Griffin Barry

Abstract

Reviews 91 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.) arriet Ward, Dora Russell’s younger daughter, has written a perceptive, Hengaging 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. 92 Reviews 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, however , 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 children , 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 in1927—BeaconHill School—appearedto offera spectacularlysuccessful 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 jealousy . 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...