A bit more on Henry Miller, clarifying some of the earlier post, which overstated some points.

Henry Miller was born 26 December 1891 and raised in Brooklyn, New York.  By his own account, he had a happy childhood.  In the 1910s and 1920s, he moved the Greenwich Village, a Bohemian center.  His family had been unreligious, but Miller himself was drawn to religious ideas, and so found himself captivated by many of the Metaphysical movements then current in Greenwich Village>  He played around with Ouija boards, for instance.  As well, he was  drawn to Eastern religions.  Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, was especially influential, as were Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha (on the life of the Buddha) and Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism.  He said he always found gurus more interesting than Christ because of their quest for Enlightenment.

“Freedom,” he wrote in the 1950s, “is a misnomer.  Certitude is more like it.  Unerringness.  Because truthfully there is always only one way to act in any situation, not two, nor three.  Freedom implies choice and choice exists only to the extent that we are aware of our ineptitude.  The adept takes no thought, one might say.  He is one with thought, one with the path.”

Miller (whose literary evaluations were always as eccentric as he was: “My encounters with books I regard very much as my encounters with other phenomena of life or thought.  All encounters are configurate, not isolate.  In this sense, and in this sense only, books are as much a part of life as trees, stars or dung.   I have no reverence for them per se.  Nor do I put authors in any special, privileged category.  They are like other men, no better, no worse”) also found himself drawn to the early weird writers: he was in “thrall” to Rider Haggard’s She.  (Indeed, his Books in my Life spends an inordinate amount of time on Haggard.)  He was also a devoted fan of Algernon Blackwood.  These works, and others like them, including the books of Bulwer-Lytton appealed to him as Romantic yawps against the deadening materialism of the time.  He wrote, “around 1880 English novelists of imagination—the writers of ‘romances’—began to introduce into their works the so-called and miscalled ‘supernatural’ element.  Theirs was a revolt against the fateful tendency of the times, the bitter fruits of which we of this generation our tasting.”

It may be that this love of early weird writers and his own religious quest fuelled his interest in Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical movement—after all, there are a lot of echoes of Bulwer-Lytton in Blavatsky’s writings.  At any rate, he found Theosophy endlessly engaging.  Blavatsky’s Voice of Silence (along with Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism) provided his writing with themes, symbols, and character names.

It may also be that Miller was impressed by Blavatsky because he had a life-long interest in finding a unity to all the world—and Blavatsky’s systemization of science, religion, and the occult certainly did that.  Spengler’s The Decline of the West also did something similar.  Miller became fascinated with it, as did many in the Greenwich Village scene.  (Excerpts appeared in one of the Little Magazines.)  It gave an intellectually respectable base to Blavatsky’s speculation.  It also resonated with his own sense of history’s trajectory.  Despite having an exuberant love of life, Miller thought that the world was running down, and Spengler advocated this, with his premonition that the West was on the decline.  Miller wrote in the 1950s:

“That the American way of life is an illusory kind of existence,  that the price demanded for the security and abundance it pretends to offer is too great.  The presence of these ‘renegades,’ small in number though they be, is but another indication that the machine is breaking down.  When the smash up comes, as now seems inevitable, they are more likely to survive the catastrophe than the rest of us.  At least, they will know how to get along without cars, without refrigerators, without vacuum cleaners, electric razors and all the other ‘indispensables’ . . . probably even without money.  If ever we are to witness a new heaven and a new earth, it must surely be one in which money is absent, forgotten, wholly useless.”

A nice little find.  Syracuse University holds the Mercury Press Records; Mercury Press produced The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, edited for a long time by Anthony Boucher.  It turns out that there’s a file labeled Drussai which contains several letters from Garen and a pair from Kirk, all to Boucher.

The correspondence begins in January 1951, after Boucher had already asked for rewrites on an early version of “Extra-Curricular.”  All of the correspondence is from one or the other Drussai to Boucher—none of his responses survive except as faintly penciled notes on the letters.  Most of the material is Drussai sending off manuscripts, often through several rounds of revisions, which gives some insight into her career.

At the time she first wrote Boucher, Garen had already been rejected by Horace Gold at Galaxy and she was trying to get a sense of the market—how many revisions she could expect, and what-not.  At first, she admitted, she started a lot of stories but could not finish them.  Then she focused more.  One gets the sense that she sometimes felt overwhelmed by her domestic responsibilities: “Between lawn planting------and fence building----------and curtain making I did manage to whip this “Surprisingly” long (for me) story together.  Huh?,” she wrote in October 1956.  A little while later, she resolved to take her writing more seriously.  She also asked for Boucher’s advice on agents.  She wanted to move into mainstream publishing, in addition to her science fiction, and also found Harry Altshuler—her agent—was apathetic toward her work.

In addition, the correspondence sheds some light on some of the obscure details of the Drussai’s life.  They moved often.  Her first letter gave their address as 259 Montana Street—far from Telegraph Hill, almost in Daly City.  By May of 1951, she had moved to Hollywood, then to LA before the summer was over.  The following Autumn she was on La Crescenta, only to move back north to San Francisco by 1955.  In the spring of 1956, she was in the suburb of San Carlos, and then moved to Campbell, California that summer.  The Drussais seemed to have stayed there until they divorced, right around New Year’s 1960.  Garen and Milo moved to San Jose, Kirk to Santa Clara.

Apparently, Kirk had been in sales for most of this time—although I don’t know what he was selling.  Around the beginning of 1957, he got involved with technical writing and was a member of the Bay Area Chapter of the Society of Technical Writers and Editors, which had about 25 members.  He obviously could not know it, but moving into technical writing just as Silicon Valley was about to take off was wise.  Quite probably, he published far more than his wife, who, judging by the correspondence here, had a lot of trouble placing her writing, although it’s unknown whether that’s because of the quality of the output or the closing of the pulp market in the 1950s.

Indeed, it’s worth a slight digression on this topic.  I have seen a couple of newsletters the Golden Gate Chapter of the Society of Technical Publishers put out in the late 1950s.  (That group and the STWE merged in 1960), and there are some interesting connections between technical writers and Forteans that are worth further exploration.  Anthony Boucher, for example, came to talk at one of TPS’s meetings, discussing funny gaffes that had gotten past science fiction editors.  Members of the TPS also heard a talk by one of the followers of General Semantics, which was then taking root in San Francisco since S. I. Hayawaka had come to San Francisco State University.  And Kirk asked Tony to republish Isaac Asimov’s “Insert Knob A in Hole B,” which had been in the December 1957 F&SF.  Although tech writing and science fiction seem, on the face of it, so different, I can see the connection, as in both cases the writer must use her or his imagination to make sense of—and make sensible—otherwise undigested scientific material.

But, back to the correspondence.  It also reveals some personal facts about Garen that would otherwise be hard to come from.  She had a great sense of humor, for instance.  One letter to Boucher was entirely blank between the salutation and the signature, with a P.S.: “More later.”  Another time, she submitted a story that, she learned upon reading the magazine, was very similar to one just published by F&SF (Avram Davidson’s “Summerland,” which implies that hers, titled “Wish Fulfillment, had something to do with Spiritualism.)  She wrote, “I’ve been tricked by coincidence. . . .  I hope my next to you is not the result of some telepathic meeting of minds.  I couldn’t take it.”

Frustratingly, however, the letters do not quite solve some problems about her identity.  In his first letter to her, Boucher was confused about her gender; she explained that she was a woman and, after some further prompting, gave some background to her unusual name: “In the Ross 128 Sector, Karen is a cognate of Garen; and Drussai is quite a common name.  Sort of like your Smiths and Jonses (sic) here.  (It’s Hungarian).”

At the time, Boucher (obviously) had not met Garen face-to-face.  But he had by the time of his introduction to her first story (“Extra-Curricular,” June 1952), when he commented on her Hungarian beauty.  But, of course, she never says in this letter that she is Hungarian.  Maybe he assumed it, and so wrote it—and given that Garen was interested in re-inventing herself, she let it stand.  Or maybe she had confirmed this in some other conversation.  At any rate, it suggests that, at least at this time, she was not claiming to be Hungarian.

More confusing is her reference to “Ross 128 Sector.”  Ross 128 is the star nearest the Earth; it had been discovered in 1926 and so was likely known by science fiction aficionados.  Perhaps this was what she meant—a joke, her letters full of them, a reference to how far she was from Berkeley and the Bohemian parts of San Francisco?—or perhaps something more obscure.  If we accept the star interpretation, then she seems close to admitting that the name is wholly fabricated, whether Drussai is Hungarian or not.

Like so many Forteans, Garen Drussai is quite a slippery character.

We’ve already seen that, geographically, the distribution of Forteanism across the Bay Area correlated with the areas of Bohemianism.  So now, let’s look a little closer at Bay Area Bohemianism, its history, its traits, and its structure.

San Francisco had an established Bohemian culture in the 1890s, much of it revolving around Ambrose Bierce, whose ghost stories, especially, would much influence the weird writers of the 1920s.  (And whose disappearance in Mexico inspired Fort’s musing that perhaps someone was collecting Ambroses.)  As we have seen with Kenneth MacNichol, there was concurrently a small arts colony in and around Carmel.  In the wake of the 1906 fire and earthquake, much of San Francisco’s bohemia moved south.

The doyenne of this Carmel was George Sterling, a poet who had been mentored by Bierce.  Sterling wrote, “There are two elements, at least, that are essential to Bohemianism.  The first is devotion or addiction to one or more of the Seven Arts; the other is poverty.  Other factors suggest themselves: for instance, I like to think of my Bohemians as young, as radical, in their outlook on art and life, as unconventional, and, though it is debatable, as dwellers in a city large enough to have the somewhat cruel atmosphere of all great cities.”

Sterling seemed to have known Kenneth MacNichol at a time when MacNichol was very interested in New Thought.  He also encouraged the work of Clark Ashton Smith, second only to H. P. Lovecraft as a writer of weird tales during the 1930s.  Eventually, Sterling moved back to the Monkey Block of San Francisco, which he had left.  In 1927, he killed himself in a room in the Bohemian Grove.

That same year, the poet Kenneth Rexroth arrived in San Francisco after a peripatetic life had taken him across the country, to Paris and back.  Rexroth would become one of the central figures in the Bay Area arts scene and shaped the form of Bohemianism.

He had been in Greenwich Village during the years after World War I, and in Paris as well, where he was exposed to the cynical Bohemianism of the time.  Rexroth’s thoughts ran in a different direction.  He was interested in mysticism and occultism—occasionally his lectures would devolve into conspiratorial harangues about the Freemasons.  After having been in what was then considered the center of civilization—New York and France—Rexroth saw San Francisco as a backwater, untouched by modernism, and so fertile ground for a new kind of approach to the arts and life.  He stood against consumerism and, as World War II broke, the permanent war state.  He was interested in Orientalism and translated a number of Asian poets.

He also established some of the foundational structures of Bay Area Bohemianism.  He formed a Libertarian Group which held meetings Wednesdays on San Francisco’s Steiner Street.  As many as 200 people might attend these meetings of “philosophical anarchists.”  Among the group was Lewis Hill, a pacifist who founded the Pacifica Foundation in 1946 and then KPFA in 1949, the country’s first listener-supported radio station, broadcasting from Berkeley.

In addition, other outlets for avant-garde thought were opening up.  George Leite and the Manhattan Project-physicist Bern Porter published together the journal Circle and Porter alone put out Berkeley: A Journal of Modern Culture.  Leite also ran a bookstore in Berkeley, daliel’s—a;ways with the little d—where Bohemians congregated.

In the months after World War II ended, a recognizable group came into being, with Rexroth as a distant guru, and characterized most especially by three young poets, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, and Robin Blaser.  These writers some themselves as inheritors of all of modernism—they all were devoted to Ezra Pound—and Romanticism.  Their work combined intensely intellectual poetry with homosexual desire—and this became the mark of the Berkeley Renaissance, as they named their movement.  The Berkeley poets also maintained an interest in mysticism.  Robert Duncan had been raised a theosophist before he vagabonded across the country, and Rexroth encouraged him to return to those roots.  Spicer claimed to be descended both from Native Americans and Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the New Thought Christian Science Church.  He read science fiction, read Crowley, and practiced the Tarot.

Philip K. Dick, who lived with Spicer for a time, remembered that Berkeley culture of the late forties ‘required you to have a really thorough grounding in the classics.’  (SF fandom, by contrast, he thought was overrun by “trolls.”)  This was the culture—the mixture of heady intellectualism and mysticism—that nourished Polly Lamb Goforth and Anthony Boucher, among others.

This Berkeley Renaissance spread across the Bay Area, the seed of what would become the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beat movement, which, in turn, would feed into the later Hippie and Free Love movements.  These developments depended upon San Francisco as a place, and also as an idea—Herb Caen’s Baghdad by the Bay.

In terms of place, San Francisco Bohemian culture was coming into its own.  Philip Lamantia remembered, “San Francisco was terribly straight-laced and provincial, but at the same time there were these islands of freedom—in North Beach at bars like the Iron Pot and the Black Cat, where intellectuals met to talk.  There was a whole underground culture that went unnoticed by the city at large.”  Returning GIs, displaced by the war, and Conscientious Objectors released from camps in Oregon, rounded out these movements, helped them grow.  As historian Richard Candida Smith notes, to the surprise of many, returning soldiers did not only tap into the GI Bill for vocational education, but for more broad, liberal, and arts-related education, too.

There was also the myth of San Francisco itself, as an enchanted place, which charged the Bohemia there.  This was not a jaded old world, but a new one, ready to be molded by the artist.

The quintessential art movement to emerge out of this moment was abstract expressionism.  Abstract expressionism had its roots in the earlier surrealist movement, but whereas surrealists tried to plumb the individual psyche for universal—though still weird—symbols, abstract expressionism turned toward individual experience.   The art was confessional and personal—both of which can be seen in relation to Forteans and weird tales, which also tended toward the confessional and personal, and against the universal.  San Francisco artists, generally speaking, stood against determinism and the force of history.  Often inspired by Buddhism, they argued that humans had limitless potential and so the chief job of the artist—be it painter or poet—was to reflect upon experience and find the meaning in it.

Smith again: “The imagination, manifested in its highest form in the aesthetic act, became the most stable source of personal freedom in a world otherwise deterministic and frightening.  An absolutized privacy, no matter what the costs, turned out to be the most radical defense against the claims of public order.  Bohemian enclaves developed a repertoire of self-images that proived to have appeal to the collective imagination far beyond the limited boundaries of the art and poetry worlds.  As feelings of powerlessness spread, the aesthetic avant-garde provided an antidote.”

These ideals, matched with the influx of older, more experienced (and in the case of CO’s, more idealistic) individuals helped to create the Bay Area scene.

As I have already suggested, the Fortean community was interwoven with this larger art world.  Boucher had a radio show at KPFA, for example, and knew Philip K. Dick from Dick’s job at the record store (and later as his editor).  Circle was discussed in the San Francisco Chronicle’s book review column just before Boucher took that job.  Henry Miller was Fortean and also a key figure in the extension of the Bay Area Renaissance onto the Monterey Peninsula.  He published in Circle, and new many of the area artists.  His writings, too, exemplified the turn toward the confessional.

It is also possible to see in the art world itself an interest in things Fortean.  The best example is a project by Clay Spohn at the California School of Fine Arts (in San Francisco).  The installation was “The Museum of Unknown and Little Known Objects”—the very name of which is Fortean.  Spohn saw his work—very much as Fort did—as “philosophical prankism,” a way of testing the boundaries of what was known by showing what was unknown.  In all, the Museum contained 42 pieces, made up of scrap metal an unusual pieces of trash that Spohn had been collecting, including a watch on a wire, the starter for a rat race, a hat tree for a neighborly garden, and “bedroom fluff”: things he picked out of a vacuum cleaner.