Necessary Russell; an introduction to the life and the times of Bertrand Russell, by William Ready

* Source: Necessary Russell; an introduction to the life and the times of Bertrand Russell, by William Ready (Toronto; Copp Clark, c1969. 118 p. 18 cm.)

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Preface - its beginning

This book, this Necessary Russell, is a child of the Russell Archive. It serves to introduce the reader to this, and so to Russell, his papers, life and times. If it gets people - students and strangers particularly - reading about him, sets them on the path towards understanding this extraordinary man, this Man of the Century, as he is so often hailed these days, it will serve its purpose. There are far finer, bigger, better books about Lord Russell than this pretends to be. The biography by Alan Wood, Bertrand Russell the Passionate Sceptic, (Allen & Unwin) is very good; the author almost raises Russell from the dead of print to meet the reader. There is also, translated from the German, the brief biography by Herbert Gottschalk, also published by Allen & Unwin in paperback.
Then, above all, are the writings of Russell himself. Surely his Autobiography, in three volumes (the third yet to come) also published by Allen & Unwin - I have a strong affection for these publishers for they too brought Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, to this Earth - is one of the landmarks in the world of literature and personal relations; compared to Russell's Autobiography even Rousseau's Confessions pale. The first volume, concerned with his childhood and youth is the most moving, the most revealing, the saddest, yet the most hopeful, of all the books that I have ever read, and if this account of Russell's childhood, background and growing-up is not enough to bring the reader closer to Russell, to respect, aye, and to love him, that reader is sick. Besides the volumes of the Autoiography and his two-volume edition of the Amberley Papers, collected and annotated from the letters and diaries of his parents, other Russell books will further fill in the rich and glowing, ever moving and startling, picture of Russell and his times, the times he helped to shape, the social, intellectual, literary and political history of these days. There is Fact and Fiction, a series of B.B.C. talks wherein Russell relates his youthful reading to his never-ending pursuit of truth that encompasses the beauty of the word and of the world. The Archive possesses several tapes of parts of this - book, and to hear Russell reading of the stuff of his dreams, for example, is one of the pleasures that awaits the visitor to the McMaster archival area.
The Russell Archive, with its hundreds of thousands of pages, either in manuscript or in printed form, contain the matter of it all, and hence this Necessary Russell, in introducing the Earl and his times, is a sketch, as it were, of the whole, that the student can fill out with the glowing colours the archival material will provide. He will find himself gazing face to face at the most illustrious and many-sided English genius who, for all his follies and grandeurs, remains the last great individual upon whom we all can take heart and bear, resist, even perhaps emerge alive as free men from, the dark that is coming down on us.
So we must see Russell, both as the public man and the other man he has been in times past and present, away from the roar of the crowd, the camera's eye, the roll of film, the partial view we are afforded of him by radio, television and the newspapers, the grind of the mass media. ....