Even as We Speak (16 page)

New Yorker
, 25 August and 1 September, 1997

Two twentieth-century philosophers whose names are inseparable, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell, were such a great double act that there simply has to be a buddy movie
sooner or later. At last, the material is all set to be licked into a script. Ray Monk has now matched his justly lauded biography of Wittgenstein with a fat and equally enthralling first volume
wrapping up the earlier half of Bertrand Russell’s long life –
Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude 1872–1921
(Free Press) – and is sitting on the hottest
Hollywood prospect since Paul Newman and Robert Redford signed on for
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
. Every A-list male star will want to play Wittgenstein – the philosopher who
blew away all the other philosophers, including Russell – so, although Lyle Lovett looks the part and Arnie has the accent, Tom Cruise will probably get the job, armed with a Tatlin-tower
lopsided bouffant coiffure personally teased out by the great José. (‘Mmm! You look like
beeg theenker
now!’) Nobody bankable – not even Steve Martin, a philosophy
wonk who can actually explicate
Principia Mathematica
while wearing a plastic arrow through his head – will want to play the physically unappealing Russell, so the way should be
clear for the perfect choice: Gene Wilder. Fluctuating uncontrollably between idealism and disillusion, forever persuaded that sexual fulfilment is at hand in the form of a luscious girl in a red
dress, Wilder’s persona, like his appearance, exactly fits a part that should revive his career. The only strike against Wilder is that even he has a bit too much gravitas for the role. On
the evidence of Monk’s book, Russell, for all his clipped speech and pipe-sucking air of cerebral precision, was a zany, a pantaloon, a fourth Stooge. Monk does his best to lend Russell
dignity and stature, but that’s the way it comes out, like a fanfare from a whoopee cushion.

It took Russell a long time to get to here. While he was alive, he was a sage. Even in his last phase, when he recklessly allowed himself to be set up as the star turn in various World Peace
tent shows that had little to do with any known world and nothing to do with peace, he was regarded as, at worst, a supermind whose bonnet had been unaccountably penetrated by fashionable bees. In
his early life, he was universally assumed to be a genius. For all most of us know, he was. Most of us, when we give our opinion on such subjects as analytical philosophy and symbolic logic, are
only grazing, the way we are with relativity theory, quantum mechanics and how a mobile telephone works: the best we can hope to do is talk a good game, backed by the consensus of those who really
know. Ray Monk, who really knows, says that the young Bertrand Russell’s brilliantly original thinking in mathematics and symbolic logic laid the foundations of analytical philosophy and
helped open up the field of theory which made our modern computerized world possible. Glad to take all this on trust, I will add it to the store of dinner-table science talk by which I contrive to
maintain some kind of communication with my molecular biologist daughter.

The difference between me and the molecular biologists, of course, is that they know what they’re talking about, whereas I know only how to talk. It is a difference basic to the life of
the mind in our time – a time that can usefully be thought of as going back to Goethe, who didn’t like Newton’s theories about colour. Goethe had good humanist reasons for his
dislike but didn’t have the maths to back them up. Science was already off on its own; there were already two cultures. It could be said – it should be said, in my view – that
only one of these, the unscientific one, is really a culture, since the mark of culture is to accumulate quality, whereas science merely advances knowledge. But my view is part of the unscientific
culture, and has no weight in the scientific one, which settles its questions within itself, marshalling evidence powerful enough to flatten cities and bore holes in steel with drills of light. If
Russell the philosopher had been content to keep his philosophy sounding scientific, his reputation would have remained unassailable, even though, or perhaps because, its published basis was
unintelligible. There would never have been any way for the lay critic to get at him.

But, to give Russell his due, he was reluctant to confine his philosophical writings to the safely abstruse. Like most of the great philosophers before him – and unlike many of his
successors – he strove to instruct the general reading public in ordinary language. Commendably, and sometimes heroically, he sought the most transparent possible exposition of his ideas,
thereby proselytizing for the scientific, critical spirit that would liberate mankind from its perennial irrationality and offer the only hope for reforming a cruel world. Reason was
Russell’s religion: he believed in it passionately. The question now is not whether this is a self-contradictory position – surely it isn’t, unless passion becomes zeal –
but whether Russell was equipped by nature to promote it. The evidence provided by this book overwhelmingly suggests that he wasn’t. His natural use of language was hopelessly in thrall to
high-flown, over-decorated rhetoric. When he wrote passionately, he wrote dreadfully, and he could eschew the ornate only by leaving the passion out. Much of his workaday prose was plain to a
fault. The principles he promoted in his voluminous writings on human affairs were unexceptionable – it would be better if people were persuaded by facts instead of myths, loved each other,
and sought peace – but the language in which he set them down defeats memory. His heart wasn’t in it, even if his mind was. His professional philosophy, the hard stuff, all sprang, we
are told and must accept, from his conviction that our complex knowledge of the world could be analyzed down to its ultimately simple conceptual foundations. But his popular philosophy, the easy
stuff that you and I are meant to understand, all too clearly proves that a prose bereft of nuances leaves out the texture of real life. Qualities that Russell entirely lacked were the stylistic
density and precision of a writer capable of judging common life in the light of his own most intimate failures and defeats – the density and precision by which a great writer clarifies
complexity without simplifying it and intensifies the clarity into incandescence. The last thing Russell could write from was personal experience.

By Monk’s account, it isn’t any wonder. Russell’s personal experience was awful, first of all for himself and later on, crucially, for the women he was
involved with. Paradoxically surrounded by the complete apparatus of wealth and comfort, his childhood was all bereavement.

In what must have seemed a conspiracy to leave him alone, his parents and everyone else he might have loved departed prematurely, stricken by diphtheria and other then incurable diseases with no
respect for rank: in adult life, he would say that he always felt he was a ghost. Nowadays, armed with the knowledge distilled into John Bowlby’s great trilogy
Attachment and Loss
,
those interested in such things would be able to identify Russell’s situation as a casebook example of detachment: undermined from the start by childhood separations of such violent
intensity, the victim’s relationships in adult life tend to be more controlling than cooperative and much more eloquent than felt. Russell filled the bill to what would be hilarious effect if
you could forget that the women who made the mistake of getting involved with him were real, and really suffered. Russell could forget it, but then he had the advantage of having never fully
realized it in the first place. In matters of emotion, he was an almost perfect solipsist: a woman could exist for him not as a separate personality but only as an extension of his own personality.
Like conscientious objection, free love was a cause he was ready to suffer for, but the freedom was all for him, and the suffering, it turned out, was all for those he loved.

The pattern was set from the start, when he wooed and won Alys Pearsall Smith as his first wife. Russell, a suitor not to be denied, or even interrupted, talked for hours and covered square
miles of paper explaining to her that the great thing about marriage would be sex. Alys, by her own admission, distrusted the whole idea, proclaiming for women in general and for herself in
particular what Russell described as ‘an aversion to sexual intercourse and a shrinking from it only to be overcome by the desire for children’. Undaunted, the budding ratiocinative
genius pursued the courtship with a heat from him that increased with every glint of ice from her. He attempted to persuade her that sex would be the ideal
spiritual
expression of their
mutual love. When, in a rare moment of abandon, she allowed him to kiss her glacial breasts, he soared into the stratosphere of prose, declaring in a letter to her that the event was ‘far and
away the most spiritual thing there has yet been in my life’. Russell then attempted to convince her that, once the knot had been tied, the proper approach to conjugal bliss would be a
plenitude of indulgence, thus to tame in his otherwise elevated soul the disruptive element of testicular agitation. Using the Quakerish ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ familiar form with
which the two betrothed conspired to elevate their discourse to the empyrean plane, Russell declared:

The poor schmuck had blue balls, but it would have been a better gag if he had been fooling only himself. Unfortunately, he was also fooling her, and one feels for her even at this range.
Dynastically, the alliance of a British aristocratic scholar and a well-connected American bluestocking looked good on deckle-edged paper. In fact, it was hell, and the partner who suffered its
most acute torments was Alys, although Russell, typically, managed to convince himself that
he
was the patsy. Having cajoled her ruthlessly into a cryogenic marriage, he felt within his
rights not only to fall for her sexier sister, Mary, during a Continental holiday but to tell Alys all about it: ‘I am trying to fall in love with her and make these last days pass, and I
think I shall succeed enough to avoid too much impatience – she’s a fearful flatterer.’

Sharing a sitting room in a Paris hotel, Russell and Mary read Nietzsche together by day and wallowed in Wagner by night. Probably they weren’t having full sex, because Russell would never
have been able to withhold the glad tidings from Alys, thee can bet thy life. He certainly told her about his and Mary’s tender goodnight kisses after midnight discussions about the
Zeitgeist
. ‘Why should I mind thee kissing [Mary]?’ Alys told him. ‘Cried most of the morning,’ she told her diary. She cried most of the rest of her life. The
immediate cause of their estrangement, six years later, was Russell’s unrequited but spectacular passion for Alfred North Whitehead’s wife, Evelyn – a permanently convalescent
beauty whose spiritual reluctance to put out was matched by an earthy willingness to soak up Russell’s money in the form of gifts, trips and other freebies. Alys had a closeup of the
proceedings, because the Russells, fulfilling all the requirements of Strindbergian claustrophobia, were sharing a house in Grantchester with the Whiteheads, where Evelyn faithfully reported to
Alys everything Russell was saying – a possibility that failed to occur to Russell even while Evelyn was faithfully reporting to him everything Alys was saying. As Russell’s last embers
of feeling for Alys chilled to grey, he wrote her a letter that can be said to epitomize his ability to analyse his own emotions:

The writing was on the wall – though backwards, like Leonardo’s. Life without her became possible two months later. His renowned account of how he got the idea in a flash, as
enshrined in his ostensibly frank but deeply self-serving three-volume
Autobiography
(1967–69) – ‘I went out bicycling one afternoon, and suddenly, as I was riding along
a country road, I realized that I no longer loved Alys’ – turns out to have more truth in it than you might think: there really was a bicycle. But there was no suddenly about it; he was
merely bringing to a head what had been festering for years. As Alys went from being miscast to being cast off, she began a slow, limping exit to the wings of the drama, there to await in vain her
cue for reentry, with death a longed-for but elusive alternative. (She despaired when a lump in her breast turned out
not
to be cancer.) She always hoped that he would come back to her. He
must have had something.

Mostly, he had a brain, and the ladies went for it, even when they didn’t think much of his body. Lady Ottoline Morrell was grandly married but sported an impressive track
record of adulterous bunk-ups with
prominenti
of all stamps. Anyone but the great philosopher would have spotted that this was a good reason not to try to get her all to himself. But
Russell was so bowled over by an actual, consummated, thrashingly carnal love affair that he went ape. He counselled her to tell her husband, Philip, so as to avoid ‘deceit and
sordidness’. Typically, Russell had misread the object of his adoration completely. Ottoline, who, unbeknownst to Russell, was still pursuing long-term affairs with Henry Lamb and Roger Fry,
liked her life. She was loyal to her complacent husband. She was a realist. Russell, even though the warm impact of Ottoline’s physicality had made him uncertain that he could now maintain
contact with the cool world of mathematical logic, was, in emotional matters, still and forever an idealist. For once, the result was less Strindberg than Shaw, with the philosopher Russell
spouting high-flown balderdash and the layperson Ottoline talking all the sense. His ‘morality of passion’, he explained to her, demanded the ability ‘to behave as one might in a
grand opera or in epic poetry’, and he went on to vaporize about how ‘rapturous it would be to die together like the people in Rosmersholm’. Sensibly planning to die in her
comfortable bed like people in real life, Ottoline became more sparing with her favours. ‘His intellect is supreme, but he lives up there so much that all the rest of him seems to have lost
motion,’ she told her journal. ‘I feel it exhausting, as I have to keep in step with his intellect all the time, and also satisfy his heart.’ Russell’s intellect was at that
time keeping in step with that of his dazzling new discovery, Wittgenstein, so he perhaps found it hard to slow down the pace. Satisfying his heart was not easy, either: satisfaction bred
hunger.