The Pleasure Principia

By Le Anne Schreiber

THE LIFE OF BERTRAND RUSSELL

by RONALD W. CLARK 766 pages. Knopf. $17.50.

MY FATHER, BERTRAND RUSSELL

by KATHARINE TAIT 211 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

$8.95.

THE TAMARISK TREE

by DORA RUSSELL 304 pages. Putnam. $9.95.

The mathematician-philosopher Bertrand Russell was a child's delight, full of games and good spirits and tall tales. As the Pied Piper of Cairn Voel, his country retreat on the Cornwall coast, he used to lead his young followers on hunts for the ingredients of a special home brew--a concoction of stagnant water, mold, dead leaves, old grass and whatever other unsavories could be dredged up at the moment.

The slop, labeled "Poison for the Government," was then poured in tobacco tins and left to stew in the sun. Russell's daughter Kate says that the game was one of her father's ways of teaching his children that everything the government did was "completely misguided if not deliberately wicked." The game also indicates the degree of pleasure --both principled and perverse--that Russell derived from his nearly lifelong role as the loyal opposition to all forms of authority.

About 1950 Russell suddenly became respectable. For his prolific output of technical and popular philosophy, social criticism and history, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and England's Order of Merit. Such respectability made the inveterate outsider in Russell uneasy. Occasionally, those bestowing the honors were uncomfortable too. As he was decorating the philosopher imp with the Order of Merit, King George euphemistically remarked:

"You have sometimes behaved in a way that would not do if generally adopted."

In his voluminous Life. Biographer Ronald Clark presents the full range of Russell's behavior that would not do: the grandson of a former Prime Minister, standing for Parliament in 1907 as the first candidate of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies; going to prison for pacifist activities during World War I; and leaving a wife behind in England in 1921 while he went to China for a year with another woman --Dora Black, the future second Mrs.

Russell. Nor would it do when in 1927 Bertrand and Dora opened up Beacon Hill, a progressive school where children were allowed to roam the grounds naked and taught how to be good, godless creatures of the earth.

Pink Ribbons. The tut-tutting spread to America in 1929, when he published Marriage and Morals. A defense of free love, the book caused an uproar in 1940 when Russell--then living in the United States with his third wife--was offered a professorship at the City College of New York. The case against Russell's appointment was tried--and won --in the state supreme court, where the prosecution argued that Russell was "lecherous, libidinous, lustful, venerous, erotomaniac, aphrodisiac, irreverent, narrow-minded, and bereft of moral fiber."

Definitely aphrodisiac, he was able to win four wives and countless other women who remained unwed. Russell was also able to keep them enthralled decades after he had abandoned them.

In her 80s, Alys Pearsall Smith, the prim American Quaker who had been Russell's first wife, still pinned pink ribbons in her hair for his visits.

Even more telling is Dora Russell's The Tamarisk Tree. Although Dora has lived a full and active life during the 45 years since her divorce, the autobiography she published this fall ends at the point of Russell's departure. Sadly, the book reads like a prolonged apologia for the fact that Russell left her, as if that called her worth rather than his capacity to love into question.

Perfect Woman. In his attempt to be dutifully definitive, Biographer Clark plods doggedly, day by day, through all 98 years of Russell's life: from his miserably unhappy childhood spent in the morbid solitude of his grandmother's house ("She would call me by mistake the names of people who were dead") to his final years as the thundering, latter-day Ezekiel of the nuclear disarmament movement. The result is a work that is more thorough than thoughtful.

Although far less ambitious and comprehensive than Clark's biography, My Father, Bertrand Russell succeeds better in bringing the man into focus. Katharine Tait, Russell's daughter by Dora, understands what linked the brilliant young nationalist of the Principia Mathematica (who with his teacher Whitehead and his student Wittgenstein redirected modern philosophy away from German idealism) to the political and sexual provocateur of later years: "All his life he sought perfection: perfect mathematical truth, perfect philosophical clarity, a perfect formula for society, and a perfect woman to live with in a perfect human relationship."

Bertrand Russell insisted on living in the best of all possible worlds and responded to imperfection as if it were a personal insult to his intelligence. That stubbornness made him the pain in the neck par excellence of modern times. Or perhaps, as Tait speculates, it made him a sort of saint -- "God's gad fly, sent to challenge the smugness of the churches with a righteousness greater than their own."

Le Anne Schreiber

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