Dealing with Disappointment

Adam Phillips

Bertrand Russell 1921-70: The Ghost of Madness by Ray Monk

In the introduction to the first volume of his biography of Russell, Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude, Ray Monk was clear, as his title indicated, about the story he had to tell, though also daunted by the amount of material he had to work with. The bibliography of Russell’s work lists more than three thousand publications, and this doesn’t include the letters he wrote – over forty thousand of them. It was, of course, a long life, but even so, as Monk noted, ‘the quantity of writing that Russell produced in his lifetime almost defies belief.’ Russell may have experienced himself as a ghost: but he was an unusually articulate one. Monk was even more struck by what he called, in a characteristically prudent phrase, Russell’s ‘detailed self-absorption’. All this, one might think, would be something of a gift to a biographer: a dispersed autobiography to accompany the known facts. And yet in retrospect – in the light of this troubled and troubling second volume – one can see that Monk was uneasy about something. ‘A perhaps surprising amount of this vast output,’ he wrote, ‘was concerned with himself.’ ‘Concerned’ as in ‘worried’, ‘preoccupied’ and ‘baffled’; and ‘concerned with himself’, as it turns out, because he was quite unable, in Monk’s convincing account, to be concerned about anyone else. People become self-absorbed when being absorbed in others has become a problem. And so to be fascinated by the self-absorbed can be an especially lonely (and therefore enraging) task.

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Adam Phillips’s Intimacies, written with Leo Bersani, is out now. A book on the pleasures of kindness, written with Barbara Taylor, is due in January.

Dealing with Disappointment

Adam Phillips

From the archive