Procession which I attended because of Alys. We quarrelled about the Mission
to Deep Sea Fishermen, concerning which I made some disparaging remark.
Shortly afterwards she followed the example of Bernard Shaw by standing for
the St Pancras Vestry (which corresponded to what is now the Borough
Council). She lived up a back staircase in a slum, and as I had my Cambridge
furniture to dispose of, I gave some of it to her.
Meanwhile, through Alys, she came to know a young man named Bobby
Phillimore, who had proposed to Alys but been refused. He was at
Christchurch, and was the son of Lord Phillimore, a very rich Liberal Law
Lord and a close friend of Mr Gladstone. Bobby, I think under Logan’s
in?uence, became Socialist and a poet. He was the original of the poet in
Shaw’s Candida. He decided that he wanted to marry Lion, but he was not
going to repeat the mistake of precipitancy which he had committed with
Alys. So he got himself elected to the St Pancras Vestry and carefully prepared
his approaches. Shortly after Alys and I were married, when we were living in
Berlin, I got a letter from Lion asking my advice as to whether she should
accept him. I wrote back at once giving twelve reasons against. By return of
post I got a letter from her saying that she had accepted him.
In the following spring, when Alys and I were staying with her sister at
Fiesole, Lion and Bobby came to see us on their return from their honey-
moon in North Africa. I then for the ?rst time learned why she had accepted
later years of telegraph house 433him. After she had resolutely refused him for some time, he developed heart
trouble, and eminent medical men gave it as their opinion that if she per-
sisted he would die. His father pleaded with her, but in vain. Finally, in
response to impassioned requests from Lord Phillimore, Mr Gladstone, though
eighty and nearly blind, climbed her slummy staircase in person to urge her
to abandon the role of Barbara Allen. This was too much for her, and she
accepted her love-sick swain.
So far, so good – a pleasant King Cophetua story. But in Fiesole, after her
honeymoon, she told a surprising sequel. Alys and I noticed at once that she
had become profoundly cynical, and amazingly obscene in her conversation,
so we naturally pressed her as to what produced such a change. She told us
that, as soon as she and Bobby were married, he told her he had deceived the
doctors, and had nothing the matter with his heart;
3
further that, though he
had been determined to marry her, he did not love her and never had loved
her. I believe the marriage was never consummated.
Bobby’s father owned Radlett, at that time a picturesque country village; he
owned also a rather beautiful country house between Radlett and Elstree. He
gave Bobby the house and a free hand in managing the estate. The poet
and the Socialist receded into the background, and were replaced by a very
hard-headed business man, who proceeded to develop Radlett by putting up
vast numbers of cheap, ugly, sordid suburban villas, which brought in an
enormous pro?t. Years later he really did become ill. His wife nursed him
devotedly for about three years, at the end of which he died. After his death
she told me she would marry any man who would promise to be always ill,
because she had grown so used to nursing that she did not know how to ?ll
her days without it.
She did not, however, marry again. She published anonymously a book
which had a considerable success, called By an unknown disciple. She had an
abortive a?air with Massingham. She took a great interest in psychical
research. Being left a rich widow, she devoted a large part of her income to
support of the Labour Party. I saw little of her in her last years, because she
demanded that one should treat seriously things that I regard as nonsense –
sentimental religiosity, second sight, the superior intuitions of the Irish, and
so on. But I regretted these obstacles, and tried to see her without either
quarrels or insincerity.
To W. V. Quine, the Harvard logician
Telegraph House
Harting, Peters?eld
6-6-35
Dear Dr Quine
Your book [System of Logistic] arrived at a moment when I was over-worked
the autobiography of bertrand russell 434and obliged to take a long holiday. The result is that I have only just ?nished
reading it.
I think you have done a beautiful piece of work; it is a long time since I
have had as much intellectual pleasure as in reading you.
Two questions occurred to me, as to which I should be glad to have
answers when you have time. I have put them on a separate sheet.
In reading you I was struck by the fact that, in my work, I was always being
in?uenced by extraneous philosophical considerations. Take e.g. descriptions.
I was interested in ‘Scott is the author of Waverley’, and not only in the
descriptive functions of PM.
4
If you look up Meinong’s work, you will see the
sort of fallacies I wanted to avoid; the same applies to the ontological
argument.
Take again notation (mainly Whitehead’s): we had to provide for the
correlators in Parts III and IV. Your αβ for our R|S would not do for three or
more relations, or for various forms (such as R||S) we needed.
I am worried – though as yet I cannot put my worry into words – as
to whether you really have avoided the troubles for which the axiom of
reducibility was introduced as completely as you think. I should like to see
Induction and Dedekindian continuity explicitly treated by your methods.
I am a little puzzled as to the status of classes in your system. They appear
as a primitive idea, but the connection of α with x ?(φx) seems somewhat
vague. Do you maintain that, if α = x ?(φx), the prop. xα, is identical with φx?
You must, if you are to say that all props are sequences. Yet it seems obvious
that ‘I gave sixpence to my son’ is not the same as ‘my son is one of the people
to whom I gave sixpence’.
And do you maintain that an in?nite class can be de?ned otherwise than
by a de?ning function? The need of including in?nite classes was one of my
reasons for emphasising functions as opposed to classes in PM.
I expect you have good answers to these questions.
In any case, I have the highest admiration for what you have done, which
has reformed many matters as to which I had always been uncomfortable.
Yours very truly
Bertrand Russell
To G. E. Moore
Telegraph House
Harting, Peters?eld
Feb. 8, 1937
Dear Moore
I have become very desirous of returning to purely philosophic work;
in particular, I want to develop the ideas in my paper on ‘The Limits of
Empiricism’, & to investigate the relation of language to fact, as to which
later years of telegraph house 435Carnap’s ideas seem to me very inadequate. But I am in the unfortunate
position of being legally bound to pay between ￡800 & ￡900 a year to other
people, & having only ￡300 a year of unearned income. I cannot therefore
work at philosophy unless I can get some academic job. I suppose there is no
possibility at Cambridge? I should be very glad if there were, as my desire to
get back to philosophy is very strong.
Yours
Bertrand Russell
Telegraph House
Harting, Peters?eld
Feb. 18, 1937
Dear Moore
Thank you for your letter, which shows the position to be much as I
supposed. I think perhaps, at the moment, it is hardly worth proceeding
in the matter, as the chance of success seems small, & there are other
possibilities elsewhere. I am very grateful to you for being willing to recom-
mend me, & if other things fail I will write to you again. In the meantime,
I think it will be best to do nothing.
The Leverhulme Fellowships are settled in June; till then, I shall not know.
In any case they only last two years.
Yours
Bertrand Russell
From Desmond MacCarthy
25 Wellington Square
S.W.3
March 16. 37
Dear Bertie
I am relieved that you thought my review likely to whet the public appetite:
that is what I tried to do. I did not write it well: I wrote it too quickly and
only had time to make perfunctory corrections, but I think it will persuade
people that The Amberley Papers are very interesting. I went to Trinity Commem:
and dined in Hall on Sunday night. I found the review was working there.
What I am pleased about is that I got G. M. Young to write about it in
the Observer. He wanted to write about it in the S. T. & I got him, by grabbing
the book from him, to o?er his comments to Garvin.
I don’t expect that you hope for a large sale, but I think it may have a very
respectable one & go on selling.
I am interested to hear that you have sold Telegraph House, & long to hear
particulars. I am afraid the price was not not [sic] good or you would have
written with more elation. It does not mean – does it that your worst money
the autobiography of bertrand russell 436worries are at an end? Do you remember what a fuss Schopenhauer made
about having to pension the woman he pushed down stairs for the term of
her natural life? And he had only a brown poodle dependent on him, (Its
name was Butz) and you have never pushed a woman down stairs. Do you
remember his triumphant entry in his diary after many years, Obit anus, abit
onus? I look forward to getting two postcards from you, soon, with these words
on them.
It is of the utmost importance that you should have leisure to write your
book clearing up the relation of grammar and philosophy and many things
beside. Is it true that you could manage on ￡500 a year till you can write
those post-cards? Your admirers ought to be able to raise that. Would you
object to being pensioned? I shouldn’t if my prospects were as good as yours
of writing something valuable.
Time is getting short now. I don’t mean that death is necessarily near either
of us, but the slow death is near; the softening and relaxing of the faculty of
attention which in its approach feels so like wisdom to the victim.
I met Shaw not long ago & he talked about his latest works, which exhibit
all his astonishing aptitudes – except grip. I had an impulse to say (but I
thought it too unkind) ‘Aren’t you afraid though of letting out the deadly
secret – that you can no longer care?’ I guessed the nature of that secret from
having observed what was threatening me. But with you & me it is still only a
threat – You, especially, can still care, for your power of feeling has always
been stronger than mine. Still, time is short. We are all (and I mean also
people neither of us know) [anxious] that you should philosophise, and
write your book before the power to write it begins to be insensibly sucked
away in the fat folds of that hydra, old age.
I stayed with Moore and we were happy – grey-beards at play, most of the
time. He made me read a paper by Wisdom on De?nition but I didn’t get
the hang of it. It was Wittgensteinian. I wanted to talk about myself and make
Moore talk about himself, but we didn’t care enough to get over the
discomfort of leaving the pleasant shore of memories. But damn it I’ll do it
next time (This isn’t the ?rst time though, I’ve said that). Do please send me
word when you are next in London & come to lunch or in the morning or in
the afternoon, or to dinner – any time. We cd put you up. Dermod is a ships
doctor, his room is empty. And I will come to you for a visit in May after my
Leslie Stephen lecture. Give my a?ectionate & best wishes to ‘Peter’ for a
happy delivery –
Yours always,
Desmond
later years of telegraph house 43713
AMERICA. 1938–1944
In August 1938, we sold our house at Kidlington. The purchasers would
only buy it if we evacuated it at once, which left us a fortnight in August to
?ll in somehow. We hired a caravan, and spent the time on the coast of
Pembrokeshire. There were Peter and me, John and Kate and Conrad, and our
big dog Sherry. It poured with rain practically the whole time and we were all
squashed up together. It was about as uncomfortable a time as I can remem-
ber. Peter had to prepare the meals, which she hated doing. Finally, John and
Kate went back to Dartington, and Peter and Conrad and I sailed for America.
In Chicago I had a large Seminar, where I continued to lecture on the same
subject as at Oxford, namely, ‘Words and Facts’. But I was told that Americans
would not respect my lectures if I used monosyllables, so I altered the title
to something like ‘The Correlation between Oral and Somatic Motor Habits’.
Under this title, or something of the sort, the Seminar was approved. It was
an extraordinarily delightful Seminar. Carnap and Charles Morris used to
come to it, and I had three pupils of quite outstanding ability – Dalkey,
Kaplan, and Copilowish. We used to have close arguments back and forth,
and succeeded in genuinely clarifying points to our mutual satisfaction,
which is rare in philosophical argument. Apart from this Seminar, the time
in Chicago was disagreeable. The town is beastly and the weather was vile.
President Hutchins, who was occupied with the Hundred Best Books, and
with the attempt to force neo-Thomism on the philosophical faculty, natur-
ally did not much like me, and when the year for which I had been engaged
came to an end was, I think, glad to see me go.
I became a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. After
the bleak hideousness of Chicago, which was still in the grip of winter, it was
delightful to arrive in the Californian spring. We arrived in California at theend of March, and my duties did not begin until September. The ?rst part of
the intervening time I spent in a lecture tour, of which I remember only two
things with any vividness. One is that the professors at the Louisiana State
University, where I lectured, all thought well of Huey Long, on the ground
that he had raised their salaries. The other recollection is more pleasant: in
a purely rural region, I was taken to the top of the dykes that enclose the
Mississippi. I was very tired with lecturing, long journeys, and heat, I lay in
the grass, and watched the majestic river, and gazed, half hypnotised, at water
and sky. For some ten minutes I experienced peace, a thing which very rarely
happened to me, and I think only in the presence of moving water.
In the summer of 1939, John and Kate came to visit us for the period of
the school holidays. A few days after they arrived the War broke out, and it
became impossible to send them back to England. I had to provide for their
further education at a moment’s notice. John was seventeen, and I entered
him at the University of California, but Kate was only ?fteen, and this
seemed young for the University. I made enquiries among friends as to
which school in Los Angeles had the highest academic standard, and there
was one that they all concurred in recommending, so I sent her there. But I
found that there was only one subject taught that she did not already know,
and that was the virtues of the capitalist system. I was therefore compelled,
in spite of her youth, to send her to the University. Throughout the year
1939–40 John and Kate lived with us.
In the summer months of 1939 we rented a house at Santa Barbara, which
is an altogether delightful place. Unfortunately, I injured my back, and had
to lie ?at on my back for a month, tortured by almost unendurable sciatica.
The result of this was that I got behind hand with the preparations for
my lectures, and that throughout the coming academic year I was always
overworked and always conscious that my lectures were inadequate.
The academic atmosphere was much less agreeable than in Chicago; the
people were not so able, and the President was a man for whom I conceived,
I think justly, a profound aversion. If a lecturer said anything that was too
liberal, it was discovered that the lecturer in question did his work badly, and
he was dismissed. When there were meetings of the Faculty, the President of
the University used to march in as if he were wearing jack-boots, and rule
any motion out of order if he did not happen to like it. Everybody trembled
at his frown, and I was reminded of a meeting of the Reichstag under Hitler.
Towards the end of the academic year 1939–40, I was invited to become a
professor at the College of the City of New York. The matter appeared to be
settled, and I wrote to the President of the University of California to resign
my post there. Half an hour after he received my letter, I learned that the
appointment in New York was not de?nitive and I called upon the President
to withdraw my resignation, but he told me it was too late. Earnest Christian
america. 1938–1944 439taxpayers had been protesting against having to contribute to the salary of
an in?del, and the President was glad to be quit of me.
The College of the City of New York was an institution run by the City
Government. Those who attended it were practially all Catholics or Jews;
but to the indignation of the former, practically all the scholarships went to
the latter. The Government of New York City was virtually a satellite of the
Vatican, but the professors at the City College strove ardently to keep up some
semblance of academic freedom. It was no doubt in pursuit of this aim that
they had recommended me. An Anglican bishop was incited to protest
against me, and priests lectured the police, who were practically all Irish
Catholics, on my responsibility for the local criminals. A lady, whose daugh-
ter attended some section of the City College with which I should never be
brought in contact, was induced to bring a suit, saying that my presence in
that institution would be dangerous to her daughter’s virtue. This was not a
suit against me, but against the Municipality of New York.
1
I endeavoured to
be made a party to the suit, but was told that I was not concerned. Although
the Municipality was nominally the defendant, it was as anxious to lose the
suit as the good lady was to win it. The lawyer for the prosecution pro-
nounced my works ‘lecherous, libidinous, lustful, venerous, erotomaniac,
aphrodisiac, irreverent, narrow-minded, untruthful, and bereft of moral
?ber’. The suit came before an Irishman who decided against me at length
and with vituperation. I wished for an appeal, but the Municipality of New
York refused to appeal. Some of the things said against me were quite
fantastic. For example, I was thought wicked for saying that very young
infants should not be punished for masturbation.
A typical American witch-hunt was instituted against me,
2
and I became
taboo throughout the whole of the United States. I was to have been engaged
in a lecture tour, but I had only one engagement, made before the witch-hunt
had developed. The Rabbi who had made this engagement broke his
contract, but I cannot blame him. Owners of halls refused to let them if I
was to lecture, and if I had appeared anywhere in public, I should probably
have been lynched by a Catholic mob, with the full approval of the police.
No newspaper or magazine would publish anything that I wrote, and I
was suddenly deprived of all means of earning a living. As it was legally
impossible to get money out of England, this produced a very di?cult situ-
ation, especially as I had my three children dependent upon me. Many
liberal-minded professors protested, but they all supposed that as I was an
earl I must have ancestral estates and be very well o?. Only one man did
anything practical, and that was Dr Barnes, the inventor of Argyrol, and the
creator of the Barnes Foundation near Philadelphia. He gave me a ?ve-year
appointment to lecture on philosophy at his Foundation. This relieved me of
a very great anxiety. Until he gave me this appointment, I had seen no way
the autobiography of bertrand russell 440out of my troubles. I could not get money out of England; it was impossible
to return to England; I certainly did not wish my three children to go back
into the blitz, even if I could have got a passage for them which would
certainly have been impossible for a long time to come. It seemed as if it
would be necessary to take John and Kate away from the University, and to
live as cheaply as possible on the charity of kind friends. From this bleak
prospect I was saved by Dr Barnes.
The summer of 1940 o?ered for me an extraordinary contrast between
public horror and private delight. We spent the summer in the Sierras, at
Fallen Leaf Lake near Lake Tahoe, one of the loveliest places that it has ever
been my good fortune to know. The lake is more than 6000 feet above sea-
level, and during the greater part of the year deep snow makes the whole
region uninhabitable. But there is a three-months’ season in the summer
during which the sun shines continually, the weather is warm, but as a rule
not unbearably hot, the mountain meadows are ?lled with the most exquisite
wild ?owers, and the smell of the pine trees ?lls the air. We had a log cabin
in the middle of pine trees, close to the lake. Conrad and his nursery gover-
ness slept indoors, but there was no room for the rest of us in the house, and
we all slept on various porches. There were endless walks through deserted
country to waterfalls, lakes and mountain tops, and one could dive o? snow
into deep water that was not unduly cold. I had a tiny study which was hardly
more than a shed, and there I ?nished my Inquiry into Meaning and Truth. Often
it was so hot that I did my writing stark naked. But heat suits me, and I never
found it too hot for work.
Amid all these delights we waited day by day to know whether England
had been invaded, and whether London still existed. The postman, a jocular
fellow with a somewhat sadistic sense of humour, arrived one morning
saying in a loud voice, ‘Heard the news? All London destroyed, not a house
left standing!’ And we could not know whether to believe him. Long walks
and frequent bathes in many lakes helped to make the time endurable, and,
by September, it had begun to seem that England would not be invaded.
I found in the Sierras the only classless society that I have ever known.
Practically all the houses were inhabited by university professors, and the
necessary work was done by university students. The young man, for
instance, who brought our groceries was a young man to whom I had been
lecturing throughout the winter. There were also many students who had
come merely for a holiday, which could be enjoyed very cheaply as every-
thing was primitive and simple. Americans understand the management of
tourists much better than Europeans do. Although there were many houses
close to the lake, hardly one could be seen from a boat, since all were care-
fully concealed in pine trees; and the houses themselves were built of pine
logs, and were quite ino?ensive. One angle of the house in which we lived
america. 1938–1944 441was made of a live and growing tree; I cannot imagine what will happen
to the house when the tree grows too big.
In the autumn of 1940 I gave the William James lectures at Harvard. This
engagement had been made before the trouble in New York. Perhaps Harvard
regretted having made it, but, if so, the regret was politely concealed from me.
My duties with Dr Barnes began at the New Year of 1941. We rented a
farmhouse about thirty miles from Philadelphia, a very charming house,
about two hundred years old, in rolling country, not unlike inland Dorsetshire.
There was an orchard, a ?ne old barn, and three peach trees, which bore
enormous quantities of the most delicious peaches I have ever tasted. There
were ?elds sloping down to a river, and pleasant woodlands. We were ten
miles from Paoli (called after the Corsican patriot), which was the limit of the
Philadelphia suburban trains. From there I used to go by train to the Barnes
Foundation, where I lectured in a gallery of modern French paintings, mostly
of nudes, which seemed somewhat incongruous for academic philosophy.
Dr Barnes was a strange character. He had a dog to whom he was passion-
ately devoted and a wife who was passionately devoted to him. He liked to
patronise coloured people and treated them as equals, because he was quite
sure that they were not. He had made an enormous fortune by inventing
Argyrol; when it was at its height, he sold out, and invested all his money in
Government securities. He then became an art connoisseur. He had a very
?ne gallery of modern French paintings and in connection with the gallery
he taught the principles of aesthetics. He demanded constant ?attery and had
a passion for quarrelling. I was warned before accepting his o?er that he
always tired of people before long, so I exacted a ?ve-year contract from him.
On December 28th, 1942, I got a letter from him informing me that my
appointment was terminated as from January 1st. I was thus reduced once
again from a?uence to destitution. True, I had my contract, and the lawyer
whom I consulted assured me that there was no doubt whatever of my
getting full redress from the courts. But obtaining legal redress takes time,
especially in America, and I had to live through the intervening period some-
how. Corbusier, in a book on America, tells a typical story about Barnes’s
behaviour. Corbusier was on a lecture tour, and wished to see Dr Barnes’s
gallery. He wrote for permission, which Dr Barnes always accorded very
grudgingly. Dr Barnes replied that he could see it at nine o’clock on a certain
Saturday morning, but at no other time. Corbusier wrote again saying that his
lecture engagements made that time impossible and would not some other
time be suitable. Dr Barnes wrote an exceedingly rude letter, saying it was
then or never. To this Corbusier sent a long answer, which is printed in his
book saying that he was not averse from quarrels, but he preferred to quarrel
with people who were on the other side in matters of art, whereas he and
Dr Barnes were both in favour of what is modern, and it seemed a pity that
the autobiography of bertrand russell 442they should not agree. Dr Barnes never opened this letter, but returned it,
with the word ‘merde’ written large on the envelope.
When my case came into court, Dr Barnes complained that I had done
insu?cient work for my lectures, and that they were super?cial and perfunc-
tory. So far as they had gone, they consisted of the ?rst two-thirds of my
History of Western Philosophy, of which I submitted the manuscript to the judge,
though I scarcely suppose he read it. Dr Barnes complained of my treatment
of the men whom he called Pither-gawras and Empi-Dokkles. I observed the
judge taking notice, and I won my case. Dr Barnes, of course, appealed as
often as he could, and it was not until I was back in England that I actually
got the money. Meanwhile he had sent a printed document concerning my
sins to the Master and each of the Fellows of Trinity College, to warn them
of their folly in inviting me back. I never read this document, but I have no
doubt it was good reading.
In the early months of 1943 I su?ered some ?nancial stringency, but not
