BR TO CONSTANCE MALLESON, [21 OCT. 1916]
BRACERS 19062. ALS. McMaster. SLBR 2: #279
Edited by S. Turcon. Reviewed by K. Blackwell

<letterhead>
57 Gordon Square,1
London. W.C.
In the train.
Saturday.2

I have meant every time to tell you many things about my life, and every time the moment has conquered me. I am strangely unhappy, because the pattern of my life is complicated and yours is simple, because I am old and you are young, because with me passion can seldom break through to freedom, out of the net of circumstance in which I am enmeshed; because my nature is hopelessly complicated, a mass of contradictory impulses; and out of all this, to my intense sorrow, pain to you must grow.

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.

I can’t explain it or make it seem anything but foolishness — but whether foolish or not, it is the source of whatever is any good in me. I have known others who had it — Conrad3 especially — and I half think Gertler4 — but it is rare — it sets one oddly apart and gives a sense of great isolation — it makes people’s gospels often seem thin.

At most times, now, I am not conscious of it — only when I am strongly stirred, either happily or unhappily. Being busy kills it, and so does affection which is not passionate. I seek escape from it, though I don’t believe I ought to — but I must if I am to live any sort of ordered life. In that moment with you by the river I felt it most intensely — I wonder if you can understand it?

Well, now I come to outward circumstances. I began telling you about my friends the Eliots.5   I have a very great affection for them both — my relation to her especially is very intimate. If you met her you would be utterly unable to understand what I see in her — you would think her a common little thing, quite insignificant. But when I first knew her, which was 14 months ago, after her marriage, I found her so bruised and hurt by various people6 that I couldn’t bear it, and I felt only a great deal of affection would cure her. The result is a responsibility. I thought lately that I had come to an end, as there had been a long disagreement. But I find her mood quite changed, and all that I had tried to do for her has at last succeeded. I can explain the whole thing better when I see you. The root of the matter is that she had become filled with fear through having been hurt, and out of defiance had become harsh to every one including her husband, who is my friend, whom I love, and who is dependent on her for his happiness. If I fail her, she will punish him, and be morally ruined. During the disagreement, I thought this had happened, but it turns out that it hasn’t. I am really vitally needed there, and one can’t ignore that.

Then there is the slavery of work. The sort of work I try to do is not a question of hours, but of getting ideas, which only come to one if one keeps one’s thoughts on the subject — and that means that I have to keep on thrusting you out of my thoughts when I am away from you. Although liberty is one’s creed, there is no inward liberty when one has responsibilities — they are and must be a slavery:  I rebel against them often, but I can’t escape them.

The final result of all this is that I don’t very often have leisure and buoyancy of spirit together — as soon as I am at all tired I get oppressed, and often I can’t shake myself free. I feel that life and the world look much simpler to you than they do to me — I don’t disagree in theory, but my feeling is different. If you are able to find any happiness in what must be rather intermittent, I know the times will come again and again when I shall be all life and fire and passion — but perhaps you will grow too frozen between whiles to be able to respond? And perhaps you will feel there is so much unhappiness in such a thing that it isn't worth having?

It was quite terrible to see you so unhappy yesterday my dearest dear. It made me feel such a criminal. Can you learn to trust my love when it gives no sign? It is only because my spirit is in prison at times — and then, if you can bear the times between, it will come out of its prison again, singing with the joy of freedom, turning to you with a fuller joy each time, learning gradually to speak to you through the prison bars. But I cannot give you a simple happiness. I can give you moments of heaven with long intervals of pain between — if you think them worth while.

“Windows always open to the world”  I told you once  — but through one’s windows one sees not only the joy and beauty of the world, but also its pain and cruelty and ugliness — and the one is as well worth seeing as the other — and one must look into hell before one has any right to speak of heaven.  But it makes one a little grim.

My dear one, my lovely one, my Beloved, don’t, don’t be unhappy.  It is so dreadful to think that I am spoiling the beautiful joy of you which is like a sunny April morning.

We must talk more and get to know each other better. And when we have a background of many happy times together, momentary absences won’t be so hard. I am glad of the leisure of the train — it has made it possible to write things out. Goodnight my dear dear love — I would not mar your life. I would rather you should forget me than that. I love you, my Colette.

B.

• 1

  [document] Document 200028. A literary version (no. 4, pp. 8–9), greatly condensed was typed at a later date (document 007052EZ, F6; pp. 544–5), with a date of 23 October 1916. Its location in RA indicates it was at one time to be included in BR’s Autobiography.

• 2

  [date] Colette wrote “21 Oct. 1916” on the letter.

• 3

  Conrad Joseph Conrad (1857–1924), the novelist. BR named both his sons after Conrad (John Conrad [1921–1987] and Conrad Robert Sebastian [1937–2004]). BR, who first met Conrad in 1913, admired him immensely. His library contains many works by Conrad.

• 4

  Gertler Mark Gertler (1891–1939), the painter and member of the Bloomsbury Group.

• 5

  Eliots Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965), the poet and critic, was a student of BR’s at Harvard in 1914. BR sensed his ability, especially “a certain exquisiteness of appreciation” (to Lucy Donnelly, 11 May 1914; SLBR 1: 491), but did not see a genius in embryo. After Eliot travelled to England later the same year, to study philosophy at Oxford under H. H. Joachim, BR became something of a father figure to the younger man. He also befriended Eliot’s English wife, Vivien (née Haigh-Wood, 1888–1947), whom he had hastily married in 1915 and with whom BR may have had an affair the following year. BR shared his Bloomsbury flat (at 34 Russell Chambers) with the couple for more than a year after their marriage, and jointly rented a property with them in Marlow, Bucks. He further eased Eliot’s monetary concerns by arranging paid reviewing for him and giving him £3,000 in debentures from which BR was reluctant, on pacifist grounds, to collect the income (Auto. 2: 19). Eliot’s financial security was much improved by obtaining a position at Lloyd’s Bank in 1917, but during BR’s imprisonment Eliot faced uncertainty of a different kind as the shadow of conscription loomed over him. Nine years after the war ended Eliot returned the securities (BRACERS 76480). See Ronald Bush, “Eliot, Thomas Stearns”, Oxford DNB.

• 6

  I found her so bruised and hurt by various people In a draft of a letter which he did not send to Ottoline, he had said she had been badly hurt in two love affairs before she met Eliot (see Ronald W. Clark, The Life of Bertrand Russell [London: Cape and Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975], p. 311).