Introduction and Aim

The English mathematician, philosopher and social critic Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) is one of the few Nobel Prize Laureates for Literature (1950) who was not primarily a writer of fiction. The others are the German philosopher Rudolf Eucken (1908), the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1927), the English writer and heroic Prime Minister Winston Churchill (1953) and finally the French enfant terrible Jean-Paul Sartre, who won the prize in 1964 – but for obscure reasons – refused to accept it.

The distinction between fact and fiction is in reality not that clear when we take a closer look at all the different kinds of writing we can find. The most well-established forms of fiction are novels, short stories, plays and poems. But what about autobiographies, essays, diaries and letters?

Many literary scholars and critics would probably classify them under the category of fact, but I would like to raise a question in this context: can not some of these more personal writings have aesthetic dimensions that make them worthy of being classified as fiction in the sense that they can contain real literary qualities?

The aim of this essay is to answer that question with a positive reply by analyzing two of the letters of Bertrand Russell concerning religion published in the book The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell. The Public Years, 1914-1970, superbly edited by Nicholas Griffin and assisted by Alison Roberts (2001).

One letter is to his lover, the young actress Colette O’Neil (Lady Constance Malleson), and the other to his daughter Katherine, whose mother (Russell’s second wife) was the well-known feminist Dora Black, who reluctantly agreed to marry the British philosopher in order to satisfy his aristocratic vanity.

Analysis

Although Griffin has explicitly excluded letters regarding religion, the topic is touched upon directly in some letters and Russell’s often complicated relationship to God and religious matters is indirectly revealed through his poetic and semi-religious use of words like “God”, “The Infinite”, “love”, “sin” and “wicked”.

One of my favourite letters regarding Russell’s religious struggle is one he wrote to Colette in October 1916 (#279), where he writes:

The centre of me is always and eternally a terrible pain – a curious wild pain – a searching for something beyond what the world contains, something transfigured and infinite. The beatific vision – God. I do not find it, I do not think it is to be found – but the love of it is my life – it is like passionate love for a ghost. At times it fills me with rage, at times with wild despair – it is the source of gentleness and cruelty and work, it fills every passion that I have. It is the actual spring of life within me. (85)

Although the intensity of his religious struggle diminished with time and was replaced by a strong ethical commitment that he expressed through his political work, it still remained an undercurrent in most of his undertakings and he expressed it in a poignantly poetic style.

The topic of religion often turned up in his letters to his daughter, whose struggles as a young person in many ways mirrored those of her father. His answer to her regarding her fears of Hell reveals his own understanding of what God values most, which happens to coincide with his own preferences. The letter was written in December 1946, when she was in her early twenties (#476). Russell writes: “As for fear of Hell, I suggest the following hypothesis: God values veracity above all other virtues, and has refrained from giving us evidence of His existence; therefore He will damn all those who believe in Him, as having sinned against veracity.” (419)

If Russell were right, he and other agnostics who refused to believe something without good reason had nothing to worry about, and as a matter of fact they would be the truly religious rather than those who believe and obey out of fear of punishment.

Conclusion

The Bertrand Russell Archives at McMaster University in Canada hold between forty and fifty thousand of Russell’s letters. He was a master of an art that today is almost dead because of the introduction of telephones, computers and SMS. In order to prove my case more strongly, I could perhaps have used some of his many love letters to his first wife Alys or – even better – some of his more poetic outbursts of passion for Lady Ottoline Morrrell, published in the first volume of The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell: The Private Years, 1884-1914.

Some readers of this essay might find my interpretation of the word “literary” a bit idiosyncratic. But I would like to explain my semantic liberty by pointing to Russell’s poetic touch in the first letter and his humorous twist in the second. He is not only stating matters of emotional and philosophical facts; his rich language uses tropes that I find truly literary and he also used them in his factual writings.

No wonder the Nobel Committee found him a worthy recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature. In his Presentation Speech Anders Österling, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy said among other words of praise: “With his keen and sound good sense, his clear style, and his wit in the midst of seriousness, he has in his work evinced those characteristics which are found among only the elite of authors.” And this was said long before they – or anyone else for that matter – had read his diaries, autobiography or letters, except the original receivers, who must have counted themselves lucky indeed.

Russell wrote many philosophical essays with literary qualities before he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, but it was not until three years later that he actually sat down to write short stories for publication, which were published as Satan in the Suburbs (1953) and Nightmares of Eminent Persons (1954). The writer’s main intention was entertainment and he was quite successful in this regard. Otherwise their literary qualities are not so impressive.

However, the first collection contains a story with the title “Satan in the Suburbs or Horrors Manufactured Here.” What is interesting about this piece of fiction is that it contains a number of important but disguised facts about Russell’s life and views and can be seen as personal confession about his own darker side.

This adds another dimension to the complicated semantic relationship between the concepts of “fact” and “fiction.”

Works Cited

Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, ed. Horst Frenz, Amsterdam: Elsevier Publishing Company, 1969.

The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell. The Public Years, 1914-1970, edited by Nicholas Griffin and assisted by Alison Roberts, London and New York: Routledge, 2001.