BR TO ALYS RUSSELL, 12 NOV. 1950
BRACERS 21828. ALS(X). Barbara Halpern. SLBR 2: #503
Edited by A.G. Bone and N. Griffin. Reviewed by S. Turcon

Swarthmore Coll.
12.11.501

Dearest Alys2

Until now I have not had a moment to write any but business letters but now I have a few minutes. I was very glad to get thy letter of Oct. 27.3 How typical of Lion to behave as thee describes! — I saw Miss Putnam, who is amazingly plucky, and impressed me.4 I also saw Evelyn Whitehead — very old, very shaky with neuritis, and so nearly blind that she can’t read. She has a miserable life.5 On Tuesday I shall see Edith Finch.

Friday I go to Washington to see my daughter Kate, and Monday I return. Everybody is kind, but the F.B.I. haunts people’s minds — it is almost like Russia.6

I have to go to Stockholm on Dec. 10 to get the Nobel Prize. Descartes died of it just 300 years ago,7 but I hope I may survive. After that I hope never to travel again.

I will come to see thee as soon as I can in December.

Thine ever
B.

• 1

  [document] The letter was edited from a photocopy of the signed original in BR’s hand among the papers of Alys Russell’s great-niece, Barbara Halpern.

• 2

  [recipient] After almost forty years of silence, BR’s first wife Alys (née Pearsall Smith, 1867–1951) congratulated her ex-husband out of the blue when his Order of Merit was announced in June 1949. Yet Alys had remained quietly devoted to BR since their separation was formalized in 1911, after which she took on occasional social and humanitarian work before concentrating in later years on the care of her ailing brother, Logan, who died in 1946. She was thrilled that her friendly overture to BR was reciprocated and that some contact between them resumed (see Monk 2: 319–23). One highlight of this for Alys was the seventy-eighth birthday party she put on for BR and his son’s family in May 1950. As indicated by this letter and others, which continued until Alys’s death early the following year, BR immediately slipped back into the seemingly formal but actually intimate Quaker use of the second-person “thy”, “thee” and “thine”, by which they had always addressed each other as a courting and married couple.

• 3

  thy letter of Oct. 27 The letter from Alys has not survived so we do not know how "Lion" behaved. Lucy FitzPatrick (“Lion”) Phillimore (1869–1957) was a close friend of both Alys and BR.

• 4

  Miss Putnam … impressed me Bertha Haven Putnam (1872–1960) was a medieval historian and former professor of history at Mount Holyoke College, MA. Alys would probably have known her from her student days at Bryn Mawr. A recent attack of shingles had left her partially blind.

• 5

  I also saw Evelyn Whitehead… miserable life. This was the last time that BR saw his once intimate but always platonic friend Evelyn (née Willoughby-Wade) Whitehead (1865–1961) — widow of his Principia Mathematica collaborator, Alfred, whom she had married in 1891. Despite continuing poor health, her “miserable life” lasted for another eleven years.

• 6

  F.B.I. … almost like Russia In September 1950 the Internal Security (McCarran) Act had been passed over President Truman’s veto. It sought to register “communist” organizations, to set up concentration camps in which to intern their members without trial in the event of a national emergency, and to strengthen espionage and immigration laws. Through the late 1940s and early 1950s (to BR’s growing consternation: see, e.g., Papers 29: 148), the FBI enhanced its role as a political police force of rapidly increasing size and power. Informers of all kinds were widely used: in November the Director of the FBI had called on doctors to inform on their patients.

• 7

  Descartes died of it just 300 years ago French philosopher, mathematician and scientist René Descartes (1596–1650) died in Stockholm, probably of pneumonia, after being invited there by Sweden’s Queen Christina, both to attend her as a tutor and set up a scientific academy.