Brixton Letter 83
BR to Ottoline Morrell
August 26, 1918
- ALS
- Texas
- Edited by
Kenneth Blackwell
Andrew G. Bone
Nicholas Griffin
Sheila Turcon
Cite The Collected Letters of Bertrand Russell, https://russell-letters.mcmaster.ca/brixton-letter-83
BRACERS 18688
<Brixton Prison>1
Aug. 26. ’18.
My dearest O.
You mustn’t think of me as being “tortured” here2 — I really am not. My months here belong with the happier half of my life. At moments I feel, superstitiously, that there must be disasters ahead; but I have no reason to think so. And when I can avoid irrational worries, it is really not so bad. Having found this way to write and get letters3 has made a great difference. Your letters have been an immense joy.
One has creative moods and receptive moods. This week I have a receptive mood: I can pay attention to what I am reading. My great trouble is that most days, if I read anything at all serious, I can not keep my mind from wandering. So I am glad of receptive moods, tho’ they make me dull for other people. — The last batch of flowers you sent were quite lovely. I don’t know the names of the tall spiky orange-coloured ones, but I love them. I don’t think it would be any use your telling me as I shouldn’t be able to read it! I enjoy the snuff very much. Thank you so much for it.
Katherine and Murry “make me tired”.4 It is all her doing, really, from jealousy: she wants to isolate him. She is black and wicked, a source of hatred of all against all. When I was in that mood myself, she suited me; but really she is to be avoided.
It will be lovely seeing you the day after tomorrow — but those moments are so short, and the other people make them so difficult. Oh what a joy it will be to have real human contact again.
Your letters do encourage me so much. And I need it. The weight of the hostile world so weighs on one’s instinct of expression. The war has taught one a great deal — the problem was to learn the lesson without being crushed by it. I have been on the whole happy here because I have been happy in the two big things: affection and purpose. There have been long times when I felt puzzled and baffled as to what I wanted to do and what I really believed; now I feel clear: I know what I believe and what I want to do. I have an inner harmony beyond what I have ever had, so that all my energy can go outward, as it should. Logic and imagination have fought a long fight in me,5 but I think they are reconciled at last. — I will do one more big piece of technical work,6 but in the main I will teach, and write on social questions, and generally put before people a way of feeling about the world. I have still a work to do which is bigger than anything technical;7 and now at last I believe I can do it. Don’t you think I am right? My work must be technical while the war lasts; I am talking of later. My ambition is revived: it had quite died. I am so glad.
You tell little about yourself in your last letter.8 I always like to have your news. Goodbye dearest O. Much much love.
your
B.
P.S. Don’t bother about novels. I don’t care for French ones, because they are some effort, and I want novels as complete rest. One more sheet,a and letter from Miss Wrinch9 which please destroy.
- 1
[document] The letter was edited from digital scans of the two half-sheet originals in BR’s handwriting and initialled by him in the Morrell papers at the University of Texas at Austin.
- 2
“tortured” here BR may have expected rough treatment in prison. He was appealing his conviction and sentence of imprisonment in the second division when he wrote this passage in Roads to Freedom:
“At present, when a man suffers from insufficient love for his fellow-creatures, the method of curing him which is commonly adopted seems scarcely designed to succeed, being, indeed, in essentials, the same as his attitude toward them. The object of the prison administration is to save trouble, not to study the individual case. He is kept in captivity in a cell from which all sight of the earth is shut out: he is subjected to harshness by warders, who have too often become brutalized by their occupation. He is solemnly denounced as an enemy to society. He is compelled to perform mechanical tasks, chosen for their wearisomeness. He is given no education and no incentive to self-improvement. Is it to be wondered at if, at the end of such a course of treatment, his feelings toward the community are no more friendly than they were at the beginning?” (London: Allen & Unwin, 1918, p. 135).
In the book’s second printing (in July 1919), BR added this note to the passage: “This was written before the author had any personal experience of the prison system. He personally met with nothing but kindness at the hands of the prison officials.” - 3
this way to write and get letters I.e., by concealing them in the uncut pages of books and journals.
- 4
Katherine and Murry “make me tired” Ottoline (letter of 17 Aug. 1918, BRACERS 114755) had complained that Katherine Mansfield and J. Middleton Murry had set themselves apart as the only true members of an artistic elect, but now “Poor Katherine ... hungers and thirsts after other people and longs for affection and friendship.” Ottoline blamed Murry for the original aloofness and was still sympathetic to Mansfield, pointing out that her mother had just died. She did not mention that Mansfield was seriously ill with tuberculosis, having been diagnosed in April, suggesting that Ottoline may not have been aware of this (though she and BR had previously discussed the possibility: see Letter 15). BR, however, continued to blame Mansfield (see Letter 48). It is not clear why BR put “make me tired” in quotation marks.
- 5
Logic and imagination have fought a long fight in me It is far from clear what BR had in mind here, but it seems to have been psychological. It does not concern the issues raised in his 1914 paper “Mysticism and Logic”, in which mysticism was by no means reconciled to logic, though both were commended. BR had the strongest possible impulse to logical thinking, while at the same time was deeply sensitive to poetry and other forms of beauty.
- 6
I will do one more big piece of technical work This plan did not come to fruition because (if he meant a single book to write) BR reduced the scope of The Analysis of Mind (1921) after his release, became involved in other projects and travelled to Russia and China. However, his philosophy of neutral monism, which he was developing at this time, did appear in that book.
- 7
a work to do which is bigger than anything technical BR never did write a very large book that was not technical philosophy or logic, although before he decided on Human Society in Ethics and Politics (1954) he outlined a compendium of his more systematic writings on political theory (BRACERS 48277). Perhaps BR meant by “a work” a task rather than a book to write.
- 8
your last letter Dated 25–27 August 1918 (BRACERS 114756).
- 9
Miss Wrinch It is not clear why BR wanted the letter destroyed — he did not give similar instructions for other letters from Wrinch.
- a
One more sheet The sentence was added in pencil.
Brixton Prison
Located in southwest London Brixton is the capital’s oldest prison. It opened in 1820 as the Surrey House of Correction for minor offenders of both sexes, but became a women-only convict prison in the 1850s. Brixton was a military prison from 1882 until 1898, after which it served as a “local” prison for male offenders sentenced to two years or less, and as London’s main remand centre for those in custody awaiting trial. The prison could hold up to 800 inmates. Originally under local authority jurisdiction, local prisons were transferred to Home Office control in 1878 in an attempt to establish uniform conditions of confinement. These facilities were distinct from “convict” prisons reserved for more serious or repeat offenders sentenced to longer terms of penal servitude.
Dorothy Wrinch
Dorothy Maud Wrinch (1894–1976), mathematician, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. She studied mathematics and philosophy at Girton College, Cambridge, and came under BR’s influence in her second year when she took his course on mathematical logic. She taught mathematics at University College, London, 1918–21, and then at Oxford, 1922–30. Her first publications were in mathematical logic and philosophy, and during the 1920s she wrote on the philosophy of science. But in the 1930s her interests turned to mathematical biology and crystallography, and in 1935 she moved to the United States on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship and remained there for the rest of her life. Unfortunately, as a biologist she is best known for a long and stubborn controversy with Linus Pauling about the structure of proteins in which he was right and she was wrong. See Marjorie Senechal, I Died for Beauty: Dorothy Wrinch and the Cultures of Science (New York: Oxford U. P., 2013). Chapter 7 is devoted to Wrinch’s interactions with BR in Brixton.
J. Middleton Murry
J. Middleton Murry (1889–1957), critic and editor, was educated in classics at Brasenose College, Oxford, before establishing in 1911 the short-lived avant-garde journal, Rhythm. In May 1918 he married the author Katherine Mansfield, to whose literary legacy he became devoted after her death from tuberculosis only five years later. The couple were frequent visitors to Garsington Manor, and Murry appears at one time to have had a romantic yearning for Ottoline (see note to Letter 48). Although Murry’s scornful treatment of Sassoon’s poetry annoyed BR (see Letter 39), he became, nevertheless, a frequent contributor to The Athenaeum during Murry’s two-year stint as its editor (1919–21). After the ailing literary weekly merged with The Nation in 1921, Murry continued his vigorous promotion of modernism in the arts from the helm of his own monthly journal, The Adelphi, which he edited for 25 years. During the First World War he worked as a translator for the War Office but became an uncompromising pacifist in the 1930s. One of the last assignments of his journalistic career was as editor of the pacifist weekly, Peace News (1940–46). Source: Oxford DNB.
Katherine Mansfield
Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923), pseudonym of Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp, New Zealand-born short-story writer. After studying music in her native country, Mansfield moved to London in 1908, married George Bowden, a music teacher, whom she left after a few days, the marriage unconsummated. She was at the time pregnant from a previous affair. Her experiences in Bavaria, where the child was stillborn, became the background for her first collection of stories, In a German Pension (1911), most of which had been previously published in A.R. Orage’s journal, The New Age. In 1911 she met J. Middleton Murry, who fell quickly under her spell and with whom she was to be associated until the end of her life, though they frequently lived independently and married only in 1918. Her health had long been fragile, and in 1918 she was diagnosed with the tuberculosis which eventually killed her. BR met her in 1916 when she was living in Gower Street, near BR’s brother’s house in Gordon Square. For a short time they had an intimate friendship, but not an affair. BR found her talk, especially about what she planned to write, “marvellous, much better than her writing”. But “when she spoke about people she was envious, dark and full of alarming penetration in discovering what they least wished known.” She spoke in this vein of Ottoline Morrell. BR listened but in the end “believed very little of it” and, after that, saw Mansfield no more (Auto. 2: 27). Main biography: Antony Alpers, The Life of Katherine Mansfield (New York: Viking, 1980).
Ottoline Morrell
Lady Ottoline Morrell, née Cavendish-Bentinck (1873–1938). Ottoline, who was the half-sister of the 6th Duke of Portland and grew up in the politically involved aristocracy, studied at St. Andrews and Oxford. She married, in 1902, Philip Morrell (1870–1943), who became a Liberal M.P. in 1910. She is best known as a Bloomsbury literary and artistic hostess. BR and she had a passionate but non-exclusive love affair from 1911 to 1916. They remained friends for life. She published no books of her own but kept voluminous diaries (now in the British Library) and was an avid photographer of her guests at Garsington Manor, near Oxford. (The photos are published in Lady Ottoline’s Album [1976] and mounted at the website of the National Portrait Gallery.) In the 1930s she had a large selection of BR’s letters to her typed, omitting sensitive passages. BR’s letters to her are with the bulk of her papers at the University of Texas, Austin.