Anthony Boucher was something of an iconoclastic thinker—although less so, and certainly less Bohemian, than most of the Bay Area Forteans we’ve met to this point.  He was a liberal Catholic—not so unusual in those days—for women’s rights, civil rights, and even relatively sympathetic to homosexuals.  It may have only been a defense mechanism explaining why he was a pedant living in Berkeley but not a professor, nonetheless his argument for being a popular writer was cogent.  As his wife Phyllis remembered, according to the introduction to The Anthony Boucher Chronicles:

He used to say that the heresy of our age is the perceived dichotomy between art and entertainment: if something is one, it cannot be the other.  Things that are now being studied in school were in their own time great popular successes.  The public avidly awaited the next installment of a current Dickens novel.  There was a popular following of the Elizabethan theater and if the Greek theater.  He used to say that you could get a better idea of just what it was like to be alive in that time from reading the fiction of an earlier period than you could from reading factual history.

There is great truth to this argument.  Lawrence Levine has shown how Shakespeare was transformed from an object of popular enjoyment to the epitome of the high culture during the nineteenth century.  Eric Lott’ Love and Theft argues that the story was, perhaps, messier than Levine makes it out to be, but there is little doubt that the nineteenth century saw an increasingly rigid distinction between high and low culture.  The rise of mass culture tended to blur that distinction in the first part of the twentieth century, but, broadly speaking, the upper classes were not yet willing to give up on the earlier division, and so saved it by altering the hierarchy: the late 1930s through the 1950s saw a focus on the lines of demarcation between high brow, low brow and the newly conceived middle brow.  In this taxonomy, mysteries—for example Agatha Christie’s—could sometimes reach the middlebrow, but the great mass was lowbrow—“The pulps are the backbone of the American mystery novel,” he wrote in a 28 February 1943 column for the San Francisco Chronicle—and certainly science fiction and fantasy were lowbrow, fit for working men and adolescents, but not for the more refined.  (Boucher was also a fan of comics.)

Boucher was astute enough to see that some of such lowbrow entertainments were as good as that aimed at a highbrow audience and, more importantly, that the very lines defining the categories did not reflect the transcendental value of different works, but were historically contingent.  Shakespeare was always dense and intelligent—although the plays had scenes specially constructed to entertain the masses—but there was intelligent and worthwhile work being published in the pulps, too, which had to be entertaining for general readers but still could deal with important themes.  In that same San Francisco Chronicle article, he suggested that pulps send copies of their works to reviewers, as a way of bridging the divide between low- and middlebrow.  “Fantasy is an essential part of the tradition of the English short story—see any anthology for proof,” he wrote in a 15 November 1942 review of Clark Ashton Smith’s Out of Space and Time for the Chronicle.  “It has its writers and its readers, and the general editorial opposition has driven them, the supercilious might say, underground into a few pulps.  Don’t be too hasty to sneer at the word ‘pulp.’  These pulps provide the only steady market that would publish the work of a latter-day Bierce or Machen or Poe.”  Boucher wrote Rocket to the Morgue in part to publicize the really smart things the Southern California science fiction writers were saying and doing and thinking.

As I said earlier, that book was also Fortean—and admiring Fort was another of Boucher’s iconoclastic stances.

Boucher had what might be called an ironic appreciation of Fort.  “Few fields can be so diverting as good honest crackpottery,” he wrote in a 20 June 1943 review of The Challenge of the Great Pyramid in the Chronicle.  He enjoyed Fort’s work, calling him “the noble science-heckler of the Bronx” and thinking it “excellent” that others continued to collect and compile books of Fortean material.

Fortean thinking to Boucher, it seems, was one way of comprehending the unknown.  In a review of William Oliver Stevens Unbidden Guests” A Book of Real Ghosts for the 6 January 1946 Chronicle he suggested that Stevens’s preference for psychic theories was too restrictive and understanding ghosts required other interpretative framework, from psychoanalysis to Christianity, from Einsteinian physics to Fortean musing.

That the unknown was worth comprehending, Boucher had no doubt.  He knew (interesting) mystery writers who dabbled in the subject” H.F. Heard, he reported in a 27 January 1946 column for the Chronicle (Forteana seemed to be on his mind that month), was a mystical philosopher who composed his detective stories by automatic writing.  Kendell Foster Crossen and Bruce Elliot were practicing magicians; Stuart Palmer was “one of the few men willing to admit that he actually saw a sea serpent.”

Science fiction, too, dealt with the unknowable—in the process making it knowable.  While reviewing the science fiction anthology The Portable Novels of Science in the 7 October 1945 Chronicle, Boucher had an opportunity to discuss how scientifiction devotees, as he called them, in emulation of Hugo Gernsbeck, had thought about atomic bombs, space ships, time travel, and mutants for a long time before the rest of the world caught up.  Fort, he suggested, might be similarly visionary.  For example, Boucher reviewed John Alden Knight’s Moon Up—Moon Down in the 4 October 1942 Chronicle, which he compared to Fort in its eccentricities.  Knight’s book was about the periodicity of animal activity—which, based on his initial research on when to go fishing, and expanding from there—he decided was driven by some unyet-known factor.  The review starts with a story from Edmund Pearson—who?—about Fort.  Apparently, Fort looked up one of his own books at the NYPL and found an odd call number.  He asked the librarian, who told him that it referred to “eccentric literature.”  That classification can work for Knight and “that noble science-heckler of the Bronx,” but might someday have to lead to changes—just as Darwin’s book might once have seem eccentric.  (Probably not, since this shows little understanding of the history of biology: Darwin was not eccentric, but stood in an identifiable tradition; many just considered him wrong.)

Fantasy, of course, dealt with the uncanny as well—that was the basis of so many other Bay Area Forteans connection of Weird Tales and Fort.  But it also had a more ironic way of creating Forteana: by creating characters, known to be fake, but taken as real, just as Sherlock Holmes was.  In his 5 December 1953 review of the Lovecraft collection Beyond the Wall of Sleep in the Chronicle, he wrote: building on Bierce, Arthur Machen, and Robert W. Chambers, Lovecraft created the Cthullu Mythos “which dominated pulp fantasy during his lifetime and achieved an independent reality of its own almost comparable to the Holmes saga.”

But while he admitted Fort’s diligence, Boucher saw his work as limited: not only was it only one way to comprehend the unknown—apparently both competing with and complementing his own Christian Faith—but also he thought that Fort’s style undermined his work.  In a review of R. DeWitt Miller’s Forgotten Mysteries for the Chronicle (4 May 1947), he bemoaned Fort’s cryptic documentation and dim documentation.”

It is not known exactly when Boucher first came into contact with Fort, although it is likely when he went to Los Angeles and met the Mañana Society.  Certainly, this is how he presented it in Rocket to the Morgue.  In that novel, the main character, Lieutenant Marshal, is told about Fort when he confronts the science fiction author based on Robert Heinlein, who offers teleportation—citing Fort—as one science fiction explanation for a locked room mystery (76).  “Locked rooms,” Marshal said at another point, “fit into the Fort pattern if pattern it can be called.”  Inspired by the ingenious explanation, Marshal begins to explore Fort more and comes to see the world in Fortean terms (151).

In the course of the mystery, he meets Hugo Chantrelle—based on the occultist and racketeer Jack Parsons—and in him sees the possibilities and problems with Forteanism (112):

For Hugo Chantrelle was an eccentric scientist.  In working hours at the California Institute of Technology he was an uninspired routine laboratory man; but on his own time he devoted himself to those peripheral aspects of science which the scientific purist damns as mumbo-jumbo, those new alchemies and astrologies out of which the race may in time construct unsurmised wonders of chemistry and astronomy.  The rocketry of Pendray, the time-dreams of Dunne, the extra sensory perception of Rhine, the sea serpents of Gould, all these held his interests far more than any research conducted by the Insitute.  He was inevitably a member of the Fortean Society of America, and had his own file of unbelievable incidents eventually to be published as a supplement to the works of Charles Fort.  It must be added in his favor that his scientific training automatically preserved him from the errors of the Master.  His file was carefully authenticated, and often embellished with first hand reports.

Ultimately, its Fortean thinking that solves this locked room mystery.  The key was that an investigating doctor was wrong when he said it was impossible for Hilary to stab himself—he had (as Boucher really did) unusually jointed arms that allowed him to reach around his back easily.  Hilary’s brother-in-law Wimpole—based on that great charlatan L. Ron Hubbard—was nonplussed: “And I bit.  A good Fortean like me, and swallowing Science as gospel.”   The phrase that hung over the whole book was from Dr. Derringer, “Eliminate the impossible.  Then if nothing remains, some part of ‘impossible’ must be possible.”  This was clearly derived from the Holmesian mantra, but had a Fortean twist—making not the improbably the case, but the impossible.  Science did not know everything: the world was yet filled with mysteries.

Fort provided not just a way of thinking about the world, though, but also a way of living in the world.  For instance, he discussed otherwise unreported UFO activity in San Diego with Miriam Allen de Ford.  (Worth considering is trying to understand better the connection between Boucher’s Forteanism and his Catholicism.)

He mentions in a footnote to Miriam Allen De Ford’s “Charles Fort: Enfant Terrible of Science,” which he published in the January 1954 issue of FSF that he investigated a stone-fall case in Oakland in 1943.  He thought that the coverage provided by the local press was “misleading and sometimes outright mendacious” and decried the loss of Fort.  But, as compelling as Forteanism was, it was not enough to restructure the rest of his life: it was a useful exercise, but did not determine a lifestyle.  On 3 August 1944 he wrote to de Ford that he had let the matter of the stone drop (a pun!): “A combination of factors (travel, then a long illness, then pure damned inertia) kept me from following it up.  Sorry.”

Boucher’s interest in science fiction and fantasy did not dwindle, though.  He wrote a poem for Weird Tales, reviewed science fiction and fantasy for the Chicago Sun-Times and Los Angeles Daily News.  During his time in Los Angeles, in the late 1930s, he became acquainted with the Mañana Literary Society, which was a club of science fictioneers (as they often called themselves), including Robert Heinlein, Cleve Cartmill, Ed Hamilton, Henry Kuttner, Jack Williamson, and others.  Boucher wrote about the Society in his mystery Rocket to the Morgue (which was published under a different pseudonym: H. H. Holmes; that was not a reference to Sherlock, at least not explicitly, but the borrowed pseudonym of murderer, Herman Mudgett—who, incidentally, was the subject of the recent The  Devil in the White City.)

Rocket to the Morgue is interesting in a number of ways.  It gave some clues to Boucher’s interest in Forteana—indeed, it is a very Fortean book.  It also gave a glimpse of the science fictioneers at work during the late 1930s.  (It was published in 1942 and set in 1941.)  It is self-referential: one of the characters is Anthony Boucher, another member of the Society, and his wife.  The book also recasts the Sherlock Homes mythos into the world of weird fiction and science fiction tales.  It is set in a world where science fiction was given a huge lift by author Fowler Foulkes, who created the character Dr. Derringer.  Derringer did for science fiction what Holmes did for mysteries—made them possible, was the epitome of the genre, was so believable that he almost seemed to be alive and, indeed, seemed to come to life in the course of the mystery.  At the time the story took place, Fowler Foulkes had died and his literary empire was being run by his son, Hilary.  Writing about the all the ways that Hilary frustrated those who hoped to adapt Derringer to different media or to continue his exploits in new stories gave Boucher a chance to comment on the manager of the Holmes character, Adrian Conan Doyle, son of Sir Arthur, who also jealously protected his father’s legacy and often confounded the plans of fans who wanted to use Sherlock Holmes in new ways.

Boucher’s most famous intervention into the world of weird tales, though, was as co-editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.  Originally conceived as only a fantasy magazine, FSF, as the cognoscenti knew it, became the successor to John W. Campbell’s Astounding—even as that magazine continued publishing.  It can be arguably said to be the standard-bearer of science fiction magazines during the 1950s, and certainly so of the fantasy—or weird—tale, with Weird Tales itself ceasing publication in the middle 1950s, after years of decline.  The magazine published a couple of Bay Area Forteans, Garen Drussai and Miriam Alan de Ford (who published an article on Fort).  Toward the end of his life, Clark Ashton Smith had George Haas facilitate correspondence with Boucher; Smith was having trouble finding new markets for his work, and hoped Boucher could help.  (Apparently, he couldn’t.)  Other Fortean inflected stories also appeared here.

Boucher edited The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction until 1958.  He stayed active in the field—and in mystery—up to his death from lung cancer on 29 April 1968.

Steven adds some more about the interview I did with him, among other things replaying a back-and-forth I had with Matt Moneymaker and offering some snark from Jeff Meldrum.

Among Boucher’s great enthusiasms was Sherlock Holmes.  He wrote radio plays about the fictional detective’s exploits, essays about him, anthologized other works about Holmes, and belonged to the Baker Street Irregulars, a Sherlock Homes fan group (not unlike, in its way, some of the science fiction fan groups; apparently, the Irregulars were all men, but when Boucher and an editor at the San Francisco Chronicle formed a Bay Area chapter they were so inundated with requests from women to join that they formed a women’s auxiliary group, which demonstrates, at least a little, some of Boucher’s liberalism and sense of social justice).  His books made regular reference to Holmes—not surprising since those who belonged to the Irregulars had to have read all of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes novels and short stories and pass a test. 

It is worth spending a few moments thinking about this fascination with Sherlockiana, as there are a couple of ways in which it connects to Fortean activities.

As I discovered in writing my book on Bigfoot, Sherlock Holmes was a favorite among cryptozoologists: Bernard Heuvelmans considered himself the Sherlock Holmes of Zoology and Holmes’s aphorism, “when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth” was repeatedly quoted by those such as Grover Krantz who were deeply committed to proving the existence of Sasquatch.

Certainly, part of this interest in Holmes merely reflected the fact that he had become the very epitome of scientific detection—even people with no knowledge of the fifty-six Sherlock Holmes short stories and four novels know of the name and know its meaning.  As well, there very well could have been a somewhat closer connection, in that Holmes was often referred to in the men’s adventure magazines which published so much about Bigfoot in the 1960s and 1970s, and so Bigfooters would have often tripped over references to Holmes.

But there’s another reason, too, I think Holmes appealed to Bigfooters: because, as historian Michael Saler says, he embodied a certain kind of rationality that was attractive to Bigfooters.  The rise of modernity and the power of science in the first part of the twentieth century, made many people worried that magic, imagination, and enchantment were being drained from the world.  Not to put to fine a point on it, but there was a sense that—in Max Weber’s phrase—the “Iron Cage” of Rationality, Science, and Bureaucracy—yes, all capitalized—conspired to turn all of us moderns into drones, mere numbers in a larger symptom.  That fear, obviously, has dwindled some but not gone away.  Holmes’s showed how to confront this dilemma and triumph over it—how to accept rationality and reason but imbue it with imagination.  Saler writes, “Holmes solved cases by relating seemingly discrete facts to a more encompassing and meaningful configuration, whose integuments were derived from a combination of rigorous observation, precise logic, and lively imagination.”  Bigfooters saw themselves employing the exact same method.  Scientists themselves were slaves to instrumental reasoning; they lacked the imagination to understand all of the subtle clues.  Bigfooters, on the contrary, could see how the tracks, the hair, the sightings added up to something exciting, something wonderful—that reason could enchant the world.  That ratiocination could prove the improbable.  Such as the existence of a monster in the Pacific Northwest woods.

Or, more broadly, that Forteans, perceptive to life’s clues and blessed with an imagination, could add up those observations and discover wonders ignored by science: falling rocks, UFOs, teleportation or, more grandly, our Et overlords or the Super Sargasso Sea that hovered above the Earth.

(A similar form of what Saler calls “animistic reason,” the melding of imagination of rationality, motivates science fiction writing, as well).

But this statement—that Forteans might believe in a Super-Sargasso Sea from which strange objects fall onto the Earth—needs to be immediately qualified, and interest in Sherlockiana shows how.

One conceit of the Baker Street Irregulars was that Holmes really existed—that Arthur Conan Doyle merely chronicled the real life exploits of a detective.  They celebrated Holmes’s birthday (the theologically meaningful January 6), for example.  There were even biographies written of Holmes.  In one of his mysteries, The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars, Boucher himself played around with this idea: the dedication read, “All characters portrayed or referred to in this novel are fictitious, with the exception of Sherlock Holmes, to whom this book is dedicated.”

Of course Boucher knew that Sherlock Holmes was fictional, as did other members of the Baker Street Irregulars, and even those who wrote a biography of Holmes.  But they were, Saler argues, indulging another response to the grim prospects of modernity: using what he calls the “ironic imagination.”  By suspending disbelief and playing around with the idea that a fictional character actually existed, they could enchant the world—make it seem magical and wonderful—while not giving up on rationality, while recognizing that what they were doing was play.

Fortean interests, I would argue, are often driven by this self-same ironic imagination.  Indeed, Fort said explicitly that he did not believe in all of his theories—nor did all of his followers.  They didn’t really think that there was a giant sea surrounding the world.  But the idea of it made the world seem more interesting, more magical.

Boucher’s interest in Holmes, then, was (possibly) of a piece with his interest in Fort.  It was a way of reclaiming a space for the imagination in a world that threatened to destroy it.

Today, Boucher is probably best remembered among mystery aficionados.  He helped to found the Mystery Writers Association, which tried to act something like a union and get mystery writers better pay rates from the fiction mags.  (It didn’t work.)  The MWA also established the Edgar (Allen Poe Award)s.  Annual mystery writer conventions are now known as Bouchercons.

Boucher’s first success as a writer came with mysteries.  He was writing during what is now killed “The Golden Age” of mysteries, and his stories were in-line with others of the time: they focused on impossible crimes, were rather bloodless affairs, all told, with the emphasis on a single clue which could point, in succession, to three or four or five suspects.  The stories were often very contrived and highlighted artifice.  These were not the noir novels—although Boucher became very familiar with the whole range of mystery writings.  He reviewed novels for the San Francisco Chronicle when World War II called away its usual reviewer (Boucher’s asthma made him undraftable).  He also did reviews for the New York Times and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, among other places.  He further refined his skills reviewing operas—another favorite.  As well, his facility with languages made it possible for him to read mysteries from other countries.  He translated a number for EQMM, including the first translation of Borges’s work into English.   This wide-ranging knowledge of the genre made him more than a reviewer—he became a critic, able to place a work in the history of the genre, show how it fit and did not, and draw connections between it and other writings.

Boucher published his first mystery novel, The Case of the Seven of Cavalry, while he was in southern California.  These he followed with six more, as well as a number of short stories.  In large part, these works were based on autobiographical details—set on the UC Berkeley campus, for example—and were well-received.

In the early 1940s, he and Phyllis and their two sons settled back in Berkeley, where Boucher did some teaching work and also expanded upon his writing.  He did more reviews.  He wrote a number of radio plays, building on his early interest in theater, and continued to translate.  He also became involved with politics—Boucher was a stout liberal, working for the left end of the Democratic Party.  His MWA advocacy was thus part of a broader philosophy.  In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he even experimented with a collective form of writing that, it seems to me, reflected this political orientation, working with other MWA locals to combine and write a novel that followed a coherent synopsis but which had different authors writing different chapters.

Boucher’s life is much more richly documented than those of any other Forteans thus far considered.  His papers—some of which I have seen—are at Indiana University’s Lilly Library; he has warranted interviews, articles, even a biobibliography by Jeffrey Marks.  (For those thinking of purchasing it—don’t.  The book has some good information, which I mine for this series, but it is poorly written, repetitive, and badly edited.  Only for the confirmed Boucher-fan or needy historian.)

Boucher was born in Oakland, California, on 21 August 1911 and given the name William Parker White.   (Parker was his mother’s maiden name.)  His father, James Taylor White, died (of typhoid, according to Marks’s book) before Boucher was one year old.  He was forty-six.

James had been a doctor, as was Boucher’s mother, Mary Parker White.  In the years after his James’s death, Boucher was raised by his mother, who continued to practice her profession, as well as her parents, William—Boucher’s namesake, who had accepted free passage to the US from Scotland in return for joining the Union Army during the Civil War.  He left behind his wife and son, eventually remarrying Annie Boucher Hine, and Irish Catholic woman, whom, whom he apparently met after the War, when he had relocated to California.  Boucher’s grandfather seems something of a restless man, having later divorced Annie, remarried and divorced again only to remarry Annie once more.   Annie died in 1913; William in 1930.

The young William Parker White grew up as a Catholic, apparently inherited from his grandmother and mother—his father had been Episcopalian.  Anthony was his confirmation name.   He was sickly as a child, afflicted with asthma.  He also spent some time in a sanitarium during the early 1920s.  The illness disrupted his education, but he eventually ended up attending a military school in San Rafael, California, north of the family home in Berkeley, and Pasadena High School.  He went to Junior College in Pasadena and then to the University of Southern California.   He received an MA from the University of California Berkeley in 1934.  Boucher met his future wife, Phyllis Mary Price, at Berkeley.  She was the daughter of a Professor of German (and his major was German).

Despite his interrupted education, Boucher was intelligent and loved reading, teaching himself to speed-read at age 14.  He came to know eight foreign languages: German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian, Greek, Sanskrit, and Italian.  Apparently—although Marks’s makes little of this—not only was Boucher interested in languages, reading, and writing from a young age, but he—like the other Bay Area Forteans—was bitten by the Weird Tales bug—or touched by Cthullu’s tentacle, or had his fate inscribed in the dread tome, Necronomicon—because his first published work was a ghost story vignette, “Ye Good Old Ghost Storie,” published in the January 1927 issue.

In college, Boucher became infatuated with the theater, which shaped much of his later career.  After receiving his MA, he moved to Los Angeles—again, after having done school there earlier—and sought work in Hollywood.  Boucher was never really successful there, although he wrote a number of plays and theater reviews for United Progressive News.  He did get a poem published in Weird Tales and in the late 1930s published his first novel, The Case of the Seven of Cavalry.  This was under the name of Anthony Boucher, presumably because his given name William White was too pedestrian, combining his confirmation name with his maternal grandmother’s maiden name.  One benefit of that name was its French meaning—“butcher,” an evocation the mild-mannered and generous Boucher liked for his stories.

As far as I can tell—and that’s not very far, to be honest—Anthony Boucher was not a member of the San Francisco Fortean Society or, strictly speaking, a Fortean.  But, he was interested in Fort and, as an Oakland resident a major player in the crime and science fiction scenes, helped to connect many of the disparate threads of Bay Area Forteanism.  He promoted some people interested in Fort—such as Miriam Allen de Ford (Shipley)--, gave Fortean ideas space in the magazines he edited, particularly The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which became the standard-bearer for science fiction (and weird) writing in the 1950s, the successor to Weird Tales and John W. Campbell’s Astounding (although they competed for a time).  Understanding Anthony Boucher’s role in Forteanism expands the view of California Forteanism, sketching in some of its connections between North and South and moving my discussion, which has been primarily biographical, to a larger—although still local—context.

The Forteans is a boring title for my prospective third book and, worse, while it seems to be descriptive, it is not: most of the world don't even know who the Forteans are, why they should care about them, or even how to pronounce the word, necessarily.  So, I need some alternate titles.  These will evolve as the book takes shape, but in the meantime, I want to record some passing thoughts.

Possible ideas: some play on circle: "A Circle Has No End," "Squaring the Circle."  Hmmmm.

Steven Streufert lets me go on and on about Bigfoot here.  Not for those with short attention spans.

Polly Lamb is an obscure figure in the history of Bay Area Forteans.  By no means is she the most obscure: if Robert Barbour Johnson’s recollections can be trusted even a little bit, dozens of people showed up to the meetings (he said about fifty).  But, I have found names for only a handful, and it seems as though most of the attendees will go unrecorded.  Compared to them, Polly Lamb’s association with Chapter 2 is well documented.  Still, there’s nothing like the sources associated with MacNichol or Haas or Johnson (which, when compared to other, more notable historical figures are themselves not so rich).

Polly Lamb was born 10 June 1901 in Colorado to Benjamin E. Lamb and Helen (Hausch) Lamb.  Benjamin Lamb came from a Wisconsin farming family.  Helen was born in Tulare County, California.  Her mother died before she was ten; her farmer father, Christian, from Germany, remarried in 1883, when she was about thirteen.   Benjamin and Helen were married in 1896.  Both were about 26.  By 1900 census, they were living in Wisconsin—where they met and married is unknown.  They had one child, also Benjamin (although spelled Benjimen on the census record), aged two.   Benjamin Lamb, Sr., was a farm supervisor.

The next year, the family had moved to Colorado, where Polly Ann (also Pollie and Pauline) was born.  By the 1910 census, they had relocated to Kern County, California.  At the time, Christian Hausch, his wife Katherine, and daughter (also) Katherine, 15, were still living in Tulare County, just to the north, and that may have drawn them West.  There had been no more children, but the family was living with Benjamin’s older brother and a boarder.  Benjamin was listed as the owner of a farm.

The family was in Chicago in 1920.  It could have been family business that brought them back.  The Lamb farm in Wisconsin seems—at least according to census records—to have passed to the eldest brother, George, and the second eldest brother, Charles, was still in Wisconsin.  Whatever the reason, Benjamin was listed as a broker.  The family was rented with Benjamin’s partner, Eugene Bivert, a French émigré and widower who had before been an engineer and mechanic.  They also had a widowed boarder living with them.

Sometime later, Polly Lamb moved to California and married George J. Goforth—the exact order is not known.   George himself had been born in Mississippi in 1897; his father had when he was very young, and his mother remarried by the time he was about two.  The 1910 census had him living alone with his maternal grandmother, still in Mississippi. (I can find no record of his mother or step-father in that census.)  He came to California some time after 1910—I can find no record of him in either the World War registration cards, though he would have been of age, or the 1920 census.  His obituary, however, does say that he served in World War I.

Probably, they married in the 1920; the census gives the age of George’s age at first marriage as twenty five, and Polly’s at nineteen, which would date to 1920 for both of them.  And by 1930, they had two daughters, Helen and Elise, 7 and 6 years old.  Helen H. Lamb, Polly’s mother, was also living with them at the time.  Benjamin must have died in the 1920s.  In 1930, George was a typewriter mechanic—his obituary says that he had worked at Capwell’s Department Store and was a member of the Staionary’s Engineers Union.  Polly was working at the time, somewhat unusually for a married woman with children, as a secretary for a printing company.  (Helen was working as a school teacher.)

Through the 1930s, the continued to live in Berkeley, California, with Polly alternately a stenographer and housewife, according to city directories, and George a mechanic, typewriter mechanic, and salesman.

Polly Lamb also had an artistic streak.  The 22 September 1929 edition the Oakland Tribune published a poem of hers, which, given the lack of material about her, is of some interest.  It is reproduced below:

Life’s My Lover

I.
Life’s my lover, bold and free.
He builds my span of days for me.
Ecstasy dawns the morning of one.
Sorrow drowns the evening sun.
I stand abashed before my lord.
And over me experience is poured.

I loved him from the nursery floor.
I worshipped more, outside that door.
In girlhood, wide my arms I flung
In praise of Life I joyfully sung.
He strained me in a wild embrace
And left his scars across my face.

He taught me happiness and pain:
He gave me loss and showed me gain.
Despair embittered my quest of strife.
But numb and aching, I clung to Life.
My lover thrilled me with delight
And left me miserable that night.

I lived with Life continually,
His whims and fancies lashing me
To docile acquiescence.

II.
Life’s my lover, hard and cruel,
Bending me to his iron rule.
He gives a seldom, soft caress
And steals from me all loveliness.
What I desire he gives away,
                What I abhor he asks to stay.

I straighten up beneath his load,
Driven by load.  It is his goad.
If I am tired, there is more work.
If I want effort, I must shirk.
He will not let me see my way,
Stumbling and falling, day by day.
 
He woes me with his steady tread.
Half of me lives, and half is dead.
I was soft clay in his artist’s hands.
He has moulded me to suit his plans.
My outer shell is callous and rough.
But my inner soul is finer stuff.

It is the spark that he set free,
It is the eye he taught to see,
His own superiority.

In the mid 1930s, according to the Oakland Tribune, she was involved with the Berkeley “Scribbler’s Club”—which seemed focused on writing—and the All Arts Club.  For the latter, she was in the drama section and wrote and performed in at least one play, “Camouflage,” which was performed at small civic buildings—a Masonic Temple and community church, for example.  In 1946, she joined the California Writer’s Club and established its novel section, according to the California Writer’s Club Bullletin.

As well, according to Don Herron, she was a pulp writer.  Her career in that, though, is hard to follow.  It seems that she wrote for the “love pulps,” a much-maligned genre targeted at young working-class women.  Unlike the science fiction, detective, and weird pulps, the love pulps have attracted very little historical scholarship.  So far, I have been able to track down one story she wrote, “Half Saint, Half Sinner,” which appeared in All-Story Love Stories 6 March 1937.  She used her full name, Polly Lamb Goforth.

It was right around this time, however, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, that her marriage to George ended.   The 1942 and 1944 city directories no longer lists George at the same address as Polly, and Polly has a job as a private secretary (her death certificate also listed her occupation as secretary, but in that case as working for an insurance company.)  George’s World War II registration card, filled out in 1945, gives the name of his wife as Anne, incidentally Polly middle name, but also the name of the wife listed in his obituary, and so a different woman.

Some time in the late 1940s she moved to San Francisco proper.   According to her death certificate—the information for which was provided by June Bird, one of George’s daughters and maybe one of Polly’s, too, or maybe not—she moved to the City in 1946.  The Writer’s Club Bulletin, however, has her address in Berkeley through May of 1947.  Presumably, then, she actually moved in late 1947 or after, and this would have been the time that she met Kenneth MacNichol.  Her last address was 628 Montgomery Street, about a ten minute walk from Pencraft Writers Studio.

The courtship and marriage (and divorce) of Kenneth MacNichol and Polly Lamb (Goforth) is unrecorded.  But it is possible to see what drew them together.  First, both were divorced, MacNichol at least twice, maybe three times.  Second, MacNcihol was a successful writer and Lamb was a writer, though seemingly not as successful.  They both looked at writing, too, as a craft, which could be mastered.  When Lamb was running the novel section of the California Writer’s Club, she insisted that participants—about five or six, according to the Bulletin—break down the process of novel writing into small bits, and focus on mastering these bits, not unlike the way MacNichol approached some of his story writing.  As well, they both wrote for the pulps, which confined them to a certain class of writers and a certain social circle—it’s not hard to see how they might have met especially since Lamb seemed to be a joiner, and so may have sought out Pencraft and MacNichol.

Pulp writing would have further focused the two on thinking of writing as a craft, rather than an art.  The love pulps, edited at the time often by women (that would change) and written by women (that wouldn’t) for a mostly young working-class audience (that wouldn’t either) had very stringent conventions, more so than the weird or science fiction pulps, even, as best I can tell.  A 1938 article for Scirbner’s on the love pulps divided them into three classes: the love pulps proper, in which a good young woman met and successfully courted a good, strong man, who was the epitome of romance.  There was no sex in these.  The confession magazines upheld the same ideals, but by following a different scheme: the so-called three Rs, ruin, regret, and redemption, with a bad girl sometimes engaging in sex, but certainly going too far, paying hell for her transgressions.  The “breezy” pulps were targeted at older women and focused on married or adulterous women.  There forbidden passions---the bed preceding the chapel, as Scribner’s had it—did not lead to ruin, but to happiness.   In all cases, it was imperative that the author understand the different rules and write to them.  It was also important that, above all else, emotion be evoked—this, said Scribner’s was what truly differentiated pulp from slick writing, even more than the quality of the prose, which sometimes did favor the pulps.

Lamb and MacNichol also shared an interest in what at the time might have been called the weird or occult.  Since the late 1930s MacNichol had turned back to pulp writing and did a lot of work for fantasy and weird magazines.   He was also interested in Forteana.  Lamb had a romantic streak, at least, as is clear from her poem.  Also, according to Robert Barbour Johnson, she was an actual sorceress, practicing a kind of magic made famous earlier in the twentieth century by Aleister Crowley.

Crowley was the most renowned mage of his generation.  The most notorious, too, known sometimes as The Beast.  He defined magic as “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.”  This definition emphasized visualization and fit in with a stream of metaphysical ideas that had been apparent in America since at least the New Thought wave of the Civil War era.  (George F. Haas, who had some works by Crowley, also defined magic in these terms.)  There’s something of this ideal in a few of the notes that Lamb wrote for The California Writer’s Club Bulletin in which she emphasized—with italics—that she would see people at the next meeting, as if visualizing what she expected to come true.  That may be reading too much into a few notes, but Johnson did swear by her abilities.

Eventually, she and MacNichol divorced and went their separate ways.  It seems likely that the Fortean Society would have dwindled, then, too, since this was already after its expulsion and Johnson only remembers it lasting for a few years after the excommunication.  (He also conflates the end with the death of MacNichol and Lamb, but those events were separated by several years.)

It is not known what Polly Lamb was doing during the middle part of the 1950s.  Presumably, she continued to write.  She did not remarry, but stayed in the City as a secretary, living in what was still then a Bohemian, artsy area.  She also seems to have continued practicing magic.

According to Johnson, it was her magical abilities that led to her demise: by mucking around with the occult, she unleashed some horrible power from the Outside.  I don’t know enough about Polly Lamb to know if that’s fair to her, or a language she would have understood and accepted.  It very well may say more about Johnson than anything else, his (possibly arch) belief in coincidence, the weird, and the beyond.  Doctors had a more prosaic cause for her death.  Polly Lamb was said to have a congenital aneurysm in her brain (in the Circle of Willis).  Around 14 December 1956, it ruptured and some time after that she went to Mt. Zion Hospital, about three miles from her home.  She died at 0700 on 17 December 1956.