Bertrand Russell in his prime
BOOKS
A. J. AYER
The second volume of Lord Russell's auto- biography (The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 1914-1944, Allen and Unwin 42s) takes him from the beginning of the First until almost the end of the Second World War. It is a more reticent work than its predecessor, but no less sincere, and it is written with the same lucidity, elegance and wit. As in the first volume, each chapter is followed by a selec- tion of letters, which acids a great deal to the interest of the book.
The First World War was a watershed in Russell's life. Coming after the completion of his great work on mathematical logic, and the breakdown of his first marriage, it took him away from purely intellectual, abstract pursuits and from the comparative serenity of academic life and made him into the storm-tossed, con- troversial public figure that he has ever since remained. His opposition to the war was both moral and political. He was not lacking in patriotism—on the contrary, be remarks, rather surprisingly, that 'love of England is very nearly the strongest emotion I possess'—but he believed that the war was being fought for no justifiable end and that it had been brought about because 'a set of official gentlemen, living luxurious lives, mostly stupid, and all without imagination and heart, has chosen that it should occur rather than that any one of them should suffer some infinitesimal rebuff to his country's pride.'
The philosophical detachment of his brother's friend Santayana (`As for death and loss of capital, I don't much care. The young men killed would grow older if they lived, and then they would be good for nothing; and after being good for nothing for a number of years they would die of catarrh or a bad kidney or the halter or old age—and would that be less horrible?) was not either morally or tem- peramentally at his command. The thought of the young men's suffering and of the futile Wastage of life was a torment to him, increas- ing as the war went on; but what was almost harder to bear was the sense of his moral isolation; the fact that the great majority of his countrymen supported the war and that this majority included his Cambridge col- leagues and men like Massingham, the editor of the Nation, and H. G. Wells and White- head and Gilbert Murray, whom he would have expected to be on his side.
Whatever view one may take of Russell's attitude to this war, one would have to be very-prejudiced not to feel that the authorities treated him disgracefully. In 1916 he was prosecuted and fined £100 for publishing a leaflet in which he did no more than protest against a sentence of two years' hard labour imposed upon a conscientious objector; and for this the College Council deprived him of his lectureship at Trinity. Two years later, when he had come to despair of his work for the pacifist movement and had already decided to return to philosophy, he wrote a leading article for the journal of the No Conscription Fellowship, in which he predicted that the con- tinuance of the war would lead to starvation throughout Europe and remarked that 'the American garrisons which will by that time be occupying England and France, whether or not they will prove efficient against the Ger- mans, will no doubt be capable of intimidating strikers, an occupation to which the American Army is accustomed when at home.' For this single phrase, he was prosecuted and sentenced to six months' imprisonment. Thanks to the intervention of Lord Balfour, he was placed in the first division, which meant that he was free to occupy himself with reading and writing. As a result, he found prison tolerable, except for his being cut off from his friends: he wel- comed 'the holiday from responsibility,' and made use of it to write his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy and begin work on The Analysis of Mind.
After the war ended, Russell was invited to return to Trinity but refused. Instead, after a visit to Russia, which he detested, finding Bolshevism 'a close tyrannical bureaucracy, with a spy system more elaborate and terrible than the Tsar's, and an aristocracy as insolent and unfeeling, composed of Americanised Jews,' he accepted an invitation to lecture for a year in China. He lived for the most part in Peking, which seemed to me even in 1954, when I visited it, to be the most beautiful city in the world, and he was as enchanted by the Chinese as he had been disillusioned by the Russians. Towards the end of his time in Peking, he fell ill with pneumonia and very nearly died. Through the malice of some Japanese journalists, a report that he had died reached the English newspapers, so that he had the rare pleasure of reading his own obituary notices. In one missionary paper the notice consisted of the single sentence: 'Missionaries may be pardoned for heaving a sigh of relief at the news of Mr Bertrand Russell's death.'
In his visit to China Russell was accom- panied by Dora Black, who shortly afterwards became his second wife. His affair with Russell between the Wars Ottoline Morrell, which had been the imme- diate cause of his leaving his first wife, had diminished into friendship by the time of his imprisonment, but in the meantime he had fallen violently in love with a much younger woman, the actress Colette O'Neill, who was at that time married to Miles Malleson. She shared his opposition to the war and for the better part of two years brought him very great happiness. But she made him jealous, and by 1919, when he became attracted to Dora Black, they bad reached a position in which they could be happy beither together nor apart.
One of the reasons for his attachment to Dora Black was that she shared his desire for children. They had a son and a daughter and, not wishing to entrust them to either sector of the English educational system, they decided to found a school of their own. For this pur- pose they rented a house in Hampshire from Russell's elder brother Frank, the second Lord Russell, who needed the money in order, among others things, to pay alimony to his second wife, a very fat lady on whose account he, too, had gone to prison on the charge of bigamy. He had elected, to be tried by his peers and was convicted on the ground that English law recognised Reno marriages but did not recognise Reno divorces. When Russell inherited the title, he found that the respon- sibility for maintaining this lady went with it.
The school was run on progressive principles, in some ways resembling those which have been made famous by A. S. Neill, from whom there are several interesting letters in this book, and at a great financial loss. It was in order to make good this loss that Russell wrote a. series of popular works, such as Marriage and Morals and The Conquest of Happiness. I think that these books have been underrated. They do not approach the level of his philosophical work, but they performed a useful social ser- vice. In the long run he paid a heavy price for writing them as it was on account of the liberal views which he expressed in them that Russell was declared legally unfit to become a profess& at the City College of New York.
This disgraceful episode, which took place in 1941, is recounted fairly briefly in the last chapter of the book. This and the preceding chapter run very swiftly through the break- down of Russell's second marriage, his third marriage to Patricia Spence, the birth of his second son, the abandonment of his pacifism in the Second World War and his difficult years in America from 1938 to 1944. No doubt it is to spare the feelings of persons who are still living that Russell tells us almost nothing in this period about his private life.
An omission which I regret more is that of any detailed reference to his philosophy.
For instance, there is not even a mention of Logical Atomism in the whole book. Wittgen- stein is represented only by a character sketch and by some fascinating letters referring mainly to the publication of the Tractatus. Russell admits to having been greatly downcast by some criticisms, presumably of his theory of knowledge, which Wittgenstein made sonic time before 1914, but he does not say what these criticisms were.
On the whole, I found this volume not quite so interesting as the first, but it is still an enthralling document. The Russell who emerges from it is a more human figure than the Russell of the first volume; not so austerely intellectual, warmer, more vulnerable I have never had any doubt of his being a great philosopher. This book shows him also to be a great man.
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