Pleasing Myself by Frank Kermode

Author:Frank Kermode
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-05-21T04:00:00+00:00

This letter is profoundly and deliberately offensive. Of course Russell probably knew that Lawrence, particularly in the war years, was prone to writing intemperate letters, but this must still have been a shock, for, as Monk remarks, ‘it was as if Lawrence could see straight into Russell’s soul and knew what would hurt it most’. Though much the younger man, Lawrence accused Russell of ‘the inexperience of youth’, knowing little of personal contact and conflict, ‘almost juvenile’. Russell, after reading the letter, briefly contemplated suicide, but he recovered and ‘was never so vulnerable again’.

Political work, and especially anti-war agitation, were partly what rescued him from this depression. As a politician he was a Liberal in the family tradition, but to particular problems like the war he applied his own mind and came up with highly unpopular solutions. He was by his formation pro-German and rather anti-Russian and did not endear himself to the bellicose public and press by suggesting that the Germans could be expected to behave reasonably if our side showed a comparable desire for peace. Though associated with pacifist causes, he was not a pacifist pur sang, believing that some causes had to be fought for, but the present cause was not of that sort. He did oppose conscription, though with a certain distaste for those conscientious objectors who declined any alternative service, finding them ‘Sunday-Schooly’ and unaware of ‘the volcanic side of human nature’, a side he considered that he understood very well by introspection. He deplored the Allied refusal of German peace offers, and genuinely hated the savagery of the mob and the dishonesty of the press.

These attitudes divided him from his professional colleagues and his class, as well as from the population in general, and he was being closely looked at by the government. In the end it was an editorial he wrote for The Tribunal that landed him in jail. He had claimed that American troops were being used to intimidate strikers, and this was judged an offence under the Defence of the Realm Act. He escaped the arduousness of imprisonment in the second division, and served his term in the first, more comfortably than the conscientious objectors, and with facilities for reading and writing. He suffered mostly from jealous speculations about the possible activities of his mistresses. And he meditated at length on his own character, as well as working on a book at the rate of 10,000 words a day.

Soon after the war he got his divorce from Alys and married the pregnant Dora, who alone among his lovers was willing to give him the child he so longed for. There this volume ends. Perhaps the most remarkable of his philosophical achievements are already recorded here, but almost half a century of celebrity and industry are still to come. This book, despite the longueurs of the love letters, provides an extraordinarily full and fascinating account of the earlier phase. Monk understands and admires his man, yet doesn’t conceal the applicability of Jeremiah’s

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