The World as I Found It (92 page)

Much as Moore looked forward to these discussions, he did not depend on them, nor did Wittgenstein. This was not from any lingering distance or ill will; it was simply how it was with them. Between them there was a certain bond, but it was not, after all these years, an especially sentimental bond, being based more on trust and respect than on what might have been called affection. Moore had his own life. He was not forgotten. There were still the fitful writings and occasional lectures; there was also the mail begging favors, and the students and former colleagues asking advice, not to mention his Saturday discussion group and the fortnightly meetings of the Moral Science Club. Moore took this with the matter-of-factness of the accomplished old: this was his life, and he neither underestimated nor overestimated it. Yet at the same time, Moore was slowly distancing himself from these things, not because of his mind or his hearing, which were both excellent, but because of a deeper instinct that was slowly weaning him from life, counseling him not to rely too much on pleasures that might end tomorrow, what with the frail state of his health.

Dorothy Moore frequently participated in her husband's discussions with Wittgenstein. And sometimes, reluctantly, she was forced to end them when she felt Moore was getting too excited for his weak heart. With Wittgenstein a now frequent visitor, she knew pretty much what to expect from him, though she was never entirely sure. Dorothy was still smarting from Wittgenstein's reaction one night about a week after the Nazis had occupied Vienna. The strain on him had been evident, and out of concern she had asked if his sisters were safe.

Of course! he said, bristling as if she had asked a completely idiotic question. The Nazis would not dare bother them. They're much too well respected.

Dorothy had dropped the matter then, but now as she and Moore sat there waiting for Wittgenstein's knock, she wondered if anxiety about his sisters wasn't partly the source of this confession. It has to weigh on him, she said to Moore. You said so yourself when we saw him last.

But this only set Moore off. Well, I'm sure it does, he said, leaning forward in his chair. It
must
. But for God's sake,
don't
say a word! You don't know how he is when he gets in these states. Already, Moore was puffing and anxious. My word, no. You'll never see me delving into personal business with him. I don't unless he asks, and even then I'm most extremely careful not to upset him. Damn it, Wittgenstein! Gripping the armrests and glaring at the door, Moore roared, I want to dispense with this nonsense and go to bloody bed!

Bill
, said Dorothy, easing up to peek through the curtain. Calm down. I think that's him coming.

A few moments later, they heard the stamping of shoes followed by Wittgenstein's emphatic knock. Opening the door, Moore saw him standing stricken on the stoop in his wet mac, flicking rain off the tines of his umbrella. He walked straight inside. Moore had almost shut the door when he realized someone else was standing off to the side. Oh, Mr. Skinner, he exclaimed. I quite beg your pardon!

It was Wittgenstein's shadow, a slender innocent named Francis Skinner, who for four years now had been Wittgenstein's almost constant companion. Moore knew the young man only by sight. Francis did not accompany Wittgenstein on his Tuesday visits, and in all the times Moore had seen them together, he had spoken to him but once, and briefly. Francis was deeply, painfully shy. At times the young man's shyness would get so bad that even Wittgenstein would shout in exasperation,
Francis, speak!
Whereupon Francis, with a slightly foolish smile, would hunch up his shoulders, speak a few guilty words, then clam up again.

Piercing-alert and efficient, Francis was twenty-six but looked a beardless seventeen — “Saint Francis,” Wittgenstein sometimes called him, this silent secretary and sounding board for his ideas. Francis was the only man in Cambridge who had ever been heard to call Wittgenstein by his Christian name. Two years before, he had accompanied Wittgenstein on a month-long trip to Russia, where it was rumored they planned to emigrate, first to study medicine, then to work as doctors among the poor. Moore had heard these rumors, including some nonsense that Wittgenstein was now a confirmed Marxist. But to this Moore paid no attention. Francis and Russia, the little cult that surrounded Wittgenstein — these were aspects of his successor's life that, to tell the truth, Moore preferred to ignore.

Under the porch light, meanwhile, Francis was still wiping his shoes. To Moore, it looked as if he was about to genuflect — the way he was scraping his feet and shaking out his coat was itself a small act of devotion.

I'll only be a second, said Francis, his face cast down from the light. I don't want to wet your floor. But then Wittgenstein gruffly called back:

Francis! Get in here! Then to Moore he said, I brought Francis because I want him to hear this as well.

Standing in a puddle in the hearth, his hands stuffed in the pockets of his dripping black mac, Wittgenstein faced them with a forbidding glare, as if he were waiting for silence to begin a lecture. Moore didn't know whether to stand or sit. Dorothy, meanwhile, was looking to Moore for direction. Fortunately, Francis sensed their confusion and, with the invisible prompting of a born courtier, pointed to the diminutive hassock, saying in a firm, precise voice, I will sit here, Professor and Mrs. Moore — if, of course, you don't mind.

Oh, please — do make yourself comfortable, said Dorothy, grateful for a chance to break the tension.

Wittgenstein did not make himself comfortable. He just stood there glaring as they took their seats, feeling their way down into the cushions. Straightaway then, he began his story. It was wrenching to watch. Stammering, halting, then urgently pushing on, Wittgenstein told them then that he was a Jew by extraction and that for years in England he had behaved with despicable cowardice by not admitting to his “origins,” which even then he made to sound shrouded and vaguely shameful. He told them this and then he told them about Max. He told them how for years he had misled Max about his Jewish origins. Not only had he misled him, but he had led him astray, when with more honesty and persistence, he might well have saved his friend from moral destruction.

At this, Wittgenstein stopped, and they slowly settled back, thinking with relief that the confession was over. But then, impulsively, as if these two “crimes” weren't enough, Wittgenstein told them about the girl he had struck in his class in Trattenbach — told how he had hurt her arm, then lied about it, and for no better reason than to prop up his own revolting pride at being a good teacher when clearly he had been nothing of the sort.

With this, Wittgenstein stopped again — stopped dead — seemingly shocked that he had run out of crimes, with nothing more to say. This silence was hard enough on his little audience. But by far the worst thing, Dorothy later said, was to see him standing there, half panting, as though he were waiting to see if there would be any
difference
— some relief or burden lifted. Yet clearly there was no relief, just sorrow and weariness. Moore knew it was no time to tell Wittgenstein that he vastly exaggerated his guilt, that people had known or assumed for years, from his name alone, that he was of Jewish ancestry. It would do no good to say this now. In his present state of mind, Wittgenstein wanted only guilt and censure, not understanding. Denying any possibility of forgiveness and forbidding any expression of sympathy, Wittgenstein wanted them only as witnesses to that guilt, that hereditary link that at once proves the past and haunts the future like the light traveling from some long-snuffed star.

It was devastating, to sit there like fools, able to do nothing but witness this man's pain. They could hear the rain drumming. Opening and closing his mouth as if there had been a change in the air pressure, Moore felt angry and cheated. Dorothy was staring at her hands, upturned in her lap. As for Francis, he was nearly overcome. Numb and trembling, forcing back tears, he was all gathered into himself in the leather hassock, which could be heard faintly creaking with his forlorn rocking.

Blurting an abrupt thank-you, Wittgenstein started for the door. Moore followed and, as he let him out, said reproachfully, You are not a patient man, Wittgenstein. Whereupon Wittgenstein, this most impatient of men, turned to Moore with a look of genuine surprise and said, as if this were one further blot on his life, I'm sorry. I did not know that. No, I did not.

What? Moore was incredulous. You mean you don't know how impatient you are? But look at you! You're too impatient now even to accept forgiveness.

Forgiveness is not at issue! Wittgenstein insisted, looking away. Truth is not a matter of forgiveness.

Perhaps
, said Moore skeptically. Nonetheless, you might have the humility to forgive yourself. Guilt just as surely brought you here as truth or goodness did.

I see, labored Wittgenstein, with a halfhearted nod. I will try, Moore. As best I can I will try. Good night.

Outside, it was still raining. Wittgenstein pumped out his umbrella and pushed into the leaning downpour. And after him, balancing precariously with his outstretched umbrella, Francis followed him to their next stop, the second of three sessions where Wittgenstein would purge himself that night, like a man crossing himself three times.

W
HEN THE WAR CAME
a year later, Wittgenstein and Francis volunteered to drive an ambulance, only to find that Wittgenstein, at fifty-one, was too old and Francis was too sick, so sick that he died a few months later from acute poliomyelitis — another heavy blow for Wittgenstein.

Besides Francis, Wittgenstein had for years surrounded himself with other young men whom the other dons would sometimes snidely refer to as his Twelve Holy Disciples. These young men did not number twelve, or even seven, and yet as much as Wittgenstein loathed the term “disciples” and all it implied, it more accurately described the relationship than did “friends” or “students.” Wittgenstein did not consciously try to create this kind of relationship, and yet as much as he tried to discount or ignore the magnitude of his influence, he could hardly help but be aware of it. And in his way, he was a tyrant — not a tyrant like his father, certainly, but a tyrant just the same, sure in his instincts, inflexible in his opinions, harsh in his judgments and exacting in his expectations. Jealously absorbing himself into the lives of his young men, he soon took over everything. He remembered birthdays and delighted in giving them durable, well-made gifts that he bought after lengthy deliberation at Woolworth's, where vulgar questions of “taste” were finally subsumed by a healthy utility. If his young needed money, he would give it, if they were sick, he would care for them, and if they were tied to their mothers, he would soon tie them to him. And if they tied themselves to some girl, or got married, he would quietly acquiesce and retire until they sought him out, affecting to be slightly surprised — though he was greatly relieved — that they would want to bother with an “odd old bachelor” like himself.

But soon these young men were leaving for the war, and then Francis was dead and Cambridge was sad and empty, denuded of yet another generation. Wittgenstein knew his innocent young men, like the prototypal Pinsent, would never be quite the same after seeing war, and this pained him deeply. At the train station, seeing off Tom, a young physicist entering the army, he said, If you should fall into hand-to-hand combat, you must give yourself up to be slaughtered.

Wittgenstein gave this order as if to say,
You must not let yourself fall below this point
, the natural assumption being that this was the stance Wittgenstein himself had taken in the last war. Unable to break from Wittgenstein's gaze, Tom nodded that he would do as his mentor advised. Tom had been instrumental in helping him settle Francis's affairs — especially in handling Francis's mother, who had long resented how Wittgenstein had taken over her son's life. Mrs. Skinner had hoped that Francis would be a doctor or at least a professor of philosophy, not some man's shadow. But Wittgenstein, knowing Francis's intense shyness and nervousness, had urged him not to squander himself in the wasteland of philosophy. Instead, he advised him to take up something decent and peaceful and manual. So the gifted prize boy — the wrangler and winner of scholarships — had taken up auto mechanics, thereby scotching the brilliant career that his mother had planned. It was a tense funeral.

Tom was another of these brilliant, tongue-tied, mother-tied boys. Handsome Tom standing on the platform with the enormous bags his mother had bought him, bags bristling with silly snaps and zippered compartments that he would certainly never use. Guileless Tom, so mild and loving, with the bewitching widow's peak and dark doe's eyes. What would they ever do with him in the army, this lollygagger with the soft heart? Tom couldn't even pass a worm on the sidewalk without stopping to carry it to safety.

Walking home later, depressed, Wittgenstein wondered why he had even given Tom his advice. Surely, Tom would be killed in hand-to-hand fighting — the notion that he would defend himself was almost ludicrous. But then Wittgenstein, now the careful reader of Freud, realized that this dictate was not for Tom but for himself. What he was really telling himself was to accept Tom's fate, so like that of the worm wriggling on the hot sidewalk after a rain.

* * *

Not long after Tom's departure for the war, Wittgenstein took an indefinite leave of absence from Cambridge and went to London, where he first worked for more than a year on the wards of Guy's Hospital, then for a doctor in the War Ministry.

While working for the doctor, Wittgenstein used his engineering and mathematical expertise to design a laboratory experiment that could simulate and measure the effects of shock. To this end, Wittgenstein, aided by an electrical engineer, designed and built a machine that registered pulse and respiration by means of two steel styluses that zigged and zagged across a roll of calibrated graph paper, charting the two functions in black and red ink. Using himself as a test subject, Wittgenstein conducted many shock experiments from 1942 through 1944. At first he did this by subjecting himself to various physical and mental exertions, but later he was able to inject greater realism in these experiments when he learned that Tom had succumbed to amoebic dysentery in Burma, and that another young friend had been blown up in Antwerp when a German V-1 missile struck the magazine of his docked cruiser. And then close on the heels of this came a letter from Gretl saying that Mining had died in her sleep in their Central Park West apartment.