Cranks [1956]

THIS SHORT STORY first appeared as “In the Company of Cranks”, The Saturday Review, 39, no. 32 (11 Aug. 1956): 7-8 (B&R C56.12). It was reprinted in Fact and Fiction (1961), pp. 159-62, and again in The Collected Stories of Bertrand Russell (1972), pp. 322-4. “Cranks” is the only fiction in the present volume, although Russell was still interested in the genre. He had published a second collection of short stories (Nightmares of Eminent Persons) in May 1954 and would write a few more such “queer tales” (see Appendix XVI.4, p. 435) later in the decade. Paper 14 had been commissioned by Gordon Robinson, the features editor of the London Evening Standard, which was running a series entitled “Did it Happen?”. For this, Robinson explained, “eminent authors are writing personal narratives and readers are asked to say which stories are fact and which are fiction” (3 Dec. 1954). Since Russell received a great deal of bizarre correspondence-which after 1952 Edith began to collect in a special file-it is quite conceivable that the various cranks described in his opening paragraph were, indeed, fact rather than fiction. The “Ephraim-and-Manasseh devotees” (66:36) had been mentioned by Russell in an article on “Queer People” published more than twenty years before by the Hearst press (1934a). There is certainly a ring of truth to the incidental details in the curious episode recounted in the second half of this piece. Nevertheless, it has not proved possible to confirm the existence of any of the eccentric characters who figure in the present paper.