REVIEW OF BOOKS
Alasdair Macintyre on Russell's flawed biography
Mr Clark's biography* of Bertrand Russell is constructed on so massive a scale that we are unlikely to have another biography of Russell for some time. Even if it is a gravely flawed achievement, it exhibits a mastery of so vast a range of source material that is will be hard to outdo Mr Clark without relying on his book extensively. The Russell Archives at McMaster University in Ontario include about a quarter of a million documents. The University of Texas at Austin has more than 1,900 letters written by ,Russell to Lady Ottoline Morrell. The Public Records Office, the BBC archives, Trinity
Cambridge, and the London School of
conomics all possess material. And Russell himself published about eighty books and Pamphlets All this Mr Clark has digested into six hundred pages of highly readable narrative. For what more or what else could one have asked? It not only seems, but is ungrateful to complain. Yet I have, unfortunately, too many complaints. The first is about Mr Clark's prose, which is littered with the corpses of dead metaphors and similes. On the very first page Russell's intellect IS 'a weapon honed razor-sharp." Later on he tilts against windmills, is transfixed much as the stoat transfixes the rabbit, looks out from his Privileged watchtower, skates over thin ice cl.hd—one could continue this list for a very long time hut the fatigued quality of Mr Clark's Prose scarcely deserves that much attention. This is not a trivial matter. The relationship of Style to substance is always complex, but there are certain types of prose style in which nothing can be said except what is superficial. Mr Clark's is one of them. It is not therefore surprising that there are also complaints to be made about the substance of his work. One such concerns scale and proportion. The content of Principia Mathematica is discussed with astonishing brevity. No one could begin to iniderstand from Mr Clark's book why Russell iS one of the greatest figures in the history of logic, for he does not even try to place Russell's logical work in historical perspective. Russell's .philosophical work is treated a little, but only a little more generously in terms of space. But not a single philosophical book of Russell's receives anything like the treatment accorded to Russell's relationship at the end of his life with the American radical, Ralph Schoenman, who became his secretary. It might be replied that a good deal of what Mr Clark has to say about those closing episodes of Russell's life is new and newly documented, whereas excellent *The Life of Bertrand Russell Ronald W. Clark. (Jonathan Cape with Weidenfeld and Nicolson £6.95) studies of Russell's thought already exist, most notably that by Sir Alfred Ayer. But this rejoinder would miss the point; it is because Mr Clark never discusses the character of Russell's logical and philosophical work adequately that he is also unable to discuss adequately the place of that work in Russell's life. Russell once explained why logic and mathematics inspired him more than religious writing; "because they disdain even to notice suffering." This is one kind of clue which Mr Clark notes, but never follows up. Another kind of clue is provided by a letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell where he wrote "My view is that passionate feeling is often sufficient ground for judging things good or bad, but not for judging that they exist." What such clues suggest is that Russell deliberately embodied in his life a certain kind of divorce both between thought and feeling and between thoughts about existence and thoughts about value. But any attempt to pursue these suggestions further would require systematic treatment of yet another topic upon which Mr Clark touches only sporadically. This is the crucial difference between the view of Russell's life afforded by Mr Clark's book and the view afforded by Russell's own Autobiography. Mr Clark does indeed suggest sometimes that the accounts which Russell gives us in the Autobiography need at least to be supplemented. But he never notes the curious fact that the version of some episodes in the Autobiography is more discreditable to Russell than the truth appears to have been. How Russell saw Russell and the gap between that vision and the reality is an important aspect of Russell not treated by Mr Clark.
Mr Clark's treatment of Russell's politics is in some ways the most adequate part of his book. But even here he does not bring out some of the most fascinating features of Russell's character. For the the charge of political inconsistency that was often levelled against Russell there was one very simple answer that could be made — Russell was in fact perfectly consistent. Yet instead of explaining the principles underlying his actions he tended to resort to prevarication. Consider one bizarre sequence of events.
In 1946 Russell had advocated entertaining the possibility of waging nuclear war against Russia, if the Russian government would, not agree to a scheme of international governance to be devised by the American and British governments. By 1953 he was saying that "The story that I supported a preventive war against Russia is a communist invention," but in 1959 he ascribed this latter denial to a lapse of memory. In 1962 however he repeated the denial, while in 1969 he once again admitted the truth. Why this extraordinary behaviour? The answer is perhaps that at moments he saw himself as his less perceptive critics saw him and tried to gloss over what appeared even to him as radical inconsistencies. After all he denounced Britain's war against Germany in 1914, supported Britain's war against Germany in 1939, advocated Britain's support for nuclear war in 1946 and denounced Britain's possession of nuclear weapons in 1957 and thereafter. But it is quite clear that, essentially, Russell's politics were consistent; at their base lay the belief that there are different types of war. In 1915 he distinguished four types. One of these, wars of prestige, he soundly condemns and in so doing condemns the first World War. Another type, the war of self-defense, he declares to be fairly often justified; and so provides the basis for his approval of the war against Hitler. A third type which he also praises is the war of colonisation. Such wars have the merit "of leading in the main to the survival of the fittest, and it is chiefly through such wars that the civilised portion of the world has been extended . ." And this is clearly the type of war he envisaged in 1946. What changed was in part his view of who "the fittest" were; but more importantly the nuclear war whi.ch he condemned in 1957 was a type of war which fell into none of his categories of a defensible war.
In this case Russell's untruthfulness seems to have been gratuitous. Yet he emerges in many different episodes as a self-deceived as well as untruthful person. His first wife had noted early how deep this trait was: "I can tell a lie from cowardice or other motives, but I always know it is a lie and regret it, whereas Bertie has to persuade himself first that it is true." Nonetheless all of Russell's vices — the self-deception, the silliness, the willingness to express contempt for what he had not understood — stand in intimate and sometimes apparently contradicting relationship to his awe-inspiring virtues: intellectual power, love of truth, courage, capacity to give and to inspire affection. Is the mixture of vice and virtue simply inconsistency or is there here again in Russell's character a deep, but elusive consistency? Mr Clark's approach does not allow him even to frame this question, let alone to attempt an answer.
Mr Clark's book will certainly be a success. It combines industriousness and literary philistinism in a way that flourishes notably today in both Britain and America. But although we should be grateful to Mr Clark for doing so much of the preliminary work which Russell's eventual biographer will need, we must be clear that he has done no more than this. The biography of Russell is still to be written.
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