Conclusion

At the end of his book, Scott admits that an anarchist history seems odd from our perspective country: nation-states have increasing power over everyday lives.  Certainly, there remain threats—terrorism, most obviously.  But the systems once proposed to undermine state power—international communism, anarchism—these have failed, or only served to strengthen the state power.  The modern position of science seems more tenuous.  It is a durable institution, one that is deeply entangled with the state, which further gives it strength, as well as another powerful institution, industry.  Nonetheless, judging by the popular press, it seems embattled on many sides: by religious fundamentalists, by some of those same corporations, and by scientific anarchists such as the Forteans.  So how should we evaluate the Forteans?  Were they threats to science?  Were they insignificant?

To answer that question requires making explicit something that had been implicit: that is, the power relations.  Corporations have the power to set agendas, to affect public policy.  When they seek to undermine science—by refuting the dangers of tobacco or dismissing the possibility of global warming—their actions have serious consequences.  To the extent that religious fundamentalists inject themselves into secular institutions—schools, for example, on matters of teaching evolution and sex education—they also have the power to check science, although to this point that power has been more theoretical than actual.  The Forteans, for the most part, were not interested in setting out contrary institutions, or even altering public ones on the matter of science.  Theirs was a more subtle project.  To paraphrase Colin Bennett, the Forteans were battling for humanity’s imagination: they did not want it limited by what scientists said it could be.  From one perspective, this seems to make them insignificant—like Scott’s anarchists, their operations were eventually swamped by the expansion of the nation-state.  Similarly, as Sam Moskowitz pointed out, the Fortean fantasy was equally overwhelmed by science.  Fort suggested that the planets were only a few miles away, that a Super-Sargasso Sea hovered above all creation.  But, by 1957, with the launch of Sputnik, this theory was a shambles.  There was no way to maintain it.

Scott’s conclusion suggests—although he does not draw this point out—that the most interesting thing about anarchists, then, are not their ideas, but that they were able to patch together local practices and an international network to resist Leviathan.  The same could be said about the Forteans.  The San Francisco Bay Area Forteans drew on local practices—especially in the arts—and tied this together with the more international Fortean movement.  They did so in many distinct, sometimes mutually exclusive ways.  But the point—beyond the various ideologies—was the same in all cases.  They wanted to find ways of viewing humans as beyond the parameters that science erected.  And in this, they were successful, sometimes ironically so.  Their imaginative creations did create a space in which humans could be free—what Philip Lamantia said was an imaginal world, distinct from the mundane one and the religious one.  Forteans, he said, were explorers of this world, explorers who reported back on the extreme, new worlds that they had found, unimaginable before their explorations.  The ironic fulfillment of some of these ideas, though, was to further the power of science.  Science fiction is a literature of resistance, opposing humane values against scientific ones, but it is also a press agent for science, increasing science’s cultural authority.  The Forteans, then, at least the Bay Area Forteans in the immediate post-War years, allowed Americans to imagine themselves free from the constraints of science, even as they strengthened science’s power to determine what counted as real. 

                Lifestyles

Scott argues that the hill tribes who escaped from the paddy state built lifestyles that embodied their sense of liberty and protected it, going so far as to claim that ethnic identities and orality were both created traditions that helped the tribes remain free from the state.  There is a strong romantic element to this argument—Scott has much to say about the egalitarian rule of such tribes, but nothing on inter-tribe conflict or sexual discrimination, to pick two examples.  Nonetheless, the core of this argument seems sound, and is applicable to the Forteans living in San Francisco’s Bohemian enclaves—especially since many of the Forteans were extremely influenced by Romantic ideology.  George Haas, for example, modeled his life on that of a Romantic traveler, and hurried to join World War II so that he could travel through the South Pacific, collecting treasures.  Back in Oakland, he built his identity, in part, around these experiences.  He converted to Buddhism.  He worked as an organic gardener—at a time when that was certainly on the fringe.  And, in correspondence, he adopted the sobriquet gi eitch—an homage to H. P. Lovecraft who renamed the people who wrote him with alien-sounding titles based on their real names, in this case gi eitch representing his initials.  Haas had so thoroughly adopted this lifestyle that when Clark Ashton Smith and his wife came to visit, Carol was surprised that Haas was not Japanese.  After all, he had that odd sounding name, was a gardener, and a Buddhist.  This lifestyle sat easily with his Fortean interests.  As a Buddhist, Haas said, he understood that nothing was permanent, which included scientific theories.  Organic gardening, of course, was an explicit challenge to the agricultural sciences.  Robert Barbour Johnson lived a similarly off-beat life, although the axes around which it turned were different.  In his youth, he had worked for circuses as an animal trainer.  Once in San Francisco, he made much of his earnings turning those experiences into art: he painted and sold circus scenes, constructed miniature circuses, wrote several stories for Blue Book about circus history, and even trained his own housecat to perform tricks.

In contrast to Haas, many of the Forteans and members of Bay Area Bohemia were sorely disappointed by America’s entry into World War II.  Kenneth Rexroth became a conscientious objector, as did Philip Lamantia.  Miller famously wrote—and Bern Porter published—the fiercely anti-war screed Murder the Murderers.  Charles Fort’s texts offered no direct support for Pacificism, but Thayer’s version of Forteanism, as spelled out in Doubt certainly did.  Thayer argued that the entire war was a hoax perpetrated by financiers.  Miriam Allen de Ford, for one, disliked his turning of Doubt into a pacifist rag, even though she agreed in large part with his stand.  Rexroth, too, worried about the way that militarization empowered the state—which then restricted the spaces in which Americans could be individuals, could plumb their own infinite vastness—and that was a large part of what was behind his founding of the libertarian circle.  Philip Lamantia’s disgust with the war was deeply tied to his disgust with science—and so part of his turn toward Forteanism.  In his personal papers, Lamantia said that he died in 1945—not coincidentally the year the world entered the age of atomic weapons.  In his letter asking for conscientious objector status, Lamantia wrote that the nineteenth-century dream of perfecting man through science had reached its inevitable conclusion in the atomic bomb, and that conclusion was tragic.  The state, he said, was evil.  Lamantia rooted his understanding of humankind’s predicament in a religious vision.  God, he said, was reality—was nature: a view consonant with Fort’s monism.  But through consciousness humans had separated themselves from nature, from the whole.   Another autobiographical note, dated the end of August 1961, makes the connection more explicit.  The apocalypse had already come, he said, and so humans needed to find a new way of life, “Anything not identifiable with the stupid, synthetic half/life of postAtomicBomb man, his exploded his cities, literature, art, his corny mis/education, his phantom governments, his corny reasoning, sick politics . . .”

Perhaps the embodiment of the Fortean lifestyle can be found in the personal histories of Garen and Kirk Drussai.  Both were born under different names: Garen was born Clara Hettler and Kirk was Gerald Polenz.  They seem to have changed their names upon moving to Hollywood, where Garen took an additional step in altering her identity: she was ashamed of her New York accent and so took locution lessons to rid herself of it.  Apparently, Garen and Kirk met while in Hollywood.  According to Tiffany Thayer, their marriage was brought about by a shared interest in Forteanism and Doubt proudly announced their nuptials.  Kirk had earlier met Thayer while in New York, and was one of the motive forces behind the founding of Chapter 2.  Garen was trying to become a writer, and some of her stories had an obvious Fortean influence.  Her first story—published in Boucher’s Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction—“Extra-Curricular” (1952) reads like a catalog of Fortean odd events.  Only at the end does the reader learn they are all tied together by a student of the future who was playing around with a time machine, messing with the past.  Another of Drussai’s stories appeared in Doubt.  “The Tainted” 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.  When Garen became pregnant, the Drussais paid membership in the Fortean Society for their unborn child.  Milo Drussai, as he would become known, was, in Tiffany Thayer’s words, the Virginia Dare of the Fortean Society—a prophecy that perhaps the off-beat lifestyles adopted by the Forteans would spread.

                Places

Where are the cultural hills?  In The Art of Not Being Governed, Scott argues that terrain was one of the main factors that contributed to lengthy existence of anarchists—or, more properly, people who resisted rule by the state.  They took to the hills, the forests, where tax collectors, census workers, and military conscriptors found it hard to follow.  San Francisco is a famously hilly city, but it was not all of the hills in the city where Forteans concentrated—nor was it hills necessarily.  Rather, they took to—or came from—the Bohemian enclaves.  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.”  These could be found across the region.  Most stereotypically, Bay Area Bohemia took root in densely-populated areas rife with multi-family homes, apartments, and residential hotels, such as along Telegraph Hill and its Montgomery Block.  What geographer Richard Walker calls the “ecotopian suburbs” were also home to some Bohemians—these are the mock cabins and craftsman houses tucked into hills of San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, and Marin, surrounded by oaks and redwoods and eucalyptus.  Although they look natural, these suburbs were built: the coast range of the Bar Area was mostly grass when European settlers arrived, and developers had to create the landscape as well as built the houses, using as their model Yosemite and trying to evoke that valleys romanticism and combine it with mysticism and Masonic ideals.  This part of Bay Area Bohemia stretched far south, through San Mateo and to the Monterey Peninsula, where an earlier iteration of Bohemia had taken refuge after the devastation of 1906.

Kenneth MacNichol had been part of that Bohemia of the early 1900s, visiting with the likes of Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) and the doyenne of San Francisco poetry of the early twentieth century, George Sterling (1869-1926).  It was here that some of the earliest evidence of MacNichol’s interest in alternative lifestyles appeared.  He planned, for example, a trip into the desert where he could study primitive mysticism.  (whether he made the trip is unknown.)  He also wrote an article extolling the virtues of “New Thought,” and the American metaphysics.  Sterling himself would become Clark Ashton Smith’s largest champion.  Much later, Henry Miller would take up residence here and become something of a guru to vagabond Bohemians who came to visit, especially conscientious objectors who, released from wartime service or camps, made pilgrimages to his small house.  Others of the Forteans lived not here, on the Monterey Peninsula, but still in the ecotopian suburbs: Shipley and de Ford lived in Sausalito until Shipleys death and Garen (1916-2009) and Kirk Drussai (1919-1991) moved between various suburbs south of San Francisco.  E. Hoffman Price lived in this general area, too.  Anthony Boucher lived in Berkeley.

The multi-family dwellings were especially rich with Forteans.    Kenneth MacNichol established his writing school—Pencraft University—at 478 Union on Telegraph Hill.  Robert Barbour Johnson also lived on Telegraph Hill.  Miriam Allen de Ford relocated to the Ambassador Hotel in the Tenderloin—but not far from the public library.  Kenneth Rexroth harnessed much of this Bohemian energy.  A veteran of Chicago’s bohemia and New York’s Greenwich Village in 1927, the year that Sterling committed suicide at the Bohemian Grove.  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.  Rexroth 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.

What makes these areas the equivalent of Scott’s hills is that the residents were free from the ruling ideology: they could conduct their life with or without regard to scientific developments, as they saw fit.  Careers here were not dependent upon science, as they were say around Lawrence Livermore Lab or the defense contractors that spread through the eastern suburbs in the years after World War II.  Attention could be focused elsewhere.  Henry Miller, for example, had already inveighed against the “air-conditioned nightmare” that America had become before he arrived on the Monterey Peninsula.  There, he could live a simpler life, spending his time cutting firewood, painting, and writing.  In much of the region, art was a constant topic of conversation.  The science fiction writer Philip K. Dick (1928-1982), who was friendly with those who formed the Berkeley Renaissance, said the local culture in the late forties “required you to have a really thorough grounding in the classics.”  And where science was allowed into Bohemian enclaves, it could be twisted and changed to serve other purposes.  After Bern Porter left the Manhattan Project, he introduced what he called “sci-art,” the application of scientific techniques to solve problems of art.  He imagined, as an example, sci-lit, in which flashes of light would substitute for the alphabet and allow for the creation of new forms of human expression.  There is no evidence directly tying Porter to Fort, but he was certainly familiar with Forteans—publisher of Henry Miller, Philip Lamantia and Circle, friendly with George Leite and Kenneth Rexroth.  Whatever his degree of interest in Charles Fort, his project was certainly Fortean, taking science away from the scientists and tweaking it to create new realities.  

Forteans as Scientific Anarchists

The varieties of Forteanism may not reflect an underlying unity, but sense can still be made of the diversity.  To do so requires an analogy: Forteans are to science as anarchists are to the state.  This analogy does not mean that all Forteans have similar political ideologies, although, at least in San Francisco, they tended to be leftists of various stripes.  Rather, the comparison relies on the relationship between individuals to an overarching institution.  In The Art of Not Being Governed, James C. Scott outlines what it means to be an anarchist in Upland Southeast Asia—not necessarily a bomb-throwing anarchist, but an anarchist in the sense of those who do not wish to be governed by the state.  Too often, he says, these groups have been seen as holdovers, evolutionary remnants of a time before there was centralized government.  This is wrong, though.  The nomads and hill people who stand against the state are not relicts: rather, they co-evolve with the state.  As the state grows and changes, so do those who wish to be free of it, altering their tactics, shifting between citizen and non-citizen, crafting lifestyles that allow them to live by their own codes—going so far, Scott suggests, as inventing new ethnicities and replacing literacy with orality to remain free.  They are ever aware of the state and its machinations, however, trading with citizens when it is convenient.

The parallel with the Forteans is obvious from the start.  It is easy to dismiss Forteans as those who refuse science and modernity, choosing instead to cling to outdated modes of knowledge—magic and superstition.  But, of course, Charles Fort did not believe in superstition.  And, also of course, his books would not have been possible without science: he read scientific journals, collected scientific facts, and argued with scientists—not that the world should retreat to an age of faith or superstition, but about restrictions scientists themselves put on the interpretation of their data.  Forteanism was not relic.  It co-evolved with science.  And the parallels can be drawn out further.  Science, like the state, had certain colonizing tendencies.  States needed people for taxing, for labor, and for war.  Science needed the public to accept its pronouncements as true—and other interpretations as false—in order to gain and then maintain cultural power—indeed, becoming inextricably intertwined with the state.  In order to find refuge from scientific determinism, Forteans (and other scientific heretics) adopted similar tactics as Scott’s anarchists.  They sought places where control was difficult to impose—the hills of Southeast Asia or the Bohemian enclaves of San Francisco.  They constructed lifestyles that allowed them liberty from the state or from science: in the case of Forteans that meant careers where they were free to live without concern about scientific facts, identities that emphasized not material determinism but infinite possibilities.  Like the hill people and tribes of Southeast Asia, the San Francisco Forteans created their own groups, their own language.  But, that did not mean they were ignorant of science.  There was trade, most obviously in the Forteans collecting data, but the trade went both ways, and Forteans injected ideas into the scientific mainstream, as well.   

                Weird Tales

At times, surrealism came close to being unanalyzable—that was certainly the case with some of Lamantia’s poems.  The point was the experience, not whether the poem could be run through the usual English 101 formulas—symbolism, allusion, etc.  Thus, the poem stood outside of any explanatory framework, could not be reduced to physical equations or chemical symbols.  Fort was important to that—an important to an even more radical proposal: that experience, itself, not just experienced processed through poetry, could be indescribable, and thus a space beyond science and scientific explanation.  This lineament of Forteanism was advanced by the so-called weird writers.  Weird writers were most easily identified with the pulp magazine Weird Tales, but they could trace the tradition of their literature back into the nineteenth century, through Ambrose Bierce (about whom Fort wrote), Algernon Blackwood, Rider Haggard (one of Henry Miller’s influences) to Edward Bulwer-Lytton (a fiction writer who seems to have inspired Helena Balavatsky’s Theosophy).  In the late 1940s, the names most associated with weird tales (and Weird Tales) were probably Clark Ashton Smith, who lived in Auburn and inspired Lamantia as well as a number of Fortean pulp writers, and H. P. Lovecraft, whose stories had come to the attention of the surrealists.  Weird tales, in their best moments, were characterized by their ability to evoke difficult to articulate emotions of fear and horror and, especially, uncanniness.  Lovecraft, for example, was known for his cosmic vision, in which humanity was but a small and irrelevant part of a vaster and more wild universe than could possibly be imagined.  (Fort, in turn, influenced to certain degree both Smith and Lovecraft.)

Probably the best example of the phenomenon of the weird in San Francisco comes from visits that Robert Barbour Johnson and George Hass made to the Monterey area, near where Henry Miller lived.  The glen had what Johnson described as “a strangely unpleasant atmosphere.”  Haas felt felt “oppressed there” and a friend “magnetized,” her legs made to “tingle.”  This was an phenomena that could only be experienced.  Words were inadequate, and explanation useless.  It was a quality of the glen that could not be otherwise described that existing—in the manner of the stories of Clark Ashton Smith and H. P. Lovecraft.  Indeed, Johnson based one of his early stories on his visiting the glen, “They” (1936).  Tame by today’s standards, “They” tells the story of a visitor who meets someone whose job it is to guard a horrible secret; this narrator tells the story of how he came to be in the position to the visitor, who hardly says a word.  Very little action occurs in the course of the story.  The whole point seems to be the creation of a feeling of foreboding.

This interest in the odd, the indescribable seems fringe—and it was.  But among aficionados of the emotion, it was important, and the Bay Area Forteans had a good sense of how to create it.  In “Far Below,” published by Weird Tales in 1939, Johnson followed a similar pattern as in “They.”  A man visits the New York subway—although Johnson notes he based it on “Forest Hill Tunnel” in San Francisco—where he meets what amounts to an occult police: a former zoologist who has been tasked to guard a stretch of subway tunnel that is constantly attacked by some bizarre creatures, part ape, part mole.  These Johnson borrowed from Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model,” although the idea of an occult police may have come from Fort, who wrote about such a force in Book of the Damned.  At the end of the story, the visitor notes that the former zoologist is himself turning into one of the creatures.  The story was well-received, and continues to be.  It was chosen as the best story ever to appear in Weird Tales, received encomiums from critic S. T. Joshi, and was widely reprinted.  Again, though, the story is tame by modern standards, lacks action—opting instead to create mood—and distances the reader through Johnson’s narrative device.  Nonetheless, it does manage to make subways feel weird—uncanny.

                Surrealism

Imagination, in science fiction, is subject to stringent rules that control it.  Fort was also seen, though, as spurring a more unruly imagination—an imagination of individual experience, an imagination that had to fantastic to reflect the infinite depths of a single person.    As Richard Candida Smith put it, “By the mid-1940s, a central political tenet crystallized out of” the San Francisco avant garde: the most important corrective to the barbarities of the twentieth century was that people excluded from power claimed the right to speak for themselves about their lives.  The narration of human experience in all its complexity, particularly from those who are despised and excluded from society’s rewards, challenged all complacent views of social life and subverted the power of any hierarchy pretending to be able to explain human action.”  This view was central to Rexroth’s work, as well as to others, and fit with the Fortean concentration on damned things.  Clay Spohn, for example, at the California School of Fine Arts curated a project titled “The Museum of Unknown and Little Known Objects” that included scrap metal he wired together and stuff recovered from the brush of a vacuum cleaner that he labeled “bedroom fluff.”  A truly Fortean project!  Many San Francisco artists of the time were also fascinated by collages, particularly of found objects.  Bern Porter, who had quit the life of a physicist (he had been on the Manhattan Project) for the life of the artist, for example, made many found poems.  And David Bascom illustrated “A Fine Mess” with cuttings from newspapers and magazines that often had nothing to do with the article it decorated.   These collages did some of the same work as Fort, gathering the detritus of everyday—the damned, the ignored, the stuff hidden in plain sight—and organizing it into striking arrangements, meaningful communications.

The merging of this unruly imagination and Forteanism can be seen in the work of surrealist poet Philip Lamantia.  A literary prodigy, Lamantia published his first poems in the surrealist journal View when he was fifteen.  The following year, 1944, he dropped out of high school and went to New York to be with the European surrealists exiled to the New World by the war.  Andre Breton, author of The Surrealist Manifesto, hailed Lamantia as “a voice that rises once in a hundred years.”  Surrealism---in the arts, at least—was interested in plumbing the anarchic, jumbled human unconscious, which, in Lamantia’s case—and several others—was done through automatic writing, allowing the images to invade one’s thoughts and flow out the pen.  (Henry Miller used a similar writing technique.)  The idea was that the subconscious was ruled by associative logic, synchronicity and parallels, not the logic of science and causation.  Fort was of interest to the surrealists.  Robert Allerton Parker made note of Charles Fort in the catalog of the International Surrealist Exhibition of New York, 1942:

“This Socrates of the Bronx . . . was primarily a collector of newspaper clippings; out of these clippings, by a craft of literary collage and montage, Fort managed to project his picture of a paradoxical and highly unpredictable universe.  He was a connoisseur of the incredible—a snatcher up of unconsidered, yet disconcerting, trifles—the alogical, the illogical, the analogical, the neological.”

These were Lamantia’s interests, too—the alogical, illogical, analogical, and neological continuities of his poems.  It is also likely that Lamantia, at least in his first surrealist incarnation, was drawn to Fort’s materialism.  Lamantia, as noted, saw himself and surrealism carrying on the tradition of dialectical materialism.  Fort was not interested in occultism or esotericism, but material, physical things that resisted conventional explanations.  Given these various connections, then, one can see how Lamantia was interested in Fort not (or not only) as a source of odd facts, but as rescuing the marvelous and embedding it into a kind of poem, a collage or montage.  According to the poet Neel Cherkovski was a fan of Fort, considering his books “an epic poem, one any surrealist might find especially interesting.”

The libidinal imagination—the trip into a world run by irrational laws—also was an inspiration of the painter and Fortean Ralph Rayburn Phillips.  Although living in Portland, Phillips made frequent trips to San Francisco and attended some of Chapter Two’s meetings.  He called himself an “ultraweird” artist and used a technique similar to the surrealists’s to generate his images.  He tried to get himself into a detached state of mind so that he could receive inspiration from what he called “the invisible world.”  He worked at night, when he could see (imagine?) strange faces and alien presences outside his window.  Sometimes, the images—and titles—came to him fully formed.  His work was often abstract, but—signs of Fort—occasionally had unexpected clarities.  He told the Oregon Journal, “I start a picture with no idea what the finished product will be.  Often it turns out to be a colorful network of lines, but somewhere in the picture will appear a cat carrying a kitten.  Weird, isn’t it?”

    The Ironic Imagination
Fort’s works were understood ironically, as well—as worth considering, even if they weren’t accepted.  Michael Saler calls this kind of play “the ironic imagination” and identifies it as one way moderns reconciled science and enlightenment—by the willing suspension of belief, allowing one to experience enchantment even if it was known to be false.  The ironic imagination thus was a space in which individuality could be expressed away from Benjamin De Casseres (1873-1945) called in the “Fortean Fantasy” the “new Trinity”: “Reason, experience, and hard-boiled facts.”  Exploration of this playful space occurred in such mundane, black and white spaces as the pages of the Oakland Tribune.  In 1947The Tribune did a large, unserious spread on the flying saucer craze.  The article quoted David Bascom (1912-1985), an advertising man, inventor—and jokester.  Later in his career, he would hang pictures of his ulcer over desks stuffed with eight phones, most of which did not work but looked impressive.  After taking up fishing, he invented his own fly—“a wretched mess,” he called it, and started advertised it.  His fliers for the fly soon grew into an environmentally-conscious but otherwise silly newspaper, which he put out under the pseudonym Milford Poltroon.  with such searching articles as “Is Smokey the Bear a Communist Spy?”  It was the last bastion of Yellow Journalism, he announced gleefully.  Much later, still as Poltroon, he wrote two fishing parodies and a book of witty ways to answer the telephone.  Back in 1947, Bascom told the Tribune that he had seen a UFO—but it was not shaped like a saucer: :it was a gravy boat.  A year later, in response to a series of letters on the moon published in the same paper, Bascom was moved to write his own missive.  He expressed mock amazement at the “misinformed writers” who had clearly been exposed to the “completely erroneous information” in science and astronomy texts.  Such books, he said, obviously could not be taken seriously: they had it that tomatoes were poisonous, flying machines and submarines were impossible, and kangaroos avoided migraines by eating fresh salmon.  Rather, Bascom went on, the moon was made of green cheese.  Tongue firmly in cheek, Bascom goes on to say that the moon’s craters are made by the nibbling of rats and the air composed of Cheddaroxide, which can be converted into gasses breathable by humans with “a common cheese-gas converter” added to any gas mask.  In support of this contention, Bascom cited Charles Fort.

The pulp writer Kathleen Ludwick (1870-?) had a similar understanding of Fort, judging by her letter to the Tribune.  Responding to an editorial about flying saucers that mentioned Fort, Ludwick wrote, “Well, shiver my timbers!  Was I astounded, amazed to read the reference to Charles Fort, the Apostle of Doubt, the High Priest of Skepticism, in the Tribune!”  She went on to say that she had independently reached Fort’s conclusion that astronomical objects must be much closer than astronomers declaimed.  After all, how could she see a moon that was a quarter of a million miles away?  Or a sun 93 million miles away?  And so, she speculated, if the heavens were close and the places there not planets but, as Fort had it in his second book, “new lands,” then that gave a clue as to the flying saucer’s identity.  Perhaps, she suggested, some enemy nation had sent radio-active material into the sky, but then dismissed the possibility because the enemy nation would be harmed just as well.  Most likely, she concluded, the saucers were an advertising stunt, “like this horrendous monster of the airways that has been seen hovering over Oakland at night advertising some brand of gasoline.”  She wanted such stunts to stop.

The kind of play engaged in by Bascom and Ludwick might seem incidental—a way to step outside a world awash in scientific determinisms and gaudy advertising.  But the effect of Fort on the ironic imagination was anything but insignificant.  Fort had a profound influence on the writing of science fiction, in San Francisco, certainly, but more generally as well.  "It was recently proposed to form a club that would be called, 'Writers Who Have Stolen lots from Charles Fort,'” Robert Barbour once joked.  “The idea was dropped, however, when it was realized that such a group would include virtually every writer in the imaginative field, including many now deceased.”  Miriam Allen de Ford was among those who would have belonged to such a club.  After Shipley’s death, she took to writing more and more for pulps and her 1954 story “Henry Martindale, Great Dane,” about a man who transforms into a dog explicitly references Fort.  Another member of such a group would be Anthony Boucher (1911-1968), who mentored de Ford in her science fiction writing.  Born William Anthony Parker White, Boucher made a name for himself both in the field of mystery writing and in science fiction and fantasy, in which he is probably best known as one of the founding editors of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, a highly literate pulp that set the standard for literary quality in fantastic writing after World War II.  A number of Boucher’s stories were Fortean, including one which relied on two characters having the same fingerprint—a Fortean happenstance noted in Thayer’s  Doubt.

Not everyone appreciated Fort’s contribution to science fiction.  Sam Moskowitz (1920-1997), one of the most famous fans, dismissed Fort’s originality by showing that ideas he developed had been present in earlier fantastic literature, and laughed at Fortean astronomy in light of the launch of Sputnik, which proved beyond a doubt that space was vast.  But Moskowitz misses the point.  Whether or not earlier fantastic fiction exhibited some of the same themes as Fort, and whether or not Fort was right or wrong, his influence was immense.  Historian of science fiction Adam Roberts argues that there are two traditions in science fiction—the story of technology and the Fortean story.  Science fiction writers in the post war years read Fort and were influenced by him to take as their starting point some odd thing and extrapolate a fictional world in which that odd thing was a given.  This made Fortean science fiction a literature of dissent.  The odd thing at the base of the story—a man becoming a dog, two men with the same fingerprint—might not be true in the non-fictional world.  But considering it, playing with the idea, took science fiction writers and readers to an imaginative place where the science of the real world was not dominant, a place where their imagination and individuality could roam free.

                Mysticism

Shipley (and perhaps MacNichol) found in Fort a way to acknowledge science’s powers, as well as its limits, thus proving that science’s explanations are not complete—that there was still room for individuals and individual experience.  Others used Fort to much more radically curtail the power of scientific explanation.  They saw in his accounts of the odd and mysterious that there were other forces operating in the universe, forces that may never be explained by scientific principles but obeyed the laws of something else.  Catherine Albanese argues that there was a long tradition of such theorizing in American society—the metaphysical lineage, she calls it.  For historical reasons, San Francisco was especially open to metaphysical groups: the rapid growth of the area, from a few hundred residents in 1848 to a quarter million in 1880 prevented the rise of any one dominant religious group; its populating by single men in the days leading up to the Civil War worked against evangelism, which at the time was largely communicated through women and was suspect because of its connection to belligerence; liberal theologians, influenced by Unitarianism and Transcendentalism found especial favor here and maintained a space for religious experimentation; these tendencies were refreshed by a second Gold Rush during World War II, when shipbuilding attracted huge numbers of people to the area.  The art community that developed in Berkeley at this time—called the Berkeley Renaissance—which laid the seeds for the later San Francisco Renaissance (and beats and hippies) emphasized this tradition.  Poet Robert Duncan (1919-1988) had been raised a Theosophist before he vagabonded across the country, and Rexroth encouraged him to return to those roots.  Jack Spicer (1925-1965) claimed to be descended both from Native Americans and Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910), founder of the New Thought Christian Science Church.

Kenneth Rexroth saw Forteanism and mysticism as mixing easily.  He had been raised in Indiana, but his family spent extensive time in New York and, according to family lore, his father had been friends with Charles Fort.  In the Midwest, Rexroth learned mysticism at his grandmother’s knee.  She told him tales of ghosts, sea serpents, monstrous births, and horse whispering.  They shared the “annoying habit” of second sight—annoying because his prescience always involved trivial matters.  According to Rexroth, his grandmother had stories of atmospheric oddities “to rival Fort,” to of which he witnessed himself: a blue sphere traveled through their house and a fish-shaped hole appeared in the sky.  Rexroth continued his metaphysical education by reading the works of Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891) and studying Asian religion.  This mystical approach to the world influence his reading of Fort—and the poetry he produced.  Although Rexroth left no specific statement about Fort, it seems reasonable to suppose that he understood his collection of data not as phenomena waiting to be explained by science, but events beyond science’s ken.  Experience, then, particularly individual experience, was not amenable to scientific analysis.  Rather, it required a refined literary mind to understand and express—a central tenet in the Bay Area artistic community.  As historian Richard Candida Smith put it, “The imagination manifested its highest form in the aesthetic act, became the most stable source of personal freedom in a world otherwise deterministic and frightening.”

This connection between Forteanism and mysticism can be seen in some other Bay Area residents, although the coupling may not be as tight.  For instance, two Forteans (at least) considered themselves magicians, and not in the sense of being proficient at sleight-of-hand, but of being able to tap into laws of the universe that had not been—and probably could not be—explained by science: occult powers.  Neither Fort nor Shipley were drawn to this way of thinking, but George F. Hass (1906-1977) and Polly Lamb both were.  They practiced a form of magic that was similar—if not derived from—Aleister Crowley (1875-1943): "the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will."  Haas’s magical acts included cursing the apartment where he thought the thieves of his television lived and having the set returned and looking for a book that was only available in hardback in a paperback store—yet finding it.  Robert Barbour Johnson thought that Polly Lamb’s death might have been caused by her meddling with occult forces.  Both were also Forteans, and it is possible to see them understanding some of the events Fort discussed not as weird manifestations of unknown natural laws, but as the actions of sorceresses and wizards.  A peripheral figure who may have had a similar world view was Anton LaVey (1930-1997), who would go on to found the Church of Satan in the 1960s.  LaVey palled around with Haas and Robert Barbour Johnson and the poet of Auburn Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961).  His understanding of Satanism was in accord with Haas (and Lamb’s) metaphysics, emphasizing the power of human will to alter the structure of nature, and thus, like Rexroth—who was nonetheless very different—finding in Charles Fort evidence that there were forces beyond scientific manipulation that could be accessed and controlled by individuals, freeing up a space away from the determinisms of scientific materialism.

                A Scientific Supplement

Maynard Shipley best epitomizes though who saw in Fort’s work not an attack on science, but a supplement to it.  Shipley placed a high value on scientific knowledge.  He studied criminology, sociology, astrology, and evolutionary biology.  In the early 1920s, he (especially) and Deford (to a lesser extent) started writing for Haldeman-Julius’s Little Blue Books, easing their tight financial situation.  Shipley authored 30 titles (de Ford fifteen), twenty-three on scientific subjects.  In 1924, concerned about the threat that religious fundamentalism posed to the teaching of evolution, he founded the Science League to defend scientists against Christian dogma.  So, he was not inclined to accept Fort’s attacks on science or ridiculing of scientists: Fort was especially harsh on astronomers, suggesting that the stars were only a few miles away and that there was a Super-Sargasso Sea above the Earth, and it was from here that mysterious objects fell.  In his letters to Fort and his review of Lo!, Shipley dismissed this theorizing and Fort’s understanding of the true practice of science: it wasn’t just idle theorizing, but based on profound entanglements with the natural world.

But Shipley was fascinated by the many damned facts that Fort collected.  This was data, he said, that needed to be taken seriously.  Fort’s data, Shipley said in the New York Times, are “difficult to accept but impossible, in all honesty, to ignore.”  Shipley’s willingness to consider Fort’s data makes sense in light of his own experiences.  Their house in Sausalito, for example, seemed to have been haunted, with mysteriously moving objects and a bed that drove every sleeper out before the night was over.  In 1919, Shipley accepted a commission from Scientific American to investigate Dr. Albert Abrams (1863-1924), of San Francisco, who was making incredible claims about his electronic medicine.  Shipley was open to the possibility, and at first even believed that Abrams was doing work, but eventually had to conclude that the doctor was either a charlatan or dupe.  Shipley came to believe that scientific laws were too provincial, failing to account for all natural laws.  De Ford wrote,

He was inclined to believe that ‘this mundane existence of ours is neither the beginning nor the end of the drama of life. . . . We do not, and cannot, while clothed with flesh, know things in themselves.  The universe is a multidimensional world, and we three-dimensional simians can see but as “through a glass darkly.”’  In the end, however, he became convinced that though such phenomena as he had witnessed were indubitably real and not hallucinatory, they were not extra-physical, since ‘matter’ and ‘spirit’ are monistically one, and that some day they would be understood and reduced to law.

Fort seemed to Shipley a soul-mate, of sorts, the “Enfant Terrible of Science” as he (and, later, de Ford) dubbed him, “bringing the family skeletons to the dinner table when distinguished guests are present.”  It was the job of scientists to account for these skeletons, these damned data.  Fort’s work thus supplemented science.

Kenneth MacNichol (1887-1954) may also have been among those who saw Fort as adding to science, although this claim is more speculative, as MacNichol remains relatively unknown.  A pulp writer traumatized by the Great War, MacNichol found his way to San Francisco after years of traveling the world, eventually marrying for the fifth and sixth times in the Bay Area, the fifth time to Polly Lamb (Goforth) (1901-1956), a writer who also considered herself a sorceress.  He opened Pencraft University, a writing school, at 478 Union in San Francisco, which is where Chapter Two held many of its meetings.  As part of the curriculum, MacNichol was teaching Alfred Korzybski’s (1879-1950)General Semantics, presumably as laid out in Science and Sanity (1933).  General Semantics was an incredibly complex system of “non-Aristotelian” logic, but can be glossed as the claim that words do not adequately represent reality, and so people need to be liberated from their linguistic tradition so that they can confront reality more fully.  It is not clear exactly how MacNichol used Korzybski’s system—although he gave a lecture at a General Semantics conference on “Experiments with a Simplified Method in Teaching General Semantics to Writers”—but it seems fair to say that General Semantics was meant to make knowledge—including science—truer.  MacNichol was also using Fort in his courses at Pencraft, and it is not too much to suspect that he found in Fort some of what he found in Korzybski: that what had been ignored might be a key to making science better. 

The Varieties of Forteanism

Miriam Allen de Ford (1888-1975) noted that Charles Fort “leveled at the scientists and in large part hit the literary folk.”  That is certainly true of his career in San Francisco, as de Ford would know.  She was one of Fort’s early fans, having come across his Book of the Damned at the Oakland public library in 1921.  “My husband and I sat up all night, reading the book aloud to each other, unable to put it down.”  Both de Ford, and her husband Maynard Shipley (1872-1934), were struggling writers and struggling socialists (they  left the part the following year because of its rightward drift).  Shipley, the more philosophical of the two—undereducated, he nonetheless labored for years writing a criminology text—was also a monist, which certainly would have endeared him to Fort.  The three struck up a long-distance friendship.  In 1922, de Ford traveled to Chico, California, to investigate stones mysteriously falling from the sky, even seeing on herself.  That report made New Lands.  (A clipping she sent Fort was included in Wild Talents.)  Shipley gave Fort’s Lo! a glowing review in the New York Times, the first positive notice he got from the Grey Lady.  The correspondence lasted until Fort’s death, but his influence on de Ford continued long past that, through the travails of Irene Fellows and beyond.

Fort’s influence on the San Francisco literary scene would also continue, although not immediately.  Bay Area writers of the 1930s evinced no interest in his heretical texts; it wasn’t until the mid-1940s that his writings took off.  Around that time there coalesced a literary movement which came to be known as the San Francisco Renaissance, and among its members were a number of Fortean devotees, such as Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982) and Philip Lamantia (1927-2005).  One of the early fruits of this movement, the magazine Circle, was named, in part, to evoke famous line from Fort’s third book: “One measures a circle, beginning anywhere.”  In 1948, about fifty people came together to form a chapter of the Fortean Society.  Many of the writers who took Fort to heart were of a different style, pulp authors, to generalize broadly but not incorrectly, tellers of science fiction and mystery tales.  (De Ford would later become connected to some of this group.)  Fort was also popular among journalists, especially in Oakland.  The Tribune made relatively frequent note of him.  And The San Francisco Chronicle found reason to mention him both in its coverage of Irene Fellows’s odd rain and its coverage of the book world.

It would be too much to say that all of these people were Forteans in the sense that Thayer meant that word.  Indeed, there was a range of reactions to Thayer’s bomb-throwing magazine.  Henry Miller (1891-1980), already infamous for his dirty books, joined and hawked his paintings in the pages of Doubt.  George Leite (1920-1985), editor or Circle, swapped issues of his magazine for Doubt.  Journalist Joseph Henry Jackson (1894-1955) seemed to think of Thayer’s organization in terms similar to Time—as a home for literary rebels.  Others, though, were more in agreement with Martin Gardner, even if they never read In the Name of Science.  The pulp author E. Hoffman Price (1898-1988) belonged to the society long enough to contribute an article on the dishonesty of translators, but soon turned away from its dogmatism.  Robert Barbour Johnson (1907?-1987)), another pulp author, declaimed Thayer’s perversion of Forteanism to a local science fiction fan club, a harangue that was printed and reprinted over the decades and helped solidify opposition to Thayer’s version of Forteanism.  To put the matter another way, there was a variety of Forteanisms in the San Francisco Bay Area, especially in the immediate post-War years, and these did not parallel the literary classes—high art, pulp fiction, journalism—but cut across them.  In fact, some of Fort’s fans, such as de Ford, understood him in several different ways.   Using a very unFortean procedure, it is possible to classify these varieties—not as parts of a single, underlying unity, but into six, sometimes mutually exclusive, categories.  Fort’s works were understood as scientific supplements, keys to a mystical understanding of the world, as ironic play, as surrealist poetry, and, as unanalyzably weird.