The World as I Found It (46 page)
As it turned out, though, Pinsent did not have to decide whether to leave or stay. The decision came when Wittgenstein's neighbor Nordstrøm rode out with a ten-day-old paper, which said there was to be a war. That night, Pinsent wrote:
11.VIII.14
⦠Wittgenstein, who until several hours ago was ready to vow himself for sainthood, is roused to find it is over a Bosnian who killed some Austrian archduke, who even W. admits was an ass. I ask W., “You mean Austria is willing to risk a general European war to discipline Serbia â and all because of two students?” Suddenly W. is a firebreathing patriot. From the heights a despicable politics emerges. He says these are not students but “revolutionaries,” and these unregenerate frontier peoples must be taught a “lesson.” “Then you will fight?” I ask in disbelief. “Of course,” he says. “And shoot somebody â with a gun?” I ask again in amazement. Stalwartly, he nods, & I walk away in disgust.
They rode into Høyanger the next day. In a three-day-old paper, the most recent they could find, they read that fighting had already broken out. Austria-Hungary had declared war on Serbia, causing Russia to begin mobilizing. Germany had then declared war on Russia and her ally France, and then Britain had declared war on Germany after her forces had pushed through neutral Belgium on their way to Paris. Reports now said that the German armies in Belgium were taking and inflicting heavy losses amid talk of atrocities against the populace. Austria-Hungary, meanwhile, was mounting a punitive operation against Serbia while sending other forces to halt the dangerous Russian advance from the East. Wittgenstein wired his family that he would be home within ten days. Pinsent was waiting with the horses when Wittgenstein emerged from posting his wire. They rode back to the hut in silence. Over the next week, Pinsent's entries became almost telegraphic, the days running down like an old clock.
Attempting to strike a hopeful note, I say, “They predict it will be over quickly.” W. frowns: “It will not be over quickly. Not with the Russians.”I say, “You just don't want to miss it.” W. says nothing. He has begun to pack.
*
Later W. comes to me. “I have money in the bank at Bergen. I want to give it to you. Your mother can use it.” Unnerved by his practicality, I retort, “Wouldn't that be aiding the enemy?” “Stop it!” he says. “This changes nothing between us. Nor between any of my English friends.” Nodding, I say, “Do you actually believe that? Do you really?”
*
I am sitting outside, feeling ill. It is afternoon & we have not spoken a word since breakfast. Suddenly he appears & demands, “
Will
you take the money?” Obstinately, I say, “But you have given us money. I can't take any more from you.” “For your mother, then!” he insists. “Don't be an ass!” But he sees I won't take it & turns away in frustration.
*
An hour later W. comes to me again, very alarmed with something that clearly has just occurred to him. “You will not enlist, will you?” “And why not?” I ask. He says, “Because of your mother. She has no one else.” “Don't drag Mother into it,” I say. “Mine isn't the only mother with a son.”
This time I stalk off & hear him call, “You are doing this only to defy me! You said you could not carry a rifle in good conscience.”
“Then I will carry a stretcher.”
*
We are eating when, with a look of sudden relief, he says, “But they will not take you! Your deaf ear. This will keep you out.” “Only in one ear,” I say. “They'll never find out.” Then I remember & say, much relieved myself, “And what about your rupture? They won't have you, either!”
But W. has already considered this. “I will have surgery. My family has also tremendous influence. The army will take me, I assure you. My mother has also two sons and two daughters. And no material cares. But your mother, David â who has she but you?”
*
Nordstrøm rides out. W. tells him we are leaving & says he can take everything, except the horses, wch. he is donating to a church in Høyanger for charity auction. I am packed. Our belongings sit by the door.
*
Later, I say, “What if we became doctors? We could go away & do anything. What are wars or governments up here? You would deny hippopotamuses or my existence, yet you acknowledge governments & races of people avenging themselves. Where is your mystical now? A year from now you may find yourself bayonetting me in the gut.”
At this his voice cracks. “Stop! You will be fighting Germans,
Germans
! And I will be fighting Russians. Never will we even
see
one another.”
*
Nordstrøm comes with his sons to say good-bye & take away everything. Carrying off our pots & utensils, he leaves us cooked food to eat until our departure in the morning. I am not hungry. The stove is cold, but I don't bother to light it. The oil lamp sputters.
In six hours not a word between us. Outside in the half dark, W. is transfixed. He is sitting on the stool with a hat & the mosquito net drawn like a shroud over his face â looking like a condemned man, I think. I walk down and sit on the hill. There I feel that the world, so full of promise a week ago, has turned on us. Like a bird of prey, the earth has sunk its beak into its own dark breast.
*
It's all up today. On the eaves, I see the wasps sealing up their nests. I have an angry impulse to set their nest & ours afire â let us be off like those dead Norse warriors, pushed out to sea in burning ships. Listen to me â already a bitter, destructive impulse has seized me by the throat.
We carve our names above the door: D.P. & L.W. 18.VIII.14. W. is red-eyed & on the verge; he cannot look at me. He says that whatever happens we shall meet here after the war; he says life is always ready to be shaken off & taken up again once you find it. I am not such a mystic or optimist. We will leave the door open for travellers. We will leave the door open so the spirits may depart, but without much hope they will return.
*
In Bergen, before we part, W. asks me to go with him to a church service. Why must he prolong it? For days we have been saying good-bye. But for him I go to this church â what church, I don't know or care. What does he expect? Even if the service were in English, it would be no less foreign to me, dead to song, dead to words. And Wittgenstein thinks I am a
naïf
; if so, I am not the only one. Sitting beside me, his eyes tightly shut, W. seems as if he is praying for a miracle. He is asking the Almighty to speak to him â to take over our lives & gather us unto his cold teat. Yes, I think, the Almighty has a plan for us, but not the one he wishes.
*
I go first. Quick & sweet is how I want it. We promise to write as long as there are mails; we promise to meet here after the war â fairy tales to me as we embrace & I board.
Then the train is starting, swaying and rattling, & I am stumbling into the loo; & then, suddenly, I am crying in spurts into my hand, a wrenching, spilt feeling, knowing somehow we shall never meet again. Whether from your end or mine, it will not happen again, Luddy, not in this world or the next â not ever.
The World As I Found It
When Homer said that he wished war might disappear from the lives of gods and men, he forgot that without opposition all things would cease to exist.
â Heraclitus
When the child must be weaned, the mother blackens her breast, it would indeed be a shame that the breast should look delicious when the child must not have it.
â Søren Kierkegaard,
Fear and Trembling
R
USSELL WAS IN AMERICA
, winding up his lecture series, when news of the archduke's assassination came from Sarajevo.
Russell had been a rousing success in America, where he was surprised to find himself famous, far more highly regarded than he was as yet in England. His whereabouts and quips were frequently mentioned in the papers, and crowds of four and five hundred packed the halls where he spoke about our knowledge of the external world. At Harvard, home of the New Realism, where his
Principia Mathematica
was already a sort of Bible, he taught several classes and found the faculty and students to be friendly and highly receptive to his ideas, though rather backward by English standards. As for America, he found it barbaric. He wrote Ottoline long letters railing about the disgusting food and the smells in his hotel room, where windows were never opened, about the spittoons and Boston's ossified matrons who, along with their stuporous husbands, gorged themselves at tedious banquets given in his honor. Still, he had to admit he liked the adulation â especially from the ladies who clamored around him after each lecture, nervously asking gratuitous questions and hanging on his every word as he edged toward the door.
They seem to find me irresistibly brilliant and witty, he wrote Ottoline. I find the attention most flattering, and hope I shall not be seduced by it â¦
But in spite of his high-minded hopes, Russell was seduced soon enough by a young woman who came mooning up to him after his third lecture and introduced herself as Doris Dudley.
She hovered there a moment before she added impulsively, You may remember me as
D.D.
â this as she deftly stepped in front of an older woman who had been waiting a good ten minutes for a word with him. We met last year at Oxford â Professor Norris introduced us,
Professor Norris of Princeton?
Russell opened his mouth expectantly, but nothing jogged. With a wriggle, D.D. scrunched still closer, pushing her smiling face up to his, as if they were being thrown together on a bus (the woman behind her cleared her throat indignantly), then said with a telling smirk, I'm the
writer
you met. At which point he raised his eyes, still without the foggiest idea who she was, and said, Ahh â wondering what he should do.
But in fact he didn't have to do anything. With that word from him, D.D. was merrily telling him how much she admired his work and loved England, and how she had come all the way from Chicago just to attend his lectures, all the while blithely blocking the other woman while he signed her copy of that new transatlantic sensation,
Problems in Philosophy
. D.D. gushed: I've never read anything that can make â profundities so, well ⦠accessible and, I mean,
interesting
â¦
Oh, she had his attention, all right. She was about twenty-five, rather plain, with thin, catlike lips, a blunt nose, wispy bobbed brown hair and a good, if not excellent, figure, a fact he could not help but notice as D.D. finally stepped aside for the sputtering woman, allowing Russell to better discern the solid rump and frank, uncorseted breasts floating beneath the clingy folds of her white knit dress. There was a certain sweet, beguiling quality about her, careless as a cow and seemingly mindless of the potent and musky heat she exuded. On second glance, in fact, he was intrigued because she seemed so unsophisticated â so peculiarly
American
: her wan earthiness reminded him of some lone pioneer woman, a sort of American Ruth, plain as rain, the opposite of Ottoline.
But, Professor Russell, said D.D., sashaying up again. Professor, about your statements on intuition in philosophy â¦
Ostensibly, she was asking him a philosophical question, but implicit in her voice and every gesture was her willingness â indeed, her eagerness â to go to bed with him. He was so thrilled that he abruptly ended the conversation, pleading a prior engagement, then fled to his hotel room and wrote Ottoline two letters, one for that night and one for the next, already remorseful for what was about to happen.
At his lecture the following evening, with a red-hot horseshoe in his stomach, he saw D.D. sitting in the first row, diligently taking notes. Afterward she stood tactfully off to one side, beaming like a valedictorian as the gaggle rushed up to greet him. This time he was ready for her, having had his blue suit pressed and put on a bold red tie. He had even crunched up a precautionary mint before he winnowed up his papers and skipped down off the stage. Without a word from him, D.D. cheerfully waited until the last of the crowd had left, then followed him outside, ghostly and remotely histrionic as she told him about the stories she wrote and of her dreams of becoming a great writer. For over an hour they talked. Then, as they passed beneath a tree, he pulled her toward him, kissing her roughly, while within, the subdued and impeccable mathematician watched his growling, heavy-breathing alter ego, aghast. Russell felt himself to be the aggressor, but then he was shocked to feel D.D.'s nails dig into the small of his back, as she said in a gargling voice, Come with me, darling. I'm just two blocks away. There'll be no problem.
How odd, he thought, hurrying with her across the deserted square and up the back stairs of an old rooming house with listing floors. She's already calling me darling. D.D. was efficient. Within minutes, it seemed, her blouse was hiked up and she was squeezing her breasts into his mouth, whining and smiling as her slick hair whipped softly from side to side.
Afterward he was even remotely touched as D.D. poured out her grief and loneliness, the relentless pressures of her art and her need for a mentor. Lonely himself, he thought the girl would provide a pleasant interlude. So the next day, while D.D. looked on, stricken, he read
Little Lamb
, a highly charged and disjointed story of how Penelope falls for Charlie, a beer truck driver who runs over her white poodle in a rainstorm.
All that remained of poor Tuffet was a runover rag of red fur, one bag full. Penelope wailed under the beating, bleating rain while the brawny beer truck driver delicately nudged the canine corpse into an empty beer box with a stick.
“Here she is, Miss,” stammered the brawny behemoth. P-p-poor little doggie ⦠I-I don't know what to sss-say.”