The World as I Found It (39 page)

* * *

Not long before this time, Russell had finally seen a dentist about his halitosis. Bibbed and reclining in the wooden chair, he closed his eyes as rotund Mr. Geach focused the brilliant dial fixed to his forehead, then probed Russell's gums with a fat finger.

There we are … Em — hold there, please.
Hold
—

Peering down, with the air whistling through his hairy nostrils, Geach registered a look of surprise, then disappeared into the other room and returned with a medical book.

Russell took a sip of the bile-colored antiseptic on the stand beside him, spat into the steel bowl and quipped, Is it that bad? He looked up anxiously but only got a finger in the mouth.
Geeeth!
he lisped.
Whahtth ithh issht?

The dentist exhaled loudly. You'll want a second opinion. You must understand that I'm not at all expert in this.

Russell sat up in the chair. Expert in what?

I see several lesions on your gum. Geach steeled himself, then said it. It's possible you have a cancer.

Russell lapsed back in disgust.

Remember, cautioned Geach,
I'm not sure
…

But Russell wasn't even listening. He thought, If it's cancer, I'll throw myself under a train.

One specialist said possibly cancer and sent him to a second specialist, who said quite possibly. Both said it was still too early to tell. The second did remove the lesions, though, then gave his gums a thorough scraping that he thought would end his halitosis. As for the rest, they'd have to see how his gums healed. Eight weeks would surely tell the story.

As a boy, Russell had lost his Uncle Mortimer to mouth and throat cancer. Russell could still see his uncle with a handkerchief, dabbing the ooze that issued like tobacco juice from the red ulcerations on his seared lower lip. Russell promised himself a quick dive under a train before it came to that. Gone in a roaring.

In the meantime, he told no one about the news, not even Ottoline, grimly deciding to hug it close to him, for shame, for pleasure. He could not die, not really. For all his fantasies of death, he still didn't believe he could part from this life, or it from him. Death, rather, was an idea he could explore in much the way his tongue anxiously probed this sore on his gum, rueful and smarting with its presence, like a sweet on a carious tooth. And maybe it
was
better he quit the field now, Russell thought. He knew what Wittgenstein was saying between the lines. Likely his best work was behind him. Well, if so, he thought, he must make room for the younger generation. Wittgenstein could take his place; Russell would still have his reputation. As for his darker thoughts, these, too, he stanched with fantasies of grief-stricken Ottoline, the line of mourners and the lengthy obituaries.

The happy narcissism of death. For days Russell was in a sort of delirium, half anxious, half rapturous with the presence of this death, which lay against his life like a shadow against a hill. He could indulge himself now. He wrote brave, romantic couplets and read the life of Mozart. For the first time in years, he even allowed himself to routinely do the things that he supposed ordinary people do, dining out, going to concerts and taking long rides on his bicycle.

One day he even decided he would get pleasantly tight. Bringing three bottles of wine with him, he went down to the Cam and took out a punt. Ah, the tang of dry, tart wine in the hot, hot sun! The sluggish water was cool. He let his wrist trail in it as he drifted along under the willows fluttering with their tentative green. With each sip, sweat sprang to his skin, flashing cool then hot with the wind's refrain.

Unused to drink in any quantity, he first thought himself crafty, but within an hour he was freely grinning as he rammed one punt, then accidentally splashed a lady with his pole while valiantly fending off a second collision. Oh, he was
sorry
! he cried to the spattered woman and the irate gentleman with her. Percolating his p's as he blathered back, P-p-pardon me! … Is the laaady all —
fine?

Get off the water, you drunken idiot!

As he raised his arms to plead forgiveness, it struck him as funny. He laughed in the man's face and stumbled back, nearly capsizing as he sat with a splat in the dirty bilge water. The day declined. Bottoming the third bottle, he heard the twang of a guitar, then saw a boating party, young swains in cream whites and their young ladies. He stood and, rocking, waved farewell to that, too. Wan and nostalgic, he then lay back across the seat, noticing his feet spreadeagled before him, pointing as they would point for an eternity, useless and skewed. Looking up then, he saw a girl peering down at him from the arched stone bridge, smiling as the sun fanned through her hair. For a moment, he imagined her flame-red hair spreading in strands across his face, and then he saw himself pulling her open mouth to his. But then this image curdled; and, inserting his finger under his lip, he probed that rawness, stunned by the thought of a wild, weedlike growth that would clog his head and choke off his thoughts, even his immortal thoughts! Staring down his half-insensible length, scratching the shriveled nub between his legs, he felt like Gulliver tied by the threads of Lilliputians, dazzled, as blackbirds twittered overhead in a whir of wings …

Back at his rooms he fell heavily to sleep, then awoke in stuffy darkness, hung over, thirsty and confused. It took him an hour to wash, eat, shave and settle himself. Shaky, penitent, he then opened Ottoline's latest letter. More bad news. She was prolonging her stay in Lausanne. Another week eliminating.

Enough!
Sitting down, Russell dashed off a letter chiding her for frivolousness and selfishness and demanding that she come home. For three scathing pages he continued before a milder, more speculative tone crept in — a foreign voice, older and wiser than his own. By the fourth page, Russell realized he wasn't even writing to Ottoline, he was writing to Wittgenstein. But he wasn't really writing, he was speaking, and the person he was addressing wasn't quite Wittgenstein, nor was he quite Russell. Rather, he was an older, haunted man speaking to a brilliant younger man — speaking in the manner of a Socratic dialogue.

Russell hardly dared breathe for fear it would end. But it didn't end; it only became more urgent. For twenty pages the older man answered the younger man's questions and objections, all the while growing more confused.

With burning eyes, Russell followed the curls of his scratching pen until three
A.M.
, whereupon he fell heavily to sleep. But again at seven, as if jabbed by a current, he awoke and returned to his desk, watching as the phantom hand picked up the pen and resumed writing, transcribing this inner voice.

His bed maker, Mrs. Phelps, was a motherly sort who fussed over him and the other bachelor dons. He usually chatted with her when she arrived, but that morning he dashed back to his desk, still furiously scribbling as she set to work, beating air into his pillows and sweeping.

Why, Mr. Russell! she gasped the next morning when the door opened. 'Ave you been at work all this time?

Paper littered the floor. Hunted, his eyes. Yes! he cried. And, by God, it's good, good,
good
! Look at this! Eighty … eighty-five …
ninety-five
pages since yesterday!

Well, sir, she allowed, surveying the disarray. That's all very nice, but you ought to sleep, you should. Truthfully, you do look a bit pale and shaky, sir. 'Ave you eaten?

Have I eaten?
he asked, uprooting his hair. Who can think of food at a time like this!

Just the same, sir, I'm going to send Mr. Prichert's boy to fetch you something.

Yes, do that, he said distractedly, scrawling another line. And pipe tobacco, please. He pushed some change into her hand. And tea and milk, Mrs. Phelps — and crackers. And
thank you
! God, look at this, will you? I've never had such a run, never!

By the third day, it had grown into a full-blown novel called
The Perplexities of John Forstice
. Forstice, the protagonist, had grown younger and handsomer than the old man who began the dialogues. Nearing forty, prematurely gray and unmarried, Forstice was now a famous physicist, an atheist and freethinker known for his cynicism and cool brilliance.

But then Forstice takes as his student Thomas Graf, a pure, clear-thinking German who debunks Forstice's theory of electrogravitation, then runs off to Norway, leaving his teacher on the Jobian dungheap, plagued by doubts about physics, human progress, himself. Yet here Russell wondered: Was the story perhaps too familiar and self-indulgent, too centered on Forstice? All right, thought Russell, let the outer world mirror Forstice's feverish state. Forstice must have conflict — a war, then, something biblical! And let's, while we're at it, make Forstice more vulnerable and human, not such a fire-breathing atheist. We'll make him, say, a Quaker and man of peace, a sort of Emersonian believer in human progress and the transcendental wholeness of nature.
More!
ordered the Author.
The book must have even more conflict, something splendidly mechanical and Wellsian
. That's it! thought Russell, who was, as it were, the Author's secretary. Nature betrays Forstice! Nature plants a bomb. And not just a bomb but a gravitational bomb developed from the one theory that Graf hasn't savaged — a bomb that can destroy ships and harbors!
Oh, go on
, said the insatiable Author, throwing caution to the wind.
Let the bomb destroy whole cities!

Russell could hardly stoop to pick up all the baubles popping from his teeming brain. Serve up one war. And one plague. And let's put Forstice in a refuge, a mountain sanitarium or something. Right! He meets a nun, a tall, slender nun named Sister Catherine, who eats peppermints and suffers migraines. And let her also be suffering a spiritual crisis, what with the plague and God being such a beast, letting the world ride to ruin. On the verge of a breakdown, she's taking radium and carrying on with some therapeutic regime called — what? Elimination? No, no, blot that, old boy, we must protect the innocent. All right, then — Subtraction!

But it must be larger
, the Author insisted. More characters, then! One Futurist. And a window-breaking feminist and a deranged misogynist like Strindberg. And a Madame Blavatsky and a Kiplingesque imperialist with a little brown Indian boy who calls him
sahib. More!
cried the indefatigable Author. Very well, then. A Prussian militarist and a deposed monarch, an anarchist, a plutocrat and a socialist named Shifsky.

All right, old boy, Russell cackled to himself. The gluepot is simmering! Riots outside the sanitarium gates. London in flames. Swarming like ants across blackened plains, armies leave a tide of plagues, starvation and burning heaps of dead. And all the while in their mountain nest the characters are talking, talking,
talking. But wait!
cried the Author.
What happened to Graf? That's it!
said the Author.
Graf has the antigravity secret that can stop the gravity bombs
.

It was his Ecclesiastes, his
Decameron
and
Masque of the Red Death
. Would Russell ever forget the feeling when, twenty-three days later, he penned that last, poignant paragraph? All his authorial wishes had been fulfilled. There was even a happy ending to ensure snappy sales. Graf had appeared with his antigravity formula, thereby ending the war. Forstice, meanwhile, had undertaken a whole new generation of theories that promised to change the course of physics. As for Sister Catherine, she had gotten off her priedieu and was now Catherine Belusys again. She had stopped her vain subtracting and had begun adding — yes, she had torn off her musty habit and become
Mrs. John Forstice
. Capping off those last pages of Forstice's internal soliloquy, Russell wrote:

It was too perfect. Sitting in his drawers, with a ravished look of locusts and honey, Russell closed his eyes as grateful tears streamed down his face. He felt like a cathedral filled with music, balanced, voluminous, ringing. Surely, this was the best he'd ever written, perhaps even his swan song. Promising himself not to look at it for at least a month, he tucked the manuscript in a drawer, then went out to walk into the early coolness.

Good morning!
he said somewhat impertinently to an old lady, who shot him a dirty look in return. He was not deterred. Buying a paper from the stumpy paperman, normally a three-second transaction, he paused to gab, then smiled at two children, who darted away, staring at their feet. Things ordinarily invisible to him — tradesmen, shopkeepers, idlers — all were transformed by his heroic act of imagination.
Hello! Fine day!
Splendid in his new spiritual feathers, the strutting author hailed them all, high or low, bent or straight, smiling with such intense beneficence that their first impulse was to flee.

* * *

Ottoline returned in late August, utterly transformed, to hear her tell it. But over the next weeks, her new life unraveled just as surely as Russell's own postcompletion euphoria did.

His philosophical work resumed and foundered, resumed again. Over the next months, he finished
Our Knowledge of the External World
, but he finished it because he was a professional — that is, because it was expected and not because he thought it was adequate. Harder still, he could not even say how the work might be remedied, except somehow to summon that lapsed sense of conviction. Wittgenstein had such conviction, that was what hurt. Russell could feel it in Wittgenstein's letters from Norway, where it seemed something incalculable was happening.