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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What was going on at MacNichol’s Pencraft University?  I found a glimpse into its actions through Doubt.  Apparently, MacNichol was using Fort’s books to teach writing.  Exactly how is unclear, although I suspect that he may have used them help students generate story ideas.  Certainly, Robert Barbour Johnson thought the books were good for that.

MacNichol was also using General Semantics.  Indeed, he gave a paper at a General Semantics conference, “Experiments with a Simplified Method in Teaching General Semantics to Writers.”  Again, exactly how he used General Semantics is unknown.  And I don’t know more than a glossing of General Semantics, but there seems to have been a fairly strong connection between it and Forteanism.

Tiffany Thayer was initially dismissive, but then became enthusiastic, as did a number of science fiction writers with Fortean connections.  Certainly, there seems to be an elective affinity between General Semantics and Forteanism, if I understand General Semantics correctly.

General Semantics was a philosophy developed by Alfred Korzybski in the first half of the twentieth century that was based on the premise that human thinking is limited by the structure of the brain and the languages human use.  This could explain Fortean events as, for example, irruptions from a universe that could not be fully comprehended by the brain or fully explained by language.

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.

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'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.

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.  

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.

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.

According to Robert Barbour Johnson, MacNichol met Thayer while he was in New York.  Johnson isn’t a reliable historian, but this claim makes sense.  The two men were in New York at the same time and were well known writers.  It seems likely that there social circle should overlap.  MacNichol was not a science fiction writer, but did turn out fantasy and what was called the weird story (although in Twelve Lectures he warned his students that the market for such stories was small and unreliable).  Given this interest, it’s not hard to imagine that MacNichol knew of Fort’s work, especially after 1941 when Thayer put out a collected volume of Fort’s four books on damned facts.  So an interest in Forteana may have drawn the two together, as well.  It’s all speculation at this point, though, for none of the Thayer correspondence I have seen is with MacNichol.

At any rate, we do know that MacNichol founded the San Francisco Fortean Chapter, from Johnson as well as Haas (and, through him, Herron), so, again, it makes sense that he might have met Thayer in New York and carried the interest west with him.  The meetings took place at Pencraft College, which suggests that they began after 1946.  Johnson’s story of Thayer expelling the chapter—more on this later—dates, through outside sources, the excommunication to 1948 or 1949.  It seems likely that the club may have declined after the break-up of MacNichol and Polly Lamb, which would date the end to some time between 1951 and July 1953.  Whatever was going on with the club was not attracting a great deal of attention—at least my research has uncovered no reporting on the club by the local papers.

MacNichol appears in the 1945-46 city directory for San Francisco, so he came west sometime after the start of World War II.  His address is given as 478 Union Street, his occupation as literary consultant.  His business listing also included someone named Susan E. MacNichol, which may mean that he married again.   No later than 1948, he opened Pencraft College at 2255 Lombard Street, where he taught writing, and was a founding member of the Seven Arts League, which was supposed to encourage the fine arts in San Francisco.  The League didn’t seem to have made much of a dent—there’s no discussion of it in the San Francisco Chronicle and no record of it in the California State Library History Room.

If he had been married to someone named Susan, that ended by the late 1940s, for in 1949 he married Polly Lamb, another member of the Fortean Society.  That relationship, too, ended a few years later, for in 1953, he married Marie A. Wright (it was her second marriage) in San Francisco.  He was sixty five; she was forty two.  The marriage was recorded in San Francisco, but it seems that his connection to the city was dying.

He did give a series of lectures on writing at the University of San Francisco in 1954, but he last appeared in the city directory in 1951, and then he was listed as a writer (not the head of Pencraft College) and still married to Polly Lamb.  A few years later, he was mostly remembered as publisher of the San Lorenzo Village Sun, a newspaper that served the planned community of San Leandro Village, which suggests that he may have been living there, or in Santa Cruz.  I can find no record of this publication at the California State Library or Hayward Area Historical Society.   At any rate, the paper could not have lasted very long—like most of the many projects MacNichol started and then abandoned.

On Sunday June 26, the MacNichols were on a bus in Santa Cruz, California, crossing the railroad tracks at Younglove Avenue and Seaside Street.  A slow moving train crashed into the bus.  Kenneth’s chest was crushed, puncturing his lungs.  “If he had been 10 years younger he probably would have recovered,” a medical spokesman said.  But he died on Wednesday morning.  Marie suffered a fractured skull, but was expected to make a full recovery.  I’m not sure what happened to her, but presumably she did survive because I have been unable to find a death certificate for Marie MacNichol from the summer of 1955.