A Philosopher in the Boudoir
DRAPER, ROGER
A WINTER. PHILOSOPHER IN THE BOUDOIR BY ROGER DRAPER Bertrand Russell was the foremost intellectual hero of my youth, but I did not think him a faultless hero, because his three-volume...
...Helen accepted this proposition, apparently promising to join him in England as quickly as she could...
...Now compelled to earn his living as a free-lance writer and lecturer, he soon won a much larger audience...
...As he says in the autobiography, "I broke her heart," and indeed Helen eventually went mad...
...Russell's efforts to replace class with an alternative route to certitude were undermined by his former student Ludwig Wittgenstein, who argued (to quote Monk) that "the 'truths' of logic were of a piece with those of ethics, esthetics, and religion" in their unprovability...
...In 1890 "Bertie" went off to study math at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he would subsequently teach...
...PHILOSOPHER IN THE BOUDOIR BY ROGER DRAPER Bertrand Russell was the foremost intellectual hero of my youth, but I did not think him a faultless hero, because his three-volume autobiography was much too frank...
...It is true that Russell ended his discussion of the liaison with Helen Dudley by claiming that the War "intervened" against "the plan which we formed in Chicago...
...Though he often behaved obtusely with her, she was at least his match as a manipulator, and in this affair it was, as the French say, he who loved and she who let herself be loved...
...if it isn't, it is...
...Can anyone really say what evil lay in the hearts of G. E. Moore, or Wittgenstein, or Russell's other colleagues at Cambridge...
...The future Nobel laureate in literature (1950) honed his talent for general writing in his letters to Ottoline, where he finally abandoned the Victorian earnestness that had often made him absurd, developing the ironic manner of his mature style...
...In 1920, he went to Soviet Russia as a member of a British labor delegation and almost immediately disliked what he saw...
...A few classes are, to use philosophic jargon, "self members"for example, the class of all classes...
...According to him, in the autobiography Russell contends it was solely the onset of World War I "that killed his passion for Helen Dudley...
...caused her to change her mind...
...It was...
...He said it anyway, in The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, at a time when illusions about the Communist regime were virtually universal on the Left...
...The correspondence documents not only Russell's life but also his maturation as a writer...
...His first plan was to base everything on logic, in particular the concept of "class," or category...
...When Helen Dudley arrived in England in August, he was at first completely unavailable...
...This, however, was Imperial Germany, not the Third Reich, and Russell was basically right to say the disruption of the long 19th-century peace was a catastrophe that couldn't possibly have been justified by any right or wrong...
...He was not in principle a pacifist, and in the beginning he did not undertake any active resistance to the War effort...
...later, he occasionally condescended to make love to her...
...After conscription was instituted, in 1916, he wrote a pamphlet against it, was prosecuted for "impeding recruiting and discipline," fined ?00, and ejected from his lectureship at Trinity College...
...He then encouraged her to come to England to cohabit with him, and suggested that they might marry if he could get a divorce...
...In the early missives to Alys, he is hardly more fascinating than she is...
...But as a writer, he kept faith with the wonderful tradition that produced him...
...Lenin, with whom Russell talked for an hour, seemed to be merely a pedant...
...This soon became obvious, and in 1911, following much unpleasantness, he left Alys...
...An acquaintance described Aiys as "aggressively dull," and her letters do seem to suggest this...
...Contact with those who have no doubts [the Communists] has intensified a thousandfold my own doubts, not as to socialism in itself, but as to the wisdom of holding a creed so firmly that for its sake men are willing to inflict widespread misery...
...She refused, chiefly because she did not find him very attractive physically...
...The Russell Archives at McMaster University, in Canada, has more than 40,000 letters, and it does not have them all...
...Although he had by then broken with the Liberal Party, which his grandfather helped found, Russell was still a liberal at heart...
...But as his letters to Ottoline show, his passion for Helen was dead long before his thoughts turned to war...
...But she does not appear to have been any less dull in 1893-94...
...In March 1914, with this relationship at an impasse, Russell embarked on what Monk rightly sees as the most discreditable episode in his subject's life...
...This may be easier to understand in the case of a less abstract paradox: For example, Diomedes the Sicilian says that all Sicilians always lie...
...Shortly thereafter, he wrote that when they had met, "she was young and happy and blooming, and full of simple unselfdistrustful kindness...
...Here Monk makes a serious mistake...
...Yet even in Monk's book something remains of the Bertrand Russell I admired long ago a man who willed his transformation from a writer on highly technical questions into a master of belles lettres and was right about a number of important issues, notably the Russian Revolution and, in part, World War I. Russell, who was literally the godson of John Stuart Mill, embodied the great Whig tradition of English history...
...One point, though it is only procedural, must be made on behalf of Russell's character: We know the worst about him because he told us so much in the autobiography and wrote so many intimate letters to women who saved them and were themselves prolific correspondents and journal keepers...
...As with all true paradoxes, the answer is the following: If it is, it isn't...
...Monk does not deny his importance or brilliance as a thinker...
...Informed of these momentous developments by Russell's letters, Lady Ottoline became much more obliging to him when he returned home in June 1914...
...than I have tried to persuade myself that I was...
...Russell's next romance the love of his life involved Lady Ottoline Morrell...
...During one of the nights he spent at the Dudleys, he made love to Helen...
...He tried to mix lechery and high-mindedness by demanding that she leave her husband, a man with his own amours, as well as her other lovers, and live in open sin with him...
...Another was a martyr to liberty in the struggle leading up to the Glorious Revolution of 1688...
...From the outset, Russell aimed to replace the religious faith he had lost in adolescence with certainty of a different kind, by demonstrating that all of mathematics could be derived from self-evident-ly true axioms...
...A certain sympathy thus accrues to him...
...It is all my doing...
...A third, Lord John Russell, served in the highest offices of state in the mid-19th century and was the person most responsible for the act (1858) granting political equality to the Jews...
...In Russell's case, we know precisely...
...Although I will dispute this specific detail, the author's unflattering portrait is fundamentally accurate...
...It is Russell the man who is diminished by Monk's book, especially for his treatment of women...
...Unfortunately, he himself undermined this strategy by conceiving "Russell's paradox...
...My letter crossed one from her, saying that she wished our relations henceforth to be pla-tonic...
...In 1918, Russell spent several months in jail because of an antiwar article deemed "likely to prejudice His Majesty's relations with the United States of America...
...Of course, this partially honest account the author does show that Russel was completely unaware of the impending War in August 1914does not make his behavior less contemptible...
...Most classes such as the class of all book reviews are not...
...Nonetheless, a few sentences earlier he admits that "On the boat [to England] I wrote to Ottoline telling her what had occurred [with Helen...
...As he noted in the autobiography, Russell was pained that "to say anything against Bolshevism was, of course, to play into the hands of reaction...
...Russell, he writes, devised techniques and approaches to logic "that would provide the inspiration" for Alan Turing and John von Neumann, the founders of computing...
...His first love affair is perhaps the most painful to read about, albeit the most innocent given his inexperience...
...Now she is broken, tortured, twisted, with no self-confidence, no hope, no purpose...
...Is the class of all classes that are not self-members itself a self-member...
...Soon he was writing to her, "I am less fond of H.D...
...Ottoline could still, when she chose, be a lover so delightful that to leave her seemed impossible...
...Lord and Lady Amberly died young...
...So I was astonished by Ray Monk's charge, in Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude, 1872-1921 (Free Press, 695 pp., $35.00), that the autobiography suppressed the most serious evidence against him...
...In 1893, the 21-year-old Russell courted Alys Pearsall Smith, the daughter of a family of rich American esthetes, and in 1894 they married...
...Russell simply mistook his sexual attraction for love...
...So vast was Russell's ambition that his failure to realize it was hardly surprising...
...Carrying on the family tradition, his eldest son Bertrand Russell's father, Lord Am-berly supported such advanced causes as women's suffrage and birth control...
...After taking a short-term position as a lecturer on logic at Harvard, in late spring he went on a speaking tour of the Midwest, staying in Chicago at the family home of Helen Dudley, whom he had met in Oxford...
...My news...
...He and his wife were also sexual experimenters: With her husband's consent, she had an affair with the tutor of their son Frank...
...Toward the end of the period covered by this volume Russell emerged as a public figure, mainly through his opposition to World War I. He had paid little attention to foreign policy before its outbreak and greatly exaggerated the role of Britain's ally Russia in bringing it about, while underestimating the responsibility of Germany...
...Is he lying...
...As a man, Bertrand Russell was something of a monster...
...One ancestor played a major role in the Reformation during the 16th century...
...Frank and his younger brother Bertrand (born 1872) were reared by their grandmother, a woman liberal in politics and religion (she converted to Unitarianism at the age of 70) but austerely Victorian in personal morality...
Vol. 79 • December 1996 • No. 9
