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.

God Dissolve (and Forgive) Your Fortean Society

Of course, the main reaction to Fort’s publications and the founding of the Fortean Society was a collective shrug.  But, in addition to those who took up Fort’s cause, there were detractors.  One set of readers seemed to have missed—or dismissed without comment—his monism, which made his books nothing more than miscellany of the bizarre, interesting only in so far as one finds the weird worth considering.  Laurence Stallings (1894-1968), for example, admitted in his review of Wild Talents that he could suss out no underlying metaphysics and so found the book “dull.”  The journalist and book reviewer Bruce Catton (1899-1978) offered the back-handed compliment that Lo! and Wild Talents were “interesting” but otherwise “silly,” “outlandish,” and “nonsense.”  Librarian Edmund Pearon (1880-1937) included Fort’s first two books in his own compendium Queer Books in the category “freaks and curiosities of nature.”  H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) thought Fort “enormously ignorant of elementary science.”  When, after Fort’s death, journalist H. Allen Smith (1907-1976) listed Mencken as among those devoted to the Bronx heretic, Mencken chastised, “This was liberal of a virulence sufficient to shock humanity.  As a matter of fact, I looked upon Fort as a quack of the most obvious sort and often said so in print.  As a Christian I forgive the man who wrote the story and the news editor who passed it.  But both will suffer in Hell.”

Seeing Fort in this light gave the Fortean Society a particular cast—it was a joke, the fraternal order of the ostentatiously odd.  Journalist Richard G. Massock (1901-1979) reported on the founding of the Fortean Society in his column “Seen and Heard about New York,” making it seem like nothing more serious than a gathering of boisterous litterateurs.  Time magazine declared Fort a “prophet of footless negation” and joked that “science itself might have predicted the names of those to whom all this appealed”: “a group of literary exhibitionists.”  At least one newspaper saw Thayer’s attack on science after Earhart’s disappearance as a sad attempt at publicity.  The Greeley Daily Tribune and Republican titled a short blurb on the matter “This All Publicity It Gets Today.”  In 1947, Broadway impresario Billy Rose (1899-1966) suggested  the Fortean Society as an antidote to the world’s travails.  Writing in his nationally syndicated column, he said that, with the break-up of the Big Four Conference in London he was joining Thayer’s group, dedicated as it was to the “snicker and sneer”: “If I’m going to go down the drain, I may as well go down laughing.  In 1945, the clear thinkers finished killing 30,000,000 people.  Now they’re choosing up sides to kill 300,000,000.  If that’s all our clear thinkers can show me, I might as well join up with the loonies.  At least their jokes are better.”

Others understood that, while often funny, Fort was more than a humorist, and had critiques of him—and the Fortean Society—that accounted for Fort’s more serious points, including his monism, but found them unpersuasive or uninteresting.  Anticipating the publication of Lo! and the founding of the Fortean Society, Dreiser sent a copy of The Book of the Damned and Lo! to H. G. Wells (1866-1946), in hopes that the eminent science writer might provide publicity for the new book.  Wells returned The Book of the Damned and threw away Lo!  “Fort seems to be one of the most damnable bores who ever cut scraps from out of the way newspapers.”  Wells maintained that there was no such thing as scientific orthodoxy.  “Scientific workers are first rate stuff and very ill paid,” he said, and concluded, “God dissolve (and forgive) your Fortean Society.”  The science and mathematics writer Martin Gardner (1914-2010) was more sympathetic to Fort in his book In the Name of Science (1952), one of the founding texts in the nascent skeptic movement that would culminate in the founding of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal in 1976.  Gardner’s book was preceded into print by Bergen Evans’s (1904-1978) Natural History of Nonsense (1946).  But whereas Evans only briefly mentioned Fort, Gardner devoted an entire chapter to the Forteans.  Gardner respected Fort’s sense of humor, and his intelligence—noting that he was one of the first commenters on quantum mechanics, and that he understood the material.  He also recognized Fort’s metaphysical project, even if he did not, ultimately, find monism persuasive.  What he did not understand, though, was the Fortean Society.  He found Thayer too earnest, without his mentor’s limber imagination.  “Why the Fortean Society continues to exist is hard to understand,” he said.  “If we lived in an age in which the majority of citizens had a clear comprehension of science, there might be some point in preserving an organization to remind scientists of their limits. . . .  It was all very amusing in 1931, Now, the Society’s magazine, Doubt, has become a dreary prolongation of a joke that should have been buried with Fort.”

                The Red Cross of the Human Mind

Fort’s agitating leukocyte failed to persuade his fellow white cells.  Fort himself made converts with the first of his four book series.  In his review, Ben Hecht (later a well known author, then a short story writer) said, “Whatever the purpose of Charles Fort, he has delighted me beyond all men who have written books in this world.  Mountebank or Messiah, it matters not.  Henceforth, I am a Fortean.”  Pultzer-prize winning author Booth Tarkington was so taken by Fort that he wrote the foreword to his second book.  And that book, too, gained him fans—indeed, perhaps his most important—if not famous—fan besides Dreiser: Tiffany Thayer.  Son of actors, Thayer was something of a free spirit, having dropped out of school in Illinois to tour with an acting company.  He came to New York in 1926 to make his fame and fortune.  Fort and Thayer corresponded for six years, before their first meeting, in 1930.  At this point, Fort was close to publishing Lo!—the title provided by Thayer—and Thayer decided to found a Fortean Society as a kind of book-release party.  Fort wanted no part of such an organization—he was an iconoclast, not an icon—but was tricked into attending the first meeting.  Dreiser was declared president.  Tarkington and Hecht were there, too, as were other literary luminaries, including Burton Rascoe and John Cowper Powys.  The initial meeting of the Fortean Society was held 26 January 1931 at the Savoy-Plaza Hotel, and generated a fair bit of national publicity.

Fort was prophetic about the dangers of having his name turned into an institution, although it did not seem so early on.  After its debut, the Fortean Society met irregularly, mostly, it seems, as a kind of dinner club for authors.  It went on hiatus after Fort died and Thayer headed to Hollywood to try his hand at scriptwriting.  When he returned to New York in 1936, Thayer announced his attention to publish a Fortean magazine.  Dreiser wanted no part of such an operation, but Thayer pushed ahead, crafting a new kind of Forteanism.  In the foreword he wrote for Lo!, Thayer had maintained some of Fort’s agnosticism, but, in retrospect, it seems clear that Thayer was not one to suspend judgment.  The first issue of The Fortean Society Magazine came out blasting, blaming science for the (likely) death of Amelia Earheart—scientists, he implied, pretended the world was better known than it was, and that ignorance had led the aviatrix to crash.  The article, if nothing else, was a triumph of publicity-generation: wire services placed descriptions of Thayer’s theory in hundreds of newspapers around the country.  From the start, Forteanism was associated with the cranky crackpottery that Fort himself had avoided by rewriting X, Y, and Z.

And the eccentricity was just beginning!  After a slow start and a title change—the magazine became Doubt—Thayer hit his stride.  Thayer retained some of Fort’s humor, never taking himself too seriously in the prolix editorials he used to fill Doubt’s pages, but he was not shy about dogmatism: science was a fraud.  Vaccines were dangerous.  Flying saucers were inventions of the defense department.  Both World Wars had been hoaxes.  The old Forteans dropped from the rolls, or were attacked, as happened with Ben Hecht, who Thayer resented for supporting Israel.  Space was opened to heterodox thinkers such as Ernst Philipp Barthel, who proclaimed the end of Copernicanism, advertisements for books and pamphlets on odd theories, such as Alfred Wilkes Drayson’s claim that ice ages resulted from the earth’s tilting axis, and cartoons poking fun of Einstein.  Thayer conceived of Forteanism a religion that preserved human dignity and helped rid the world of false ideologies—and replaced them with truth, he often implied, although sometimes paying homage to Fort’s skepticism.  Gone was any discussion of Dominants or a coming era of Intermediatism.  Instead, Thayer’s version of Forteanism was, as he said in a pamphlet, “The Red Cross of the Human Mind,” rescuing those who had become prisoners to dogma. 

A Radical Corpuscle

In Wild Talents Fort remembered that his father used to punish him by forcing him to work Saturdays at the family’s grocery, scraping off the labels from canned goods and pasting on his parents’s label.  “Theoretically,” he said, the punishment was meant to teach him “the errors of his deceitful ways”.  Fort learned a different lesson:

“One time I had pyramids of canned goods, containing a variety of fruits and vegetables.  But I had used all except peach labels.  I pasted peach labels on peach cans, and then came to apricots.  Well, aren’t apricots peaches?  And there are plums that are virtually apricots.  I went on, either mischievously, or scientifically, pasting the peach labels on cans of plums, cherries, string beans, and succotash.  I can’t quite define my motive, because to this day it has not been decided whether I am a humorist or a scientists.  I think that it was mischief, but, as we go along, there will come a more respectful recognition that also it was scientific procedure.”

It may be that moments such as this one, in which Fort confronted his father’s authoritarianism and refused to truckle, were what bred his independence of mind.  It may even be, as Philip Jenkins as suggested, that Fort was born to a particularly rebellious generation.  Whatever the cause, Fort was an individual, which is paradoxical, as his adult philosophy questioned the very notion of individuality.  In 1892, when he was 18, Fort left his home of Albany, New York, and traveled extensively, only returning after he was struck ill.  Anna Filing, a girl whom Fort knew in his youth, nursed him back to help, and the two were married in 1896.  They settled in the Bronx, and Fort eked out a living as a writer.  Although he wrote several novels only one, The Outcast Manufacturers, was ever published; otherwise, he made do with short stories.  Fort’s short stories won the attention of Theodore Dreiser, who became a mentor and patron.  They ranged from the humorous to the mysterious to slice-of-life pieces, most marked by wit, sharp dialogue, and striking images.  (A born collector, Fort carried pencil and paper wherever he went and wrote down similes, metaphors, and descriptions as they came to him.  These he squirreled away in boxes that filled his and Anna’s apartment, going to them for ideas, arranging and rearranging them.)  “A Radical Corpuscle,” published in 1906, continued Fort’s grocery-store philosophizing.  A white blood cell lectures other leucocytes that they are not, as they imagined, individuals, but parts of a larger whole, and man himself part of a still larger existence: “He is a white corpuscle to the earth.  He says the moon causes the tide.  Perhaps.  Then the moon is the Earth’s heart.”  The cellular prophet, though, made no converts.

Around 1906, Fort began a new collection.  He clipped stories from newspapers that fit into what he thought of as a developing system.  This hobby grew into an obsession, so that by 1912he was spending great spans of time at the New York Public Library, taking notes from various technical journals and books, categorizing what would become 40,000 citations according to 1,300 general subjects--.  Dreiser called him a “library mole” and warned, “Eat libraries and suffer inevitable encyclopediac apoplexy.”  Instead, Fort wrote a metaphysical work, X.  As reconstructed, later, by Damon Knight, X argued that humans were controlled by Martians—through a mysterious force known as X—and the evidence for it were the odd coincidences and mysterious happenings that Fort had been gathering in his research.  While X  sought a publisher—it had already wowed Dreiser—Fort went to work on a sequel, Y, claiming that an advanced civilization lived at the North Pole.  His obsession became easier to maintain in 1916, and again in 1917, when small inheritances relieved Fort of the need to sell his stories, and he pushed on, imagining yet a third book in what was becoming a series, Z, about psychic phenomena.  Of these manuscripts, only Z lived, although in modified form.  Fort destroyed X and Y, probably in a fit of depression that also saw him destroy his notes and head to England.  Before that, Z became The Book of the Damned (1919), and that was followed by New Lands (1923).  In England, Fort returned to the haunting of libraries and collected new notes, which he continued compiling after he and Anna returned to New York, the research resulting in his final two books, Lo! (1931) and Wild Talents (1932).

The four books that make up the Fortean corpus are unusual animals.  They are not volumes of occultism—as they had been in their earlier iterations, X and Y.  Fort nowhere straightforwardly argues for Martian bosses or hidden polar civilizations.  Instead, they have the impish quality that characterizes the anecdote about his grocery-store rebellion, with Fort proposing outlandish theories, then undermining them, as when he discussed a newspaper report of a talking dog, but discounted it because the dog was supposed to have disappeared into green smoke: talking dogs are worth considering, but not vanishing ones.  Neither can the books be classed as novels, either, although they are often novelistic.  Fort commented about Lo!: “It is a kind of non-fictional fiction [so] that, though concerned with entomological and astronomical matters, and so on, it is ‘thrilling’ and ‘melodramatic.”  And the narrator, as Colin Bennett notes, is not Fort, but a slightly different personality.  Indeed, Fort rejects the distinction between fiction and non-fiction, just as he rejects the difference between peaches and succotash.  The books are philosophical, at times wrestling with the meaning of Darwinian theories of evolution and quantum physics, but Fort did not consider himself a philosopher.  “I’m just a writer,” he said.  His books, weaving together the thousands of reports of strange happenings, solved what he saw as writerly problems:

“I have a theory that the moving pictures will pretty nearly drive out the novel, as they have very much reduced the importance of the stage—but that there will arise writing that will retain the principles of dramatic structure of the novel, but, not having human beings for its characters, will not be producible in the pictures, and will survive independently.  Maybe I am a pioneer in a new writing that instead of old-fashioned heroes and villains, will have floods and bugs and stars and earthquakes for its characters and motifs.”

Nonetheless, there was a metaphysical unity to the books, one that makes sense of his humor, one that builds from his childhood tomfoolery through short stories such as “A Radical Corpuscle” and his musings in X and Y.  Fort was a monist.  He argued that all categories were specious, hiding the underlying unity of all reality—the sameness of peaches and apricots, the oneness of humanity with the moon.  The key to discovering this unity were the bizarre reports he collected—the falls of stone, like what occurred in Oakland, rains of blood, mysterious lights and unexplained disappearances, and frogs, lots of falling frogs.  Fort divided history into three epochs, what he called Dominants.  The first Dominant was religious; the second was scientific.  In each case, a selected group of people—theologians, scientists—erected a system of classification from the raw material of the integrated universe.  To do, they had to exclude—in the case of scientists, this meant damning some data as wrong, as unthinkable.  Thus, Fort could go through entire runs of scientific journals, picking out hundreds of facts that could not—and would not—be explained by scientists, but were instead ignored, forgotten, damned to oblivion.  In resuscitating these facts, Fort wanted his readers to question not just the judgment of scientists (and theologians) but the very foundation of their respective projects.  Scientists wanted to dismiss events such as those that befell Irene Fellows because they did not fit into their explanatory frameworks.  But it was only by contemplating such mysteries that the nature of reality could be divined.  Speaking of all those falling amphibians, Fort quipped, “We shall pick up existence by its frogs.”  And so, pasting the same label on cans of seemingly different contents was science, as it accurately described not only the contents of the cans but of the entire universe.  Everything is peaches.  And everything is not peaches.  The world was entering, Fort thought, a third Dominant, the Dominant of Intermediatism, the era of the hyphen, in which categories withered and died: fiction and non-fiction were the same; humor and science were indistinguishable; the fantastic was real, the real fantastic.

I see that, for whatever reason, the introduction did not post last time.  Let's try again:

In August 1943, stones fell from a clear sky onto a little white stucco house.  At least that’s what the newspapers said.  The house was on 89th Avenue in Oakland, California, and belonged to Irene Fellows, a grandmother.  Some of the rocks were pebbles, some as large as chicken eggs.  According to reports, the stones fell only on the Fellows’s house.  Police investigated but could find no cause.  The story gained local attention.  The San Francisco Chronicle reported on the mystery and its book review editor used the event as an introduction to one of his daily columns.  Anthony Boucher, resident of the adjacent city Berkeley, California, visited and collected one of the stones.  He gossiped about the event with fellow writer Miriam Allen de Ford, who lived across the bay in San Francisco.  For many of the people—for the journalist who wrote the story, for Joseph Henry Jackson, the Chronicle’s book reviewer, for Boucher and de Ford, for Manly P. Hall who told of the happenings in his magazine Horizon—the odd occurrence on 89th Avenue immediately brought to mind one name: Charles Fort.

Born in 1874, Charles Hoy Fort was an American writer who spent inordinate amounts of time in libraries collecting reports of mysterious events—stone falls such as the one in Oakland, as well as other unusual things dropping from the heavens, unidentified lights in the sky, disappearances and such—weaving these into four books, the last one published in 1932, the year of his death.  Fort inspired a cultish following, a loosely allied group who called themselves Forteans.  It was Forteans who had his books republished as an omnibus edition in 1941, and they have never been out of print since.  To the extent that Forteans do garner attention, it tends to be as cranks: conspiracy theorists, mystery-mongers, the naïve and credulous.  There is some truth to this characterization—some Forteans are mystery-mongers; some are credulous—but it oversimplifies a much more complicated, and interesting, story.  Not all Forteans are cranks—and, indeed, many played important roles in the history of the twentieth century.  Forteans invented practices and crafted a vocabulary that allowed individuals to simultaneously recognize the growing power of science and liberate themselves from its determinisms, and these practices, this language have hardly been investigated.  To put the matter bluntly—perhaps too bluntly—it is impossible to fully understand the public meaning of science in twentieth-century America (as well as England and France) without understanding the Forteans.

The Forteans, though, remain obscure, fringe figures.  Fort himself has warranted two biographies, the first by science fiction writer Damon Knight, the second by magician and writer Jim Steinmeyer.  Steinmeyer’s biography, published in 2008, came as Fort was gaining a small semblance of scholarly respect: Jeffrey Kripal, Simon Locke, and Deborah Dixon have all had occasion to write about Fort, with Dixon offering the most sympathetic interpretation of the Forteans.  In addition, author Colin Bennett published an analysis of Fort and his ideas in 2002.  These various writings can be understood as part of a larger literature, concerned with the relationship between science, modernity, and enchantment—for Fort’s mysteries are nothing if not enchanting.  Historian Michael Saler has usefully divided this literature into three.  The first line of though descends from Max Weber’s influential statement that science has disenchanted the modern world.  Studies in this tradition set science and enchantment as opposites, and so Fort and the Forteans become emblematic of the antiscientific view, chasing a disappearing enchantment.  Saler classifies these works as binary.  There is a strong binary tendency in both biographies of Fort as well as in Bennett’s Politics of the Imagination.  The second way of sorting the relations between science, modernity, and enchantment is best exemplified by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer—they are what Saler calls dialectical.  Such works argue that modern science, by being so closely allied with capitalism, enchants the public and so distracts them from more important issues.  Bennett’s argument sometimes toys with this approach as well.  Saler calls the third category antinomial, and in it belongs  much writing on science, modernity, and enchantment over the past fifteen years or so.  Certainly, Kripal, Locke, and Dixon are best understood as antinomials, although there concerns are also often with their own disciplines—religious studies, sociology, and geography, respectively.  According to the antinomial perspective, modernity is not disenchanted, necessarily, nor is science.  Rather, science and enchantment both continue to exist in the modern world; both are continually produced, and not just to dupe the public.  Rather, enchantment is an important component of science, of reason.  Weber was wrong: science did not disenchant the modern world.  It merely redrew the boundaries between the two.  The question then becomes, How did individuals live in a world where the boundary was being redrawn, a world in which scientists could exploit the fundamental forces of nature to destroy a city with a single bomb, and in which stones could fall from an empty sky?

Forteans provided answers to this existential question.  By no means were they the only answers—indeed, Weber’s binary thinking and the Marxist dialectics of Adorno and Horkheimer provided, and continue to provide, influential answers to this question.  But the Fortean answers were significant.  This paper outlines some of these answers.  It focuses on Forteans in the San Francisco Bay Area between 1920, just after Fort published his first book, and 1959.  The end date is chosen both for practical and methodological reasons.  By the mid-1950s, San Francisco Forteanism was petering out.  As well, 1959 marked a change in Forteanism, the nature of which is beyond the scope of this paper.  The Bay Area was chosen entirely for pragmatic reasons: there was a diverse community of Forteans living in the area.  They were connected to other Forteans throughout the country, but nonetheless were circumscribed, even if the community was not very well integrated.  Bay Area Forteans were identified through the Fortean Society’s official publication and newspaper searches; basic biographical information, writings, and a few archival collections—especially that of Anthony Boucher’s—provided materials for reconstructing the community, its shape and concerns.

The argument falls into three parts.  First, is an overview of the life of Charles Fort, the founding of the Fortean Society, the development of Forteanism, and its detractors.  The paper then moves on to consider how Forteanism came to the San Francisco Bay Area from its home in New York and the varieties that it took.  Roughly speaking, there were five forms—five answers to the question of how science and enchantment related in the modern world: some saw Forteanism as an adjunct to science, some as a key to mysticism.  Others understood Forteanism ironically, as certainly wrong but still worth considering.  Artists, especially, found much to admire in Fort’s works, which was easily adapted to some of their theoretical concerns.  Fort was used to investigate unexplored realms of human experience, including phenomena that were beyond analysis: weird events.  The third section of argument tries to find an underlying logic to these varieties of Forteanism by comparing Forteans to (political) anarchists as described by James C. Scott.  This comparison provides a model for understanding other Forteans as well as others of similar bents, the so-called crackpots and aficionados of the weird and wonderful.

This is the introduction of a paper I am working up on the San Francisco Bay Areas based on the research I've been putting up on this blog.  Comments welcome!  Subsequent parts to come.

In August 1943, stones fell from a clear sky onto a little white stucco house.  At least that’s what the newspapers said.  The house was on 89th Avenue in Oakland, California, and belonged to Irene Fellows, a grandmother.  Some of the rocks were pebbles, some as large as chicken eggs.  According to reports, the stones fell only on the Fellows’s house.  Police investigated but could find no cause.  The story gained local attention.  The San Francisco Chronicle reported on the mystery and its book review editor used the event as an introduction to one of his daily columns.  Anthony Boucher, resident of the adjacent city Berkeley, California, visited and collected one of the stones.  He gossiped about the event with fellow writer Miriam Allen de Ford, who lived across the bay in San Francisco.  For many of the people—for the journalist who wrote the story, for Joseph Henry Jackson, the Chronicle’s book reviewer, for Boucher and de Ford, for Manly P. Hall who told of the happenings in his magazine Horizon—the odd occurrence on 89th Avenue immediately brought to mind one name: Charles Fort.

Charles Fort was an American writer who spent inordinate amounts of time in libraries collecting reports of mysterious events—stone falls such as the one in Oakland, as well as other unusual things dropping from the heavens, unidentified lights in the sky, disappearances and such—weaving these into four books, the last one published in 1932, the year of his death.  Fort inspired a cultish following, a loosely allied group who called themselves Forteans.  It was Forteans who had his books republished as an omnibus edition in 1941, and they have never been out of print since.  To the extent that Forteans do garner attention, it tends to be as cranks: conspiracy theorists, mystery-mongers, the naïve and credulous.  These dismissals are simplistic and wrong.  Forteans, at least in the first few decades after Fort’s death, were more than crackpots.  They invented practices and crafted a vocabulary that allowed individuals to simultaneously recognize the growing power of science and liberate themselves from its determinisms, and these practices, this language have hardly been investigated.  To put the matter bluntly—perhaps too bluntly, but the point holds—it is impossible to fully understand the public meaning of science in twentieth-century America (as well as England and France) without understanding the Forteans.

The Forteans, though, remain obscure, fringe figures.  Fort himself has warranted two biographies, the first by science fiction writer Damon Knight, the second by magician and writer Jim Steinmeyer.  Steinmeyer’s biography, published in 2008, came as Fort was gaining a small semblance of scholarly respect: Jeffrey Kripal, Simon Locke, and Deborah Dixon have all had occasion to write about Fort, with Dixon offering the most sympathetic interpretation of the Forteans.  In addition, author Colin Bennett published an analysis of Fort and his ideas in 2002.  These various writings can be understood as part of a larger literature, concerned with the relationship between science, modernity, and enchantment—for Fort’s mysteries are nothing if not enchanting.  Historian Michael Saler has usefully divided this literature into three.  The first line of though descends from Max Weber’s influential statement that science has disenchanted the modern world.  Studies in this tradition set science and enchantment as opposites, and so Fort and the Forteans become emblematic of the antiscientific view, chasing a disappearing enchantment.  Saler classifies these works as binary.  There is a strong binary tendency in both biographies of Fort as well as in Bennett’s Politics of the Imagination.  The second way of sorting the relations between science, modernity, and enchantment is best exemplified by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer—they are what Saler calls dialectical.  Such works argue that modern science, by being so closely allied with capitalism, enchants the public and so distracts them from more important issues.  Bennett’s argument sometimes toys with this approach as well.  Saler calls the third category antinomial, and in it belongs  much writing on science, modernity, and enchantment over the past fifteen years or so.  Certainly, Kripal, Locke, and Dixon are best understood as antinomials, although there concerns are also often with their own disciplines—religious studies, sociology, and geography, respectively.  According to the antinomial perspective, modernity is not disenchanted, necessarily, nor is science.  Rather, science and enchantment both continue to exist in the modern world; both are continually produced, and not just to dupe the public.  Rather, enchantment is an important component of science, of reason.  Weber was wrong: science did not disenchant the modern world.  It merely redrew the boundaries between the two.  The question then becomes, How did individuals live in a world where the boundary was being redrawn, a world in which scientists could exploit the fundamental forces of nature to destroy a city with a single bomb, and in which stones could fall from an empty sky?

Forteans provided answers to this existential question.  By no means were they the only answers—indeed, Weber’s binary thinking and the Marxist dialectics of Adorno and Horkheimer provided, and continue to provide, influential answers to this question.  But the Fortean answers were significant.  This paper outlines some of these answers.  It focuses on Forteans in the San Francisco Bay Area between 1920, just after Fort published his first book, and 1959.  The end date is chosen both for practical and methodological reasons.  By the mid-1950s, San Francisco Forteanism was petering out.  As well, 1959 marked a change in Forteanism, the nature of which is beyond the scope of this paper.  The Bay Area was chosen entirely for pragmatic reasons: there was a diverse community of Forteans living in the area.  They were connected to other Forteans throughout the country, but nonetheless were circumscribed, even if the community was not very well integrated.  Bay Area Forteans were identified through the Fortean Society’s official publication and newspaper searches; basic biographical information, writings, and a few archival collections—especially that of Anthony Boucher’s—provided materials for reconstructing the community, its shape and concerns.

The argument falls into three parts.  First, is an overview of the life of Charles Fort, the founding of the Fortean Society, the development of Forteanism, and its detractors.  The paper then moves on to consider how Forteanism came to the San Francisco Bay Area from its home in New York and the varieties that it took.  Roughly speaking, there were five forms—five answers to the question of how science and enchantment related in the modern world: some saw Forteanism as an adjunct to science, some as a key to mysticism.  Others understood Forteanism ironically, as certainly wrong but still worth considering.  Artists, especially, found much to admire in Fort’s works, which was easily adapted to some of their theoretical concerns.  Fort was used to investigate unexplored realms of human experience, including phenomena that were beyond analysis: weird events.  The third section of argument tries to find an underlying logic to these varieties of Forteanism by comparing Forteans to (political) anarchists as described by James C. Scott.  This comparison provides a model for understanding other Forteans as well as others of similar bents, the so-called crackpots and aficionados of the weird and wonderful.