Bertrand Russell achieved fame in three very different worlds. His reputation rests, pre- eminently, on his achievement as a philosopher. Although he never attained his goal of placing mathematics on a logical foundation, the attempt itself was enormously influential. Russell's work helped shape the tradition of analytic philosophy, as well as spawning the new discipline of mathematical logic. But his interests extended far beyond the narrow circle of English academia. His affair with the society hostess Ottoline Morrell gave him an entree into the literary world, and he became close friends with D H Lawrence and T S Eliot. After the First World War, Russell began a third career as a freelance journalist and pamphleteer, writing accessibly on politics and ethics. Success in this world entailed the abandonment of the other two. Russell's attempts to re-enter academia met with a cold reception, and his literary friends avoided him. The long twilight of his declining years had begun.
The Ghost of Madness, the second part of Ray Monk's two- volume biography of Russell, begins in 1921, a year that falls exactly halfway through Russell's 98-year life and marks the point at which he gave up serious work in mathematical logic. It is fascinating to observe how Monk has evolved a method appropriate to his subject. In his earlier (and magnificent) Ludwig Wittgenstein: the duty of genius, he followed Wittgenstein's own practice of "perspicuous presentation", arranging the facts of the life in such a way that connections become clear without ever being explicitly stated. They are - as Wittgenstein himself might have put it - not said but shown. Wittgenstein had no guile, no trickery; there is nothing there to "unmask". All the biographer has to do is stand back and let him speak.
Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein's friend and fellow philosopher, demands a very different kind of treatment. Russell's life is far from "perspicuous". Lucid prose and gallant attitudes conceal a dark mass of fear, aggression, snobbery and vanity. Russell was seldom honest, either with himself or others. To deal with him, Monk adopts the style of a judicial prosecutor. He sifts evidence, investigates motives and apportions guilt. Russell is hard to pin down; like any good trickster, he always has an alibi to hand. But Monk is tenacious, and secures a damning verdict.
Russell's reasons for abandoning serious intellectual work were complex. When asked by the head of a respectable American girls' college why he had given up philosophy, he replied: "Because I discovered I preferred fucking." That was only half-true; more important was the devastating impact of Wittgenstein's criticisms on his intellectual self-confidence. But he would probably have given up philosophy even without Wittgenstein or sex. "The brain becomes rigid at 50," he told Virginia Woolf.
The aristocratic Russell's vanity demanded a wider audience, and his recently acquired fame as a conscientious objector provided him with one. Above all, there was the need to earn a living. Having spent his inheritance on various good causes, Russell found himself, at 49, with a wife and child to support. There was little to which he would not stoop. Asked why he had written an article for the magazine Glamour advising women on what to do if they fell in love with a married man, he replied, "I did it for $50."
Ray Monk - himself an academic philosopher - has little sympathy for the populist Russell. The distinguishing mark of Russell's popular writing is a kind of hyperbolic simplicity. Complex problems are condensed into neat antitheses; solutions are presented in the manner of a maths primer. Failure to agree is invariably attributed either to stupidity or to wickedness, the implication being that no person who was both honest and intelligent could possibly dissent from something so obvious. These traits have been interpreted as the deformation professionnelle of a logician. This is no doubt true, but there is something else. What is one to make of the following sentence: "It seems on the whole fair to regard negroes as on the average inferior to white men, although for work in the tropics they are indispensable, so that their extermination (apart from questions of humanity) would be highly undesirable."
Even allowing for the conventions of the Twenties, there is a nastiness here that sits strangely with Russell's popular image as a prophet of enlightenment. The most charitable interpretation is that he was being flippant; even so, it is a brutal flippancy. Similar remarks are dotted throughout Russell's later writing. He may have championed humanity, but it was an attribute in which he was severely deficient.
Russell changed his mind frequently on political questions, without ever acknowledging that he had done so. Still, a consistent theme emerges. Although he was famous as an advocate of pacifism - during the First World War, during the Thirties, and as a founder of CND in the Sixties - he was not, in truth, a pacifist. His pacifism was simply the local application of a more fundamental belief in world government. This is confirmed by a curious episode in 1945-48. In order to prevent the Soviet Union from developing the bomb, Russell advocated a policy of threatening - or actually waging - atomic war, writing: "Communism must be wiped out and world government must be established." Later on, after the Cuban missile crisis had convinced him that America, not Russia, was the greatest danger to world peace, he switched to the "better red than dead" line of argument. He seems not to have cared much about the particular identity of the global hegemon, so long as one existed.
A profound misanthropy underlay Russell's support for world government. He had a fixed belief that human beings were incapable of managing conflict in a civilised way, and that therefore peace could be established only through force. And while he often accused Kennedy, Khrushchev and Macmillan of desiring "the massacre of the whole of mankind", his writings occasionally reveal a similar desire. "Sometimes, in moments of horror, I have been tempted to doubt whether there is any reason to wish that such a creature as man should continue to exist." The cataclysmic urges that Russell attributed to politicians and generals were his own.
If cruelty lurked behind many of Russell's public attitudes, it is all the more palpable in his private life. The same cast of mind is evident in both spheres. Russell's temperament was governed by the law of the excluded middle; compromise was alien to him. Just as he was incapable of conceiving any third alternative to world government or nuclear annihilation, so, in his personal relations, he was unable to negotiate any third course between devotion and indifference. Once Russell had decided to exclude a person from the circle of his affection, he could be monstrously icy.
Two relationships dominate the second volume of Monk's biography, and both end with Russell shutting the other person out of his life. Russell's second wife, Dora, was a well-known advocate of free love. She and Russell were open about their infidelities. But as so often in such cases, the openness was a pretence. Dora seems to have been genuinely happy with the arrangement, but Russell - while maintaining a facade of courtly dignity - seethed inwardly. As the miserable story unfolds, it is hard to know whether to be more dismayed by Dora's naivety or Russell's hypocrisy. The end came when Dora announced that she was pregnant by her lover Griffin Barry. "You won't find me tiresome about it," Russell replied, but he never forgave her. After their divorce, he communicated with his former wife only through lawyers, addressing her by her new title of Mrs Grace.
Even more melancholy was Russell's relationship with John, his first and favourite son. Russell's delight in fatherhood was scientific as much as personal. From the moment of his birth, John was nurtured in accordance with the grim precepts of behavioural psychology. The experiment continued at Beacon Hill, the progressive school that Russell and Dora set up largely in order to educate their own children. The influence of this bizarre upbringing on John's latter life is hard to quantify, but it appears, combined with a hereditary strain of madness, to have unhinged his mind. After his son's final collapse into schizophrenia, Russell withdrew all affection from him. John had become no more than a "legal and medical problem". Monk speculates that behind Russell's repeated efforts to have John certified, was a fear that he might one day inherit the title of Earl Russell. The effort was unsuccessful; John inherited his father's title and - although he never fully recovered his sanity - became a regular attender of debates in the House of Lords.
There is an emblematic contrast between the tragedy of Russell's private life and the buoyant optimism of his public pronouncements. The greater his domestic misery, the more heartily he ground away at his old enlightenment barrel organ. The Conquest of Happiness - "arguably the most superficial and dishonest book he ever wrote" - was brought out as his marriage to Dora disintegrated. One person to be frustrated by the shallowness of Russell's ethical writings was his daughter Kate: "They all offered the same solutions: reason, progress, unselfishness, a wide historical perspective, expansiveness, generosity, enlightened self-interest. I had heard it all my life, and it filled me with despair."
Kate eventually found an answer in Christianity: "The doctrine of original sin gave to me, when I finally understood it, the same sense of intoxicating liberation my father had received from sexual emancipation. It was normal for me to be bad, and I need not feel ashamed." She came to understand what Russell never could: it is only by acknowledging our sins that we can hope to gain freedom from them.
Edward Skidelsky's reviews appear monthly in the NS
