One of the benefits of doing historical research in the early 21st century is the wealth of newspaper indexes. There is Newspaperarchive.com. Proquest has digitized many papers. As well, there are still the older indexes—some published, some not. It’s important to remember that even using these, there’s still a lot that is missed. Nonetheless, surveys of papers today can be made much broader much easier than in the past.
And doing so, it becomes clear that the Oakland Tribune was a major disseminator of Charles Fort, at least in the Bay Area. Again, this conclusion must be taken with a certain grain of salt: the Tribune is digitized, which makes searching it easier. Its San Francisco competitor, The Chronicle--both were staunchly Republican papers in the first part of the twentieth century—is only indexed. Some of the indexes are published. Some were created by California state librarians. And it is possible that references to Fort slipped through the index. Be that as it may, the Tribune was important.
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 centralquestion 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.
Miriam Allen de Ford and Maynard Shipley discovered Charles Fort in 1921. De Ford was at a library in Oakland, where she came across Fort’s The Book of the Damned. It had been published two years before. She flipped through the book, found it intriguing, and took it home to Shipley, in Sausalito. “My husband and I sat up all night, reading the book aloud to each other, unable to put it down,” she wrote later.
What was the attraction?
Shipley was primarily drawn to the catalog of odd facts—he had little time for Fort’s theories, whether meant as jokes or not. Although obviously a committed scientist, Shipley was open to expanding the known laws to account for unusual phenomena. For instance, in 1919—the same year Fort published The Book of the Damned—he investigated Dr. Albert Abrams for The Scientific American. Abrams was a San Francisco doctor who claimed amazing results with “electronic medicine.” At first, Shipley—who de Ford admits several times was quite naïve—accepted Abrams findings. Eventually, though, he concluded that the doctor was both a charlatan and a dupe.
In her biography of him, de Ford writes that he had several unusual experiences himself. His house in Mill Valley, for instance, was haunted. She said,
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.)
Yeah, so I haven't used this category as much as I thought. But now I am starting to apply a little more thought to exactly what I want to say about the Forteans--or at least some of them--and so thought I might make use of it again.
I still have some reading to do, but I think I've finished collecting information on the San Francisco Bay Area Forteans through the 1950s, and so am in the early stages of combining it into what will eventually become an article. But to what end?
As noted earlier, thinking about Forteans is one way of thinking about collecting, and what collecting means in a world that becomes increasingly oriented around consumption.
From a completely different angle, one can also think of Forteans as superstitious hold-outs--people who turn their back on science to embrace irrationalism and unreason. Certainly, there are plenty of examples in Doubt of Tiffany Thayer standing against reason simply for the sake of standing against reason. Even many Forteans thought so.
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.
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.
A few posts down, I mentioned Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, and noticed that I did not have a tag for him, which makes me think that dropping his name there might have been confusing. So let me explain his connection.
As far as I know, LaVey was not a Fortean, at least not explicitly. But, he did have a collection of the works of Ben Hecht, a writer who ran in Tiffany Thayer's circle and was a founding member of the first Fortean Society.
By itself, that doesn't say much: lots of people read Hecht. But, LaVey was also in San Francisco by the 1950s and spent time with George Haas, Robert Barbour Johnson, and Clark Ashton Smith. There's a semi-famous picture of them together, which LaVey titled, "Headmasters in a School for Ghouls." By the 1960s, Haas told Ashton Smith's wife that he no longer heard from Lavey--"since he became Satan."
But, it's clear there was a substantive connection between LaVey and the Bay Area Forteans and so understanding something about LaVey--who has more written about him--helps explain the Forteans.
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