I just came across a story by Garen Drussai that is not included in any of the usual on-line bibliographies.  It’s called “Sugar Puss.”  I haven’t figured out the date of publication yet.

I found “Sugar Puss” in Sir! Droll Stories, a 1967 collection of tales that ran in the magazine Sir! During its first twenty-five years.  Sir! Belongs to a class of magazines that was important to me for reconstructing the history of Bigfoot, a genre known as men’s adventure magazines.  Unlike the sci-fi and mystery pulps, these have not attracted many collectors—they’re largely considered embarrassing—and so I have not yet found any bibliographies.

There are a few enthusiasts, however, and these offer some clue.  Bill Devine put together a great checklist of magazines in 1997; it was printed in Adam Parfrey’s 2003 It’s a Man’s World.  According to Devine, Sir! Was put out by Volitant publishing.  In the 1950s, it was a true adventure magazine, in the mold of Argosy or Blue Book—and so like the pulps, but bigger, glossier.  In 1963 it switched to a pin-up format, and it is clear that Drussai’s story came from this era: so between 1963 and 1967.

The tale is about Vic, an office worker who likes to play at being Casanova, constantly propositioning his secretary, who he calls “Sugar Puss.”  He is married to Evelyn, an unattractive, overweight homemaker.  (More than any of her science fiction stories, this one trades in traditional gender stereotypes.)  Vic and Evelyn enjoy an active sex life—whenever he comes home and calls her “Sugar Puss,” Evelyn knows that they will make love that night.  (But only after dinner.)

It turns out that Vic keeps his sex life active by always imagining Evelyn as someone different—sometimes as his secretary, sometimes as a starlet—and acts out a little drama that Evelyn is unaware of: although she does find the constant variety in their lovemaking exciting.  Sometimes Vic is strong, sometimes romantic, sometimes quiet, sometimes loud.

There is not much to the story.  I suppose it is supposed to be scandalous, but in today’s terms it is laughable.  Drussai, though, gives it a little twist at the end—not enough to redeem the story, but enough to show it’s genealogy.  The story is not Fortean nor, strictly speaking, is it science fiction, but it’s structure is resembles the stories that appeared in F&SF.

Vic’s secretary finally takes him seriously, and for the first time ever he sets out to cheat on his wife.  He meets the secretary, calls her “Sugar Puss”—and then cannot stop imagining her as . . . Evelyn!  Fat, unattractive Evelyn.  He busts out of the room and returns home, determined to never cheat again, except in his own mind.

There are other influences one might guess at in a story like this.  Delving into the imagination of a man during sex recalls the Kinsey Report from 1948.  One might also see the story as a traditional confessional story, with the genders reversed: Vic Rebels, is Ruined, and Redeeemed.  The story also hints at—though does not explore—the effect of imagination on relationships, which I get the feeling was starting to be of concern to mainstream writers about this time.  (Think of John Updike).

At any rate, it’s a little more information about Garen Drussai.       

What was going on at MacNichol’s Pencraft University?  I found a glimpse into its actions through Doubt.  Apparently, MacNichol was using Fort’s books to teach writing.  Exactly how is unclear, although I suspect that he may have used them help students generate story ideas.  Certainly, Robert Barbour Johnson thought the books were good for that.

MacNichol was also using General Semantics.  Indeed, he gave a paper at a General Semantics conference, “Experiments with a Simplified Method in Teaching General Semantics to Writers.”  Again, exactly how he used General Semantics is unknown.  And I don’t know more than a glossing of General Semantics, but there seems to have been a fairly strong connection between it and Forteanism.

Tiffany Thayer was initially dismissive, but then became enthusiastic, as did a number of science fiction writers with Fortean connections.  Certainly, there seems to be an elective affinity between General Semantics and Forteanism, if I understand General Semantics correctly.

General Semantics was a philosophy developed by Alfred Korzybski in the first half of the twentieth century that was based on the premise that human thinking is limited by the structure of the brain and the languages human use.  This could explain Fortean events as, for example, irruptions from a universe that could not be fully comprehended by the brain or fully explained by language.

According to Garen Drussai, Kirk spent some time in New York City, where he me Tiffany Thayer, the one man operation behind the Fortean Society.  Afterwards, he ended up in Hollywood.  Garen Lewis—as Tiffany Thayer called her—and Kirk Drussai met somehow and were drawn together—by Forteanism, Thayer claims.  This probably oversells the importance of Foreteanism to them, but there is no doubt that they were both interested in the subject.

Kirk Drussai was sending clippings to Thayer and promising a paper on heterodox cancer cures for the Fortean Society’s magazine, Doubt.  It never appeared—whether Kirk never wrote it or Thayer never published it is not known.  In his introduction to her first short story, Anthony Boucher noted that Garen Drussai was a vigorous debater on matters Fortean.

The Drussais seem to have been the motive force behind the organization of the Fortean Society in San Francisco after they relocated to the northern part of the state.  (Garen said that they hitchhiked between the northern and southern parts of the state.)  Thayer announced in Doubt 21 (published around June 1948): The San Francisco and Bay Area members have met informally as guests of MFS MacNichol, who shares honors for the idea with MFS Drussai [no mention as to which Drussai], and the labors of assembly with MFS di Gava [?].”  The meeting was held on 1 April and attendees put their names in a ledger titles “The Book of the Damned.”

This founding of Chapter Two, as it was known, came at a time when Tiffany Thayer seemed to be interested in organizing Forteanism a little bit.  He suggested a Fortean University, a Fortean arrangement of knowledge, and the announcement of Chpater Twos formation was soon followed by Chapters Three and Four—in Chicago and Dallas—although this burst of organization ended soon enough.

Drussais soon became moderator of the meetings, as well as its “Bugler,” or secretary.”

Doubt 24, published around April 1949, noted that the Drussais paid dues for their unborn child.  This was, Thayer said, The Fortean Society’s Virginia Dare, referring to the first person born to English parents in North America.  The Drussais named their son Milo.  He was born 21 April 1949.

Within a few months, Thayer had overcome his interest in organization, reprimanded the chapters, and stopped reporting on them.  A few years later, Garen was turning her attention to writing science fiction, and though the high tide of Chapter two had ebbed, her stories showed that she maintained an interest in Forteanism.         As Garen remembered the times from years later, it was a brief, but fun interval, a chance to hang out with young oddballs, in her phrase.

Following the working lives of Garen and Kirk is difficult.  It may be that Garen supported herself—or them—with her writing, but so far too little has been uncovered to believe that she made a living of it.  Probably there is more than is currently catalogued: she wrote for magazines that had short shelf lives, for example, and on-line indexes of pseudonyms list her as having one, Milo Kirkham, a combination of her son and husband’s name, but do not connect that name to any stories.

There is a record of a Garen Drussai appearing in Los Angelese during the 1970s.  The description is thin, but is likely her: she was described as beautiful, and close to fifty, which would have undersold her age a bit, and the name is so unusual that it seems likely.   In two articles, The Los Angeles Times noted that she was working as a hat check girl—a distinctly out of fashion career—and writing, the two incomes supporting her through Santa Monica College, a junior college, and then UCLA, where she received a degree in English.  The University of California can confirm that a Garen Drussai did attend its Los Angeles campus from 1977 to 1980 and did receive a Bachelor’s of Art.

This would fit, too, with her receiving a Masters in English from Sonoma State University: at any rate, there is a thesis by a Garen Drussai there—I have not yet seen it—titled “Tryptich,” consisting of short stories.  Drussai did live her final 24 years in nearby Santa Rosa, so, again, it fits.  And her death certificate says her highest degree was a Master’s.  She also apparently started a business in 2000 called “Sun Maps,” which I am still investigating.  According to her death certificate, she was a hotel manager from about 1996 to 2009.

It is not known what Kirk did after his job with Safeway.  According to Garen, in the short talk I had with her, he went to New York, where he met Tiffany Thayer, but I have no record of that.  No record of his career appears in California until 1958 when he is listed in the Palo Alto city directory.  At the time, he was working for Microwave Engineering Laboratories and living in Campbell California.  According to historian Staurt Leslie (“How the West Was Won”), MEL was founded in 1956 by four engineers and did research on solid-state microwave technology for the military.

In 1961, he married Noelle Curtis in Santa Clara County, California; they divorced in the same county in 1975.  According to his obituary in the San Jose Mercury News and his death certificate he was a consultant for the last ten years of his life, 1981 to 1991.  His last residence was Sunnyvale, California.

I spoke briefly with Garen Drussai in November 2009.  At the time, I didn’t have any idea about her name change, and so never talked to her about that.  But she did mention that before she met Kirk, she was already a writer of what might be called mainstream articles.  Kirk introduced her to science fiction, and its as a science fiction writer that she is best remembered.  In an introduction to one of her stories, Anthony Boucher claimed credit for discovering her.

Drussai was not a fictioneer in the mold of E. Hoffman Price or Fredric Brown, churning out page after page of copy.  As best I can tell, she wrote four works of science fiction, one with Kirk.  (Although Robert Barbour Johnson referred to them as a writing team, and the Eric Leif Davin’s Partners in Wonder: Women and the Birth of Science Fiction, 1926-1965 has her as Mrs. Kirk Drussai, she insisted that she was the writer, not Kirk, and Kirk didn’t seem to write any science fiction by himself.)  Her stories were “Extra-Curricular,” which appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (1952); “Grim Fairy Tale,” which appeared in Vortex (1953); “The Twilight Years” with Kirk, in If(1955); and “Woman’s Work,” also in F&SF (1956).

Now although Garen Drussai is best known as a science fiction writer, she has not attracted a lot of attention—unsurprising given her small output.  What she has attracted, though, does not serve her well: it’s too limiting.  To the extent that her work has been studied, it has been considered as an example of woman’s writings.  Critics of her work argue that her stories do not explore, challenge, or subvert the gender stereotypes common to the 1950s.  Justine Larbalestier’s The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction suggests that later women writers including Joanna Russ, Susan Wood, and Anne McCaffrey were reacting to—and rejecting—the confining vision of Drussai’s vision. 

After all, her characters reproduce standard-issue mid-century gender roles, the men working, the women housewives and consumers.  Stories turned around domestic events.  “Grim Fairy Tale,” for example, was told from the point of view of home appliances which had once been enslaved by housewives and now used them as dolls (as well as other humans, presumably).  In “:The Twilight Years,” the main male character had worked until retirement, while his wife spent her days shopping.  The main character in “Woman’s Work” is a housewife who spends her time fighting off door-to-door salesmen—again, the wife is the family’s chief of consumption and, although this is the future, gender roles have stayed the same.

Even Lisa Yaszek, who reads Drussai’s work sympathetically in her book Galactic Subrubia: Recovering Women’s Science Fiction, admits that the focus stays on standard gender relations and domestic environments.  Yaszek just thinks that Drussai is satirizing these roles, these places, by showing how conditioned women were to accept their roles.  At the end of “Woman’s Work,” Yaszek notes, it becomes clear that Sheila, the housewife in question, is married to a salesman, and he observes her methods of dealing with other salesman to improve his own procedures.  Yaszek concludes, “In a world where housewife consumers literally sleep with their enemies, it seems likely that woman’s work will never be done.”

At the risk of being overly conciliatory, I think that both these appreciations are fair—Drussai’s work are indeed satires, although they do not usually go beyond satire to suggest other ways of thinking or living.  But, seeing her writing as domestic fiction is still too limited.  There are other influences.

First, it is clear that Drussai, although coming to science fiction late, learned the tropes of the genre, and set out to tweak them.   “Extra-Curricular,” for example, is a time machine story, although we do not learn that until the end: what we read about first are three episodes in which something bizarre happens—a baby speaks as an adult, a mistress becomes her lover’s intellectual equal, and an honored woman scientist speaks gibberish at a celebration in her honor.  These are certainly domestic issues—mother and baby, man and woman, especially—but they also show the influence of Boucher, who set out on a mission to tweak time machine stories.  Only at the end do we realize that a student in the future—doing extra-curricular work—has been dipping back in time and playing around.

Similarly, “Grim Fairy Tale” plays around with the evergreen topic of robots becoming masters to humanity, a commentary on the increasing mechanization of life.  Meanwhile, the “The Twilight Years” plays around with generational change and the increasing power of television.  It is set in a future where after age 60, people are killed with state approval—they are useless and need to make way for the newcomers.  In this telling, though, the couple at the heart of the story watch their own impending death on television, as some of the killings have been turned into a television show.  All of her stories, in fact, also deploy that old pulp method—so favored, again, by Boucher—of the surprise twist at the end (although “Grim Fairy Tale” telegraphs its end, as does “The Twilight Years” for that matter, which would seem to be more a case of lack of execution and my own familiarity with the generic conventions than an attempt to suggest inevitability).

It is possible to see in these stories a clever foresight into future events, as with the best of science fiction.  That’s not true of “Grim Fairy Tale”—believing robots our certain master was a mistake many science fiction writers made, as Thomas Disch points out in The Dreams our Stuff Is Made of.  But “Woman’s Work” foreshadows the age of spam and ubiquitous advertising, and “The Twilight Years” envisioned “reality television” years before it happened.

For my purposes, though, it is also interesting to read these stories from a Fortean perspective.  The one that most clearly fits the Fortean pattern is “Extra-Curricular,” for here you have a series of bizarre vignettes—I’m tempted to say Fortean damned facts.  These are inexplicable by any known science of the time.  And so you then get a way of explaining them that transcends current scientific knowledge.  The story, in fact, reads like a bit of Fort, with a string of unusual events, and then a hypothesis (usually an outrageous one, in Fort’s books).  “Grim Fairy Tale,” also plays with a Fortean notion—much beloved by science fiction writers, that we are property.  In this case, humans are the property of their machines. 

Less obviously Fortean is a tale that actually appeared in Doubt, the magazine of the Fortean Society.  This one was called “The Tainted” and was set in a society in which young boys practiced at becoming warriors so that they could be drafted into an interplanetary conflict at age thirteen.  The grandfather, who could remember as far back as the Korean War, bemoaned these developments, seeing the gunplay of the current generation as different from his, because they no longer understood it was play.  And he was right: at the end, a small boy gets hold of a real gun and kills his mother.

Charles Fort himself didn’t consider pacifism, but as developed by Thayer, an ant-war stance was central to the Fortean ideal.  Thayer felt that the mainstream was conditioning the younger generation, tricking it into killing for the fat cats who sat at the top of society.  Forteanism, in questioning everything, stood for pacifism.  Garen Drussai obviously made the connection—as Boucher attests in the introduction to one of her stories, in which he notes how she was both a passionate Fortean and pacifist.  “Woman’s Work” also fits with Forteanism as Thayer developed it.  Thayer took a dim view of advertising—it was all propaganda to him, brainwashing the masses.  “Woman’s Work” echoed these sentiments.  

Like his future wife, Kirk Drussai had a slippery identity.  There is less documentation on him, but it is as certain as certain can be that he was born 14 August 1919 in Ravenna (Buffalo County), Nebraska.  Of course, census records uncover no Drussais from Nebraska at all—like Garen, Drussai is an exceedingly rare name.  From his death certificate, however, it was possible to obtain Kirk’s social security number, and from that get his social security application.  He filed his about a week before Garen (Clara) filed hers.  According to that, his name was not Kirk Drussai, but Gerald Larry Polenz.  And, indeed, the census does have a records of Polenz’s in Ravenna at that time—and their names are the same that Kirk (Gerald) listed on his social security application.  If we assume that Kirk changed his name—and did not later steal someone else’s identity—then we know this about him:

His father was Albert Polenz.  A native Nebraskan, Polenz was born in 1889 to German immigrants.   Apparently, he had a child sometime in the 1910s—the 1910 census lists him as single and without a child, but his WWI draft card—he never served—has him as single and with a child.  Probably this means that he was married and his wife died.  The 1930 census does date his first marriage to 1916.  If that census is correct, then in 1918 he married Olive Mae Howard.  She was born in Custer Bow, Nebraska in 1893, her father from Iowa, her mother from New York.

Albert was a farmer in the late 1910s, but by 1920 had taken a job as a brakeman for the railroad.  The family did well.  The Polenz’s mortgaged a home in 1920.  In 1930, the house was valued at $9,000.  The family owned a radio.  F. Lannie, the daughter from Albert’s first marriage, had moved out, and three boarders were living with the Polenz’s.  The census for that year specified that Albert was employed by the CB&Q railroad, still as a brakeman.

In 1936, Gerald (Kirk) was still living in the family home at 804 Grand Avenue, Ravenna.  He was eighteen and, fortunately for a Midwesterner in the midst of the Depression, employed.  He was working at for the Safeway Grocery chain in nearby Grand Island, Nebraska.

Again like Garen, Kirk then seems to disappear from the historical record.  This is more surprising for him, since he would have been prime age for World War II.  But, I can’t identify any records related to him.  Maybe those records are lost or inaccessible.  Maybe he was playing around with his name and so was registered under some other name.  Or maybe, given the later interest of Garen and the Fortean Society with pacifisim, his dodged the draft or registered as a conscientious objector.  What we do know is that Gerald Polenz disappears.  And a decade or so later, Kirk Drussai appears in Hollywood, California. 

New Bigfoot article, just came out: Wildmen on the Cyberfrontier: The Computer Geek as an Iteration in the American Wildman Lore Cycle.

Probably the most committed Forteans in Chapter Two—the San Francisco Fortean Society—were Garen and Kirk Drussai, a married couple who lived in the Bay Area.  They were the first ever to put their unborn child up for membership in the Fortean Society.  Piecing together their lives has been difficult, especially for Kirk, who seems to have left few traces.  But here’s what I know so far—or think I know.

There is some confusion about who the Drussais even were.   I can be sure that Garen was born 17 June 1916 in the Bronx: all relevant documents confirm this.  But what was her name?  According to her death certificate and the birth certificate of her son, Garen’s maiden name was Lewis.  A search of the census records, however, fails to find any Garen Lewises—Garen is an extremely uncommon name.  A clue to her identity can be found in her social security application—there she gives her name as Clara Hettler and her parents as Benjamin Hettler and Annie (Besner) Hettler.  The 1920 and 1930 census does record a family of Hettlers living in the Bronx, headed by Benjamin and Annie (Besner), with a daughter, Clara, born about 1916.

Clara Hettler filled out her social security application in December 1936.  It seems very possible that she changed her name in the late 1930s when Hettler—a variation of Hitler—would have been a very inconvenient name to carry.  (It is also possible that she married in the 1930s and later divorced.)  Further confirmation that she Clara and Garen are indeed the same person come from a 1966 obituary for the eldest of the three Hettler sisters listed on the 1920 census, Estelle.  The article lists her parents and her sisters as Gertrude, the middle child, and Garen Drussai, indicating that although the rest of the family did not change its name—except upon marriage—they accepted their youngest daughter’s new name (at this point, Garen had married and divorced Kirk, and came by Drussai that way).

Anthony Boucher, who knew Garen Drussai in the 1950s, at least, said that she was Hungarian.  The census gives her parents birthplace as Austria.  Both may be correct, given the union of Austria and Hungary in the years between World War II and the inexactitude of the census.  Likely, Benjamin and Annie immigrated in 1900.  The 1910 census gives their immigration date as 1904—in contrast to later census data—but also note that they had an 8 year-old daughter who had been born in New York.  This was Etha.  It is possible that Etha was born out of wedlock, as the age of first marriage for Benjamin was given as 24 and Annie as 20, which would have put their wedding in 1908.  It’s also possible the census got the data wrong.

Neither Benjamin or Annie were naturalized as of 1910, although they both spoke, read, and wrote English.  Their native tongue, however, was Yiddish and the children were taught Yiddish in addition to English.  Benjamin was a furrier, his occupation variously given as furrier or nailer in a fur factory.  They lived in an ethnic enclave dominated by Russians, Austrians, and immigrants from Bohemia.  By 1930, Estelle and Gertrude had also obtained jobs, contributing to the family income as Stenographers.

By late 1936, Clara was still in the Bronx, at 1695 Andrews Avenue, very near where the Sedgwick Library is located now.  It is not clear whether she was living with her parents or was on her own—the address was different than the family’s in 1930, but they all may have moved, or just Clara may have.  She was employed by the Richard Steinweg Studio at 110 W. 40th Street, New York, about ten miles South and right across from Charles Fort’s old haunt, the main New York Public Library Branch.  Steinweg was apparently a fashion stylist of some sort, and his office was also very near the garment district.  The exact nature of Clara’s work at the time is uknown.

At some point between the end of 1936 and the late 1940s, Clara Hettler drastically changed her life.  The exact order of events is unknown, but she stopped being Clara Hettler and became Garen—maybe Garen Lewis, certainly Garen Drussai.  And After a life in New York she crossed the country and took up residence in Hollywood, California.

Further research has turned up some more material on Polly Lamb Goforth, and her background.

In the mid-1920s, Polly attended a short story class at Berkeley Evening High School.  The school was an experiment in progressive education, begun in the late teens or early twenties.  In addition to writing and arts courses, the school offered vocational classes in mechanics and typewriting, among others, most of them for free or a nominal fee.  Polly’s teacher in the short story class was Elizabeth A. Everett.  Everett was an active writer, publishing romance and westerns—and winning awards for them—as well as personal sketches and travel memoirs.  She was attached to the University of California Extension Service, and also was very active in the California Writer’s Club.  (It is likely that Everett influenced Polly to join that Club.)

The 1925 short story class went on to form The Scribbler’s Club, a group from Berkeley and Oakland who shared writing and encouraged one another’s efforts.  Polly was an active member, running the entertainment committee for many years.  The Scribbler’s Club annual festival occurred at Halloween.  (There were, of course, monthly meetings.)  Polly had the guests come as ghosts one year, and made a haunted house another.  These are not unusual but, given her interest in sorcery, they are worth noting.

It is also worth noting that the president for many years was William Naum Ricks.  Ricks was a middle-class black writer of some renown.  The Scribblers also produced David Duncan, a somewhat famous Berkeley writer.  So, Polly was surrounded by people of talent, but also by people not usually in leadership positions at the time—Everett, Ricks, and the California Writer’s Club, while presidented by men, was largely driven by women.  After BEHS she also attended the Williams Institute, another organization experimenting with progressive—read: low-cost—education, matriculating at their school of journalism and authorship.  These associations may have also led Polly to take up more unusual strands of American life.  Indeed, Polly became president of the Scribbler’s Club in 1936.

But still, she was involved with the standard, too.  She was part of the woman’s auxiliary of the United Veterans Council in Berkeley.   She was entertainment director for the All Arts Club.  She was a member of the Writers Workshop Guild.  In the early 1940s, when she was with Heath Dairy she joined a woman’s professional group.  And in 1942, when she was living at 1945 Berryman—apparently after she and George divorced—she hosted a going away party for a soldier joining the war effort.

Further research has turned up more material on Kenneth MacNichol.  I have spoken with one of his descendants, the grandson from a relationship which Kenneth did not formalize with marriage.  The woman in question was named Dorothy, and she may have been the woman for whom Kenneth left Louise.  At any rate, they were a couple in the 1920s and, according to the grandson, part of the “Bloomsbury Set.”

“The Bloomsbury Set” was a loosely allied group of artists, writers, and thinkers—including Virginia Woolf and J. M. Keynes—who met around Bloomsbury, London, during the first part of the twentieth century.  It’s not easy to distill a single vision—or even say if the group cohered enough to be taken together—but there is a sense of Bohemianism about them, as they argued about the limits of domesticity, the place of women in society, and the problems with capitalism and imperialism.  If MacNichol was indeed part of this set, he would have felt at home, as it had echoes of his time in Carmel and foresaw his time in San Francisco (as well as New York, perhaps.)

But it’s not clear that MacNichol actually belonged to this group.  Certainly, he lived in the area—his flat at 120 Clapton Common, where he and Dorothy held soirees, was only a few miles from Bloomsbury.  But MacNichol’s grandson remembers the stories of the set revolving around George Bernard Shaw, DH Lawrence, and HG Wells (and his father—Kenneth’s son—remembers meeting Shaw), none of whom are usually included in the Bloomsbury Set.  Indeed, Woolf was partially writing against the realistic style of Wells.

At any rate, it seems fair to say that Kenneth probably fell in with a crowd of London thinkers that influenced him to—as he said—take on more serious material, economics and sociology, and got him thinking about how to relate writing and advertising.

At some point in the late 1920s, MacNichol and Dorothy broke up and he married again, this time, according to his grandson, a woman named Olga.  That marriage lasted only a short time before he married Netta in 1930.

There was also one other marriage not yet mentioned, Susan, whom he married in 1944.  That gives a total of 6 wives, plus one other long term relationship.