Two examples. The first comes from a letter written by Edward F. Ricketts to Don Emblem dated 3 November 1943. Ricketts was a marine biologist who developed into something of a philosophe. He is best known for his friendship and work with John Steinbeck. At the time, Ricketts was living in the Monterey area, where he was also friendly with Henry Miller and Joseph Campbell. Emblem was a poet.
Ricketts wrote, “Your speaking of Henry Miller reminds me to say that Janko met him down there, and Miller speaks of coming on here again. I think he is a good man. Charles Fort makes my tired ache, although I realize I am one of a minority. Many people whose minds I respect admire him: Janko; at one time John; Toni. Most of the writers whose work appears not to be circumscribed by form are those who have got to use it as familiarly as a person uses his senses.”
The context of the reference to Fort is not exactly clear; Emblem’s article, as far as I know, has not survived. But it seems fair to say that Emblem probably brought up the subject of Fort. The important point here is to note that in early 1940s, Fort was well-known among the Monterey-area Bohemians. In particular, Ricketts specifically references Janko—Jean Varda, a Greek painter who had been in the U.S. Since 1939. Janko and Henry Miller (another Fortean) were good friends. (At the time of the letter, though, Miller was in southern California.)
Little remembered today, Kenneth Rexroth was a major influence on the art world through the middle of the twentieth century, especially in San Francisco. In a fittingly Fortean way, he both recurs throughout the history of Forteanism and is peripheral to the subject. He never wrote directly about Forteanism, and his work shows no influence from Fort. But, it is impossible to write about the development of Forteanism without referencing him.
Rexroth was born in South Bend Indiana in 1905. He was raised in a family that had extensive ties to socialism and had been involved in abolitionist movements, including working on the Underground Railroad. These would have significant effects on Rexroth throughout his life.
His father, Charles Rexroth, had originally intended to become a doctor, but never finished his schooling and instead feel into pharmaceutical sales. If socialism was one influence on Rexroth, then his father’s alcoholism and philandering was another, causing drastic shifts in the family’s fortune—from mansions to shared rooms—and putting the boy into untenable situations, as when the young Rexroth was forced to live with his paternal grandmother, who was senile and beat him mercilessly for no reason. (Rexroth would, in turn, become abusive.) Kenneth was close to his mother, Delia, but she had many illnesses and eventually died in 1916, when he was about eleven. (His father died two years later.)
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.
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