A nice little find.  Syracuse University holds the Mercury Press Records; Mercury Press produced The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, edited for a long time by Anthony Boucher.  It turns out that there’s a file labeled Drussai which contains several letters from Garen and a pair from Kirk, all to Boucher.

The correspondence begins in January 1951, after Boucher had already asked for rewrites on an early version of “Extra-Curricular.”  All of the correspondence is from one or the other Drussai to Boucher—none of his responses survive except as faintly penciled notes on the letters.  Most of the material is Drussai sending off manuscripts, often through several rounds of revisions, which gives some insight into her career.

At the time she first wrote Boucher, Garen had already been rejected by Horace Gold at Galaxy and she was trying to get a sense of the market—how many revisions she could expect, and what-not.  At first, she admitted, she started a lot of stories but could not finish them.  Then she focused more.  One gets the sense that she sometimes felt overwhelmed by her domestic responsibilities: “Between lawn planting------and fence building----------and curtain making I did manage to whip this “Surprisingly” long (for me) story together.  Huh?,” she wrote in October 1956.  A little while later, she resolved to take her writing more seriously.  She also asked for Boucher’s advice on agents.  She wanted to move into mainstream publishing, in addition to her science fiction, and also found Harry Altshuler—her agent—was apathetic toward her work.

In addition, the correspondence sheds some light on some of the obscure details of the Drussai’s life.  They moved often.  Her first letter gave their address as 259 Montana Street—far from Telegraph Hill, almost in Daly City.  By May of 1951, she had moved to Hollywood, then to LA before the summer was over.  The following Autumn she was on La Crescenta, only to move back north to San Francisco by 1955.  In the spring of 1956, she was in the suburb of San Carlos, and then moved to Campbell, California that summer.  The Drussais seemed to have stayed there until they divorced, right around New Year’s 1960.  Garen and Milo moved to San Jose, Kirk to Santa Clara.

Apparently, Kirk had been in sales for most of this time—although I don’t know what he was selling.  Around the beginning of 1957, he got involved with technical writing and was a member of the Bay Area Chapter of the Society of Technical Writers and Editors, which had about 25 members.  He obviously could not know it, but moving into technical writing just as Silicon Valley was about to take off was wise.  Quite probably, he published far more than his wife, who, judging by the correspondence here, had a lot of trouble placing her writing, although it’s unknown whether that’s because of the quality of the output or the closing of the pulp market in the 1950s.

Indeed, it’s worth a slight digression on this topic.  I have seen a couple of newsletters the Golden Gate Chapter of the Society of Technical Publishers put out in the late 1950s.  (That group and the STWE merged in 1960), and there are some interesting connections between technical writers and Forteans that are worth further exploration.  Anthony Boucher, for example, came to talk at one of TPS’s meetings, discussing funny gaffes that had gotten past science fiction editors.  Members of the TPS also heard a talk by one of the followers of General Semantics, which was then taking root in San Francisco since S. I. Hayawaka had come to San Francisco State University.  And Kirk asked Tony to republish Isaac Asimov’s “Insert Knob A in Hole B,” which had been in the December 1957 F&SF.  Although tech writing and science fiction seem, on the face of it, so different, I can see the connection, as in both cases the writer must use her or his imagination to make sense of—and make sensible—otherwise undigested scientific material.

But, back to the correspondence.  It also reveals some personal facts about Garen that would otherwise be hard to come from.  She had a great sense of humor, for instance.  One letter to Boucher was entirely blank between the salutation and the signature, with a P.S.: “More later.”  Another time, she submitted a story that, she learned upon reading the magazine, was very similar to one just published by F&SF (Avram Davidson’s “Summerland,” which implies that hers, titled “Wish Fulfillment, had something to do with Spiritualism.)  She wrote, “I’ve been tricked by coincidence. . . .  I hope my next to you is not the result of some telepathic meeting of minds.  I couldn’t take it.”

Frustratingly, however, the letters do not quite solve some problems about her identity.  In his first letter to her, Boucher was confused about her gender; she explained that she was a woman and, after some further prompting, gave some background to her unusual name: “In the Ross 128 Sector, Karen is a cognate of Garen; and Drussai is quite a common name.  Sort of like your Smiths and Jonses (sic) here.  (It’s Hungarian).”

At the time, Boucher (obviously) had not met Garen face-to-face.  But he had by the time of his introduction to her first story (“Extra-Curricular,” June 1952), when he commented on her Hungarian beauty.  But, of course, she never says in this letter that she is Hungarian.  Maybe he assumed it, and so wrote it—and given that Garen was interested in re-inventing herself, she let it stand.  Or maybe she had confirmed this in some other conversation.  At any rate, it suggests that, at least at this time, she was not claiming to be Hungarian.

More confusing is her reference to “Ross 128 Sector.”  Ross 128 is the star nearest the Earth; it had been discovered in 1926 and so was likely known by science fiction aficionados.  Perhaps this was what she meant—a joke, her letters full of them, a reference to how far she was from Berkeley and the Bohemian parts of San Francisco?—or perhaps something more obscure.  If we accept the star interpretation, then she seems close to admitting that the name is wholly fabricated, whether Drussai is Hungarian or not.

Like so many Forteans, Garen Drussai is quite a slippery character.

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.  

Like his future wife, Kirk Drussai had a slippery identity.  There is less documentation on him, but it is as certain as certain can be that he was born 14 August 1919 in Ravenna (Buffalo County), Nebraska.  Of course, census records uncover no Drussais from Nebraska at all—like Garen, Drussai is an exceedingly rare name.  From his death certificate, however, it was possible to obtain Kirk’s social security number, and from that get his social security application.  He filed his about a week before Garen (Clara) filed hers.  According to that, his name was not Kirk Drussai, but Gerald Larry Polenz.  And, indeed, the census does have a records of Polenz’s in Ravenna at that time—and their names are the same that Kirk (Gerald) listed on his social security application.  If we assume that Kirk changed his name—and did not later steal someone else’s identity—then we know this about him:

His father was Albert Polenz.  A native Nebraskan, Polenz was born in 1889 to German immigrants.   Apparently, he had a child sometime in the 1910s—the 1910 census lists him as single and without a child, but his WWI draft card—he never served—has him as single and with a child.  Probably this means that he was married and his wife died.  The 1930 census does date his first marriage to 1916.  If that census is correct, then in 1918 he married Olive Mae Howard.  She was born in Custer Bow, Nebraska in 1893, her father from Iowa, her mother from New York.

Albert was a farmer in the late 1910s, but by 1920 had taken a job as a brakeman for the railroad.  The family did well.  The Polenz’s mortgaged a home in 1920.  In 1930, the house was valued at $9,000.  The family owned a radio.  F. Lannie, the daughter from Albert’s first marriage, had moved out, and three boarders were living with the Polenz’s.  The census for that year specified that Albert was employed by the CB&Q railroad, still as a brakeman.

In 1936, Gerald (Kirk) was still living in the family home at 804 Grand Avenue, Ravenna.  He was eighteen and, fortunately for a Midwesterner in the midst of the Depression, employed.  He was working at for the Safeway Grocery chain in nearby Grand Island, Nebraska.

Again like Garen, Kirk then seems to disappear from the historical record.  This is more surprising for him, since he would have been prime age for World War II.  But, I can’t identify any records related to him.  Maybe those records are lost or inaccessible.  Maybe he was playing around with his name and so was registered under some other name.  Or maybe, given the later interest of Garen and the Fortean Society with pacifisim, his dodged the draft or registered as a conscientious objector.  What we do know is that Gerald Polenz disappears.  And a decade or so later, Kirk Drussai appears in Hollywood, California. 

Probably the most committed Forteans in Chapter Two—the San Francisco Fortean Society—were Garen and Kirk Drussai, a married couple who lived in the Bay Area.  They were the first ever to put their unborn child up for membership in the Fortean Society.  Piecing together their lives has been difficult, especially for Kirk, who seems to have left few traces.  But here’s what I know so far—or think I know.

There is some confusion about who the Drussais even were.   I can be sure that Garen was born 17 June 1916 in the Bronx: all relevant documents confirm this.  But what was her name?  According to her death certificate and the birth certificate of her son, Garen’s maiden name was Lewis.  A search of the census records, however, fails to find any Garen Lewises—Garen is an extremely uncommon name.  A clue to her identity can be found in her social security application—there she gives her name as Clara Hettler and her parents as Benjamin Hettler and Annie (Besner) Hettler.  The 1920 and 1930 census does record a family of Hettlers living in the Bronx, headed by Benjamin and Annie (Besner), with a daughter, Clara, born about 1916.

Clara Hettler filled out her social security application in December 1936.  It seems very possible that she changed her name in the late 1930s when Hettler—a variation of Hitler—would have been a very inconvenient name to carry.  (It is also possible that she married in the 1930s and later divorced.)  Further confirmation that she Clara and Garen are indeed the same person come from a 1966 obituary for the eldest of the three Hettler sisters listed on the 1920 census, Estelle.  The article lists her parents and her sisters as Gertrude, the middle child, and Garen Drussai, indicating that although the rest of the family did not change its name—except upon marriage—they accepted their youngest daughter’s new name (at this point, Garen had married and divorced Kirk, and came by Drussai that way).

Anthony Boucher, who knew Garen Drussai in the 1950s, at least, said that she was Hungarian.  The census gives her parents birthplace as Austria.  Both may be correct, given the union of Austria and Hungary in the years between World War II and the inexactitude of the census.  Likely, Benjamin and Annie immigrated in 1900.  The 1910 census gives their immigration date as 1904—in contrast to later census data—but also note that they had an 8 year-old daughter who had been born in New York.  This was Etha.  It is possible that Etha was born out of wedlock, as the age of first marriage for Benjamin was given as 24 and Annie as 20, which would have put their wedding in 1908.  It’s also possible the census got the data wrong.

Neither Benjamin or Annie were naturalized as of 1910, although they both spoke, read, and wrote English.  Their native tongue, however, was Yiddish and the children were taught Yiddish in addition to English.  Benjamin was a furrier, his occupation variously given as furrier or nailer in a fur factory.  They lived in an ethnic enclave dominated by Russians, Austrians, and immigrants from Bohemia.  By 1930, Estelle and Gertrude had also obtained jobs, contributing to the family income as Stenographers.

By late 1936, Clara was still in the Bronx, at 1695 Andrews Avenue, very near where the Sedgwick Library is located now.  It is not clear whether she was living with her parents or was on her own—the address was different than the family’s in 1930, but they all may have moved, or just Clara may have.  She was employed by the Richard Steinweg Studio at 110 W. 40th Street, New York, about ten miles South and right across from Charles Fort’s old haunt, the main New York Public Library Branch.  Steinweg was apparently a fashion stylist of some sort, and his office was also very near the garment district.  The exact nature of Clara’s work at the time is uknown.

At some point between the end of 1936 and the late 1940s, Clara Hettler drastically changed her life.  The exact order of events is unknown, but she stopped being Clara Hettler and became Garen—maybe Garen Lewis, certainly Garen Drussai.  And After a life in New York she crossed the country and took up residence in Hollywood, California.