Peer's Passions

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF BERTRAND RUSSELL. 356 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. $7.95.

As a young scholar just out of Cambridge at the turn of the century, Bertrand Russell confronted a baffling conundrum. On one side of a piece of paper was written: "The statement on the other side of this paper is false." On the other side it read: "The statement on the other side of this paper is false."

The 3rd Earl Russell, now 94, presents a psychological conundrum of a similar order. Renowned mathematician, logician, philosopher and Nobel prizewinner, he writes English with all the precision and lucidity of which the language is capable. Yet for all its clarity and wit, the first volume, instantly acclaimed in England as a classic, leaves unresolved problems of character. To some, he is a crypto-mystic, to others, a heartless brain. Most recently he has become an excessively emotional organizer of peace marches who mouths anti-American propaganda drivel.

Great Winds. Each page in Lord Russell's autobiography disputes what is on the other side. He combined a rigorous skeptical rationalism with a naturally religious temperament. He was a rich aristocrat in the days when a peer was a peer, but became an "international socialist" and pacifist--exhibiting the gift of naivete that he possesses in such abundance today. Earlier, having become a teetotaler to please his wife, he had taken up drinking again because "the King took the pledge during the First War. His motive was to facilitate the killing of Germans, and it therefore seemed as if there must be some connection between pacifism and alcohol."

Trying to resolve the contradiction of his heart and mind, Russell has found words of some nobility: "Three passions have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair."

Dotty Aunt. Bertie was born destined for great things, but what things? Grandfather Lord John Russell had been Prime Minister, and his mother was a Stanley--one of a rich and titled tribe that took a hand more than once in governing England. His father, Lord Amberley, was a freethinker; his mother an even freer one. They died in Bertie's infancy, leaving him to be brought up by two atheist tutors. Mother had been sleeping with one of them, but on the highest principles: poor fellow was a tubercular, and it was then thought that he should have no children; still, Lady Amberley felt that he should not have to do without sex merely because of this.

The Russells and Stanleys snatched

Bertie from the godless guardians and placed him in care of his grandmother, Lady Russell, who had been a lady in waiting to Queen Victoria and was a Scotch Presbyterian of dour principles. Bertie was judged too sickly for school (actually he was strong as a horse) and was sketchily educated at home by tutors or a slightly dotty aunt. He had no way of knowing until much later that he was one of the cleverest little boys who ever lived.

Puck & Pan. He arrived at Cambridge with a scholarship at Trinity. "A shy prig," is his own description; too shy to ask where the toilets were, he walked to the one at the railway station. At Trinity, dons were gargling grace in two alternate systems of Latin pronunciation; the junior dean had to be eased out because, though his sermons were eloquent, he had become crippled by syphilis and had raped his daughter. The master was another kind of monster--a snob. Yet this cloister now housed some of the brightest spirits of the age.

Russell had come to the university in the hope of meeting the most brilliant of his contemporaries. It was some time before he found out that he already had done so: they were his immediate circle of friends, including the three Trevel-yans, poet, historian and scholar; Lytton Strachey, J. M. Keynes, and the philosopher G. M. Moore.

Russell was not awed. At the age of two he had said of Robert Browning, a man who had stayed to dinner: "Why doesn't that man stop talking?" and later withstood the awful eye of Prime Minister Gladstone as the original Grand Old Man asked after dinner: "This is very good port they have given me, but why have they given it to me in a claret glass?" After unanswerable questions like that, Bertie developed the confidence he needed to decide that New ton's calculus was "a tissue of fallacies" and to begin his historic collaboration with Alfred North Whitehead, his senior in college. That resulted, after ten years' labor, in the publication of Principia Mathematica, named after Newton's great work, which in many respects it superseded. Almost as soon as the bulky manuscript had been trundled to the university printer in a handcart, young Bertie--Puck, Pan, Pythagoras and Peer --found himself famous, acclaimed as a philosophic genius throughout the civilized world and a master of clarity in the higher regions of human thought.

In Series. Such achievements did not daunt the contradictions in his personality. Against the theoretical wisdom of his 1929 paean, Marriage and Morals, must be set the preposterous practice of his own love life--a comedy more apparent to the reader than to the author. He was a puritan possessed of, or by, a powerful sexual nature. He tells about his industrious masturbation--at 94, he should surely allow himself to forget what he was doing at 15--and of the first time he fell in love, presumably with someone other than himself. His unhappy choice was Alys Pearsall Smith, who came from a family of rich emigre Philadelphia Quakers. She used the Friends' virtue of truth-telling as a cozy cover for natural malice. It was years before he found this out.

There followed a succession of passionate love affairs in which he was faithful--but only, as a mathematician might put it, in series. First there was Lady Ottoline Morrell; then an unnamed American, who later went mad. The recitation of these disasters seems can did enough, but it is the explications that Bertie strews like rosemary on their cold beds that do not seem right. One would like to have heard their side of the bed story.

Darkening Sky. What remains undimmed, despite his present sad decline, is Russell's glorious intellectual history and his talent for what a pre-Freudian age called passionate friendship with men, some of them as great as himself (he writes to Joseph Conrad as to "a star seen from the bottom of a well"). His book is the last witness to a great age.

In August 1914, where Russell's volume ends, he and his friends must have seemed the most graced and fortunate men alive; their talent, wit and intellectual energy sparkled in the darkening sky of history, and if they enjoyed privilege, their moral concern justified it. Faith, hope and charity ruled the minds of these splendid skeptics, but in a moment all would be gone. Philosophers and poets would die in Flanders, and Russell himself would sit in jail as a conscientious objector, laughing his head off over Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians until a warder came along to remind him of his responsibilities: prison was not supposed to be a joke. If only Bertie could have foreseen that he would live on to become the last and most eminent Victorian of them all.

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