Brixton Letter 39
BR to The Nation
July 14, 1918
- ALS
- Texas
- Edited by
Kenneth Blackwell
Andrew G. Bone
Nicholas Griffin
Sheila TurconCite The Collected Letters of Bertrand Russell, russell-letters.mcmaster.ca
/brixton-letter-39The Nation; 99 in Papers 14
BRACERS 131571
To the Editor of the Nation.
Sir,
Your review2 of Mr. Sassoon’s poems,3 in your issue of July 13, lays down certain dogmas which, ancient and respectable as they are, should not be regarded as unquestionable. In criticism of Mr Sassoon’s attemptsa to portray the war, your reviewer says: “We feel not as we do with true poetry or true art that something is, after all, right, but that something is intolerably and irremediably wrong.” And again: “There is a value in the plain, unvarnished truth; but there is another truth more valuable still.” Why are we to be asked to accept such statements? Being toldb that “God’s in His Heaven”4 may in the end grow more wearisome to those who certainly are not there, and they may refuse to be put down byc being reminded of the serenity of Sophocles,5 and havingd it pointed out that Shakspeare,6 , e after making a fortune and retiring to Stratford on Avon, took a more cheerful view of life than he did when he was writing King Lear. For my part,f I believe that art is important and that truth is important, and that the union of the two is very important, butg that it is untrue that “something is, after all, right.” It is just as easy to turn the “after all” the other way round, to point out how all happiness, even when it seems most innocent, is obtained at the expense of intolerable misery to others, and how even the emotions that seem noblest to those who feel them are often mere disguises for vanity, despotism, or greed. I do not say that such a view of life would be wholly true; I say only that it is as true as the optimistic view. If art is to remain living,h it must be combined with truthfulness; those who cannot believe that “something is, after all, right” must make and seek an art which is free from this dogma. And among the young they are the vast majority, for iti is not only their lives that they are losing in the war.
Yours etc.
Philalethes.7
- 1
[document] The letter was edited from a photocopy of the pseudonymously signed original in BR’s hand in the Morrell papers at the University of Texas at Austin. The letter appeared untitled in The Nation 23 (27 July 1918): 446, and as “On a Review of Sassoon” as 99 in Papers 14. The original manuscript was followed in The Brixton Letters, instead of the printed text (as in Papers 14), which BR could not have proofread.
- 2
Your review “Mr. Sassoon’s War Verses”, The Nation 23 (13 July 1918): 398, 400. Although the review was unsigned, BR discovered from Ottoline that it had been written by the critic J. Middleton Murry (see Letter 48).
- 3
Mr. Sassoon’s poems Siegfried Sassoon, Counter-Attack and Other Poems (London: William Heinemann, 1918). Russell’s library copy is annotated with vertical lines in two places. Ottoline had brought him a copy in prison (1 July 1918, BRACERS 114748).
- 4
“God’s in His Heaven” The line is from Robert Browning’s poem Pippa Passes (1841). It continues, “All’s right with the world!”
- 5
Sophocles Ancient Greek general, civic leader, religious leader — and great tragedian.
- 6
Shakspeare BR was suspicious of Shakespeare’s “common sense that made him a successful man of business” (letter to Ottoline, 3 April 1911, BRACERS 17073).
- 7
Philalethes “Lover of truth”, from the Greek. It was a frequently used literary pseudonym, including, notably, by Leibniz for the empiricist Locke in the former’s New Essays on Human Understanding (1765).
Textual Notes
- a
attempts The Nation printed “attempt”, as is done in 99 in Papers 14.
- b
Being told Replaced “Some of us are tired of being told”.
- c
may in the end … put down by Inserted.
- d
having After deleted “of being”.
- e
Shakspeare In this letter BR spelt the playwright’s name in his customary way, e.g. as he did in several letters in 1911. By 1924, in the manuscript of “How to Read History” (RA Rec. Acq. 27), BR had adopted the standard spelling.
- f
For my part, Inserted.
- g
and that the union of the two is very important, but Above deleted “and”.
- h
remain living Above deleted “be important”.
- i
for it Replaced illegible.
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.
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.
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.
Siegfried Sassoon
Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967), soldier awarded the MC and anti-war poet. Ottoline had befriended him in 1916, and the following year, when Sassoon refused to return to his regiment after being wounded, she and BR helped publicize this protest, which probably saved him from a court martial. BR even assisted Sassoon in revising his famous anti-war statement, which was read to the House of Commons by a Liberal M.P. on 30 July 1917. Sassoon’s actions were an embarrassment to the authorities, for he was well known as both a poet and a war hero. Unable to hush the case up, the government acted with unexpected subtlety and declared Sassoon to be suffering from shell-shock and sent him to Craiglockhart War Hospital for Officers, near Edinburgh. After a period of recuperation in Scotland overseen by military psychiatrist Capt. W.H.R. Rivers, Sassoon decided to return to the Front (see Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Siegfried Sassoon: Soldier, Poet, Lover, Friend [New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2014]). He was again wounded in July 1918 and was convalescing in Britain during some of BR’s imprisonment. Although each admired the other’s stand on the war, BR and Sassoon were never close in later years. Yet Sassoon did pledge £50 to the fellowship plan fund (see BRACERS 114758), and decades later he donated a manuscript in support of BR’s International War Crimes Tribunal (see BRACERS 79066).
The Nation
A political and literary weekly, 1907–21, edited for its entirety by H.W. Massingham before it merged with The Athenaeum and then The New Statesman. BR regularly contributed book reviews, starting in 1907. During his time at Brixton, he published there a book review (14 in Papers 8; mentioned in Letters 4 and 102) and a letter to the editor (Letter 39). In August 1914 The Nation hastily abandoned its longstanding support for British neutrality, rejecting an impassioned defence of this position written by BR on the day that Britain declared war (1 in Papers 13). For the next two years the publication gave its editorial backing (albeit with mounting reservations) to the quest for a decisive Allied victory. At the same time, it consistently upheld civil liberties against the encroachments of the wartime state, and by early 1917 had started calling for a negotiated peace as well. The Nation had recovered its dissenting credentials, but for allegedly “defeatist” coverage of the war was hit with an export embargo imposed in March 1917 by Defence of the Realm Regulation 24B.