BR TO EDITH RUSSELL, 20 OCT. 1951
BRACERS 20255. ALS. McMaster
Edited by A.G. Bone. Reviewed by S. Turcon

Goose Bay, Labrador.
Oct. 20, 1951.1

My Darling2 —

If you know where this place is, you know more than I did till today. Our plane has an oil leak, and we have to stay here probably till tomorrow. It is a dismal place, dead flat, with small scrubby pines and occasional scars caused by the Sunday edition of the New York Times. The telegraph service and even the radio have broken down, so one can’t send word. I am so afraid you will be worried, but there is nothing I can do. I think with less sorrow of Medlock3 champing at the bit. I am contemplating standing for the Parish Council as the oldest inhabitant. There are no others except Air Force people. Our plane was mad from the start; it began by going to Iceland. The only fortunate circumstance is that it is not the mosquito season — every one says they are frightful in Labrador. The only other things I knew about Labrador were (a) that it is on the latitude of Yorkshire4 (b) that a couple in H.G. Wells who hated each other went to Labrador5 and became reconciled because they hated Labrador so much worse. For my part, I am glad of 24 hours’ respite. Most of the other passengers come from Palestine or the Persian Gulf. Some are white.

Going away from you was utterly hateful. However, it won’t really be a very long time, and you (I hope) will be consoled by doing your duty. I love you Darling and miss you every moment. All my heart, Beloved.

B

• 1

  [document] The letter was edited from a photocopy of the signed original written in BR’s hand.

• 2

  [recipient] The woman who became BR’s fourth wife, Edith Finch (1900–1978), was a close friend of his longtime correspondent and confidant Lucy Donnelly, who had introduced them (in England) as far back as 1925. BR and Edith had met periodically ever since, and they renewed this acquaintance in October 1950 when he was lecturing at Mount Holyoke College. They saw each other again a few weeks later in New York, to where Edith had moved from Bryn Mawr after Donnelly’s death in 1948. Romance blossomed after she quickly acted on BR’s invitation to visit him in London. Not only was he starting the most successful (and least complicated) loving relationship of his life, but he also acquired a dedicated secretary and amanuensis into the bargain. A published biographer (of Bryn Mawr college president Carey Thomas and American poet American poet Wilfred Scawen Blunt), Edith lived life with BR with an eye to posterity, and she performed an invaluable service in this regard by carefully preserving his archives over the next twenty years.

• 3

  Medlock Julie Medlock (1910–1976) was a forty-year old public relations consultant when introduced to Russell in November 1950, towards the end of his penultimate American lecture tour. She had been hired by the Matchette Foundation to handle publicity while Russell presented his lectures on the “Impact of Science on Society” at Columbia University. But this assignment was complicated by the announcement just before Russell arrived in New York that he had won that year’s Nobel Prize for Literature. As a result, she undertook with great skill and dedication the necessary “bear-leading” (as he later put it: Auto. 3: 28) of her celebrity charge, arranging and hosting, for example, a large press conference for him in her E. 57th St. apartment (see Apps. III.3–5 in Papers 26). The pair quickly established a rapport, and before returning to Britain Russell had hired Medlock as his literary agent for the American periodical press. Politically progressive and imbued with an idealistic faith in the power of informed opinion, Medlock was devoted to Russell precisely because she viewed him as an almost perfect apostle of public enlightenment. Russell, in turn, was impressed by her energy, efficiency and enthusiasm, which produced a flow of article commissions for him and made his last visit to the United States highly remunerative. But these same qualities came to grate on him too, as is abundantly clear from his lecture tour letters to Edith. Medlock’s professional assistance to Russell tailed off subsequently, until he effectively ended that relationship in 1953. But their correspondence continued into the 1960s, when Medlock was involved with anti-colonial politics in Ghana and established ties with the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation.

• 4

  (a) that it is on the latitude of Yorkshire Although Labrador spans the 52nd to 60th parallels North, Goose Bay (where BR landed) is located between the 53rd and 54th, the same as the largest English county by area.

• 5

  (b) that a couple in H.G. Wells who hated each other went to Labrador In Wells’s satirical novel Marriage (London: Macmillan, 1912), the socially ambitious Marjorie accompanies Trafford, her successful but disenchanted businessman husband, on a quest for meaning and fulfilment in the Labrador wilds. Battling the punishing winter elements together, the slightly jaded couple rediscover love and establish their relationship on a new footing: “We’ve found something here — that makes everything different.... We’ve found each other, too, dear wife” (p. 511).