I’d enjoyed Caroline Moorehead’s biography of Martha Gellhorn, but this book fell short, primarily because of the excessively detailed descriptions of Russell’s famous friends. There were many, including Wittgenstein, “the Bloomsberries,” Ottoline Morrell, D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, T.S. Eliot and Joseph Conrad. I’m intrigued by all of these people, so I expected their interactions to have some magic in them, but they typically follow a pattern of fast friendship devolving into disagreement and ending in acrimony — a pattern that seems to have been as tedious for Moorehead to write about as it was for me to read.
It’s clear that relationships were of primary importance in Russell’s life, offering him opportunities for the feedback and collaboration that contributed to his life’s work and his personal development. But the details included are not particularly compelling. The epigraph Moorehead chose comes from a letter Russell wrote to Ottoline Morrell. He says, “I do not know who my biographer may be, but I should like him to report ‘with what flourish his nature will’ something like this:... I loved life and real people, and wished to get rid of the shams that prevent us from loving real people as they really are. I believed in laughter and spontaneity, and trusted to nature to bring out the genuine good in people, if once genuineness could come to be tolerated.” This is a Bertrand Russell who seems worth getting to know, but it wasn't the Bertrand Russell I found in Moorehead’s biography. It's Russell as a 7th house whiz — perhaps aspirational on his part, rather than the man Moorehead found in her research.
Russell’s 7th House Development
As a study of the 7th house, this biography is a treasure trove. Bertrand Russell had 5 planets in Taurus in the 7th house, the house of partnership/marriage: the circumstances of his life revolve around his relationships with others — his 4 wives, numerous romantic liaisons, plus an array of friends, collaborators and open enemies. With Sun in the 7th it's no surprise that his mistress Colette O’Niel (stage name of Lady Constance Malleson) broke off their 40+ year love affair with a letter that said, "I see now your inability to care for anybody with the whole of you, for longer than a rather short time...Your life is a complicated cocoon, getting more and more involved always. Three times I've been drawn into its centre and three times thrown aside..."
Learning to truly partner with others—rather than find a pleasing and disposable satellite—was a lifelong lesson for Russell. His first wife, Alys, suffered from his incapacity in this arena. It's not until his affair with with Ottoline Morrell, begun in his late 30s, that he first experiences the jolt that opens him to being truly affected by another. As Moorehead writes, “It was the single most dramatic thing that had happened to him and he would never be the same again.”
Through love of another, Russell discovers himself. “To Ottoline, he found and exposed an apparently undiscovered soul, ardent and full of excitement, which had lain concealed behind moroseness and self-indulgence. In love, he suddenly wanted to lay bare his entire character, every nuance of it, every memory repressed since childhood, and as he began to explore it, so he discovered new facets.”
Although Ottoline awakened Russell’s self-discovery, he’s not yet learned the 7th house relationship ideals of equality and respect of the other’s personhood. Russell is voracious in his demands on Ottoline’s time and attention. In her journal, Ottoline expresses the feeling of being locked in his gravitational pull, writing, “He was like Savanarola exacting from me my life, my time, and my whole devotion, and I cried out ‘Oh, to be free!’”
In choosing Alys as his first wife, we see Russell attracted to Taurean qualities. Alys is described as “very upright, very simple.” But Ottoline awakens him to a new awareness of Taurean possibilities. In one of his thousands of letters to her, he writes, “You can give me happiness, & what I want even more — peace.”
Of course, another person can’t give Russell peace. He spends the next five decades becoming the sort of man who can truly find the lasting Taurean placidity he craves within his relationships. He seems, finally, to manage it with his last wife, Edith, whom he married at age 80. Moorehead writes, “It was to be his happiest marriage, lasting until his death in 1970, more enduring in terms of affection than any of the others and lacking all the frenzy of his earlier commitments.”
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