Lecture to Young Men and Young Women’s Hebrew Association [1951]

Paper 33a was delivered by Russell as a lecture to the Poetry Centre of the Young Men and Young Women’s Hebrew Association (ymywha) on 92nd Street, New York, on 27 October 1951. After Russell agreed to address a gathering to which the poets T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost and Dylan Thomas were also invited to speak in the same season of events, Julie Medlock informed him that its organizers wanted “something manifesting your literary side.… They suggested that if you couldn’t think of enough to say on the subject of poetry and literature (which we all think doubtful), you might pull out your old volume ‘Free Man’s Worship’—which they consider to be poetry”. Medlock also reported that the ymywha’s John Brinnin had already asked Russell to consider giving “five or six lectures” (2 July 1951). Russell was “practically sure” that no such request had ever reached him, although if it had he may well have acceded for payment of the $2,000 fee mentioned by Medlock. As it turned out, Russell was still offered generous terms of $750 for a single, “literary” lecture. Yet even this more modest commitment placed him in a quandary, as he explained in this letter to Medlock:

I do not see quite how I am to give a lecture about literature, though I did once do so at the Poetry Society in Chicago [1929a]—but that was a long time ago when I was more versatile, besides it was in another country, as it says in the Jew of Malta. But what I do think is that I could give them the tail-end of my new book, which will not yet be published, which gives my present confession of faith and which, so far as literature is concerned, is written as well as I am able to write. (7 July 1951)