
This was the genesis of their school, and once they decided to go forward with it they had no trouble finding students. Rather, the problem all too often was finding normal children, as opposed to problem children; or, as was more often the case, problem children with problem parents — incompetent, irresponsible, often divorced parents who often had trouble paying their bills and, still worse, trouble taking back their problem children once their other problems had become insurmountable. Such parents did not want to be presented with more problems: there would be loud denials and accusations, the problem parents swearing that, in fact, their children had not been problems until they had come to Beacon Hill. And didn’t the brochure plainly say that Beacon Hill, though designed for the normal child, was also specially suited for the “exceptional child” — to wit, the “gifted” (problematic) child? Why, several of the more cunning problem parents had threatened the white-haired headmaster, saying that because the school had been negligent on one count and clearly fraudulent on another, he could either wipe their debt clean or else face long and certainly messy legal action.
Such were the miseries of running a school. But there were also considerable pleasures. Most of the children were good, normal, loving children who ranged in age from four to eleven. The Beacon Hill staff was also excellent, its teachers willing to work long hours with demanding, outspoken children who were encouraged to question everything. Filled with admiration for the Russells and believing themselves to be on the groundswell of a new movement, Beacon Hill’s teachers tended to be talented, intellectually venturesome and progressive. Happily for the headmaster, they also tended to be young, idealistic and female.
Even so, it took more than trips to America to float the school. By night, the headmaster was the ever more popular journalist and author, tossing off myriad articles and books to stave off his creditors. Yet this, too, had its satisfactions. Russell liked seeing his name and ideas in print, and he was proud to be able to hold his own in the practical, pecuniary world that made the higher world possible. Russell wrote like he lived — quickly and easily, often brilliantly, in long, lean, lucid sentences. No subject was too daunting and none too trivial. If the Hearst papers or Vanity Fair wanted an article on the morality of kissing or the social implications of bobbed hair, they would quickly have it. Russell rarely revised and he never looked back, taking workmanlike pleasure in his better efforts and quickly putting out of mind his poorer ones. Having finished a book entitled Marriage and Morals two years before, he was now at work on its sequel, The Conquest of Happiness, along with an article — or rather a foregone thesis — that Parents’ Magazine had assigned him entitled “Are Parents Bad for Children?”
As for the rest, Russell had little direct connection with philosophy or academia now, and he was taken aback by Moore’s letter asking if he would be willing to examine Wittgenstein. Russell had worked hard to get Wittgenstein’s Tractatus published, and he had been sorely irked when Wittgenstein sent him a letter rejecting his introduction, saying with an evasiveness otherwise foreign to him that Russell’s ideas about the book did not survive in translation and “left only superficiality and misunderstanding.”
Russell, though disappointed, was certainly not surprised when Wittgenstein suddenly announced that he was going off to teach school in lower Austria. Despite the tensions between them, Russell and Wittgenstein still corresponded at that time. In one letter, Wittgenstein spoke of his decision as “my good deed” and said he intended to haul the peasants “out of the muck.” Russell still could vividly remember Wittgenstein’s first enthusiastic letters from Trattenbach, which he described as a “sound old roof” and “a peaceful nest of a place.” Wittgenstein said the children were especially charming, thoroughly simple and unaffected. They loved to hear him whistle and would sit open-mouthed with their chins resting in their hands while he read them tales from the brothers Grimm. Less charming were their backward parents. From the start, they were suspicious of the new teacher, but Wittgenstein nonetheless felt they were appreciative — good, hearty peasant folk, in the main.
Russell wasn’t surprised as this rosy picture gradually changed for the worse. In 1920 and 1921, with Dora Black as his companion, Russell was living in China as a guest of the Chinese Lecture Association. Defiantly unmarried and openly sharing their quarters, Russell and Dora made headlines, carrying scandal to British consulates from Tokyo to Peking, who anxiously wired London for instructions as to whether the libertine couple should be officially received. The Chinese were far more broad-minded than the English, not caring a bit about Russell’s personal life. Revolutionary students and moderates alike welcomed the great thinker with a reverence and enthusiasm that he found almost embarrassing, importuning him, as a sort of latter-day Lao-tzu, to kindly, if he would, please, sir, enlighten them in the halcyon ways of social revolution and lead their backward country into the twentieth century. With Dora, Russell toured Peking and the surrounding provinces, speaking to students, officials and sundry delegations on topics ranging from mathematics to education, and from syndicalism to the Boxer indemnity. Russell liked the Chinese, and he was greatly encouraged by what he saw in China — especially compared to what he had seen in revolutionary Russia, where he had expected to find the embodiment of his political dreams and had instead seen poverty, gross inequality and mass persecution on a staggering scale.
As for Wittgenstein, his eyes seemed to have been opened as well, his letters from Trattenbach turning sour, then bitter. In a matter of months, his snug little
nest had become “a disgusting swamp of humanity.” In the aftermath of the war and the wild inflation, the money-grubbing Trattenbachers had sunk to the “very bottom,” Wittgenstein said. Past the bottom: the reformer now claimed they were the most wicked and debased people on earth. Indeed, their only saving grace was the children, but with such drunkards and ignoramuses for parents, he feared the children would also perish.
Russell was then in a good period of life — too good to be spoiled by these doom-ridden reports from the barrens. Oppressed by Wittgenstein’s unhappiness and irked by his naiveté, he wrote back, “If you think the Trattenbachers are wicked, then you ought to go to Russia as I did last year. Then you will have a better appreciation of the relative scale of wickedness and inhumanity. The people of Trattenbach are no better or worse than people anywhere else in the world.”
How glad Russell was not to be around Wittgenstein in those years! His fame was steadily growing, and he was terrifically busy with various writings. Russell was even involved in politics again, having unsuccessfully stood for Parliament as a socialist candidate in the 1922 and 1923 elections. Wittgenstein and his narrow concerns seemed quite foreign to him, and their relationship dribbled down to almost nothing — a card or two, usually around Christmas, but blessedly remote. Then around 1926 or so, Russell got a rather mysterious card from Wittgenstein saying that he had left Trattenbach some time ago. He gave no reason. He said that for his sister Gretl he was designing and building a spare modern house, pruned of the usual clutter and, he hoped, the usual pretenses. Beyond that, though, Wittgenstein said, he didn’t have the slightest idea what he would do with his life.
That was the last Russell heard from Wittgenstein until he received Moore’s letter. Wittgenstein after a doctorate! What a howler! And wasn’t it vindicating for Russell to have Trinity come crawling to him — and better yet making Moore the messenger boy! Still, despite all the old doubts and anxieties that the Viva would inevitably dredge up, Russell felt almost morally bound to examine Wittgenstein. Moore was another matter. Russell had little idea what Moore was doing, though he figured, snidely, that Moore probably wasn’t doing much. True, Moore had published Philosophical Studies, a collection of his articles, in 1922; and he had been elevated to full professor in 1925. It was also true, as Russell thought with some distaste, that Moore was now editor of the prestigious philosophical journal Mind. Still, as Russell sometimes felt compelled to tell himself, Moore’s output was minuscule compared to his own. But here Russell’s feelings were basically preemptive: as he well knew, Moore and his other old colleagues didn’t think that he was doing much either, opinionizing from the popular pulpit and squandering himself on children.