天天读书网（www.book.d78i.com）整理Autobiography‘Witty, invigorating, marvellously candid and generous in spirit’Times Literary SupplementBertrandRussellAutobiographyFirst published in 1975by George Allen & Unwin Ltd, LondonFirst published in the Routledge Classics in 2010by Routledge2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RNSimultaneously published in the USA and Canadaby Routledge270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor and Francis Group, an informa business? 2009 The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation LtdIntroduction ? 1998 Michael FootAll rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprintedor reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafterinvented, including photocopying and recording, or inany information storage or retrieval system, withoutpermission in writing from the publishers.British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British LibraryLibrary of Congress Cataloging in Publication DataA catalog record for this book has been requestedISBN10: 0–415–47373–XISBN10: 0–203–86499–9 (ebk)ISBN13: 978–0–415–47373–6ISBN13: 978–0–203–86499–9 (ebk)This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009.To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’scollection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eB.ISBN 0-203-86499-9 Master e-book ISBNTo EdithThrough the long yearsI sought peace,I found ecstasy, I found anguish,I found madness,I found loneliness,I found the solitary painthat 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.CONTENTSacknowledgements ixintroduction x1872–1914 1Prologue: What I have Lived for 31 Childhood 52 Adolescence 273 Cambridge 464 Engagement 645 First Marriage 1156 ‘Principia Mathematica’ 1357 Cambridge Again 1951914–1944 2218 The First War 2259 Russia 30910 China 33911 Second Marriage 36612 Later Years of Telegraph House 40913 America. 1938–1944 4381944–1967 483Preface 48514 Return to England 48715 At Home and Abroad 53716 Trafalgar Square 57417 The Foundation 629postscript 699notes 703index 710the autobiography of bertrand russell viiiACKNOWLEDGEMENTSAcknowledgements are due to the following for permission to includecertain letters. In Part I: the letters from Joseph Conrad are included bypermission of J. M. Dent Ltd and the Trustees of the Joseph Conrad Estate. InPart II: Les Amis d’Henri Barbusse; Margaret Cole, for the letters of BeatriceWebb; 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; theExecutors of the H. G. Wells Estate (? 1968 George Philip Wells and FrankWells); Pearn, Pollinger & Higham, with the concurrence of William Heine-mann Ltd, for passages from the letters of D. H. Lawrence; the Public Trusteeand the Society of Authors, for the letters of Bernard Shaw; the Trustees of theWill of Mrs Bernard Shaw; and the Council of Trinity College, Cambridge.Facsimilies of Crown-copyright records in the Public Record O?ce appear bypermission of the Controller of H.M. Stationery O?ce. The above listincludes only those who requested formal acknowledgement; many othershave kindly granted permission to publish letters.Acknowledgements are also due to the following for permission to includecertain letters and articles in Part III: Baron Cecil Anrep, for the letters ofBernard Berenson; the Estate of Albert Einstein; Valerie Eliot, for the lettersof T. S. Eliot; Dorelia John, for the letter of Augustus John; The New York TimesCompany, for ‘The Best Answer to Fanaticism-Liberalism’ (? 1951); TheObserver, for ‘Pros and Cons of Reaching Ninety’. The above list includes onlythose who requested formal acknowledgement; many others have kindlygranted permission to publish letters.INTRODUCTIONA particular, persistent reason why Bertrand Russell had such appeal, through-out his ninety odd years, especially to the young, was the trouble he took towrite 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 themore 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 notrather 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 beused to tell lies. He would stake everything to tell the truth. The century heloved 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 theyseldom failed. Yet they continued to be read thanks to the enduring individualresonance in their writing which they also achieved.All through his life and increasingly in the later years, as many of usbelieved, Bertrand Russell was given credit for a comparable combinationof qualities. And yet the claim has been challenged, and the point should bedisposed of at once. Ray Monk, himself a philosopher, has written a newbiography of Russell in which he insists that he is dealing with the philo-sophical questions overlooked or bowdlerised by previous biographers or byRussell himself. His ?rst volume, subtitled The Spirit of Solitude, takes the recordfrom Russell’s birth in 1872 until 1921. In the light of his actual text, the titlemight be regarded as satisfactorily restrained. What he is examining morespeci?cally, as he indicates in an epigraph from Dostoevsky, is how nearlyand 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 himselfwho 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 inthe human race. Mr Monk is a skilful operator, and his assault on BertrandRussell’s reputation responds to all those wretched instincts in the humancondition which like to see great men reduced in their status. Devout Chris-tians especially seem to be happier when free-thinkers of one breed oranother are exposed as victims of the same fate as the rest of humanity. Suchwas 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 writerbut not enough to stem the ?ow of malevolence which poisons the wholebook. However, Russell did take the precaution of speaking for himself, andwe 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 notbeen deterred from the attempt. To tell the whole truth about oneself withoutin?icting gratuitous injury on the people we love or the causes we espouselooks an impossible task, and yet constantly these objections are set aside. Anunwillingness to let others tell the tale, a knowledge that they are certain toget some essential strands of the story wrong, and that these misconceptionswill remain inscribed in the public mind for ever, a driving, inner egotismwhich disperses all these other considerations takes command. All the great-est autobiographers have been egotists – Montaigne, Rousseau, BenvenutoCellini – but Russell, we may honestly remind ourselves, found good reasonsto quarrel with all of these, chie?y on account of their too intrusive egos. Forhis taste, Montaigne was too placid, Rousseau too hysterical, Cellini a hopelessegotistical case. His own model was Voltaire, and had he not denounced allthe Rousseauite outbursts, whether novelettish or autobiographical, as theravings of a larger lunacy quite foreign to the eighteenth-century enlighten-ment in which they were both born and bred? If Bertrand Russell had listenedonly to these ancestral voices, he would never have embarked on his ownbravest odyssey.Russell studied, with a special insight, one other ?gure sometimes damnedfor his incorrigible egotism, and he maybe o?ered the essential spur forRussell to proceed with his own work. In his History of Western Philosophy,published in 1945, Russell devoted a whole chapter to someone who wasnever considered to be a philosopher at all. His chapter on Byron explains thematter with admirable, indisputable assurance. In glaring contrast with thecool eighteenth-century temper which Russell had drunk in with his mother’smilk, Byron’s expression took the form, in Russell’s own words, ‘of Titaniccosmic self-assertion or, in those who retain some superstition, of Satanism’.Russell himself of course had taken special precautions to forswear all formsintroduction xiof superstition, Satanic or otherwise, but this made his understanding ofByron’s titanic qualities all the more remarkable. By the end of the chapter heis using Byron’s own language to describe the essence of Rousseau’s revo-lutionary message, and much else besides. Man may bleed to death throughthe truth that he recognises. Byron, says Russell, expressed this in ‘immortallines’:Sorrow is knowledge; they who know the mostMust 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 therevolutionary epic which the whole age cried out for. It had the same spaciousqualities 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 autobiographersmight be exposed and how little credence should be accorded to anythingthey said, except in the rare instances where they might be o?ering damningevidence against themselves. Orwell indeed embraced biographers of allbreeds along with autobiographers in his sweeping anathema. He was con-stantly on guard to subdue his own egotism and indeed to remove all tracesof it from his style of writing. No one who read what he wrote could doubtthat he was completely honest in these professions; to conclude otherwisewould be to convict him of an hypocrisy totally absent from his nature. Yetsome of his very best writings were autobiographical – Homage to Catalonia, forexample – and he wanted to make sure that no blundering biographical handwould be allowed to appear later to wreck his design.H. G. Wells once wrote a polemical essay attacking both biographers andautobiographers 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 therest of the argument rang with such power that it looked as if he would neverwish to escape from it. ‘All biography has something of that post-mortemcoldness and respect, and, as for autobiography, a man may show his soul in athousand, half-conscious ways, but to turn on oneself to explain oneself isgiven to no one. It is the natural resort of liars and braggarts. Your Cellinis andCasanovas, men with the habit of regarding themselves with a kind of objec-tive admiration do best in autobiography.’ Thus he argued in his 1911 essaythat the task was wellnigh impossible.Yet, twenty odd years later, he changed his mind or had it changed for himby publishers and friends. He did it only after much heart-searching or head-searching. The volume was called Experiment in Autobiography, since he knewthe 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 couldnot be published while he or his friends and lovers were still alive. He was noCasanova wishing to make a parade of his conquests. He had described allthose perils and temptations in his 1911 essay. His 1935 Experiment could notdo more than tell a part of the story. And yet, even more amazing, was thehigh proportion of the truth he did tell. André Manrois, no mean judge inthese matters who could transfer into his English essays the more liberaloutlook permitted in France, concluded that ‘Wells’s Experiment in Autobiographywas 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 forRussell’s even braver one; we would cite it if we could. Often their politicalpaths crossed or recrossed, but sympathy between them remained obstinatelyimperfect. They were regarded by their contemporaries as the foremostexponents of liberal doctrines in the best sense of the term, yet they oftenfound themselves engaged in furious quarrels. Looking back now, how-ever, we can see that there were three great matters on which they foughttogether 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 nucleardestruction.All these seemingly distinct issues were involved in their ?rst encounterin which, however, neither seemed to appreciate to the full the virtues ofthe other. Russell had just read Wells’s In the Days of the Comet (published in1906) and had been more impressed by the hostility which it aroused insome quarters than by its intrinsic virtues. It was the most radical work, usingthat word in its proper political sense, which Wells had written. He describedhow the socialist dawn could open a new world for men and women in theirsexual relations; how working people, men and women, could experiencea new democracy, which they had never even tasted before; how the newawakening in Britain could forbid the plunge into a continental war withGermany. Russell shared all these aspirations or expectations, especially thelast. He thought that all other kinds of social advance could be destroyed ifthe 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 viciouslydenounced for his alleged advocacy of free love. Russell invited Wells and hisyoung wife Jane to Oxford with the kindly intention of o?ering support in allhis campaigns. But each had a di?erent approach, even if they shared thesame destination. The upstart Wells informed the aristocratic Russell that hedid not as yet possess the independent income which would enable him toadvocate 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 theway 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 bestmasters and mistresses, with his own family in the lead and with John StuartMill’s Subjection of Women as his bible. He never ceased to be amazed how slowthe world at large had been in recognising women’s rights and never lost achance to help those who were best serving them. His ancestors showed himhow to ?ght this ?ght, as they did so many others. I pause here to note howabsurdly this respect for his ancestors seems to irritate his new biographer,Ray Monk; ‘One might have expected Russell, on occasions at least’, he writesin a footnote on page 48, ‘to have expressed some irritation at being regardedwherever he went as “Lord John’s grandson”, but, if he did, there is no signof it either in the surviving correspondence or in any of the vast number ofautobiographical writings he produced throughout his life.’ But surely it isMr Monk’s irritation which is more remarkable than Russell’s lack of it. Hewas proud of his family but most especially of his ancestor, William LordRussell executed by Charles II on 21 July 1683: ‘He was a warm friend not toliberty 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 mighthave done. Who is this fellow Monk descended from?, we may be provokedat last to ask. The only one who achieved real fame was the general whohelped to restore the Stuarts who in turn started the wretched practice ofpersecuting the Russells. But we must not get sidetracked. The new Mr Monkis a philosopher who too frequently parades himself as an expert on Russell’sancestry or his love life.However, the cause which bound Russell and Wells together most closelyin the end was the greatest which ever faced humankind: how to stop theatomic 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. Theyeach spoke the truth that was within them, on this subject more forcefullythan 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 herewhat he emphasised in his most important booklet on the subject, Com-monsense and Nuclear War, published in 1959. He tackles there, quite fairly, thecharge that he had once advocated the threat or the use of the atomic weaponagainst the Soviet Union, to stop them embarking on the race. However, thetest which he faced quite fairly and openly, in the 1960s, the last decade ofhis life, was the challenge where many more countries would soon possessthe capacity to destroy the world.the autobiography of bertrand russell xivH. G. Wells had been the ?rst to discern these perils in full imaginativedetail; he did so in his book The World Set Free, published in 1914. He had seizedupon some recent highly tentative revelations about the splitting of the atomand transformed them into a full-scale description of what an atom bomb warmight entail: ?rst and foremost, a shattering exposure of what would be thescale of the disaster with the addition of such niceties as the warning that,fearful as the explosions might be, the subsequent ineradicable e?ects ofradiation might be even more fearful; and some discussion about whether thedebate would become specially dangerous when terrorists could carry theirworld-destructive potions in suitcases. So remote were these possibilitiesfrom the actual terrors which crowded upon one another that few wouldtake him seriously. Moreover, he seemed to add to his own intellectualself-doubt by suggestions that, faced with these realities, these new formsof terror, the world would, at the relevant minute of the last minutes ofthe eleventh hour, come to its senses. He prophesied a war starting with aGerman invasion of France by way of Belgium, but then he prophesied alsothat ‘a wave of sanity’ might take command – ‘the disposition to believe inthese spontaneous waves of sanity may be one of my besetting weaknesses’.At which, casual readers may pause to wonder whether the quotations comefrom Wells or Russell. Each as they tried to grasp the reality of atomic horrormight ?nd himself plunged into hope or despair. Without the despair, Homosapiens would not be facing the reality. Without the hope, he would forfeitthe ?ghting spirit and the comradeship of men and women needed fortheir salvation.Throughout the century, the paths of political action each man chose withsuch care crossed and re-crossed. Each might enrage the other when heseemed to be adopting extreme political positions at the very moment whenbalancing restraints were necessary to preserve humankind’s sanity. The ?er-cest of all these clashes, one which threatened to forbid any future civilisedexchange between them, was the argument about the outbreak of the1914–1916 war. Russell accused Wells of having deserted their previouscommon stand about an anti-German war to become the most raucous of thewarmongers; Wells insisted that Russell’s brand of paci?sm, however justi?edin some circumstances, would not face the question of the German conquestof Europe. For years thereafter, each furiously rejected the arguments of theother and yet could not fail to be impressed by the persistent passion withwhich the case was presented. Each knew well enough how such passionscould be mobilised for the worst causes; the new curse was threateninghumankind. And yet if the good causes were to triumph, they must be no lesspassionately 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 uponall of us who are in any measure in?uential in left thought to dispel thetendency to waste energy in minor dissentions. . . . I get more & moreanarchistic & ultra left as I grow older. . . . We must certainly get together totalk (& perhaps conspire) & that soon.(see pp. 515–16 below)The date was 20 May 1945, a few months before the atomic explosions atHiroshima and Nagasaki. A few months later, Wells was dead and had to leavehis fresh essays in conspiracy to Russell alone. How much he would haveapproved the whole autobiographical exertion.The ?rst volume of Russell’s autobiography was published in 1967 andthe third in 1970, just before he died at the age of 98 in 1970. It might bethought that such an old man’s judgements lose their potency or their rele-vance. No honest reader of these pages can reach that conclusion. Whateverelse it is, it is one of the truly great autobiographies in our language. Thepoets 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 – ‘WhatI have Lived for’ – at the start of the ?rst volume or the Postscript whichconcludes the ?nal one. Along with his simplicity he had an eloquence allhis own. Both the warnings of calamity and the recoveries of hope may ringacross the intervening years. Thanks to his whole life, he had a special right tobe heard.I may be permitted to add a personal postscript, nothing like so eloquent asany of Russell’s own, but one which may help to clinch the case for hisveracity. My ?rst introduction to him occurred when someone at Oxfordgave me a copy of his book The Conquest of Happiness. Then, two years later, heturned up in person for a university meeting of some sort, spreading his ownspecial brand of wit and wisdom and beaming with happiness. Who couldresist 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 Russellappeared and carried her o? with such grace and ease, it was truly a conquestto write home about.Michael FootHampstead, July 1998the autobiography of bertrand russell xvi1872–1914PrologueWHAT I HAVE LIVED FORThree passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life:the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for thesu?ering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hitherand thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching tothe very verge of despair.I have sought love, ?rst, because it brings ecstasy – ecstasy so great thatI 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 inwhich one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into thecold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, ?nally, because in the unionof love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the pre?guring vision of the heaventhat saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though itmight 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 understandthe hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have triedto 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 theheavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of painreverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors,helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world ofloneliness, 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 itagain if the chance were o?ered me.1CHILDHOODMy ?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