In the bosom of Bertrand
New McMaster location for its archives of great philosopher opens, and Ken Blackwell is delighted
It’s been a good week for Ken Blackwell, Bertrand Russell torchholder, archival virtuoso, chronic job withdrawal sufferer (he’s come in to work “volunteering” virtually every day since he retired in 1996.)
“Another letter has been found,” he tells me the other day, and I half expect him to hand out cigars. “Handwritten.”
New letters never cease to excite Ken, even though there are already 130,000 in the Bertrand Russell Archives at McMaster, about 40,000 written by Russell, the great philosopher/peace activist; the rest written to him.
There are correspondences with Einstein, John Lennon, John Kennedy, Nikita Khruschev — all manner and means of people, high, low, in-between.
There are 1,900 just between Russell and Lady Ottoline, a mistress of his, some written to her from Brixton where Russell was imprisoned for pacifist activism during the First World War.
The letters and vast archives of which they’re part now have more than a room of their own; they have an entire house; yet more reason for Ken to come in.
Friday was its grand opening — the new Bertrand Russell Archives and Bertrand Russell Research Centre building, a repurposed home, corner of Forsyth and Sterling. The archives had been in the basement of Mills Library.
Friday was also the start of the 45th annual Bertrand Russell Society Annual Meeting/Conference, being held in Hamilton at McMaster, partly in honour of this, the 50th anniversary of the archives. So, yes, a good week for Ken Blackwell.
“It’s nice to have all these people together who speak the same language,” he says. And that language is Bertrand Russell.
We’re in the vaults where materials are stored in rows of climate-controlled shelving space behind sliding doors with wheel handles. Conference visitors stream in to see the archives in their new home.
There’s Yi Jiang, for instance, visiting from China. He’s founding an institute of analytic philosophy (the kind Russell’s known for) in Beijing.
Ken’s 75, and since his early 20s, he’s looked after the archival collection, among the largest ever assembled around the work and life of a single person. But then, Russell was like 10 people crammed into one identity.
McMaster University acquired the archives in 1968, after Ken had spent two years organizing them. A Texas university offered Russell’s literary agent £100,000 for them. The agent, unsure about the value, asked Ken how much it was worth.
Ken said, “Double that.” And that’s what the archives eventually fetched.
Many were bidding, including Harvard. When McMaster, under the direction of chief librarian William Ready, outflanked them all, it was to the tune of a cool US$480,000.
Ready tapped on a lot of big private money to make it happen, including Cyrus Eaton.
With the deal done, Ken was asked to manage the archives. He knew them — and Russell — better than anyone. (Still does arguably, always acquiring, adding to, cataloguing, fine tuning and editing the holdings.) So he repatriated himself, Hamilton 1968, a city he barely knew, having grown up in Victoria.
It was in Victoria, 1963, that Ken, 20, read a book about the Cuban Missile Crisis, with the world still shuddering from the apocalyptic chill of that Cold War contretemps. Of course, we somehow survived; instead of nuclear annihilation, we got a crop of stilted TV docudramas featuring toothy actors with stagy Boston accents trying to out-Kennedy each other. But some good resulted too: “Unarmed Victory” by Bertrand Russell, the book Ken read, about Russell’s efforts to intervene.
Ken had never read anything by Russell before; he’s read everything since.
“Unarmed Victory” didn’t just change his life, it changed his major (from commerce to English/philosophy) and, at length, his geographic co-ordinates. From west coast Canada to Wales, where he travelled, just to meet Russell, who almost on instinct, it seems, asked Ken to sort out some of the papers in his basement.
That’s how Ken, at 23, came to be involved, soon authoritatively so. It’s hard to grasp the enormity of what he undertook. Russell was almost ridiculously prolific.
Philosopher/mathematician, he reshaped 20th century philosophic thinking. His was also a Cassandra voice of early, farsighted nuclear disarmament advocacy. He protested for peace. He was agnostic, a thorough critic of prevailing sexual mores and had several open affairs.
Russell, grandson of a British prime minister, had radically freethinking, atheistic parents; his mother conducted an affair with the children’s tutor with his father’s consent. Russell’s godfather was the philosopher John Stuart Mill.
Russell wrote so many books, letters, articles and essays on so many subjects (Marriage and Morals, for instance) that the bibliography listing all his works, the one Ken prepared, runs to three volumes.
Russell being an inexhaustible source, new materials are always being found. And Ken, being of indefatigable ardour, seems always there to scoop them up.
And we — anxious over fresh nuclear pistol-cocking and other falsifications — always the better for it.