The World as I Found It (4 page)

Wittgenstein often spoke of the “bewitchments” of language, but he was far less mindful of the bewitchments of his own personality.

Surely, nothing could have been more disagreeable to him than the mounting spectacle of his own influence, engulfing other minds. The last thing he wanted was to found another school or movement, yet he could plainly see it coming and, wittingly and unwittingly, he fostered it. He hated to see his students unconsciously mimic his gestures and parrot his expressions, and he was even more distressed to see his unpublished ideas pirated and distorted. Indeed, at times, he feared he would leave nothing but a collection of mannerisms: the Do-This-in-Remembrance-of-Me School.

Inevitably, he had his rivals and detractors, chief among them his former teacher and mentor, Bertrand Russell. It pained Wittgenstein to think that he and Russell should be doomed to bear this antagonism through the rest of their days. Still, it could have ended only this way. Their natures were too disparate. Besides, their reputations had both grown too large, and there was now much else at stake — fundamental values and beliefs, not to mention the added goad of vanity.

Difficult to say how this emnity had come about. Attribute it to time, time and the misunderstandings of time, ingrown. Russell had long felt that Wittgenstein disapproved of his life, of his couplings and anti-Christian beliefs, of his politics and popular writings, his easy socializing and celebrity. Russell was not entirely wrong in his suspicions. Wittgenstein did disapprove, but not as sternly as Russell thought. On Wittgenstein's end it was the same. In the twenties, when he was off in that Austrian backwater teaching school, Wittgenstein fancied that Russell felt him to be more misguided and confused than in fact he did. Besides, Russell had a family by then. He had more on his mind than Wittgenstein.

Time was the breach, then. Friendship, it seemed, wasn't long or durable enough for time. Slowly, almost inevitably, they lost sight of one another. And they changed — they changed more than they knew, accepting all too readily those ways in which they felt they had changed for the better and spurning what they had lost or discarded as the price of becoming something else. It was a very human amnesia, this spewing of the past while hungrily swallowing the future. Like colliding waves, they broke and fell away.

But to think: Russell had once called the twenty-three-year-old Wittgenstein his philosophical heir, the most brilliant man he had ever met. Now Russell called him tragic, a brilliant failure. Russell said many cutting things, especially as Wittgenstein's influence in certain circles began to eclipse his own. This was what was beginning to happen by 1946. Russell's philosophical work was then undergoing one of those periodic declines of reputation. Indeed, his reputation was suffering the aftershocks of his own hegemony and grandeur as a thinker. He was too gargantuan; his successors had to throw him off, had to debunk and devalue him so their own work could proceed, unintimidated. But beyond that, Russell was a victim of his own fame and success, qualities that to those who were unknown or, worse, only marginally successful meant he must now be a smug old fraud who was happily coasting — and cashing in — on his name. Russell simply did too many things well, wore too many hats — educator, journalist, sexual revolutionary, libertarian, gadfly, pundit, peace advocate and moral leader. And these were by no means all his hats. To his now venerable head, others would have sooner fastened goat's horns and plastered his forehead with scarlet letters proclaiming “Atheist,” “Philanderer,” “Pervert,” “Public Pest.”

This was the same Russell who corresponded with Einstein, Gandhi and Niels Bohr, who hectored and advised kings, premiers and presidents and who had long shown an intransigent willingness — if not an appetite — to be jailed if necessary in the cause of peace and the free exchange of civil beliefs. Russell didn't just have detractors, he had sworn enemies. The press loved and hated him, but early on Russell had been shrewd enough to see that, in the long run, the periodic black eyes they gave him made no difference and sometimes even worked in his favor. All that really mattered, he realized, was that he be provocative and quotable.
He
was the story; the papers were only the mouthpiece, and he plied them like a master ventriloquist so that no matter how they distorted or vilified him, they spoke with one voice, blabbing the universal praise of publicity.

Russell was a master of the bon mot and the slogan, of the seemingly good-natured slight, fraught with élan and bonhomie, which fizzed up like a fatal heartburn in the person slighted. In Wittgenstein's case, the old fox knew better than to show himself as a bitter old man nursing a grudge against a now famous associate. His tone was not angry. Rather, it implied a wistful
what if
as he shook his hoary head with the thought of all Wittgenstein might have been. Ah, it was a tragic loss. Yes, he opined, it must have been the First War — why, it would have been enough to unhinge anyone, let alone so finely tuned a mind. And then there was the long absence from philosophy, the deliberate isolation from his colleagues. Sad, very sad.

Yet without fail there came the
but
, and then the blow. Tragic, Wittgenstein's influence. Incalculable, the damage he had done. Russell — and now most emphatically
Lord
Russell — was now penning his memoirs. Yes, Lord Gadabout Russell was talking more freely than ever. I'm an old goat but I don't butt or bite, he would playfully tell students and reporters.
Ask
, I say! That's all. You have only to ask.

Aristocratic and elegant, wearing a rumpled chalk-striped suit, Russell was persuasive and charming, even seductive. A mist of dry white hair swept back over his oblong skull. The face was long and drawn, and the nobbed upper-class chin, though receding, was still hard, rearing back like a ball-peen hammer when he laughed. Then there was the pipe with its gurgling and popping. Thumbing the pipe, then knocking it against the wide heel of his palm. Locking it back between his discolored molars where it seemed a slot had formed. Grinning. Just grinning.

His voice was Whig-BBC, a little shrill when excited. Yes, he said, Wittgenstein had brought chaos, beguiling many naive young men, not to mention many older philosophers who ought to have known better. Worse, added Russell, betraying a little testiness, there were Wittgenstein's beliefs. Take his disingenuous, Tolstoyan fantasy that philosophy can be conducted solely with
ordinary
language. Russell threw up his arms. As if an ordinary person would bother to read — let alone comprehend — a word Wittgenstein has written! Yet Wittgenstein acts as if employing a more precise, technical vocabulary is a sin against democracy!

Russell sighed. For the life of me, I can't fathom his concerns. Really now, who cares what silly people mean when they say silly things? If I were to say, I see the table, Wittgenstein would ask, But in what sense of the word “see”? Oh, I can just see him, biting the word like a piece of bad money. Well, life is simply too short for that sort of nonsense, don't you agree?

Realizing he was getting nigh into a rant, Russell reined himself in. Look at me, he said, dropping his shoulders with a smile. Here I am going on about Wittgenstein and the poor fellow hasn't published a word in twenty years — why, twenty-five years at least. But of course, conceded Russell, grinning out the side of his mouth, a humble man like Wittgenstein can hardly be concerned with mere publishing.
Jesus
never published, after all …

People were only too happy to carry and embellish Russell's words — or invent them. One way or another, though, the words always returned to Wittgenstein, harsher and more stinging. Wittgenstein wasn't one for mudslinging, but he made an exception in Russell's case. In response to Russell's barb likening him to Jesus, Wittgenstein retorted that Russell, like the old Tolstoy, had fallen victim to his own insane celebrity. Celebrity had driven him to the point that he could hear only his own voice. Why, said Wittgenstein, you could hardly turn on a radio broadcast without hearing Lord-Help-Us Russell spouting nonsense on the revolting BBC
Brain Trust
program. What a life! Publicly whining about the atom bomb while popping around the world collecting fat lecture fees, having his picture taken and eating lavish suppers! Well, if nothing else, said Wittgenstein, I, unlike Russell, am a
practicing
philosopher. No wonder Russell finds philosophy so easy now. The man has done no real philosophical thinking in thirty years.

In a bruised way, Russell and Wittgenstein relished these snipings, which, paradoxically, made their former closeness all the more apparent. The last time they saw each other, as it turned out, was at a meeting of the Cambridge Moral Science Club in 1946, five years before Wittgenstein's death and four years before Russell's Nobel.

It was appropriate that G. E. Moore should have been presiding over the meeting. For years, Moore had acted as a sort of buffer between Wittgenstein and Russell.

Wittgenstein had assumed Moore's chair at Cambridge when Moore had retired, and the two were still on quite friendly terms. Wittgenstein found the judicious Moore a good sounding board for his ideas, and he met with the old don every Tuesday to discuss philosophy, music, literature or anything else that struck their interest. The two men also met once a month at the Moral Science Club, where Wittgenstein would appear like a guilty conscience to brain a visiting Reputation or silence some mouthy young twit.

Moore ran a civil meeting, thoughtfully introducing speakers and rapping his gavel whenever a discussion got out of hand. A boyish, courtly, paunchy man of seventy-three, with fine white hair and rosy little chaps for cheeks, Moore was the most unvain of men, especially great men. In this respect alone, he could not have been more unlike the contentious Russell. Since their undergraduate days at Cambridge they had known each other, and for almost as long they had been rivals. Typically, this rivalry was more Russell's doing than Moore's, but it was largely quiescent now, not from any change of heart or, Lord knows, from the supposed softening of age, but as a purely practical matter. After all, the two men almost never saw each other. They moved in completely different orbits, and though they did not want to admit it, they both knew their best work was behind them. As elder statesmen secure in their reputations — indeed, as men whose names were even commonly linked because of their early alliance in demolishing the idealism of Bradley, the reigning
ism
when they were both coming up at Cambridge in the late 1890s — they knew there was nothing to be gained from squabbling. To Russell, Moore did not present the threat he had forty years before, when the young author of
Principia Ethica
stood as the moral guide and example to a generation of young England's finest young minds, including Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf. And faster than either of them cared to imagine, they were becoming history now — captive spirits.

Between them, then, was the tacit understanding that each would speak appreciatively, if briefly, about the other should his name come up. An innocent anecdote or thoughtful parenthesis, a thoughtful smile — that would do it. Moore admirably disguised his dismay when he learned that Russell would be attending that night's meeting. The speaker, a visiting professor from the University of Chicago, might as well have stayed home. It was Wittgenstein and Russell they came to see, and the normal audience of two or three dozen swelled to a standing-room crowd of more than a hundred.

Russell was the first to arrive, accompanied by a little throng of students and several dons. Russell observed the etiquette: straightaway, he went up to Moore and warmly shook his hand. The master courtier asked about Dorothy, Moore's wife. He asked about Moore's two sons, just demobilized, then turned, in passing, to ask of Moore's health and work. Well … said Moore, reaching for a comparable question (wondering, that is, which wife or mistress Russell was on). Tell me, resumed the politic Moore, altogether sidestepping the sensitive question of woman. How are
your
children?

Very well — oh, very well indeed …

And so they stood, making bland small talk, waiting for Wittgenstein while answering the usual nervous questions from people who nosed up like frightened fry, searching for some pretext to shake Russell's hand — longing to feel the heat of his genius while inwardly marveling or carping at the least things he said, as if genius must always be radiantly manifest, like the emanations from some true magnetic north.

The voltage jumped when Wittgenstein arrived with his contingent. He walked right up to Russell, the way parting before him. The two men observed the same etiquette, shaking hands and whispering inaudible pleasantries, all too aware of the eyes upon them. It was too civil for words — too civil to last, Moore saw. He quickly called the meeting to order.

The speaker was a large, balding, petulant man. His paper, entitled “The Articulation of Moral Rules,” was a thicket of grammar and conjecture grown over assorted categorical holes in which rabbits consorted with porcupines to produce polecats. The speaker knew Wittgenstein's reputation as a spoiler, and when Wittgenstein raised his hand immediately afterward, the man was gunning for him.

Looking up thoughtfully, Wittgenstein said, These categories you have for moral values. It's all so tidy, everything in its place, as in an apothecary's shop. Leaving aside this questionable business about articulation, I am quite confused by these categories.

Well, retorted the speaker, anxious to land the first punch. I understand you're confused by a great many things, Dr. Wittgenstein. In fact, from what I understand, you've done an admirable job yourself in the confusion department.

The gloves were off. Staring holes through him, Wittgenstein said, It's your work we're discussing tonight, not mine. And I would say you've built your edifice by exercising what I would call
air rights
. First, you must lay a foundation — something
on the ground
.