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Autobiography
‘Witty, invigorating, marvellously candid and generous in spirit’
Times Literary SupplementBertrand
Russell
AutobiographyFirst published in 1975
by George Allen & Unwin Ltd, London
First published in the Routledge Classics in 2010
by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor and Francis Group, an informa business
? 2009 The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation Ltd
Introduction ? 1998 Michael Foot
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
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permission in writing from the publishers.
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ISBN10: 0–415–47373–X
ISBN10: 0–203–86499–9 (ebk)
ISBN13: 978–0–415–47373–6
ISBN13: 978–0–203–86499–9 (ebk)
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009.
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ISBN 0-203-86499-9 Master e-book ISBNTo Edith
Through the long years
I sought peace,
I found ecstasy, I found anguish,
I found madness,
I found loneliness,
I found the solitary pain
that gnaws the heart,
But peace I did not ?nd.
Now, old & near my end,
I have known you,
And, knowing you,
I have found both ecstasy & peace,
I know rest,
After so many lonely years.
I know what life & love may be.
Now, if I sleep,
I shall sleep ful?lled.CONTENTS
acknowledgements ix
introduction x
1872–1914 1
Prologue: What I have Lived for 3
1 Childhood 5
2 Adolescence 27
3 Cambridge 46
4 Engagement 64
5 First Marriage 115
6 ‘Principia Mathematica’ 135
7 Cambridge Again 195
1914–1944 221
8 The First War 225
9 Russia 309
10 China 339
11 Second Marriage 366
12 Later Years of Telegraph House 409
13 America. 1938–1944 4381944–1967 483
Preface 485
14 Return to England 487
15 At Home and Abroad 537
16 Trafalgar Square 574
17 The Foundation 629
postscript 699
notes 703
index 710
the autobiography of bertrand russell viiiACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Acknowledgements are due to the following for permission to include
certain letters. In Part I: the letters from Joseph Conrad are included by
permission of J. M. Dent Ltd and the Trustees of the Joseph Conrad Estate. In
Part II: Les Amis d’Henri Barbusse; Margaret Cole, for the letters of Beatrice
Webb; Joseph Conrad through J. M. Dent Ltd, for the letters of Joseph Conrad;
Valerie Eliot, for the letters of T. S. Eliot; the Estate of Albert Einstein; the
Executors of the H. G. Wells Estate (? 1968 George Philip Wells and Frank
Wells); Pearn, Pollinger & Higham, with the concurrence of William Heine-
mann Ltd, for passages from the letters of D. H. Lawrence; the Public Trustee
and the Society of Authors, for the letters of Bernard Shaw; the Trustees of the
Will of Mrs Bernard Shaw; and the Council of Trinity College, Cambridge.
Facsimilies of Crown-copyright records in the Public Record O?ce appear by
permission of the Controller of H.M. Stationery O?ce. The above list
includes only those who requested formal acknowledgement; many others
have kindly granted permission to publish letters.
Acknowledgements are also due to the following for permission to include
certain letters and articles in Part III: Baron Cecil Anrep, for the letters of
Bernard Berenson; the Estate of Albert Einstein; Valerie Eliot, for the letters
of T. S. Eliot; Dorelia John, for the letter of Augustus John; The New York Times
Company, for ‘The Best Answer to Fanaticism-Liberalism’ (? 1951); The
Observer, for ‘Pros and Cons of Reaching Ninety’. The above list includes only
those who requested formal acknowledgement; many others have kindly
granted permission to publish letters.INTRODUCTION
A particular, persistent reason why Bertrand Russell had such appeal, through-
out his ninety odd years, especially to the young, was the trouble he took to
write plain English. Considering how complicated or rari?ed were the sub-
jects he started writing about in his own youth or early manhood, it is all the
more instructive to see how he shaped his own style for his own purpose.
Was it just a gift from the gods in whom he never believed, or was it not
rather a deliberate design to carry forward the tradition of intellectual integ-
rity in which he was reared? The plainer the style, the less likely it could be
used to tell lies. He would stake everything to tell the truth. The century he
loved best and the language he came to love o?ered the best exemplars.
Jonathan Swift and David Hume aimed to secure an absolute clarity and they
seldom failed. Yet they continued to be read thanks to the enduring individual
resonance in their writing which they also achieved.
All through his life and increasingly in the later years, as many of us
believed, Bertrand Russell was given credit for a comparable combination
of qualities. And yet the claim has been challenged, and the point should be
disposed of at once. Ray Monk, himself a philosopher, has written a new
biography of Russell in which he insists that he is dealing with the philo-
sophical questions overlooked or bowdlerised by previous biographers or by
Russell himself. His ?rst volume, subtitled The Spirit of Solitude, takes the record
from Russell’s birth in 1872 until 1921. In the light of his actual text, the title
might be regarded as satisfactorily restrained. What he is examining more
speci?cally, as he indicates in an epigraph from Dostoevsky, is how nearly
and constantly Russell himself trembled on the edge of despair and madness.
It is indeed a very di?erent portrait from the one drawn by the man himself
who believed that he derived at least part of his inspiration from the fountainof eighteenth-century rationalism and who so often, when he was on the
‘verge of despair’, could still ?nd the honest words to restore his faith in
the human race. Mr Monk is a skilful operator, and his assault on Bertrand
Russell’s reputation responds to all those wretched instincts in the human
condition which like to see great men reduced in their status. Devout Chris-
tians especially seem to be happier when free-thinkers of one breed or
another are exposed as victims of the same fate as the rest of humanity. Such
was the kind of venom which Dr Johnson unleashed on Jonathan Swift.
Something of the same order Ray Monk has unleashed against Bertrand Rus-
sell, and there is still more to come. He himself has many qualities as a writer
but not enough to stem the ?ow of malevolence which poisons the whole
book. However, Russell did take the precaution of speaking for himself, and
we are especially entitled to note how and why he did it.
Autobiography is the most risky and arduous of all the writer’s arts,
although the claim may be questioned, judging by the numbers who have not
been deterred from the attempt. To tell the whole truth about oneself without
in?icting gratuitous injury on the people we love or the causes we espouse
looks an impossible task, and yet constantly these objections are set aside. An
unwillingness to let others tell the tale, a knowledge that they are certain to
get some essential strands of the story wrong, and that these misconceptions
will remain inscribed in the public mind for ever, a driving, inner egotism
which disperses all these other considerations takes command. All the great-
est autobiographers have been egotists – Montaigne, Rousseau, Benvenuto
Cellini – but Russell, we may honestly remind ourselves, found good reasons
to quarrel with all of these, chie?y on account of their too intrusive egos. For
his taste, Montaigne was too placid, Rousseau too hysterical, Cellini a hopeless
egotistical case. His own model was Voltaire, and had he not denounced all
the Rousseauite outbursts, whether novelettish or autobiographical, as the
ravings of a larger lunacy quite foreign to the eighteenth-century enlighten-
ment in which they were both born and bred? If Bertrand Russell had listened
only to these ancestral voices, he would never have embarked on his own
bravest odyssey.
Russell studied, with a special insight, one other ?gure sometimes damned
for his incorrigible egotism, and he maybe o?ered the essential spur for
Russell to proceed with his own work. In his History of Western Philosophy,
published in 1945, Russell devoted a whole chapter to someone who was
never considered to be a philosopher at all. His chapter on Byron explains the
matter with admirable, indisputable assurance. In glaring contrast with the
cool eighteenth-century temper which Russell had drunk in with his mother’s
milk, Byron’s expression took the form, in Russell’s own words, ‘of Titanic
cosmic self-assertion or, in those who retain some superstition, of Satanism’.
Russell himself of course had taken special precautions to forswear all forms
introduction xiof superstition, Satanic or otherwise, but this made his understanding of
Byron’s titanic qualities all the more remarkable. By the end of the chapter he
is using Byron’s own language to describe the essence of Rousseau’s revo-
lutionary message, and much else besides. Man may bleed to death through
the truth that he recognises. Byron, says Russell, expressed this in ‘immortal
lines’:
Sorrow is knowledge; they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth.
The tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.
Byron’s Don Juan indeed was no self-indulgent essay in egotism; it was the
revolutionary epic which the whole age cried out for. It had the same spacious
qualities which Russell himself sought and found.
Two considerable writers of our century – George Orwell and H. G. Wells –
faced the same dilemma in their writing careers and seemingly reached a dif-
ferent conclusion. Each understood the temptations to which autobiographers
might be exposed and how little credence should be accorded to anything
they said, except in the rare instances where they might be o?ering damning
evidence against themselves. Orwell indeed embraced biographers of all
breeds along with autobiographers in his sweeping anathema. He was con-
stantly on guard to subdue his own egotism and indeed to remove all traces
of it from his style of writing. No one who read what he wrote could doubt
that he was completely honest in these professions; to conclude otherwise
would be to convict him of an hypocrisy totally absent from his nature. Yet
some of his very best writings were autobiographical – Homage to Catalonia, for
example – and he wanted to make sure that no blundering biographical hand
would be allowed to appear later to wreck his design.
H. G. Wells once wrote a polemical essay attacking both biographers and
autobiographers in a manner no less comprehensive than Orwell’s. His pri-
mary aim had been to extol the novel as the vehicle for truth-telling but the
rest of the argument rang with such power that it looked as if he would never
wish to escape from it. ‘All biography has something of that post-mortem
coldness and respect, and, as for autobiography, a man may show his soul in a
thousand, half-conscious ways, but to turn on oneself to explain oneself is
given to no one. It is the natural resort of liars and braggarts. Your Cellinis and
Casanovas, men with the habit of regarding themselves with a kind of objec-
tive admiration do best in autobiography.’ Thus he argued in his 1911 essay
that the task was wellnigh impossible.
Yet, twenty odd years later, he changed his mind or had it changed for him
by publishers and friends. He did it only after much heart-searching or head-
searching. The volume was called Experiment in Autobiography, since he knew
the autobiography of bertrand russell xiihow tentative or incomplete the volume or two volumes were bound to be.
Moreover, he sought to complete at the same time a third volume which could
not be published while he or his friends and lovers were still alive. He was no
Casanova wishing to make a parade of his conquests. He had described all
those perils and temptations in his 1911 essay. His 1935 Experiment could not
do more than tell a part of the story. And yet, even more amazing, was the
high proportion of the truth he did tell. André Manrois, no mean judge in
these matters who could transfer into his English essays the more liberal
outlook permitted in France, concluded that ‘Wells’s Experiment in Autobiography
was so frank that Rousseau’s Confessions looks cautious or maidenly by com-
parison’ – and that was the Experiment without the much more explicit sequel.
No evidence exists to prove that Wells’s Experiment paved the way for
Russell’s even braver one; we would cite it if we could. Often their political
paths crossed or recrossed, but sympathy between them remained obstinately
imperfect. They were regarded by their contemporaries as the foremost
exponents of liberal doctrines in the best sense of the term, yet they often
found themselves engaged in furious quarrels. Looking back now, how-
ever, we can see that there were three great matters on which they fought
together and should share the victor’s crown – the ?ght for women’s rights,
the ?ght for democratic socialism, and the ?ght to forbid world-wide nuclear
destruction.
All these seemingly distinct issues were involved in their ?rst encounter
in which, however, neither seemed to appreciate to the full the virtues of
the other. Russell had just read Wells’s In the Days of the Comet (published in
1906) and had been more impressed by the hostility which it aroused in
some quarters than by its intrinsic virtues. It was the most radical work, using
that word in its proper political sense, which Wells had written. He described
how the socialist dawn could open a new world for men and women in their
sexual relations; how working people, men and women, could experience
a new democracy, which they had never even tasted before; how the new
awakening in Britain could forbid the plunge into a continental war with
Germany. Russell shared all these aspirations or expectations, especially the
last. He thought that all other kinds of social advance could be destroyed if
the drift to continental war was not stopped, and his sympathies were espe-
cially enlisted on Wells’s behalf when he noted that he was most viciously
denounced for his alleged advocacy of free love. Russell invited Wells and his
young wife Jane to Oxford with the kindly intention of o?ering support in all
his campaigns. But each had a di?erent approach, even if they shared the
same destination. The upstart Wells informed the aristocratic Russell that he
did not as yet possess the independent income which would enable him to
advocate free love from the roof-tops. Russell professed himself ‘displeased’
by this show of reticence. Later, he was displeased by his own displeasure.
introduction xiiiIn the Days of the Comet was one of the ?rst trumpet blasts which prepared the
way for the sexual revolution of the century and in which, from ?rst to last,
Russell played such an honourable role. He had been taught by the best
masters and mistresses, with his own family in the lead and with John Stuart
Mill’s Subjection of Women as his bible. He never ceased to be amazed how slow
the world at large had been in recognising women’s rights and never lost a
chance to help those who were best serving them. His ancestors showed him
how to ?ght this ?ght, as they did so many others. I pause here to note how
absurdly this respect for his ancestors seems to irritate his new biographer,
Ray Monk; ‘One might have expected Russell, on occasions at least’, he writes
in a footnote on page 48, ‘to have expressed some irritation at being regarded
wherever he went as “Lord John’s grandson”, but, if he did, there is no sign
of it either in the surviving correspondence or in any of the vast number of
autobiographical writings he produced throughout his life.’ But surely it is
Mr Monk’s irritation which is more remarkable than Russell’s lack of it. He
was proud of his family but most especially of his ancestor, William Lord
Russell executed by Charles II on 21 July 1683: ‘He was a warm friend not to
liberty merely but to English liberty.’ His own special education on the ques-
tion of women’s rights came not directly from Lord John, although it might
have done. Who is this fellow Monk descended from?, we may be provoked
at last to ask. The only one who achieved real fame was the general who
helped to restore the Stuarts who in turn started the wretched practice of
persecuting the Russells. But we must not get sidetracked. The new Mr Monk
is a philosopher who too frequently parades himself as an expert on Russell’s
ancestry or his love life.
However, the cause which bound Russell and Wells together most closely
in the end was the greatest which ever faced humankind: how to stop the
atomic and nuclear discoveries achieving the ?nal result of total extinction;
how to develop the world authority which alone could banish the ?nal threat.
At some particular moments throughout the century they seemed to be o?er-
ing sharply contradictory advice, but the appearance was deceptive. They
each spoke the truth that was within them, on this subject more forcefully
than upon any other, and joined forces to win the ?nal intellectual argument.
The climax is reached in the third volume of Russell’s Autobiography. To com-
plete his presentation of this part of the picture we should also note here
what he emphasised in his most important booklet on the subject, Com-
monsense and Nuclear War, published in 1959. He tackles there, quite fairly, the
charge that he had once advocated the threat or the use of the atomic weapon
against the Soviet Union, to stop them embarking on the race. However, the
test which he faced quite fairly and openly, in the 1960s, the last decade of
his life, was the challenge where many more countries would soon possess
the capacity to destroy the world.
the autobiography of bertrand russell xivH. G. Wells had been the ?rst to discern these perils in full imaginative
detail; he did so in his book The World Set Free, published in 1914. He had seized
upon some recent highly tentative revelations about the splitting of the atom
and transformed them into a full-scale description of what an atom bomb war
might entail: ?rst and foremost, a shattering exposure of what would be the
scale of the disaster with the addition of such niceties as the warning that,
fearful as the explosions might be, the subsequent ineradicable e?ects of
radiation might be even more fearful; and some discussion about whether the
debate would become specially dangerous when terrorists could carry their
world-destructive potions in suitcases. So remote were these possibilities
from the actual terrors which crowded upon one another that few would
take him seriously. Moreover, he seemed to add to his own intellectual
self-doubt by suggestions that, faced with these realities, these new forms
of terror, the world would, at the relevant minute of the last minutes of
the eleventh hour, come to its senses. He prophesied a war starting with a
German invasion of France by way of Belgium, but then he prophesied also
that ‘a wave of sanity’ might take command – ‘the disposition to believe in
these spontaneous waves of sanity may be one of my besetting weaknesses’.
At which, casual readers may pause to wonder whether the quotations come
from Wells or Russell. Each as they tried to grasp the reality of atomic horror
might ?nd himself plunged into hope or despair. Without the despair, Homo
sapiens would not be facing the reality. Without the hope, he would forfeit
the ?ghting spirit and the comradeship of men and women needed for
their salvation.
Throughout the century, the paths of political action each man chose with
such care crossed and re-crossed. Each might enrage the other when he
seemed to be adopting extreme political positions at the very moment when
balancing restraints were necessary to preserve humankind’s sanity. The ?er-
cest of all these clashes, one which threatened to forbid any future civilised
exchange between them, was the argument about the outbreak of the
1914–1916 war. Russell accused Wells of having deserted their previous
common stand about an anti-German war to become the most raucous of the
warmongers; Wells insisted that Russell’s brand of paci?sm, however justi?ed
in some circumstances, would not face the question of the German conquest
of Europe. For years thereafter, each furiously rejected the arguments of the
other and yet could not fail to be impressed by the persistent passion with
which the case was presented. Each knew well enough how such passions
could be mobilised for the worst causes; the new curse was threatening
humankind. And yet if the good causes were to triumph, they must be no less
passionately supported. Here was one letter, appealing for common action,
which Wells wrote:
introduction xvMy dear Russell . . . In these days of revolutionary crisis it is incumbent upon
all of us who are in any measure in?uential in left thought to dispel the
tendency to waste energy in minor dissentions. . . . I get more & more
anarchistic & ultra left as I grow older. . . . We must certainly get together to
talk (& perhaps conspire) & that soon.
(see pp. 515–16 below)
The date was 20 May 1945, a few months before the atomic explosions at
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A few months later, Wells was dead and had to leave
his fresh essays in conspiracy to Russell alone. How much he would have
approved the whole autobiographical exertion.
The ?rst volume of Russell’s autobiography was published in 1967 and
the third in 1970, just before he died at the age of 98 in 1970. It might be
thought that such an old man’s judgements lose their potency or their rele-
vance. No honest reader of these pages can reach that conclusion. Whatever
else it is, it is one of the truly great autobiographies in our language. The
poets have stopped writing epics, he himself had written. Well here is an epic,
written with all the combined passion and clarity of which he was the master.
And if anyone doubts the combination, let him turn to the Prologue – ‘What
I have Lived for’ – at the start of the ?rst volume or the Postscript which
concludes the ?nal one. Along with his simplicity he had an eloquence all
his own. Both the warnings of calamity and the recoveries of hope may ring
across the intervening years. Thanks to his whole life, he had a special right to
be heard.
I may be permitted to add a personal postscript, nothing like so eloquent as
any of Russell’s own, but one which may help to clinch the case for his
veracity. My ?rst introduction to him occurred when someone at Oxford
gave me a copy of his book The Conquest of Happiness. Then, two years later, he
turned up in person for a university meeting of some sort, spreading his own
special brand of wit and wisdom and beaming with happiness. Who could
resist so radiant a practitioner of his own theories?
One particular cause of that happiness for sure was his a?air with ‘Peter’
Spence which was suddenly blossoming into the happiest of his whole life-
time. She already had young Oxford at her feet but when Bertrand Russell
appeared and carried her o? with such grace and ease, it was truly a conquest
to write home about.
Michael Foot
Hampstead, July 1998
the autobiography of bertrand russell xvi1872–1914Prologue
WHAT I HAVE LIVED FOR
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life:
the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the
su?ering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither
and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to
the very verge of despair.
I have sought love, ?rst, because it brings ecstasy – ecstasy so great that
I would often have sacri?ced all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy.
I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness – that terrible loneliness in
which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the
cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, ?nally, because in the union
of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the pre?guring vision of the heaven
that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it
might seem too good for human life, this is what – at last – I have found.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand
the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried
to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the
?ux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.
Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the
heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain
reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors,
helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of
loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be.
I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too su?er.
This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it
again if the chance were o?ered me.1
CHILDHOOD
My ?rst vivid recollection is my arrival at Pembroke Lodge in February 1876.
To be accurate, I do not remember the actual arrival at the house, though I
