REVIEWS

The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell - Vol. I (1872-1914 )–George Allen and Unwin Ltd., Ruskin House, Museum Street, London. Pages 230. Price 40 shillings.

Despite his latter-day excursions into the explosive region of world conflicts, in which his maturity of political wisdom is not always seen at its best, Bertrand Russell remains a sort of intellectual Methuselah of the modern world. His pronouncements, on any and every subject under the sun, are sure to compel attention, even where they do not convince people and win their agreement. Those who might occasionally feel like writing him off for one of the vestigial remains of a more spacious age, cannot ignore his versatile genius and wide-ranging scholarship. He is regarded not only as one of the most significant seminal thinkers of this century, but as one of the best prose-writers of the English language for several generations. In life, as in thought, he has never ceased to be a figure of controversy. He might not always have been on the side of the angels, but his good intentions, at any rate his intellectual bona fides, have never been seriously questioned. It is possible that he was many times in the wrong but rarely, if ever, on the side of wrong. That his autobiography, of which the first part has recently seen the light of the day, should be eagerly awaited as an epoch-making document by his admirers and other readers alike the world over, is but natural. Nor would it be a surprise if it were to prove a best seller, for the year, in the branch of serious non-fiction.

To those who have been used to thinking of the Russell way of writing as being rather cold, logical and precise, not to say restrained, the manner of dedicating this book certainly comes as a surprise. In praise of his fourth (and possibly last) wife, Edith, he says:

“Through the long years I sought peace. I found anguish, I found madness, I found loneliness. I found the solitary pain that gnaws the heart, but peace I did not find,”

“Now, old and near my end, I have known you, and, knowing you, I have found both ecstasy and peace. I know rest after so many lonely years, I know what life and love may be.”

“Now, if I sleep, I shall sleep fulfilled.”

To presume that he literally means every word of what he says would be to put a liberal construction on a passage, which might otherwise read like part of an unpublished letter from a Keats without his gift of poetry. Something of the same maudlin sentiment, with a saccharine flavour, seems to overflow into the brief prologue, setting out the main objectives of his life, which says:

“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of 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 verge of despair.

“Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

“This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again, if the chance were offered me.”

If we had read these lines in the columns of a daily newspaper, instead of in the pages of a hard-cover book, we might well have mistaken them for an extract from the political rhetoric of Dr. Soekarno or the lugubrious histrionics of the late Dr. Mossadeq. The testament of beauty and faith is delightfully vague and impressively lofty, as it is. One could only hope that there was no overstatement of any kind in this. That the main body of the book, running to over a couple of hundred pages, is not written in this emotional strain, is no small mercy that the reader has to be thankful for. Actually, it represents the other extreme–factual in approach, meticulous in detail, and even trivial in its minutiae. Now past 95, the author cannot, in fairness, be expected to recall his early childhood, with any degree of vividness or accuracy, unless he had maintained a diary, with retrospective application. All that we can be sure about in the period is that his childhood and youth were far from happy. An almost unrelieved loneliness and boredom and a suffocating discipline of a mid-Victorian aristocracy were the main impressions of these formative years. He mentions quite a few incidents, of no great importance in the evolution of his personality–e.g., how he hurt his penis in a fall from the coach, and how he began to cry in trying to gulp down a large slice of icecream, and suchlike.

The ‘longing for love’ leads the youthful Russell to many odd, and not so odd, situations beginning with the overtures to the maid-servant whom he wanted to kiss, and culminating in the more passionate love-affair with a sister of Logan Pearsall Smith, Alys, five years his senior, whom he succeeds in winning as his first wife. But after a few years, the realisation dawns on him, all on a sudden, while seated on a bicycle in a country ride, that he no longer loved her, though she had remained faithful to him all through. The unforgettable encounter with the still young and beautiful Lady Otteline Morrell, with whom he spends two or three ecstatic nights, seems to have brought him close to the highest fulfilment. But when he found that she was in no mood for a family break-up and that her interest in him was much less than his in her, he began to reconcile himself to the inevitable. He was mainly instrumental too in shattering the heart of a bright young American girl of literary ambitions and driving her to madness and then to a premature death. He makes the confession that he would have married her, but for his campaign for pacifism on the eve of the First World War, which he did not want disturbed by a private scandal! A remarkable feature of all these experiences is that none of them were allowed to affect his concentration on the intellectual work with which his name is ever to be associated. The saving grace is, of course, the refreshing candour with which he recounts them, even when they do not show his character in the best of lights.

The life at Cambridge, as a student or as a Fellow, as depicted by the author, stands out as the best part of the whole account in this volume. It was at Cambridge that his resourceful intellect received the sort of stimulus that it most needed for its development. And it really never stopped growing hence. Prof. Whitehead, his teacher, and McTaggart his college contemporary, and other great minds of his generation left an abiding impress on him. The groundwork for his Principles of Mathematics, as also the later Principia Mathematica, was done during this period and the foundations were laid for the basic structure of his philosophic thought. Not that the scholar’s life was all work and no play. He obviously enjoyed the company of some of his brilliant friends, as he recalls many anecdotes in his typical tongue-in-the-cheek manner. Some of these profiles (not quite adding up to ‘portraits’) from memory are delightful in themselves–the three brothers Trevelyan, of whom the second seemed to love books more than anything else in life, prefacing every poetry reading with the remark that the present selection was not from the author’s best. The youngest, George (who was to attain fame as a historian), was addicted to the habit of walking miles, about forty a day, which he would not give up even on his wedding day, to the discomfiture of his bride! Logan Pearsall Smith (who was at Ballioi) was the founder of the Society of Prigs (sic.), G. L. Dickinson is remembered with some affection. Of Keynes, many years his junior, he has only the highest praise:

“Keynes’s intellect was the sharpest and the clearest that I have ever known. When I argued with him, I felt I took my life in my hands, and seldom emerged without feeling something of a fool. I was sometimes inclined to feel that so much cleverness must be incompatible with depth, but I do not think this feeling was justified.”

Amusing pictures are given of the Webbs, especially Beatrice Webb (“Marriage is the wastepaper basket of emotions”), and H. G. Wells. The only person, for whom his respect was not affected by the intrusion of the sense of the ludicrous, was, surprisingly enough, the novelist Joseph Conrad. The Strachey family, large and confusing in their likeness, is described with a full play of the comic spirit. Of the writings of Lytton Strachey, which he enjoyed reading, he has this to say:

“His style is unduly rhetorical, and sometimes, in malicious moments, I have thought it not unlike Macaulay’s. He is indifferent to historical truth and will always touch up the picture to make the lights and shades more glaring and the folly or wickedness of famous people more obvious. These are grave charges, but I make them in all seriousness.”

And so he might let himself forget that Strachey was less of a liberal-minded historian than a superb literary artist, beside being a satirist. Strachey’s prose style was rightly described by Max Bearbohm as the most beautiful he had ever read in the English language. Of Russell’s own style the present volume does not provide the best example. Most often it is rather undistinguished here, and in places downright clumsy, as in:

“In our differences on this subject he was more tolerant than I was, and it was much more my fault than his that these differences caused a diminution in the closeness of our friendship.”

“I had no longer any instinctive impulse towards sex relations with her, and this alone would have been an insuperable barrier to concealment of my feelings.” (sic.)

The surprise at the end of the book (which is eminently readable, by and large) is not that he fails to write as brilliantly as he might be expected to by the admiring reader, but that he writes at all and clearly enough at his age! The overall impression of the subject, however, is anything but pleasant. He is peevish, more often than not, and thinks low of American professors who try to be extra-polite to him (by telling him the way home in a town, to which he was new). His famous ‘dry wit’ is a little too dry and brittle and the ‘cad’ under the skin plays hide and seek with the genius. All the same, anything written by Russell can hardly fail to be of absorbing interest. One could only hope that the next volume of his autobiography will be more satisfying than the first and that the well-known publishers will be a little more careful about their proof-reading.

–D. ANJANEYULU

A Study of Telugu Compounds by Bhasha Praveena, J. Suryanarayana, M. A., Ph. D. Pages 15 plus 122. Published by Sri Venkateswara University, Tirupati.

This work is a thesis submitted to the Sri Venkateswara University, Tirupati, for the award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. The thesis is an attempt to study the influence of the formation of Samskrit Compounds On that of the Telugu compounds and also the structure of Compounds in the light of modern linguistics. The scope of study is confined to Telugu Compounds in Tikkana’s Mahabharata wherefrom about 1800 desi compounds have been selected. A comparative study of the formation of Compounds in the important Dravidian languages is also made here.

The author defines the word Compound as “a combination of two or more constituents.” What the Telugu grammarians regarded as aluk Compounds are not really such and there is no possibility for such Compounds in Telugu. Avyayibhava and ekadesi Compounds are not natural to Telugu and the Telugu grammarians have erred in adopting that nomenclature from Samskrit. Bahuvrihi or exocentric Compounds are also rare in Telugu. Compounds like Padagatalpu and Nelatalpu cannot be regarded as Tatpurusha Compounds in Telugu. The dropping of case suffix in the formation of Telugu Compounds is imaginary and based on the Samskrit grammar. Samasanta Pratyaya in Telugu is deliberately brought into Telugu to make Bahuvrihi construction possible therein. Some of the Compounds named by Telugu grammarians as avyayibhava and tatpurusha are in reality exocentric in construction. There are in Telugu many Compounds that remain unclassified. These are a few of the conclusions arrived at by the author, and these require a careful consideration, scrutiny and proper understanding.

An ordinary reader would like to have a comparative evaluation of the definition given by the author and the Telugu grammarians. He would like to know more clearly how the Compound Suryatejudu In Telugu can be understood as a tatpurusha. Is the interpretation of the sutra defining Pratipadika comprehensive? Does the last statement on Page 121 take into account the rules in Balavyakarana?

These and other very minor doubts do not in any way detract the work from its merits. The author has certainly thrown a new light on the Compounds in Telugu and paved a path for fresh research in that line.

–B. KUTUMBA RAO

Window to the West–Travel Diary of an Indian Writer: By D. Anjaneyulu. (Triveni Publishers, 240 Angappa Naick Street, Madras-1)

Many indeed are the achievements of Indo-Anglian literature in recent years, but good travelogue is not one of them. We have either bare narratives of one’s travel experiences or idealised pictures of places visited by the traveller that almost answer to the pejorative epithet of traveller’s tales, but not that rare amalgam of personal experience blended with the poetry of place to yield a true work of art of the genre of Johnson’s Tour or Boswell’s Journal.

In this, as in many others, the distinction of being the first amongst Indians should perhaps go to Mr. K. P. S. Menon, whose travel diaries are at once a personal record and an evocation of the place. Mr. Anjaneyulu deserves to rank a close second, for his Window to the West is in the best tradition of the trail blazed by Mr. Menon in his Delhi Chungking, Russian Panorama and the Flying Troika.

In one sense, the performance of Mr. Anjaneyulu is more praiseworthy even as it is more challenging and arduous. Within the brief compass of 144 pages, he takes his readers in a whirl over Europe–Europe on either side of the Iron Curtain. Starting with Tashkent, a city of contrasts, the reader is not only taken in turn to Moscow and Leningrad, but also to other important places of literary and artistic importance in their neighbourhood like Tolstoy’s birthplace and Pushkin Town. He is then given a vivid glimpse of Helsinki, a clean and modern city; Stockholm, The City Beautiful; Copenhagen, of Dreaming spires; Amsterdam with its Canals and Gables; Picturesque Brussels; legendary London; Paris of faded elegance; there is Rome, a sermon in stone; Geneva, a Confluence of Nations; Vienna of Palaces and Vineyards; Prague, Western City in Eastern Europe; and finally Berlin, the tale of Two Cities.

It is not the least of the work’s merits that Mr. Anjaneyulu is an uncommitted traveller. He could, therefore, see the countries visited in their true perspective and give a travel diary as free from bias and propaganda as it is full of delight and wisdom. As the great ‘Cham of literature’ rightly observed, a man must carry knowledge with him if he is to bring home knowledge. Mr. Anjaneyulu’s travel diary of Europe is verily a true index of his wide reading and vibrant humanism. He saw things as a scholar and without either lordly sneer or servile adulation and expressed himself in a prose-style as simple as it is elegant.

Even those who are familiar with some of its contents (as some chapters had appeared earlier) will find the diary of absorbing interest as seeing a scene or two in rushes is not the same as being treated to the whole movie itself. A perceptive critic has already called it “a kaleidoscope of still life.” But, when read as a whole, I suppose the stillness makes place for movement.

Whether still or moving, the diary contains good sense, and is so happily worded that it deserves to be set for study by our college students for its style no less than for its content. That honour had already been accorded to Mr. Menon’s Delhi Chungking, and it would not be rash to predict the same treatment for Mr. Anjaneyulu’s Window to the West.

–T. S. R.

History of Indian Journalism: by S. P. Thiaga Rajan. Dstributors: The Columbia House, Gandhiji Road, Thanjuvur, Tamil Nad, Price: Rs. 3.

Peeps at the Press in South India: by A. A. Nair. Published by the author, 8 South Street, Santhome High Road, Madras-28. Price: Rs.3.

Personal Preferences (essays for literary occasions): by S. A. Govindarajan (M. Seshachalam & Co., Madras-1, Machillpatnam, and Secunderabad. Price Rs. 2)

All the three books under notice are by noted journalists of the south of India, who had grown grey in the profession. Time was when the south was known as the pen-arm of India–a well-merited tribute to the writing talent form this part of the country, which was very much in demand in all the regions, including Bengal, though to a slightly lesser extent. It was then possible largely because of the position occupied by the English language in the political and intellectual life of the nation, even at those times when the English rulers were not in favour among a freedom-loving people who could hardly ever feel the language itself to be a hurdle in the struggle to attain the long-cherished goal. All the three authors have one common feature–that of a commendable felicity of expression in the English language, in which they had been functioning for over half-a-century. Their temperaments and outlook on life, as reflected in their writing, in the manner as well as the matter, are vastly different from one another. But, there is a lot of common ground covered by two of these books and the third is not unrelated to them in its basic element. All these three authors roughly belong to one generation of journalists who believed in the quality of what they wrote and kept their interests as wide as they possibly could, without losing sight of their own acknowledged forte.

In the History of Indian Journalism, Mr. S. P. Thiaga Rajan brings together a number of articles contributed by him, from time to time, to newspapers like the National Herald (Lucknow), Blitz and The Times of India (Bombay), besides the souvenirs brought out by IFWF and other organisations of working journalists. In these articles are discussed, at length, many of the problems of practical interest to the profession, including freedom of the press and training for journalism, the Press Commission and the Press Council. In the first chapter entitled “History of Indian journalism”, the author makes a merciless analysis of the second part of the report of the Press Commission, which was compiled by Mr. J. Natarajan. While exposing the gaps in the chronicle and pointing out the general deficiencies of the compilation, he, however, concedes the utility of the volume as raw material (“notes,” to quote the exact word) for a history, of Indian journalism, which is yet to be written, in a real sense, in spite of some work-a-day attempts extant in the field. On the ‘Freedom of the journalist’, the author is typically down-right in warning against its being confused with that of the proprietor (who insists on calling the tune as he pays the piper) or the well-paid editor, who is only too willing to serve as the mouth-piece of his employer and identify public interest with the former’s private interest. Refreshing candour is one of the striking characteristics of the book. Not surprising this when we remember that the author has always called the spade a spade. His rugged intellectual honesty is complemented by a range of knowledge, which is almost encyclopaedic in this field.

In some ways, the second book is rather a contrast to the first. While Mr. Nair restricts himself to the newspapers and editors of Madras, he prefaces it with a general introduction into which had obviously gone a good amount of research work. He pieces up an impressive array of historical facts into a useful chronicle for students of journalism. Among the Madras newspapers, he devotes considerable Space to ‘The Mail’, which he had loyally served for over three decades, recalling his association with its English editors, whom he succeeded towards the close of his career. In discussing men and events, he is always cautious, and almost non-committal, unlike Mr. Thiaga Rajan, who has done a hearty job of it with “Some vanished voices.” Printer’s devils abound in both the books, which deserve better of the printer as well as the reader.

‘Personal preferences’ is an apt title for the pleasant collection Mr. Govindarajan’s essays in literary journalism. Churchill, Shakespeare and Presidency College are among his personal preferences long familiar to those who had known him and his catholic tastes. The genial personality of the author (S. A. G., to friends) casts a gentle glow on every page of the slim booklet. He underlines the vital links between literature and journalism by precept as well as by example, worthy of emulation by the aspiring journalist.

–D. ANJANEYULU

panditji–A portrait of Jawaharlal Nehru By Marie Seton. Rupa & Co. Calcutta. Pages 515. Price Rs. 40.

Builder of Modern India –Edited by M. Chalapathi Rau. Published by the National Herald, Lucknow. Price Rs. 10.

At a certain level, of the overt and the political, Jawaharlal Nehru’s life was almost an open book to the Indian reader. Or so it seemed, for decades more than any national leader’s, with the possible exception of Mahatma Gandhi’s. But even here, there is a point that is apt to be forgotten by the more superficial observer. While it is true that the Mahatma was thinking aloud all the time (and he meant it when he said it, which was quite often), the process itself threatened at times to defy the ordinary methods of logical analysis, as it was intuitive rather than strictly rational. The ‘inner voice’ was necessarily shrouded in mystery, and the spiritual basis of any formulation lent it a kind of sanction that could not be easily challenged, except at the risk of blasphemy.

Nehru, on the other hand, spoke the language of the modern man, which could be understood by the educated Indian no less than the Western intellectual. He was communicative in a very real sense, which fitted him well for the task of the great educator of the Indian masses. There was no conscious mystification or deliberate vagueness about his personality or his approach to any problem. It was altogether a different matter if the subject itself was not easy of understanding or the issue was intractable. One could always follow his line of thinking, even where one could not see eye to eye with him. Even so, less than a couple of years after his death, Nehru had become one of the most misunderstood (as well as the least understood) men of the modern world. The political commentators and other professional writers, who were never tired of laying it on with a trowel during his lifetime and stood to gain by their self-imposed labours, are the busiest now in wielding the tar brush to blacken his memory and make further gains to their own personal credit, largely made up of the fictitious dividends of political hindsight. Our image of Nehru the man and the thinker no less than that of Nehru, the Freedom-fighter and the Prime Minister, is likely to get distorted in this campaign, if we are not alert.

Far from being intellectually fashionable, it might now be deemed slightly awkward for sometime for anyone to try and make a friendly assessment of Nehru, the political leader, or Nehru the human being. Marie Seton does not undertake to do either, as of set purpose. Her “Portrait of Panditji” is intimate, personal and spontaneous. She writes more as a family friend than as a trained biographer or a learned student of public affairs. Her facts are not always meticulous in their dates and other details. Nor is she very subtle in her grasp of the complexity of post-freedom politics in India. As a matter of fact, she is rather naive in her comments on many of the topics of controversy in India or the world outside. But on one thing she is on sure ground. She never misjudges the larger stakes, nor does she misinterpret Nehru’s basic intentions. She does not indulge in misunderstanding as a fine art. She does not try to be clever where she can be content with being simple, direct and factual.

The author’s first direct encounter with Nehru and Indira Gandhi was sometime in 1955, when she stopped over in Delhi on her way to attend the Asian Film Festival. She might have met them earlier in England, but it was only from now on that her real acquaintance with the family began and she stayed off and on as a guest in “The Big House” and almost became one of the household. The one impression that stands upper-most in her sumptuous volume, profusely illustrated by rare snapshots from the family album, is that of Nehru as a human being–warmhearted, uninhibited, genuine, friendly and lovable. His friendship for K. Krishna Menon (perhaps one of the very few who could understand him fully) is described in good detail and the progress of their relationship traced in all its ups and downs. The last days of Nehru are vividly captured in a series of close-ups as on a television Screen. The postscript contains a brief study of Mrs. Gandhi’s character and the confidence it inspires in measuring up to her new responsibilities.

Jawaharlal Nehru’s relation with the National Herald was among the most fruitful in the annals of political journalism. He gave much of himself to it, but also derived not a little by way of moral and intellectual reinforcement from its editorial columns. On the spelling out of the basic postulates of his foreign policy, this was particularly true. No wonder, therefore, that the souvenir (which is really a symposium on Nehru’s contribution to Indian life and thought) brought out by the Herald is something more than a bunch of conventional tributes to the memory of a departed leader. In editing this volume, Mr. Chalapathi Rau has shown his characteristic judgment and discrimination as also his well-known restraint. The studies are well-thought out and well-written. Mr. Narla’s assessment of Nehru as a maker as well as a writer of history is bold and perceptive. He places him higher than Churchill and Caesar, but with good reasons. Prof. Hiren Mukerji’s political analysis is sympathetic but sharp and Dr. Mulk Raj Anand’s essay on Nehru, the Intellectual, is very comprehensive. Messrs Sri Prakasa, P. N. Sapru, Joachim Alva, Dr. Syed Muhmed, Dr. Gopal Singh and others, who had known the subject at close quarters, have contributed to this substantial volume, which is indispensable for any student of Nehru.

–CHITRAGUPTA

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