BR TO CONSTANCE MALLESON, 8 JULY 1942
BRACERS 19817. AL. McMaster
Edited by S. Turcon. Reviewed by K. Blackwell

<letterhead>
Little Datchet Farm
Malvern, R. D. 1
Pennsylvania1
8 July 1942

Dearest Colette

Your letter of 11 May2 reached me about a week ago, and two days ago I got a letter from S.K. Ratcliffe3 enclosing one from you. Evidently several of my letters to you must have gone astray; yours to me, as far as I can make out, have all arrived safely. I am not sending this air mail, as ordinary mail seems now to be better.

Peter4 got you letter thanking for photos, and I replied. She sends her love, and is sending a large recent photo of me; also some China tea from China Relief, from which we get all our tea. I hope they will arrive. — We have had good fortune with John:5 he is to be allowed to stay here till Feb. when he gets his degree, and then go home to enlist in <the navy>.6 This has given us all great relief. John is very studious, and his mind grows steadily better; he is altogether delightful, and full of fun.

I am sorry you have so much difficulty about getting books published. Now-a-days opinions have to fit into a narrow groove of orthodoxy; I can’t get articles published here, except sometimes by luck. Do you remember a man named Mainucci, whom I used to talk about, who in the 17th century wrote a history of the Great Mogul,7 which he hoped would not fall into the hands of the Jesuits, but it did, so it was not published till this century.

I go on with my History of Philosophy;8 it turns out to be a history of the growth and decay of the Catholic Church which began with the Orphics9 in the sixth century B.C. Plato was the most important of the Fathers of the Church — a bad man, but charming. The whole thing may seem remote, but what is there to say about the present day?

Kate10 is at Radcliffe (the feminine of Harvard) — she always gets the best possible grade in everything. Conrad11 flourishes, and is very like John at his age.

Peter sends love. My very warmest wishes for whatever good fortune is possible in these times.

Yours evera

Peter has packed up a parcel of tea but the Post office doesn’t know whether it can be sent. Probably she will find a way in time. The tea is not very good, but the best obtainable.

• 1

  [document] Document 200823.

• 2

  letter of 11 May (BRACERS 98439).

• 3

  letter from S.K. Ratcliffe The letter is dated 2 July 1942 (BRACERS 97205). Samuel Kerkham Ratcliffe (1868–1958) was a journalist and writer on Indian and American affairs. In the letter Ratcliffe writes that Colette took a parcel from Ratcliffe’s wife for Elli, a Finnish girl who had lived with them long ago, to Finland in late 1939. The letter he enclosed is not extant.

• 4

  Peter Patricia (“Peter”) Russell, née Spence (1910–2004). She and BR were married from 1936 until 1952.

• 5

  John John Conrad Russell, born 16 November 1921 to BR and his wife Dora.

• 6

  enlist in <the navy> The missing words “the navy” have been taken from the “Letters to Bertrand Russell from Constance Malleson, 1916–1969”, 2, p. 74, but there is space for more than these two words.

• 7

  Mainucci ... Great Mogul Niccolò Manucci, Storia do Mogor, or Mogul India, 1653–1708, translated and with an introduction and notes by William Irvine (Russell Library, no. 264–7). Irvine found the missing manuscripts in 1899, which had been written in Italian, Portuguese, and French. Before then, the text had only been known through three abstracts prepared from 1707 to 1717 by the Jesuit Father Catrou. Manucci left Venice in 1653 and lived in India from 1656 until his death.

• 8

  my History of Philosophy  A History of Western Philosophy (B&R A79) which was published in 1945.

• 9

  the Orphics The Orphics taught that the soul hereafter might achieve eternal bliss or suffer eternal or temporary torment according to its way of life here on earth” (History of Western Philosophy, “The Rise of Greek Civilization”).

• 10

  Kate Katharine Jane Russell, born 29 December 1923 to BR and his wife Dora. Her surname changed to Tait upon her marriage.

• 11

  Conrad Conrad Sebastian Robert Russell, born 15 April 1937 to BR and his wife Patricia.

Textual Notes

• a

  Yours ever signature missing because of excision on recto