A nice little find.  Syracuse University holds the Mercury Press Records; Mercury Press produced The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, edited for a long time by Anthony Boucher.  It turns out that there’s a file labeled Drussai which contains several letters from Garen and a pair from Kirk, all to Boucher.

The correspondence begins in January 1951, after Boucher had already asked for rewrites on an early version of “Extra-Curricular.”  All of the correspondence is from one or the other Drussai to Boucher—none of his responses survive except as faintly penciled notes on the letters.  Most of the material is Drussai sending off manuscripts, often through several rounds of revisions, which gives some insight into her career.

At the time she first wrote Boucher, Garen had already been rejected by Horace Gold at Galaxy and she was trying to get a sense of the market—how many revisions she could expect, and what-not.  At first, she admitted, she started a lot of stories but could not finish them.  Then she focused more.  One gets the sense that she sometimes felt overwhelmed by her domestic responsibilities: “Between lawn planting------and fence building----------and curtain making I did manage to whip this “Surprisingly” long (for me) story together.  Huh?,” she wrote in October 1956.  A little while later, she resolved to take her writing more seriously.  She also asked for Boucher’s advice on agents.  She wanted to move into mainstream publishing, in addition to her science fiction, and also found Harry Altshuler—her agent—was apathetic toward her work.

In addition, the correspondence sheds some light on some of the obscure details of the Drussai’s life.  They moved often.  Her first letter gave their address as 259 Montana Street—far from Telegraph Hill, almost in Daly City.  By May of 1951, she had moved to Hollywood, then to LA before the summer was over.  The following Autumn she was on La Crescenta, only to move back north to San Francisco by 1955.  In the spring of 1956, she was in the suburb of San Carlos, and then moved to Campbell, California that summer.  The Drussais seemed to have stayed there until they divorced, right around New Year’s 1960.  Garen and Milo moved to San Jose, Kirk to Santa Clara.

Apparently, Kirk had been in sales for most of this time—although I don’t know what he was selling.  Around the beginning of 1957, he got involved with technical writing and was a member of the Bay Area Chapter of the Society of Technical Writers and Editors, which had about 25 members.  He obviously could not know it, but moving into technical writing just as Silicon Valley was about to take off was wise.  Quite probably, he published far more than his wife, who, judging by the correspondence here, had a lot of trouble placing her writing, although it’s unknown whether that’s because of the quality of the output or the closing of the pulp market in the 1950s.

Indeed, it’s worth a slight digression on this topic.  I have seen a couple of newsletters the Golden Gate Chapter of the Society of Technical Publishers put out in the late 1950s.  (That group and the STWE merged in 1960), and there are some interesting connections between technical writers and Forteans that are worth further exploration.  Anthony Boucher, for example, came to talk at one of TPS’s meetings, discussing funny gaffes that had gotten past science fiction editors.  Members of the TPS also heard a talk by one of the followers of General Semantics, which was then taking root in San Francisco since S. I. Hayawaka had come to San Francisco State University.  And Kirk asked Tony to republish Isaac Asimov’s “Insert Knob A in Hole B,” which had been in the December 1957 F&SF.  Although tech writing and science fiction seem, on the face of it, so different, I can see the connection, as in both cases the writer must use her or his imagination to make sense of—and make sensible—otherwise undigested scientific material.

But, back to the correspondence.  It also reveals some personal facts about Garen that would otherwise be hard to come from.  She had a great sense of humor, for instance.  One letter to Boucher was entirely blank between the salutation and the signature, with a P.S.: “More later.”  Another time, she submitted a story that, she learned upon reading the magazine, was very similar to one just published by F&SF (Avram Davidson’s “Summerland,” which implies that hers, titled “Wish Fulfillment, had something to do with Spiritualism.)  She wrote, “I’ve been tricked by coincidence. . . .  I hope my next to you is not the result of some telepathic meeting of minds.  I couldn’t take it.”

Frustratingly, however, the letters do not quite solve some problems about her identity.  In his first letter to her, Boucher was confused about her gender; she explained that she was a woman and, after some further prompting, gave some background to her unusual name: “In the Ross 128 Sector, Karen is a cognate of Garen; and Drussai is quite a common name.  Sort of like your Smiths and Jonses (sic) here.  (It’s Hungarian).”

At the time, Boucher (obviously) had not met Garen face-to-face.  But he had by the time of his introduction to her first story (“Extra-Curricular,” June 1952), when he commented on her Hungarian beauty.  But, of course, she never says in this letter that she is Hungarian.  Maybe he assumed it, and so wrote it—and given that Garen was interested in re-inventing herself, she let it stand.  Or maybe she had confirmed this in some other conversation.  At any rate, it suggests that, at least at this time, she was not claiming to be Hungarian.

More confusing is her reference to “Ross 128 Sector.”  Ross 128 is the star nearest the Earth; it had been discovered in 1926 and so was likely known by science fiction aficionados.  Perhaps this was what she meant—a joke, her letters full of them, a reference to how far she was from Berkeley and the Bohemian parts of San Francisco?—or perhaps something more obscure.  If we accept the star interpretation, then she seems close to admitting that the name is wholly fabricated, whether Drussai is Hungarian or not.

Like so many Forteans, Garen Drussai is quite a slippery character.

We’ve already seen that, geographically, the distribution of Forteanism across the Bay Area correlated with the areas of Bohemianism.  So now, let’s look a little closer at Bay Area Bohemianism, its history, its traits, and its structure.

San Francisco had an established Bohemian culture in the 1890s, much of it revolving around Ambrose Bierce, whose ghost stories, especially, would much influence the weird writers of the 1920s.  (And whose disappearance in Mexico inspired Fort’s musing that perhaps someone was collecting Ambroses.)  As we have seen with Kenneth MacNichol, there was concurrently a small arts colony in and around Carmel.  In the wake of the 1906 fire and earthquake, much of San Francisco’s bohemia moved south.

The doyenne of this Carmel was George Sterling, a poet who had been mentored by Bierce.  Sterling wrote, “There are two elements, at least, that are essential to Bohemianism.  The first is devotion or addiction to one or more of the Seven Arts; the other is poverty.  Other factors suggest themselves: for instance, I like to think of my Bohemians as young, as radical, in their outlook on art and life, as unconventional, and, though it is debatable, as dwellers in a city large enough to have the somewhat cruel atmosphere of all great cities.”

Sterling seemed to have known Kenneth MacNichol at a time when MacNichol was very interested in New Thought.  He also encouraged the work of Clark Ashton Smith, second only to H. P. Lovecraft as a writer of weird tales during the 1930s.  Eventually, Sterling moved back to the Monkey Block of San Francisco, which he had left.  In 1927, he killed himself in a room in the Bohemian Grove.

That same year, the poet Kenneth Rexroth arrived in San Francisco after a peripatetic life had taken him across the country, to Paris and back.  Rexroth would become one of the central figures in the Bay Area arts scene and shaped the form of Bohemianism.

He had been in Greenwich Village during the years after World War I, and in Paris as well, where he was exposed to the cynical Bohemianism of the time.  Rexroth’s thoughts ran in a different direction.  He was interested in mysticism and occultism—occasionally his lectures would devolve into conspiratorial harangues about the Freemasons.  After having been in what was then considered the center of civilization—New York and France—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.

He also 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.

In addition, other outlets for avant-garde thought were opening up.  George Leite and the Manhattan Project-physicist Bern Porter published together the journal Circle and Porter alone put out Berkeley: A Journal of Modern Culture.  Leite also ran a bookstore in Berkeley, daliel’s—a;ways with the little d—where Bohemians congregated.

In the months after World War II ended, a recognizable group came into being, with Rexroth as a distant guru, and characterized most especially by three young poets, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, and Robin Blaser.  These writers some themselves as inheritors of all of modernism—they all were devoted to Ezra Pound—and Romanticism.  Their work combined intensely intellectual poetry with homosexual desire—and this became the mark of the Berkeley Renaissance, as they named their movement.  The Berkeley poets also maintained an interest in mysticism.  Robert Duncan had been raised a theosophist before he vagabonded across the country, and Rexroth encouraged him to return to those roots.  Spicer claimed to be descended both from Native Americans and Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the New Thought Christian Science Church.  He read science fiction, read Crowley, and practiced the Tarot.

Philip K. Dick, who lived with Spicer for a time, remembered that Berkeley culture of the late forties ‘required you to have a really thorough grounding in the classics.’  (SF fandom, by contrast, he thought was overrun by “trolls.”)  This was the culture—the mixture of heady intellectualism and mysticism—that nourished Polly Lamb Goforth and Anthony Boucher, among others.

This Berkeley Renaissance spread across the Bay Area, the seed of what would become the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beat movement, which, in turn, would feed into the later Hippie and Free Love movements.  These developments depended upon San Francisco as a place, and also as an idea—Herb Caen’s Baghdad by the Bay.

In terms of place, San Francisco Bohemian culture was coming into its own.  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.”  Returning GIs, displaced by the war, and Conscientious Objectors released from camps in Oregon, rounded out these movements, helped them grow.  As historian Richard Candida Smith notes, to the surprise of many, returning soldiers did not only tap into the GI Bill for vocational education, but for more broad, liberal, and arts-related education, too.

There was also the myth of San Francisco itself, as an enchanted place, which charged the Bohemia there.  This was not a jaded old world, but a new one, ready to be molded by the artist.

The quintessential art movement to emerge out of this moment was abstract expressionism.  Abstract expressionism had its roots in the earlier surrealist movement, but whereas surrealists tried to plumb the individual psyche for universal—though still weird—symbols, abstract expressionism turned toward individual experience.   The art was confessional and personal—both of which can be seen in relation to Forteans and weird tales, which also tended toward the confessional and personal, and against the universal.  San Francisco artists, generally speaking, stood against determinism and the force of history.  Often inspired by Buddhism, they argued that humans had limitless potential and so the chief job of the artist—be it painter or poet—was to reflect upon experience and find the meaning in it.

Smith again: “The imagination, manifested in its highest form in the aesthetic act, became the most stable source of personal freedom in a world otherwise deterministic and frightening.  An absolutized privacy, no matter what the costs, turned out to be the most radical defense against the claims of public order.  Bohemian enclaves developed a repertoire of self-images that proived to have appeal to the collective imagination far beyond the limited boundaries of the art and poetry worlds.  As feelings of powerlessness spread, the aesthetic avant-garde provided an antidote.”

These ideals, matched with the influx of older, more experienced (and in the case of CO’s, more idealistic) individuals helped to create the Bay Area scene.

As I have already suggested, the Fortean community was interwoven with this larger art world.  Boucher had a radio show at KPFA, for example, and knew Philip K. Dick from Dick’s job at the record store (and later as his editor).  Circle was discussed in the San Francisco Chronicle’s book review column just before Boucher took that job.  Henry Miller was Fortean and also a key figure in the extension of the Bay Area Renaissance onto the Monterey Peninsula.  He published in Circle, and new many of the area artists.  His writings, too, exemplified the turn toward the confessional.

It is also possible to see in the art world itself an interest in things Fortean.  The best example is a project by Clay Spohn at the California School of Fine Arts (in San Francisco).  The installation was “The Museum of Unknown and Little Known Objects”—the very name of which is Fortean.  Spohn saw his work—very much as Fort did—as “philosophical prankism,” a way of testing the boundaries of what was known by showing what was unknown.  In all, the Museum contained 42 pieces, made up of scrap metal an unusual pieces of trash that Spohn had been collecting, including a watch on a wire, the starter for a rat race, a hat tree for a neighborly garden, and “bedroom fluff”: things he picked out of a vacuum cleaner.

I’ve had a chance to go through most of Robert Barbour Johnson’s stories for Blue Book Magazine.  This is the vast bulk of his known and credited work.

They are not very good.

For the most part, they are heavily dipped in nostalgia—the old circus man is always the right one, the new ways always lead to danger.   There’s a sugar-coated patriotism to them—George Washington makes a cameo appearance in one, and is rendered monodimensionally.

Beyond that, the stories engage in an awful lot of telling.  There are large lectures throughout.  I get the sense that these were excerpted from—or inspired by—the novel Johnson was supposed to be writing on circus life, and expressed ideas that he held very dearly, and therefore not very clearly or critically.

According to Tiffany Thayer’ Doubt, Henry Miller joined the Fortean Society sometime around 1945.  Miller was the notorious author of, among other works, The Tropic of Cancer and The Tropic of Capricorn, both of which were banned in his own country.  At the time he joined the Fortean Society, he had settled in Big Sur, where he continued to write, to watercolor, and become a guru to the disenchanted: Bohemian youths, Conscientious Objectors as they were released from work camps in Oregon, those looking for something more in this materialistic age—an age savagely satire by Miller in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, a book he wrote about the cross-country trip which took him to California and Big; in the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company section of The Tropic of Cancer; an age of materialism that devalued the most valuable material possession, the body, censoring discussion of its pleasures even as it sent young men across the world to be torn apart.

Miller’s joining of the Fortean Society was not a surprise.  As Kenneth Rexroth, the San Francisco poet, notes in his introduction to Miller’s Nights of Love and Laughter, Miller had long been interested in the occult.  His writings are sprinkled with references to Mu and astrology—he was a deep devotee of astrology since his time in Paris.  (He fled to France after walking out on the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company—Western Union—the rest of his life living by his wits and what he could bum from others.)  His writing was resolutely non-conformist.  In her biography of him, Erica Jong catches Miller saying,

“I am not following a strict chronological sequence but have chosen to adopt a circular or spiral form of time development which enables me to expand freely in any direction at any given moment.  The ordinary chronological development seems to me wooden and artificial, a synthetic reconstitution of the facts of life.  The facts and events of life are for me only the starting points on the way toward the discovery of wisdom.”

With the exception of that final phrase, a more Fortean approach to literature is hard to imagine.

Early in my work on Robert Barbour Johnson I read his short The Magic Park about the Golden Gate Park.   At the time, I did not get a whole lot out of it.  It’s not clear what the book is supposed to be.  He touches on the history of the park—but then goes on to say that while he would love to do a fully detailed historical reconstruction, that is not what his book is about.  He sometimes writes as if it is a guidebook—but then admits that’s impossible, since the park has no beginning and no end: it is fifty-two blocks long and eight blocks wide, and one can enter or leave at any point.  He touches on some of the main attractions—the Academy of Sciences, the bison and elk enclosures, the DeYoung Museum—but then admits that these are not always as interesting as the quail and rabbits running about and, besides, gives no directions how to get there.

In essence, it’s a paean to the park, a love song.

And in that sense, it can be understood as part of what Kevin Starr called the enchantment of San Francisco, the making of the myth of Baghdad by the Bay.  In other words, part of the same project that engaged Herb Caen, whom Johnson claimed as an acquaintance, at the very least.

What makes the park magic, to Johnson, is not is natural becauty: it’s that the park was created by human hands, a green oasis crafted from seaside wastelands where, he says, nothing had lived before.  He imagines that the whole endeavor started as a joke on the park superintendent, John McLaren, a Scotsman who came to San Francisco in the late nineteenth-century to make his fortune as a . . . landscape architect.  Such a carer seemed out of place in the (very provincial) and rough San Francsco of the time, Johnson suggests, and McLaren could only have gotten the job of creating a park from the city on a lark.  But he showed them!

There are obvious Fortean tones in this history of the park.  First, there is the little guy battling mainstream and making good.  There is the sense that all of creation is a cosmic joke.  And a sense that what counts is art, not nature, and that through art magic can be conjured.

The book also has some more obvious Fortean analogues.  Johnsons spends time talking about the ghosts and unusual things that have been reported in the area—and some even caught, as when an Arctic Owl was found to haunt the park, although officialdom had dismissed the possibility.

Johnson’s view of the park, then, is an attempt to find an enchanted geography in a world where such enchantment seemed impossible—the park operates for him the same way that the ptach of uncanny ground near Monterey did.

The eleven stories in Garen Drussai’s “Triptych” tell us one thing regarding her Forteanism: she left that philosophy behind, even as she continued her interest in other topics.  A couple of the stories reiterate her pacifist stance—in particular, “Selection,” which concerns an Earth driven to near destruction, saved only when a race of aliens came and put the remaining humans on reservations.  While they tried to rebuild civilization with the peaceful types, the rest were divided by races and kept entertained by violent pastimes.  The stories also emphasize the power of imagination.  For example, in “The Smell of Ice Cream” merely a whiff of the dairy dessert make a couple remember a bad day; in “Touching,” a lonely man finds satisfaction in his ability to, well, touch.  And in “Caring,” a sensitive girl wills herself to become a dying bird when after she fails to save a broken-winged seagull.

The stories reflect, broadly speaking, a liberal attitude.  Even the most reactionary (and predictable), “The Fifth Window,” about a man in long ago China trying to arrange his marriage, is liberal in the sense that, as Drussai explains in the introduction, she tried to understand the man in the context of his time, not measured against some timeless ethics.  Others are more obviously so: “Leopardus,” for instance, concerns a woman who comes to hate what fur represents.

But her critics would still probably take exception at her vision of women.  She mentions in the introduction that women are essential to civilization—but makes the argument in essentialist terms, seeing women not as potential explorers, say, but as those who build churches and hold societies together.  The four hundred page novel which she wrote was about a pioneer woman, “Harriet” and one vignette makes it into the thesis as the story “snare.”  Harriet turns out to be a selfish hedonist, who resents her husband, hates her children, has an affair, but cannot find it in herself to feel anything but trapped.  The main character in “Knowing It All” is a woman who relies on the help of men to make her way through the world.

I got a hold of Garen Drussai’s Sonoma State University thesis.  I haven’t had time to read through the eleven stories (it’s called “Tryptich” because the thesis is divided into three sections), but the introduction gives some more information on her life, and also confirms some of what I had been guessing.

According to the introduction, Drussai was a born story-teller.  When, as a child, she was supposed to be dusting the furniture, she would instead hide under a table and tell herself stories.  (She felt herself an “alien,” adrift from others.)  As she looked back on that time, she valued her imagination—it is imagination, the ability to create vivid images—which makes the writer.  She seems to have a romantic, as opposed to craftsmanlike, say, view of writing.  Movies fed her imagination—although never stories with violence—and reading, of course.

The first stories she read were adventure tales, Lost World, and fairy tales, and the travels of Richard Halliburton, and the fantasies of Jules Verne.  She was influenced by Jack London and H. G. Wells and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holes—this may have given her a connection to Anthony Boucher—as well as Greek, Roman, and Norse myths.  She read A Tale of Two Cities and memorized the poems of Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe.

While she was in high school she tried her hand at writing—“melancholy teen-age poems and stories” as she says on page ix, and though she submitted them they were never published.  After graduating high school, she lit off for Hollywood—this would have been about 1937—and took a speech class at Hollywood High School to get rid of her New York accent.  (It would have been about this time that Clara Hettler changed her name to Garen Lewis, and so it is likely that Garen was changing her entire identity with the move across the country.)

It was in California that Garen met and married the (also newly-renamed) Kirk Drussai.  She was attracted by his love of reading and interest in things philosophical.  He introduced her to science fiction where she could work out her own philosophical ideas: Science Fiction “opened up new vistas for me,” she wrote.  “There were subjects I could not tackle, at least it might be unwise to do so if I wanted to be published in popular magazines.  Sexual, racial, and violent themes might not be acceptable, and yet put the same ideas on another planet or at another time in the future, and they were all right.”  Garen name checked some of the masters, Bradbury, Heinlein, Asimov, Matheson (although she mis-spelled Asimov and Heinlein).  She went on to tell a story about how the editor of Galaxy recognizer her on a return trip to New York and invited her to a party, at which a man asked her what her husband did.  She put him in his place.

According to Garen’s later account, she sold over a dozen stories (of which I have found five), some of which were reprinted.  Apparently, she had no other job at the time.  Her first sale—and first hundred dollars ever earned—came from the second story she sold to Anthony Boucher at F&SF.  (This was “Extra-Curricular.”)  She had to do three rewrites.  At the time, Drussai also began auditing courses at San Francisco State University, which fed her love of learning but left her no better off when she and Kirk divorced and she was left to support Milo.  (Who was, she said, ten years-old, which puts the divorce at about 1959.)

She did indeed end up in Southern California again, where she had a “managerial position” (likely this was running the coat check) and happened onto the UCLA campus.  Vowing to return to academe, she applied at Santa Monica Junior College and spent six years getting her bachelor’s—so she was in school from 1974 to 1980.  During this time, she also wrote a four-hundred page novel, although this remains unpublished.

I contacted the California State Military Museum in Sacramento to see if I could get more information on Robert Barbour Johnson's (short) stint in the army during World War II.

According to Dan Sebby, Director and Curator, the unit to which Johnson was assigned--Service Command Unit (SCU) 1952) was the permanent garrisoning party stationed at Fort Rosecrans, and so Johnson would have been involved not with the artillery batteries that were stationed at the Fort but to housekeeping services.

I just came across a story by Garen Drussai that is not included in any of the usual on-line bibliographies.  It’s called “Sugar Puss.”  I haven’t figured out the date of publication yet.

I found “Sugar Puss” in Sir! Droll Stories, a 1967 collection of tales that ran in the magazine Sir! During its first twenty-five years.  Sir! Belongs to a class of magazines that was important to me for reconstructing the history of Bigfoot, a genre known as men’s adventure magazines.  Unlike the sci-fi and mystery pulps, these have not attracted many collectors—they’re largely considered embarrassing—and so I have not yet found any bibliographies.

There are a few enthusiasts, however, and these offer some clue.  Bill Devine put together a great checklist of magazines in 1997; it was printed in Adam Parfrey’s 2003 It’s a Man’s World.  According to Devine, Sir! Was put out by Volitant publishing.  In the 1950s, it was a true adventure magazine, in the mold of Argosy or Blue Book—and so like the pulps, but bigger, glossier.  In 1963 it switched to a pin-up format, and it is clear that Drussai’s story came from this era: so between 1963 and 1967.

The tale is about Vic, an office worker who likes to play at being Casanova, constantly propositioning his secretary, who he calls “Sugar Puss.”  He is married to Evelyn, an unattractive, overweight homemaker.  (More than any of her science fiction stories, this one trades in traditional gender stereotypes.)  Vic and Evelyn enjoy an active sex life—whenever he comes home and calls her “Sugar Puss,” Evelyn knows that they will make love that night.  (But only after dinner.)

It turns out that Vic keeps his sex life active by always imagining Evelyn as someone different—sometimes as his secretary, sometimes as a starlet—and acts out a little drama that Evelyn is unaware of: although she does find the constant variety in their lovemaking exciting.  Sometimes Vic is strong, sometimes romantic, sometimes quiet, sometimes loud.

There is not much to the story.  I suppose it is supposed to be scandalous, but in today’s terms it is laughable.  Drussai, though, gives it a little twist at the end—not enough to redeem the story, but enough to show it’s genealogy.  The story is not Fortean nor, strictly speaking, is it science fiction, but it’s structure is resembles the stories that appeared in F&SF.

Vic’s secretary finally takes him seriously, and for the first time ever he sets out to cheat on his wife.  He meets the secretary, calls her “Sugar Puss”—and then cannot stop imagining her as . . . Evelyn!  Fat, unattractive Evelyn.  He busts out of the room and returns home, determined to never cheat again, except in his own mind.

There are other influences one might guess at in a story like this.  Delving into the imagination of a man during sex recalls the Kinsey Report from 1948.  One might also see the story as a traditional confessional story, with the genders reversed: Vic Rebels, is Ruined, and Redeeemed.  The story also hints at—though does not explore—the effect of imagination on relationships, which I get the feeling was starting to be of concern to mainstream writers about this time.  (Think of John Updike).

At any rate, it’s a little more information about Garen Drussai.       

What was going on at MacNichol’s Pencraft University?  I found a glimpse into its actions through Doubt.  Apparently, MacNichol was using Fort’s books to teach writing.  Exactly how is unclear, although I suspect that he may have used them help students generate story ideas.  Certainly, Robert Barbour Johnson thought the books were good for that.

MacNichol was also using General Semantics.  Indeed, he gave a paper at a General Semantics conference, “Experiments with a Simplified Method in Teaching General Semantics to Writers.”  Again, exactly how he used General Semantics is unknown.  And I don’t know more than a glossing of General Semantics, but there seems to have been a fairly strong connection between it and Forteanism.

Tiffany Thayer was initially dismissive, but then became enthusiastic, as did a number of science fiction writers with Fortean connections.  Certainly, there seems to be an elective affinity between General Semantics and Forteanism, if I understand General Semantics correctly.

General Semantics was a philosophy developed by Alfred Korzybski in the first half of the twentieth century that was based on the premise that human thinking is limited by the structure of the brain and the languages human use.  This could explain Fortean events as, for example, irruptions from a universe that could not be fully comprehended by the brain or fully explained by language.