George Leite was an important part of the Bay Area literary scene in the first five years after World War II or so, although he is not much remembered now.  There’s no doubt that he was a Fortean—another example of the way that San Francisco Forteanism united artists of both high and low culture.

George Thurston Leite was born 20 December 1920 in Rhode Island to Joaquin and Margaret Leite.  Joaquin was from Portugal; he had come to the States in 1912.  Margaret was from Massachusetts.  By 1930, the family had relocated to San Leandro, California, in Alameda, not far from Oakland.  San Leandro had a well-developed Portuguese community, which may have attracted the Leites.  According to an acquaintance, Lee Watkins, George nevertheless had to endure a great deal of discrimination which made him, in the 1940s, sympathetic to black agitation for civil rights.

Like Kenneth Rexroth and Philip Lamantia, Leite was a conscientious objector during World War II, and so was in the merchant marines.  He married a woman named Nancy in the mid-1940s, and worked at menial jobs—tending bar, driving a taxi.  Supposedly, he was also taking a pred-med course at Berkeley in hopes of becoming a psychiatrist.

Watkins’s remembrances of Leite are the most intimate I have found, although he very clearly did not like the man.  Supposedly they were written in 1945, although they were not donated to the UC Davis library until much later.

Watkins thought that he was “a complete egotist,” only interested in other people as far as he could use them.  He spent his time drinking and brawling and, according to Watkins, was not above ripping off his fares.  (Indeed, he once was arrested for stealing a drunk’s wallet.)  According to Stephen Schwartz’s From West to East, it was Leite who got Lamantia into Peyote, which in some ways can be seen as the start of the Bay Area drug scene.

Although he was married, Watkins claims that Leite liked to shock people by “pulling the homosexual act”—which actually is not so shocking, considering the antics of Rexroth, Duncan, and others in the Bay Area literary scene.

Watkins although found Leite a “poseur and pretender” who read enough only to maintain an intellectual façade.  Be that as it may, Leite did do some literary work.

In 1951, he published with the fantasy writer Joanna Scott Cure It With Honey (later retitled I’ll Get Mine) under the pseudonym Thurston Scott (from his middle name, and her last).  The story was about a psychiatrist from San Quentin who became involved in a murder mystery among the Pachucos—the hard-edged Mexican gangsters of Oakland.  The book was raw for its time—tame for now—with suggestions of easy sex between a teenager and older man, references to marijuana and homosexuality—but had a strong Romantic feel, the Pachucos held up as a vital, salt of the Earth group, just trying to make their way in a foreign land.  Clearly, Leite’s interest in racism and psychiatry went into the book, which was widely praised, including by Anthony Boucher.

Leite also joined with Bern Porter, a physicist-cum-artist, to create the literary journal Circle.  They put out ten issues (irregularly) between 1944 and 1948, printing the likes of Lamantia, Rexroth, Anais Nin, and Henry Miller.

It is here, in Leite’s literary tastes and Circle, that his Forteanism is apparent.  As with many San Francisco authors of the day, Leite was drawn to Henry Miller—in large part because of Miller’s mysticism.  Watkins remembers that Leite was intrigued by Madame Blavatsky, Theosophy, astrology, and “so-called esoteric knowledge.”  Watkins thought it was all an act: “he made a cult of being different.”  Plus, Watkins said, mysticism was easy, certainly easier than studying science, as Theosophy, for example, presented an entire system of thought, an entire history of the world.  His ego had something to do with it, too, Watkins wrote.  “George had the kind of ego that would believe or preach any kind of shit if he thot [sic] it would get his name before the public.  He is the sort that would fuck his grandmother if it would gain him headlines without jail.”

But the limited evidence seems to suggest that Leite felt genuine affection for mysticism and Forteanism (which were intimately bound in the post-War Bay Area).

The manifesto that opened the first issue of Circle proclaimed its allegiance to Fort.  The opening words were, “A circle can be measured beginning at any point: we decided to start our measure on the West Coast.”

There’s no doubt that Leite’s source for this was Fort.  In the fourth issue, there was a page of mock reviews, “What They Are Saying about Circle” which listed a bunch of quotes about circles from famous and not so famous artists—Klee, Joyce.  One was Fort’s famous maxim, “One measures a circle, beginning anywhere.”

The circle that Leite was trying to measure was the literary circle.  He started in the West Coast, the manifesto proclaimed, because good work—virile work—was being done there but ignored on the East Coast.  The work from the West was part of a teue battle for freedom (presumably, unlike World War II0: a battle for freedom of expression, which was best symbolized by Henry Miller, whose work was still being censored.  (I suspect Leite saw Cure It with Honey a salvo in this battle.)

Fort, too, was part of this struggle for freedom.  The fourth and fifth issues, from 1944 and 1945, both advertised the works of Fort and noted that the editors could provide copies.  By the fifth issue, Tiffany Thayer had made a connection and was asking for readers to provide a copy of the first issue of Circle to him.  In the sixth issue—also from 1945—he paid to advertise the Fortean Society.

The first advertisement best captures how Leite saw Fort in relation to other literature of the time.  It quoted Dreiser’s assessment that Fort was “The most fascinating literary figure since Poe,” Ben Hecht’s paean to Fort as “The Mad Hatter and Jack of Clubs,” and Booth Tarkington’s comparison of Fort to Blake and Cagliostro, then noted that “If you haven’t read” Fort, “kind and simple folk, you will remain kind and simple folk[sic]  But if you do read him which out [sic] and we urge you to read him for your own self-respect.”  The book sold for an admittedly high $4.50 but “it costs a lot to be freed from stupidity.”

Fort, in other words, was not to be taken seriously, necessarily, but to be read literarily, as another author forcing readers to examine their assumptions and imagine the world differently.   

Miller travelled through Europe and the United States (on the trip that would inspire his critique of America, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare) before reaching California and his own personal paradise, Big Sur.  Miller was a dedicated Bohemian, scraping together cash here and there, unafraid to bum from others, and work if only accountable to himself—certainly life in wild Big Sur required a lot of manual labor.  Miller eked by on very little: looking back from the 1950s on his untouchable royalties in France, for example, he mused, “A hundred a month--regularly—would have solved our problems.  (It would have then.  Today no sum is large enough to solve anybody’s problems.  The bombs eat up everything.)”

He fit in with the developing Bay Area scene well, extending the axis of the Bohemia south to the Monterey Peninsula.  His ideas about art were similar to those being developed among the poets and painters of the regions.  “And what is the potential of man, after all?  Is he not the sum of all that is human?  Divine, in other words?  You think I am searching for God.  I am not.  God is.  The World is.  Man is.  We are,” he told Conrad Moricand, echoing the Eastern-inflected ideas of the other artists.  Every one, every thing was a mixture of good and bad, of white magic and black magic: even the bomb, which could destroy the world but also provide energy.