The World as I Found It (50 page)

His attitude toward the war had evolved slowly. Dead set against the war at first, he then decided that, with war an established fact, the government had no choice but to fight for an early victory, though not a brutal one. Until then — or rather, until England was out of danger — he said he would refrain from directly criticizing the government. Instead, he would hold his fire until hostilities ceased, at which point he wanted a full-scale investigation of the events that had led to war, followed by a public forum on how civilization might be reordered to avoid future wars.

For the first two years, he largely kept his word about speaking out against the government's war policy, but this didn't stop him from speaking out about the politics and impulses of war — and the need for a just peace once the war was over. Taking leave from Trinity, he joined several political parties, organizing, speaking and writing a stream of articles and pamphlets with titles such as “War, the Offspring of Fear,” “Why Nations Love War” and “Is a Permanent Peace Possible?”

But his position changed dramatically in 1916, when the government imposed mandatory conscription. Russell saw it not only as an unlawful infringement of liberty but as a clear indication that the war, after two years of butchery and stalemate, was a moral, human and economic impossibility. He joined the radical No-Conscription Fellowship and began an active campaign against the government's war policy. The British authorities didn't know what to do with him. As a writer and speaker, he was too effective to ignore, yet he was too prominent to simply be jailed. As for bringing legal injunctions against him, this carried considerable risk, since it would offer him precisely what he wanted: martyrdom and a public forum from which he could mock the government and espouse his views.

The government was far from stupid in this regard. Indeed, they went to such lengths to ignore him that they jailed six men for distributing an anticonscription leaflet that he had written. Russell wouldn't have this. To shame the authorities into action, he sent
The Times
a letter declaring himself the author of the pamphlet and chiding the government for punishing others for his deeds. This time the authorities had no choice but take him to court, and he made them regret it, ridiculing the government's policies and making the periwigged lord mayor who led the proceeding look like a fool before a delighted throng of reporters. Convicted, he was fined one hundred pounds, which he promptly refused to pay, saying that they would have to jail him. The lord mayor wasn't falling into that trap. Instead, he decreed, under Defense Regulations, that the defendant's books and furniture would be seized and auctioned. This was distressing but it was only a slap compared to what happened next: because Russell had been convicted of a crime — at that a relatively minor political crime — the council of Trinity, led by the militant McTaggart, dismissed him, in spite of a petition in support of him signed by twenty-two dons, ranging from the warlike Whitehead to the anticonscriptionist Moore. Moore even published a scathing letter in
Cambridge Magazine
, thanking the rectors for their patriotism, courtesy and liberality of mind, then suggesting that they end chapel services, too, since
Love Thine Enemies
was plainly subversive.

This sacking was a deep wound for Russell, a bitter betrayal of all he held sacred. Smelling blood, the government, meanwhile, grew bolder in its campaign to isolate and discredit him. After he was offered a lectureship at Harvard, where he thought he might have even greater impact against the war, the authorities revoked his passport, saying that he was liable to make seditious statements. Then, after he made a successful speaking tour of the mines and steel mills in South Wales, they further curbed his freedom, invoking a rule that barred suspected spies from industrial areas. This was a serious blunder: no one, not even Russell's worst enemies, seriously believed he was disloyal, and overnight he was transformed into an object of sympathy, with editorials appearing in his favor, along with a corresponding swing in public support. And he fought back. In those areas he could not enter, he wrote blistering epistles to the faithful, while in those areas he could enter, he was even more ferocious in his condemnation of the war, the government and the generals, who, he said, would gladly butcher sixty thousand men in a morning for a few blood-soaked yards.

No one could have been more warlike in his opposition to war. In his own rising hatred and frustration, in the increasing pitch of his rhetoric, Russell even began to exhibit a certain sadistic streak. Wherever he went now, there would be a police inspector shadowing him, taking notes. Masterfully mugging for the mob, Russell would unfailingly introduce the poor man, then subject him to the most humiliating ridicule, verbally whipping him as a proxy for his enemies as the delighted crowd stamped and jeered.

Inspector, he would say, I have for our most benevolent government a modest proposal. In the interest of greater efficiency, let us end the war today and divide our young men into three groups, killing the first group outright, maiming and blinding the second and driving the third mad with noise and fear. Or better yet, let them kill us all and be done with it! What do you think, Inspector? Tut, tut, old boy, do speak up! Will you clap us all in irons? What do you
think
, man?

By God, he knew now how to get their blood up — how to jerk them to their feet and cow the heckler. Nothing was more intoxicating than the feeling of standing atop that whirlwind. Why, there were nights when, with but a word from him, the crowds would have wrecked the hall and followed him into the streets for a night's rampage. This, he thought, was the exaltation Christ must have known during his last days on earth. At long, long last, he was speaking out, and speaking freely. At long last, the opposition movement was growing into a chorus heard throughout England. But most of all he heard his own strident voice, and in his black periods he alternated between feeling utterly deluded or like a vulturous war profiteer — a Krupp or a Vickers — advancing his own interests over the heaped dead of a war that he could see was only widening. His followers told him he was in danger but this he found oddly consoling, like his periodic thoughts of suicide. And how easy it would have been, in his excitement and weariness, to martyr himself for this noble cause. Martyrdom was easy; it was change — changing one's fundamental being — this was what was hard. In this respect, Russell saw himself, in the later days of the war, less as a revolutionary than as a sort of regenerative creature, a lobster that gladly tears off an appendage in a predator's jaws, knowing that it can drag itself off to grow another claw or feeler, however stunted.

Garsington Manor, Ottoline's new five-hundred-acre estate outside Oxford, was Russell's refuge at this time, even if Ottoline herself was not.

Philip had bought the estate early in 1913 on the advice of their doctor, who felt country air was essential for both Ottoline's and Julian's delicate health. However, it was not until more than two years later, when the house had been redecorated according to Ottoline's extravagant taste, that the Morrells finally took up residence.

Sequestered there with her jesters and freeloaders, the rapier intellects and vaunted opinions, Ottoline had little reason to pine for London. London was soon flocking to Garsington to escape blackouts, queues, food shortages and other lesser wartime barbarities. Before long, there was a stream of genteel visitors who sometimes stayed for weeks at a stretch, and some, like Lytton Strachey, who never seemed to leave, ridiculing Ottoline behind her back while partaking of her eerie, seemingly bottomless generosity.

Gone now were a good many of her young men, lost from month to month in places like Vimy Ridge and Ypres, the Dardanelles and Somme. Every day they would read the long death rolls in the newspaper, sometimes two and three full pages listing those who had gone down. Everybody had lost someone, and it had its effect on Ottoline, who became more extreme and a little more desperate, crossing that zone from demimondaine to grand dame, a now decorated and much scarred social warrior. Within a matter of months, she had quite transformed herself. Scarved as Isadora, gloriously oversparkling, then flinty, Ottoline would hold court, duly accepting the homage of the young men's pecking kisses. The shy gawk who, as a girl, had prayed while her brother, the duke, gave his beastly black masques — the girl still visible at times only a year ago — had been banished. Suddenly, Ottoline had a reputation to protect, and what had been charmingly naive and eccentric about her had hardened into a conscious style. Bitchy, flamboyant, preposterous, she was now a practiced oddity, bristling with vague ideas, impressions, gossip. She smoked Russian cigarettes and sometimes dressed as a Gypsy or a shepherdess, carrying a crook tied with ribbons and leading a pack of pugs. And like all of them, she was deeply afraid, hoarding culture and beauty in the way others did soap or matches.

Set behind hedges and rectangular gardens, the house was built of gray Cotswold stone in the Tudor style, quite light and Italian in feeling, with a triptych of tall gables and arched-and-leaded windows. Below the house was a reflecting pool with pink marble piers and brass gorgon spouts, which required some now unobtainable pumping apparatus to purge it of the green scum that choked it and bred mosquitoes. Ottoline installed marble statues of eyeless Greek gods around its edges and set peacocks loose to roam the brick garden paths. And there, under the great ilex tree, her guests would gather — mostly young men in Panama hats who sat under lacquered parasols with their knees hiked to their chins, talking a mongrel tongue of Italian, French and English and penning verses oft inspired by the chiseled loins of the eyeless divinities by the pool.

Garsington was their sanctuary once conscription started. Giving no thought to the enormous expense and complications involved, Ottoline convinced Philip to use his pull to open the manor as a farm where conscientious objectors could do alternate farmwork. Her young men were not nearly as grateful as they should have been, what to have been spared the ordeal of laboring under the hostile eye of some gimpy sergeant just back from the front. The more idealistic ones read Tolstoy and worked, more or less. As for the other Boy Blues, they napped, groused and dawdled, slapping flies and goosing one another in the new-mown hay. At dusk, they could be seen with their rakes and hoes, trudging home for their glass of sherry behind the manor farmworkers who did the real work, keeping their mouths shut for small bribes when the army came hunting for slackers.

Russell often went to Garsington to recuperate. Now that he was sexually out of the picture, he got on quite admirably with Philip, and passing well with Ottoline. Russell rarely stayed in the main house. Instead, Ottoline put him in a little guest house of clabber-colored stucco where Lamb's self-portrait now hung above the mantel, a shrine to another of her lost loves (Lamb, a stretcher-bearer, was bogging bodies through the Somme). Russell paid no attention to the portrait. Like a desert hermit in his cell, he remained most of the day in the little house, writing tracts aimed at a total revision of society, beginning with love and marriage.

Ottoline said the overhaul ought to begin with himself. Sometimes, to goad him, she would eye him wonderingly, as if he were a hopeless case, saying, Poor, poor Bertie. Dear me, where will we find him a good wife? Retaliating for this, Russell would himself muse aloud: Now, where on Garsington shall we find an
able
young man for Ottoline?

Obscurely, each thought — or fondly hoped — the other was sliding into musty celibacy. In their ability to bite and bicker, they were like an unhappy middle-aged couple. One afternoon, as they were sitting in the garden, he looked at her and said, Pity, your hair is going gray. Pierced, she replied, Pity, yours has quite gone.

Ottoline didn't succeed in finding Russell a wife, but she did give him a temporary ally in D. H. Lawrence, introducing the two men at Garsington early in the spring of 1916.

Leading Russell toward the slender young man standing in the garden, Ottoline said, Now, do be patient. Lawrence is a poet, not a logician. He can be opinionated but he really is a dear, lovely man, so gentle and honest,
most
passionate. Now,
her
, she continued, nodding toward Lawrence's big-boned wife, Frieda, who was playing croquet with several men on the flat green below. She's your poster Hun. A
baroness
in case you can't tell. Lawrence is absurdly vain about her lineage — loves to use her crested stationery. Understandable for a collier's son, I suppose.

Frieda's voice sounded, at a distance, like the barking of a large, hoarse dog. She soon pegged out, she did. Laughing, brandishing her mallet, she stepped on one red ball and busted the one abutting it, crying out triumphantly to the vanquished, angular men. Ottoline, like a guide, continued:

Four years ago, she abandoned her husband and three children to run away with Lawrence — I told you that story, didn't I? You don't know the power he has over people. She took right up with him, abandoned everything. Oh, but then she thought better of it — the children, I mean. She was a miserable creature then, a madwoman, completely inconsolable. Several times she tried to see the children, but her husband was shattered — wouldn't let her near them. She's the stuff of Greek tragedy, a Clytemnestra, that one. I don't know how Lawrence bears it. At times, he goes quite mad with her unhappiness. And for all his sex talk, they've had no children. Ottoline sniffed. She has only him to mother now — murder's more like it. They fight like cats and dogs. Not here, thank God, Philip wouldn't tolerate it. David Garnett told me he once saw Lawrence haul her back by the hair and strike her full in the face. Dreadful screaming. David thought he would kill her. Frieda's mouth was bleeding but David said she laughed —
sneered
at him. And then — Ottoline shrugged and brightened — an hour later all was lovey-dovey again! Isn't that the maddest thing you've ever heard?