The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell: The Public Years, 1914-1970
ed Nicholas Griffin
704pp, Routledge, £25
He ended as OM - a very angry and very old man who wrote to Khrushchev, Chou En-lai and Nehru as a world-historical equal. For by now the philosopher earl was a one-man intellectual superpower. The Trinity don once imprisoned in Brixton for his bellicose pacifism (rather like life on an ocean-liner, he noted - being "cooped up with a number of average human beings") had agitated for a purpose. In post-war England he could feel at home, the progressive causes he had embraced in both study and bedroom having gained their sway. But there was also nostalgia for a dead aristocratic England. Looking at blitzed London, he lamented: "Of my grandmother's house in Dover Street not a trace remains."
The dramas and conflicts of Bertrand Russell's long public years are inseparable from the private storms and stresses that made him as a thinker but often came close to undoing him as a man. The philosopher in love - an Abelard, a Diderot or a Voltaire - can be a figure of incongruous fun, as Eros wreaks vengeance on the best-laid plans of mind and reason. Not that Russell was ever very good at jokes. As agony uncle he failed to detect the spoof letter from a correspondent complaining about her short husband's night sweats: "You should remember that your husband's being a small man increases the proportion of superficies to cubic capacity."
His was an astringent scepticism. Tough on existentialism and the causes of existentialism, he thought Sartre's movement was a syntactical mistake. Gilbert Ryle's philosophic work was "repulsive, in the sort of way in which a bad smell is repulsive". And he would have been unamused that the sole stumble in Nicholas Griffin's otherwise immaculate edition of the letters comes when Albert C Barnes, Russell's American benefactor, is credited with a fortune made from "an antisceptic called Argyrol".
Russell was a Gibbon redivivus, only dissenting from the historian in one regard. The success story of the early church was the result of "episcopal organisation and promiscuous charity on a large scale". The Labour Party, he thought, should learn the lesson. Persecution, contra Gibbon, was always a setback. And when he wasn't being 18th-century and naughty he was vigorously Victorian and virtuous. Bloomsburies were "a rotten crew". Strachey might mock but Russell thought that "we shall need a set of Victorians to put us right".
But for all the public-spirited rationalism, the wonderfully consistent lashing of tyranny, obscurantism and persecution, it is the emotionalism that dominates this great work. What Russell hated in the Bloomsbury set was "their sneers at anything that has live feeling in it". It was a sentiment he shared with DH Lawrence, an otherwise improbable soul mate but "wonderfully lovable. The mainspring of his life is... the universal mystical love... which inspires even his most vehement and passionate hate."
For more than 20 years - first triggered by reading Euripides' Hippolytus in 1901 - Russell's was a mind unhinged. The impression is of a highly charged psyche suffering a nervous breakdown for a generation - and laying waste to those around him. From 15 to 18 he often considered suicide. Surviving, he developed a taste for suffering women. And if not suffering beforehand, they were surely well up for it after a spell with Bertie.
It is touching to find him reverting in 1949 to the language of half a century earlier and thanking Alys, his Quaker (and abandoned) first wife for "thy very kind letter". But placid Alys's problem was that she couldn't satisfy Russell's insatiable craving for torment, which he equated with emotional depth. And so enters the jaw-jutting, snobbish and manipulative figure of Ottoline Morrell, alternately close and distant; encouraging his libidinous psychic jaunts and drawing him back to her when he threatened to stray permanently. He once said that he had never loved a happy woman, which is why he was drawn towards Vivien Haigh-Wood, TS Eliot's depressive first wife (though the one-night adventure with her was "utter hell").
When he came up against more self-contained women, such as Colette O'Niel, he raged against the ego "hard and entire with firm boundaries". Deep feeling meant exposure so that "one's separate self seems no longer important". This was a cosmic force with a categorical sexual imperative (and chronic halitosis).
These letters show that the English 20th century's most notorious anti-Christian was also a mystic in the traditional late-Victorian pantheistic mode. "The moments of ecstasy in love, of sudden intellectual insight, of intoxicating glory in storms on a rocky coast... I should like to think of these as forever part of the universe". The emotionalism has an adolescent quality, possibly because Russell was a real book-in-breeches case, with a private tutor rather than schoolfriends. The tidal waves were all the more dramatic because postponed: "The centre of me is always and eternally a terrible pain... a searching for . . . something transfigured and infinite. The beatific vision - GOD. I do not find it... but the love of it is my life."
Russell can disgust in these pages. "In many women there is nothing of sex except vanity." "Women of that sort exist to drive men insane." But in politics no one saw the 20th century more clearly and more consistently - from the cynical cordiality of the Anglo-French entente to the madness of mutually assured destruction. The Bolsheviks, he quickly saw, were "energetic ascetics, pursuing power with all the energy that comes of thwarting the desire for enjoyment". And his detestation of autocracy, whether Tsarist or communist, was a grand continuity. He had the true liberal hatred of collectivism, whether of the left or the right, and saw clearly that the 19th century had been a journey from international reactionaries to national ones.
For his Harvard pupil Eliot (in "Mr Apollinax"), Russell was "Priapus in the shrubbery", laughing "like an irresponsible foetus". He was a wordly innocent - an aristocrat bearing hereditary genes of government, but also the wide-eyed tormentor of the cruel. If the centaur's hooves beat thunderously in these pages, they are also the echo of a passionate intellect at once destructive and creative, suffering and assured, whether in a Cambridge college or Brixton jail.
