Einstein's Genius Club Read online

  If their scientific energies had relatively short half-lives, their political energies, once unleashed by the two World Wars and their interregnum, knew no boundaries.

  The two men first met sometime in the early 1930s, possibly when Russell stopped in Princeton during an American tour. Their first known correspondence seems to have been in 1931, when Einstein wrote, expressing his “highest admiration” for the mathematician turned philosopher.59 (Russell returned the compliment, calling Einstein “the leading intellect of the age.”60) Had Plutarch lived today, he might have chosen Einstein and Russell as subjects of a modern Parallel Lives. By education and outlook, they were Victorians; by dint of genius, they helped define modernity. They shared the high optimism of purpose and confidence bequeathed by the European empire and the skepticism bequeathed by its inexorable demise. Both worked energetically throughout their lives. They carried on the Victorian practice of reading aloud to family. Einstein, for one, read to his invalid sister each evening from Herodotus or Xenophon—or Bertrand Russell. After his first marriage in 1894, the twenty-two-year-old Russell and his bride happily entertained each other in the evenings by reading aloud from Shakespeare, Gibbon, Plutarch, and Shelley's Epipsychidion.

  The two men also shared an intellectual heritage. Each had discovered Kant early in life (Einstein in his early teens; Russell at Cambridge).61 John Stuart Mill and David Hume were foundational, especially Mill for Russell. In later years, Einstein remembered Hume's works as having had “considerable effect on my development.”62 (Einstein's admiration of Russell's wit, logical precision, and skepticism may have its roots in the resemblance to Hume.) Although canonized, along with Nietzsche, Hegel, and Freud, as arch-shapers of the modern spirit, Einstein and Russell both preferred the cool rationalists of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Russell paid scant attention to such twentieth-century fevers as nihilism, existentialism, or the unconscious psyche. Einstein bothered with them even less and had no more to do with moral or historical relativism than the accident of the word “relativity.” His theory sought to rid physics of subjective relativity; indeed, the term “relativity theory” was coined by Planck, who nevertheless marveled over the “absolute, the universally valid, the invariant” uncovered by the theory. “Invariance theory” was proposed at one point as an alternative name, but “relativity” stuck.

  Above all, they were committed leftists, whose politics were tempered by inconsistencies. Einstein, a lifelong enemy of nationalism, supported Zionism and the creation of Israel—“I am against nationalism but for the Jewish cause” seemed to be a compromise he could live with. He championed freedom and equality but also declared that “the creative sentient individual… alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd remains dull in thought and feeling.”63 Russell was a political radical who remained an aristocratic with an aristocrat's sense of privilege. Ever at odds with the spirit of his times, he found himself drawn to and ultimately abandoned by young turks (Wittgenstein and D. H. Lawrence, especially) because he could not or would not subscribe to their views. The First World War moved Einstein and Russell into collision with politics and changed their lives. By the 1920s, they were activists and global celebrities, Einstein the Sage of the Universe and Russell the nonconformist founder of analytical philosophy.

  And yet, few men were so different, above all, in their heritage. Einstein was born into a middle-class family, but as a Jew and, for most of his life, a man without a country, he was very much the outsider. The aristocratic Russell was by birth an insider. Their given names reflect social class. Einstein's parents straddled the awkward, tentative path of assimilation, giving Albert a nonbiblical name, but not the more assimilated “Albrecht.” “Bertrand” had the opposite purpose—to emphasize distinction. The Russell family gained prominence when Henry VIII replaced the troublesome Catholic aristocracy with loyal Protestants. He ennobled John Russell and gave him splendid estates and abbeys. Bertrand's grandfather was an earl, a title Bertrand inherited in 1931.

  In character and demeanor, too, the differences were stark. One has only to think of the famous photograph of the elderly Einstein sticking his tongue out at the camera—childlike impudence mixed with self-mockery, the celebrity scoffing at anyone foolish enough to take celebrity seriously. Earthy and droll, Einstein also tended to be gentle with friends. More often than not, he was the target of his own sarcasm: “So now I too am an official member of the guild of whores,” he said upon taking the Patent Office position.64

  Such antics were never Russell's style. If Einstein was the benign clown, Russell was the witty satyr. T. S. Eliot, who had been Russell's student at Harvard in 1914, caricatured Russell in “Mr. Apollinax” as an interloper at a tedious faculty party, “laugh[ing] like an irresponsible foetus” and “grinning over a screen / With seaweed in his hair.” He did not fancy the Harvard dullards, and he let them know it. His wit was often used to flay. Of the Bloomsbury set, he snarled:

  They put up with me because they know I can make anyone look ridiculous—if I had less brains and less satire, they would be all down on me—as it is they whisper against me in corners, and flatter me to my face. They are a rotten crew.65

  One hardly knows whether to be awed more by the ruthless candor or by the ruthless turn of language. The power to sting never deserted Russell. Throughout his life, he discharged his quick brains and combative wit against the enemy, whoever it might be. When the target was public injustice or folly, Russell could be a refreshing gadfly—witness his early courageous attack on Soviet oppression in 1920, which earned the wrath of many intellectuals. Of his travels in Russia, he wrote, “I felt that everything I valued in human life was being destroyed in the interests of a glib and narrow philosophy, and that in the process untold misery was being inflicted upon many millions of people.”66 In private company, his acuity could make him chilling and feared: “He has the tongue of a witty, acidulous and far from benignant adder,” wrote Leonard Woolf in 1968, noting not only Russell's tendency to flay, but his prejudices as well—his “dislike and hatred of Americans, Jews, and even his personal friends.”67 He seemed to fascinate and repel in equal measure. D. H. Lawrence lampooned him in Women in Love (1920) as a “learned dry baronet” with frozen feelings and a “harsh horse-laugh.” Aldous Huxley cast Russell as Mr. Scogan in Crome Yellow (1921), harping on his “rather fiendish laugh”:

  Mr. Scogan was like one of those extinct bird-lizards of the Tertiary. His nose was beaked, his dark eye had the shining quickness of a robin's. But… his hands were the hands of a crocodile. His movement was marked by the lizard's disconcertingly abrupt clockwork speed… an extinct saurian.68

  Russell often struck observers this way: beak-nosed, small and bony, quick as a bird in response—and in his ability to peck. Einstein's sad eyes and wild hair seemed those of a simple saintly genius, a poetic dreamer. These familiar images distort both men. The “icy” Russell was as often stirred and generous; Einstein was neither simple nor saintly.

  Admiration and praise of another expresses one's own inner self. Einstein's heroes and heroines were many. Foremost was Hendrik Lorentz, the great Dutch physicist, whose “quite unusual lack of human frailties never had a depressing effect on others.”69 Max Planck was another father figure with whom Einstein remained friendly, despite their political disagreements. Of Marie Curie, Einstein recounted “twenty years of unclouded and sublime friendship”:

  Her strength, her purity of will, her austerity toward herself, her objectivity, her incorruptible judgment…. [O]nce she had recognized a certain way as the right one, she pursued it without compromise and with extreme tenacity.70

  Einstein had the same tough qualities, though unlike Curie, he was constitutionally cheerful. Madame Curie, he once lamented, could not shake off sadness: “She had the soul of a herring.”71 Not Einstein.

  Russell often saw himself reflected in those he admired, as if their genius might shore up his self-confidence. He felt a special kinship with the
novelist Joseph Conrad. “In the out-works of our lives, we were almost strangers, but we shared a certain outlook on human life and human destiny, which, from the very first, made a bond of extreme strength.” Conrad's pessimistic “philosophy of life” led him to “a profound belief in the importance of discipline… by subduing wayward impulse to a dominant purpose.”72 Russell, too, gazed into the abyss, and his life was a ceaseless struggle to subdue that “passionate madness” to which he, like Conrad's characters, tended. Russell never gave way to madness, but he was tormented by it, and by the passions to which he confessed in the first sentences of his Autobiography:

  Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.73

  Such buffeting by warring passions is nowhere visible in Einstein. In his soul there was no abyss. He remained grandly, classically optimistic: “The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.”74 In 1949, he composed some “Autobiographical Notes” for a volume in his honor. In sharp contrast to Russell's “ocean of anguish” (although Russell, too, indulged in gallows humor), Einstein's reminiscences begin with a humorous and jaunty bit of self-deprecation: “Here I sit in order to write, at the age of sixty-seven, something like my own obituary.”

  RUSSELL: ARISTOCRAT IN TURMOIL

  Bertrand Russell never seemed to lack social confidence. Rupert Crawshay-Williams, a young friend, describes a trip with Russell to Wales to check on a house that was being renovated, in Russell's view, too slowly. As they drove, Russell calmly discoursed on philosophy with Williams and his wife, Elizabeth. At the house, they found both builder and architect. Without more than a perfunctory greeting, Russell began to rant:

  “What do you mean by this intolerable and quite inexcusable delay?” he roared. The builder and the architect were so taken aback by this eruption that they were speechless for the first few minutes. They went pale with astonishment and their lips trembled….75

  Russell railed on and on. The workers were left “gasping and floundering.” Then he strode out to the car and calmly resumed the conversation as if nothing had happened. His companions were astonished. Might the workers now think badly of Russell, ventured Crawshay-Williams, having heard so much thunderous criticism? “No, I wasn't worried about that. Why should I be?” Russell the aristocrat knew his place in the social strata and did not hesitate to trade on it.

  But the inner Russell was not quite so confident. Much of his insecurity was fostered by a difficult childhood. Born into an aristocratic, unconventional family of stalwart Whigs, Russell inherited his liberal politics and, for better or worse, his Victorian sensibilities. His mother and father died before he was three, after which he and his older brother Frank were sent to live with their paternal grandparents at Pembroke Lodge. Lord John, the boys’ grandfather, once a monument of nineteenth-century English history (having launched the great Reform Bill of 1832 and served two terms as prime minister), died in 1878, when Russell was just six. Lord John's widow, Lady Russell, though twenty years younger than her husband, was formidable and utterly unsuited to parenting.

  Lady Russell was widely read, perfectly fluent in German, French, and Italian, and fearlessly unconventional. She was also immensely puritanical. For the good of her soul, she eschewed wine, meat, even the luxury of a “comfortable chair” for most of the day.76 Her self-abnegation extended beyond herself to her grandsons. The young Bertrand was forbidden even modest pleasures: No fruit, only the rare piece of candy, cold baths, and a rigid schedule were the order of each day.77 At Pembroke Lodge, Lady Russell's great house, a succession of eccentric relatives and eminent personages came and went.

  So, too, at the more vibrant household of the sharp-tongued Lady Stanley, his maternal grandmother. Russell remembered the “hawk's eye” of Prime Minister Gladstone and, at a time when the Irish nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell was under suspicion of murder, a succession of Irish MPs.78 Bertrand's godfather was John Stuart Mill, long a family friend. All around the boy, the talk was of high politics and Whiggish history. It was Lady Russell's great hope that Bertrand would enter politics, as his father and grandfather had before him.

  The boy had no real friends and few companions his own age. Frank escaped the dreary house early by waging a campaign of misbehavior until he was finally sent away to Winchester. Not Bertrand, who was tutored at home. He sometimes played games with the servants when their chores allowed. A solitary, brilliant child, he grew prematurely intellectual, analyzing others and himself. At eleven, he fell in love with Euclid. In his teens, introspective, precocious, and shy, he naturally kept a diary, but wrote his thoughts in secret Greek characters.

  Trinity College at Cambridge was his salvation. When he entered at eighteen, he was astonished to find other people like himself. He was not as odd as he had feared. A. N. Whitehead, Crompton Llewelyn Davies, Ellis McTaggart, Robert and Charles Trevelyan, Roger Fry, Lowes Dickinson—these young men were friends and colleagues with whom he could share the “whole world of mental adventure.”79 The shy, priggish, slight adolescent was, by the time he left Cambridge, self-confident and, if not worldly, at least part of a world.

  Russell's “first” in mathematics from Trinity was followed by a “first” in philosophy (Moral Sciences) in 1894. Immediately upon graduating, while working at the British embassy in Paris, Russell traveled to Germany, where he attended party meetings of the Social Democrats, who had just been outlawed. The trajectory recapitulates his life—one devoted first to mathematics, then to philosophy, and finally to left-leaning political action.

  In 1893, Russell began a romantic correspondence with Alys Pearsall Smith, the daughter of American Quakers living in Surrey. Alys was a serious, pious social reformer four years older than Russell. He fell in love immediately, but prudently waited until he was twenty-one, at which time he came into his inheritance and felt sufficiently independent to brave his family's inevitable disapproval. His formidable grandmother seems to have rejoiced when, momentarily, the marriage was delayed by fears that insanity in both families might be passed on to their children.80 The crisis was resolved when they assured each other (falsely, as it turned out, on Russell's side) that children were not necessary. The specter of birth control, which the Russell family doctor deemed “injurious to health,” was another impediment. At last, a second opinion laid to rest Russell's qualms. They married in 1894. Their marriage lasted until 1911, when Russell fell in love with Lady Ottoline Morrell. He and Alys were finally divorced in 1921.

  His academic life began when he was appointed a lecturer at the London School of Economics in 1896. By then, he had published German Social Democracy, his first book. Thereafter, of course, he evolved into the familiar Russell of the modern landscape: The archrationalist brushing away logical cobwebs, metaphysical confusion, and the shackles of religion, and the champion of social progress. He was the new Voltaire. Yet within, he always felt different and apart. His puritan impulses were at constant war with his desire for sexual liberation, and his yearning for certainty never seemed to square with the rationalism to which he aspired. Above all, his long experience with solitude in childhood haunted him, as did fears of insanity. Russell championed mathematical logic and analytic philosophy. He was, said Ottoline, “so quick and clear-sighted, and supremely intellectual—cutting false and real asunder. Somebody called him the Day of Judgment.”81 Yet he tangled incessantly with the vagaries of passion: “[M]y nature is hopelessly complicated; a mass of contradictory impulses.”82 These impulses, so beyond his control, led to a lifelong passion for self-analysis.

  From boyhood on, Russell recorded his inner self in letters, memoirs, journals, essays, and books. No other important philosopher has recorded his own life in such detail. Much of this detail is self-deprecating, all of it extremely revela
tory, nowhere more so than in his Autobiography, the final volume of which was published just before his death. Writing one's own life, observes Michael Foot in his introduction to the Autobiography, “ is the most risky and arduous of all the writer's arts.”83 It is courageous in great part because whatever it reveals can be taken at face value or deemed disingenuous—either way, in the effort to set history “right,” the autobiographer inevitably provides more ammunition.

  Russell's Autobiography alternates narration with contemporary letters to and from him. He scrutinizes his sexual maturation and its vicissitudes: his awkward masturbation as a youth; the enduring “comic” difficulties of coitus with his first wife, Alys; learning from his lover Lady Ottoline Morrell of his pyorrhea, finally cured by an American dentist. He records humiliation and anguish at the hands of his onetime pupil Wittgenstein and his onetime acolyte, the writer D. H. Lawrence.

  His relationship with Ottoline, the first truly uncontrollable love affair of his life, set off equally uncontrollable behaviors. Angry with her once, he walked twenty miles in the rain, “in a fit of madness.”84 Sexual passion left him haunted by the fear of insanity: “It doesn't do for me to relax too much—the forces inside are too wild—some of them must be kept chained up.”85

  Insanity must have seemed a threat. He was plagued by nightmares “in which I dream that I am being murdered, usually by a lunatic.” One night, he awoke from a nightmare with his hands around Alys's throat.86 He was no stranger to rage: At eighteen, he nearly choked his best friend to death; he attempted to smother his third wife, Patricia, with a pillow; he felt, in his own words, “murderous impulses” toward Paul Gillard, an acquaintance whom he called a “drunken homosexual spy.” He wasn't afraid of “peccadilloes,” he said, but he was terrified of “big violent crimes—murder and suicide and such things.”87