The World as I Found It (64 page)

The man with the cane was Wittgenstein, and Moore and Dorothy were meeting him at Cambridge Station to take the train to Petersfield, on the South Downs, where Russell and his wife, Dora, lived with their two children at Beacon Hill, the progressive children's school they had started four years before. It would be a reunion of sorts, but it wasn't a social visit. The next day, at Russell's, Wittgenstein was to stand for his doctorate, with Moore and Russell as his examiners.

It had been a good two years at least since Moore had seen Russell, and probably ten years since Russell had seen Wittgenstein; and it had been at least seventeen years since the three of them had been together. The prospect of examining Wittgenstein at this
Viva
was reason enough for Moore to be uneasy, but he had others, one being the perhaps volatile chemistry among the three of them, and another being Russell, who for him was still persona non grata. Ever since their row during the war, when Russell had accused Moore of not understanding Wittgenstein's work, Moore and Russell had studiously avoided each other. Moore guessed he had not seen Russell more than a handful of times during those years, and then typically in some unavoidable public context. A few bland pleasantries and he and Russell would quickly move on. They had little to say to each other.

Still bitter about his expulsion from Cambridge during the war, Russell had also been keeping his distance from Trinity. It was with deep reluctance, then, and in a purely official capacity, that Moore wrote to Russell asking if he would examine Wittgenstein for his doctorate. To Moore's surprise, Russell agreed, though he said that, because of commitments at his school, they would have to conduct the
Viva
at Beacon Hill. Russell did add that Moore and Wittgenstein — and Dorothy, too — were most welcome to stay there. While not keen on the prospect of spending two or three days with Russell, much less a horde of children, Moore had to admit this was an exceedingly decent offer. Russell was under no obligation to examine Wittgenstein, nor at this point was Russell on especially good terms — or really on any terms — with Wittgenstein. This, Moore figured, was largely a result of frictions brought on by the book Wittgenstein had published after the war, though certainly there were other factors, not the least of them being time and distance.

Wittgenstein was another story. The war, it was said, had unmoored him. Other than his stint in the Italian prison camp, no one knew exactly what had happened to him, but for years word had it that he was slightly “off.” Moore discounted most of these rumors, but he had heard from fairly reliable second- and thirdhand sources that Wittgenstein had become quite religious. Russell was doubtless the source of these stories, and Moore, knowing Russell's tendency toward exaggeration and his antipathy to religion, took them with a grain of salt. Still, Russell had been the first and, for many years, the only one from Cambridge to have seen Wittgenstein after the war, when they met in The Hague in 1919 to discuss Wittgenstein's manuscript. From what Moore gathered, it had been a tense and difficult meeting. Apparently, Russell thought Wittgenstein was suffering from nervous exhaustion, and Wittgenstein was typically impatient with Russell's questions about his manuscript — questions whose answers, to
him
at least, seemed obvious. According to Russell, Wittgenstein said he had undergone some sort of mysterious conversion. But then so, in a sense, had Russell, with his now outspoken sexual views and aggressive socialism. Certainly Wittgenstein must have disapproved of Russell's politics and anti-Christian views, but then so did a good many other people. A few months after meeting with Wittgenstein in The Hague, Russell traveled to Russia to meet Lenin and see firsthand the fruits of the Russian Revolution. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, was apparently continuing to undergo some kind of internal revolution. It was all very murky, but Moore did know that, sometime prior to this meeting with Russell, Wittgenstein had given up his quite sizable fortune, apparently in the Tolstoyan belief that money was evil, or something to that effect. Moore knew this because he remembered hearing that Wittgenstein was so poor that he could not pay his train ticket to The Hague. Russell had to pay his passage, taking, at Wittgenstein's insistence, some expensive furniture that Wittgenstein had left in England before the war.

The manuscript of Wittgenstein's book had been passed around Cambridge. Moore had read and admired the book; in an appreciative letter to Wittgenstein around this time, Moore had even suggested a title for it. Moore had a poor recollection of dates and chronology, but it seemed to him that some time after his meeting with Russell, Wittgenstein renounced philosophy. The story got murky here as well, but apparently the decision was partly precipitated by Wittgenstein's disgust with his book, which had been published after much difficulty and then only after Russell had promised the publisher that he would write an introduction to it. As promised, Russell wrote his introduction. Moore thought it was a rather good introduction, but evidently Wittgenstein felt it was completely wrong and misleading — so misleading that he finally tried to stop publication of the book. Fortunately, Wittgenstein was too late, however, and the book was published anyway, first in German in 1921 and then the following year in an English translation that appeared under the Latin title that Moore had suggested:
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
.

Moore knew only the bare facts of what had happened next. Having given up his fortune and renounced philosophy, Wittgenstein virtually disappeared, going off to teach school in a little Austrian village called Trattenbach. A gifted young protégé of Moore's named Frank Ramsey, who in fact had helped translate Wittgenstein's book, made the journey to Trattenbach in 1923 in the hope that Wittgenstein might resolve some questions he had about his work. As far as Moore knew, Ramsey was the only one from Cambridge who ever saw Wittgenstein during that so-called lost period, and it was not an altogether cheering sight. Austria was in bad shape after the war, and so, apparently, was Wittgenstein. Ramsey told Moore the village was a poor and dreary place. Worse, said Ramsey, Wittgenstein was embroiled in tensions with the villagers. For the life of him, Ramsey couldn't see why Wittgenstein chose to stay there — “intellectual suicide” was what Ramsey called it. Mysteriously, Wittgenstein one day remarked to Ramsey that he had undergone a painful but necessary operation on his character. It had been a kind of surgery, Wittgenstein said, a surgery of the most radical nature — certain limbs had been lopped off. But Wittgenstein maintained that he was better off for it, though certainly diminished and weakened. Wittgenstein told Ramsey that he harbored no illusions about himself or his talent. Six or eight years was about as long as anyone could expect to do this kind of logical work before being ruined by it, at least in the case of a marginal and basically derivative talent like his own. Not, Wittgenstein hastened to add, that this was any great loss to philosophy. In fact, he said, it was no loss whatsoever. Having said all he had to say philosophically, he had turned to the world of children, feeling that it was better to persist as a benign spirit among children than as a ghost among men.

With Wittgenstein apparently having consigned himself to silence, it was a great surprise when he returned to Cambridge in 1929, clearly as sharp as ever, with a mass of new written work. Wittgenstein told Moore he wanted to get his doctorate so that he might make a living teaching while he developed a new philosophy. At least, Wittgenstein said, this was what he planned to do if Cambridge would have him. Moore told him that it was not a question of Cambridge wanting Wittgenstein. The question, said Moore, was whether Wittgenstein really wanted Cambridge.

As for Russell, he had his own problems, one immediate problem being his need of money.

Married ten years now, Russell and his wife, the socialist and feminist writer Dora Black, had two children, a boy of ten named John and a girl of eight named Kate. Russell and Dora also had thirty-five pupils, nine teachers and a house staff, not to mention two cars and the upkeep of the school's buildings and grounds. Certainly, Russell had not begun the school as a profit-making venture. On the contrary, he had begun the school for personal, social and experimental reasons, and in the full expectation of
losing
money, but not on a scale like this. At times, Russell's life seemed to him like a sorry ledgerbook, with one debit row for employees, forever pinched and begging advances, and one for children, forever eating, getting sick, breaking bones and smashing things.

Even then, during the early years of the depression, America was where the money was, so every summer, just to meet the staggering costs of the school, Russell was compelled to leave his children and spend weeks on tour, talking himself hoarse in New York, Boston, Chicago and points west. Not that touring was completely bereft of rewards. Besides affording one a chance to exercise one's fame and opinions, there were always eager, attractive women and, with them, exciting nights of dalliance and only slight pangs of regret in the morning. Russell had written that it was inevitable and probably healthy that husband and wife should have their occasional infidelities, at least so long as these episodes did not intrude on family life. Russell believed this a matter of reason, yet he also knew that for one of his Victorian-bred generation it was difficult to completely shake the deeply ingrained feelings of shame that society had implanted. In all likelihood, Russell thought, he would never entirely shake them. But he hoped that at least his children and the generations to follow might be free of these fears, thereby fostering a world less pent up and violent, or rather more happy, tolerant and humane.

In the meantime, though, in these seedy American hotels where he stayed, there was this unpleasant residue and the longing not so much for his wife, who could wait, but for his two children, who could not. The children were now the focus of his life, and he found it harder and harder to be separated from them. And increasingly he resented it, the loneliness and the frantic pace of his touring schedule, then the inevitable guilt and disorientation upon his return, when he saw how much his two children had changed even in that seemingly short interval.

Ironically, it was because of their children that Russell and Dora had begun the school that now kept him away twelve weeks every summer. For more than a year after John was born, Russell and Dora had researched schools and educational philosophies, reading, among others, Freud, Froebel, Montessori, Piaget and Margaret McMillan. They also looked with despair at the English school system, where coeducation was virtually nonexistent, where children routinely received religious instruction and where boys were typically given some form of military training. In its tendency to perpetuate class hierarchies, intolerance and aggression, the system was already bad enough. To someone like Dora, long active in the campaigns for birth control, sexual education and legalized abortion, the system seemed even more disastrous in its propensity for fostering repressive sexual attitudes. In their marriage, Russell and Dora had eschewed the possessive notion of husband and wife, but then marriage, at least as they viewed it, was not really the problem. It was the fundamental dishonesty of society's patriarchal heritage that finally shackled and killed love, insisting on fidelity at the price of either frustration or dishonesty. They wanted both to be free, and they wanted nothing less for their children. After all, if boys and girls were not educated together, not taught from earliest childhood to work and play and cooperate in a miniature society of children, how could they ever grow into free men and women, living and loving as equals in a free society of adults?

Russell and Dora were in general accord on these principles. The problem was finding a school that could properly promote them. More liberal schools were of course closer to their liking, but after examining the situation more carefully they had concluded that there was not a school anywhere, not progressive, Quaker, Montessori — not even Summer-hill — that could give their children the humane, nondogmatic, practical education that, in their view, was crucial to peace and social progress.

This was the genesis of their school, and once they decided to go forward with it they had no trouble finding students. Rather, the problem all too often was finding
normal
children, as opposed to problem children; or, as was more often the case, problem children with problem parents — incompetent, irresponsible, often divorced parents who often had trouble paying their bills and, still worse, trouble taking back their problem children once their other problems had become insurmountable. Such parents did not want to be presented with more problems: there would be loud denials and accusations, the problem parents swearing that, in fact, their children had not been problems until they had come to Beacon Hill. And didn't the brochure plainly say that Beacon Hill, though designed for the normal child, was also specially suited for the “exceptional child” — to wit, the “gifted” (problematic) child? Why, several of the more cunning problem parents had threatened the white-haired headmaster, saying that because the school had been negligent on one count and clearly fraudulent on another, he could either wipe their debt clean or else face long and certainly messy legal action.

Such were the miseries of running a school. But there were also considerable pleasures. Most of the children were good, normal, loving children who ranged in age from four to eleven. The Beacon Hill staff was also excellent, its teachers willing to work long hours with demanding, outspoken children who were encouraged to question
everything
. Filled with admiration for the Russells and believing themselves to be on the groundswell of a new movement, Beacon Hill's teachers tended to be talented, intellectually venturesome and progressive. Happily for the headmaster, they also tended to be young, idealistic and female.