The Logical Negativist
Caroline Moorehead
BERTRAND RUSSELL: THE GHOST OF MADNESS by Ray Monk Cape, £25, pp. 574 When John, the son of Bertrand and Dora Russell, was four, his parents decided that the time had come for him to learn to swim. John was resistant and terrified. He cringed and cried. They went on immersing him in the sea in North Wales — often choppy and always freezing — until his protests at last ceased. The second volume of Ray Monk's fine biography of Russell explores in depth the effect of Russell's upbringing and character on a family that grew to include four wives, three children and many grandchildren. For all Russell's Immense achievements and range of inter- ests, it is an often sad and depressing tale, that of a man so emotionally cold and guarded as to damage, in some cases devas- tatingly, the lives of those around him. Monk's evident dislike for his subject, bare- ly discernible in the first volume, comes across more strongly in the second book.
In the first volume, The Spirit of Solitude, Monk celebrated Russell's success as a mathematician and philosopher, his first two marriages, his important affairs with Ottoline Morrell and Constance Malleson, and the pacifism that took him to prison during the first world war. Volume two opens in 1921, when Russell was 49, exactly half way through his long life. By now, with a few distinguished exceptions, the greatest of his philosophical work was over. As the expenses of his life mounted, so he turned to popular, quasi-philosophical and scien- tific books and articles, to feed a public searching, in the aftermath of the first world war, for political and social guidance, referring to himself as a 'species of mental male prostitute'. Short works on the nature of marriage, on religion, fear and happi- ness, brought him money, increased by lec- ture tours in the United States, but they caused dismay in many of his friends. Rus- sell, observed Beatrice Webb, had become `a fallen angel with Mephistophelian wit'. Nor was he always much good at this new work: his old friend G. M. Trevelyan declared that when it came to politics, which he insisted on treating with a logi- cian's desire for absolute clarity, Russell was a 'perfect goose'. With John and a daughter called Kate to educate, and influenced by Freud and the behaviorist John Watson, the Russells opened their own school in Sussex, attract- ing a more than average number of chil- dren who had failed elsewhere and were now to be brought up freed 'from fear and inhibitions and rebellious or thwarted instincts'. Determined that his children should receive no special attention, Russell paid little heed to them. When Russell left Dora soon afterwards, she was wretched, never having understood that Russell's polite behaviour towards her disguised a profound indifference. As the wrangles over custody of the children grew more acrimonious, Russell took to addressing her as 'Dear Madam' and communicating with her only through solicitors.
In 1940, Russell accepted a professorship at the College of the City of New York. His popular books had not gone down well with all Americans and before he had a chance to take it up he was dismissed. Not even his friends Whitehead and Dewey were able to save him from being famously branded as 'lecherous, salacious, libidinous, lustful, venerous, erotomaniac, aphrodisiac, atheistic, irreverent, narrow-minded, bigot- ed and untruthful'.
Rescued from financial difficulty by a millionaire called Dr Alfred Barnes, who invited him to lecture at his new founda- tion in Philadelphia, Russell started work on what became his most widely known book, The History of Western Philosophy. That relationship too ended in acrimony, with Barnes complaining when Peter, Rus- sell's third wife, insisted on knitting during Russell's classes.
All his life Russell had a tendency to blame the evils of the world on the stupidi- ty and wickedness of governments, saying that why politicians were bad was because they were sexually and emotionally frus- trated and didn't understand the meaning of happiness. The 1940s saw him violently opposed to the Soviet Union and strength- ening his opinion that only a world govern- ment could save civilisation from a nuclear war. Under the influence of Ralph Schoen- man, an American political activist, soon known as 'Russell's viper', he directed his hatred away from the Soviet Union and towards the United States. Monk's descrip- tion of Schoenman's relationship with the elderly philosopher is very well done, as is his picture of Russell's growing belief in himself as world saviour. There is a reveal- ing story about Russell arriving first at a dinner party and being given an article about himself to read. When the other guests arrived he did not even look up, say- ing only, 'I'm very sorry. I cannot pay atten- tion to anybody. I am reading about myself.'
But it is as a portrait of Russell as hus- band, father and grandfather that Monk's second volume will be remembered. Basing his book on newly available papers and diaries, he documents more fully than has been possible before the catastrophic effect of Dora and Russell's break-up on Kate and John, who emerges from this addition- al material an interesting and tragic figure, never able to escape his father's shadow, descending into schizophrenia. Russell had been terrified of madness from the time when his grandmother, seeking to prevent his first marriage to Alys Pearsall Smith told him there was insanity in the family. When John grew more confused, Russell did all he could to have him permanently committed to an asylum. As Kate wryly noted in her excellent book My Father Bertrand Russell, he had the 'capacity for withdrawing all feeling from a person who had disappointed him'. Alys, who wor- shipped Russell all her life and never man- aged to free herself from him — the story of Alys's life makes poignant reading Dora, and Peter, who departed in fury and misery to become a recluse, bear witness to her words.
Russell found happiness at last with his fourth wife, Edith Finch, whom he married in 1952, when he was &I Together they cared for John's step-daughter and two daughters, Susan and Lucy, but like all the other people he was close to they forfeited his love when they failed to live up to his expectations. `Ah yes,' Schoenman is said to have told someone ringing up Russell anxiously about Lucy, 'Lord Russell asked me to tell you that, compared with the Vietnam war, Lucy is a very small prob- lem.' Susan has spent much of her life in psychiatric care, while Lucy, at the age of 26, poured paraffin over herself and set fire to it. Monk has a harrowing description of her flaming hands stretched beseechingly towards a neighbour as if begging to be saved. It was, Monk concludes, 'the final visitation of the ghosts that haunted Rus- sell throughout his life'.
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