G ABRIELE T AYLOR
FRANK RAMSEY – A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
I. Over ten years ago, in September 1992, Margaret Paul and I spent a fortnight in Vienna, in the footsteps of Frank Ramsey. Margaret was Frank’s much younger sister. She was a Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and a tutor in Economics. She was married to George Paul, Philosophy tutor and Fellow of University College, Oxford. They had four daughters. After her retirement in 1983 she began writing a memoir of her brother Frank, a task she found totally absorbing until her illness prevented her from continuing this kind of work. She died last year. The manuscript she left behind is practically complete, and I want to try and give a picture of Frank and his short life as it emerges from those pages. Being so much younger, and Frank dying so young, she cannot be said to have shared his life to any great extent, but of course they shared the same background: both were born into a distinguished academic family in Cambridge. Their father, Arthur Stanley Ramsey, a mathematician, was successively Fellow and Tutor, Bursar and finally President (ViceMaster) of Magdalene College, Cambridge, from 1897 until 1934. Her mother, Agnes, a graduate of Oxford, had a passionate interest in social work and feminism. She was killed in a car accident when Margaret was only 10. There were four children: Frank, the eldest; Michael, the only one of the children not to reject the religion of their parents and grandparents. He was archbishop of Canterbury from 1961-74; Bridget, who became a doctor, and finally Margaret. Obviously, quite apart from having easy access to letters and diaries, she was in a unique position to tell Frank’s story from an insider’s point of view. Frank was 14 when Margaret was born, a scholar at Winchester College. He took a keen interest in the new arrival. His letters home show him giving thought to what sort of book would be suitable to give his baby sister for her christening. He had some suggestions to make: What book? I think the Just-So-Stories nicely bound for 5/- Perhaps Esmond or Ivanhoe or Pickwick or Martin Chuzzlewit or David Copperfield would be better. What do you think? I can easily afford 5/- by eating less at school shop.
Eventually he decided on Thackeray’s Esmond.
1 M. C. Galavotti (ed.), Cambridge and Vienna: Frank P. Ramsey and the Vienna Circle, 1–18. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.
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The same question occupied him at the time of Margaret’s first birthday: should he give her Shakespeare’s Tragedies, the shorter poems of Browning or perhaps some Carlyle. But again he settled for Thackeray, this time Vanity Fair. Margaret kept these two leather-bound copies, inscribed ‘Elizabeth Margaret Ramsey from her brother Frank’ throughout her life. These early letters from Winchester, quite apart from the charm of their particular subject-matter, indicate characteristics and concerns that were typical of Frank throughout his life. They show, firstly, the amount and range of his reading. He clearly did not neglect English literature while also working at mathematics ahead of his form, and having to cope with a great deal of classics, for which he was said not to have had a natural aptitude. He was very keen to ‘get on’: ‘I ought to get some prizes this term’, he wrote, ‘You see, I could get my classical-form prize, my maths prize, a problem paper prize and a prize for all round…’.1 But particularly, the letters show his interest in his small sister to be clearly focused on her mental development rather than on her present state or desires. This concern for the intellectual well-being of his siblings is expressed in a number of letters sent to his mother over the years. So, for example, he seemed to worry about Bridget’s involvement with and success in various sporting activities, which he thought might interfere with her academic advancement. Again, while in Vienna he was told that Margaret, aged 7, would be sent to the Perse school, where her sister Bridget had already been for some years. Frank sounds quite upset: Gug (Bridget) says you are sending Margie to the Perse; if so, for god’s sake don’t leave her long in that outrageous institution but send her somewhere where she’ll learn something like the amount she is capable of. If she goes on like Gug it will be criminal of you.
The Perse school, incidentally, was the best regarded girls’ school in Cambridge. His brother Michael also gave cause for concern: he got only a II.1 in the first part of the classical tripos, largely because, his father thought, he found the debates at the Union an irresistible attraction; and a General Election in which Liberals hoped for the re-establishment of the Liberal Party as a dominating force in politics soon engrossed much of his time and thoughts.
Frank wrote sympathetically: It is a pity about Mick’s Mays. It looks as if he were in the wrong tack in doing classics; odd seeing how interested he is in them.
The number and the content of Frank’s letters sent home when away from Cambridge show him to have been on very close and affectionate terms with all the members of his family, but particularly so with his mother. He seems to have reported to her everything he thought of importance in his life, all the pleasures and the worries of the moment. His letters written from Vienna are characteristic
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in this respect, and so convey a vivid impression of what he did, felt and thought during that period. Frank went to Vienna on two occasions: first in September 1923 to visit Wittgenstein and discuss the Tractatus with him. On this occasion he only passed through Vienna, on his way to and from Puchberg, where Wittgenstein was teaching in the village school. He went the second time a few months later, in March 1924, to see Wittgenstein again if possible, but mainly for personal reasons. When Margaret and I visited Vienna nearly 70 years later she was deeply involved with her research into Frank’s life. And to this research she devoted her stay in Vienna. That was the point of our visit. So we went to the house where Frank had had lodgings when in Vienna for the second time: in the Mahler str. 7, practically next door to the Opera house, which he visited frequently and where he discovered his love of opera. We went to the house where Wittgenstein’s sister Gretl lived: the Palais Schönborn in the Renngasse. Gretl was married to the American Stonborough, and she and her family occupied the first floor. We got a glimpse of the splendid wide marble staircase but could not explore any further as the house had been taken over by offices. Frank saw Gretl frequently and got very attached to her: he went to call on her shortly after his arrival in Vienna and wrote home: She lives in a baroque palace of the time of Maria Theresa, with a vast staircase and innumerable reception rooms very beautiful. She must be colossally wealthy. She was out, but I gave her secretary my address and I got a message asking me to dinner that day. I went and had an evening tête-à-tête with her. – She is 42, handsome and intelligent, and I enjoyed talking to her very much. And I had a very good dinner. She asked me if I should like to come and visit her regularly, and I said I should love to. So she asked me to a dinner party with music on Saturday and said she would then fix a day of the week for me to dine with her every week.
When, a few months previously, Frank had visited Wittgenstein in Puchberg he saw him living in poverty: He has one TINY room, containing a bed, washstand, small table and one hard chair and that is all there is room for. His evening meal which I shared last night is rather unpleasant coarse bread and butter and cocoa.
After this experience of Wittgenstein’s way of life the discovery of the wealth of the family came as a shock to Frank. His two visits were a contrast in every respect. The first one, in September 1923, just after Frank had taken his final examinations, was undertaken and dedicated entirely to a discussion of the Tractatus. He spent a fortnight with Wittgenstein in Puchberg, the longest time they had together until Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge in 1929. Frank, in his second undergraduate year at Trinity College, aged 18, had translated the Tractatus. There is an account (initially given by I.A. Richards)
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according to which Frank learned to read German to a sufficiently high standard in just over a week. This is not so: he had German lessons at Winchester at least during his last year there. But the teaching of modern languages was not taken very seriously, and as usual Frank thought he was not getting on fast enough. So he consulted Ogden – a friend of the family- as to how best to learn the language. Ogden gave him what turned out to be excellent advice, viz. to read German books side by side with their English translation. He also sent a list of suggestions, among them Brentano’s Vom Ursprung Sittlicher Erkenntnis (The Origins of our Knowledge of Right and Wrong) and Mach’s Analyse der Empfindungen (The Analysis of Sensations). Frank studied these, but he also turned the advice on its head and read works by English philosophers together with their translations into German: he read Berkeley and Hume in German. The method was successful: he won the school prize in German, an event of which he wrote to Ogden: It’s disgraceful that there is no one in the school who knows more German than I do, but there isn’t, and I have won the German prize….
Much more important, of course, than winning any prizes, was that his combined study of German and Philosophy enabled him to translate the Tractatus. As a result of this translation Wittgenstein asked Frank to come and visit him. By the time the visit took place Frank, in his last Lent-term as an undergraduate, had also begun work on a review of the Tractatus for the periodical Mind which was published in October 1923, after his talks with Wittgenstein. These talks were clearly very intense. Frank wrote home: He is prepared to give 4 or 5 hours a day to explaining his book. I have had two days and have got through 7 out of 80 pages + incidental forward references… He has already answered my chief difficulty which I have puzzled over for a year and given up in despair myself and decided he had not seen…. He is great. I used to think Moore a great man, but beside W!
And in another letter: It is terrible when he says “is that clear?” and I say “no” and he says “Damn. It is HORRID to go through all that again”….
Altogether Frank found the fortnight both healthy and intellectually extremely profitable; a pleasant and inexpensive life: in the morning I walk for 3 hours in the mountains…. In the afternoon I listen to W from lunch to dinner. Then I read Gibbon…
After the Puchberg visit Frank and Wittgenstein wrote to each other, on Frank’s side (only his letters survive) full of affection and friendship, referring to personal problems as well as worries about e.g. the axiom of infinity. Both he and
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Russell tried to persuade Wittgenstein to come to Cambridge, but they were not successful. Frank’s second visit to Vienna, a few months later, was certainly also pleasant and no doubt also intellectually stimulating in some way, but it was hardly as healthy and certainly not as inexpensive as the previous one. Nor was it focussed on Wittgenstein or indeed primarily on philosophy. Frank had certainly intended to see Wittgenstein again in Puchberg, but in the end, apart from a brief farewell visit in September, he only saw him on two weekends during the six months of his stay. The reason was at least partly that he had gone to Vienna to be psychoanalysed, and his psychoanalytic sessions occupied much of his time. They also made it harder for him to think about philosophy or about work in general. ‘I am going down to Puchberg’, he wrote in March, ‘though I don’t want to talk about work as I have forgotten almost all about it.’ When he did go, the visit seems to have been a disappointment: I stayed a night at Puchberg last weekend. Wittgenstein seemed to me to be tired, though not ill; but it isn’t really any good talking to him about work, he won’t listen. If you suggest a question he won’t listen to your answer but starts thinking of one for himself. And it is such hard work for him like pushing something too heavy uphill.
The second visit, a couple of months later, was no more successful. He found Wittgenstein more cheerful, but, he adds, ‘he is no good for my work.’ He thought Wittgenstein quite exhausted by his teaching job and frugal way of living, and thought it absurd of him to refuse all financial help from his family, who were so anxious to help him in any way they could. But ‘he rejects all their advances, even Christmas presents or invalid’s food, when he is ill, he sends back.’ This is from a letter to Maynard Keynes. He and Keynes were again discussing the possibility of getting Wittgenstein to Cambridge, and Frank points out that any offer of financial assistance would certainly be refused. He adds that the only thing that would persuade Wittgenstein to come to England would be an invitation from Keynes himself to stay with him in the country, ‘in which case he would come.’ He adds: I’m afraid I think you would find it difficult and exhausting. Though I like him very much I doubt if I could enjoy him for more than a day to two, unless I had my great interest in his work, which provides the mainstay of our conversation.
Keynes evidently shared the view that it would be difficult and exhausting to have this guest: there was no invitation for Wittgenstein that year. Rather than battling with philosophical problems with Wittgenstein, he enjoyed the society of Wittgenstein’s sister Gretl and other members of Wittgenstein’s family; he listened to music, went to the opera and saw the Cambridge friends who were in Vienna at the time. There was briefly Richard Braithwaite, and throughout the time Lionel Penrose, (later the distinguished geneticist), both very close friends for the rest of his life. He also had some contact with some members of the Vienna Circle, at least shortly before leaving Vienna he met
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Moritz Schlick at a dinner at Gretl’s, whom he thought ‘a very nice man’. He was invited to tea by Hans Hahn, where he was rather overawed but also flattered by being included in a discussion entirely in German about atomic theory. But the framework of his daily life was provided by analysis with Theodor Reik, whom he saw every weekday from 12 to 1. II. After the ’14-’18 war psychoanalysis had boomed in England, but there were as yet few British psychoanalysts, and for those wishing to be analysed Vienna was the obvious place to go to. Among the people who influenced Frank in this enterprise were James and Alix Strachey, who did much to spread an interest in this new science in England, and whom Frank knew personally. Both James and Alix had been psychoanalysed by Freud, and Freud had asked them to translate his works – a translation which became their lives’ work and resulted in the 1950ies publication of the English Standard edition. There were other followers of Freud in Cambridge whom Frank knew, e.g. John Rickman, who later became one of the leading figures in the London Institute of Psychoanalysis. Rickman had been at school with Lionel Penrose, and they all met at Cambridge. Another of Frank’s close friends, Sebastian Sprott, had visited Freud in 1922, so Frank would have been well informed about psychoanalytic practice in Vienna. It is then unsurprising that Frank was interested in psychoanalysis, and that, wanting to be psychoanalysed, his thoughts should turn to Vienna, especially since Lionel Primrose, encouraged by Rickman, had gone to Vienna and had a flat there, which Frank could share. But why this desire for psychoanalysis? Partly it seems to have been in the air, the thing to do, in Frank’s particular circle. The idea appealed to Frank particularly because at the time when the thought first came to him, his third year at Trinity, he was in a state of depression. In a rare diary entry during that year he speaks of his feeling of loneliness: I feel lonely…. I need some satisfactory human relationship and have none; I feel this more than ever before. Before I have felt keenly the unsatisfactoriness of some particular relation; but this is more; it is a general feeling of isolation….
The rest of the entry, quite a long one, goes through the list of his friends, all male, and the respects in which they are unsatisfactory. The ones free of such drawbacks are not around, and in any case he doubts that his affection for them is matched by theirs for him. He was in this state of mind when he met, and fell in love with, a young married woman, Margaret Pyke, and his relation with Margaret became his preoccupation throughout that year and beyond. Both she and her husband accepted him as a friend, he visited them often and they seemed very glad to see him. But her feelings for him were nothing like his feelings for her, and for much of the time Frank was tortured by her apparent coldness and
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neglect of him. This of course added to his depression and feeling of isolation. His father became worried about him and wrote, looking back to that time: As his Tripos drew near he suffered a good deal of mental unrest and slept very badly and I began to be afraid whether he would get it over without a breakdown. He was very well prepared in Mathematics and it was not, I think, anxiety about the Examination that worried him but deeper problems about the meaning of life and his relation to other people. (In 80 Years and More.)
Preoccupation with Margaret and work on the Tractatus did not of course prevent Frank from doing brilliantly in Part II of the mathematical Tripos. Although Frank was on very affectionate terms with his mother and reported to her everything of interest in his Viennese life, they did not, naturally, always see eye to eye. There was, firstly, the question of the use of being psychoanalysed. At some stage of his analysis Frank wrote to his mother asking her about events in his early childhood and about children’s books he had liked, which she was to send so that Reik could read them. Agnes was not impressed: if, she suggested, analysis just consisted of putting together facts about his early childhood, Frank could have asked her in the first place without bothering to go to Vienna. Frank replied that information about a person’s childhood was not analysis.2 Agnes was worried also about the analysis being so time-consuming as to prevent Frank from doing much work, and about the expense of the whole enterprise. Both worries were up to a point shared by Frank. Even in Winchester Frank had kept account of his income and expenses, and these figure in his letters from Vienna as well. Shortly after arriving in Vienna he heard that he had won the Allen scholarship, (£250 p.a.) but, Frank thought, even with this addition his financial problems were not solved: the Allen scholarship was meant to help support him while working on his thesis, and while holding it he was not allowed to teach to fill the gap between receipts and expenses. So his immediate financial future did not look rosy. Agnes suggested that he could make a little money, and get himself known, by reviewing for the New Statesman. He replied: ‘it is rot to think you get known (except to the ignorant public) as an authority by reviewing in the NS.’ Shortly after this correspondence Frank had the unexpected and happy news that he had been elected to a Fellowship at King’s College, Cambridge, and his money problems were solved. The question of whether Frank was doing enough work worried Agnes even more persistently than that of the expense. Was not psychoanalysis taking up too much of his time and energy, and could it be right to use some of his scholarship money to support him in Vienna when he was doing so little work? Frank found this attitude rather irritating. He replied, perhaps somewhat defensively: I had a letter from the Registrar saying my residence here is approved. It seems to me perfectly proper to spend a scholarship being analysed, as it is likely to make me cleverer in the future, and discoveries are made by remarkable people not by remarkable diligence. …
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Later in his course of analysis he puts his case more strongly: Psychoanalysis is very important even I think to one’s work. You see obscure unconscious things may decide your attitude about certain things, especially personal factors in a controversial subject. Lots of work on the Foundations of Mathematics is emotionally determined by such things as: 1) Love of mathematics and a desire to save it from those (villainous and silly) philosophers. 2) Whether our interest in mathematics is like that in a game a science or an art. 3) General Bolshevism against authority. The opposite; timidity. Laziness or the desire to get rid of difficulties by not mentioning them. If you can see these in other people you must be careful and take stock of yourself.
These observations don’t perhaps altogether settle the question as to whether psychoanalysis is so important for one’s work, but Frank seemed to be convinced. However, he himself every now and then expressed feelings of guilt about his doing so little work. But he shared his parents’ work ethic and his expectations of himself were extremely high. He was hardly idle: while in Vienna he wrote the greater part of ‘The Foundations of Mathematics.’ Frank’s psychoanalytic sessions seemed to be going well. Reik was a clever and distinguished man, and Frank respected his intellect. Not that he altogether enjoyed the experience: ‘It is surprisingly exhausting and unpleasant’, he wrote to Sebastian Sprott : For about 2 times I said what came into my head, but then it appeared that I was avoiding talking about Margaret, so that was stopped and I was made to give an orderly account of my relations with her… I rather like him, but he annoyed me by asking me to lend him Wittgenstein’s book and saying, when he returned it, that it was an intelligent book but the author must have some compulsive neurosis.
In all his letters from Vienna to his parents and friends Frank says nothing about how, if at all, he thought psychoanalysis had changed him in his attitudes to personal relationships. When he returned to Cambridge in October ’24 he was cured of his infatuation for Margaret Pyke, but of course that might have passed anyway. There is a comment on Frank’s sessions from Alix Strachey, written in November 1924 from Berlin, where she was being psychoanalysed, to her husband James in London. She had met Reik at a conference in Würzburg: (Reik) was enthusiastic about Frank Ramsey’s beautiful character, and seemed to think, analytically, that all was for the best.
And again: He (Reik) said to me that he had done all he could to Frank in the short time at his disposal-that the analysis had gone very well owing to Frank’s crystal clear mind and soulwas enthusiastic about him; and wound up by saying that there’d never been much wrong with him. All of which seems fairly reasonable.
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It is in a later letter, written back in Cambridge at the end of the year to his wifeto-be that Frank indicates how helpful he had found psychoanalysis as far as his personal relationships were concerned: I wrote a long letter to my psychoanalyst saying how happy I was & how grateful I felt to him. Because he did make it possible though you may not see how….
Frank’s six months in Vienna was his first long period away from Cambridge and his home since leaving Winchester nearly four years previously. In some ways his letters to his mother did not change much between Winchester and Vienna: rather like a child he took it for granted that his parents would do all manner of menial tasks for him. They arranged for his belongings to be moved from Trinity to King’s, forwarded his letters, posted books, acted as his banker, bought furniture, ordered taxis, bought clothes for him. They treated him as a mixture between a very special person for whom too much could not be done, and as a rather helpless child. This reliance on his mother prompted some of his more malicious friends to think that Frank needed psychoanalysis not to be cured of his passion for Margaret Pyke, but rather to be cured of his dependence on his mother. Perhaps more surprising than his attachment to his mother is that he also got on so well with his father. Arthur Ramsey was not an easy man to live with. He was absorbed in College affairs and this did not, perhaps, contribute to ease and happiness at home. Margaret Paul describes him sitting ‘at the end of the table at Howfield3 meals, often silent, occasionally telling stories about the latest iniquities at Magdalene, and sometimes roaring abuse at Agnes, or a servant, about some feature of the meal that displeased him.’ Frank appears to be the only one of his children who actively sought his society, asked his advice on books and lectures, went for walks with him and went on holidays with him. But of course Arthur was extremely proud of a son who showed his brilliance very early in life, and whose chosen subject was his own. In many ways Arthur was wholly admirable, a man of integrity, enormously hard working, a good and devoted teacher. Colleagues at College remarked on how intolerant he was of any opinion which differed from his own, but as far as his children were concerned he showed surprising tolerance: ‘Though his children becoming atheists must have been a great sorrow to him,’ his daughter writes, ‘he never protested or even tried to argue with any of them about it. And again, when it came to their marrying, though he was not always pleased by the timing or choice of partner, he accepted their wishes in a good humoured way.’ III. Frank got married to Lettice Baker a year after leaving Vienna. Beyond the statement of this fact there is hardly any comment on either Lettice herself or on the marriage in his father’s (unpublished) Memoirs, written when Arthur was in
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his eighties. He only adds that, having taken the Moral Science Tripos, Lettice was able to some extent to share Frank’s interests. But Michael, at the time of their marriage a third year undergraduate in Cambridge, thought that his parents exercised a ‘kindly tolerance’ towards Lettice: I don’t think, they felt much in common with her probably, but they were entirely friendly as far as I know…. Lettice and they had very different temperaments. You see Frank was different from them and Lettice was still more Frankish than Frank was.
Lettice had enjoyed great freedom as a child and remembered her childhood as an entirely happy one. In 1911, aged 13, she went to Bedales, which was then recently founded, a progressive, co-educational school, and much freer and more friendly than most boarding-schools at the time. There she met and became a close friend of Frances Partridge, the writer and longest surviving member of the Bloomsbury group, and after Lettice’s marriage to Frank a close friend of his as well. Lettice was a graduate of Newnham College, Cambridge, and at the time of meeting Frank in 1924 she was doing some research in the Psychological Laboratory at Cambridge for the Industrial Training Board. She was 5 years older than Frank, considerably more experienced and held unconventional views. It seemed natural to her that she and Frank should live together. Agnes may have shown ‘kindly tolerance’ towards Lettice, (and Lettice herself agrees that she was friendly and generous) but she was so horrified at the discovery of the nature of their relationship, that Frank felt compelled to cancel a weekend away which he had planned with Lettice. He wrote to her at the end of the letter cancelling the weekend: I don’t really feel as if I had enough moral courage to go on living with you; but I can’t say for certain. What about marrying? It is risky, but what do you think? I don’t feel sure of myself… It seems so absurd not to go away as we had planned; but I can’t. I should be worrying about mother and possibly being caught. It is a shame for you. …
Frank’s own view of the situation is not clear. Lettice assumed that of course he had no sympathy at all with his mother’s attitude; and indeed he wrote to her: I had a long argument with mother yesterday about free love, and she maintained that it threatened the order of society and the security of women, and said she was sure my bark was worse than my bite or she would be in a perpetual state of anxiety about me.
But at about the same time he read a paper to the Apostles, the select debating society which Frank attended regularly and with enthusiasm. In it he said that with the decline of religion the old ideas of marriage were collapsing, and we ought to consider whether this movement is a good one, and if so, what, if anything, we should attempt to substitute for the old morality… I think the institution of marriage is a great benefit to the female sex especially if we suppose, as seems reasonable, that apart from it the care and maintenance of children would fall on their mothers.
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This rather seems to echo his mother’s views. It is true, of course, that papers read to the Apostles did not always express the speaker’s own opinions but were put forward merely to elicit views and discussions. Be that as it may, Frank seems to have thought his mother’s case against free love at least worth considering. The year preceding his marriage was a very busy one for Frank. His teaching-obligations were considerable. Each week he lectured three times and gave a dozen or more supervisions. After a year or so of carrying this teaching load he wrote to Maynard Keynes, asking his advice as to whether anything could be done to lessen it. ‘It is not that I dislike teaching’, he said, ‘but that doing so much seems to interfere much too seriously with what I mainly want to do.’ Since, he said, his main interest was in philosophical questions nearly the whole of his teaching was quite disconnected from his own work, and did not involve reading or thinking anything useful for it. And he expressed some envy of tutors at his undergraduate College, Trinity, where the teachingload was much lighter. It seems that nothing could be done about it, but it seems also that a year or so later when, as Frank put it, he was ‘in the swing of it’, teaching was not felt by him as being quite so burdensome. His lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics were a great success, judging by comments of some of those who attended them. So for instance one member of his audience, Sir Douglas Elphinstone wrote to Margaret Paul many years later (1990): … my recollection of him is of a big and rather clumsy man. He generally had his hair in tufts all over the place. I remember him in a brown tweed suit, much more countrified than the conventional grey suits normally worn by other lecturers. And I think he wore his clothes untidily… Shining through all this was a round cheerful face, and his style of lecturing was also cheerful; he imparted an enjoyment of his subject, and spiced a clear exposition with little touches of humour.
He speaks of Frank introducing his audience to rigorous logical methods in analysis, which, he wrote, almost set his (Sir Douglas’s) mind on fire. And he concludes: There were other good lecturers who prepared their work properly and had the gift of clear exposition (for Ramsey’s thoughts and expressions were always clear); there were others who lectured not like a version of a printed text book, but who threw something of themselves into their work. But Ramsey exuded some sort of personal charm into his lectures. It was like going into a friend ’s house to go into his lecture room.
Reactions to Frank’s supervisions were not quite as favourable. His sister writes: ‘He impressed his pupils by his friendliness, but not all profited from his explanations.’ One former pupil wrote: I must honestly admit, that his intelligence, knowledge and teaching was miles above my head and I understood nothing of what he tried to teach me.
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Another one, Alister Watson, who became a friend, described him as an idiosyncratic teacher. So for instance Frank frequently tackled questions in applied mathematics by working out the answer from Newton’s laws, and then roaring with laughter at his success. As usual, Frank worried about not doing enough work, by which of course he meant his own work. But during the first vacation as a Fellow of King’s he completed his paper on the Foundations of Mathematics, on which he had worked during his stay in Vienna. He submitted it for the University Smith Prize, but was not awarded it. His father thought that the reason for this lack of success was that it had baffled the awarders: ‘it is very unlikely that any of them understood it’ he said. Frank himself seems to have been rather downcast by his failure to be given the prize: ‘After it was refused a Smith’s prize I didn’t think I could publish it’ he wrote to Keynes. But he was cheered by praise from Russell, and of course the paper was published. He was still working on what he felt were problems in it he had not solved, and he had a contract with Ogden for a book on the Foundations of Mathematics. But that was never written. Frank also worked on the problem of Universals, a paper which he read to the Moral Science Club and which was published in Mind in October ’25. After reading the paper he was too stimulated to sleep. Instead he wrote a note to Lettice: … The discussion was a very pleasant surprise. It was almost only with Moore who was very reasonable and intelligent…. I wasn’t at all discomfited as I feared, and to one of my arguments against a theory of his he admitted he could see no answer….
So it can hardly be said that during his first year at King’s he neglected his own work altogether. During that year Frank also kept up his interest in psychoanalytic theory. Among his unpublished papers are detailed notes on Freud’s ‘Papers on Metapsychology’, which he greatly admired and thought ‘illuminating’. He helped found a small society which was to meet monthly to discuss psychoanalytic topics. James Strachey, who came from London to attend these meetings, commented after the first one. ‘I was crushed by the unaccustomed intellectual level – especially of Ramsey.’ He also said that Frank thought psychoanalytic theory very muddled: He is thinking of devoting himself to laying down the foundations of Psychology. All I can say is that if he does we shan’t understand them. He seems quite to contemplate, in his curious way, playing the Newton to Freud’s Copernicus.
And finally, during that year, he also greatly enjoyed the social life King’s had to offer. He found good friends of his at the College: Richard Braithwaite, who had also recently been elected to a Fellowship, Alex Penrose and John Maynard Keynes among others. He enjoyed the occasional Feast, but also ordinary, everyday dinners in the company of his colleagues. Richard Braithwaite said of him:
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He had an excellent effect on every company. He was very appreciative of people – modest, added to the pleasure of life- he wasn’t a spoil sport. The least malicious person I have known. … On the other hand, he had a gift for avoiding people he thought of as morons, but if you do it discreetly you can’t be savagely condemned.
IV. Frank’s first year of marriage was a relatively tranquil one, free of disasters and upsets. His brother Michael, then a third year undergraduate at Magdalene College, speaks of him as being very happy, marvellously settling down with a most lovely happy marriage and being a Fellow of King’s, and finding his feet intellectually in these different ways, and having an awfully good circle of friends, and all very happy, friendly with the rest of the family, too….
But the following year, 1926-7, brought many changes. From the point of view of Frank’s work it was fertile: he wrote two philosophical articles: ‘Truth and Probability’ and ‘Facts and Propositions’, and also one of his two economics articles: ‘A Contribution to the Theory of Taxation’. In the domestic sphere it was the year in which his daughter Jane was born. But it was also the year in which Agnes was killed in a car accident, and the year in which he fell in love with a friend of Lettice’s, Elizabeth Denby. Frank’s interest in Economics was long-standing, in at any rate his last year at Winchester he had read enormously widely in Economics – as well as in Philosophy and Politics. By that time he was at least as interested in these subjects as he was in Mathematics. Keynes, in a short biography of Frank, refers to the early age, about 16, at which his precocious mind was intensely interested in economic problems. Economists living in Cambridge have been accustomed from his undergraduate days to try their theories on the keen edge of his critical and logical faculties….
Keynes was editor of The Economic Journal and so received from his Cambridge colleagues many drafts for discussion and publication, and frequently the writer mentioned having shown the article to Ramsey. In June ’28 Frank himself sent to Keynes the draft of the article ‘A Mathematical Theory of Saving’. Keynes described it as ‘one of the most remarkable contributions to mathematical economics ever made,’ but Frank enclosed a letter with the draft in which he said: Of course the whole thing is a waste of time as I’m mainly occupied on a book about logic, from which this distracts me so that I am glad to have done it. But it’s much easier to concentrate on than philosophy and the difficulties that arise rather obsess me.
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It seems that this important economics paper was written in a few weeks as a more or less light relief from his work on logic. His work on logic, however, brought him again in touch with Wittgenstein, who wrote to him in July ’27, commenting on ‘The Foundations of Mathematics’, which Schlick had sent him. The letter broke a two-year silence. In the summer of 1925 Wittgenstein had approached Keynes to suggest a visit, and this time Keynes responded positively. Wittgenstein arrived at the place in Sussex where Keynes was then living in the middle of August. The visit could not have been timed more badly: Keynes himself had just got married, to the ballerina Lydia Lopokova; he had business in London and was preparing for a visit to Russia to meet his wife’s relatives. So he asked Frank to come and help entertain Wittgenstein. It was only days before Frank’s own wedding. Lettice had gone to Dublin to stay with her mother, and had left Frank, perhaps not the most practical of men, to see to the flat they were to live in and to deal with preparations for the wedding, send out invitations and so on. So Frank had his hands full. Still, he went to Sussex for a couple of days. It was during that stay that there was a quarrel – quite untypically as far as Frank was concerned. But he can hardly have been in a state of mind which allowed him to concentrate on Wittgenstein, and Wittgenstein was no doubt disappointed and hurt that the visit did not at all live up to expectations, owing to Keynes’ many other preoccupations. It is not clear what the quarrel was about, except that Frank stated it was not about logic. At any rate, they did not correspond for two years, though in his letters to others Frank, while still annoyed with Wittgenstein, always emphasised his affection for and admiration of him. The renewed correspondence may well have encouraged Wittgenstein to return to Cambridge at the beginning of 1929. Agnes’ death in August ’27 was of course devastating for every member of the family. One of the consequences was that Frank and Lettice decided to leave their flat and move to Howfield, the Ramseys’ house in Huntington Road, so that his father and young sister should not be left alone with just servants. So they, with baby Jane and a nurse, moved in and made it their home-base for about a year, after which they found their own house in Cambridge, where Frank lived for the last 15 months of his life, and Lettice for the remaining 57 years of hers. Perhaps the decision to move to Howfield had been taken too hastily: it was an unhappy time and an unhappy arrangement, since Arthur’s way of life and his expectations of members of his household was not theirs, especially not Lettice’s, who was used to an easy-going social life with friends dropping in unannounced at all hours. So after some months it seemed best for Arthur’s sister Lucy to come and run the household, and for Frank and Lettice to have their own establishment. They had a so-called open marriage. They had also agreed to have no secrets from each other. Both of them seemed to interpret this to mean that they had to tell each other not only of other lovers appearing in their lives, but also to describe in minute detail their affairs, their feelings for the relevant person, and that person’s overwhelming attractions. Not surprisingly, Lettice managed to cope
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better with this state of affairs than Frank did, but even she could not have been pleased with a birthday- letter he sent her to Dublin where she and Jane were staying, which after brief congratulations dealt entirely with the time he was spending with Elizabeth. Christmas ’27 he also spent with Elizabeth on a holiday in France. While there he had a letter from Lettice in Dublin informing him that she had fallen in love with an Irish writer called Liam Flaherty. Frank was outraged by this piece of information and accused her of destroying their happy peace together to which he was looking forward to returning: Frankly your letter gave me an awful shock, I can’t see how you could imagine it wouldn’t. I felt quite furious and still after a lot of reflection it seems to me very sickening…. I feel this is such an unfortunate time. I had decided to give up Elizabeth, and you know how important she is to me….
Lettice, in her turn, was amazed and hurt by his reaction: I do think you rather a pot to be calling me a black kettle…. I can’t help feeling hurt at your seeming unfairness….
There is a fairly hectic exchange of letters over the next few weeks, some angry and accusatory, others apologising for having been angry and accusatory. Frank to Lettice: … I am sorry I am so unreasonable. The truth is since I got your letter… I have been in a frenzy of anger unlike anything I’ve ever in my life experienced before… I have never been one to feel malice for more than a moment, but now I’m simply consumed by anger, hatred and all uncharitableness….
The letter ends: … Really, of course, I must blame myself for not knowing my own mind. I began it with Elizabeth, but I find that in fact I can’t stand the strain of this sort of polygamy and I want to go back to monogamy, but it’s now too late.
Lettice’s affair with Liam fizzled out after a few weeks, and she faithfully reported her consequent misery and depression. Frank, of course, was much relieved by this turn of events, and, with equal honesty, explained his improved state of mind to her. She replied: Well, it’s something that my being unhappy has helped you! What people we are! Let me cheer you by saying I’m still very gloomy and depressed.
Elizabeth, however, remained in Frank’s life. They do not seem to have met very often, but they corresponded regularly. Frank’s letters to her, on her instructions, were burnt after her death in 1965. She never married. Like Frank’ s mother, she was a social reformer, primarily interested in improving the lot of working-class people, and she devoted her life trying to improve working-class housing.
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V. The pen-ultimate chapter in Margaret’s manuscript, with the title ‘Lettice, Elizabeth and Economics’, deals with the correspondence from which I have just quoted, as well as with his work in Economics and Keynes’ reaction to it. In her last chapter, ‘Death’, there are naturally few quotations from Frank himself; they are restricted to a cheerful account of a walking tour in Ireland in August ’29, a couple of notes to G.E. Moore, with whom he had planned weekly discussions which had to be cancelled because of Frank’s illness, and his last letter to Lettice. Of course, there were other important events in his life: he and Lettice had a second daughter, Sarah, and Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge and stayed with them in their house in Mortimer Road for a fortnight, and after that visited them frequently. He seems to have got on well with Lettice, and Frank’s worry, expressed to Keynes, that Wittgenstein might not want to see him again, turned out to be quite unfounded. Wittgenstein went to see Frank after his operation in Guy’s Hospital, London. Since Frank had not come round after the operation he spent some time with Lettice and her close friend Frances Partridge, who writes of the event: When I came back in the evening and went into the cubby-hole again I was surprised to see the remarkable head of Wittgenstein hoist itself over the back of a chair. Everyone reacts differently when the white face of death looks in at the window. Wittgenstein and I were brought closer together than ever before by our intense sympathy for Lettice … Wittgenstein’s kindness, and also his personal grief, were somehow apparent beneath a light, almost jocose tone….
There are other comments from Frances Partridges which, I think, catch particularly well some of Frank’s chief characteristics. She finds him difficult to describe, partly, she says because of his great simplicity. He had a rather quiet voice, he would consider things, I mean he wasn’t one of these volatile talkers at all, he was somebody who listened to other people and responded… In any ordinary sort of thing in life, like going for a walk and looking at the view, sitting on a lawn, eating and drinking, and so on, he was just a very normal person, and totally unselfconscious… I would recognise the quality of his voice more than anything, which had this rather measured and gentle nature to it…. He was not an ambitious man… he was following his thought, he had no desire to make a splash in the world. He was a simple character in many ways… he had a tremendous sense of humour; his whole face cracked when he laughed with a rather hee-hawing noise…it was delightfully easy to get him laughing….
She adds:
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I don’t think Frank ever made conversation. He would talk of what was interesting him but he would probably rather remain silent than talk for the sake of making things go – he was always himself, not always very good socially. (Interview 1982)
Frank’s simplicity and lack of self-consciousness are often remarked upon by his friends, as are his modesty, lack of aggression, and friendliness. Margaret Paul remarks that while his early death may have led to some idealisation, the view of him as exceptionally fortunate in his nature was held by many people before his death. As Frank himself said in the letter to Lettice I quoted: he rarely experienced malice, and when he did then only for a moment or two. He seems to have been free of all the destructive emotions Nor, as far as one can tell, did he arouse them in others. Many of his after all very clever friends (e.g. Richard Braithwaite and Lionel Penrose) thought Frank much more brilliant than they were themselves, but none seems to have felt the least resentment on that account. Perhaps the last word should be left to his brother Michael: when they were both in Cambridge Frank and Michael had a great many conversations together on a wide range of topics, sometimes about religion, about which, of course, they differed entirely, Frank but not Michael thinking Reason the highest court of appeal. Michael thought his brother the cleverest person he knew, and felt himself to be intellectually on a much lower level. ‘But’, he said, ‘there was a total lack of uppishness about him – he never made me feel inferior…. That was the wonderful joy of it.’
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He found life at Winchester pretty austere and strenuous, and at any rate initially was not happy there. His sister suggests that he tried to cope with his unhappiness by reading and working very hard and becoming competitive, aiming not only at being top but also, at least in mathematics, being top by a considerable margin. Peter Pan, apparently, was a book Frank had been fond of as a child and which was sent to Vienna. A book he had not liked so much was Alice in Wonderland. Agnes, while at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, had been friendly with Lewis Carroll, who gave her a presentation copy of Alice. As a child Frank was so frightened by some of the strange pictures in it that Agnes cut them all out. The name of their house in Huntingdon Road.
R EFERENCES Margaret Paul: Frank Ramsey Unpublished. Arthur Stanley Ramsey: 80 Years and More. Unpublished. ‘Better than the Stars’. A Radio Portrait of Frank Ramsey, BBC 1978. Ed. Perry Meisel and Walter Kendrick: The Letters of James and Alix Strachey, Basic Books, Inc. Publishers New York 1985.
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John Maynard Keynes: Essays in Biography, The Royal Economic Society 1972. Frances Partridge: Memories, Phoenix Paperback 1981.
Department of Philosophy University of Oxford 33 Templar Rd. Oxford U.K.
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