Brixton Letter 91
BR to Constance Malleson
September 1, 1918
- ALS
- McMaster
- 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-91
BRACERS 19355
<Brixton Prison>1
1 Sep. ’18.
O my Dearest I am wanting you so much. It is so difficult to forget the horror of the world. There is knowledge that has come to one, during the war, that one can never forget. Old gentlemen at tribunals,2 every bit as cruel as a cat with a mouse. Envy and fear, the two great motive forces. I find it so difficult not to hate; and when I do not hate, I feel we few are so lonely in the world. Hate is still a human relation; but the only other attitude that I find possible towardsa the bulk of men and women is one of pitying comprehension, which removes me to such a terrible distance that I shiver from the cold of isolation. It is very difficult: I know that one ought to keep a vital relation with the community, and not only with one’s friends, but something seems destroyed, some connection severed. I feel the mass of the community to be cruel, rapacious, cowardly and hypocritical; I feel as if I could never again have a friendly relation with them. I can’t make myself believe in the Labour Party; it gets such strength as it has out of envy of the rich, and would gladly harm them even if no good were to come to the rest through their suffering. So, although politics may be better or worse, I can never again make them a vehicle for ideals.3 But I dread the attitude of the sect, retiring from the battle into mutual admiration and a set of soft lies in which virility is smothered. One must find activities that are rooted in the hope of ultimate power for the things one believes in. It is difficult to see the evil in the world quite truly but without exaggeration or melodrama or emphasis on tragedy, without anger or the wish to hurt, and yet not coldly.
You know that you help me in this. You know that when I can hold your hand, when I am warmed by your companionship, I can look steadily at things that hurt, see them as they are, and learn how to live with them, resisting but not mad. My part, I know, is to make as many people as possible see truly how they live and what the world is. And for this, as for everything, I need your love.
2 Sp.b One month from today! All things end, even the unpleasant ones. — I have now read “Madge”,4 , c being in a more controlled mood. It moved me, like everything Miles does. But it is not really good. It is dated, it depends wholly on its moral; as soon as people take that for granted, it has no point. And Madge’s sufferings are conventional. Miles has a great deal of poetry in him; that is his best item, I think, but it doesn’t get much chance here. Oh dear, I wish he could be shaken into being really good. One feels it such a very near thing. — The tip-top of his type is Shelley,5 who has the same softness. — You never gave me Young Heaven,6 which I want.
My lovely one I thirst for you. Goodnight Beloved.
B.
- 1
[document] The letter was edited from the initialled, twice-folded sheet in BR’s hand in the Malleson papers in the Russell Archives. The 2 September portion is all that was written on the verso of the sheet, and in fact entirely within a single quarter when folded.
- 2
tribunals Young C.O.s had to plead their cases before people who were too old to be conscripted.
- 3
I can’t … believe in the Labour Party … vehicle for ideals In “The German Peace Offer”, the article for which BR was imprisoned, he still felt able to proclaim that “Labour holds the key. It can if it chooses secure a just and lasting peace within a month, but if this opportunity is allowed to pass by, all that we hold dear will be swallowed up in universal ruin” (The Tribunal, no. 90 [3 Jan. 1918]: 1; Auto. 2: 79–81; 92 in Papers 14). Although welcoming Labour’s (belated) embrace of a foreign policy in close alignment with his own desire for a negotiated peace, he remained suspicious of a political organization dominated by a trade-union leadership committed first and foremost to furthering the sectional interests of its working-class members. “Something broader and more constructive is needed”, he wrote in Political Ideals (New York: Century, 1917; Papers 14: 231), than the narrow pursuit of material gain out of what he saw as class hatred and envy. But the guild socialist programme that was BR’s preferred solution (with its projected democratization of industry, for example) held little appeal for trade-union bosses. When BR joined the Independent Labour Party in July 1917, he did so advisedly because this affiliated organization was strongly anti-war and far more committed than the parent body to transforming capitalist society along socialist lines. For all his dissatisfaction with the Labour Party, however, BR twice stood as a parliamentary candidate for it and remained a loyal, if hardly uncritical, member until resigning in 1965 over the Wilson Government’s support of the US in the Vietnam War.
- 4
read “Madge” The play by Miles Malleson that Colette had sent BR in which she was to play the title role for the Experimental Theatre. “Madge” was never published, at any rate under that title. Earlier (in Letter 72) BR had been too upset by it to continue reading the play.
- 5
The tip-top of his type is Shelley Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) was a favourite poet of Colette and BR; he had read Epipsychidion (1821) to Colette at Ashford (S. Turcon, “Then and Now: Bertie and Colette’s Escapes to the Peak District and Welsh Borderlands”, Russell 34 [2014]: 117–30), and also to his first fiancée, Alys Pearsall Smith (Auto. 1: 83). The anonymous Times obituary of Miles Malleson remarked that “as a writer his power was inadequate to express his vision of things, which was that of a Shelleyan idealist” (17 March 1969, p. 10).
- 6
Young Heaven A play by Miles Malleson, published by Allen & Unwin in 1918; Colette played Daphne in it when it was staged in September 1919.
- 7
More later in the book. “The book” refers to one of the camouflage books with uncut pages used to smuggle letters into and out of the prison. None of the letters (or possibly other documents) referred to here could be identified.
Textual Notes
Boismaison
Colette and BR vacationed at a house, The Avenue, owned by Mrs. Agnes Woodhouse and her husband, in the countryside near Ashford Carbonel, Shropshire, in August 1917. They nicknamed the house “Boismaison”. Agnes Woodhouse took in paying guests. Their first visit was idyllic. They returned for other vacations — in 1918 before he entered prison and in April 1919. Their plan to go soon after he got out of prison failed because their relationship faltered for a time. They discussed returning in the summer of 1919 — a booking was even made for 12–19 July — but in the end they didn’t go. See S. Turcon, “Then and Now: Bertie and Colette’s Escapes to the Peak District and Welsh Borderlands”, Russell 34 (2014): 117–30.
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.
Experimental Theatre
Colette first mentioned that she and Miles were trying to start an Experimental Theatre in a letter of 24 June 1918 (BRACERS 113135), indicating that Miles would earn a tiny income from it. About a month later, she wrote that Elizabeth Russell had subscribed generously to the Theatre and that £700 had been raised, but hundreds still had to be found (BRACERS 113146). A few days later she wrote that Captain Stephen Gordon, a north-country lawyer working for the government, was to be the honorary treasurer, noting that he had “put most of the drive into the whole thing” (BRACERS 113147). During August Colette was happy with her involvement with the Theatre (Letter 68). John Galsworthy came to tea to discuss the project (c.14 Aug., BRACERS 113149). On 2 September she listed the members of the Theatre committee as “Desmond <MacCarthy>, Massingham, Galsworthy, and Dennis (Bradley)” (BRACERS 113155). The following day she wrote that she was learning three parts (BRACERS 113156). In her memoirs, Colette wrote about the “Experimental Little Theatre” but dated it 1919 (After Ten Years [London: Cape, 1931], pp. 129–30). An “artistic” theatre did get founded in 1920 in Hampstead, and John Galsworthy was connected to that venture, The Everyman Theatre — he was part of a reading committee which chose the works to be performed (The Times, 9 Sept. 1919, p. 8). The Everyman Theatre was under the direction of Norman MacDermott. In his book Everymania (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1975), he noted that he met Miles in the summer of 1918: they rented a store in Bloomsbury, had a cabinetmaker build sets, and put on plays with actors “bored with West-End theatres” (p. 10). It is likely that the Everyman Theatre was an out-growth of the Experimental Theatre.
George Allen & Unwin Ltd.
George Allen & Unwin Ltd., founded by Stanley Unwin in 1914, was BR’s chief British publisher, had published Principles of Social Reconstruction in 1916, and was in the process of publishing Roads to Freedom (1918) while BR was in Brixton.
Miles Malleson
Miles Malleson (1888–1969), actor and playwright, was born in Croydon, Surrey, the son of Edmund and Myrrha Malleson. He married his first wife, a fellow actor, Lady Constance Annesley (stage name, Colette O’Niel), in 1915. They had met at Tree’s (later the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts). Their marriage was an “open” one. In 1914 Miles enlisted in the City of London Fusiliers and was sent to Malta. He became ill and was discharged, unfit for further service. He became active in the No-Conscription Fellowship and wrote anti-war stage plays as well as a pamphlet, Cranks and Commonsense (1916). In the 1930s he began to write for the screen and act in films, in which he became a very well-known character actor, as well as continuing his stage career at the Old Vic in London. He married three times: his second marriage was to Joan Billson, a physician (married 1923, divorced 1940), with whom he had two children; his third wife was Tatiana Lieven, an actress (married 1946). He died in London in March 1969.
Constance Malleson
Lady Constance Malleson (1895–1975), actress and author, was the daughter of Hugh Annesley, 5th Earl Annesley, and his second wife, Priscilla. “Colette” (as she was known to BR) was raised at the family home, Castlewellan Castle, County Down, Northern Ireland. Becoming an actress was an unusual path for a woman of her class. She studied at Tree’s (later the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art), debuting in 1914 with the stage name of Colette O’Niel at the Duke of York’s Theatre, London, in a student production. She married fellow actor Miles Malleson (1888–1969) in 1915 because her family would not allow them to live together. In 1916 Colette met BR through the No-Conscription Fellowship and began a love affair with him that lasted until 1920. The affair was rekindled twice, in 1929 and 1948; they remained friends for the rest of his life. She had a great talent for making and keeping friends. Colette acted in London and the provinces. She toured South Africa in 1928–29 and the Middle East, Greece and Italy in 1932 in Lewis Casson and Sybil Thorndike’s company. She acted in two films, both in 1918, Hindle Wakes and The Admirable Crichton, each now lost. With BR’s encouragement she began a writing career, publishing a short story in The English Review in 1919. She published other short stories as well as hundreds of articles and book reviews. Colette wrote two novels — The Coming Back (1933) and Fear in the Heart (1936) — as well as two autobiographies — After Ten Years (1931) and In the North (1946). She was a fierce defender of Finland, where she had lived before the outbreak of World War II. Letters from her appeared in The Times and The Manchester Guardian. Another of her causes was mental health. She died five years after BR in Lavenham, Suffolk, where she spent her final years. See S. Turcon, “A Bibliography of Constance Malleson”, Russell 32 (2012): 175–90.