The World as I Found It (38 page)

What!
he demanded. I hate your squeamishness. What is it?

She was embarrassed to say, but with prodding she came clean, saying that it wasn't just squeamishness. It was his breath.

He was thunderstruck. My
breath?
Why did you never tell me?

Ottoline smoothed his neck. I didn't want to hurt your feelings. Besides, she hedged, it wasn't always so bad.

He chewed up one of her mints, then beckoned her to him.

Smell your breath?
Ottoline recoiled in horror. I'd rather kiss you!

Then kiss me, damn it!

She kissed him, then drew away, smirking.

No better? Damn! Must be the pipe, don't you think? Well, I shall see the dentist while you're away — I promise.

For all her kindnesses, Ottoline was never kinder than when she was leaving. Then she would revert to her Florence Nightingale self, valiantly striving to put him back together. Still, she could not undo the mark of her leaving — an extravagant kiss, then the rap of her sharp heels down that narrow hallway reeking of boiled mutton. Through the window, Russell would watch her wide plumed hat undulating as she sailed down Sooty Lane past ragged, scowling children and the shrill row house women who called after her:
Will yer look at 'er! Miss Ta-ta! ' Ey, yer Majesty!

And later, fuming, Russell would be driven down the same public road, with the harpies throwing out their arms, cackling. '
Ere we are, Princey. Throw us a kiss, love! Awwww…

Standing on the platform later, Russell would close his eyes as the shrieking 6:05 enveloped him in pulverizing darkness, dragging and mashing him before he awoke with a shudder, wreathed in steam, and quietly boarded. Second-class carriage — still pinched these days, what with the continuing drain of Alys. Traveling home, he would already be writing his next letter to Ottoline, another relentless analysis of what was wrong between them. And each trip, under the radiant darkness on a hill far out in the country, near Wenden, he would see a ruined stone cottage. Beside the cottage, dark as a shadow, was a fir tree. Standing like an upraised palm, it seemed to beckon or warn him, and with twisted mouth, he would avert his face, feeling, without a clue why, that he would suddenly start weeping.

Then Ottoline left for the spa in Lausanne, where, in addition to the waters, she was given glasses of whole cow's milk cut with brewer's yeast and radium. “I now know why they call it radium,” she wrote. With a draught of this heavenly cocktail, she said, she felt like an icon of the Virgin surrounded by rays of hammered gold, her hidden passion. Open to receive were her aching arms — open as if, like the Blessèd
Vierge
, she had dropped the babe. But, oh, so melting she felt as she watched him fall helplessly to earth, poor dear. (She would pray for him.) “Dearest Bertie,” she wrote, “if only you could see the world from up here.” (
I wasn't invited!
) “If only you could fling away the world with its dross and foolish cares.” (
I'm busy and have no money!
) “If only for once, my love, you could see inside my mind.” (
Idle bitch! Give me a lamp!)

Oh, they were torture for him, these psalms that wandered even more than Ottoline's usual letters. In them, she was always reproaching herself for being a basically ignorant woman, while yet insisting, as if something had been denied her, that she had a poet's feel for the voluptuousness of earth. Like a window, she had opened herself to the spirit, she said. Like a radiant window, she prayed that he, too, would open himself to it and quit his atheistic thinking. Really, her letter would continue, it was the most gorgeous summer, such a wonderful age was upon us. And Philip was such a dear, so understanding and undemanding, such a deeply spiritual man, actually. With Philip her mind was free, never weighed like dead fish on a scale. Through the swashing, radiant grass, they would walk down the mountainsides looking for purple gentians, the most intense of flowers, with deep, dark purple cups that reminded her of Christ's passion. And looking down, she saw her mind was melting like the snowcaps. Like freshets, her happy tears were pouring down the valleys as a herdsman blew his alpenhorn. The cows were coming home.

Then toward the second week, she met a Dr. Vittoz, who changed her life utterly and absolutely. For Dr. Vittoz, she kept a diary in which she was to practice eliminating unnecessary letters from words and unnecessary words from sentences, and finally whole paragraphs filled with unnecessary fears and habits of mind that for years had plagued her. By her third week, Ottoline was shedding whole books of fear. And such joyful tears she shed — as through a cloud spent of all thunder, they sieved clear through her. Really, she advised, he ought to try eliminating, ought to try jettisoning all the weight of intellect that only bogged him down and tortured his soul. Really, she said, he ought to try. It was so very lovely to forget — just to gaze out where the snow rested on the mountains and the fat cattle stood knee deep in the grassy meadows. She felt as she did when she was pregnant, full to the paps, like an enormous bulb germinating. It was an adventure to change, and she was changing ever so rapidly — even Dr. Vittoz said so. There were these young girls who danced for them at night in their dirndls, with their hair newly shorn and eyes so impossibly bright. They made her feel old, but then Ottoline eliminated that as well, writing
old
, then
ol
, then,
o
…

By the third week she was sure of it: a momentous change was upon the world. There were so many of them up there, Swiss and German, English and French, Italians, Russians, even a Lithuanian. At night they spoke of outbreaks of influenza and said alarming things about money and politics that she did not understand, nor want to. And then one night they made a pact that if ever the world collapsed under a disaster or war, they would come to Lausanne with Dr. Vittoz, where they would work with their eliminating books, washing away dreadnoughts and greed, money and nationalities, so that all the world could partake of this eternal peace and blessèdness. She met so very many people. Among the guests there was a priest and an industrialist, a physicist and his wife. There was even a Hindu, who had given her the Bhagavad-Gita to read. But the Hindu book was so violent in places, like the Old Testament or mythology — why was it, she wrote, that the ancients were so tainted with thoughts of bloodshed and violence, with gods always smiting and breaking into different forms, appearing as burning bushes, swans and such? That was not her religion.

She said she also met an Italian painter — a
Futurist
, he called himself, Vorno was his name. Fearfully beautiful, he was, powerful and dark, with a wolflike face and bad teeth. Every day, recklessly, he would race his bicycle down the mountainside, heedless of sudden turns, animals and drays, people. Vorno said the Futurists gloried in danger, speed and struggle; they loved brutal locomotives, aeroplanes and powerful automobiles spitting flames. Progress, Vorno said, was the sacred economy of life, forever destroying for the sake of onwardness. Yes, Vorno said, he and his comrades were anarchists and murderers, not toothless lap dogs, like these English painters painting nudes and bottles for the licentious rich. Worse were the French — except for Braque, he despised them, too. Sack the museums! Torch the past! Vorno said the human body must be painted in motion — must be shown streaked with savage force lines, like the hideous, blood-streaked face of an Indian warrior.

The other guests thought Vorno would break his neck as he hurtled down the mountain roads,
whisk whisk
in the turns, his head inclined over the bars like a battering ram. Someone said it was a terminal illness that made him so reckless, but Ottoline thought it was his mind. Vorno took the waters, but he sneered at their eliminating. Throw down these idle worries! Rise up and murder the old world! Embrace the evernewness of high-production machines and factories! War was the world's hygiene! War, Vorno predicted, was itself a ferociously beautiful machine, one that would propel mankind into revolutions more beautiful than
The Victory at Samothrace
!

Vorno chilled them, he did. They were all much relieved when he left after a row. It was a scandal, Ottoline said. Missing billfolds, and one guest with both eyes blackened and a fractured skull. Unpaid bills and Vorno's room a shambles, the walls painted with terrible war engines and dynamos and the legend VICTOIRE. The police were into it now. There were even whispers about the wife of the man with blackened eyes — apparently, she was but one of the women he had had, spitting them out, one man said, as a wolf does bloody hen feathers.

With Vorno gone, the guests returned, like atoning monks, to their eliminating, a process that Dr. Vittoz likened to untying the knots they spent their whole lives tangling. Still, looking down from her mountain-top, beholding the world with its fragile lights, Ottoline was tormented by the way her nocturnal mind would busily reknit and knot what she had spent days unraveling. Dr. Vittoz assured her that this was natural. This mischief would pass, he promised. Nevertheless, Ottoline spent much of the night praying, fearful of this beauty that was upon them.

Oh, it made Russell ill, this spirit muck and eliminating. But what Russell most feared was that Ottoline would eliminate
him
.

Alone and adrift, Russell was then writing Our Knowledge of the External World, a series of lectures he was to deliver at Harvard the following summer. His theory of judgment was central to this unifying effort, but his theory, like his confidence, was broken, and his work took another dive.

Wittgenstein's letters didn't help matters. Just prior to Ottoline's departure, Wittgenstein had finally sent word about his father, saying that he would not survive the summer. Wittgenstein continued:

Russell had replied with a sympathetic letter, but still he hadn't been able to resist asking Wittgenstein if he might better explain his objections to his theory of judgment. Wittgenstein found this imposition enough; Russell did not help matters by adding that Wittgenstein's criticisms had “paralysed” him.

Wittgenstein complied with Russell's request, but his answer was not much help: terse to the point of being telegraphic, he largely repeated his objections, capping them off with what seemed an even more draconian judgment:

This was no help. It was an insult. Immediately, Russell sent Wittgenstein another letter — this one distinctly irritable in tone — requesting additional details, or at least some context. Wittgenstein replied:

Evidently, Wittgenstein regretted his harshness. The next day he sent Russell a second letter:

Russell was still thinking of how to respond to this letter when another arrived: