Ralph Rayburn Phillips did not live in the Bay Area—he was a Portlander.  But, he did come to the Bay Area often, and was among those who dropped in on the Fortean meetings, at least according to Don Herron.  And so I have included him here, among the Bay Area Forteans.  There’s not a lot on Phillips, but it is possible to piece together an outline of his life from census records, a file held at the Portland Art Museum, and a brief biographical sketch in the spring 1953 issue of the fanzine Destiny.

Ralph was born to George T. and May G. on 17 October 1896 in Rutland, Vermont.  George T. was a native Vermonter—as were his parents—born just after the end of the Civil War in August 1865.  May G. was just a little younger than her husband, born in March 1866 to a couple who had emigrated from Canada.   They were married in 1892, when both were in their late twenties.

George’s father had been a farmer and car inspector; May’s had been a carpenter.  George became a dentist.  The family seemed to start out in good financial standing: by 1900, they owned their home, free and clear.

Ten years later, still in Rutland, Vermont, the house became a bit fuller.  According to the census, they took on a boarder from French Canada, and May’s parents, Joseph and Philament Harper were also living with the Phillips.  Later evidence also suggests that Ralph had two younger sisters, although they were not captured by the 1910 census.  George was the only one working: he was called a “physician.”  Ralph was then a student—at “Eastern public schools,” where he studied art.

As he remembered much later, Ralph was a rebel from an early age.  He told the Oregon Journal in 1970, “I remember walking out of a Baptist Church in anger.  I learned early to hate hopeless conformity.”

By 1920, the family had relocated to Portland, Oregon, without the boarder or May’s parents, who had likely died by this time.  According to a brief biography down for a fanzine, the move came when Ralph was eighteen, so about 1914.  George now sold farm implements, which seems a step down in prestige, although the family did still own its home.

According to his later recollections, Ralph had continued to study art at high school in Portland, and apprenticed to a commercial artist.  The census backs this up, listing his career as commercial artist.  (He was still living at home, and so it is likely helped contribute to the family finances.)  At some point—maybe in the 1910s, maybe later—he also attended the School of Applied Art in Battle Creek, Michigan.

Sometime in the next ten years, George died, and the family’s fortunes declined.  By 1930, they had moved into a rental, and Ralph took a new job—as an organizer and salesman for a fraternal order.  The monthly rent was a rather steep $25, but the house had to be big enough to fit Ralph, his mother (who was not working), his sister Iris.  Iris had just married a marine engineer, James C. Barrie, but he was at sea when the 1930 census was conducted.  Nonetheless, the artistic spirit continued to flow through the family.  Iris listed her occupation as poet—a brave choice, indeed!

Ralph would live in Portland until his death in 1974, going from Bohemian to Beatnik to Hippie.  The Oregon Journal reported in 1970, “He has been a familiar figure in the SW Park Blocks for years—tall, silver-haired, simply but neatly dressed, and always barefoot.  You usually see him on a park bench, sucking on his pipe, as he reads his latest library book, all the while absent-mindedly wriggling his toes.”

During the next decade—if not before—Ralph’s professional world expanded.  Probably he received his first real exposure doing Western scenes for the Portland-based magazine “Northwest Background.”  At least, he did seem to publish in this magazine, and this work was the most traditional, his later pieces indicating extensive experimentation, which takes time.  In the mid-1930s he became intrigued by Buddhism and travelled to Buddhist temples in San Francisco and Los Angeles; for a time he was director of something he called “American Buddhist Society.”  Likely this was the American Buddhist Society and Fellowship, founded in 1945 by Robert Ernst Dickhoff, who would later try to link UFOs to Buddhist mythology.  (Phillips’s connection to Buddhism seemed to attenuate some over the years: in a 1949 form for the Portland Museum of Art, he made the connection prominent, but he told the Oregon Journal in 1948 he no longer had formal connections to Buddhism.)

Phillips seems to have had a long-standing interest in H.P. Lovecraft and Weird Tales, and this was reflected in his art by the 1940s, when he started to call himself a painter of the “Ultra Weird.”  He explained this as “mystic, occult, weird, macabre, psychic-inspired.”  He also called his work “modern,” which may have been a nod to the likes of Picasso, although it cut across genres.  A few times, at least, he blended his mysticism with his Western scenery, creating images of Native Americans that he thought would interest Spiritualists, who sometimes used Indians as spirit guides.

His methods were occult, too.  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 technique and subject matter can sound like a parody of those who uncharitably criticized abstract expressionism—created around the same time that Phillips was working—as something a kid could doodle.  But Phillips didn’t see it that way.  “Any Tom, Dick, and Harry can paint what he sees, but few can do my type of work.”

Phillips sold paintings to Weird Tales and fanzines; he displayed at science conventions in Los Angeles (1946) and Philadelphia (1947).  Robert Bloch, author of Psycho and another devotee of Lovecraft, owned some of his work, as did Erle Korshak, a Chicago science fiction fan who co-founded Shasta Publishing.

How Phillips became involved with the Bay Area Fortean community is unclear.  In the late 1940s, he was renting an 8x10 room in a mansion near the corner of SW 12th Avenue and Clay in Portland, where his “favorite friend” was an owl that lived in the eaves.   Perhaps he met Haas at a Buddhist temple?  Perhaps he met some of the writers at one of the conventions?  Perhaps they made contact with him to praise his works.  (Haas, after all, was collecting Clark Ashton Smith’s art.)  He also developed a fan in Chingwah Lee, an art dealer in San Francisco’s Chinatown and art critic.  At any rate, it is known that by the late 1940s he was visiting the San Francisco Bay Area for artistic inspiration, meaning he had connections by then—just as Chapter Two was founded.

Miller travelled through Europe and the United States (on the trip that would inspire his critique of America, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare) before reaching California and his own personal paradise, Big Sur.  Miller was a dedicated Bohemian, scraping together cash here and there, unafraid to bum from others, and work if only accountable to himself—certainly life in wild Big Sur required a lot of manual labor.  Miller eked by on very little: looking back from the 1950s on his untouchable royalties in France, for example, he mused, “A hundred a month—regularly—would have solved our problems.  (It would have then.  Today no sum is large enough to solve anybody’s problems.  The bombs eat up everything.)”

He fit in with the developing Bay Area scene well, extending the axis of the Bohemia south to the Monterey Peninsula.  His ideas about art were similar to those being developed among the poets and painters of the regions.  “And what is the potential of man, after all?  Is he not the sum of all that is human?  Divine, in other words?  You think I am searching for God.  I am not.  God is.  The World is.  Man is.  We are,” he told Conrad Moricand, echoing the Eastern-inflected ideas of the other artists.  Every one, every thing was a mixture of good and bad, of white magic and black magic: even the bomb, which could destroy the world but also provide energy.

Miller knew Robert Duncan and Kenneth Rexroth.  His first home in Big Sur was a shack loaned to him by George Leite, who published some of his (and Nin’s) work in Circle.  And like the other artists he saw California as a barren wasteland in which he could be free to develop his art unfettered by the Modernists.  He told Nin, ““I admit there is no life—no cultural, intellectual life.  But in times like these, when everything is roped off, one has to fall back on oneself.”

At the time, Miller was developing a literary reputation—although an underground one—and he seems to have been enthralled by it, believing the hype.  Soldiers smuggled his books in the country from places where they had been legal, and they began to be passed around.  Literary scholar Warner Berthoff, for instance, showed that his style not only influenced Nin, but Norman Mailer, T. S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Thomas Pynchon—and those two icons of mid-1950s Bay Area Bohemia Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.

Bern Porter, the Berkeley physicist-cum-publisher, was especially excited by Miller’s writings.  He went to see him in Hollywood in 1942, before Miller had made it to Big Sur and while he was contemplating a career writing for movies.  Porter punctuated his resignation from the Manhattan Project by putting out Miller’s anti-war screed, “Murder the Murderers.”  (This would have certainly enamored him to Tiffany Thayer.)  A few years later, Porter put together a festschrift, “The Happy Rock.”

The title played on Miller’s increasing sense of himself as a guru—he was a happy rock, “:Henry Tzu.”  The newspapers in San Francisco started to notice this and, with a Harper’s article, cast his home in Big Sur as the center of a “Cult of Sex and Anarchy,” attracting conscientious objectors, artists, and groupies.  Publicly, Miller disavowed this, but privately he knew it and did nothing to discourage.  He told Nin, for instance, that he knew George Leite and Bern Porter “were making a cult of me” and he encouraged this by publishing a stream of ephemera and half-finished projects—partly, no doubt, derived from his idea of himself as a man of the people, but also from the sense that everything he wrote might be profound.  He fancied that Big Sur was an intellectual circle of rebels and off-beats—the cast-off who could renewe America after the big crash.  “Nearly every one” of his neighbors, he wrote, “seems to be a specialist in some field, be it art, archeology, linguistics, symbolism, Dianetics, Zen Buddhism or Irish folklore.”  He Romanticized all outsiders—American blacks, for example, whom he saw as repositories of soul against the materialism of the day.     

Beyond his anti-war stance and general allegiance to Bohemianism, there are other ways of drawing connections between Miller and Forteanism—of suspecting what might have drawn him to the Society.

He saw UFOs, like “twin stars gyrating about an invisible pivot for about twenty minutes, after which the light grew too strong and it faded out.”  UFOs were central to Forteanism in the 1940s and 1950s.

He was interested in the discarded—discarded people, discarded facts.  “Strange, how people suddenly develop an appreciation for that which is tossed away!”  This was Forteanism’s main task, to recover that which had been forgotten.  Only by recovering such things, Miller thought, could reality be fully understood.  He told Moricand, “The full reality, that’s God—and man, and the world, and all that is, including the unnameable.  I’m for reality.  More and more reality.  I’m a fantaic about it, if you like.”

Indeed, he in some ways he seems to have fancied himself another Fort: a good third of his paean to life in California, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, was spent lamenting the number of letters he received from all around the world—on the Ascended Masters of the Himalayas, Dianetics, Zen, Buddha, and Jesus—as well as celebrating them, and their access to reality.  The latter-day guru bragged from his Shangri-La, his own Tibet, a place where Ascended Masters passed on necessary knowledge, “People are constantly supplying me with startling facts, amazing events, incredible experiences—as if I were another Charles Fort.  They struggle, they rebel, they experiment they get glimpses of truth, they are raised up by spasmodic gusts of self-confidence—and yet they are hopelessly enmeshed.”

The obscenities in Henry Miller’s books made them sensations in the 1960s, after the trials that finally allowed them to be published—but they obscured his essentially religious task.

Miller synthesized his ideas from the French philosopher Henri Bergson, fromCarl Jung, and from Otto Rank.  In his opinion, there was a creative spirit—what Bergson called an elan vital—inside each human being.  This spirit leads to the creation of religion, of art . . . and of sex.

The vast universe itself, he suggested, was a sprawling, undirected mélange of things and energy.  Each person needs to become awakened—enlightened, a la the Eastern mystics—in order to understand this energy and channel it correctly.  His books were about his own struggles to overcome the inhibitions and blocks in his life, to come fully awake so that he could be free and creative, so that the energy could flow through him unimpeded.  Sex, in this sense, was not instrumental, not merely for reproduction or pleasure, but was a sacred act, and, when performed correctly, between two connected people, holy.

The land of fuck, he said, was Cockaigne: the Medieval land of plenty, when all pleasure was at hand, when everyone lived fulfilled lives, freed from the shackles of work and the rigid caste system.

He told Nin in the 1930s, “Here is the crux of the matter: art is not the translation or the representation or the expression of some hidden thing.  It is a thing in itself—pure, absolute, without reference.”  It, like sex and religion, was the highest output of humankind.

But Miller saw himself as more than just an example for his readers.  Beginning in the 1930s, he started fashioning himself into a guru.  “The gulf between knowledge and truth is infinite.  Parents talk a lot about truth but seldom bother to deal in it.  It’s much simpler to dispense ready-made knowledge.  More expedient too, for truth demands patience, endless, endless patience.”  Miller was a purveyor of truth, he thought.    

This was a way of reconciling two parts of himself: he was a common man, from a working class background, never attended college, and had a well developed distaste for elite toffs.  (Admittedly, astrology was far from the man of the street, but it took account of all, high and low.)  Miller was also an intellectual.  Being a guru allowed him to raise the quotidian to the level of enlightenment.

Borrowing from Nietzche, Miller thought himself a Dionysian artist, that is, an artist fully in touch with the emotions of life (as opposed to the Apollonian personality, who is intellectual, reserved, controlled).  And like Dionysus—like Jesus—he needed to die, at least symbolically, and be reborn—hence his Rosy Crucifix series, in which he was crucified.  That death fertilized the what T. S. Eliot called the modern “Wasteland.”  Miller did not like Elliot’s work, or that of the other moderns, Joyce and Pound, which was all too Apollonian.  He wanted something messier, and his works were supposed to offer Gnostic knowledge—Rosicrucian knowledge—Theosophical wisdom—for a world that was too mechanical.

In New York, Miller was a Bohemian manqué, living the lifestyle but never embodying it because he never created Art.  (Yes, with the capital A.)  He continued this posing when he moved to Paris, where he lived until the early 1940s.  But here, he also got serious about writing, and turned out three great pieces of American literature, Black Spring, Tropic of Cancer, and Tropic of Capricorn.

It was also in Paris where he met Anais Nin, with whom he fell in love.  Hard.  As his biographer Robert Ferguson notes, Henry Miller had to make a choice in order to keep up with Nin.  He had to either accept psychoanalysis or astrology, in both of which her work—and thought—steeped.  Certain aspects of psychoanalysis—especially the more mystical, such as Jung’s theories—resonated with Miller, but in general he never subscribed to it.  (He preferred Algernon Blackwood, who thought encompassed psychoanalysis and much more.)  Astrology he did come to embrace—although slowly.

In the mid-1930s, he told Nin that astrology was “absurd.”  “I am not taking this stuff seriously—as prognostication!”  Around this time, she introduced him to Conrad Moricand, a French astrologer, who continued his education in the subject as well as Rosicrucianism, a mystical, Gnostic branch of Christianity.  This last took better, as he titled his crowning trilogy “The Rosy Crucifix” (made up of the novels Sexus, Nexus, and Plexus.)  But he did find some things to look about astrology, at least by the early 1940s.  One was that it seemed to confirm his life’s opinions.  The other, as he told Moricand, was that it was a language to use, one path toward life’s ultimate truth:

“For me it was just another language to learn, another keyboard to manipulate.  It’s only the poetic aspect of anything which really interests me.  In the ultimate there is only one language—the language of truth.  It matters little how we arrive at it.”

He seems to have approached Theosophy similarly, admitting in the 1940s that Madame Blavatsky had invented the gurus on which her wisdom relied, but not being bothered by it because the language—the poetry—of the synthetic religion appealed to him.

There are obvious touches of astrological symbolism in his writing of the period—Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, the names of which already proclaim their astrological alliance.  But there are also other mystical elements to his writing—indeed, as Thomas Nesbit argues, his books, although best known for their sexuality, were essentially religious tracts.

As Miller tells the story, for example, the writing of Tropic of Capricorn was itself almost a religious act, a form of that Fortean staple automatic writing.  Ferguson argues that while Miller was indeed a fast touch typist who could write as he conversed, he exaggerated the degree to which his work was done without revision.  Still, it is worth noting how Miller himself interpreted his work.  He remembered,

“I didn’t have to think up so much as a comma or a semicolon; it was all given, straight from the celestial recording room.  Weary, I would beg for a break, an intermission, time enough, let’s say, to go to the toilet or take a breath of fresh air on the balcony.  Nothing doing!  I had to take it in one fell swoop or risk the penalty: excommunication.” …………