Russell: The Journal of Bertrand Russell Archives

Lectures on immortality and ethics: the failed D. H. Lawrence-Bertrand Russell collaboration by George J. Zytaruk THE PLAN HAD all the ingredients ofan outrageous literary farce. The two leading characters could not have offered a greater contrast : one was definitely from the working class, or to use his own words "the son of a coal-miner, and very ordinary. I should probably pass as a 30/- clerk"; "married, age 30, a novelist of some small reputation, poor".1 The other was a Cambridge lecturer , "one ofits intellectual stars",z Fellow ofthe Royal Society, brother of an Earl, and lover of one of London's best-known patronesses of the arts. It was, in addition, "the worst of times". Since August 1914, England had been at war; on 7 May 1915 the Cunard liner Lusitania (see Letters, II: 340) was torpedoed by a German submarine with a loss of 1,198 lives; there were anti-German riots in London and on 27 July 1915 Prime Minister Asquith was to announce that the total number of British casualties up to date numbered 330,995. Who would be interested in attending a series of lectures? The proposed subject-matter was hardly likely to inspire an 1 The Letters ofD. H. Lawrence, Vol. II: June 191J-October 1916, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981): 35,397· 2 Paul Delany, D. H. Lawrence's Nightmare: The Writer and His Circle in the Years of the Great War (New York: Basic Books, 1978), p. 77. 7 8 Russell summer 1983 enthusiastic response among the general population. Even Russell had reservations about how the subject should be approached, being "so temporal, so immediate" (Letters, II: 358), as Lawrence put it, and had to be persuaded "to have a real, actual, logical belief in Eternity ... a belief in the absolute, an existence in the Infinite." Of course, for Lawrence, it was all very logical and obviously what was needed, what the times called for. Thus on 20 June 1915 he boldly announced to Lady Ottoline Morrell: "We think to have a lecture hall in London in the Autumn, and give lectures: he [i.e. Russell] on Ethics, I on Immortality: also to have meetings, to establish a little society or body around a religious beliefwhich leads to action" (the italics are Lawrence's, Letters, II: 359)· He went on to add: "We must centre in the Knowledge of the Infinite, of God. Then from this Centre each one of us must work to put the temporal things ofour own natures and ofour own circumstances in accord with the Eternal God we know." Although Lawrence already realized that his approach mightnot be accepted (and Frieda, he confessed, had the same trouble "as with all the Germans-all the world-she hates the Infinite, my immortality "), he was himself convinced that the "great work ... to do" that autumn (1915) was to "put aside the smaller, personal things" and to concentrate on "the big impersonal" issues, those which pertain to "the immortal world, the heaven of the great angels" (ibid.). All this, as I have said, he duly set down on 20 June 1915, apparently after his meeting with Russell on 19 June 1915, and at which time, as we may assume, the collaboration on the lectures was worked out. Russell was, in fact, still at the Lawrences when the letter to Lady Ottoline was written: "Bertie Russell is here. I feel rather glad at the bottom, because we are rallying to a point" (p. 358). Lest it be thought that the lectures scheme was wholly of Lawrence's making, we should be aware how Russell felt about it at the time. Writing to Lady Ottoline, who figures as a sort of "matriarchal confessor" in the whole enterprise, Russell reported: "We talked of a plan for lecturing in the autumn on his [i.e. Lawrence's] religion, politics in the light of religion and so on. I believe something might be made of it" (Letters, II: 359n. I). And he went on to outline his own possible contribution as follows: "I could make a splendid course on political ideas; morality, the Lectures on...