Anthony Boucher was something of an iconoclastic thinker—although less so, and certainly less Bohemian, than most of the Bay Area Forteans we’ve met to this point.  He was a liberal Catholic—not so unusual in those days—for women’s rights, civil rights, and even relatively sympathetic to homosexuals.  It may have only been a defense mechanism explaining why he was a pedant living in Berkeley but not a professor, nonetheless his argument for being a popular writer was cogent.  As his wife Phyllis remembered, according to the introduction to The Anthony Boucher Chronicles:

He used to say that the heresy of our age is the perceived dichotomy between art and entertainment: if something is one, it cannot be the other.  Things that are now being studied in school were in their own time great popular successes.  The public avidly awaited the next installment of a current Dickens novel.  There was a popular following of the Elizabethan theater and if the Greek theater.  He used to say that you could get a better idea of just what it was like to be alive in that time from reading the fiction of an earlier period than you could from reading factual history.

There is great truth to this argument.  Lawrence Levine has shown how Shakespeare was transformed from an object of popular enjoyment to the epitome of the high culture during the nineteenth century.  Eric Lott’ Love and Theft argues that the story was, perhaps, messier than Levine makes it out to be, but there is little doubt that the nineteenth century saw an increasingly rigid distinction between high and low culture.  The rise of mass culture tended to blur that distinction in the first part of the twentieth century, but, broadly speaking, the upper classes were not yet willing to give up on the earlier division, and so saved it by altering the hierarchy: the late 1930s through the 1950s saw a focus on the lines of demarcation between high brow, low brow and the newly conceived middle brow.  In this taxonomy, mysteries—for example Agatha Christie’s—could sometimes reach the middlebrow, but the great mass was lowbrow—“The pulps are the backbone of the American mystery novel,” he wrote in a 28 February 1943 column for the San Francisco Chronicle—and certainly science fiction and fantasy were lowbrow, fit for working men and adolescents, but not for the more refined.  (Boucher was also a fan of comics.)

Boucher was astute enough to see that some of such lowbrow entertainments were as good as that aimed at a highbrow audience and, more importantly, that the very lines defining the categories did not reflect the transcendental value of different works, but were historically contingent.  Shakespeare was always dense and intelligent—although the plays had scenes specially constructed to entertain the masses—but there was intelligent and worthwhile work being published in the pulps, too, which had to be entertaining for general readers but still could deal with important themes.  In that same San Francisco Chronicle article, he suggested that pulps send copies of their works to reviewers, as a way of bridging the divide between low- and middlebrow.  “Fantasy is an essential part of the tradition of the English short story—see any anthology for proof,” he wrote in a 15 November 1942 review of Clark Ashton Smith’s Out of Space and Time for the Chronicle.  “It has its writers and its readers, and the general editorial opposition has driven them, the supercilious might say, underground into a few pulps.  Don’t be too hasty to sneer at the word ‘pulp.’  These pulps provide the only steady market that would publish the work of a latter-day Bierce or Machen or Poe.”  Boucher wrote Rocket to the Morgue in part to publicize the really smart things the Southern California science fiction writers were saying and doing and thinking.

As I said earlier, that book was also Fortean—and admiring Fort was another of Boucher’s iconoclastic stances.

Boucher had what might be called an ironic appreciation of Fort.  “Few fields can be so diverting as good honest crackpottery,” he wrote in a 20 June 1943 review of The Challenge of the Great Pyramid in the Chronicle.  He enjoyed Fort’s work, calling him “the noble science-heckler of the Bronx” and thinking it “excellent” that others continued to collect and compile books of Fortean material.

Fortean thinking to Boucher, it seems, was one way of comprehending the unknown.  In a review of William Oliver Stevens Unbidden Guests” A Book of Real Ghosts for the 6 January 1946 Chronicle he suggested that Stevens’s preference for psychic theories was too restrictive and understanding ghosts required other interpretative framework, from psychoanalysis to Christianity, from Einsteinian physics to Fortean musing.

That the unknown was worth comprehending, Boucher had no doubt.  He knew (interesting) mystery writers who dabbled in the subject” H.F. Heard, he reported in a 27 January 1946 column for the Chronicle (Forteana seemed to be on his mind that month), was a mystical philosopher who composed his detective stories by automatic writing.  Kendell Foster Crossen and Bruce Elliot were practicing magicians; Stuart Palmer was “one of the few men willing to admit that he actually saw a sea serpent.”

Science fiction, too, dealt with the unknowable—in the process making it knowable.  While reviewing the science fiction anthology The Portable Novels of Science in the 7 October 1945 Chronicle, Boucher had an opportunity to discuss how scientifiction devotees, as he called them, in emulation of Hugo Gernsbeck, had thought about atomic bombs, space ships, time travel, and mutants for a long time before the rest of the world caught up.  Fort, he suggested, might be similarly visionary.  For example, Boucher reviewed John Alden Knight’s Moon Up—Moon Down in the 4 October 1942 Chronicle, which he compared to Fort in its eccentricities.  Knight’s book was about the periodicity of animal activity—which, based on his initial research on when to go fishing, and expanding from there—he decided was driven by some unyet-known factor.  The review starts with a story from Edmund Pearson—who?—about Fort.  Apparently, Fort looked up one of his own books at the NYPL and found an odd call number.  He asked the librarian, who told him that it referred to “eccentric literature.”  That classification can work for Knight and “that noble science-heckler of the Bronx,” but might someday have to lead to changes—just as Darwin’s book might once have seem eccentric.  (Probably not, since this shows little understanding of the history of biology: Darwin was not eccentric, but stood in an identifiable tradition; many just considered him wrong.)

Fantasy, of course, dealt with the uncanny as well—that was the basis of so many other Bay Area Forteans connection of Weird Tales and Fort.  But it also had a more ironic way of creating Forteana: by creating characters, known to be fake, but taken as real, just as Sherlock Holmes was.  In his 5 December 1953 review of the Lovecraft collection Beyond the Wall of Sleep in the Chronicle, he wrote: building on Bierce, Arthur Machen, and Robert W. Chambers, Lovecraft created the Cthullu Mythos “which dominated pulp fantasy during his lifetime and achieved an independent reality of its own almost comparable to the Holmes saga.”

But while he admitted Fort’s diligence, Boucher saw his work as limited: not only was it only one way to comprehend the unknown—apparently both competing with and complementing his own Christian Faith—but also he thought that Fort’s style undermined his work.  In a review of R. DeWitt Miller’s Forgotten Mysteries for the Chronicle (4 May 1947), he bemoaned Fort’s cryptic documentation and dim documentation.”

It is not known exactly when Boucher first came into contact with Fort, although it is likely when he went to Los Angeles and met the Mañana Society.  Certainly, this is how he presented it in Rocket to the Morgue.  In that novel, the main character, Lieutenant Marshal, is told about Fort when he confronts the science fiction author based on Robert Heinlein, who offers teleportation—citing Fort—as one science fiction explanation for a locked room mystery (76).  “Locked rooms,” Marshal said at another point, “fit into the Fort pattern if pattern it can be called.”  Inspired by the ingenious explanation, Marshal begins to explore Fort more and comes to see the world in Fortean terms (151).

In the course of the mystery, he meets Hugo Chantrelle—based on the occultist and racketeer Jack Parsons—and in him sees the possibilities and problems with Forteanism (112):

For Hugo Chantrelle was an eccentric scientist.  In working hours at the California Institute of Technology he was an uninspired routine laboratory man; but on his own time he devoted himself to those peripheral aspects of science which the scientific purist damns as mumbo-jumbo, those new alchemies and astrologies out of which the race may in time construct unsurmised wonders of chemistry and astronomy.  The rocketry of Pendray, the time-dreams of Dunne, the extra sensory perception of Rhine, the sea serpents of Gould, all these held his interests far more than any research conducted by the Insitute.  He was inevitably a member of the Fortean Society of America, and had his own file of unbelievable incidents eventually to be published as a supplement to the works of Charles Fort.  It must be added in his favor that his scientific training automatically preserved him from the errors of the Master.  His file was carefully authenticated, and often embellished with first hand reports.

Ultimately, its Fortean thinking that solves this locked room mystery.  The key was that an investigating doctor was wrong when he said it was impossible for Hilary to stab himself—he had (as Boucher really did) unusually jointed arms that allowed him to reach around his back easily.  Hilary’s brother-in-law Wimpole—based on that great charlatan L. Ron Hubbard—was nonplussed: “And I bit.  A good Fortean like me, and swallowing Science as gospel.”   The phrase that hung over the whole book was from Dr. Derringer, “Eliminate the impossible.  Then if nothing remains, some part of ‘impossible’ must be possible.”  This was clearly derived from the Holmesian mantra, but had a Fortean twist—making not the improbably the case, but the impossible.  Science did not know everything: the world was yet filled with mysteries.

Fort provided not just a way of thinking about the world, though, but also a way of living in the world.  For instance, he discussed otherwise unreported UFO activity in San Diego with Miriam Allen de Ford.  (Worth considering is trying to understand better the connection between Boucher’s Forteanism and his Catholicism.)

He mentions in a footnote to Miriam Allen De Ford’s “Charles Fort: Enfant Terrible of Science,” which he published in the January 1954 issue of FSF that he investigated a stone-fall case in Oakland in 1943.  He thought that the coverage provided by the local press was “misleading and sometimes outright mendacious” and decried the loss of Fort.  But, as compelling as Forteanism was, it was not enough to restructure the rest of his life: it was a useful exercise, but did not determine a lifestyle.  On 3 August 1944 he wrote to de Ford that he had let the matter of the stone drop (a pun!): “A combination of factors (travel, then a long illness, then pure damned inertia) kept me from following it up.  Sorry.”

 


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