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GRIFFIN BARRY
Deborah Gorham
History / Carleton U.
Ottawa, on, Canada k1s 5b6
dgorham@ccs.carleton.ca
Harriet Ward. A Man of Small Importance: My Father Griffin Barry. Debenham,
Suffolk: Dormouse Books, 2003. £10.00. 179 illustrations. Pp. 303. (Ward’s
memoir is self-published. Write to Dormouse Books, 1 Church Cottages, Cross
Green, Debenham, Suffolk ip14 6qf, uk. Postage and packing: uk and Europe
£2.00. £4.00 airmail, £2.25 surface. Cheques in foreign currency must include
an additional £5.00 for bank charges.)
H arriet Ward, Dora Russell’s younger daughter, has written a perceptive,
engaging and informative memoir. Her subject is her father, Griffin Barry,
a left-wing American journalist who in his youth was a man of great charm.
Griffin was born in Wisconsin in 1884, the son of a newspaperman and his
active, resourceful wife Harriet, for whom Harriet Ward was named. Griffin’s
23 See Stephen Toulmin, The Uses of Argument (New York: Cambridge U. P., 1958).
24 Wittgenstein consciously avoided all things political, and thus gave Monk no opportunities to
be disappointed by his political interventions. Perhaps this helps account for the preference Monk
shows for Ludwig over Bertie.
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brother Richard became a successful journalist. But despite a promising early
career, Griffin himself never succeeded in using his considerable talents in a
sustained manner. In the 1920s and 1930s his attractive, gregarious nature made
him a popular figure in radical, bohemian Greenwich Village and in the artists’
and writers’ community in Provincetown on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. His
friend, the writer John Dos Passos, described him in the early 1920s as a “‘man
who knew everything and everybody. He was the insider incarnate. There was
hardly anybody he hadn’t been to bed with’” (p. 23). By the early 1930s, how-
ever, his career took a downward turn and his personal life became painful.
Barry always hoped to establish a family with Dora Russell and their two chil-
dren, but he was never able to achieve this and in 1957 he died a poor, lonely
and disappointed man.
Ward has done considerable research to unearth her father’s past. Her main
source is the correspondence between her father and mother, but she has also
used the published works and archives of Griffin’s friends and acquaintances.
She successfully places Griffin in his milieu: the radical, avant garde world of the
1920s–1940s.
Ward’s portrait of Griffin Barry is valuable in itself, but this book is more
than a memoir of this “man of small importance”. First, it is the author’s own
memoir, and the Harriet Ward revealed in this book is worth knowing. Ward’s
central project is not so much to retell her father’s life as to understand her own
relationship with him, and beyond that, to offer her own perceptions of the
complex, difficult, extended family in which she grew up. She herself calls the
“Russell–Barry” family “complicated”.
The family story begins with the marriage in 1921 of the eminent Bertrand
Russell to Dora Black, a brilliant young woman with a First from Cambridge
and an academic career in front of her, which she abandoned for the marriage.
The Russells’ marriage, the birth of their two children John and Katharine, their
involvement in Labour politics, and the educational experiment they launched
together in 1927—Beacon Hill School—appeared to offer a spectacularly success-
ful example of an intellectual and sexual partnership that dared to be truly
modern. In print and on the lecture circuit both Dora and Bertrand Russell
challenged conventional attitudes about sex and sexual fidelity; about women’s
equality; and about the rearing of children.
Unfortunately, this courageous but risky experiment began to unravel at the
end of the 1920s. Bertrand and Dora both had love affairs with other people,
and while each tried to live up to their ideological support of what we would
now call “open marriage”, both suffered from heartache, bitterness and jeal-
ousy. The occasion of the final rift between Bertrand and Dora was Dora’s affair
with Griffin Barry, whom she met in America in 1928, and by whom she had
two children, Harriet in 1930 and Roderick in 1932. Although initially Bertrand
Reviews 93
accepted the idea of an extended family, and indeed Harriet was registered as
his child, in fact he could not carry it off. He quickly became involved with the
woman who would be his third wife, and after bitter wrangles, Bertrand and
Dora were divorced in 1935.
All this is well known to Bertrand Russell scholars, and Dora Russell has told
her side of the story in her volumes of autobiography. But in addition to the
adults who created the chaos, there were five children involved in this situation:
John and Kate, Harriet and Roderick, and Conrad, Russell’s child by his third
wife. John, Kate and Conrad are granted some space in Russell scholarship, and
Kate has written her own account, My Father Bertrand Russell.1 But the story of
Dora’s “illegitimate” children by a man she herself saw as a lover who had no
lasting importance in her life is given short shrift. Dora does tell her readers
about Harriet and Roddy in her volumes of autobiography, and it is evident
that she loved all of her children and tried to be the best mother she could to all
of them. But Russell never took the trouble to concern himself with Harriet’s or
Roddy’s welfare, even though he played a significant part in their lives, both as
their mother’s ex-husband, and for some years as the official father of Harriet.
Russell scholarship has followed Russell’s lead.
Ward offers a contrasting and therefore especially welcome and valuable
perspective on this family constellation. As the echo in Ward’s title suggests, she
is offering a related but quite different story from that of her sister Katharine.
Ward’s book in no way challenges the views of her older sister, to whose
affection and support she pays tribute. Rather, Ward, whose wisdom and
even-handedness are evident, emphasizes that each person will bring a unique
point of view to the telling of any complex story.
A case in point is her treatment of Beacon Hill School. Russell and Russell
scholars have been largely dismissive of this important experiment in progressive
education. Dora Russell, on the other hand, quite justifiably presents its
strengths. Ward devotes a chapter to Beacon Hill, into which she incorporates
fascinating information she has received from adults who were pupils or
teachers, as well as her own memories and her use of the archival material relat-
ing to the school. For her, while the school had weaknesses, on balance it was a
success. Moreover, it offered Harriet and Roddy a refuge from the anger and
confusion perpetrated by the parents and parental figures in their lives. Ward
mentions that her sister Kate believes the school destroyed the family she and
her brother John had enjoyed. But for Ward, “the school provided the idyll
which shielded us to a large extent from the parental quarrel raging over our
1 New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975; London: Gollancz, 1976. Reprinted, with an
Introduction by Ray Monk, Bristol: Thoemmes P., 1996.
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heads” (p. 192).
Ward’s book is an indispensable source for anyone interested in the Russell–
Barry family or in Beacon Hill School. Indeed, most Russell scholars will profit
from reading Ward’s work. It is also significant as a family memoir. The book
is, of course, about a famous family. Messy divorces and painful childhoods
were common in the 1930s, but few such families contained adult members like
Bertrand and Dora Russell who not only attempted bold experiments, but
through their public activities, including their best-selling writings, were influ-
ential voices contributing to debate on these issues. But this book would be
valuable even if it were not about a famous family. In recent years, memoir has
become a genre with new significance. Historians of the family now recognize
that family memoirs can provide an essential source for our understanding of
changing definitions of the family in the past and in the present. A Man of
Small Importance is such a memoir. It deserves to be read and enjoyed by a wide
variety of readers.
