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Bertrand Russell in Prison

Dernière mise à jour : 2 févr.

Bertrand Russell in 1907
Bertrand Russell in 1907

Extract from :

Ray Monk

Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude

(1872-1921)



PRISON


"For the first two or three months of his sentence [in 1918], life at Brixton prison suited Russell perfectly. Freed from the demands of both political campaigning and romantic attachments, he was able to live precisely the kind of cloistered, contemplative life he had long craved. The conditions, though naturally more austere than he was used to, were not especially harsh. His cell (an extra-large one, for which he paid a rent of two shillings and sixpence a week) was furnished in style by his sister-in-law, Elizabeth, and decorated with flowers from Garsington.


He had The Times delivered every day, and was, from the great number of books supplied by his friends, able to transform his cell into a reasonably well-equipped study. From Cambridge via his student Dorothy Wrinch came complete sets of the great philosophers and bound volumes of academic journals of philosophy and psychology; from the library at Garsington came works of history, biographies, memoirs and letters; and from a variety of sources came a vast number of novels. He did not even have to eat prison food; as a first-division prisoner he was allowed to order his meals from outside. Nor was he expected to clean his own cell. The first division was designed for those in the habit of employing servants, and, at sixpence a day, Russell could have his cell cleaned for him by another prisoner.


Given these conditions, he was able fairly soon after arriving to establish an extraordinarily fruitful daily routine: four hours of philosophical writing, four hours of philosophical reading and four hours of general reading. Altogether, it was rather like being in a somewhat spartan study centre - or perhaps even more like being in a monastery. He was finding it all so agreeable, he wrote to Frank, that he was beginning to think he had missed his vocation by not being a monk in a contemplative order.


The greatest drawback was loneliness. He was allowed just one visit a week of up to three visitors at a time. In order to make the most of these visits, he drew up a list of preferred visitors, marking those he thought compatible with each other. Ottoline generally came with Frank, Colette with Clifford Allen, and Whitehead with H. Wildon Carr. With a warder sitting close enough to hear everything that was said, conversation was stilted and difficult, and real communication was conducted — as so often in Russell’s life - by letter. Officially, he was allowed to write no more than one letter a week, which had to be read first by a prison official to see that it contained nothing seditious. Usually this took the form of a sort of circular, addressed to Frank, but containing a series of specific messages for other people: discussions of philosophy for Carr and Whitehead, expressions of devotion to Colette and passages of self-analysis for Ottoline.


For Russell, a limit of one letter a week was obviously intolerable, and he soon invented ways of getting round it. To Colette, he wrote letters in French, disguising them as transcriptions from the correspondence between Madame Roland and Francis Buzot. By and large, these letters consist chiefly of rather desperate and repetitious declarations of his love, and, as time went by and his frustration at being separated from her increased, strident expressions of fierce jealousy of whoever she was with.


His letters to Ottoline were quite different. They were, Ottoline says in her memoirs, ‘a great pleasure, as they expressed his delightful poetic side’:


They are indeed, besides being to me very moving, amongst the best interesting and brilliant letters I ever received from him. I was so happy to have established our friendship on a new basis, and he was franker too which was a great comfort.


Most of these letters were smuggled out of prison by hiding them in the uncut pages of books and journals. The first time this ruse was used, Ottoline was puzzled to receive the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, together with a note from Russell saying that she would ‘find it very interesting’. After a good deal of bemused scrutiny, and ‘feeling certain that this very unintelligible magazine held some secret communications’, she at last turned the volume upside-down and found the letter. She, in turn, sent him several uncut books hiding long letters, and in this way they kept up a flow of affectionate and thoughtful letters that sealed the new basis of their friendship.


In a newspaper article written in the 1930s, Russell provided colourful descriptions of his fellow-prisoners, claiming (perhaps even boasting) that during the war he had ‘associated habitually with criminals’. From the letters he wrote at the time, however, it would appear that he had very little to do with the other prisoners and indeed rather kept his distance from them. ‘Life here is just like life on an Ocean Liner,’ he wrote in one of his circular letters, ‘one is cooped up with a number of average human beings, unable to escape except into one’s own state-room.’ Given his twelve-hours-a-day reading and writing schedule, it is hard to see how he could have spent much time outside his ‘state-room’. Of course, every day he had to take exercise in the yard with the other prisoners, but on those occasions talking was forbidden and his impressions of his fellow-inmates were formed chiefly on the basis of what they looked like.


‘I see no sign that they are worse than the average,’ he reported to Frank, ‘except that they probably have less will-power, if one can judge by their faces, which is all I have to go by.’ The closest contact he had with other prisoners was with those he employed to clean his cell, and these prisoners he observed much as an anthropologist might observe the members of a strange and primitive tribe. ‘It is queer the different ways there are of living,’ he wrote to Ottoline:


To me pride is essential, but I had a man to clean out my cell who had absolutely none. Fat and elderly, always cheerful and full of fun, he boasted of having spent all his life in prison ... He knew all the dodges, got plenty to eat when others were near starvation, was a favourite of all the warders, and kept everybody laughing. He had many merits but was utterly and entirely ignoble. A world of people like him would be good-natured, happy, and of no account.


The truth is that Russell did not really want, or need, the companionship of his fellow-prisoners. His prison sentence came just at a time when what he craved most was the solitude and leisure necessary for intense absorption in philosophical questions. In a description that recalls those of Russell when he was writing Principia, Ottoline mentions that, when she went to visit him, he at first looked dazed with the change from his solitary existence. She speaks of Russell’s ‘rather rarefied solitary existence, his mind absorbed by serious problems’ and says that she hesitated to intrude on this exalted state with trivia from the outside world. ‘Bertie seemed really happy during the first months of his imprisonment,’ she writes, and ‘enjoyed the seclusion and was able to do a good deal of writing’.


Throughout most of the war, Russell had felt that, in order to concentrate his energies on political work, he had neglected his inner life. Being in prison now freed him from the obligation to put public matters first, and he was able to devote himself to his own thoughts and emotions, without feeling selfish or self-indulgent. ‘The holiday from responsibility is really delightful,’ he wrote to Frank, ‘so delightful that it almost outweighs everything else’:


Here I have not a care in the world: the rest to nerves and will is heavenly. One is free from the torturing question: What more ought I be doing? Is there any effective action that I haven’t thought of? Have I a right to let the whole thing go and return to philosophy? Here, I have to let the whole thing go, which is far more restful than choosing to let it go and doubting if one’s choice is justified. Prison has some of the advantages of the Catholic Church.


But, allowed to go where they would, his thoughts did not always turn to philosophy. They also turned inwards, to the kind of reflective scrutiny of his past apd searching analysis of his character to which Russell was always prone but which overwork had lately made impossible. Several times in his prison letters he commented on how self-absorbed he had become. Almost anything he read or thought about might provoke him to reflect upon himself.


(...)"


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