`Why should not old men be mad?" Yeats rhetorically asks, and we nod indulgently, knowing that the poet means not mad, but bad: raucous and randy and brimming with spiteful glee. We assent because, after all, sooner or later, we shall ourselves be old, and in need of indulgence and a bit of wicked fun. But an old man's fun is often the ruin of those around him, a truth illustrated by the example of the philosopher, controversialist and womaniser, Bertrand Arthur William, 3rd Earl Russell, who in his remarkably long life - 1872-1970 - inflicted untold damage on family, friends, colleagues and, eventually, himself.
Untold until now, that is. Ray Monk, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton, and biographer of Wittgenstein, in this second, large part of his magnificent two-volume life of Russell, shows how his subject betrayed his lovers and his spouses, warped the lives of his children, and even of some of his grandchildren, and, in the end, betrayed himself and his own genius. It is a sorry tale, told with candour and regret.
In his preface, Monk speaks of the difficulties he encountered during the writing of the book, and his growing realisation of the tragedy of Russell's life. Tragedy may seem an odd word to apply to a life so full of achievements, he remarks, but "to research Russell's private life, I discovered, is to pick one's way through a long trail of emotional wreckage, and to put oneself in the position of someone close to Russell has often been a heartbreaking experience". This is not entirely biographer's hyperbole, or the rueful complaint of a writer at the end of a long and arduous work. There are passages in this book which, if they do not break the heart, will certainly rend it.
Russell was born in Gwent, in south Wales. His parents died when he was a child, and he was brought up by his grandmother, the redoubtable wife of the late Lord John Russell, one-time Liberal Prime Minister and 1st Earl (Lord John, of very small stature, married a prominent widow and was ever after known as "the Widow's Mite"). He was educated privately and then at Cambridge, graduating with a first in mathematics and philosophy in 1894. He worked briefly as a diplomat in Paris, and became a fellow of Trinity in 1895, after his marriage to Alys Pearsall Smith. (Small World Dept: Alys was the sister of Logan Pearsall Smith, humourist and aphorist, whose pithy observation on life v. literature adorns the sides of Waterstone's book bags).
The bulk of Russell's philosophical work was done prior to the first World War. In 1903 he published The Principles of Mathematics, which argues that all mathematics can be derived from logic, a theory he worked into a highly complex formal system in Principia Mathematica (1913), which he wrote in collaboration with Alfred North Whitehead. While Russell was working on the Principia, his nemesis arrived in the form of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who studied under Russell at Cambridge in 1912 and 1913, and whose Tractatus Logico-philosophicus (1922) demonstrated to Russell that all of his work to date was misconceived. Mathematics and logic, far from being the embodiment of eternal truths, are, Wittgenstein showed, linguistic conventions, and the truths they state merely tautologies.
This, as Monk's first volume indicated, was a devastating blow to Russell's amour propre, badly denting his sense of himself both as a philosopher and a man. Arguably it was a blow from which he never recovered. Already haunted by the knowledge of the strong streak of inherited madness in his family, a fear which, he wrote in his Autobiography, "caused me, for many years, to avoid all deep emotion and live, as nearly as I could, a life of intellect tempered by flippancy", he now had to cope with the fact that the Principia, the work that was to be his monument as a philosopher, was irredeemably flawed. Thenceforward, his intellectual life would be not so much tempered by flippancy as stifled by it.
The Ghost of Madness opens in 1921, when Russell was 49, and his affairs were at a low ebb - his social affairs, that is, for his amorous life was as vigorous as ever. He had divorced Alys, and married Dora Black, who, at 27, was half Alys's age and, according to Beatrice Webb, "a singularly unattractive little person". It was Dora, however, who provided Russell with the gift he most desired in life: a child. John Russell, born in 1921, became the centre of Russell's world. "I am amazed to find," he wrote to his former lover Ottoline Morrell, "how much passionate affection one can give to a little creature who as yet is only stimulated to activity by greed and stomach-ache."
Russell did genuinely love his son, insofar as he was capable of loving anyone, but in his determination to bring the boy up along model, modern lines, he probably damaged him terribly. In his book On Education (1926), Russell set out his views on child-rearing. Displays of affection by both parents were to be strictly controlled, in order to strengthen the child's self-reliance. On the other hand, the infant's sense of self-importance must be undermined: "To a devoted parent, the child is immensely important. Unless care is taken, the child feels this, and judges himself as important as his parents feel him . . . Do not let the child see how much you do for it, or how much trouble you take."
Then there is the matter of sleep:
All mothers wish their children to sleep . . . They had developed a certain technique: rocking the cradle and singing lullabies. It was left for males, who investigated the matter scientifically, to discover that this technique is ideally wrong, for though it is likely to succeed on any given day, it creates bad habits.
Although it would be unfair to blame Russell, and Dora, for John Russell's later descent into madness - he died in 1987 after a lifelong struggle with schizophrenia - one cannot help feeling sorrow for a child thus subjected to scientific theories of upbringing and education.
RUSSELL and his wife were keen advocates of sexual freedom. In 1928, Dora met an Irish-American journalist, the bisexual Griffin Barry, and began an affair with him, which was to result in the birth of not one but two children. Not unnaturally, considering his outspoken views on love and marriage, Dora expected Russell to be complaisant in the matter of Barry and the children, both of whom she registered in her husband's name. Russell, hoist with his own petard, gritted his teeth and tried to bear it. However, he was never to forgive Dora, and during and after their divorce, which came through in 1934, he behaved toward her with such savagery that Dora was simply not able to believe that he really intended the things that he said and did. He also devoted much energy to persuading Burke's Peerage and Debrett's to drop the "two bastards" from inclusion in his family's listings (he also tried very hard to have John committed to a lunatic asylum partly, it seems, because, as Monks writes, "the thought that the title `Earl Russell' might one day be inherited by a lunatic filled him with dread").
After Dora came Patricia, called Peter - her mother had wanted a boy - a great beauty, who was 21 when Russell met her. Peter had been hired by Dora as the Russell children's governess. Russell and she were married in 1936, Peter having agreed to marry, according to Russell, only "as a result of my weekly proposals, which she saw no other way of stopping". It was one of Russell's more successful liaisons, although, like all the others save the last, it ended badly, with Peter hurling vituperations at Russell for his coldness and his cruelties.
All this time, Russell was pouring out a stream of bad but highly lucrative journalism on subjects ranging from the prospects for world peace to the wearing of lipstick. He had, it seems, no shame, and would write anything, for anyone. Asked once why he had agreed to sign his name to a meretricious piece written by someone else, he answered simply: "I did it for $50." He worked for the Hearst syndicate, and undertook gruelling but financially rewarding lecture tours in America. Although he did have a complex family structure to support, the lows to which he sank in his hack-work are breathtaking.
On his political writings, which are almost universally naive, misconceived and plain silly, Monk poses the question of "why he abandoned a subject [philosophy] of which he was one of the greatest practitioners since Aristotle in favour of one to which he had very little of any value to contribute". According to one anecdote, Russell himself, in his flippant mode, provided an answer when he told the principal of an American girls' college whom he found himself sitting beside at dinner that he had given up philosophy "Because I discovered I preferred fucking."
He certainly did a lot of the latter. It is hard, at this remove, to account for his attractiveness to women - he was an unprepossessing little squirt - but then, what man ever understands that conundrum? T.S. Eliot, who was no admirer, based an early poem, "Mr Apollinax", on what he knew of Russell, comparing him to "Priapus among the shrubbery/Gaping at the lady in the swing", but it is more likely that it was Russell's brain rather than his body that made him lovable. It should also be remembered that Russell was one of the last of the Great Men, in the age of Great Men that is now dead. And Greatness was, of course, a great attractor.
RUSSELL'S final years were relatively peaceful. His last wife, the formidable, remote and punctilious Edith, took the kind of care of him that was probably what he had always craved from women. After making a fool of himself with his commitment to revolutionary politics in the 1960s - he formed an alliance with a creepy young American called Ralph Schoenman, who got him, among other follies, to champion Che Guevara and the cause of worldwide guerrilla revolution, and who was known to his detractors as "Russell's viper" - he settled into his Welsh home at Plas Penrhyn. However, he kept on at his polemics to the end, not without success, though his belief that he had been largely instrumental in defusing the Cuban missile crisis seems far-fetched, on the evidence. Nor did his family troubles abate. He developed an intense relationship with John's wife, Susan, another schizophrenic, and may even have slept with her. John and Susan's daughter, Lucy, was also greatly attached to her grandfather; the final, grisly pages of Ray Monk's biography close with an account of Lucy's appalling self-immolation in a Welsh churchyard in 1975.
In Russell we are left with an enigma. What turned him from a great philosopher into a foolish, self-centred purveyor of fatuous opinions? How could such a fine mind turn itself to such low concerns? Why did he behave so cruelly to those who tried to love him? Was he truly human, in the sense in which most people would define the term? Throughout his life he was haunted by what Monk describes as the feeling that he was "a spectre that did not quite belong in the corporeal world". There are such people, the plausible ghosts who move among humankind, warming themselves against the warmth of the living, feeding a little life with large doses of love, or the next best thing. Perhaps, in the case of Russell, the greater mystery is why so many others, women especially, offered their innocent necks to his needful fangs. Here is his longsuffering daughter, Kate, describing him as she found him in his old age:
Small and old, a bit deaf and a trifle frail, he sat there in his slippers, pouring tea by the fire, like any old man. But out from him radiated his spirit: his wit, his learning, his love of beauty and passion for truth, reflected on the walls around him and spreading out from the house all over the country and the world. I felt his greatness more then, as we sat quietly over tea in Plas Penrhyn, than at any other time.
Even monsters have their moments.
John Banville is Chief Literary Critic and Associate Literary Editor of The Irish Times