Brixton Letter 64
BR to Constance Malleson
August 10, 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-64Auto. 2: 87-8
BRACERS 19342
<Brixton Prison>1
Aug. 10. ’18.
There is no good life of my grandfather, and there couldn’t be, because he was such a dull dog.2 The official biography is by Spencer Walpole.3 — If I had been in Gladstone’s place I would never have let Gordon go to Khartoum,4 but having let him go I think it was foolish not to back him up, because it was bound to incense people. It started the movement of imperialism which led on to the Boer War5 and thence to the present horror. It is useless in politics to apply a policy people won’t understand. — I remember a talk we had in the woods once about what C.A. would do if he were Prime Minister, in which this came up. — I did not realize the film job you refused was Ll.G. Certainly you had to refuse that.6 One might as well have expected St. John7 to take employment under Pontius Pilate as official biographer of Judas Iscariot. — What a queer work the Bible is.8 Abraham (who is a pattern of all the virtues) twice over, when he is going abroad, says to his wife: “Sarah my dear, you are a very good-looking person, and the King is very likely to fall in love with you. If he thinks I am your husband, he will put me to death, so as to be able to marry you; so you shall travel as my sister, which you are, by the way”. On each occasion the King does fall in love with her, takes her into his harem, and gets diseased in consequence, so he returns her to Abraham. Meanwhile Abraham has a child by the maidservant, whom Sarah dismisses into the wilderness with the new-born infant, without Abraham’s objecting. Rum tale. And God has talks with Abraham at intervals, giving shrewd worldly advice. Then later, when Moses begs to see God, God allows him to see his “hind parts”. There is a terrific fuss, thunder and whirlwind and all the paraphernalia, and then all God has to say is that he wants the Jews to eat unleavened bread at the Passover — he says this over and over again, like an old gentleman in his dotage.9 Queer book. Some texts are very funny. Deut. XXIV, 5: “When a man hath taken a new wife, he shall not go out to war, neither shall he be charged with any business: but he shall be free at home one year, and shall cheer up his wife which he hath taken.” I should never have guessed “cheer up” was a Biblical expression. Here is another really inspiring text: “Cursed be he that lieth with his mother-in-law. And all the people shall say, Amen”.10 St Paul on marriage: “I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, It is good for them if they abide even as I. But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn”.11 This has remained the doctrine of the Church to this day. It is clear that the Divine purpose in the text “it is better to marry than to burn” is to make us all feel how very dreadful the torments of Hell must be.
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[document] The letter was edited from the unsigned, thrice-folded single sheet, written in BR’s hand on both sides, in the Malleson papers in the Russell Archives. The letter was published with a minor omission in BR’s Autobiography, 2: 87–8.
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no good life of my grandfather ... dull dog Lord John Russell, later first Earl Russell (1792–1878), twice a Whig Prime Minister who held every major cabinet office, architect of the Great Reform Act, and author. BR, born in 1872, remembered little of his grandfather, but what he did remember he remembered “vividly”; see his “Lord John Russell” (1952; in Portraits from Memory). At the time Lord John died, one person who could have written a biography that assured him his proper place in the historical record was John Morley. However, Morley declined. After a delay the commission was given to Spencer Walpole, and the Life was eventually published in 1889. No further biographies had been written by 1918.
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official biography is by Spencer Walpole The Life of Lord John Russell (London: Longmans, Green, 1889; Russell’s library).
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in Gladstone’s place I would never have let Gordon go to Khartoum BR was responding to queries in Colette’s letter of 26 July (BRACERS 113145). In 1884 General Charles Gordon (1833–1885) went to the Sudan to evacuate Egyptian forces, threatened by Sudanese rebels, from Khartoum. The city came under siege, and on 26 January 1885 the rebels broke into the city, killing Gordon and his supporters. The British relief force arrived two days later. The British public blamed the government, particularly Gladstone, for failing to relieve the siege. William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898), then Prime Minister, resigned later that year. The topic may have come up because of the chapter on Gordon in Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918).
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movement of imperialism … Boer War The Siege of Khartoum coincided roughly with the Congress of Berlin (1884–85), at which the European powers established a basis for their occupation, partition and colonization of the African continent, which proceeded rapidly over the next fifteen years. Even BR was caught up in this “movement of imperialism”, for at the start of the Boer War he recalled, “British defeats caused me much anxiety, and I could think of nothing else but the war news” (Auto. 1: 136). Although Britain’s superior military forces soon inflicted reverses on the Boers, the struggle over the resource-rich colonies of a rival white settler population mutated into a protracted guerrilla insurgency. As that conflict dragged on, BR’s attitudes, not only to British imperialism in southern Africa but also towards war and empire generally, shifted in a pacifist and internationalist direction (see David Blitz, “Russell and the Boer War: from Imperialist to Anti-imperialist”, Russell 19 [1999]: 117–41).
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the film job you refused was Ll.G. … had to refuse that This refers to Colette’s declining to act in a film about Lloyd George. This was her own decision, about which BR had not known until very recently. She was well aware of BR’s antipathy towards that man, writing that “you’d have divorced me if I’d acted in a film whitewashing Lloyd George” (3 Aug. 1918, BRACERS 113147). The Life Story of David Lloyd George (Ideal, 1918) was directed by Maurice Elvey. The film was never exhibited (see Letter 87, note 12) and thought missing for decades. But it was found in 1994, restored, and is regarded as one of Elvey’s best. In retrospect it is unfortunate that Colette did not appear in the film, as the two films in which she did appear, Hindle Wakes and The Admirable Crichton, have not survived.
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St. John BR clearly refers to John the Evangelist, Apostle and contemporary of Jesus, and reputed author of the fourth Gospel (although biblical scholarship rejects him as such).
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What a queer work the Bible is See Genesis 12: 11–19, 16: 1–16, 20: 2–12, 21: 10–16 for passages relevant to BR’s “commentary” on Abraham and Sarah.
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dotage It seems to have been Moses, not Abraham, who saw God’s hind parts amid all the paraphernalia (Exodus 33: 23) and to whom God prescribed unleavened bread (ibid., 34: 18). But it is to Abraham that God repeated himself, not about unleavened bread, but about circumcision (Genesis 17: 10ff.).
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“Cursed be … Amen” Deuteronomy 27: 23.
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better to marry than to burn I Corinthians 7: 9.
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.
Clifford Allen
(Reginald) Clifford Allen (1889–1939; Baron Allen of Hurtwood, 1932) was a socialist politician and publicist who joined the Cambridge University Fabian Society while studying at Peterhouse College (1908–11). After graduating he became active in the Independent Labour Party in London and helped establish a short-lived labour newspaper, the Daily Citizen. During the war Allen was an inspiring and effective leader of the C.O. movement as chairman of the No-Conscription Fellowship, which he co-founded with Fenner Brockway in November 1914. Court-martialled and imprisoned three times after his claim for absolute exemption from war service was rejected, Allen became desperately ill during his last spell of incarceration. He was finally released from the second division of Winchester Prison on health grounds in December 1917, but not before contracting the tuberculosis with which he was finally diagnosed in September 1918. He was dogged by ill health for the rest of his life. BR had enormous affection and admiration for Allen (e.g., 68 in Papers 13, 46 in Papers 14), a trusted wartime political associate. From February 1919 until March 1920 he even shared Allen’s Battersea apartment. A close friendship was soured, however, by Allen’s rejection of BR’s unforgiving critique of the Bolshevik regime, which both men witnessed at first hand with the British Labour Delegation to Russia in May 1920 (see Papers 15: 507). Yet Allen was far from revolutionary himself and did not even identify with the left wing of the ILP (which he chaired in the early 1920s). He was elevated to the peerage as a supporter of Ramsay MacDonald’s National Government, an administration despised by virtually the entire labour movement. Although Allen’s old intimacy with BR was never restored after the Russia trip, any lingering estrangement did not inhibit him from enrolling his daughter, Joan Colette (“Polly”) at the Russells’ Beacon Hill School.
David Lloyd George
Through ruthless political intrigue, David Lloyd George (1863–1945) emerged in December 1916 as the Liberal Prime Minister of a new and Conservative-dominated wartime Coalition Government. The “Welsh wizard” remained in that office for the first four years of the peace after a resounding triumph in the notorious “Coupon” general election of December 1918. BR despised the war leadership of Lloyd George as a betrayal of his Radical past as a “pro-Boer” critic of Britain’s South African War and as a champion of New Liberal social and fiscal reforms enacted before August 1914. BR was especially appalled by the Prime Minister’s stubborn insistence that the war be fought to a “knock-out” and by his punitive treatment of imprisoned C.O.s. For the latter policy, as BR angrily chastised Lloyd George at their only wartime meeting, “his name would go down to history with infamy” (Auto. 2: 24).
Lytton Strachey
Lytton Strachey (1880–1932), biographer, reviewer and a quintessential literary figure of the Bloomsbury Group. He is best known for his debunking portraits of Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Arnold and General Gordon, published together as Eminent Victorians (London: Chatto & Windus, 1918; Russell’s library), which BR read in Brixton with great amusement as well as some critical reservations (see Letter 7). Although Strachey was homosexual, he and the artist Dora Carrington were devoted to each other and from 1917 lived together in Tidmarsh, Berkshire. BR had become acquainted with the somewhat eccentric Strachey, a fellow Cambridge Apostle, while his slightly younger contemporary was reading history at Trinity College. He admired Strachey’s literary gifts, but doubted his intellectual honesty. Almost three decades later BR fleshed out the unflattering thumbnail of Strachey drawn for Ottoline in Letter 7, in a “Portrait from Memory” for BBC radio. Strachey was “indifferent to historical truth”, BR alleged in that broadcast, “and would always touch up the picture to make the lights and shades more glaring and the folly or wickedness of famous people more obvious” (The Listener 48 [17 July 1952]: 98). Main biography: Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: a Critical Biography, 2 vols. (London: Heinemann, 1967–68).
Maurice Elvey
Maurice Elvey (1887–1967) was a prolific film director (of silent pictures especially) and enjoyed a very successful career in that industry lasting many decades. Born William Seward Folkard into a working-class family, Elvey changed his name around 1910, when he was acting. He directed his first film, The Fallen Idol, in 1913. By 1917, when he directed Colette in Hindle Wakes, he had married for a second time — to a sculptor, Florence Hill Clarke — his first marriage having ended in divorce. Elvey and Colette had an affair during the filming of Hindle Wakes, beginning in September 1917, which caused BR great anguish. In addition to his feeling of jealousy during his imprisonment, BR was worried over the rumour that Elvey was carrying a dangerous sexually transmitted disease. (See BR, “My First Fifty Years”, RA1 210.007050–fos. 127b, 128, and Monk, 2: 507). Colette later maintained that Elvey cleared himself (“Letters to Bertrand Russell from Constance Malleson, 1916–1969”, p. 154, typescript, RA). BR removed the allegation from the Autobiography as published (see 2: 37), but he remained fearful. After Elvey’s long-lost wartime film about the life of Lloyd George was rediscovered and restored in the 1990s, it premiered to considerable acclaim (see Letter 87, note 12).
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.