Confession and Concealment in The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell

ROBERT H. BELL

In 1897, writing for a short-lived journal edited by his brother-in-law Logan Pearsall Smith, Bertrand Russell produced an anonymous "Self-Appreciation?' As in all autobiography, the author is trying on a mask; still, the mask roughly fits the contours of his face as Russell perceived it at the time. After a good deal of Wildean posing, he con­cludes: "Psychologically, sin has a meaning for me, and I love to see sinners punished. Logically I can find no meaning for the word Sin."¹ In another autobiographical meditation from this period, called The Pilgrimage of Life, Russell expresses a surprisingly intense desire to confess sin and seek penance: "when, worst of all, Death awakens us to an injury which it is now too late to repair: then remorse, black, swift, fierce, and terrible, takes possession of us, branding, scorching, withering, filling us with hatred of all sinners and a fiery desire for punishment. For ourselves, for others, we long for pain, intolerable pain, pain that shall expiate the awful load of guilt . . . there seems no forgiveness of sins, and our own ruthlessness becomes a law of nature."² In 1911, when he was forty, Russell devoted considerable time to a manuscript entitled Prisons, which he envisioned as a kind of spiritual autobiography like Saner Resartus. "It is so desireable." he wrote Ottoline Morrell, "to be able to make a dramatic statement of views one doesn't agree with and moods one has outgrown. And one can make the final outcome more complex and many-sided than in direct exposition."³ Unfortunately, he added, "I have no skill in that sort of thing; it is a pity."⁴ Like The Pilgrimage of Life (1902-03), Prisons remains a heap of fascinating fragments, ranging from self-pitying lament to piercing eloquence.

Inspired by a complex range of impulses, Russell wrote versions of autobiography throughout his life. An important element in the final Autobiography stands out more visibly in the context of these earlier autobiographical excursions: the man who became the greatest skepti­cal sage since Voltaire in striking ways remained the child reared by his Calvinist grandmother and never stopped trying to compose spiritual autobiography. In this passage from the Autobiography,⁵ for example, Russell recalls failing gravely ill in China in 1921, and describes the meaning of his recovery.

I had always imagined until then that I was fundamentally pessimistic and did not greatly value being alive. I discovered in this that I had been completely mistaken, and that life was infinitely sweet to me. Rain in Peking is rare, but during my convalesence there came heavy rains bringing the delicious smell of damp earth through the windows, and I used to think how dreadful it would have been to have never smelt that smell again. I had the same feeling about the light of the sun, and the sound of the wind. Just outside my windows were some very beautiful acacia trees, which came into blossom at the first moment when I was well enough to enjoy them. I have known ever since that at bottom I am glad to be alive. Most people, no doubt, always know this, but I did not.

At many such moments Russell's lifestory resembles inchoate spiri­tual autobiography. Almost exactly in the middle of his long life, he vividly imagines what appears to be a metaphoric death and rebirth: sickness unto death, regeneration in springtime, conversion to life. Yet Russell's sweeping revaluation of self lacks the certainty or finality of, say, Augustine's Confessions or Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua: he never finds anything transcendent and eternal upon which to rely. Consequently, the symbolic meaning of particular events and the larger pattern of his whole life are not seen as providential.⁶

The other dominant strain in all Russell's autobiography is doubt. If he is something of a spiritual autobiographer manqué, he is emphati­cally an Enlightenment philosophe. Yet the Autobiography of this per­petually inquiring skeptic is a very puzzling and cryptic work. Fear­lessly committed to rigorous self-scrutiny (a disposition common to both skeptics and the faithful), Russell frequently fails to explore trou­bling issues. Why, during an idyllic year with Dora Black in China was it such a surprise to discover that "at bottom I was glad to be alive"? Russell's limpid prose swerves away from the question, offering instead such a marvelous capping vignette that we scarcely notice what has been ignored: "I was told that the Chinese said that they would bury me by the Western Lake and build a shrine to my memory. I have some slight regret that this did not happen, as I might have become a God, which would have been very chic for an atheist" (II, 188). The glittering wit of such sentences is worthy of Voltaire, Gibbon, or Hume. Russell even has the pleasure of recording one of his obituary notices: "Missionaries may be pardoned for heaving a sigh of relief at the news of Mr. Bertrand Russell's death" (II, 189).

It is characteristic of Russell the autobiographer to dramatize his revelation in Peking without connecting it to the rest of his life. In this regard he is the antithesis of the spiritual pilgrim who views his life in retrospect as reenacting the pattern of fall and redemption. Russell's conception of Logical Atomism repudiates pattern and epitomizes sec­ular empiricism: "The most fundamental of my intellectual beliefs is that the idea that the world is a unity is rubbish. I think the universe is all spots and jumps, without unity, and without continuity, without coherence or orderliness, or any of the other properties governesses love."⁷ Instead of unified development, Russell's Autobiography pre­sents a series of revaluations which remain transient and discontinu­ous. In 1901 he experienced what he describes as "a sort of mystic illu­mination" involving the ill wife of his collaborator A. N. Whitehead: "She seemed cut off from everyone and everything by walls of agony, and the sense of the solitude of each human soul suddenly over­whelmed me. Ever since my marriage, my emotional life had been calm and superficial. I had forgotten all the deeper issues, and had been content with flippant cleverness. Suddenly the ground seemed to give way beneath me, and I found myself in quite another region" (I, 193).

As in the China vision, the immediate context is most significant for what it does not reveal. Russell tells us that the previous year had been "intellectually . . . the highest point of my life" (I, 192). There are in the Autobiography glaring discontinuities between Russell's emotional and intellectual aspects. His marriage to Alys was on the verge of col­lapse and his passionate regard for Evelyn Whitehead was probably never expressed. Still the ramifications of his empathy for Evelyn were remarkable: "Within five minutes I went through some such reflec­tions as the following: the loneliness of the human soul is unendura­ble; nothing can penetrate it except the highest intensity of the sort of love that religious teachers have preached; whatever does not spring from this motive is harmful, or at best useless; it follows that war is wrong, that a public school education is abominable, that the use of force is to be deprecated, and that in human relations one should pene­trate to the core of 'loneliness in each person and speak to that." Again Russell finds religious idiom natural, speaking of the "human soul" and the spiritual exhortations of "religious teachers?' How he gets to war and public school education is unclear. The moment ends this way: "The Whiteheads' youngest boy, aged three, was in the room. I had previously taken no notice of him, nor he of me. He had to be pre­vented from troubling his mother in the middle of her paroxysms of pain. 1 took his hand and led him away. He came willingly, and felt at home with me. From that day to his death in the war in 1918, we were close friends" (1, 193-194).

This pivotal episode reveals both the lucidity and murkiness of Rus­sell's autobiographical vision. On the surface it dramatizes, quite beau­tifully, the reality of loneliness and the need for compassion. It is a moment, all too rare for Russell, when he "felt at home." But the con­ventional figure-of-speech also suggests a deeper, unexplored associa­tion. Russell becomes acutely aware of Evelyn's pain because he iden­tifies with the little boy: Russell had lost both his parents at that age. Those five minutes symbolized the painful orphanage of all life and in this perception he "had become a completely different person" (I, 194).⁸

Unfortunately, this conversion, like the rebirth in Peking twenty years later, yields to Russell's habitual and dominant "habit of analy­sis" (194). Isay "unfortunately" not because I wish Russell had com­posed genuine spiritual autobiography but because he suffered so long from his solitude. And because he was unable to sustain the values of his "mystic illumination," he brought pain to many people he loved. Within a page of describing his illumination he recalls another revela­tion: "I went out bicycling one afternoon, and suddenly, as I was rid­ing along a country road, I realized that I no longer loved Alys. I had no idea until this moment that my love for her was even lessening" (196). Apparently the "core of loneliness" in his wife's soul did not inspire "the sort of love" he had gleaned in his mystic illumination.

Thus Russell's Logical Atomism, which may account for (or at least describe) the many formal deficiencies of his Autobiography, has far graver implications we might call Psychic Atomism. Perhaps the most interesting sections of his story are these startling disjunctions and lacunae. At crucial moments like the bicycle ride, Russell virtually dis­appears; he not only fails to connect the "spots and jumps" of his uni­verse, he seems oblivious that anything is missing. The obvious ques­tion is, how could anybody be so estranged from his emotions as not to realize love was diminishing until it was gone? Equally striking is why the autobiographer fails to ask such a question. As a narrator he is most remarkable for "the absence of the presence." Russell's illumina­tions, pitying Evelyn or forsaking Alys, are precisely articulated and deeply baffling. Perhaps the inclusion of so many letters, ultimately some two-thirds of the manuscript, is not mere padding, but a recogni­tion and a strategy: Russell sensed that he was an elusive, evanescent presence in his own story and thus provided data for verification.

Russell's conception of himself in his Autobiography is almost exclu­sively emotional and sexual, especially in the first two volumes. Accounts of his work and thought are sketchy and disappointing. The idea of integrating his emotional and intellectual life, in the manner of Gibbon or Mill, either did not occur to him or seemed unappealing or insurmountable. He wrote a separate account called My Philosophical Development. It was often this incongruity between his feelings and thoughts which forcibly struck his contemporaries and perpetually haunted him. He begins a love letter to Alys, "Don't say thee thinks of me from my letters as 'brains in the abstract,' it does sound so cold and dry and lifeless" (I, 130). Perhaps in compensation, his Autobiography is unusually candid, as in mentioning the bad breath which offended his lover Ottoline Morrell. Yet confessional candor vies awkwardly with self-delusion:

So many things were forbidden me that I acquired the habit of deceit, in which I persisted up to the age of twenty-one. It became second nature to me to think that whatever I was doing had better be kept to myself, and I have never quite overcome the impulse to concealment which was thus generated. I still have an impulse to hide what I am reading when anybody comes into the room, and to hold my tongue generally as to where I have been, and what I have done. It is only by a certain effort of will that I can overcome this impulse ... (I, 39).

No sooner does he say he overcame the habit of deceit at twenty-one than he admits he has never fully overcome it, and still has a rather evi­dent obsessive neurosis. Confessing the "impulse to concealment" is an intriguing and complicated autobiographical tactic: now we wonder how much he will not tell.

Conversely, he often puzzles us by telling so much, as in the strange way he ends Volume One. He recounts an episode he need not have included in a somewhat disconcerting tone: a sort of unrepentant con­fession. As Russell tells the story, he stayed during an American lec­ture tour with the family of an eminent gynecologist, whose daughter he had met while she was studying at Oxford.⁹ Russell admired her poetry and sensibility and (as often with the objects of his affection) imagined himself an altruistic source of life: "Her youth had been lonely and unhappy, and it seemed that I could give her what she wanted" (I, 286). While her three sisters stood guard, Russell had rela­tions with her. They agreed that she should join him in England "as soon as possible and that we would live together openly, perhaps marrying later on if a divorce could be obtained?"

Russell returned to England and to Ottoline, cured of his obnoxious pyorrohoea and thus more appealing. By the time the young woman arrived, war erupted and seized Russell's attention. He did not wish to compromise his public stance against the war with a private scandal. "I felt it therefore impossible to carry out what we had planned. She stayed in England and I had relations with her from time to time, but the shock of the war killed my passion for her, and I broke her heart." Later she succumbed to a disease which paralyzed her and drove her insane. "Before insanity attacked her, she had a rare and remarkable mind, and a disposition as lovable as it was unusual. If the war had not intervened, the plan which we formed in Chicago might have brought great happiness to us both. I feel still the sorrow of this tragedy" (287).

Although Russell gives us no reason to doubt the authenticity of his sorrow, he seems not to recognize the potentially damaging nature of his testimony. It has the stock ingredients of a romantic melodrama—the lonely young girl smitten by the cosmopolitan professor, faithfully following her lover to Europe, abandoned to an awful death. Small wonder that this episode finds its way into the Dictionary of National Biography: "He also met Helen Dudley who was to follow him fruitlessly in the war, one of the more pathetic victims of his amorous energies."¹⁰ it is true that Russell might have been more self-critical; he might also have suppressed the story entirely or withheld the fact that he urged her to come to England in hopes of a marriage. The atti­tude he strikes is decidedly mixed: unrepentant but saddened, objec­tive rather than defensive or self-serving. The original draft of this pas­sage, incidentally, has a more emotive conclusion: "I feel still as poignantly as if it were yesterday the sorrow of this tragedy."¹¹

Russell's complex tone was shaped by many factors, including the massive "shock of the war" and, probably, his memory of Helen's post-war letters. After she returned to America , they corresponded only occasionally, without regrets or reproaches. In 1922, for example, she wrote to congratulate him on the birth of his son, and describes a "funny experience" in which she met a man "you had once demolished in a discussion, wiped up the floor with him. Then he asked me if I could explain what your attraction was for women! Couldn't understand it himself but knew three women in this country on whom you'd made a lasting impression—when you were spoken of their expressions changed. Mine didn't change and he was left guessing about a possible fourth woman. . ."¹² Helen sounds positively smug about being one of the elect—far from a "pathetic victim." Like so many of Russell's lovers, she felt touched by something extraordinary, and remained uncommonly loyal and magnanimous. For Russell, Helen was a genuine passion but only a temporary respite from terri­ble loneliness, in which, as he writes elsewhere in his Autobiography, "one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss" (I, 3).

Russell's Autobiography, as in his recollection of Helen Dudley, is a fascinating blend of insight and blindness, revealing without quite evaluating some of his deepest needs. Both the extent and limits of his vision emerge in this passage, when he and Dora have just arrived in Tokyo:

and were received by a series of magnesium explosions, each of which made Dora jump, and increased my fear of a miscarriage. I became blind with rage, the only time I have been so since I tried to strangle FitzGerald. I pursued the boys with the flashlights, but being lame, was unable to catch them, which was fortune, as I should certainly have com­mitted murder. An enterprising photographer succeeded in photo­graphing me with my eyes blazing. I should not have known that I could have looked so completely insane. This photograph was my introduction to Tokyo. I felt at the moment the same type of passion as must have been felt by Anglo-Indians during the mutiny, or by white men sur­rounded by a rebel coloured population. I realized then that the desire to protect one's family from injury at the hands of an alien race is probably the wildest and most passionate feeling of which man is capable. (II, 193)

The photograph undoubtedly blazoned the event on his memory, but it is not the kind of portrait one usually hangs in one's own gallery. To Russell the picture is telling because it depicts the irrational element he strove to combat. With the dedication of an Enlightenment philo­sophe he describes the picture, fearlessly revealing what he dreads, and captures the beast with his best weapon, intellect. He holds the pas­sion in his hand, at arm's length but under intense scrutiny, and con­nects it with similar passions about which he has read. Then he moves to higher ground, the plateau of philosophical generalization, associating his temporary insanity with a permanent and universal human quality, "probably the wildest and most passionate feeling of which man is capable."

With his laser-like intellect, Russell was known in Ottoline's Gar­sington circle (awkwardly but aptly) as "Day of Judgment." With the notable exception of his "longing for love," (I, 3) he visited the judg­ment of Jeremiah upon himself as well as others. But he never regarded such vision as an unmixed blessing; once, speaking of the sympathy between himself and Joseph Conrad, he defined it as "Satanic mysticism": "I cannot pretend that I have ever quite under­stood it. I think I have always felt that there were two levels, one that of science and common sense, and another, terrifying, subterranean and periodic, which in some sense held more truth than the everyday view. . ."¹³ He repeats the demonic imagery at the beginning of Vol­ume Two of the Autobiography in stating that his life before 1910 and after 1914 was "as sharply divided as Faust's life before and after he met Mephistopheles . . . thinking of myself as a non-supernatural Faust for whom Mephistopheles was represented by the Great War" (II, 3). His definition of Satanic Mysticism, and the cryptic, strained quality of the comparison with Faust, indicate that Russell is groping toward a painful realization: can it be that he is estranged because in some sense he deserves punishment? Two parallel scenes, beginning and ending the chapter on World War I show the degree and sources of alienation.

As war seems imminent, he walks around Trafalgar Square, "notic­ing cheering crowds, and making myself sensitive to the emotions of passers-by. During this and the following days I discovered to my amazement that average men and women were delighted at the pros­pect of war. 1 had fondly imagined what most pacifists contended, that wars were forced upon a reluctant population by despotic and Machia­vellian governments" (4). Again he articulates his significant discovery and repudiates his "fondly imagined" misconception. Notice too the self-conscious collection of data: "making myself sensitive to the emo­tions. . ." Like an anthropologist he observes the natural responses of the distant society he visits.

One might expect Armistice to erase or at least assuage these terrors of isolation. It does not. "Late into the night I stayed alone in the streets, watching the temper of the crowd, as I had done in the August days four years before. The crowd was frivolous still, and had learned nothing during the period of horror, except to snatch at pleasure more recklessly than before. I felt strangely amid the rejoicings, like a ghost dropped by accident from some other planet" (II, 35). Russell sounds like Milton's Raphael, rather bitterly disappointed that humanity will never learn the lessons. It's not surprising that Russell would remain mindful of the waste and carnage he had prophesied; but to character­ize the armistice celebration as "frivolous" and "reckless" is perhaps severe. It tells us more about what "Day of Judgment" brought to the moment than what he saw there.

What follows this scene is an astonishing confession:

Always the skeptical intellect, when I have most wished it silent, has whispered doubts to me, has cut me off from the facile enthusiasms of others, and has transported me into a desolate solitude. . . . Underlying all occupations and all pleasures I have felt since early youth the pain of solitude. I have escaped it most nearly in moments of love, yet even there, on reflection, I have found that the escape depended partly on illusion. I have known no woman to whom the claims of intellect were as absolute as they are to me, and wherever intellect intervened, I have found that the sympathy I sought in love was apt to fail. What Spinozoa calls "the intellectual love of God" has seemed to me the best thing to live by, but I have not had even the somewhat abstract God that Spino­zoa allowed himself to whom to attach my intellectual love. I have loved a ghost, and in loving a ghost my inmost self has itself become spectral. I have therefore buried it deeper and deeper beneath layers of cheerful­ness, affection, and joy of life. But my most profound feelings have remained always solitary and have found in human things no compan­ionship. The sea, the stars, the night wind in waste places, mean more to me than even the human beings I love best, and I am conscious that human affection is to me at bottom an attempt to escape the vain search for God (II, 35-6).

Russell's horrible discovery, "I have loved a ghost;' is especially emphatic following his depiction of himself as a "ghost dropped by accident from some other planet?' Not only pleasure and purpose, but fundamental identity, appear insubstantial: only desolation and de­spair have reality. No wonder we hear so many references to suicide in this story.

The same subjects recur, explicitly or metaphorically, throughout all his autobiographical writings: darkness, gulfs, ghosts, spectres, sui­cide. Here is an entry from Ins occasional journal of 1892-95, quoted in his Autobiography.

I feel as though darkness were my native element, and a cruel destiny has compelled me, instead of myself attaining to the light, to drag her back with me into the gulf from which I have partially emerged. I cannot tell whether this destiny will take the form of a sudden blow, or of a long-drawn torture, sapping our energies and ruining our love; but I am haunted by the fear of the family ghost, which seems to seize on me with clammy invisible hands to avenge my desertion of its tradition of gloom—(I, 65-0).

The passage is even more incongruous and ominous in its original con­text: young Russell has just completed a successful, even ecstatic, courtship of Alys! If this bleakness were merely an incidental gloom, we could attribute it to the painful struggle with his "people" for inde­pendence and to his fear of the hereditary insanity with which they tried to dissuade him from marriage_ Yet we discover the imagery everywhere. Like the self-consciously tragic young Romeo, Russell perceived ill omens before any irreparable disaster occurs, because that is what he finds in himself. When, for example, Russell had to identify the corpse of his brother Frank, he seemed to see his own reflection: "He looked more than life-size and terribly cruel, like some dark hea­then deity to whom human sacrifices are offered."¹⁴ What he most feared was neither insanity nor suicide, but the cruel force of his self-absorption.

In 1933 Colette published a roman a clef entitled The Coming Back. Russell appears as Gregory del Orellano, who has a student named T. C. Maynard, Colette's version of T S. Eliot. To Maynard Colette attributes a pointed evaluation of Gregory: "a man exhausting other men by his intellect; exhausting women by his intensity; wearing out his friends, sucking them dry, passing from person to person, never giving any real happiness—or finding any ... it was in just such a (perhaps unnecessarily melodramatic) light;' adds the narrator, "that Gregory often saw himself: as an harbinger of doom."¹⁵

In her avowedly autobiographical account, After Ten Years: A Per­sonal Record, Colette quotes Russell speaking in just such terms.

One felt an alien among people to whom one could not speak in a lan­guage they could understand. . . . One was strangely unhappy because the pattern of one's life was complicated. . . The center of one was always and enternally a terrible pain—a curious wild pain—a searching for something beyond what the world contained, something transfigured and infinite—the beatific. . . . One did not find it. . . . Perhaps it was not to be found—but the love of it was one's life. It was like passionate love for a ghost. At times it filled one with rage, at times with wild despair, it was the source of gentleness and cruelty and work. . . It was the actual spring of life within one. One could not explain it or make it seem anything but foolishness. . . . One had known others who had it‑ Joseph Conrad especially. . . It made people's gospels often seem thin. It gave one a sense of great isolation. One sought escape from it, though perhaps one ought not to. . . . One had to look into hell before one had any right to speak of heaven. . . . ¹⁶

Russell realized that his "spring of life" was also "an harbinger of doom." Unable, until very late in life, to control this force, Russell's courageous honesty in confronting and revealing it is one of the heroic virtues of his Autobiography.

It is in this light, I believe, that we should view Russell's decades of philandering. The very word "philandering" is misleading, since it suggests thoughtless trifling instead of Russell's earnest, desperate questing. As he says, he escaped the "pain of solitude ... most nearly in moments of love" which are invariably revealed as "illusion." Another remarkable gap in the Autobiography is Russell's failure to correlate his emotional needs, his sexual behavior, and his childhood deprivations. Early on in the Autobiography, Russell describes the menage a trois between his parents and his tutor. His free-thinking par­ents decided that although the tutor was tubercular and should not marry, he ought not to be deprived of sexual relations. With clinical sympathy Russell recounts the situation and adds, with surprising blandness, that he knows "of no evidence" that his mother "derived any pleasure" from the arrangement (I, 10). The apostle of liberty resists the notion that his mother might have enjoyed sexual passions. In his Journal of 1902-05 he records an episode which further illumi­nates his complicated feelings towards his mother and the other women in his life.

Alys had directed the maid to clean a miniature of Russell's mother; the job was botched and the picture ruined. Russell refrains from reproaching Alys but complains to their visitor Lucy Donnelly. The anger bursting through Russell's calm recitation of the facts is extraor­dinary.

I said very little: only that I had refrained from blaming her . . . and that she couldn't understand why I wouldn't have it restored by Mrs. Mason, whom I think sentimental and self-absorbed and an intolerably bad miniature-painter, and who in any case could not have given me  back the thing I had loved, with the more intensity because I had not permitted the same sort of love to grow up towards any other possession. I was vexed, not only because of the loss, but also because she thought she knew better than I did how to take care of things I valued, and there­fore took the opportunity of my absence to do what she knew I should not have wished; also because she did not feel the sacrilege of giving such a thing to a common whore . . . I minded the loss of the picture quite immensely; I don't know how long it will take me really to forgive her (Jan. 14, 1905).¹⁷

Note that he attributes conscious malice to his wife, and considers it not simply a loss but a terrible desecration: "giving such a thing to a common whore." It may be that Russell's romances were a quest for the perpetual renewal of ideal union. His love letters, often extraordi­narily beautiful, sometimes depict sexual intimacy as the bliss of a nursing baby. Of course in real life no woman, no person, can bear for very long the madonna's mantle. Like his mother's miniature, every icon becomes tarnished and destroyed. "The thing I had loved" is always another ghost, insubstantial yet ineluctable.

In this regard, Russell's next and penultimate journal entry is par­ticularly significant. He confesses, "I feel temptations that I cannot think decent people feel" (March 9, 1905). The measure of young Russell's prudishness is his assumption that sexual fantasies are both shameful and peculiar. Possibly his guilt was aggravated by years of calculated coolness toward Alys; nothing makes us feel more wicked than living in bad faith. "The Day of Judgment" brings resurrection to few, damnation to most. Russell wishes to imagine himself as a life-affirming spirit, wakening men and women to beauty, hope, and "joy of life"; he fears that he is also "an harbinger of doom," stripping peo­ple, including himself, of the illusions we live by. After such knowl­edge, what forgiveness? It is precisely when he feels most passionately about someone that he is most likely to reject her. The ghosts of Alys, Helen Dudley, Vivien Eliot,¹⁸ Colette haunt him. As autobiographer Russell veers sporadically from callous egocentricity to stringent self-castigation, in a "vain search" for human companionship, logical cer­tainty, or God.

A good test of an autobiographer is his version of quarrels; Rous­seau's pathetic self-pleadings illustrate how badly an autobiographer can go astray. Russell's version of his "brief and hectic" relationship with D. H. Lawrence, a kind of "Dionysus meets Mr. Apollinax," dramatizes some of what he discovered about himself.¹⁹ Russell in ret­rospect is able to remember Lawrence's virtues: "I felt him to be a man of a certain imaginative genius .... I thought that perhaps his insight into human nature was deeper than mine" (II, 11). Russell the rationalist imagined that Lawrence the Dionysian offered a "vivifying dose" (15) of life-force. "It was only gradually that I came to feel him a positive force of evil and that he came to have the same feeling about me" (11). Lawrence's denunciations had a devastating effect upon Russell: "I was inclined to believe that he had some insight denied to me, and when he said my pacifism was rooted in blood-lust I supposed he must be right. For twenty-four hours I thought I was not fit to live and contemplated suicide. . . . He had written, 'The enemy of all man­kind you are, full of the lust of enmity. It is not a hatred of falsehood which inspires you, it is the hatred of people of flesh and blood, it is a perverted mental blood-lust. Why don't you own it? Let us become strangers again. I think it is better.’ I thought so too. . . ." (II, 14).

Projecting frantically and ludicrously, Lawrence still touched upon a truth implicitly acknowledged by Russell; in a sense the Autobiography is a belated attempt to "own it." Russell realized that there was an element of misanthropy in his prophetic denunciations of human folly; and in his personal relations it was all-too-easy to "become strangers again" with people he once loved. As an epigraph to his second vol­ume of Autobiography Russell selects Blake's "The Defiled Sanctuary."

I saw a chapel all of gold
That none did dare to enter in,
And many weeping stood without,
Weeping, mourning, worshipping.
I saw a serpent rise between
The white pillars of the door,
And he forced and forced and forced
Till down the golden hinges tore:
And along the pavement sweet,
Set with pearls and rubies bright,
All his shining length he drew,
Till upon the altar white
Vomited his poison out
On the bread and on the wine.
So I turned into a sty,
And laid me down among the swine.

In a fine bit of Blakean (and Lawrentian) exegesis, Russell describes the speaker as a "worshipper of Bacchus who had been unable to com­bat his Pentheus" (I, 213). The defiled sanctuary represents for Russell all the noble Victorian illusions shattered by the Great War. But I also think that in that serpent vomiting his poison out, Russell may have recognized himself.

A final instance of "concealed confessions" occurs in Volume III, where Russell pauses rather oddly to give a synopsis of an unpublished short story. A scientist invents an annihilation machine and decides, Like the Old Testament Jehovah, to see if the world deserves to be spared: "He keeps his little machine in his waistcoat pocket and if he presses the knob the world will cease to exist. He goes round the world examining whatever seems to him evil, but everything leaves him in doubt until he finds himself at a Lord Mayor's banquet and finds the nonsense talked by politicians unbearable. He leaps up and announces that he is about to destroy the world. The other diners rush at him to stop him. He puts his thumb in his waistcoat pocket—and finds that in changing for dinner he forgot to move the little machine" (III, 31).

Russell is of course that mad scientist, who might well have been nicknamed "Day of Judgment." The scientist is blessed and cursed with more than mortal power and insight; like Russell he is confident that he can define good and evil, until experience "leaves him in doubt:' So infuriated does he become by the venial offense of political rhetoric that he decides to sacrifice the whole world. One of Russell's most famous aphorisms, from a celebrated BBC talk on the nuclear peril, is "Remember your humanity—and forget the rest" (III, 91). In Russell's grim little parable, his alter ego forgets his humanity and ob­liviously forgets the rest too. The burden of this demonic alter ego helps account for Russell's "sense of sin" (I, 24 and III, 85) and desire for martyrdom. It also helps explain why he is so thoroughly surprised by joy, even predictable pleasures, like being lauded "For he's a jolly good fellow" by fellow peace marchers or celebrated by birthday well-wishers. With the Puritan's drive to define goodness and wickedness, and relentless introspection, his Autobiography is unsparing, but there is no grace abounding to this chief of sinners.

Ideally Russell might have given more credence to the complexity of his experience and discovered the extent as well as the limits of his development. Instead he tended to apply his favorite philosophical tool: Occam's Razor. For a certain kind of philosophical analysis, Occam's Razor is useful; "for any more particular account of heart-occurrences," in Richard Baxter's wonderful phrase,²⁰ it can be disas­trous. We see the difficulty in Russell's treatment of his religious skep­ticism. He includes a perfectly fair sample of his adolescent "Greek Exercises," with one significant exception—the omission of this final entry.

Thus God has become a part of my life, an ever present influence, moulding my action and my thought, comforting me in dejection and soothing me in inquietude.—Whether this faith be mere poetic senti­mentalism, as a year ago I should have pronounced it to be, I know not; but this I do know, that it brightens my life, and harmonizes with all my highest. Let it then remain and bear fruit.²¹

Although young Russell methodically and systematically repudiated most of the conventional faith of his Grandmother, there remained a truly spiritual aspiration. His retrospective view simplifies the tension by suggesting a more resolved skeptical conclusion to his struggles. He seems less embarrassed about disclosing intimate sexual details than about confessing embers of religious flame. In fact, long after he claims to have resolved the issue Russell was driven by spiritual quest­ing and tormented by doubts. On December 5, 1892, he records in his Journal: "O God forgive me; I have sinned grievously. . . How vain a thing it is to lead others to a knowledge of the highest when in my own acts I evince a folly no less than that of whatever companions chance or the moment has assigned to me!"²²

In one Prisons essay, Russell distinguishes between the religion of salvation, for which he has majestic scorn, and the religion of human­ity. By the time he has pared away the fallacious and the non-verifi­able, Russell is left with a narrowly secular and humanist credo. That is no mean achievement, but I wish his Autobiography gave a fuller sense of the nobility and grandeur, as well as the pain and frustration, of his odyssey. Russell seems to me a martyr of modernism, unable to do full justice to his own story. He was, after all, much more than he renders—surely one of our century's most profound humane teachers. What might have been is what he imagined in Prisons as the purpose of studying great lives: a vision of one of "the men whose mere attempts to redeem the human race, [whose] fragments of success form the inspiration of all that is best. . . ."²³

It was precisely this sense of disappointment Ottoline Morrell felt when she read the early draft of Russell's Autobiography in 1931. Understandably sensitive to Russell's portrait of her, because she had been savagely caricatured by Lawrence in Women in Love and satiri­cally rendered by Aldous Huxley in Creme Yellow, she rose above per­sonal interest and urged him to write an autobiography as good as Gib­bon's, a story "bigger, less personal," closer to the "large events of general life."²⁴ She liked the first half of what Russell had written, and warmly praised one of his finest passages, "regarding the skeptical intellect" and Spinoza's "intellectual love of God" (II, 35-6). She urged him to delete some "spiteful" details; in another letter she notes that she has never seen as much evil in humans as Russell does, and implores him to include more of his "great & imaginative and wonder­ful side. . . . And above all give ideas."²⁵

Russell took only a few of Ottoline's suggestions and never recon­ceived his story in the grander way she imagined. Most of what she did not live to read, Volume III, is terribly disappointing—the more so because Russell addressed those "large events" such as human rights, nuclear proliferation, war and peace. Here more than anywhere we seek that prophetic, solitary voice crying in the wilderness. Instead we get pages of tedious travelogue and petty political tribulations, little of what Ottoline valued, his ideas about "general life." The third volume was dictated, apparently in haste, to Edith Russell, and is marred by awkward constructions and even grammatical errors. Consequently the Postscript comes as a wondrous revelation; it was actually written almost twenty years earlier, as "Reflection on my Eightieth Birthday," in Portraits From Memory.

The Postscript is Russell at his finest, stirring, but sadly reminding us once more how great an Autobiography he might have composed. When he says, "I was troubled by scepticism and unwillingly forced to the conclusion that most of what passes for knowledge is open to rea­sonable doubt. I wanted certainty in the kind of way in which people want religious faith" (III, 326), he suggests an overall pattern of devel­opment which remains merely incipient in his story.

The concluding paragraphs rise to a glorious height, balancing his political and intellectual disappointments with indomitable spirit.

But beneath all this load of failure I am still conscious of something that I feel to be victory. I may have conceived theoretical truth wrongly, but I was not wrong in thinking that there is such a thing, and that it deserves our allegiance. I may have thought the road to a world of free and happy human beings shorter than it is proving to be, but I was not wrong in thinking that such a world is possible, and that it is worth while to live with a view to bringing it nearer. I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social. Personal: to care for what is noble, for what is beautiful, for what is gentle; to allow moments of insight to give wisdom at more mundane times. Social: to see in imagination the society that is to be created, where individuals grow freely, and where hate and greed and envy die because there is nothing to nourish them. These things I believe, and the world, for all its horrors, has left me unshaken.

In such moments, Russell shares "the intellectual love of God" with his beloved Spinoza. At his best, Russell conveys tragic awareness in what he elsewhere calls "a voice speaking straight to experience and sorrow?' With lucidity, detachment, and authority, he conveys the vision of a life lived passionately and contemplated whole, under the aspect of eternity. Here, truly, we are touched by the presence of a great man whose fragments of success inspire, if not redeem us.

NOTES

1. "Self-Appreciation," in The Collected Papers, Vol. I, ed. Kenneth Blackwell, et al (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1983), p. 73.

2.  "Forgiveness of Sins" in The Pilgrimage of Life, in a forthcoming volume of The Collected Papers.

3.  BR to Ottoline Morrell, 9 January 1912, in the Russell Archives of McMaster Uni­versity, Hamilton, Ontario.

4.  Cited by Ronald W. Clark, A Life of Bertrand Russell (New York: Knopf, 1976), p. 159.

5.  Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography: 1914-1944 (Boston: Little-Brown, 1968), p. 188. Subsequent references identified by volume and page number.

6.  In Newman's Apologia, by contrast, life is a journey toward safe harbor. Events like sickness in Sicily in 1833 are inherently meaningful: recovery signifies spiri­tual rebirth. Newman in fact recalls himself lying near death and murmuring, "I shall not die, for I have not sinned against the light."

7.  Cited by John Lewis in Bertrand Russell: Philosopher and Humanist London: Lawrence and Winshart, 1968), p. 29.

8.  For more on this episode, see Bennett and Nancy Simon, "The Pacifist Turn: An Episode of Mystic Illumination in Russell's Life," Russell: The Journal of the Bertrand Russell Archives, 13 (Spring 1974), p_ 11-24.

9.  The young woman, Helen Dudley, is named in the 1931 typescript of the Autobiog­raphy, now in the Humanities Research Center at Austin, Texas.

10.  Anthony Quinton, "Russell," in the Dictionary of National Biography 1961-1970 (Oxford University Press, 1981) ed. E. T. Williams and C. S. Nicholls, p. 904.

11. Cited with permission of the Humanities Research Center.

12.  Helen Dudley to Bertrand Russell, 8/1/22, Russell Archives.

13.  In Dear Bertrand Russell: a selection of his correspondence with the general public, 1950-1968, ed. Barry Feinberg and Ronald Kasrils (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd. 1969), p. 190 (letter dated October 3, 1961).

14.  Bertrand Russell to Ottoline Morrell, 9/3/31.

15.  Constance Malleson, The Coming Back (London, Toronto: Janathan Cape, 1933), p. 307.

16.  Constance Malleson, After Ten Years: A Personal Record (London and Toronto: Jonathan Cape, 1931), p. 109.

17.  From Bertrand Russell's Journal 1902-05, in a forthcoming volume of The Col­lected Papers of Bertrand Russell, ed. Kenneth Blackwell, Nicholas Griffin, Richard A. Rempel, etc.

18. For the story of Russell's relationship with the Eliots, see Robert H. Bell, "Bertrand Russell and the Eliots," American Scholar (Summer 1983).

19.  For a fine account of Lawrence's side of their relationship, see Paul Delany, a H. Lawrence's Nightmare: The Writer and His Circle in the Years of the Great War (New York: Basic Books, 1978).

20.  Richard Baxter, The Autobiography, Being the Reliquiae Baxterianae, ed. J. M. Lloyd Thomas (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1931), p. 103.

21.  "Greek Exercises," in The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, Vol. I, London: George Allen and Unwin, p. 21.

22.  Journal 1890-1894, in The Collected Papers, Vol. I, p. 60.

23.  "The Education of the Emotions," 1-2, forthcoming in The Collected Papers.

24.  Ottoline Morrell to Bertrand Russell, February 1, 1932.

25. Ottoline Morrell to Bertrand Russell, February 9, 1932. With thanks to Carl Spa­doni, Assistant Archivist of the Russell Archives, and to the editors of Rus­sell's Collected Papers.