BERTRAND RUSSELL: THE GHOST OF MADNESS, 1921-1970
by Ray Monk
Available from News Weekly Books for $79.95 plus p & hIn 1961, the 89-year-old Bertrand Russell assured humanity that JFK, Khrushchev and Harold Macmillan had become, through their respective nations' nuclear arsenals, "the wickedest people in the history of man".
Readers of Ray Monk's new volume, the second panel in his biographical diptych (1996's The Spirit of Solitude is the first), might well find themselves allotting a similarly depraved status to Russell himself. They will also sympathise with Dr Monk, who spent no less than a decade on the scholarly labour needed for his task, and whose earlier publications (including the definitive biography of Russell's friend-turned-foe Wittgenstein) surely accustomed him to a scholastic rigour in his subjects that nothing in Russell's later career displayed.
Russell's sheer survival power - he attained the age of 98 - implies a sense of cerebral progression which he never actually experienced. His tragedy (if so humdrum an event can be dignified by so sonorous a word) lay in the fact that by 1921, the year The Ghost of Madness begins, Russell the philosopher was as dead as mutton. Everything he could achieve in the philosophical sphere, he had achieved long since.
Astonishingly uninformed outside his own discipline, Russell had about as many inner resources to fall back on as does the average retired footballer. He knew this, and his last half-century is the chronicle of a profoundly bored man who, unlike his fellow tedium-connoisseur George Sanders, retained just enough spurious vitality to avoid suicide.
With four wives, three major extramarital affairs, numerous one-night stands and still more numerous attempts at seduction (one female poetically described his geriatric gropings as resembling "dead leaves rustling up your thighs"), Russell's qualifications for peddling marital content were about on a par with Henry VIII's. Following the best traditions of the sex-criminal who assures police that "she was beggin' for it", Russell repeatedly blamed his priapism on its victims.
Along with most self-proclaimed 20th century iconoclasts (H. G. Wells is a spectacular example), Russell was surprisingly deficient in fundamental forensic skills. Seeking the true nature of what he loathed before loathing it would have been, for Russell, a waste of time. Thus he committed the most elementary errors in argument, where with a modicum of diligent research he might at least have given the impression of competence.
In 1924, Russell alleged that "when one views the 19th century in perspective it is clear that science is its only claim to distinction." Not, be it noted, "main", "greatest" or "most obvious" claim to distinction, but its "only" claim.
Having thereby dismissed such 19th century no-hopers as Goethe, Nietzsche, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Tennyson, Macaulay, Thackeray, Dickens, Goya, Corot, Manet, Turner, Beethoven, Schumann, Verdi, Wagner and Brahms, Russell incurred to his stupefaction a dignified rebuke from T. S. Eliot, whose flawless courtesy could not hope to conceal a thinker's freezing contempt for a rabble-rouser. "One is immediately struck", Eliot wrote,
"by the arrogance of the scientist. No literary man would pretend to sweep aside the whole of science in any century with the magnificence with which Mr Russell dismisses the 19th century literature and art ... One draws furthermore from Mr Russell's paragraph an edifying commentary on the ability of the scientist to think clearly outside of his own sphere".
Soon after World War II, Russell's shrill protestations of anti-Communism took the form of demanding a pre-emptive nuclear strike against Moscow. Subsequently, having concluded that the Soviet slave state had its pluses, he took to persistently denying that any such demand had ever passed his lips.
Should Hollywood crave a scenario for its eventual remake of Dumb and Dumber, it need look no further afield than Russell's dotage. Whenever he gave the impression of having plumbed the abyss of folly, he found another abyss, deeper yet.
The sole blot on his otherwise perfect record of unresisting 1960s imbecility was his puzzling, still inexplicable failure to grace the cover art of the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper album. He attributed the Cuban missile crisis' end to his own antic campaign of strafe-bombing world leaders with telegrams and pamphlets. (Good Soldier Schweik discerned a similar causal relationship between his own activities and the Habsburg empire's collapse; but then he, unlike Russell, was a deliberate joke.) Later he eulogised those great humanitarians Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba and Che Guevara, while invariably maintaining his genius for what Orwell called "always being somewhere else when the trigger is pulled".
At least Che, however asinine his dogma, showed enough courage to die for it. Che's comrade, Regis Debray, paid for his own Marxist doctrine with bestial captivity in a Bolivian cage. Russell, per contra, derived his own notions of bold military leadership from the Duke of Plaza-Toro's well-known approach to enemy action. In 1967 he set up a Stockholm "trial" of America's government for Vietnam war crimes: a move that, far from saving a single Vietnamese life, merely aroused Washington's amusement.
Death alone, surely, prevented still grander exercises by Russell in counter-cultural performance art.
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