The World as I Found It (43 page)

Ho! cried Moore, cupping his hands over his mouth as the thudding boat eased into the slip. Don't you look fit!

Much as he tried to appear hearty and cheerful, Moore was sorely relieved to be getting off this rust bucket after four rough days. From the moment he stepped on the dock, Moore was pouring out his woes, beginning with the day he spent seasick in his berth, clutching the swill pail the mate had tucked in beside him. Scratching, Moore was saying:

And we had the most murderous mosquitoes. Droves of them. And rain. Thick black sheets of it —
for two days
! I didn't know you could get seasick on a fjord; I never dreamt it was possible. As an afterthought, Moore shook Wittgenstein's hand.

But you brought with you so much, said Wittgenstein later, when he saw Moore's mound of luggage assembled on the dock. Never will we get this all up the mountain.

Well, huffed Moore, rocking on his heels. I've read that you have no idea up north, what with the vicissitudes of weather.

I assure you, you will have enough, said Wittgenstein a bit ominously. Some of it we must leave. It is too late to set out today. Tomorrow, yes. Tonight, I have made for us reservations at the Hotel Flaam.

Oh,
good
, said Moore, who frankly was hoping they might spend three or four days more in this pretty town. And then, as they were going to their hotel, Moore dropped a broad hint.

So wearying, travel. I had forgotten.

Wittgenstein shook his head noncommittally.

In a flurry, Moore continued, Yes, it takes a while to settle in. A new country and all. And about mail? Do you suppose a letter to Dorothy would get back to her in
one week's time?

Impossible. Two weeks, perhaps.

Two weeks!
Oh, but she'll be very worried. Then Moore had another alarming thought: And our mail?

A shrug. They will hold it here for us.

You mean we shall get
nothing
?

Attempting to strike a more hopeful note, Wittgenstein said, If we ride in, we will get it, yes.

Oh. Moore looked at him hopefully. It's not too terribly far, then?

Fifteen kilometers. Wittgenstein's eyes rolled up into his head. In the mountains it is hard to tell.

Oh, well, on horseback, scoffed Moore, without the faintest idea what that meant. So it's not too far.

Over mountains it is far. Wittgenstein nodded. Without stops, nine, ten hours at least.

Oh, said Moore nonchalantly. But inwardly he said,
Good heavens!

This wasn't the holiday Moore had planned, not at all. Not that he hadn't tried to wriggle out of it; the wretched truth was, he was trapped.

Originally, Moore and Pinsent were to have made the journey together, but then Moore saw he would have to leave earlier than they'd planned, while Pinsent reluctantly decided to leave later as a concession to his mother, who had come down with a serious case of bronchitis. As it turned out, Moore and Pinsent would pass in Bergen, where they planned to meet one night for a changing of the guard, as Moore put it.

But this was a fortnight away, and Moore first had some business to transact. As a favor to Russell — now at Harvard delivering his new lecture series, Our Knowledge of the External World — Moore had agreed to take down Wittgenstein's dictated ideas, the culmination of his labors for the past year.

But can't he transcribe his
own
ideas? Moore had asked when Russell first approached him about it. I rather envisioned it as a holiday.

Smiling, Russell tried to formulate an answer, then gave up.

No, said Russell with a dry smile. Wittgenstein can't transcribe his own ideas. That, you see, would be
writing
.

But you said he keeps a notebook. Moore was beginning to color. He can't copy it out?

Russell's smile slithered. Well, clearly he can't. Call it anxiety, if you like — you know what a perfectionist he is. He is not ready to publish, not even near, but fortunately he finds speech acceptable — easier, I suppose, to repudiate. I've tried letters, but it's tortuous. No matter what he says, it changes — the ground is constantly shifting under your feet. But really, emphasized Russell, he's quite enthusiastic about the idea of dictating. And obviously you are, shall we say, the perfect medium. You're a trained mind, as opposed to a mere stenographer, and you're — well, basically neutral on the subject. Certainly less suspect than I am, anyway.

Then Moore started squirming. Oh, I don't know, he said, thoughtfully touching the tip of his nose. I'd sooner snatch bait from a trap. After another moment's loss, Moore recovered enough to say, But I'm afraid I still don't understand. Why can't you go yourself?

Well, I would very much
like
to, said Russell, hovering himself for a moment. But you see it will be at least January before I can, what with this American excursion. And by then Wittgenstein may not agree. And besides, he said, brightening — and here was the clincher — Pinsent will be there with you, won't he?

Moore still could not believe he had been stupid enough to agree to it — especially without Pinsent there as a buffer. Already, Moore felt weary, appearing to believe — to Wittgenstein's supreme irritation — that he had undergone a terrific ordeal. Finally, after a drab supper that first night, Moore asked Wittgenstein if they might stay a while longer at the Flaam. Three or four days more, perhaps? Curled around his pipe, with a humbled look, he confessed, I would enjoy a little, em,
transitional
civilization. I've got blisters from these new boots. And as for a
horse
, well, frankly, my piles have been acting up. Moore stuffed his pipe drearily. I suppose you must think I'm a bit of a duffer.

Straining to be conciliatory, Wittgenstein said, A few more days we can wait if you like.

Moore brightened. You wouldn't mind? Actually, I thought you could do your dictating here.

We
could
, said Wittgenstein dubiously.

Several days? Moore pressed, hopeful. You think your dictating may take that long?

Wittgenstein grew tense. I do not know. I have no idea. I am unhappy with the whole scheme.

Moore's spruce chair gave a crack. But Russell said you were quite keen on it.

Anxious
to part with my thoughts? Wittgenstein was stunned. Not
anxious
, no.

And not even very willing, it seemed to Moore: tenacious was the word for it. Over two tense days, with Moore acting as midwife, Wittgenstein grudgingly brought forth a year's worth of thinking.

Wittgenstein said, for one, that so-called logical properties
show
the logical properties of language and therefore the universe, but they
say
nothing. He said that in philosophy there are no deductions; that philosophy is purely descriptive. Distrust of grammar, he said, is the first prerequisite for philosophizing. But the swipes he took at Russell led Moore to ask slyly if the second prerequisite wasn't distrust of Russell.

On the contrary, said Wittgenstein acerbically. Distrust of oneself is second. Russell is third. Then comes you, Moore.

Such moments of levity were few. Wittgenstein's prickliness wore on Moore. No sooner would Moore read something back, it seemed, than Wittgenstein would correct him. If Moore interrupted to ask a question, he'd be met with impatience; and if Moore raised an objection, or required too much clarification, Wittgenstein would jump up, shouting:

This is a stupid idea! Idiotic! I hate it, I hate it!

Don't rage at me! Shaking the stem of his pipe. This wasn't my idea.

Rot! Everything I say is
rot
!

Listen
, Moore would say sternly. Shall we proceed with this or not?

Whatever do you mean? A look of shock as Wittgenstein motioned him down with his hand. Now, as I
said
…

By the time they finished three days later, they were both sour and exhausted. Moore felt as if somebody had been punching him in the ribs. But still, he was pleased with the results, even if he felt, as he wrote Dorothy, that he had played midwife to a rhinoceros.

Wittgenstein was not so pleased, however. The dictator was sick. The next day as they loaded the horses, he was gloomy and silent, feeling that he had offered his treasures to a thief.

With this chore over, Wittgenstein was more anxious than ever to return to the hut he had just built. Manual labor and solitude had been his cure that spring, and it was what he needed now. What he did not need was a guest.

* * *

Oddly enough, the blessing Wittgenstein had felt after his father's death had remained with him longer than he'd expected. But it had crumpled under the supreme test — his obligatory visit home to Vienna at Christmas. Like Pinsent, Wittgenstein found himself having to contend with his widowed mother's loneliness and endless worries about him, her worsening health and complaints. True to form, there had been yet another young lady for him to meet — another failure. And then from all quarters came the inevitable questions about why he insisted on leading this hermit's existence away from his family, in the middle of nowhere.

There was also the matter of money — not the lack of money but the harrowing abundance of it heaping up, and with it hectoring solicitors, trusts and endless papers to sign. There was no avoiding it now. It was not his father's money, or even his family's money. No, it was
his
money, mounting, compounding, stock and dividend money with steel jaws to trap him if he wasn't careful.

From all this he had fled, leaving Vienna in mid-January. Once back in Norway, he was better. It was nice to burrow in under the relentless winter — short gasps of daylight followed by endless nights, pulsing with the gaseous whorls of the borealis. Across virgin snows, in applecracking cold, he learned to snowshoe and ski. Several times, he was even seen in church.

His was not a hermit's existence. He was staying in the home of the town postmaster, along with his wife and four children. The postmaster was amazed at the quantity of important-looking mail the boarder received, and it quickly became known that the Austrian was a man of means who struck a bargain without haggling as he went about buying tools and supplies for the spring.

The postmaster's wife, thickset but supple, with gorgeous graying blond hair, saw all this and more in her boarder. She spoke some German and was in the process of teaching him Norwegian. Sitting across from him in a chair, tutoring him, she was like a mother bird stuffing new phrases down his hungry gullet, saying Det er virkeligsnilt av Dem …
Det-er-virkelig-snilt-av-Dem
… Leaning closer then, she would clarify the grammar, show him the proper position of the tongue, clucking and squirming with delight as he struggled to improve his pronunciation.

Norwegian he acquired with remarkable ease; it was his tutor's more subtle tongue that was slow to discern. But then one day, hearing her full skirts swish behind him, he looked down to see her plump hand sluice through the fold between his shirt buttons. When he grasped her hand, she mistook it for passion, emitting a low midwinter moan. How fearful he found her, bristling with an aurora of sticky, staticky sex. His Norwegian was not bad; he made himself understood. Shamed and furious, seeing to her disbelief that he had nothing for her, the postmaster's wife gave him a real Norwegian lesson then — it was a tongue lashing he would be months getting over. What was wrong with him? she asked. He did not go to the socials that made these winters bearable. He did not talk to the young ladies. Why do you withhold yourself? she asked. For whom? For what?

Sunk in his room later, unable to answer any of her questions, he felt only his own shameful incapacity and contradiction. Much as he wanted to leave, he saw he must stay, since to leave in midwinter would only have invited suspicions. For two tense months he remained there. Looming and unavoidable, smoldering still, the wife made him suffer for having spurned her. At times, he thought he could almost smell her, musty as a sickroom quilt in need of airing.

Spring had saved him. It was a mighty, thunderous spring, which came first with a dripping, then with a roaring and a crashing of ice as roofs and boughs shook loose their burdens. Then in April, with a squeaking and groaning like a nail being wrenched from a board, the ice-bound lakes broke open, the white-hot ice booming and splitting like the surface of a vast, aboriginal egg.

Later that month, driving a heavily loaded sledge drawn by a bay plow horse named Oskar, Wittgenstein set off for the land he had bought the previous fall. Waterfalls unfroze and crashed down the mountainsides. Under that concerted sun, hardy wildflowers popped up through the melting snow, and the lakes broke clear, flashing up with a hard, blue radiance. With a smack of leather and tinkle of harness chains, Oskar swung a head the size of a woodstove, his flanks and shoulders quivering to dislodge the first black flies. Wittgenstein cracked the reins and up the hill they climbed, the wet, dark earth ripping and squirting out under the sledge's runners with the smell of ripe cheese.

With a neighbor named Nordstrøm and his two sons, Wittgenstein had the foundation dug by the time the first load of lumber arrived on the fjord a few miles below. For two brutal months he drove himself. It took those weeks of hard physical labor just to break his will's dark hold, his pride still welted with the wife's words. But the work redeemed him, his fears melting again in the mountain plenum. In fact, he was quite good until Moore arrived — in his mind, it was Moore's visit that spoiled things. Having surrendered his ideas to Moore, Wittgenstein felt denuded, without an ounce of fat to get him through this next long winter.

Wittgenstein knew, at heart, that this wasn't Moore's fault. But still he resented Moore's intruding presence, and he was sick of Moore's complaints. As they rode out to the hut, Moore's piles throbbed so badly that he hardly knew whether to walk or ride, and so the ten-hour trip stretched into twelve. By the time they arrived, Moore was done in. Spotting the “necessary house,” Moore eased himself down from the saddle and took off with that delicate, bowlegged dance step — the green apple two-step, some call it.