Young Eliot by Robert Crawford

Author:Robert Crawford
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781429951760
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

11

Observations

WHEN Vivien first slept with Bertrand Russell is uncertain. It may have been as early as mid-1915 when she boasted that he was ‘all over me’.1 However, it seems unlikely that after only weeks of marriage she would announce her infidelity. Charismatic rather than handsome, poetry-loving Russell was an older man who could seem to exude confidence. A powerful orator, an intellectual star, a Fellow of the Royal Society and the son of an English viscount, he lived among England’s social elites. Witty, self-obsessed, orphaned at an early age and haunted by dark family secrets, Russell had a powerful, problematic allure that attracted many women. Seen by some as a feminist, by others as a libertine, in 1916 he advocated ‘advanced’ views on sex, marriage and adultery: ‘A rather small section of the public genuinely believes that sexual relations outside marriage are wicked … and a very rapidly increasing number of women … do not believe the conventional code.’2 The poem ‘Mr. Apollinax’ (which Russell liked) certainly recognises its subject’s associations with bold sexuality.3 Tom’s poetic intuition was eerily perceptive.

Russell’s use of the word ‘intimate’ usually denoted sexual relations. Decades later, he assured one of Tom’s acquaintances that ‘I never had intimate sexual relations with Vivienne.’4 This conflicts with Russell’s having told Constance Malleson that his ‘relation to’ Tom’s wife was ‘very intimate’.5 Russell’s biographer, Ray Monk, demonstrates that his denial was a lie: by 28 September 1917, Lady Malleson was describing Russell as a ‘lover’ of Vivien. Asked about ‘the idea that Vivien and Russell had sexual relations’, she recalled, ‘“I always took it for granted that they had; & when I wrote so to BR he never contradicted me … He once appeared in my bedroom wearing black pyjamas, saying that VSE likes them.”’6 Nicholas Griffin, the twenty-first-century editor of Russell’s letters, thinks it was ‘At some point in 1916’ that Russell and Vivien, who had become increasingly close, ‘began an affair’.7 Certainly by 30 October 1917, Russell, writing to Malleson to emphasise that he still loved her, made it quite clear what had been going on:

I intended to be (except perhaps on very rare occasions) on merely friendly terms with Mrs Eliot. But she was very glad that I had come back, and very kind and wanting much more than friendship. I thought I could manage it – I led her to expect more if we got a cottage – at last I spent a night with her. It was utter hell. There was a quality of loathsomeness about it which I can’t describe. I concealed from her all I was feeling – had a very happy letter from her afterwards. I tried to conceal it from myself – but it has come out since in horrible nightmares which wake me up in the middle of the night and leave me stripped bare of self-deception. So far I have said not a word to her – when I do, she will be very unhappy. I should like

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