 So what did Lamantia mean when he wrote that he had died in 1945? Certainly, part of it may have been his break with surrealism. He had invested a lot of himself into the movement, had defined himself as a revolutionary—both socialist and surrealist—and seeing this movement flounder would have been difficult. But he did not act like a dead man: he continued to study and investigate other forms of cultural radicalism.
Add Comment  In New York, Lamantia found two mentors, Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler. It is worth noting here that New York surrealists were fascinated by H. P. Lovecraft, as Lamantia had been (and probably still was). The issue of VVV following the one that first published Lamantia, in fact, had a pioneering study in Lovecraft’s work by Robert Allerton Parker called “Such Pulp as Dreams Are Made of.” According to Franklin Rosemont, the works of Lovecraft and his circle are a “central source” for surrealists. During his time here, Lamantia was exploring a kind of automatic writing, his poems held together by the hidden—esoteric, occult, one might say—connections between otherwise dissimilar images. The poems he wrote are, in a very real sense, impenetrable. Images are repeated—especially fire, rape, hair, clowns, the moon—but they are not subject to textual exegesis. They are meant to experienced—to be entered and to enter the reader. The poems that came out of this period were variously collected in his Erotic Poems (1946), Touch of the Marvelous (1966; 1974), and Selected Poems (1967). Potted biographies of Lamantia have it that he broke from surrealism around 1945, after having found it stagnant. His papers at the University of California Berkeley give a more . . . dramatic . . . interpretation to this period. An undated autobiographical note, probably written around 1961 or 1962, offers this brief biographical nugget: Born Oct 23, 1927. Died 1945. Resurrected 1954. Dying, it must be admitted, is something different than finding a particular artistic movement decadent and returning home.  According to Miriam Allen de Ford, Jackson reviewed Fort’s Wild Talents, which came out in June 1932—a month or so after Fort’s death. De Ford mentions the review in her biography of Fort written for Boucher’s Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction; she did not give any bibliographical information, however, and I have been unable to locate it. I looked through the San Francisco Chronicle for June 1932; as well, librarians at the California State Library compiled an index to the Chronicle, and there is no listing for a review of Wild Talents. (There is for Fort’s collected works, though.) It is entirely possible that Jackson published it elsewhere, but I don’t know its location. Assuming it exists, though, that dates Jackson’s awareness of Fort to the early 1930s, just after he joined the Chronicle, at the very least. What is known is that his interest in Fort became public (again?)—and positive—in the early 1940s, first with the aforementioned review of Fort’s collected works, introduced, edited, and indexed by Tiffany Thayer and published by Henry Holt. Jackson took the opportunity of the publication as an excuse to introduce Fort and his ideas to a wide world, making it clear that he was a Fortean “in spirit” if not “in fact,” as he put it in his “Bookman’s Daily Notebook” on 1 May 1941 (p. 17). Having now read this article—which is also referenced by de Ford in her biography—it is clear that Jackson’s interpretation of Fort influenced de Ford greatly. Both saw Fort the man as relatively uninteresting—at least they didn’t find much in his biography to note. Like so many others, they were attracted by his ideas. Jackson characterized Fort as “The Man Who Kept Saying ‘No!’” He stood against scientists who made too positive declarations, Jackson thought, and pointed out that there were yet many unexplained things in this world, “hushed up” by scientists because they did not fit into contemporary theories. There’s a certain truth to this, of course, but seeing Fort as only a compiler of the odd ignores his humor and his alternate theories—both of which influenced later thinkers more than the collecting. Jackson, though, does point to some of these other parts of Fort, comparing him to Rabelais at one point, and noting that while many may not like his writing style—and may therefore dismiss him as sane—others will entertain the teasing thought that perhaps Fort is the only one who is sane, the rest of the world crazy. Those who think so, he says, have “made the first step to becoming a Fortean, because” they have shifted into a new dimension and asked, “What if?” (Not coincidentally, a central question in science fiction.) To those, he recommends Thayer’s Fortean Society which he—at least at this relatively early date—saw as having “no ax to grind” and “no other purpose” than making people reconsider received opinions. Jackson had reason to return to Fort the following year. He was editing and introducing a collection of Ambrose Bierce’s short stories called Tales of Soldiers and Civilians. The book came out in 1943, but the introduction suggests that it was written in 1942. Jackson begins the introduction by considering Bierce’s mysterious end: on 26 December 1913 he crossed into Mexico and was never seen from again. This disappearance, Jackson notes, had become more famous than Bierce’s writings, with plenty of people speculating on the writer’s final days. Jackson obliquely references Robert Heinlein’s novella "Lost Legacy" published in 1941, which had Bierce joining the Lemurians on Mt. Shasta. Jackson suggested Fort’s “mystical” explanation was better. Noting that Bierce disappeared about the same time as someone named Ambrose Small, Fort impishly suggested that perhaps there was an Ambrose collector about. Though only a small comment, the introduction shows a familiarity with Fort and science fiction, and this before it is generally supposed that Jackson and Boucher met. Note that Heinlein’s tale appeared in Super Science Stories, not exactly top-flight science fiction (and was published under the name Lyle Monroe, I believe: see illustration). We do know that Boucher and Jackson had befriended by the following year--1943—and Fort seemed to be part of that friendship, or least led them in a parallel direction. As mentioned before, Boucher became interested in reports that stones were falling from the sky over Oakland. Jackson, too, had his curiosity piqued and mentioned the stones in his “Bookman’s Daily Notebook” on 1 September 1943. He used the reports as another opportunity to introduce Fort to a public that had not properly attended the writer. This article evinced a more expansive understanding of Fort, which may reflect Boucher’s influence, Jackson’s development, or his willingness to go further in a second piece. At any rate, Jackson started by describing Fort as a clip collector who wanted to encourage skepticism of science. He mentioned, again, Thayer and the Fortean Society, again lauding them as carrying on Fort’s work, singling out Thayer’s introduction to the collected works as an excellent encapsulation of the Fortean approach to life. (Boucher did not share this enthusiasm for Thayer’s introduction; at least by the 1950s—after Thayer had made many enemies—he compared it to Thayer’s earlier introduction to Lo! And found it lacking that Fortean je ne sais quoi.) Miriam Allen de Ford praised the article in a letter to Boucher and hoped it would gain Fort more readers. But Jackson did not stop at this conventional—one is tempted to same provincial—interpretation of Fort. He went on to praise Fort’s Rabelaisian exaggerations: “He juggled paradoxes and played games with words—even with sentence structure,” Jackson wrote. “But you’d better read him,” he admonished. “While you’re reading you won’t be sure if you’re on your head or heels. But then Fort knew that. He wrote to shake up the reader. He does.” There’s an echo of Maynard Shipley’s comment that reading Fort is like riding a comment. But while Shipley is loathe to take any of Fort’s theorizing seriously and spends time defending science against what he sees as Fort’s naiveté, Jackson eschews any such defense of science. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it’s possible to see a transition taking place here, from the Bay Area provincial interpretation of Fort to the looser, more radical understanding championed by Bay Area Forteans in the years after World War II. It is tempting to suggest, as well, that World War II itself mencouraged this new interpretation: the war made it seem that much more likely that humans were, indeed, property; that sinister forces controlled the world; that science would doom us all and that there needed to be not just new facts, but new theories. Better to take a Fortean approach—to note that possible interpretation, leave it hanging for contemplation, but be ready to dismiss it as only fiction: another story we tell ourselves to make sense of a world that is always beyond our full comprehension.  The poet Philip Lamantia was not only interested in Forteanism—his life, with its lost works and drastic changes of viewpoint—is itself almost a Fortean artifact. Lamantia was born in San Francisco on 23 October 1927 to Nunzio and Mary Tarantino Lamantia, both of whom had emigrated from Sicily and settled in with San Francisco’s Italian community. He was interested in poetry from a young age—but also in the growing mass culture of the time. He took great enjoyment in radio plays—he called them “A child’s bed of sirens” later in life. Lamantia also delighted in comics—and the weird. A scrapbook in his papers at UC Berkeley, apparently put together when he was about twelve, included numerous cut-outs from Ripley’s Believe It or Not comics. In junior high school, he started reading Poe and Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith. According to some reports, these enthusiasms had him tossed out of school for “intellectual delinquency.” When he was fourteen, he saw the surrealist works of Dali and Miró at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art. It was a signal moment. He read through all the works on surrealism available to him, eventually quitting school for New York, where he was welcomed enthusiastically by Andre Breton and other European exiles who had fled the war and Nazism for safer shores. He first published a poem in View and the surrealist organ VVV when he was only fifteen. At the time, it seems, Lamantia was a committed materialist. In a series of lecturing letters to George Leite, he complained that Circle was too eclectic and tended to publish poor work. Surrealists, by contrast, had a definite agenda. Surrealism, he said, is based on materialism and is uninterested in mysticism or religion. But it is fascinated by magic: because magic preceded mysticism and was a way of manipulating the universe. Science was thus its heir. Mysticism, he said, supplicates, while magic transforms: it was revolutionary, and he was interested in revolution. He disavowed any connection with Stalinism but was in sympathy with the Trotskyites.  Although not as deeply influenced by Charles Fort as some of the other Bay Area Forteans, Joseph Henry Jackson can be seen as central to the Fortean scene.
Jackson was born 21 July 1894 in New Jersey. He was educated on that side of the continent and migrated to California shortly after the Great War. It is not clear to me if he served, although he did register. The 1920 census has him in Berkeley, California, living with his younger brother and mother (who herself had emigrated from Scotland). Jackson had “none” listed as his job, as did his mother. His brother, Gordon was an officer in the U.S. Navy, which may be what prompted the move in the first place. Jackson lived in Berkeley until he died in 1955. Speaking of Charles Fort and locked-room mysteries, here we have an excellent example of the intertwining: C. Daly King’s Obelists Fly High (1935).
King himself, from what I can quickly glean, was an interesting character, an unorthodox psychologist, mystery writer, and something of a theosophist in the Oudpensky tradition. But more on him later, as we move East (and as I more thoroughly research him). For our purposes, his book is interesting because it appealed to Anthony Boucher, and so can be used to understand how Boucher—and through him, other Bay Area writers—made use of Fortean ideas. Boucher was a proponent of the book. For example, when Willy Ley—the rocket sc eintist and science writer—wrote him in 1942 asking Boucher to guide him through the thickets of science fiction, pointing out the most interesting bits, he recommended a look at King’s book as it “contains much entertaining commentary on Charles Fort.” To another correspondent and obvious Fortean—Gray Chandler Briggs, a medical doctor and roentologist from St. Louis, he wrote, “Have you read G. Daly King’s OBELISTS FLY HIGH, with the gorgeous minor character who keeps trying to solve the mystery by Fortian methods?” Boucher’s description of the Fortean connections of King’s book, though, undersells how important Fort is to the plot. The story concerns Michael Lord, a New York City police officer, who is charged with protecting a surgeon on a plane trip across the country. The surgeon is off to operate on the Secretary of Defense (who is also his brother) and has received a death threat: he will die at noon central time. And that he seems to do, upon sniffing from a glass bulb Lord hands to him. (The bulb was supposed to contain a gas that helped with nausea.) As it turns out [SPOILER ALERT] Miriam Allen de Ford and Maynard Shipley discovered Charles Fort in 1921. De Ford was at a library in Oakland, where she came across Fort’s The Book of the Damned. It had been published two years before. She flipped through the book, found it intriguing, and took it home to Shipley, in Sausalito. “My husband and I sat up all night, reading the book aloud to each other, unable to put it down,” she wrote later.
What was the attraction? Shipley was primarily drawn to the catalog of odd facts—he had little time for Fort’s theories, whether meant as jokes or not. Although obviously a committed scientist, Shipley was open to expanding the known laws to account for unusual phenomena. For instance, in 1919—the same year Fort published The Book of the Damned—he investigated Dr. Albert Abrams for The Scientific American. Abrams was a San Francisco doctor who claimed amazing results with “electronic medicine.” At first, Shipley—who de Ford admits several times was quite naïve—accepted Abrams findings. Eventually, though, he concluded that the doctor was both a charlatan and a dupe. In her biography of him, de Ford writes that he had several unusual experiences himself. His house in Mill Valley, for instance, was haunted. She said,  In historian Kenneth Starr’s categorization, “Provincial” (or “High Provincial”) San Francisco preceded the “Baghdad by the Bay” image that evolved after World War II, but was never completely replaced by it. By Provincial, Starr means to invoke San Francisco’s status as the capital of the West. Provincial San Francisco is marked by certain professions: manufacturing, banking, law, insurance, shipping, government, and food processing. Provincials are also particular about class stratifications—in a way that Bohemians and the later Baghdadders were not. “All elites are obsessed with status,” Starr writes in Golden Dreams, “but in San Francisco—insecure, yet affluent and stylish—social maneuvering had long since become a blood sport.” The pressure from Baghdadders and the post-World War II changes also turned Provincials attention to the past, as a place to affirm the city’s status and the class stratifications. That did not mean provincials were opposed to change. Indeed, it was the business elite that stood for the destruction of the Montgomery Block and its replacement with the Trans-America building and parking lots. Bohemians were opposed to such changes—as well cross-town freeways and other modernizations. In conjunction with Provincial values, authors developed a particular literary style, probably best embodied by Frank Norris, who was both fascinated and repelled by the City’s businesses and Bohemia. This literature was characterized by naturalistic detail—Zola was an influence—that was alloyed with bits of the picturesque, whimsy, and the paranormal. Shipley and de Ford clearly fit into this mold, with their socialism (as opposed to the anarchism of Rexroth and others) and concern with class stratification as well as their focus on the naturalistic (science), leavened with an openness toward the new and unexplained.  De Ford and Shipley only stayed in the socialist party and San Francisco for a short time. They moved out of the city in 1920 for Sausalito. They left the Socialist Party in 1922, thinking it had moved too far right. While never a member of the communist party, de Ford believed in revolution, not reformation. After leaving the party, their activism slowed. (It was also curtailed by Shipley’s heart attack that year.) de Ford worked for the insurance company until 1923, when she was forced out because of her radical ties. She had been doing journalism even as a claims adjuster, though, and she continued that, along with other odd jobs. Shipley was lecturing. They also found Haldemann and Julius’s Little Blue Books, and both wrote a number of volumes. In 1924, their extra time became focused on the Science League, founded by Shipley to combat the spread of anti-evolutionist sentiment and laws. They continued with that until 1932. Shipley died in 1934. De Ford grieved in Hawaii for a time, visited her family in the East, and then returned to San Francisco. She continued to move from job to job and develop her writing. De Ford had been writing detective fiction for the pulps since the 1920s and was very interested in crime writing. She dabbled in true crime as well as writing about a number of leftist martyrs who had been wronged by the justice system. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, inspired by having typed up so much of Shipley’s science material, she drifted into science fiction, mentored by Anthony Boucher. By this point, she was living in one of the Provincial enclaves—the Ambassador Hotel—and writing full time.  Maynard Shipley was born on 1 December 1872 in Baltimore, Maryland. He was the fourth of six sons. Elmon Shipley, the family’s patriarch, could trace his American ancestors back to seventeenth-century Maryland. His mother, Sarah Armitage Jerome, came from a prominent Baltimore family. In Miriam Allen de Ford’s biography of Shipley, she wrote Elmon was “about as bad a husband and father as can be imagined—a domestic tyrant, a philanderer, and a paragon of refined selfishness.” Elmon made a good living and was religious for a time, but eventually moved into the wholesale liquor business, which had him out of church and becoming a free-thinker. This last influenced Maynard greatly. In 1887, Elmon deserted the family.
| AuthorI am a father, husband, and independent scholar living in Folsom California. I can be reached at joshuabbuhs_at_yahoo_dot_com.  ArchivesMay 2012 CategoriesAll |
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