Russell - A Very Short Indroduction (3 page)

4.
Lady Ottoline Morrell (1873–1938), painted in 1926 by Augustus John; oil on canvas.

She also provided him, in her person and the voluptuous beauty of her surroundings, with satisfactions for his aesthetic impulses. Russell was then nearly 40 years of age; it was a late but profound awakening.

In 1914 Russell visited the United States and lectured, among other places, at Harvard University. His lectures were subsequently published as
Our Knowledge of the External World
. One of his pupils at Harvard was T. S. Eliot, who wrote a poem about him, ‘Mr Apollinax’, in which he appears as a mythical creature, strange and even frightening, whose seaweed-festooned head might suddenly roll under a chair or pop up, grinning, above a screen; who laughs, Eliot says, ‘like an irresponsible foetus’, yet whose ‘dry and passionate talk’ eats up the afternoon, reminding Eliot of the beating of a centaur’s hoofs on hard ground. It was an encounter that left a strong impression on Eliot; of the others present he could remember only that they ate cucumber sandwiches.

While visiting Chicago Russell fell in love with his host’s daughter – she is unnamed in his autobiography – who was then a student at Bryn Mawr. They made plans for her to join him in England so that they could marry when he divorced Alys. She did indeed come; but by then the First World War had begun, the emotional shock of which to Russell, and his passionate engagement in pacifist activities, had obliterated his feelings for her. The disaster of her visit was later compounded by her going mad. In his autobiography Russell reports this sad interlude with agonized regret.

Russell’s response to the outbreak of war was complex. He was too old to be a combatant, so he never had the status of a conscientious

5.
T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), one of Russell’s students at Harvard, wrote a poem about him, ‘Mr Apollinax’, in which he appears as a mythical creature, with a seaweed-festooned head and centaur hoofs. objector. (A number of his acquaintances who were in this position,

such as Lytton Strachey, discharged their compulsory agricultural duties by pottering about Ottoline’s country estate at Garsington.) Like many Edwardian intellectuals Russell had a tenderness for Germany and German culture. He was fluent in the language, read German books as a matter of course, and had lived there and written about its politics. But he was also intensely patriotic, once writing that ‘love of England is very nearly the strongest emotion that I possess’. Nor was he an unconditional pacifist, as shown by the fact that a quarter of a century later he strongly supported the war against Nazism. The point for him was that the outbreak of hostilities in 1914 served no principle and promised no benefits, but was brought about by the folly of politicians and threatened to engulf civilization in a huge welter of wasted young life. ‘All this madness’, he wrote in a letter to the
Nation
very soon after fighting began, ‘all this rage, all this flaming death of our civilisation and our hopes, has been brought about because a set of official gentlemen, living luxurious lives, mostly stupid, and all without imagination and heart, have chosen that it should occur rather than that any of them should suffer some infinitesimal rebuff to his country’s pride.’

Then as in the Vietnam War half a century later Russell was extraordinarily insightful. The horrendous slaughter of the trenches had not properly begun, yet Russell saw its inevitability, and with it much longer-term evil consequences. Very few could then have foreseen that a process had begun which would trap most of the world in actual or incipient war for most of the rest of the century, with scores of millions of deaths and the misdirection of massive resources to development of military technology, each new advance in the sophistication of which has been more dangerous and destructive than the last. Russell could not of course in 1914 foresee Bolshevism, Nazism and the Holocaust, nuclear weapons and the Cold War, nationalism given teeth by the international arms trade, and fundamentalism spurred by the jealous gap between rich and poor nations. But he had a lively sense that the outbreak of war meant that a gate had been swung wide to disaster of some form: and many decades of disaster duly followed.

He was equally horrified by the popular support for war in the combatant nations, and the form it took of ‘primitive barbarism’ and the release of ‘instincts of hatred and blood lust’, which – as he pointed out – are the very things civilization exists to oppose. Worst of all was the appearance of these same sentiments in the majority of his friends and acquaintances. He could not stand aside; throughout the war years he wrote articles and made speeches, supporting organized opposition to the war in the form of the Union of Democratic Control and the No Conscription Fellowship. Early in the war he did charitable work among Germans living in England who had been made destitute by being cut off from home. The need for this work did not last long because citizens of enemy nations were soon interned.

The leader of the No Conscription Fellowship was a young man called Clifford Allen (later Lord Allen of Hurtwood), who was repeatedly sent to prison for refusing to give up his anti-war work. At one of Allen’s trials Russell met Lady Constance Malleson, an actress with the stage-name of Colette O’Neil. She was engaged in pacifist work also, spending her evenings in the theatre and her days stuffing envelopes in the Fellowship’s offices. They became lovers, her calmness providing Russell with a refuge from the harshness of the wartime struggle.

Russell was himself several times on the rough end of the law for his anti-war work. In 1916 he was prosecuted because of an article he had written, and was fined £100. He refused to pay, so his goods were distrained; but his friends kindly bought them and gave them back to him, rendering his gesture futile. Then he was banned from entering any militarily restricted areas of Britain, in particular any part of the coast (to prevent him, he wryly supposed, from signalling to enemy submarines). He was refused a passport when he attempted to travel to America in 1916. And in 1918 he was sent to prison for six months because of an article in which he said that American troops coming to Europe might be used for strike-breaking, a task they had performed in their own country. Because of his connections (it was, as he sardonically acknowledged, useful being an Earl’s brother) he was placed in the first division, which meant that he had a cell to himself and could have books; so he read and wrote, producing one book –
An Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy –
and the beginnings of another
– The Analysis of Mind
– together with a number of reviews and articles. He was released in September 1918, when it was already apparent that the war could not last much longer.

The first of Russell’s brushes with the law carried an extra penalty. All the younger dons at Trinity had gone off to fight, leaving a small group of older men in charge of the College’s affairs. They were deeply hostile to Russell’s war work. When they heard of his conviction, they voted to deprive him of his lectureship. The mathematician G. H. Hardy, outraged by this treatment of Russell, later wrote an account of it. When at the war’s end the younger dons returned from fighting, they voted to reinstate Russell, but by that time Russell’s interests were leading him abroad.

Among the many changes effected in Russell by the war was a widening in the scope of his literary activity. He produced two non-philosophical books during these years,
Principles of Social Reconstruction
(in the United States called
Why Men Fight
), published in 1916, and
Roads to Freedom
, published in 1918, which presaged his many further popular books on social, political, and moral questions. While giving
Principles of Social Reconstruction
as a series of lectures in 1916 Russell met and began what was intended to be a collaboration with D. H. Lawrence, but Lawrence’s attitude soon turned hostile. At first Lawrence’s accusations that Russell’s pacifism was a mask for violently misanthropic feelings troubled Russell profoundly, because he thought Lawrence had special insight into human nature; but Lawrence’s increasingly hysterical and vituperative letters led Russell to see through Lawrence’s proto-fascistic brand of politics and his worship of irrationalism, and relations between them ceased.

In prison in 1918 Russell worked, as noted, on two philosophical books. His return to philosophy had however begun earlier, for in the early months of 1918 he gave a series of lectures under the title ‘The Philosophy of Logical Atomism’, published shortly afterwards in successive numbers of a journal called
The Monist
. In his
characteristically overgenerous way, Russell attributed his ideas to Ludwig Wittgenstein, who had been his pupil for a short time at Cambridge before the war. In fact most of the ideas in Russell’s lectures are apparent in work he did long before meeting Wittgenstein; but as one can see from the latter’s
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
, written while Wittgenstein was serving at the front in the Austrian army, the two had discussed these ideas at some length before the war. Now Russell received a letter from Wittgenstein, who was languishing in an Italian prisoner-of-war camp, telling him about the
Tractatus
. After the Italians released him Wittgenstein tried to get his book published, but failed; so Russell lent his help, and persuaded a publisher to take the book by agreeing to write an introduction to it. Although Russell was several more times of crucial help to Wittgenstein – not least in arranging a research Fellowship for him at Trinity a decade later – the two men drifted apart because of profound temperamental and philosophical differences.

Russell had once again fallen in love, this time with a young Girton graduate called Dora Black. In 1920 they independently visited the Soviet Union, from which Dora returned enthusiastic and Russell hostile. He wrote a damning book about the Bolsheviks, over which he and Dora quarrelled. But it did not stop them going together to China in 1921, where Russell had been invited to spend a year as a visiting professor in Peking.

As with many who spend any length of time in China, Russell fell in love

6.
Dora Black (1894–1986) was a young Girton graduate who met Russell in 1916. They fell in love, but Dora rejected his proposal of marriage until September 1921. They had two children, John Russell and Katharine Russell.

with it. And like many of these many, he was inclined to romanticize the Chinese themselves. He applauded their sense of humour, their sagacity, their enjoyment of beautiful things, and their immensely civilized love of culture and learning. But he somehow did not see how vilely harsh were the lives of the majority in that vast country, nor how crushed and obstructed China was by its ancient traditions. While there he refused to set himself up as an adviser to the many who asked him how they should live, what they should think, and how China could emerge from its poverty and feudal disarray. The American philosopher John Dewey was visiting China at the same time, and did not hesitate to pronounce on all these matters, with the result that his memory remains a more potent influence in China today than Russell’s. The tradition of the sage is strong in China; Russell therefore lost an opportunity to do much good there. He wrote a book setting out his views on China and its future, but a book published later in far-away England was no substitute for the oracles his guests had hoped to hear. He lectured them, instead, on mathematical logic.