BR TO CONSTANCE MALLESON, 3 AUG. 1930
BRACERS 19784. ALS. McMaster. SLBR 2: #390
Edited by S. Turcon and N. Griffin. Reviewed by K. Blackwell

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Carn Voel
Porthcurno
Penzance.1
August 3, 1930.

My dearest Colette

I was away2 and couldn’t write sooner; when I got back I found your letter, Escapade,3 John’s aeroplane quarterly,4 and a lovely bellows. We thank you for them all. I hope Burnett’s book5 will reach you in due course.

Beloved, your visit made me very happy, and you were just as dear and as lovely as in old days. Something — I don’t know what — caused my feelings to grow complex, incredibly complex. At moments I was paralysed by ghosts; at times I felt that John6 and Kate7 make it impossible for me now to give you the last agony of love; sometimes I felt that I have degenerated in the last ten years,8 and have no longer the fire I used to have. All these things made me vacillating and uncertain in my behaviour. I had not felt all this at Blagdon;9 I think it was the presence of John and Kate that made me feel it. I shall get my feelings pigeon-holed in time, but at the moment I was puzzled and probably puzzling.

Dora10 and her baby are here now; the baby’s father11 has just left.

I love you, Colette.

B.

• 1

  [document] Document 200790. Colette wrote “post-Peter” on this letter. Peter refers to Patricia (“Peter”) Spence, who had been at Carn Voel as the children’s governess when Colette visited in July. Peter would become BR’s third wife in 1936. “What the letter [i.e. this letter] does not say is that before his wife’s return BR and the governess had become lovers” (“Letters to Bertrand Russell from Constance Malleson, 1916–1969”, pt. 2, p. 21). Peter would have had to remain at Carn Voel with the children. Dora writes in her autobiography that she “had not been in the house more than a few hours before Bertie administered the shock of telling me that he had now transferred his affections to Peter Spence” (Tamarisk Tree [New York: Putnam’s, 1975], p. 226).

• 2

  I was away It is not known where BR went after dropping Colette in Exeter in Devon. He may have spent this time in solitude puzzling over his relationships.

• 3

  Escapade Presumably the book by Evelyn Scott (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1923). It concerns a young woman who flees to Brazil with an older man she loves; Scott described it as “creative autobiography” in a dust-jacket blurb of the 1930 edition (New York: J. Cape and Harrison Smith). In the next letter (BRACERS 19785) BR comments on the “remarkably plucky woman”.

• 4

  aeroplane quarterly The Air Force Quarterly.

• 5

  Burnett’s book John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy. Russell’s library (1158) has a copy published in 1908, while Colette received the fourth edition, 1930. BR cited and quoted Burnet many times in his History of Western Philosophy (1945).

• 6

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

• 7

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

• 8

  in the last ten years The ten years that had passed since BR left for China with Dora. This decade was spent almost entirely apart from Colette. She titled her autobiography, After Ten Years [London: J. Cape, 1931], and ends the book with her time in Cornwall: “We had the evenings together. The wheel had come full circle — after ten years” (p. 311). She wrote it during the summer of 1930.

• 9

  Blagdon A village in Somerset where Colette had lived since 1925.

• 10

  Dora Dora Russell, née Black (1894–1986). She and BR were married from 1921 until 1935. For information on her, see BRACERS 19506, n.3.

• 11

  her baby ... the baby’s father Harriet, who had been born 8 July to Dora and Griffin Barry. Harriet has written a biography of her American journalist father, A Man of Small Importance: My Father Griffin Barry (Debenham: Dormouse Books, 2003).