Books: From an Attic Trunk

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF BERTRAND RUSSELL: 1914-1944. 418 pages. Little, Brown. $8.95.

Bertrand Russell is one of the world’s most penetrating thinkers within the disciplines of mathematics and philosophy, and one of the most provocative, not to say infuriating, outside them. Yet he has ventured only timidly and superficially into the field of self-confession. Now 96, he is nearly fanatical in his public utterances, notably those concerning his anti-American position on the Viet Nam war, but he is not a driven author who boldly and recklessly storms the secret vaults of his own life. He is more a Sunday writer, coyly playing it safe, as he wistfully leafs through some of the mementos and letters stored in an attic trunk.

The general air in this second volume of his autobiography is one of diversion rather than dedication, the method more anecdotal than analytical; the result is a rather pleasurable belles-lettres excursion into nostalgia, not a profound exercise in self-revelation. Taken as such, it is rarely dull. In this book at least, written partly in 1931 and picked up again after World War II, Russell is still a master prose stylist and an elegant wit, with a bitchy touch of the Wilde.

Fellow Prisoners. Russell’s chronology begins with his imprisonment for pacifism in England during World War I, a subject about which he is willing to jest: “My fellow prisoners seemed to me in no way morally inferior to the rest of the population, though they were on the whole slightly below the usual level of intelligence, as was shown by their having been caught.” It ends with his virtual banishment from American academia during World War II, when C.C.N.Y. reneged on its commitment to him because of his reputed permissive attitudes about sex. This Russell finds no laughing matter: “The Government of New York City was virtually a satellite of the Vatican. … A typical American witch-hunt was instituted against me, and I became a taboo throughout the whole of the United States. … If I had appeared anywhere in public, I should probably have been lynched by a Catholic mob, with the full approval of the police.” Some of his later blatantly anti-American views perhaps can be traced to that incident, emotionally if not logically.

But Russell refuses to develop themes, instead skates surfaces. The ending of his celebrated affair with Lady Ottoline Morrell, for example, glides without distinct definition into his tempestuous life with Lady Constance Malleson. Writes Russell: “I want personal love to be like a beacon fire lighting up the darkness, not a timid refuge from the cold as it is very often . . . Oh, I am happy, happy, happy.” He passes with equal vagueness from his second marriage to Dora Black and the first joys of paternity at the age of 49 through the divorce and into his third marriage to Patricia Spence when he was 64.

Disillusionment. Russell is more open and precise about his geographical travels than he is about his personal travails. He devotes much space to his trips to post-revolutionary Russia in 1920 and his disillusionment there: “Cruelty, poverty, suspicion, persecution, formed the very air we breathed … I felt that everything that I valued in human life was being destroyed in the interests of a glib and narrow philosophy.” Of his stay in prerevolutionary China in 1920-21, he writes: “It must be said that bad government seems somewhat less disastrous in China than it would be in a European nation, but this is perhaps a superficial impression which time may correct.”

There are great stretches, also, of correspondence that seems so haphazardly selected and placed that a reader sometimes seems to be looking over mail piled up during a vacation—mixed in with announcements for sales long past. At other times the effect is one of protective padding: there are only 113 pages of text, compared with 270 pages of correspondence.

Passionate Madness. Perhaps Russell, for all of his years in the public eye, was and is too shy to sit still and be revealed—even before himself. A better sense of his essential qualities emerges from a reading of A History of Western Philosophy than from this self-portrait. In fact, the most pertinent comments and judgment about Russell himself come in the observations and strictures of others. For example, his brother Frank wrote to him back in 1916: “What the world wants of first-class intellects like yours is not action—for which the ordinary politician or demagogue is good enough—but thought, a much more rare quality.” Good advice, but in political matters, at least, Lord Russell’s thought has not always served him very well.