I’ve had a chance to go through most of Robert Barbour Johnson’s stories for Blue Book Magazine.  This is the vast bulk of his known and credited work.

They are not very good.

For the most part, they are heavily dipped in nostalgia—the old circus man is always the right one, the new ways always lead to danger.   There’s a sugar-coated patriotism to them—George Washington makes a cameo appearance in one, and is rendered monodimensionally.

Beyond that, the stories engage in an awful lot of telling.  There are large lectures throughout.  I get the sense that these were excerpted from—or inspired by—the novel Johnson was supposed to be writing on circus life, and expressed ideas that he held very dearly, and therefore not very clearly or critically.

According to Tiffany Thayer’ Doubt, Henry Miller joined the Fortean Society sometime around 1945.  Miller was the notorious author of, among other works, The Tropic of Cancer and The Tropic of Capricorn, both of which were banned in his own country.  At the time he joined the Fortean Society, he had settled in Big Sur, where he continued to write, to watercolor, and become a guru to the disenchanted: Bohemian youths, Conscientious Objectors as they were released from work camps in Oregon, those looking for something more in this materialistic age—an age savagely satire by Miller in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, a book he wrote about the cross-country trip which took him to California and Big; in the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company section of The Tropic of Cancer; an age of materialism that devalued the most valuable material possession, the body, censoring discussion of its pleasures even as it sent young men across the world to be torn apart.

Miller’s joining of the Fortean Society was not a surprise.  As Kenneth Rexroth, the San Francisco poet, notes in his introduction to Miller’s Nights of Love and Laughter, Miller had long been interested in the occult.  His writings are sprinkled with references to Mu and astrology—he was a deep devotee of astrology since his time in Paris.  (He fled to France after walking out on the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company—Western Union—the rest of his life living by his wits and what he could bum from others.)  His writing was resolutely non-conformist.  In her biography of him, Erica Jong catches Miller saying,

“I am not following a strict chronological sequence but have chosen to adopt a circular or spiral form of time development which enables me to expand freely in any direction at any given moment.  The ordinary chronological development seems to me wooden and artificial, a synthetic reconstitution of the facts of life.  The facts and events of life are for me only the starting points on the way toward the discovery of wisdom.”

With the exception of that final phrase, a more Fortean approach to literature is hard to imagine.

Early in my work on Robert Barbour Johnson I read his short The Magic Park about the Golden Gate Park.   At the time, I did not get a whole lot out of it.  It’s not clear what the book is supposed to be.  He touches on the history of the park—but then goes on to say that while he would love to do a fully detailed historical reconstruction, that is not what his book is about.  He sometimes writes as if it is a guidebook—but then admits that’s impossible, since the park has no beginning and no end: it is fifty-two blocks long and eight blocks wide, and one can enter or leave at any point.  He touches on some of the main attractions—the Academy of Sciences, the bison and elk enclosures, the DeYoung Museum—but then admits that these are not always as interesting as the quail and rabbits running about and, besides, gives no directions how to get there.

In essence, it’s a paean to the park, a love song.

And in that sense, it can be understood as part of what Kevin Starr called the enchantment of San Francisco, the making of the myth of Baghdad by the Bay.  In other words, part of the same project that engaged Herb Caen, whom Johnson claimed as an acquaintance, at the very least.

What makes the park magic, to Johnson, is not is natural becauty: it’s that the park was created by human hands, a green oasis crafted from seaside wastelands where, he says, nothing had lived before.  He imagines that the whole endeavor started as a joke on the park superintendent, John McLaren, a Scotsman who came to San Francisco in the late nineteenth-century to make his fortune as a . . . landscape architect.  Such a carer seemed out of place in the (very provincial) and rough San Francsco of the time, Johnson suggests, and McLaren could only have gotten the job of creating a park from the city on a lark.  But he showed them!

There are obvious Fortean tones in this history of the park.  First, there is the little guy battling mainstream and making good.  There is the sense that all of creation is a cosmic joke.  And a sense that what counts is art, not nature, and that through art magic can be conjured.

The book also has some more obvious Fortean analogues.  Johnsons spends time talking about the ghosts and unusual things that have been reported in the area—and some even caught, as when an Arctic Owl was found to haunt the park, although officialdom had dismissed the possibility.

Johnson’s view of the park, then, is an attempt to find an enchanted geography in a world where such enchantment seemed impossible—the park operates for him the same way that the ptach of uncanny ground near Monterey did.

The eleven stories in Garen Drussai’s “Triptych” tell us one thing regarding her Forteanism: she left that philosophy behind, even as she continued her interest in other topics.  A couple of the stories reiterate her pacifist stance—in particular, “Selection,” which concerns an Earth driven to near destruction, saved only when a race of aliens came and put the remaining humans on reservations.  While they tried to rebuild civilization with the peaceful types, the rest were divided by races and kept entertained by violent pastimes.  The stories also emphasize the power of imagination.  For example, in “The Smell of Ice Cream” merely a whiff of the dairy dessert make a couple remember a bad day; in “Touching,” a lonely man finds satisfaction in his ability to, well, touch.  And in “Caring,” a sensitive girl wills herself to become a dying bird when after she fails to save a broken-winged seagull.

The stories reflect, broadly speaking, a liberal attitude.  Even the most reactionary (and predictable), “The Fifth Window,” about a man in long ago China trying to arrange his marriage, is liberal in the sense that, as Drussai explains in the introduction, she tried to understand the man in the context of his time, not measured against some timeless ethics.  Others are more obviously so: “Leopardus,” for instance, concerns a woman who comes to hate what fur represents.

But her critics would still probably take exception at her vision of women.  She mentions in the introduction that women are essential to civilization—but makes the argument in essentialist terms, seeing women not as potential explorers, say, but as those who build churches and hold societies together.  The four hundred page novel which she wrote was about a pioneer woman, “Harriet” and one vignette makes it into the thesis as the story “snare.”  Harriet turns out to be a selfish hedonist, who resents her husband, hates her children, has an affair, but cannot find it in herself to feel anything but trapped.  The main character in “Knowing It All” is a woman who relies on the help of men to make her way through the world.

I got a hold of Garen Drussai’s Sonoma State University thesis.  I haven’t had time to read through the eleven stories (it’s called “Tryptich” because the thesis is divided into three sections), but the introduction gives some more information on her life, and also confirms some of what I had been guessing.

According to the introduction, Drussai was a born story-teller.  When, as a child, she was supposed to be dusting the furniture, she would instead hide under a table and tell herself stories.  (She felt herself an “alien,” adrift from others.)  As she looked back on that time, she valued her imagination—it is imagination, the ability to create vivid images—which makes the writer.  She seems to have a romantic, as opposed to craftsmanlike, say, view of writing.  Movies fed her imagination—although never stories with violence—and reading, of course.

The first stories she read were adventure tales, Lost World, and fairy tales, and the travels of Richard Halliburton, and the fantasies of Jules Verne.  She was influenced by Jack London and H. G. Wells and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holes—this may have given her a connection to Anthony Boucher—as well as Greek, Roman, and Norse myths.  She read A Tale of Two Cities and memorized the poems of Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe.

While she was in high school she tried her hand at writing—“melancholy teen-age poems and stories” as she says on page ix, and though she submitted them they were never published.  After graduating high school, she lit off for Hollywood—this would have been about 1937—and took a speech class at Hollywood High School to get rid of her New York accent.  (It would have been about this time that Clara Hettler changed her name to Garen Lewis, and so it is likely that Garen was changing her entire identity with the move across the country.)

It was in California that Garen met and married the (also newly-renamed) Kirk Drussai.  She was attracted by his love of reading and interest in things philosophical.  He introduced her to science fiction where she could work out her own philosophical ideas: Science Fiction “opened up new vistas for me,” she wrote.  “There were subjects I could not tackle, at least it might be unwise to do so if I wanted to be published in popular magazines.  Sexual, racial, and violent themes might not be acceptable, and yet put the same ideas on another planet or at another time in the future, and they were all right.”  Garen name checked some of the masters, Bradbury, Heinlein, Asimov, Matheson (although she mis-spelled Asimov and Heinlein).  She went on to tell a story about how the editor of Galaxy recognizer her on a return trip to New York and invited her to a party, at which a man asked her what her husband did.  She put him in his place.

According to Garen’s later account, she sold over a dozen stories (of which I have found five), some of which were reprinted.  Apparently, she had no other job at the time.  Her first sale—and first hundred dollars ever earned—came from the second story she sold to Anthony Boucher at F&SF.  (This was “Extra-Curricular.”)  She had to do three rewrites.  At the time, Drussai also began auditing courses at San Francisco State University, which fed her love of learning but left her no better off when she and Kirk divorced and she was left to support Milo.  (Who was, she said, ten years-old, which puts the divorce at about 1959.)

She did indeed end up in Southern California again, where she had a “managerial position” (likely this was running the coat check) and happened onto the UCLA campus.  Vowing to return to academe, she applied at Santa Monica Junior College and spent six years getting her bachelor’s—so she was in school from 1974 to 1980.  During this time, she also wrote a four-hundred page novel, although this remains unpublished.

I contacted the California State Military Museum in Sacramento to see if I could get more information on Robert Barbour Johnson's (short) stint in the army during World War II.

According to Dan Sebby, Director and Curator, the unit to which Johnson was assigned--Service Command Unit (SCU) 1952) was the permanent garrisoning party stationed at Fort Rosecrans, and so Johnson would have been involved not with the artillery batteries that were stationed at the Fort but to housekeeping services.