In 1919, Ben Hecht reviewed Fort's Book of the Damned for the Chicago Daily News. It was later reprinted by Tiffany Thayer in The Fortean:
Phantasmagoriophobia
“I am the first disciple of Charles Fort. He has made a terrible onslaught upon the accumulated lunacy of fifty centuries. The onslaught will perish, The lunacy will survive, intrenching itself behind the derisive laughter of all good citizens. I, however, for one, rush to surrender my homage. Whatever the purpose of Charles Fort, he had delighted me beyond all men who have written books in this world. Mountebank or Messiah, it matters not. Henceforth I am a Fortean. If it has pleased Charles Fort to perpetrate a Gargantuan jest upon unsuspecting readers, all the better. If he has in all seriousness heralded forth the innermost truths of his soul, well and good. I offer him this testament. I believe.
Who is Charles Fort? Charles Fort is an inspired clown who, to the accompaniment of a gigantic snare drum, has bounded into the arena of science and let fly at the pontifical seats of wisdom with slapstick and bladder. He has plucked the false whiskers off the planets. He has reinvented a god. He has exposed the immemorial hoax that bears the name of sanity. In the light of all reason he stands--a gibbering idiot thumbing his nose at the awful presence of world intelligence.
It is all in the point of view. The point of view of Charles Fort is the point of view of the Mad Hatter and the Jack of Clubs. Science--a pompous imbecile with cigar box whiskers and a swivel tooth. Human reason--a stagnant dream overgrown with the moss of inertia. Modern Wisdom--the tragic puerility of a flickering match against the gulf of night. The Human Race--a faintly animated spawn muling at the end of an umbilical cord.
If I should attempt to record here the theories, the excited surmises, the nightmarish leaps, the sulphuric revels of the brain of Charles Fort I should achieve instant prominence as a humorist--an unconscious humorist, of course. Yet it is a deplorably selfish thing to deprive the heroic readers of Mr. Sell’s page the pleasure of a laugh. I therefore mention the fact that Charles Fort has to his, and incidentally my, satisfaction discovered that the moon is a salt mackerel and God is the grandfather of Ezra Pound. Further, he has discovered, to our satisfaction, that the interstellar spaces are full of gold and purple argosies, which carry grain between Mars and Saturn, that what is vulgarly conceived to be the vast unknown is as a matter of fact an aquarium curiously lacking in tadpoles. In short--and now we speak with the martyrlike whimsicality which will henceforth distinguish the utterances of all Forteans--Charles Fort has taken issue with the conventions astronomy, geology, anthropology, ethnology and philology, and shot the scientific basis of modern wisdom full of large, ugly holes--holes through which monstrous ideas poke their unearthly heads, through which awful shapes and demoniac colors whirl for an instant in an apocalyptic dance.
Is it true? Has science by a process of maniacal exclusion of telltale data, of telltale phenomena, foisted an algebraic Mother Goose upon the world in the name of Astronomy? Has reason by a process of bewildered refutation of significant, of vital evidence, buried itself in a morass of sterile superstition? Laughter--the immemorial laughter of today’s sanity--answers. I have a picture in my mind of Charles Fort standing with his thumb to his nose grinning back--no, laughing back. The laughter of the world at Charles Fort and all the other Forts who have been is the conventional guffaw--the croak out of the stagnant dream that calls itself reason. And the laughter of Charles Fort I, his disciple assure you is the shriek of the banshee that has ever haunted and troubled this dream.
The book into which Charles Fort has put his shriek is called The Book of the Damned. It is published by Boni & Liveright. Perhaps you have no time for such nonsense. You prefer the concrete eruditions of poppycockiana, political and moral perunas. If so you will ignore a delicious opportunity to laugh with or at Charles Fort. For it is written that the theory he has hurled into being is destined, like some phantom gargoyle, to perch itself astride every telescope and laboratory test tube in the land. For every five people who read this book four will go insane.”
Phantasmagoriophobia
“I am the first disciple of Charles Fort. He has made a terrible onslaught upon the accumulated lunacy of fifty centuries. The onslaught will perish, The lunacy will survive, intrenching itself behind the derisive laughter of all good citizens. I, however, for one, rush to surrender my homage. Whatever the purpose of Charles Fort, he had delighted me beyond all men who have written books in this world. Mountebank or Messiah, it matters not. Henceforth I am a Fortean. If it has pleased Charles Fort to perpetrate a Gargantuan jest upon unsuspecting readers, all the better. If he has in all seriousness heralded forth the innermost truths of his soul, well and good. I offer him this testament. I believe.
Who is Charles Fort? Charles Fort is an inspired clown who, to the accompaniment of a gigantic snare drum, has bounded into the arena of science and let fly at the pontifical seats of wisdom with slapstick and bladder. He has plucked the false whiskers off the planets. He has reinvented a god. He has exposed the immemorial hoax that bears the name of sanity. In the light of all reason he stands--a gibbering idiot thumbing his nose at the awful presence of world intelligence.
It is all in the point of view. The point of view of Charles Fort is the point of view of the Mad Hatter and the Jack of Clubs. Science--a pompous imbecile with cigar box whiskers and a swivel tooth. Human reason--a stagnant dream overgrown with the moss of inertia. Modern Wisdom--the tragic puerility of a flickering match against the gulf of night. The Human Race--a faintly animated spawn muling at the end of an umbilical cord.
If I should attempt to record here the theories, the excited surmises, the nightmarish leaps, the sulphuric revels of the brain of Charles Fort I should achieve instant prominence as a humorist--an unconscious humorist, of course. Yet it is a deplorably selfish thing to deprive the heroic readers of Mr. Sell’s page the pleasure of a laugh. I therefore mention the fact that Charles Fort has to his, and incidentally my, satisfaction discovered that the moon is a salt mackerel and God is the grandfather of Ezra Pound. Further, he has discovered, to our satisfaction, that the interstellar spaces are full of gold and purple argosies, which carry grain between Mars and Saturn, that what is vulgarly conceived to be the vast unknown is as a matter of fact an aquarium curiously lacking in tadpoles. In short--and now we speak with the martyrlike whimsicality which will henceforth distinguish the utterances of all Forteans--Charles Fort has taken issue with the conventions astronomy, geology, anthropology, ethnology and philology, and shot the scientific basis of modern wisdom full of large, ugly holes--holes through which monstrous ideas poke their unearthly heads, through which awful shapes and demoniac colors whirl for an instant in an apocalyptic dance.
Is it true? Has science by a process of maniacal exclusion of telltale data, of telltale phenomena, foisted an algebraic Mother Goose upon the world in the name of Astronomy? Has reason by a process of bewildered refutation of significant, of vital evidence, buried itself in a morass of sterile superstition? Laughter--the immemorial laughter of today’s sanity--answers. I have a picture in my mind of Charles Fort standing with his thumb to his nose grinning back--no, laughing back. The laughter of the world at Charles Fort and all the other Forts who have been is the conventional guffaw--the croak out of the stagnant dream that calls itself reason. And the laughter of Charles Fort I, his disciple assure you is the shriek of the banshee that has ever haunted and troubled this dream.
The book into which Charles Fort has put his shriek is called The Book of the Damned. It is published by Boni & Liveright. Perhaps you have no time for such nonsense. You prefer the concrete eruditions of poppycockiana, political and moral perunas. If so you will ignore a delicious opportunity to laugh with or at Charles Fort. For it is written that the theory he has hurled into being is destined, like some phantom gargoyle, to perch itself astride every telescope and laboratory test tube in the land. For every five people who read this book four will go insane.”
