BOO K S
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Some great men seek power, fame and money, but Russell sees his
life as dominated by three urges or longings or concerns: for love, for
knO\\'!edgc and "an unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind". In
all three realms he has been active, to put it mildly.
With women he could be on occasion a bounder, at least so it
appears. The first volume takes him up through his first marriage
(there are to be four in all) with Alys Smith, sister of Logan Pearsall,
its break-up and a couple of love affairs, most notably with the ubiquit–
ous Ottoline Morrell. The woman he seems most to have admired –
this was platonic - was Beatrice Webb, who once wrote to him (it is
statements like these that have made the English a great race) :
I have always admired your very great intelligence, and tho' I
have sometimes had my doubts about the strength of your character,
I have always felt its peculiar charm.
Russell behaved very badly, as he admits, with the daughter of an
American gynecologist, and there were probably others. The love affair
with Ottoline is not without its moments of hilarity. Although friendly
with many Americans, Russell intensely dislikes America, more, it would
seem, than is necessary, although he has his reasons, past and present.
So all Americans will be proud to know that it was an American dentist
who cured Russell of his pyorrhea just when his "bad breath" was
about to end his love affair with the fastidious Ottoline. They came
together again, fragrantly.
His greatest intellectual passion in his early life was mathematics,
first conceived at the age of eleven when he learned Euclid and
culminating at thirty-eight when he completed the
Principia Mathematica
with Whitehead. The turning point in his intellectual life OCCUlTed in
1900 at the International Congress of Philosophy in Paris where he met
Peano and became acquainted with Peano's "mathematical logic." White–
head and Russell, with Russell doing most of the day by day work,
labored over the
Principia
for ten years. These were among the most
unhappy in his life. People who do not engage in abstract thought (and
I
do !lot) often fail to realize what agony it must be to wander about
in this strange realm utterly divorced from commonsensical reality,
where either the ideas will not come or when they come they are con–
ventional or mistaken or they lead to mistakes, which then means back–
ing up and starting all over again. Only the myth of Sisyphus or the
analogy of the wounded man crawling through a minefield suggests
the labor, the terrors, the loneli ness and the monotony. Russell himself
says that his "intellect never quite recovered from the strain" of this book.
On philosophy in general: "On the whole a rather hopeless busi-
