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.

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.  

I'm still reading through material on northern California's post-War (and earlier) Bohemia.  And I found a couple of interesting nuggets.  This one comes from Franklin Walker's very good The Seacoast of Bohemia about the Boehmian community that developed around poet George Sterling in Carmel during the early part of the twentieth-century, after the fire and earthquake had driven him from The City.

On page 64, Walker mentions that in late 1908 Carmel was home to "Kid MacNichol," a poor writer and wanderer. Combining this note with a contemporaneous article in the San Francisco Call, I'm thinking that this was probably Kenneth MacNichol.

Further evidence comes from Walker's (thin) description of Kid MacNichol  He notes that MacNichol had "lived among the Navajos reputedly as an 'adopted 'son," which is a description that has been repeated by people who know MacNichol.  I have tried to verify the connection by contacting the Navajo Nation, but have not discovered any records to prove the claim one way or another.  Nonetheless, this strongly suggests that Kid MacNichol was the Kenneth MacNichol who later led the San Francisco Fortean Society.

It also shows MacNichol's developing interest in what might be called metaphysical religion.  He and Mike Williams--who had come to Carmel with Upton Sinclair--planned a six month horseback adventure into the Utah and Arizona desert to hunt gold, find ideas for stories, and study 'primeval mysticism' (although this trip may never have happened).  MacNichol was also writing plays with Williams and his wife Peggy.

Another discovery from around this time further suggests both MacNichol's connection tot he community and American metaphysical religions.  The June 1907 issue of  Swastika: A Magazine of Triumph featured an article by MacNichol.  [Note that at the time Swastikas had no associations with Nazism, which had not yet been invented, but instead were connected to Eastern and Native American religions--indeed, Swastikas are still used in the East to mark the plce of Buddhist temples on maps.]  This was a magazine dedicated to what today would be called New Age items--Eastern mysticism, and the like--put out from Denver, Colorado.  MacNichol's article was on "New Thought."

Others in Carmel were interested in New Thought and mysticism.  Sinclair Lewis, for example--who had also come West with Upton Sinclair--published at least one story in the New Thought journal The Nautilus according to Walker on page 69.

As well, there was a general progressive dislike of prison conditions, which may have foreshadowed MacNichol's involvement with Louis Eytinge.

Finally, Google News Archives recently put up a novel by MacNichol that was syndicated by the Sloan Syndicate.  This was from August 1919, three months after he was discharged from the war and a year after his infidelity in France. 

It's called "Plenty is Enough."  The Google version comes from the Pittsburgh Press, and is not the world's best copy, but good enough.  It concerns the investigation of a Mexican sheepherders death in the Southwest against the back drop of a struggling romance, a battle over water rights, and the range war between cowboys and sheepherders.  The story feels especially compressed at the beginning and drags in the middle, but it is serviceable and diverting--if you can ignore the casual racism (against Mexicans) and sexism.  It's also notable for combining Westerns with the procedural detective kind of story made famous by Poe.

A few posts down, I mentioned Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, and noticed that I did not have a tag for him, which makes me think that dropping his name there might have been confusing.  So let me explain his connection.

As far as I know, LaVey was not a Fortean, at least not explicitly.  But, he did have a collection of the works of Ben Hecht, a writer who ran in Tiffany Thayer's circle and was a founding member of the first Fortean Society.

By itself, that doesn't say much: lots of people read Hecht.  But, LaVey was also in San Francisco by the 1950s and spent time with George Haas, Robert Barbour Johnson, and Clark Ashton Smith.  There's a semi-famous picture of them together, which LaVey titled, "Headmasters in a School for Ghouls."  By the 1960s, Haas told Ashton Smith's wife that he no longer heard from Lavey--"since he became Satan."

But, it's clear there was a substantive connection between LaVey and the Bay Area Forteans and so understanding something about LaVey--who has more written about him--helps explain the Forteans.

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.  

At least as a matter of research protocol, I am approaching the various Fortean groups geographically—concentrating right now on the San Francisco Bay Area, but collecting information on Southern California, the Midwest, New York, Great Britain, and hoping to find sources on Philadelphia, Dallas, and New Mexico, where there were also (supposedly) groups.  This approach may or may not make it to the final product—other arrangements may make for better narratives—but it helps organizing the material right now, and raises some questions that need to be answered.

Most obviously, why did Fortean groups appear where they did?  Why San Francisco?  Or New York?

This question is a tricky one—because answers are too easy.  The fact is, the Fortean groups did appear in these places, and one can then find any number of ways to explain these appearances.  But that doesn’t mean they are right or even persuasive.

Still, the question should be asked.  Answering it may not be more than a tautology—the Fortean groups appeared in San Francisco because they appeared in San Francisco—but they can also point toward connections between Forteans and society more generally.  For instance, Forteanism proliferated in Bohemia, and this raises questions about the structure and culture of American Bohemia in the middle of the twentieth century and why Bohemians would be attracted to Forteanism.  Such a question is a better one than why San Francisco—but it is arrived at by asking that first question.

And so, I need to explore San Francisco regional history to understand more about the development of Forteanism there and how it connected to local, national, and international trends.

Today, a consideration of California’s spiritual frontiers, based on Sandra Frankiel’s brilliant book of that name and Glenna Matthews’s essay, “Forging a Cosmopolitan Civic Culture.”

Both begin  by noting that California—and the Bay Area especially—is markedly different from other parts of the country in its liberalism and openness to religious experimentation, and ask why.  Both find the answer in the Gold Rush.

In 1848, San Francisco was home to a few hundred people.  By 1865, it had a population of over 100,000.  The assemblage of the San Francisco Bay Area prevented any one group from becoming too dominant.   Men flooded the region from all over the world, in huge numbers, making the city (or, as local prefer, The City) cosmopolitan in a sense unknown elsewhere.  By 1880, the City had over 230,000 residents, the ninth largest city in the country, and the highest percentage of foreign-born residents, just shy of 50%.

So, unlike other regions that developed slowly, there was no major power.  By 1906, barely 14% of the population was Protestant.  Catholics had dwindled from 30% of the population in 1850 to 20%.  About 3% of the population belonged to some smaller group.  Sixty-five percent was unchurched.  San Francisco was the first large American city to elect an Irish mayor, a Jewish mayor, labor-leader mayor, and an Italian mayor.  The first Jewish synagogue was founded only three years after the first Protestant Church; Buddhists churches opened in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Now that doesn’t mean all was peaches and cream.   Discrimination against Asians and Mexicans and Native Americans was often harsh.  The Vigilante Committees of the 1850s often deployed racist rhetoric.  The Know-Nothings had a presence, as did white supremacists.  But, discrimination between white groups was comparatively mild—one reason the labor movement did so well—and even the oft-despised Chinese were enough of a presence to organize and have their interests protected.  Matthews wrote, “San Francisco was not born enlightened—far from it—but it was born in such a way that many groups could contend in its public sphere.”

The Gold Rush contributed to San Francisco’s cosmopolitanism in other ways, too.  The men who came to the region were suspicious of evangelism, emotional religions, and denominationalism, for those things were leading the country into civil war.  They preferred a gentle denominationalism, one that was not unified, but respective of other traditions.  The Evangelism of the era—which was very important in other regions—also did not work in San Francisco because there were already well-established secular entertainments—rodeos and bullfighting—because the men were focused on material things—gold!—and because the people of San Francisco were men—about 90% of the population.  Evangelism worked primarily through women, who were supposed to be the moral centers of their families.  But there were no families.  The men of San Francisco were not actively hostile to traditional Protestantism—they encouraged churches for the sense of social order they brought—but also found little in them that appealed.  An image of California was taking shape which they supported, one that turned away from traditional Protestantism: an image of California as open, tolerant, a natural aristocracy.  This image helped attract to the town a number of Bohemians—and San Francisco was famous for its Bohemians.

Appealing to this tradition were more liberal ministers, one who drew from Transcendentalism, Unitarianism, and Spiritualism, whose preachings deemphasized sin and punishment to focus on personal growth and the powers of the mind.  This focus on social progress and lack of judgment became common, but never institutionalized, and so never challenged the power of the established religions.  It remained fringe, although powerful.

A second gold rush refreshed these tendencies during World War II, when the ship-building business pulled in tens of thousands of workers (and nearby farming similarly attracted Hispanics from the Southwest).  Thus, just at the time the San Francisco Forteans were organizing, the central planks of the California ideal, the cosmopolitanism and lack of a dominant religious tradition were again on everyone’s minds.  This made the San Francisco Bay Area of the forties liberal and open to experimentation and Bohemian ideas.  ``The Second World War and its permissiveness were not lost on me,'' Anton LaVey said. ``Prurience was the order of the day.''  Indeed, much of LaVey’s subsequent life was spent trying to recapture the spirit of the 1940s.

Southern California developed differently—or, more like other places, in that the development was gradual, that families moved to the area together, and that an Anglo-Protestant power structure was established.   Still, by the 1890s southern California was home to a burgeoning metaphysical tradition: Theosophy, New Thought, and Christian Science found southern California a welcoming home.  Why?

First, let’s put it into numerical context.   In 1890, there were about 25,000 practicing Protestants in Los Angeles; about 3,000 members of Metaphysical groups (this was the third largest center of Christian Science in the country, about 1/10th of the nation’s total—and it may have been higher than that, since many Christian Scintists registered with the home church in Boston, although they did not live there); and about 3,000 Protestants were reading in the metaphysical tradition.  Protestants were a clear majority, and the lack of institution-building by the metaphysicians meant that the Protestants social power was never seriously challenged, but the presence of so many interested in the metaphysical tradition meant that, of course, the Protestants had to respond, and often incorporated the liberal tradition of Unitarianism, Transcendentalism, and Spiritualism into their practice.  So influential were the metaphysicians that the 1915 Pan-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco devoted an entire day to New Thought.

But why, given Southern California’s conventional development, did metaphysics gain such footing there?  Part of the explanation is the post-Civil War reaction against evangelism.  Part of it is migration patterns—about 1/5 of those coming to Southern California came from the northern plains where Christian Science and New Thought were then flourishing (although in lesser numbers than Southern California).

The main reason is the promise that Southern California held out to new arrivals, and the migrants who responded to it.  Southern California was not laid out like other areas, with churches and business centers integrated into towns.  Rather—even before the advent of the car—development separated suburban living spaces from other areas: suburbs with few communal areas beyond parks.  This was a response to what people wanted, as well as part of Southern California’s developing self-image.  People went to Southern California not for better business opportunities—as was the usual case for migration at the time—but for leisure and peace and relaxation, all very powerful motivators in the half century after the Civil War, the economic turmoil of the Gilded Age, and the depression of 1893.  Many retirees arrived, as well as many who planned to make money on speculation.  The East’s traditional cultural forms did not fit here.  The weather and natural environment were seen as special impediments, the climate encouraging leisure and not the Calvinist work ethic.

This Southern California vibe mixed with the Northern California ideology to create a California ideal of openness, leisure, and tolerance that stood against the dominant Anglo-Protestantism.  Southern California changed in the years after World War I, when an influx of traditional Protestants from the South migrated to the area, bringing more conservative ideas about religion and the social order.  By that time, though, the alternative religions had already gained a place.  It will be worth exploring, though, if Forteanism developed differently in the south than the north because of that more recent conservative tradition.  (It’s also worth noting that Forteanism, as best I can tell, did not find the Central Valley so receptive, and that area was—and remains—notably more conservative than the coast, especially the north coast.)   

I finished reading The Compleat Boucher, a collection of al of Anthony Boucher’s short fantasy and science fiction.  It helps give a sense of the man.  There are some references to liberal politics, for example, and a lot of complaining against tyranny—which was relatively common during this era of science fiction.  There’s also a fair amount of Christian references—the story of Balaam seems to have been a favorite—and some light mocking of Catholicism.  Of course, there are many references to Berkeley and to academia, as well as Sherlock Holmes: “The Greatest Tertian” imagines a Martian anthropologist sifting through the ruins of Earth after the fourth planet had invaded and deducing that Sherlock Holmes and Shakespeare were the same person, the greatest of humans, and surely would have prevented the invasion if he had been alive.  (For Baker Street Irregulars, he rewrites some of the Holmesian cannon so that the master’s failures are explained by the action of Martian spies.)  The Manana Club makes an appearance, as does Dr. Deringer, the Holmesian character from Rocket to the Morgue.

Two themes predominate.  First, Boucher was inordinately fond of stories about time travel and its paradoxes.  He also dealt with the trouble that came from magic—in these cases magic being an obvious stand in for scientific and technological advancement.   In all but one story, magic created more problems than it solved—in fact, it was usually the decision to conjure where the protagonist went wrong.  The magicians or demons or fairies or other creatures called upon to perform the magic also warned their masters that there was no way to specify their wishes clearly enough to avert catastrophe, but they never listened.  And so the hero of “The Scrawny One” is transformed intot he richest man in the world—just as he asked—by being put inside the dying body of the world’s richest man, while the demon took over the old body.  The one force in the world that could obey magic was love, as was the case in “Nellthu,” a short short story from 1955.  The woman in the tale—the only one in all of Boucher’s stories to have magic work for her—wished that the demon she invoked would fall totally and unselfishly in love with her—which meant that the demon kept her well, made her beautiful and good in bed, and let her fool around, serving her all day every day.  Love, too, was the one force that could undue time paradoxes, as was the case in “Transfer Point” (1950).

Boucher’s most widely acclaimed story is “The Quest for St. Aquin,” (1959), but I don’t think it his best.  Indeed, he had dealt with similar themes in the 1954 story “Balaam,” which is tighter.  In my estimation, he produced his best works in the early 1940s, with the stories published in 1943 and 1945 having the most to recommend them: “Pelagic Spark,” “Expedition,” and “Sanctuary,” all from 1943, and the weird tales, “The Pink Caterpillar” and “Mr. Lupesco” from 1945.  (It’s no surprise that his best work would have been produced relatively early, since this would have been when he was most under the influence of the Manana Club.)  He published his best potential story in 1943, “We Print the Truth,” which only failed because at certain moments Boucher chose not to tell his story but to comment on it as a story.   This . . . tweeness, I guess is the word, seems common to mystery writing of the time, and it unfortunately infected a lot of his writing.  “St. Aquin,” I think, was sometimes played for jokes—especially insiderish jokes—at the expense of the story.  Naiveté also marred much of his science fiction.  He imagined aliens from other planets as mammals or insects, for example, which while not as clichéd as BEMs was still uninspired.

What was inspired, I would argue, was his attempts at mixing the genres of mystery and science fiction.  John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding, famously said at about this time that the two could not be mixed, because science fiction allowed one to play too much with the premises and so cheat the reader.  Asimov later took up the challenge and proved that one could write a science fiction mystery, and he’s widely credited with creating the new form, but I think in that Boucher is poorly served.  He seems to have been reluctant to completely take on Campbell—even referencing approvingly his statement in one story—and his mysteries did not always use as well worked-out science fiction as Asimov’s but he was clearly doing science fiction mysteries.

And this mixing, I think, had a lot to do with Fort.  The classic mystery is composed in the Holmesian fashion, to show that what was improbable was possible—was in fact the truth.  Boucher’s mysteries are meant to prove that some parts of the impossible are possible—just as he said in Rocket to the Morgue.  The mysteries, for instance, prove that time travel is possible.   There’s a connection here, too, with weird tales, in that Boucher sometimes does not allow himself a simple, rational explanation for the weirdnesses at the heart of the stories—but shows that the supernatural, too, is alive in the human world.

That weird tales and Fort were in his mind is unmistakable.  He wrote a number of stories for Weird Tales, which meant he was keeping up with that market.  His stories also referenced Fort.   In “The Chronokinesis of Jonathan Hull,” for example, a man of the future writes “The Co-ordinating Concordance to the Data of Charles Fort,” which implies that Fort’s ideas were later confirmed.  More subtly, “The Tenderizers,” posits—in a classic Lovecraftian manner—that there are some msyerious “they” controlling weird writers, making them tell of horrors so that the “they” can savor the fine bouquet of our fear.  And after they have been used up, the writers are harvested—which accounts for Ambrose Bierce’s mysterious disappearance in Mexico.  Any reader of Fort would remember that he suggested—jokingly—some cosmic force was collecting Bierces.  The stories “Sanctuary” and “The Pink Caterpillar” reverse the tale, reporting on mysterious appearances.  Another of Boucher’s stories plays with the classic Fortean maxim, “I think we are property.”  In “Conquest,” humans ingratiate themselves with a race of alien giants by becoming their pets—and thus will be able to sabotage the giants when galactic destroyers show up.

For the current purpose of understanding the San Francisco Forteans, another of Boucher’s Fortean references may be most useful.  In 1952’s “The Anomaly of the Empty Man,” Lamb, private detective who thrives on bizarre cases is bamboozled by his current one and so goes to the “Monkey Block”—Montgomery Block, an artist’s enclave on the edge of China Town and North Beach—right near where Robert Barbour Johnson and some others lived.  He is looking for a particular studio, “Verner’s Varieites,” which is run by the eccentric Dr. Verner, who oversees singers and sculptors and writers.   Verner is “Half Robert Burton and Half Charles Fort.”  He had been a world traveler and lover of many women and now stood at a lectern, writing—with a quill pen—The Anatomy of Nonscience, a sequel to Fort’s four books.  In general, Boucher suggests that Forteanism was common in the arts community of San Francisco—an expected part of the weirdness, maybe affected, maybe not.  But, I think that Kenneth MacNichol may also have been a model for Dr. Verner.  We know that Boucher was fond of using real people as models, that MacNichol had traveled the globe and gone through many loves, and was a dedicated Fortean.  He also worked right near the Monkey Block.  This San Francisco Fortean again connects mystery and science fiction writing.  He is related to Sherlock Holmes—they are supposed to be cousins—but uses the more Fortean mantra, that some part of the impossible must be possible.

It’s impossible that Boucher got this idea from the San Francisco Forteans—he was using it when he was in LA—but it captures nicely what he got out of Fort.

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.”