BERTRAND RUSSELL WAS A BAD MAN.

BERTRAND RUSSELL WAS A BAD MAN. Reading this review of a new book about the poetry of T.S.Eliot, I was reminded of what a bad man Bertrand Russell was. T.S. Eliot and his bride were both shy and sexually inexperienced at the time of their marriage. Eliot was 26 and had been a virgin until shortly before the marriage; his bride was 27. Eliot had longed for the transcendence of sexual experience. As Michiko Kakutani’s review says, Eliot’s poems are consistent with this yearning: “The one great animating idea of Eliot’s poetry, Mr. Raine persuasively argues in these pages, is the theme of the ‘Buried Life, the idea of a life not fully lived,’ a life of missed opportunities, repressed passions, forsaken loves….” Bertrand Russell, the great philosopher, was 43, an accomplished womanizer, a great aristocrat, and wealthy. Russell extended to Eliot a great deal of money and the opportunity to live in Russell’s flat shortly after the wedding. Russell also seduced Eliot’s bride. Russell even ridiculed what he called the “pseudo-honeymoon” that the Eliots took a couple of months after the wedding. The marriage turned out to be a disaster for both husband and wife.