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.”

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. 

I’ve been doing some reading on San Francisco geography, as well—soon to be supplemented by reading on LA geography—to get a sense of how the city (and Bay Area more generally) is organized and try to fit that in with what I know of the California Forteans.  And some interesting patterns have emerged.

Berkeley geographer Richard A. Walker recognizes four residential types.   He writes, “This civic landscape springs from the distinctive class, political and cultural nature of the Bay Area—relatively wealthy, petty bourgeois, bohemian, cosmopolitan, labourist, environmentalist, egalitarian, anti-modern—and embodies the contradictions of the libertine capitalism that is a local trademark.”

The first, and most iconic, category is the Victorian homes.  These resulted from the work of middle class reformers in the 1850s and 1860s, who saw San Francisco as too raw, too libertine, and sought to impose a more appropriate look for the city.  These were not the “modern” buildings of, say, Los Angeles.  Rather they were ornate and gaudy—Thorstein Veblen was thinking of them when he was at Stanford and writing the Theory of the Leisure Class.  Many of these were burned in 1906.  But the rich never abandoned downtown San Francisco as they did so many other inner cities, and so they remained as a tribute to the class identity of the nineteenth century rich.

A second category is what Walker calls ecotopian suburbs.  This is composed of the mock cabin and craftsman houses tucked into hills and surrounded by oaks, redwoods, and eucalyptus.  These areas, although they look natural, were made: the coast range of the Bay Area was mostly grass, and so homeowners and developers had to plant all the trees, as well as building the houses.  The inspiration for these places, Walker argues, is Yosemite and Big Trees.  Ecotopian suburbs can be found in parts of San Francisco, in the Oakland Hills, in Berkeley, and Marin.  These are the homesteads of the libertarian, bohemian middle class.  They combine mysticism, Romanticism, and Masonic ideals and stand in opposition to LA, once again: there the wave of modernist architecture expunged the arts and crafts movement.  In San Francisco, there was a conscious anti-modern movement.

A number of Bay Area Forteans are associated with this ideal.  Polly Lamb lived in Oakland; Anthony Boucher was in Berkeley—both in just these kinds of spots.  Most prominent, probably, is George Haas.  He idealized Big Trees State Park.  He built organic gardens around his Oakland home.  There were certainly anti-modern strains to his thought.

The third category is the suburb proper.  Oakland does not fit into this category because in the late nineteenth century that city wrestled with San Francisco for industrial dominance, and soon developed its own urban infrastructure: it was its own city, taking advantage of new sectors that developed after San Francisco came of age, especially food canning, auto building, and electrical manufacturing.

San Francisco did try to push South but was stopped by the presence of many elite estates in San Mateo County, which prevented the movement.  This fits into the Fortean story, too, for their developed a Bohemian connection between the Bay Area and less developed places to the south, especially Carmel, but also San Mateo.  These places retained their Bohemian, mystical vibe.  Marin did, too: remember, the Golden Gate Bridge wasn’t completed until 1936, and for many seemed unnecessary.

Instead, development marched East, and the Bay Area did well: even as San Francisco’s manufacturing declined, around 1910 the region was only outpaced by Detroit (cars!), Cleveland, and its competitor to the South, LA.  Again, new sectors allowed the outlying areas to compete with their older neighbors, food processing, oil, and chemical work, especially.  Good wages and an extensive trolley system allowed workers to move East and North into new tract homes.

Past Alameda county, Contra Costa county developed its suburbs more slowly.  Places like Hercules and Rodeo were essentially company towns, with workers shacking up on business property.  (San Francisco financiers had a level of control this far out that they did not have in the East Bay, as much of the money for Contra Costa’s development came from the City.)  To tie in with the earlier connections, these suburbs also came to be supported by defense procurements as fortress California also built out in this direction.  But there is still some connection to Forteana even here, as Jack Parsons, the occultist rocket-developer from LA came north to work at Hercules Powder Company.

The fourth category is multi-family housing.  The university in Berkeley and the industrial areas in Oakland—especially with the coming of World War II—supported such dwellings, but the center for this residential type was San Francisco.  Apartments and residential hotels came into their own during the 1890s—before that, the need was taken care of by boarding out rooms.

The small rooms pushed people into the community: in places dominated by apartment buildings and residential hotels there was more life on the streets.  People ate out.  They went to coffee.  They went to movies.  These zones of dense dwelling, cheap entertainment, and public life are where experimental lifestyles took root.  This was the natural habitat of Bohemians, beats, hippes, gays: political rebels and public intellectuals.  (San Francisco was rich in such areas and so has a rich history of experimentation, with the Barbary Coast of the mid-nineteetnh century, the turn of the century Bohemianism, as well as the more obvious later manifestations.)

The Fortean connections here are obvious.  Miriam Alan de Ford lived in a hotel for most of her life, within walking distance of the library (urbanism made Forteanism easier, as there were vast collections of facts to study).  One thinks, also, of Kenneth MacNichol with his writers studio in the heart of one of San Francisco’s art districts, and Robert Barbour Johnson living in a little apartment and making appearances at the literary hotspots—indeed, it was this scene that drew him to San Francisco in the first place.

With the depression, and the drying up of investments, these areas began to decline.  Jobs moved to the suburbs, leaving the area old, infirm, and with decreasing political clout.  In the late 1940s and 1950s, the rich began to see these areas as blights in need of redevelopment.  And so there were fights between them and the remaining rebels, especially the beats in North Beach—what Kenneth Starr says was a battle between Provincials and Baghdadders.  Some of Old San Francisco was saved, and freeways were not allowed to cut through the old downtown.  But, the most iconic Bohemian place was lost.  This was the Montgomery Block, a warren of rooms housed by artists and such.  (Likely, a number of the people who attended MacNichols’s Fortean meetings lived here.)  In 1959, the structure—which had survived the 1906 fire—was bulldozed for a parking lot.  Later, the Trans-America Building was built there.