The Bookman: Joseph Henry Jackson, part II

03/03/2011

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According to Miriam Allen de Ford, Jackson reviewed Fort’s Wild Talents, which came out in June 1932—a month or so after Fort’s death.  De Ford mentions the review in her biography of Fort written for Boucher’s Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction; she did not give any bibliographical information, however, and I have been unable to locate it.  I looked through the San Francisco Chronicle for June 1932; as well, librarians at the California State Library compiled an index to the Chronicle, and there is no listing for a review of Wild Talents.  (There is for Fort’s collected works, though.)  It is entirely possible that Jackson published it elsewhere, but I don’t know its location.  Assuming it exists, though, that dates Jackson’s awareness of Fort to the early 1930s, just after he joined the Chronicle, at the very least.

What is known is that his interest in Fort became public (again?)—and positive—in the early 1940s, first with the aforementioned review of Fort’s collected works, introduced, edited, and indexed by Tiffany Thayer and published by Henry Holt.  Jackson took the opportunity of the publication as an excuse to introduce Fort and his ideas to a wide world, making it clear that he was a Fortean “in spirit” if not “in fact,” as he put it in his “Bookman’s Daily Notebook” on 1 May 1941 (p. 17).

Having now read this article—which is also referenced by de Ford in her biography—it is clear that Jackson’s interpretation of Fort influenced de Ford greatly.  Both saw Fort the man as relatively uninteresting—at least they didn’t find much in his biography to note.  Like so many others, they were attracted by his ideas.  Jackson characterized Fort as “The Man Who Kept Saying ‘No!’”  He stood against scientists who made too positive declarations, Jackson thought, and pointed out that there were yet many unexplained things in this world, “hushed up” by scientists because they did not fit into contemporary theories.  There’s a certain truth to this, of course, but seeing Fort as only a compiler of the odd ignores his humor and his alternate theories—both of which influenced later thinkers more than the collecting.

Jackson, though, does point to some of these other parts of Fort, comparing him to Rabelais at one point, and noting that while many may not like his writing style—and may therefore dismiss him as sane—others will entertain the teasing thought that perhaps Fort is the only one who is sane, the rest of the world crazy.  Those who think so, he says, have “made the first step to becoming a Fortean, because” they have shifted into a new dimension and asked, “What if?”  (Not coincidentally, a central question in science fiction.)  To those, he recommends Thayer’s Fortean Society which he—at least at this relatively early date—saw as having “no ax to grind” and “no other purpose” than making people reconsider received opinions.

Jackson had reason to return to Fort the following year.  He was editing and introducing a collection of Ambrose Bierce’s short stories called Tales of Soldiers and Civilians.  The book came out in 1943, but the introduction suggests that it was written in 1942.

Jackson begins the introduction by considering Bierce’s mysterious end: on 26 December 1913 he crossed into Mexico and was never seen from again.  This disappearance, Jackson notes, had become more famous than Bierce’s writings, with plenty of people speculating on the writer’s final days.  Jackson obliquely references Robert Heinlein’s novella "Lost Legacy" published in 1941, which had Bierce joining the Lemurians on Mt. Shasta.  Jackson suggested Fort’s “mystical” explanation was better.  Noting that Bierce disappeared about the same time as someone named Ambrose Small, Fort impishly suggested that perhaps there was an Ambrose collector about.  Though only a small comment, the introduction shows a familiarity with Fort and science fiction, and this before it is generally supposed that Jackson and Boucher met.  Note that Heinlein’s tale appeared in Super Science Stories, not exactly top-flight science fiction (and was published under the name Lyle Monroe, I believe: see illustration).

We do know that Boucher and Jackson had befriended by the following year--1943—and Fort seemed to be part of that friendship, or least led them in a parallel direction.  As mentioned before, Boucher became interested in reports that stones were falling from the sky over Oakland.  Jackson, too, had his curiosity piqued and mentioned the stones in his “Bookman’s Daily Notebook” on 1 September 1943.  He used the reports as another opportunity to introduce Fort to a public that had not properly attended the writer.

This article evinced a more expansive understanding of Fort, which may reflect Boucher’s influence, Jackson’s development, or his willingness to go further in a second piece.  At any rate, Jackson started by describing Fort as a clip collector who wanted to encourage skepticism of science.  He mentioned, again, Thayer and the Fortean Society, again lauding them as carrying on Fort’s work, singling out Thayer’s introduction to the collected works as an excellent encapsulation of the Fortean approach to life.  (Boucher did not share this enthusiasm for Thayer’s introduction; at least by the 1950s—after Thayer had made many enemies—he compared it to Thayer’s earlier introduction to Lo! And found it lacking that Fortean je ne sais quoi.)  Miriam Allen de Ford praised the article in a letter to Boucher and hoped it would gain Fort more readers.

But Jackson did not stop at this conventional—one is tempted to same provincial—interpretation of Fort.  He went on to praise Fort’s Rabelaisian exaggerations: “He juggled paradoxes and played games with words—even with sentence structure,” Jackson wrote.  “But you’d better read him,” he admonished.  “While you’re reading you won’t be sure if you’re on your head or heels.  But then Fort knew that.  He wrote to shake up the reader.  He does.”

There’s an echo of Maynard Shipley’s comment that reading Fort is like riding a comment.  But while Shipley is loathe to take any of Fort’s theorizing seriously and spends time defending science against what he sees as Fort’s naiveté, Jackson eschews any such defense of science.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but it’s possible to see a transition taking place here, from the Bay Area provincial interpretation of Fort to the looser, more radical understanding championed by Bay Area Forteans in the years after World War II.  It is tempting to suggest, as well, that World War II itself mencouraged this new interpretation: the war made it seem that much more likely that humans were, indeed, property; that sinister forces controlled the world; that science would doom us all and that there needed to be not just new facts, but new theories.

Better to take a Fortean approach—to note that possible interpretation, leave it hanging for contemplation, but be ready to dismiss it as only fiction: another story we tell ourselves to make sense of a world that is always beyond our full comprehension.

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The Editor: Anthony Boucher, part vi

10/22/2009

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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.”

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The Editor: Anthony Boucher, part v

10/22/2009

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Boucher’s interest in science fiction and fantasy did not dwindle, though.  He wrote a poem for Weird Tales, reviewed science fiction and fantasy for the Chicago Sun-Times and Los Angeles Daily News.  During his time in Los Angeles, in the late 1930s, he became acquainted with the Mañana Literary Society, which was a club of science fictioneers (as they often called themselves), including Robert Heinlein, Cleve Cartmill, Ed Hamilton, Henry Kuttner, Jack Williamson, and others.  Boucher wrote about the Society in his mystery Rocket to the Morgue (which was published under a different pseudonym: H. H. Holmes; that was not a reference to Sherlock, at least not explicitly, but the borrowed pseudonym of murderer, Herman Mudgett—who, incidentally, was the subject of the recent The  Devil in the White City.)

Rocket to the Morgue is interesting in a number of ways.  It gave some clues to Boucher’s interest in Forteana—indeed, it is a very Fortean book.  It also gave a glimpse of the science fictioneers at work during the late 1930s.  (It was published in 1942 and set in 1941.)  It is self-referential: one of the characters is Anthony Boucher, another member of the Society, and his wife.  The book also recasts the Sherlock Homes mythos into the world of weird fiction and science fiction tales.  It is set in a world where science fiction was given a huge lift by author Fowler Foulkes, who created the character Dr. Derringer.  Derringer did for science fiction what Holmes did for mysteries—made them possible, was the epitome of the genre, was so believable that he almost seemed to be alive and, indeed, seemed to come to life in the course of the mystery.  At the time the story took place, Fowler Foulkes had died and his literary empire was being run by his son, Hilary.  Writing about the all the ways that Hilary frustrated those who hoped to adapt Derringer to different media or to continue his exploits in new stories gave Boucher a chance to comment on the manager of the Holmes character, Adrian Conan Doyle, son of Sir Arthur, who also jealously protected his father’s legacy and often confounded the plans of fans who wanted to use Sherlock Holmes in new ways.

Boucher’s most famous intervention into the world of weird tales, though, was as co-editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.  Originally conceived as only a fantasy magazine, FSF, as the cognoscenti knew it, became the successor to John W. Campbell’s Astounding—even as that magazine continued publishing.  It can be arguably said to be the standard-bearer of science fiction magazines during the 1950s, and certainly so of the fantasy—or weird—tale, with Weird Tales itself ceasing publication in the middle 1950s, after years of decline.  The magazine published a couple of Bay Area Forteans, Garen Drussai and Miriam Alan de Ford (who published an article on Fort).  Toward the end of his life, Clark Ashton Smith had George Haas facilitate correspondence with Boucher; Smith was having trouble finding new markets for his work, and hoped Boucher could help.  (Apparently, he couldn’t.)  Other Fortean inflected stories also appeared here.

Boucher edited The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction until 1958.  He stayed active in the field—and in mystery—up to his death from lung cancer on 29 April 1968.

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