Russell - A Very Short Indroduction (4 page)

Towards the end of his sojourn in Peking, Russell fell seriously ill with bronchitis, and nearly died. As a result of the overzealousness of some Japanese journalists, news of his death was announced; Russell was therefore able to read his own obituary notices, including a one-liner that appeared in a missionary journal and especially amused him: ‘Missionaries may be pardoned’, it read, ‘for breathing a sigh of relief at the news of Mr Bertrand Russell’s death.’

Alys had at last agreed to a divorce, so when Russell and Dora returned to England in September 1921 they married, and not long afterwards their first son, John Conrad, was born. A daughter, Kate, followed two years later. Russell twice stood for Parliament as a Labour Party candidate in Chelsea, in 1922 and 1923, but unsuccessfully. Family responsibilities pressed; he needed to make a living, and therefore again gave up the idea of parliamentary politics to devote himself to writing and lecturing. The most lucrative lecturing circuit was the United States, to which he made four visits during the 1920s. The popular books he published included
The A.B.C. of Relativity
,
The A.B.C. of Atoms
,
What I Believe
,
On Education
,
Sceptical Essays
,
Marriage and Morals
, and
The Conquest of Happiness
. Some of these were financially successful, and some caused scandal, mainly because of their liberal views on sexual morality. Nor did he neglect philosophy; his
Analysis of Mind
, begun in prison, appeared in 1921; he was invited to give the Tarner Lectures in Cambridge in 1925, and they were published in 1927 as
The Analysis of Matter
. He also produced an introductory textbook called
An Outline of Philosophy
.

The advent of children satisfied a long yearning in Russell. They provided him with a ‘new emotional centre’ which absorbed him in parental interests for the rest of the 1920s. He bought a house in Cornwall so that the family could spend their summers there, and when John and Kate reached school age he and Dora decided to found their own school so that the children would be educated as they thought best. They rented Russell’s brother’s country house on the South Downs, and began a school of 20 children all roughly of the same age. The house was large, set in 200 acres of virgin forest filled with magnificent beeches and yews, and roamed by many kinds of wildlife, including deer. The views from the house itself were beautiful.

Despite the ideal and the idyll, the experiment in the end was a failure. The school never paid for itself, and Russell’s writing of popular books and journalism, and his crossings and recrossings of the Atlantic to make lecture tours – he hated the sea journeys – were mainly aimed at subsidizing it. Dora also made a lecture tour to America, but her chief responsibility was running the school. Staff proved a difficulty; Russell and Dora never found teachers who could consistently apply their principles, which involved allowing freedom with discipline – for despite allegations to the contrary, Russell’s school was not an anarchy of infants; he later wrote, ‘To let the children go free was to establish a reign of terror, in which the strong kept the weak trembling and miserable. A school is like the world; only government can prevent brutal violence.’

Another difficulty was that the school attracted a high proportion of problem children, whose parents had tried to send them elsewhere but had been driven at last to try experimental schools. Because the Russells needed the money they accepted these children, only to find that they made running the school very difficult.

Worst of all, however, was the effect on Russell’s own children. The other pupils thought they were unduly favoured, because their parents ran the school; but in an effort to be fair, Russell and Dora tried to treat them on the same footing as the others, with the consequence that John and Kate were effectively deprived of their parents, and suffered for it. The early happiness in the family was, in Russell’s own words, thereby ‘destroyed, and was replaced by awkwardness and embarrassment’ (
A
390).

Hopes for education as a way of transforming the world were widespread in the years after the First World War. In Austria, for example, where the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had had a shattering effect, many young intellectuals took up school-teaching in the hope of building mankind anew. Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein were among them. In an indirect way Russell was part of this movement. But the realities of teaching, and the sheer intractability of human material, quickly disillusioned most of them, and they gave it up.

In 1931 Russell’s brother Frank died suddenly, and Russell inherited the earldom. With it he inherited his brother’s debts and an obligation to pay £400 a year in alimony to the second of his brother’s three exwives. His attitude to the earldom was somewhat wry, but he was not averse to making use of it in various ways, not least in exploiting the automatic entry it gave him to Establishment platforms, where his expression of iconoclastic and independent views could have the greatest effect. Nevertheless he did not often attend the House of Lords, and preserved a healthy streak of contempt for the British class system.

At about this time Russell’s marriage was feeling the strain both of the school and of the various affairs which both spouses allowed themselves. Russell did not object to Dora having affairs, but he did not wish to be responsible for any children that resulted. Dora became pregnant by an American lover, and the child was at first registered as Russell’s; later, when he saw her listed in Debrett’s as one of his offspring, he instituted proceedings to have her name removed. To this extent, therefore, Russell had dynastic impulses.
In the aftermath of the school and separation from Dora, and with the additional financial burdens inherited from his brother, Russell was still under the necessity of making a living from his pen. A lucrative association with the Hearst newspapers in America, for which Russell had written a column, came to an end early in the decade, so Russell had to devote his energies to books. In 1932 he published
The Scientific Outlook
, and in 1934 one of his best books, a work of political history called
Freedom and Organization 1814–1914
. In 1935 he published
In Praise of Idleness
and in 1936
Which Way to Peace?
In this book he reasserted his qualified pacifism and his commitment to the idea of world government. But by the time this book was published he had already come to feel the need for even deeper qualifications of pacifism, especially – as events in Germany over the previous two or three years showed – in the face of such an ‘utterly revolting’ threat as he perceived in Nazism. By the outbreak of the Second World War he had decided that resistance to Hitler must be unequivocal.

In 1937 Russell published
The Amberley Papers
, a three-volume record of the life of his parents. He found this work ‘restful’, because he admired and profoundly agreed with his parents’ radical views, and felt nostalgia for the more hopeful and spacious world – so it seemed to Russell – in which they had fought for them. In working both on this book and on
Freedom and Organization
Russell had the assistance of a young woman who had previously taught at his school, and who had become first his lover and then, in 1936, his third wife: Patricia (commonly called ‘Peter’) Spence. In 1937 they had a son, Conrad. They moved to a house near Oxford where Russell gave a course of lectures and held discussions with some of the younger philosophers, among them A. J. Ayer. He published
Power, A New Social Analysis
in 1938, and his Oxford lectures, at first entitled ‘Words and Facts’, became his next philosophical book,
An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth
, published in 1940.

In 1938 Russell went with Peter and Conrad to America to take up an appointment as visiting professor at the University of Chicago. Although he had stimulating conversations there with brilliant students and colleagues – among the latter Rudolf Carnap – he did not get on with the head of the philosophy department, and he disliked Chicago, which he described as ‘a beastly town with vile weather’. At the end of the year the Russells went to California, where the weather proved altogether more congenial. Russell taught at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). In the summer of 1939 John and Kate came to spend a Californian holiday, but the outbreak of war made it impossible for them to return to England, so Russell placed them both in UCLA.

Despite the sunshine he was less happy at UCLA than he had been at Chicago, because the staff and students were not very able and the president of the University seemed to Russell especially disagreeable. After a year, therefore, he accepted an invitation to become a professor at the City College of New York. But before he could assume his post a scandal was raised against him on the grounds of irreligion and immorality. It was started by an Episcopalian bishop, carried forward enthusiastically by Catholics, and achieved focus in a legal suit brought by the mother of an intending female student of the College. The mother, a Mrs Kay, said that Russell’s presence in the College would be dangerous to her daughter’s virtue. Russell was unable to plead in court because the suit was brought against the Municipality of New York and he was not himself a party to it. Mrs Kay’s lawyer described Russell’s works as ‘lecherous, libidinous, lustful, venerous, erotomaniac, aphrodisiac, irreverent, narrow-minded, untruthful, and bereft of moral fibre’. One of the grounds for this was that Russell had stated in a book that very young children should not be punished for masturbating. The Irish Catholic judge was even more vituperative in his summing up against Russell than Mrs Kay’s lawyer had been. Mrs Kay, naturally, won.

The case raised not just the whole of New York City and State against Russell, but the whole country. Driven from his New York job, he could at first find nowhere else that would give him a teaching post, and no newspaper that would offer him a column. Because of war conditions it was impossible to get money from England. He was thus stranded abroad without a livelihood, and with a family to support.

Russell was rescued from this dilemma first by Harvard University, which generously invited him to lecture in 1940, and then by a Philadelphia millionaire, Dr Barnes, a passionate collector of art who had established a Foundation for the study chiefly of art history. He gave Russell a fiveyear contract to lecture at the Foundation. To his amusement, and despite thinking it incongruous with academic philosophy, Russell gave his lectures in a room hung with French paintings of nudes. Barnes was something of an eccentric with a reputation for falling out with his staff; less than halfway through Russell’s term he suddenly issued a dismissal notice on the grounds that, in his opinion, Russell’s lectures were poorly prepared. These lectures were subsequently published as
A History of Western Philosophy
, by far Russell’s most successful book from a popular and financial point of view. Russell sued for breach of contract and gave the manuscript to the judge to read. He won his case. It must be said that parts of this famous book are sketchy enough to make one feel a certain sympathy with the Philadelphia millionaire. But in other respects it is a marvellously readable, magnificently sweeping survey of Western thought, distinctive for placing it informatively into its historical context. Russell enjoyed writing it, and the enjoyment shows; his later remarks about it equally show that he was conscious of its shortcomings.

Work on the
History
was continued in the library of Bryn Mawr College after Russell’s break with Barnes. This was owing to the kindness of Professor Paul Weiss who invited Russell there while he awaited permission from the British Embassy in Washington to return to England. Trinity College had offered Russell a Fellowship, which, together with a handsome advance for the
History
, rescued Russell from his difficulties. Just before sailing home through the dangers of German submarines in the Atlantic, Russell spent a short time at Princeton, where he had discussions with Einstein, Kurt Gödel, and Wolfgang Pauli. For the next few years Russell taught in Cambridge, publishing the
History
in 1945 and
Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits
in 1948. This was Russell’s last great work of philosophy, and he was disappointed when it received little notice from the philosophical community. One reason for this he attributed to the considerable vogue then and for some time afterwards enjoyed by Wittgenstein’s ideas. In 1949, a year which he described as the ‘apogee of his respectability’, his Fellowship at Trinity was changed to a Fellowship for life without teaching duties; he was elected to an Honorary Fellowship of the British Academy; the BBC invited him to give the first ever series of Reith Lectures; King George VI gave him the Order of Merit; and in the following year he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, news of which reached him while he was on yet another visit to the United States.

Russell was pleased to be given the OM, and went to Buckingham Palace for the investiture. King George was embarrassed at having to behave graciously to an iconoclastic ex-convict adulterer, who in addition was – in his own words – so ‘queer looking’, so he said, ‘You have sometimes behaved in a way which would not do if generally adopted.’ The reply that sprang to Russell’s lips, but which he managed to suppress, was, ‘Like your brother’, meaning the abdicated Edward VIII; instead he said, ‘How a man should behave depends upon his profession. A postman, for instance, should knock at all the doors in a street at which he has letters to deliver, but if anybody else knocked on all the doors, he would be considered a public nuisance.’ The King hastily changed the subject (
A
516–17).

Russell’s new respectability, and in particular his long-standing opposition to the communism of the Soviet Union, made him useful to the British Government in the deepening chill of the Cold War. In this capacity he visited Germany and Sweden to lecture, on the latter occasion being involved in a seaplane crash in Trondheim harbour, which necessitated his having to swim to safety through freezing water; and on the former being temporarily made a member of the British Armed Forces, to his great amusement.