Brixton Letter 95
BR to Constance Malleson
September 4, 1918
- AL
- 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-95
BRACERS 19358
<Brixton Prison>1
Sp. 4. 18.
My Beautiful, my Darling, it was heaven seeing you today,2 and feeling the touch of your dear hands. And your letter is a very very dear letter.3 No, I don’t realize how much you love me. There are moments when I do, and then it seems incredible, and I think “No one could love me like that”. If I realized always, I should never hurt you. I have been realizing it afresh these last weeks. I am glad to know about your health4 and what worried you. I am glad your Dr. is a woman — I am sure it is better for that sort of thing. Dear Love, when I come out I will do all I can to make you less tired. I have the feeling that no sleep counts that is not with you — when I sleep with you, my spirit rests5 as well as my body. (You won’t find the porter6 troublesome as regards me, because he knows me and won’t be surprised to see me about. He will be all right altogether if he is well tipped.)
I am glad you have decided for staying in R.C. the first night I am out. They will let me out at 8.30 a.m. I shall see to it that there is a taxi, so I shall be at G.S. before 9. I think I had better go there and collect all the things I shall want at Ashford, and then come to you. I don’t want to have to think about business after meeting you. I could be with you by 10.30 — perhaps your woman could be got rid of early for once? But if it suits you better I could come straight to you from here, and go to G.S. later — only I feel once with you I shan’t be able to go away. Shall we go out to rather an early lunch, and have our evening meal at home — something that needs no cooking. It would be heavenly not to have to go out again. — I shall want to cling to you and rock in your arms and laugh and cry, and look to see if it is really you or a dream. And I shall want to stroke your hair and lay my head on your breast and feel your love flowing into me like sap in the spring in an old tree that has looked as if it could never have leaves again. O Love, my Love, my Love.
I can well afford Ashford. My finances are working out all right — much better than seemed likely a while back.7 How long can you manage there? Make that and Winchelsea8 as long as you possibly can. I should like to be at Ashford till Monday 14th and go to Winchelsea that day. Could you manage to stay at Winchelsea till the week-end, i.e. 18th or 19th? Then I would come back to London for a few days, and go to Ottoline if possible about 22nd. But if you could spare longer of course I would make it later; only I fancy you can’t. I think it very likely she won’t be leaving Garsn., in which case I shall go there, say for 3 days. Then I shall want a few more days by the sea before settling to work. I want sea aira in my lungs and in my spirit, then I can work steadily through the winter. If you can’t get away again at that time I will try to find some vigorous walker to go with — Dakyns9 say. But I shall hate to be away unnecessarily.
It is a great comfort that Priscilla took it so well.10 She must be an Angel. Tell me what you meant about growing more and more like her — you had something definite in your mind, but I didn’t know what. Tell me also as much as you can of your talk with her — how much you said, and what she said. It interests me.
In the typescript I gave you11 for Miss Wrinch, I should like you to read the last sentence, and pages 26–30.12 The rest is too technical to amuse you. — I grow happier day by day, as the end approaches. It has been a weary long time. But I am very fit, I have hosts of ideas, and I look forward immensely to work. Yes, work done is very like being in love — at its best, almost more intoxicating, but much briefer and rarer, and one pays a much higher price for it in expense of spirit. I have had in prison one or two really good ideas, meaning some years of working out. It is such a joy to do something fruitful after ploughing the sands for four years.13 All you say of your work on Wuthering Heights14 interests me enormously.
I cannot find what would suit for the finale of Wuthering Heights. I have only the Oxford Book15 here in the way of poetry. If it were for a more select audience you could do with this:
Away! away! to thy sad and silent home;16
Pour bitter tears on its desolated hearth;
Watch the dim shades as like ghosts they go and come,
And complicate strange webs of melancholy mirth.
The leaves of wasted autumn woods shall float around thy head,
The blooms of dewy Spring shall gleam beneath thy feet:
But thy soul or this world must fade in the frost that binds the dead,
Ere midnight’s frown and morning’s smile, ere thou and peace, may meet.
(From Shelley, poem beginning “Away! the moor is dark beneath the moon”.) I should advise you to look through Emily Bronte’s own poems, or send them to me (I don’t possess them and should like to) and I will look through them. Presumably you know:
No coward soul is mine,17
No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere:
I see Heaven’s glories shine,
And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.
Do you know “Cold in the earth and the deep snow piled above thee”18 (on her brother), especially:
But when the days of golden dreams had perished,
And even Despair was powerless to destroy,
Then did I learn how existence could be cherished,
Strengthened and fed without the aid of joy.
I lived on this poem for years, at the worst time of my life.19
Goodnight my lovely Darling. Your love fills me with happiness beyond all telling. The time is not long now till we can rest in each other’s arms.
Your
B.
- 1
[document] The letter was edited from the initialled, twice-folded, two-sheet original in BR’s hand in the Malleson papers in the Russell Archives. Written sideways by Colette at the bottom of the letter: “Emily Brontë’s poems”.
- 2
heaven seeing you today Colette had been to visit him.
- 3
your letter is a very very dear letter Colette’s letter of 3 September 1918 (BRACERS 113156). She probably gave the smuggled letter to him during her visit.
- 4
to know about your health Colette’s edited letter of 3 September explains that her doctor thought her “inside” needed attention as her “old trouble” had returned (BRACERS 113156). See also Letters 99 and 100. In view of Colette’s “doctoring myself” for the recurrence of the old trouble in 1920, her medical problem would hardly be related to the “numbers of abortions” she told K. Blackwell she had had in her youth, adding that “abortions need not be secret” (anymore, she meant) (1 Feb. 1975, BRACERS 121694).
- 5
when I sleep with you, my spirit rests Cf. Letter 13: “ordinary rest is only for the body, while the rest you give me is rest for the soul.”
- 6
porter The porter at Russell Chambers, where BR’s flat was located and where Colette was going to live.
- 7
My finances … a while back. See Letter 15, note 22.
- 8
Winchelsea Miss Rinder had offered her family’s cottage as a place to stay once BR left prison. Windmill Cottage was in Icklesham, near Winchelsea. Although not on the coast, it was not far away.
- 9
vigorous walker … Dakyns The two men had no doubt often hiked together (see BRACERS 18694), including the walking tour of the Scottish Highlands on which Dakyns and others joined BR and Alys in August 1907.
- 10
Priscilla took it so well Colette revealed that she had told Priscilla the nature of her relationship with BR while they were away together at St. Margaret’s Bay and that Priscilla had understood it (25 Aug. 1918; BRACERS 113153). BR had already noted this in Letter 86, indicating he was glad Priscilla knew.
- 11
typescript I gave you A review of John Dewey’s Essays in Experimental Logic, first published in The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods 16 (2 Jan. 1919): 5–26; reprinted as 16 in Papers 8. After BR’s death Colette sold McMaster the printer’s copy of the typescript (RA Rec. Acq. 411).
- 12
read the last sentence, and pages 26–30. The last sentence is: “Meanwhile, whatever accusations pragmatists may bring, I shall continue to protest that it was not I who made the world” (16 in Papers 8). A prison allusion was at the start of BR’s rejoinder to Dewey, on the aloofness of the knower: “Will the present amusing inappropriateness of these remarks to the case of one at least among analytic realists suggest to Professor Dewey that perhaps he has somewhat misunderstood the ideal of contemplation?” (8: 148). The reference to “26–30” is to the last pages of section II of the typescript, against instrumentalism and in favour of contemplation and escape from one’s personality. BR wrote a similar note on the first leaf, in faint pencil: “See pp 26–30, beginning ‘Prof. Dewey, in an admirable passage’” (Papers 8: 149: 29). Gladys Rinder had given BR the typescript, along with proofs, in her letter of 3 September 1918 (BRACERS 79631).
- 13
after ploughing the sands for four years BR’s previous big idea was in 1914, the theory of perspectival space. See Letter 59, note 2.
- 14
your work on Wuthering Heights Colette was dramatizing the novel for the stage. There is no confirmation that she completed the task.
- 15
Oxford Book The Oxford Book of English Verse, ed. A.T. Quiller-Couch. Russell’s library has the 1904 edition, published by the Clarendon Press.
- 16
Away! away! to thy sad and silent home The lines that BR quoted are from the second stanza of Shelley’s poem “Remorse”, Oxford Book of English Verse, no. 617.
- 17
No coward soul is mine The first line of the poem “Last Lines” by Emily Brontë; BR quoted only the first stanza.
- 18
“Cold in the earth and the deep snow piled above thee” The first line of Brontë’s poem “Remembrance”; BR then quoted the lines from the sixth stanza.
- 19
But when … golden dreams had perished … aid of joy … worst time of my life In an earlier prison letter to Ottoline, BR alluded to the “absolute despair” he had experienced three decades previously — probably as a student at an “Army crammer” (see Letter 66, note 7). But surely these lines comforted BR not then, but when his love for Alys crumbled in 1901–02 and through years of unhappy marriage until their separation in 1911. When BR’s emotional life was in turmoil from the initial breakdown of his marriage, his intellectual hopes also received the worst possible setback when he discovered what became known as Russell’s paradox, which, despite intense efforts, was not resolved until he formulated the theory of types in 1906 (and published it in 1908: see 22 in Papers 5)—and even then not to his complete satisfaction.
- a
sea air BR wrote “see air”.
57 Gordon Square
The London home of BR’s brother, Frank, 57 Gordon Square is in Bloomsbury. BR lived there, when he was in London, from August 1916 to April 1918, with the exception of January and part of February 1917.
Arthur Dakyns
Arthur Lindsay Dakyns (1883–1941), a barrister, had been befriended by BR when Dakyns was an Oxford undergraduate and the Russells were living at Bagley Wood. BR once described Dakyns to Gilbert Murray as “a disciple” (16 May 1905, BRACERS 79178) and wrote warmly of him to Lucy Donnelly as “the only person up here (except the Murrays) that I feel as a real friend” (1 Jan. 1906; Auto. 1: 181). During the First World War Dakyns enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps and served in France. BR had become acquainted with the H. Graham Dakyns family, who resided in Haslemere, Surrey, after he and Alys moved to nearby Fernhurst in 1896. He corresponded with both father and son.
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.
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.
Gladys Rinder
W. Gladys Rinder worked for the No-Conscription Fellowship and was “chiefly concerned with details in the treatment of pacifist prisoners” (BR’s note, Auto. 2: 88). More specifically, she helped administer the Conscientious Objectors’ Information Bureau, a joint advisory committee set up in May 1916 and representing two other anti-conscription organizations — the Friends’ Service Committee and Fellowship of Reconciliation — as well as the NCF. One C.O. later testified to her “able and zealous” management of this repository of records on individual C.O.s (see John W. Graham, Conscription and Conscience: a History, 1916–1919 [London: Allen & Unwin, 1922], p. 186). Rinder exhibited similar qualities in assisting with the distribution of BR’s correspondence from prison and in writing him official and smuggled letters. Her role in the NCF changed in June 1918, and after the Armistice she assumed control of a new department dedicated to campaigning for the immediate release of all imprisoned C.O.s. She appears to have lost touch with BR after the war but continued her peace advocacy, which included publishing occasionally on international affairs. In 1924 she travelled to Washington, DC, as part of the British delegation to a congress of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Decades later Colette remembered Rinder to Kenneth Blackwell as somebody who “seemed about 40 in 1916–18. She was a completely nondescript person, but efficient, and kind” (BRACERS 121687).
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.
Priscilla, Lady Annesley
Priscilla, Lady Annesley (1870–1941), second wife of Hugh Annesley, 5th Earl of Annesley (1831–1908) and mother of Lady Constance Malleson. Colette described her mother as “among the most beautiful women of her day” with a love of bright colours and walking (After Ten Years [London: Cape, 1931], pp. 12–14).
Russell Chambers
34 Russell Chambers, Bury Street (since renamed Bury Place), London WC1, BR’s flat since 1911. Helen Dudley rented the flat in late 1916 or early 1917. In May 1918 she sublet it to Clare Annesley. Colette moved in on 9 September 1918 and stayed until June 1919. BR did not give up the lease until December 1923. See S. Turcon, “Russell Chambers, Other London Flats, and Country Homes, 1911–1923”, Bertrand Russell Society Bulletin, no. 150 (Fall 2014): 30–4. “Russell Chambers, Other London Flats, and Country Homes, 1911–1923”, Bertrand Russell Society Bulletin, no. 150 (Fall 2014): 30–4.
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.