A predicament most cruel
Angela Huth
The Tamarisk Tree My quest for liberty and love Dora Russell (Elek /Pemberton £5.95) To be a selfless woman in the life of a great man is a mere art: to be a woman in whom personal ambition flares, and who would at the same time love and live with her genius, is a predicament most cruel. The dilemma caused Mrs Bernard Shaw, for instance, to become just what she least desired — a carbon-copy of her mother. It drove Hannah Tillich to illness and despair. It inflicted Dora Russell with the kind of anguish that leaves bitterness for years. Mrs Dora Russell, second wife to Bertrand, is a woman of natural intellect, energy and earnestness. In her "quest for liberty and love" she came upon a multitude of struggles between instinct and liberal reason, and fought these battles with resolute, if sometimes humourless, spirit. If she is remembered as one of Bertrand Russell's wives rather than as a woman of some importance in her own right, the fault will lie with the unreliable perspectives of history.
Her background was serene middle-class. Understanding parents: "I cannot fault them." Father, a civil servant, Particularly close to her. But a function of even exceptional parents is to be reacted against, and when Dora witnessed her mother's embarrassment at bringing her father the household bills, she was indignant. "Perhaps that," she erzlains, "was the beginning of my feminism." At Girton, where "the purpose of the universe was the first and most important consideration of my mind," Dora sympathised with Womens' Suffrage, and left with First Class Honours. She met Russell, twenty years her senior, in 1916. "My first impression was that he was exactly like the Mad Hatter." On his advice she accompanied her father on a business trip to America: a Captain of the Merchant Service relieved her of her virginity on the voyage out. She returned from the United States to find "the excitement of the Russian Revolution had occurred": re-encountered Russell, and went back to Cambridge as a junior don.
By 1919 Dora was politically involved and Russell was romantically inclined. They dined in Soho — "I was fascinated by Malebranche at the time" — and apparently her host was entertained", if not fascinated, by her studies. They began to correspond. "The odd thing was, Whereas my letters were as learned as I knew how, his were nonsensical." Bertie, as he was by now to her, felt the exigencies of love upon him. He flourished an invitation to a college reading party at Lulworth. After a slight skirmish with her conscience ("I don't WANT to give all my life to love," she wrote later to a friend) Dora accepted. The possibility of marriage ruffled the horizon. They went to Spain: as married man and mistress, this had its problems on official occasions. Perhaps as a result of this experience, Bertie would not take her to Russia. Defiantly, she went alone, beavered into Soviet life with characteristic intensity, and returned with many views unacceptable to her lover.
It was their stay in China, where they went in 1921 and lived in "disgraceful luxury," that Dora declared the happiest time of her life. "I loved Bertie with adoration and almost worship," she says. And in a letter to her mother came the happy cry: -B thinks of course I'm a genius too." She strove, therefore, on her own behalf. gave six lectures on Political Thought and Economic Conditions," and wrote Bertie love poems. (Would that she, and other autobiographers whose talents don't encompass poetry, could resist bravely slipping in sincere early works.) Bertie came down with double pneumonia, nearly died. Dora, pregnant, nursed him back to health with great fortitude. "It sounds ridiculous," said Russell in his autobiography, -but the world needs to be mothered." Dora was a mother figure. He desperately wanted — legitimate — children. Dora could mother them all. Back in England, Bertie's first difficult divorce was accomplished and, "under pressure of his health and aristocratic feelings," Dora finally agreed to marry him.
The story of their marriage is one of conflict between their mutual belief in free love, and the baser feelings encountered when that love is put into practice. For Dora, there was an added battle: her own work versus the time she must give to her husband, husband's work, and small son. "I had to live in the shadow of his reputation," she says. "I was in no way jealous, that would have been absurd. He was. . . loyal to me, and always encouraged me." However, she privately believed she must turn to her old ambition, the theatre, "in which no question of rivalry between us could arise." (This ambition never materialised.) They had a second child, a house in Cornwall, a house in Chelsea, friends, admirers, good times — especially in Cornwall. And hard work: campaigns, elections, in which Bertie stood as Labour candidate for Chelsea, the long slog of books. Bertie wrote his with increasing fame. Dora wrote hers: the first, Hypatia, in 1925: The Right to be Happy in 1927. They also had their affairs. Persistent in their beliefs in free love, .they were convinced no mere sexual jaunt could jeopardise their marriage. Then in 1929, by which time they were running a school in Sussex, Dora became pregnant by Barry Griffin, an American journalist. Bertie took the news with fitting bravado. "You won't find me tiresome about it," he wrote. In a way, this pregnancy was a cry for help. "We never had rows and reconciliations," Dora says, "but how much, if he had given me a hint of deep hurt, I would have wished and been able to comfort him with a warmth of love and, indeed, gratitude."
Bertie was not tiresome about the baby (he even loved it): simply continued his own affairs. An emotional attachment to a girl student called Peter Spence was the turning point. Events in their freely-loving world multiplied confusingly. Dora had a second child by Barry, Bertie left her for Peter Spence just after the birth. Dora, harrassed with work (ironically in the cause of Sexual Reform) illness, running the school and earning her living, was dazed by her ruined world. Just as she had fought not to marry, now she struggled not to be divorced. "I believed, as Bertie used to, that we were inextricably entangled with one another, as two people are who have shared responsibilities and anxieties over the years, whose minds answer to one another on so many political issues." For all her enlightenment, she failed to understand that the institution of marriage is not an infallible guard against temptations of romantic love without. In love with Peter Spence, Bertie became towards Dora a man she did not recognise in his cruelty and unreason. She finally gave up her "persistence in a hopeless endeavour," and, after many a searing fight, they were divorced in 1935. During this unhappy time Dora met one Paul
Gillard, a beautiful young man with whom she fell in love. It was a brief affair: he died a mysterious death and Dora's world was blasted again. Curiously, her writing about Gillard is the only part of the book in which any "roseate haze" of happiness really breaks through. Though Russell described her as having -elfin charm" in real life, her writing is not naturally blessed with lightness of touch. She muzzles both elation and despair. (Irresistible to compare her book with the recent autobiography by Hannah Tillich. Contemporaries, faced with similar dilemmas, Mrs Tillich describes the vicissitudes of her life with a vividness that Mrs Russell has not wholly accomplished.)
But she must count herself as a woman of considerable achievement: she contributed most effectively to major left-wing causes and many aspects of Womens' Liberation. In her quest for liberty, too, it could be said she was successful: she acquired it along with its disillusions. And her quest for love? As a reluctant wife, Dora Russell must have found man's inhumanity to woman particularly hard to bear considering the whole point of their marriage was to liberate themselves from just the kind of blows that eventually befell them.
Angela Huth, the novelist, has recently written Sun Child
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