The World as I Found It (18 page)

Using the dialectic of Hegel, the rebellious anthropocentric McTaggart had sought to prove that there was a heaven of Platonic souls so bound by love that God was
superfluous
— nothing more for the frail metaphysician to uphold, nevermore to be stooped like Atlas, struggling to support a hellish pack of air. But God had not broken the back of McTaggart's dialectic; Moore and Russell had. Having learned his dialectical method, Moore, aided by Russell, had unhorsed poor McTaggart more than a decade ago, relegating his method and his idealism to a nook in the whatnot of philosophical curios. But McTaggart bore no grudge, and he ate like a true dialectician. Taking a portion, he would halve it, then halve it again, eating the quarter of the first part, then a quarter of the second, which he then halved again before moving on to another portion, halving and halving to the point that he never finished anything.

Among other eaters in evidence, there was also the old historian McDougal, a leveling reductionist long due for pasture, who mixed the all with the all — carrots, meat and cauliflower — making of it an unholy mush of meaning. Then, far down from him, there was Cecil Goodhart, stoic, classicist and xenophobe, for whom all had to be separate, like air, earth and fire, with each food group, and even its juices, free of the contagion of the other.

Besides these men, there were of course more orthodox palates. And among these, too, were a few inspired eaters, men with stomachs like bosoms, who didn't dabble or
despair
of life — men who kept eating when others had choked or fagged out, saying with a baleful glance, Does anyone wish anything more? And looking as if they'd stab the hand of anybody who did.

But Moore, Moore went these eaters one better. It was not enough to merely empty dishes. Moore must have
Moore
, went the joke, Russell's line. Having polished off two plates, Moore would snag a trout or waiter or would go back himself into the steamy, dark recesses of the kitchen, past the scullions toiling over the stacked havoc of the meal. Moore had good rapport with the head cook, to whom he would always pay his considered compliments. Smoking over the bubbling pots, as filthy and sweaty as he was savvy, the swarthy, ale-quaffing cook was pleased to have good Mr. Moore, the Reverend, as he called him, appreciatively lift the lids of the simmering pots and generally preview the next meal. Happily, Moore would examine the cuts in their bloody brown paper and smell the melon bungs in season. Brushing away the shaved ice, he would prod the stacked cod, reeking and slimy, checking for the color of the scales and the clearness of the eyes. Moore knew the correct saffron hue of a good fresh pullet, and he likewise loved to appraise the leanness and savoriness of the bacons, bringing his nose down so close that he could see the little black stubs of unshaved bristle visible under the brownish skin. As a treat, the cook would sometimes take out his big black knife and cut Moore a cheese end, a choice, smelly rind tough as a toenail paring, which Moore would stuff in his pocket with a look of pure gratitude. With stacked plate, Moore would emerge from the hot kitchen as from a cathedral, knowing, as do the wise, that sweet as the present meal is, there is none sweeter than the next.

Despite his prodigious appetite, though, Moore was not really fat — or not except for his kangaroo's stomach, which bowed out under a mis-buttoned vest lashed together with a heavy gold watch chain. Moore's suit was always loose and rumpled, and his dark blue tie — one of the maybe three he owned — was greasy at the knot and bunched about his curling, fraying collar. At thirty-nine, he was an odd mix of a man, with a slack, middle-aged body and a boyish face, which still carried with it surprising sweetness and innocence. His cheeks were ruddy, and his smooth, cowlicky brown hair curled down like a comma over a high, strong forehead, which seemed not to have formed a single line of worry.

He was extraordinarily unselfconscious, with none of that haughty reserve and guardedness that envelops many a man as he gets older. Around Russell, though, Moore had learned from hard experience to be cautious. So as he finished his dinner that night, Moore was frankly wondering why Russell, normally off like a shot once he had finished, was lingering over his second cup of tea. Moore was not wrong to wonder. Sure enough, Russell turned to him and asked the question that had been nagging him for the past thirty minutes.

By the way, Moore, who told you about Wittgenstein?

Moore wiped the grease from his lips. Lytton did. Several days ago I guess it was.

No need for Russell to wonder where Lytton Strachey had heard it. Already, Russell was composing the wounded letter he would dash off to Ottoline.

As for Moore, he sensed Russell's irritation and resolved to face it squarely, asking, Is something the matter?

Giving Moore an up-down look, Russell said with a trace of irony, No, merely curious.

Oh. Moore nodded as if this were sufficient, but of course it wasn't. And so they sat there, both inwardly glowering. No, it didn't take much these days, not with these two.

M
OORE AND RUSSELL
frequently found themselves at this point, not openly warring but just vaguely dissatisfied, each sensing in the other some hard-to-define intransigence.

Both would have shrunk from calling it a rivalry. The last thing either of them would have wanted was for anyone to feel that between them was envy or jealousy, not only because these were unseemly emotions but because it would have been tantamount to admitting that there was
reason
for jealousy.

But of course it was not so simple. If asked, neither Moore nor Russell would have hesitated to say — and say truthfully — that the other was the greatest single influence on his work. Nor could either lose sight of the fact that they were very much tied to each other professionally. Besides reading, commenting on and supporting each other's work, they exchanged ideas and watched each other's flanks, each standing ready, when the need arose, to defend the other with a well-placed letter or review, or perhaps a few politic words in the right ear.

It was a convenient if unspoken pact, and Moore, for his part, would have been most content to leave it be had Russell not always been jockeying for position. A modest man, Moore could not understand Russell's need to vie with him. Moore had never understood Russell's contentiousness, but he especially didn't understand it now. Here while his fame was on the wane, if not long past, Russell's fame, at least within philosophical and scientific circles, was steadily growing. After all, his own
Principia Ethica
was now nine years old; Russell's
Principia Mathematica
was the new work now. Besides, Moore would have been the first to point out that of the two books (and ignoring their obvious differences in subject matter) Russell's was indisputably the more ambitious and important.

True, with those of Keynes and Strachey's generation, Moore's influence remained, but his ideas were hardly in vogue. Yet Moore did not especially seem to regret the fact. This in itself irked Russell: to Russell, Moore's seeming lack of concern with fame and plaudits had always seemed unreal, if not faintly disingenuous. But perhaps what really rankled Russell was that Moore had been famous first, and famous young, when barely thirty. Harder still for Russell to take was Moore's guise of never seeming to notice that, in a single sweep in 1903, the young men had flocked to the moralist, seeking his counsel perhaps for the very reason that he did not hunger for fame or disciples in the famished way that Russell did.

What Russell also had trouble swallowing at the time was the irony of being the one who had first encouraged Moore to study philosophy. Russell had been among the first to recognize and promote Moore's special gifts, and it was a great service he had done, too, since Moore would have been the last to suppose he had a special talent for anything, least of all philosophy. Moore had always been a slow starter, yet in a queer way his pokiness — his tendency to maunder and stare at ideas that others had glibly accepted and sped by — was a fundamental part of his genius for philosophy, which he took up only after his usual period of doubt and deliberation. Having come to Cambridge to read classics, Moore continued for some time in that vein, expecting nothing more than to one day join that bedraggled corps of rumpled, pipe-smoking bachelors who teach at the public schools — monastic men who spent August on the moors and perhaps a solitary Christmas in Switzerland, while despairing of ever having money enough to marry.

No, in his first years at Cambridge, Moore didn't have the foggiest idea who he was. Besides being a cox for a rowing team, he knew he liked to read, and he liked to talk with the other fellows and sing in the Trinity choir. Tobacco he had discovered. Also the pleasures of alcohol, with which one might get talkative and silly, spending a rousing evening round the piano with the fellows, singing
Ta-ra-ra BOOM-de-ay
and the raffish street tune
Wot Cher
. Later, as a coda to this rambunctiousness, Moore would do several solos for the lads, holding them all transfixed with each bugling note of
Foggy, Foggy Dew
and
Missy Mine
, singing so achingly about these misty lasses that one never would have guessed he didn't have the faintest idea about women — not a clue. Not that Moore disliked girls; he just didn't
know
any. For him women didn't even seem to exist. But even more unbelievable to the other lads was the fact that Moore didn't seem to suffer the slightest urge or pang.

Russell did not fail to respond to Moore's unearthly innocence during their early undergraduate days together. After all, as a man engaged to an older woman, Russell could not help but feel somewhat superior in experience to this brilliant but naive boy two years his junior in academic standing. Russell knew there was something otherworldly and strangely beautiful about Moore's innocence; he really did feel that Moore was the blood incarnation of some Platonic type. Still, it seemed to Russell that if his protégé was ever to progress as a thinker, this Eden musn't persist. Besides, it irked Russell to behold a soul so pure and unpurloined by bodily urges. For a man of ordinary drives like Russell, it was a sour provocation, like an unspoiled hill of snow before a boy's new boots.

Russell's opportunity came one summer when he and Moore, virgins both, were on a walking tour of the Lake District. There they were, two hardy but both untried pilgrims, carrying their Wordsworth and talking the wafting truths of idealism as they walked over fields as glistening green as lily pads in the sun. Walking, Moore would talk and talk, his flushed young face rising like a balloon toward the evolving light. But it wore on Russell that one could be so free and untroubled, and finally one night at an inn, Russell saw a mirthful pair of eyes peering over a mug of porter and knew he'd found the man who could bring an abrupt end to Moore's innocence. He was an older man of about forty-five, a former classicist, with bulgy eyes and a long, soft, raveling beard that he fingered like a waist. An underwriter for Lloyd's, the man had traveled widely in India and the Far East. With a game grin, he said he had had some interesting experiences there. For the first two hours, Moore found him a charming companion, surprised and a little bewildered by the way the man laughed, throwing his head back so that his voice boomed off the ceiling. A born raconteur, the man loved the trick and taste of words, reveling in their spill and off-rhymes, their lingering odor. Waving his French cigarettes, drawing the words from his rather coarse lips, he twatted them forth like outrageously large bubbles, gaily laughing as they blew high into the air, then settled with unseemly little pops on the noses of his mesmerized listeners. He also liked his wine and, to Russell at least, it was clear he had an ogle eye for the ladies, what with the way he fingered his beard and wound his almost prehensile mustache whenever a full bum bustled by. Content to talk about Homer and Ovid, Moore had no idea about the man, who had already co-opted Russell with sly little winks, implying that the two of them, as much wiser sorts, could draw out the youngster.

Later, in Moore's room, the innocent hardly noticed as the talk slowly began to change, turning to the bisexual Catullus, then to Petronius's
Satyricon
and Apuleius's
Golden Ass
, classics that Moore, flushing, said he had never read. Oh, but you should, said the man, giving him an insinuating pat on his knee. And with that, he launched off on an ode about the surpassing beauty and feline cleanliness of the Oriental woman. Moore did not quite get the point, or not consciously. With evident feeling, he began talking about the corporeal lines of
horses
.

But sir, laughed the roué, so that his wooden chair gave a sharp crack. You must mean the
mares
! With that, he returned, allusively, to the most beautiful of all God's burthened beasts, the ingenious ladies of the Orient. But hardly had he warmed to his theme than Russell surprised Moore even more by volunteering how long and hard he had looked on the ladies of Paris, particularly the trollops, who were so incredibly bold, mooning up out of the night of his venereal fears, saying,
Tu viens? … Viens avec moi?
…

Moore was frozen in his seat; at first he didn't quite seem to know what was happening. Emboldened by Russell, the roué gave Moore a goose on the knee as he hissed:

But the whores of Paris must be paid more, you know, if you've a taste for
novelty
. I'm speaking here of their — and he looked at Moore the Latinist — their
cloacal
opening.
Sewer?
asked Moore, just to be sure he had heard the man correctly.
Sewer!
roared the man, throwing back his head in disbelief at one so live and green. Growing more animated, he leaned forward, almost lisping in his urgency as a little piece of dry white spittle jumped from lip to lip. You know, lad, the sweetest meat is the netherest. Oh, it's cat clean when you slide it in, so slick and sweet…