Russell’s Style

In his eighties, when he was writing his autobiography in beautiful English, Russell got taken over by a Communist secretary, Ralph Schoenman, whom later he had to disown.  Schoenman would write letters to the press and get Russell to sign them.  This was probably done by sleight-of-hand; Russell said he never signed anything he had not read, but it would be easy to transpose the papers with a very old man.

To Schoenman’s annoyance, however, the letters were not taken seriously, though the Times published them.   The reason was, that people knew Russell had not written them.  Apart from the fact that some of them appeared to have been dictated from the Kremlin, they were in low-grade American academic English, whereas it was known that Russell was still a major English stylist.

Style was something which Schoenman simply could not judge or appreciate; the meaning of the letters was clear, and he could not understand how people knew they were not genuine.  There was something invisible, not the words themselves, which betrayed the authorship.

© Trtevor Leggett