I found it irritating at first that Bertrand Russell in the 20's , who then considered himself a Socialist, felt qualified to speak out on behalf of the proletariat. Russell never did a day's manual labor in his entire life. For all I know he never washed a dish, mopped a floor or even took out the trash. He certainly had no first-hand knowledge of working conditions in factories, farms, clerical offices, or any of the other situations where proletarians are likely to end up .
Then it occurred to me that the production of Principia Mathematica had placed him among the finalists for workaholic of the 20th century! One is speaking of 4500 pages of text, its pages dense with mathematical calculations written out in a ponderous logical symbolism. Although all of its ideas were the joint work of both Russell and Whitehead, it was Russell who wrote the entire opus out by hand, sometimes working 10 to 12 hours a day over an 8-year period. Russell did not have to see the inside of a factory to understand the effects of prolonged, tedious, misunderstood toil. His familiarity with the paradoxical character of proletarian alienation, so eloquently described by Karl Marx, was both intimate and direct. A psychologically rooted penchant for hard labor, reinforced by Victorian principles of duty had indeed given him the authority to speak as a Socialist.
The bewildering array of conceptual leaps executed by Russell in his decade-long search for the primary notions underlying Mathematics, may also be found in the wild fluctuations of his political commitments . As he grew older his shifts in posture, dogma, allegiance and alliance augmented in both frequency and intensity. Ray Monk's documentation allows us to see how this phenomenon developed over the years. As a prime example, the series of contradictory pronouncements he shared with mankind on the eve of World War II would have won the admiration of the Vicar of Bray:
In the spring of 1939 Russell used the time available to him between jobs at the University of Chicago and UCLA to stump (Pun intended ) America with a lecture tour built around the issue of what the United States should do in the eventuality of the outbreak of war in Europe.
### On March 28th, in Los Angeles, Russell endorses American isolationism.
### On April 4th, speaking in New Orleans, he urges the United States to ally itself with England and France.
### On April 9th, in New York City, and again in Philadelphia, he exhorts the US to avoid alliances with any side. Rather it was the duty of the United States to assert the role of world dictator.
### On April 15th he writes a letter to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, (as from one world leader to another ), congratulating him for making peace overtures to Hitler and Mussolini.
Only in September , on the day after the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, does Russell throw his weight solidly behind American support for England and France. Apart from his short-lived infatuation with the Bolshevik miracle he never thought that any war against Russia was immoral. All through the rise of Hitler he urged his countrymen to support Germany in any war it might wage against the barbaric Russians.
Although Ray Monk chronicles Russell's political career with the same care and thoroughness one finds throughout the two volumes of the biography, he appears to have a certain antipathy to the form, if not the content, of Russell's activism. He thereby fails to credit him with some major achievements in the political domain. Sometimes Monk tends to downplay Russell's effectiveness on the grounds that he was only an amateur in politics. He should have given him more credit: all radical politics is done by amateurs: Gandhi, Shakarov, Martin Luther King ...
In addition, although most of the entries in the above list of citations from his popular writing in the above list indicate that Russell was as much a right-wing conservative, even a Fascist, as he was liberal, it is a time-honored feature of the history of civil disobedience that an activist may make a complete fool of himself, both in word and deed, and still end up doing the right things for the right reasons. Russell's opposition to World War I is a case in point. Russell never claimed to be a pacifist. The unhappiness of his first marriage soured him on pacifists, Quakers, Americans, and conventional marriage. In the first few years of World War I he frequently asserted that his opposition to the war stemmed from the fact that England was making alliances with barbarous nations like Russia and the United States to fight the infinitely more civilized Germans.
However we rarely need philosophers to tell us that actions speak louder than words. The trajectory of his career as a war resister in World War I was traditional for a tough non-violent activist and organizer. From the very beginning he was hounded by the government, spied upon, followed about , censored, fined and banned. He deliberately courted arrest, not as a thrill-seeker or someone out to win the applause of his following, but as someone who knew what he was doing and acting with circumspection and intelligence.
On the 4th of December, 1916, Russell wrote an important letter to Woodrow Wilson urging him to use his power to compel all the European governments to make peace - hardly the action of someone who thinks that all Americans are uncivilized brutes. It was smuggled out of England by the sister of one of his girl-friends, Helen Dudley, in defiance of a order from the Foreign Office censoring anything he put into the mail. This letter was among the things used against him when he was sentenced to 6 months incarceration in Brixton Prison in April, 1918.
Whatever combination of motives led him, in April 1916, to write a leaflet in defence of the conscientious objector Ernest Everett, one cannot doubt that Russell's action, and his subsequent dismissal from Trinity College, shook Cambridge to the core. It is no easy matter to raise more than a few ripples in the imperturbable calm of an ancient English academy. Wielding a jack-hammer on the foundations of Mathematics is somehow easier.
Russell's stubborn non-conformity was rooted in his family's historic association with Foxite Whig liberalism: " By the time he died in 1806, [Charles James] Fox had achieved mythic status among Whig families by taking a stand against both the wars with the French and the suppression of civil liberties that was enforced in the course of these wars. " ( Monk ,Vol I, pg. 6 ) There was more than sympathy between Fox and Russell's grandfather. the famous statesman Lord John Russell. He'd written a 3-volume biography of Fox and edited two volumes of his letters.
These were the formative influences, but what appears to have really catalyzed Russell's opposition to the Great War was his horror at the bloodthirstiness of the British public which, with a terrifying spontaneity, had burst open over the streets of London. The famous passage in the letter that he wrote to The Nation ( the English journal) , deserves to be reprinted here, because it reveals the deeper origins of his stance against the war, while showing him at his best:
" Those who saw the London crowds during the nights leading up to the Declaration of War, saw a whole population, hitherto peaceable and humane, precipitated in a few days down the steep slope to primitive barbarism, letting loose, in a moment, the instinct of hatred and blood-lust against which the whole fabric of society has been raised. " (Monk ,Vol I, pg. 369)
Russell's fears of 'barbarians' may have demonstrated his provincial prejudice, but his fear of barbarism was, in principle, principled.
It was just not possible that the Russell/Schoenman alloy could have been on target in so many ways without it/them having a shrewd sense of what they were doing. The sad story of how this alliance of youth and age degenerated into a disgraceful and ignominious farce that was played out on the international scene is well known, and makes for painful reading. At least Monk is even-handed in his blame, for there is little praise to go around. Schoenman exploited the cachet of Russell's name to collect funds for the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation ( fraudulently billed as a kind of Jimmy Carter mediation center) then used the money to assist violent guerrilla movements around the world. As Russell's personal ambassador, Schoenman was invited to address conferences and to assist at sensitive political negotiations, only to turn then into platforms for the delivery of ranting speeches about people's revolution and power at the end of a gun. In addition, most of the political manifestoes issued in Russell's name at this time were in fact written by Schoenman,( though one can assume that Russell read at least some of them before giving his approval.) One thereby finds one of the acknowledged masters of English prose being credited with:
"..The message that Cuba has for the world is one of utter determination in struggling against great odds for liberation from brutal foreign domination and rapacious economic exploitation. It is noteworthy that the meeting in Cuba has been one of solidarity, for solidarity is our overriding responsibility to all those struggling for their emancipation. It is an international struggle, it must command our clarity, our loyalty and our full solidarity... " ( Monk, Vol II, page 454 )
Writing in the 20's, Beatrice Webb characterized Bertrand Russell as a political lightweight: "...' He never seems serious, and his economic and political views follow on his temperamental likes and dislikes ... He is too indolent or impatient to work out the problems of maximizing freedom by deliberate social action '..." ( Monk, Vol II, pg 3 )
One has to concur with her opinion. Russell had to feel passionate about a political issue before he could be persuaded to take it seriously. At the few, yet significant, moments in history when that passion was present, the better side of the man eventually prevailed over the personal bitterness, the haughtiness, the narrow prejudices of his hyper-educated milieu, and the ever-present personal vanity.
The Axiomatic Casanova
"There is a story that on one of his lecture tours of America, Russell found himself at dinner sitting next to the principal of a respectable girls' college, who asked him : ' Why did you give up philosophy?' To which he is supposed to have replied : ' Because I discovered fucking. ' " (Monk, Vol. II, pg.6)
The vilification of Bertrand Russell as high priest of soulless depravity is grossly unfair. The vicious campaign of pulp and pulpit of 1940, which, in 1940, led the city of New York to force CCNY to rescind Russell's teaching contract - ( it is important to note that CCNY held its ground until the decision was taken out of its hands) - had its' origins in Bishop William T. Manning's indignation at certain passages in the bundle of inanities which constitutes Marriage and Morals . Published in 1929 , Russell had repudiated most of it by that time. The delicious phrase coined by prosecutor Joseph Goldstein speaking before the Supreme Court of the State of New York , gives some merit to Russell's accustomed tendency to think of the United States as a breakaway colony of the Empire filled with ignorant louts. Russell, Goldstein smirked, was :
" lecherous, salacious, libidinous, venerous, erotomaniac, aphrodisiac, atheistic, irreverent, narrow-minded, bigoted and untruthful ! " ( Monk, Vol II, pg. 236 )
With that kind of a recommendation, who needs to make a living?
That in the pursuit of enlightenment through erotic adventure Russell was destructive, irresponsible, selfish and sometimes arrantly immoral is, I think, demonstrable. A lot of the material Monk sifts through was Russell's own private business ( Example: the speculation that Russell may have stopped sleeping with Vivien Eliot because of her frequent menstrual discharges ) and although I do not dispute Monk's right, even obligation to bring it all out into the open, one wishes all the same that he had not devoted some hundreds of pages in his biography to searching analyses of too large a sampling of the 60,000 letters in the Russell Archive at McMaster University. In letter after letter, like a private investigator looking for evidence of moral turpitude in a divorce proceeding, Monk traces the subtle nuances of passion, affection, vanity, jealousy, insincerity, treachery, self-deception , callousness and other typically human reactions to emotional entanglements . Granted that it is difficult to resist the temptation to have a field day when your subject has placed 60,000 of his letters, many of them deeply intimate, in the public domain!
The kind of people likely to read Monk's books, of course, would want to know all there is to know about Bertrand Russell the sinner. There is no doubt as well that Monk is doing an important service by measuring the depth of the chasm separating the superior tone of Russell's political pronouncements from the baseness of his private life. Clearly, given that the targets of Russell's amorous exploits were important cultural and intellectual figures in their own right ( Ottoline Morrell, Constance Malleson, Katherine Mansfield ) , it is important that we know something about what went on between them. I cannot resist reprinting a choice phrase from an earlier review of Monk's biography by Richard Morrison, that appeared in the London Times on October 9th, 2000:
" As an account of serial bonking in upper-class England between the wars, for instance, it will rarely be bettered. "
Morrison should have read the biography more carefully. Most of the bonking occurs before the end of World War I.
Before diving into the muck and mire of Russell's alleged sinfulness, one needs to make some qualifying observations: Russell was never cured of his infection by the Victorian virus. In his college undergraduate years he was actually something of a prig, but he outgrew that. Although he frequented shifted his moralities, he never lost his intuition that the conduct life was a matter of doing one's duty. Responding to the surging of the tidal waves of sexual liberation in the period around the war, Russell preached the Religion of Sex with the earnestness of a missionary. A similar person might, at an earlier time, have pilloried adulterers, fornicators and nudists. In this regard he was in tune with his generation, and with other acclaimed literary figures: Havelock Ellis, D.H. Lawrence and Sigmund Freud for example. One suspects that a righteous and militant erotomania didn't give them much actual pleasure. One finds little of the spirit of Byron, Swinburne, Rossetti or the Marquis de Sade in their pursuit of lust. Given his obsession with excreta, if Freud derived any pleasure from sex at all, it must have been from manipulating his own excrement.
One encounters an entire generation of otherwise sensitive and intelligent human beings crying out : "It's our duty to be libertines! " Yet they remain essentially strait-laced. The record shows that Russell, as he did in philosophy, made Herculean efforts to remain faithful to all of his wives. Once again as he did in philosophy, sheer exhaustion at the effort led him to summarily ditch them. ( One suspects a bit of connivance in this pattern ) .
His first wife, Alys Pearsall Smith, ( herself the daughter of a notorious charismatic evangelist and free-thinker in the tradition of Elmer Gantry ) , was conventional to the point of dreariness. For 15 bitter years he struggled to make a go of their marriage. One need not take too seriously his statement that an epiphany experienced when he jumped on his bicycle in January of 1902 , revealed to him that he no longer loved his wife. No doubt in recollecting this incident, he'd gotten it mixed up with what he'd read in Henri PoincarŽ's Science et Hypothese , where there is a description of a revelation similarly bestowed by hopping onto a bus.
During the time he was engaged in the composition and writing of the Principia Mathematica his marriage descended into an unrelieved hell. The grinding work associated with the actual writing of the Principia also took its toll. After its completed he wrote, in a letter to Lucy Donnelly:
" 'I feel', he told Lucy, 'more or less as people feel at the death of an ill-tempered invalid whom they have nursed and hated for years. ' " (Monk, Vol I, pg. 193) In Russell's judgment his mental abilities never recovered from the strain of writing it.
By 1909 he desperately needed an escape from a bondage that was, in equal parts, physical, mental and emotional. It took the form of his deeply passionate, although self-centered and somewhat sadistic, affair with Ottoline Morrell. As it drew to its close he became sucked into a quagmire involving 5 different women in lingering affairs that lasted through World War I : Ottoline Morrell , Helen Dudley, Vivien Eliot , Constance Malleson and Dora Black, whom he married in 1921.
His feelings of guilt towards Helen Dudley did not prevent him from being abusive and rejecting. That he reneged on his promise of marriage in a particularly shameful way does not mean that he wasn't involved with her: he arranged for her to live with Ottoline Morrell when, on the strength of his promises, she'd made the dangerous trip to England from America on the eve of the war. The love letters he wrote her were virtually identical to the ones he wrote Ottoline . ( In fact it appears that whole passages were cribbed from the letters to one and put into letters to the other). He occasionally slept with her, ( allegedly for her own good of course) , and let her live in his apartment while he was in jail.
He tormented Ottoline because of her religious leanings, using brow-beatings and insults to convert her to his species of 'rationality' ; his jealous possessiveness towards Constance Malleson nearly drove him to the madhouse. Towards T.S. Eliot's wife, the unhappy Vivien Hiagh-Wood, he professed to have no feeling but 'allowed her to fall in love with him' , and slept with her because of his concern for her spiritual improvement.
In 1921 he married Dora Black because she was the only one able and willing to give him children. As she herself possessed a bottomless appetite for destruction it comes as no surprise, in fact as something of a relief, that their marriage did not survive the decade. While Dora takes up with two men, Barry Griffin and Paul Gillard, who are also involved with each other, Russell sends back letters from his lecture tours around the States in which he boasts of the conquests he's made with cute college sophomores. This ageless occupational hazard gives him a taste for this particular age group, and his next wife, Patricia ( Peter) Spence will be 22 when, in 1936 he marries her at age 64.
Although there will be a few minor affairs before divorce from Peter and his marriage to Edith Finch on December 15, 1952 , this more or less brings to an end the career of the lubricious Russell. One tends to doubt that Russell's sex life would ever have called forth much comment from anyone had he not opted for the role of Messiah of sexual liberation, something quite out of his character and at variance with the very style in which the tracts and polemics he wrote on this subject is delivered: dry, witty, cold, didactic and chaste, even prudish. We will not find any pornography … la Appolinaire in the writings of Bertrand Russell, nor the hyper-sensual ennui of a Baudelaire, nor the rollicking lustiness of a Rabelais. I would dare to venture, ( though I've read only a small fraction of the total ), that there is not a sensuous or voluptuous line in a single one of Russell's 3,000 publications.
Postscript From my own perspective I find it extremely interesting to observe how a philosopher so dedicated to opposing Idealism with Realism, so committed to the real existence of an external world, should have resolved this philosophical dilemma in his private life by a total abdication of mind to matter in an abyss of squalid debauchery. One does not, however, need to look to philosophy to understand the enigma of Bertrand Russell's volatile personal quests . There is a much simpler explanation: his childhood, though over-protected, was so unbelievably unhappy, that I think that at a certain point he made a resolution to the effect that he had earned the right to do anything he pleased - no matter how selfish ( or - alas! - how foolish ) if it contributed to his happiness; rather let us say , his 'theory of happiness', at that particular moment.