Look at any mention of the Fortean Society, and it’s almost a guarantee that Alexander Woollcott will be listed as one of the founders. This claim isn’t exactly wrong—but it isn’t exactly right, either: Woollcott was a little late to the Society and, like J. David Stern, was quick to exit when, eleven years after the first meeting, Thayer took the Society in a political direction.
Born in 1887, Alec, as he came to be known, was raised in the Phalanx, the limping remains of a nineteenth-century socialist community in Colts Neck Township, New Jersey. Education there was informal, but Woollcott was well read. In New Jersey, and then again in Kansas City, Missouri, where his family moved when he was in high school, Woollcott was drawn to the arts—literature, writing, acting—and seen as something of a sissy, and, to resist this stereotype, stupidly got into many fights, in which he was beat quite handily. He went to a small liberal arts college in Hamilton, New York—he was so fond of the place, his remains are interred there—where he continued to develop his writing and acting skills. Through the devices of an older alum (and his future biographer), Woollcott got a job with the New York Times when he graduated—though he had to resign it shortly thereafter because of mumps. He did land a job in journalism eventually, though.
Although Woollcott did not qualify as a soldier, he joined the American efforts in the Great War, first working in a hospital, later transferred to Stars and Stripes. His letters from this time are amazingly vacant—not, primarily, because of the censors but merely because he did not have much to say. He also had not yet developed the wit for which he would become famous. But, he made a good contact—this may have been Woollcott’s greatest gift, at least early on, cultivating important friendships. Also working at Stars and Stripes was Harold Ross, who would become editor of The New Yorker after the War.
After the War, Alec returned to New York and found work as a drama critic. He became more adept at clever word play, too, and soon was known as a member of the Algonquin Round Table. His wit, though, may have ill-served him, even as he won plaudits. Samuel Hopkins, his biographer, suggests that Alec was consumed with a great amount of self-hatred (and suggests this may be from homosexual inclinations; although Alec had affairs with women, he never married)—and the self-hatred he covered with an acerbic personality. A friend said, “What began as a defense mechanism led to the invention of the almost wholly artificial character, Alexander Woollcott, persistently enacted before the world until it became a profitable investment.”
Beneath the facade, though, was a man drawn to the treacly, the nostalgic, and the maudlin. The persona, though, could turn off others—who did not recognize his jabs as meaningless effluvia, but took them seriously. In time, he would wear down Ross and others at The New Yorker (as well as other editors) with his constant squealing over editorial cuts, threatening to resign if he did not get his way, taking too long with revisions. He came to be known as “The Gila Monster” among editors. But still he prospered, writing for a number of important New York publications, including The New Yorker.
By his own admission, his work as a drama critic stunted his development as a writer—although this may be a case of Alec blaming the job for what were personal problems. But the mid-1920s saw him hit his professional stride. His letters from the time—scant, because he was in New York with most of those whom he considered friends—show him developing his style: a seemingly irrelevant anecdote, the connection to the thought at hand, and the devastating finishing line. But his letters, like his writing more generally, was . . . not quite vacuous, but akin to it. His profiles were expressions of enthusiasm, his journalism never defined by fidelity to facts, his reviews encomiums. His letters showed very little of anything beyond the superficial. No longer was he well-read: rather than read widely in the new literature, he returned, again and again, to his favorites, to Dickens and Austen.
In 1932, he confessed “You see I am not a book reviewer at all. For too many years I was a dramatic critic, a post nicely calculated to rot the mind. After my flight from Times Square, I invented this page in The New Yorker where, as a kind of town crier, I can say anything that is on my mind, The trouble is that there isn’t often much on it. But every once in a while I have the satisfaction, which is the breath of the journalist’s nostril, of hearing bells ring all over the country. Then I know that I have had the good fortune to say something which a lot of people had wanted to have said. Said for them, that is.”
As a reviewer, member of the Algonquin Table, and bon vivant, Woollcott had many friends in New York’s art community, chief among them probably Dorothy Parker, but he was also friendly with future members of the Fortean Society Ben Hecht, Theodore Dreiser, Booth Tarkington, and Charles Norris. He tirelessly promoted authors he liked, handing out their books, writing encomiums for them in his columns, thrusting them on influential friends. Well paid, he lost a lot in the stock market crash of 1929 but shrugged off the turn in fortune—he was never obsessed with money and, like both Tarkington and Harry Leon Wilson, incredibly generous. One of his favorite charities was one that raised dogs to help the blind—an issue especially close to his heart after Tarkington almost lost his vision in the late 1920s.
It was Tarkington who turned him onto dogs—in particular poodles, which became fashionable among the literary set. And it was Tarkington who, according to Alec, turned him on to Fort some time in the mid-1920s, 1924 or 1925, handing him a copy of The Book of the Damned. Thayer said that Woollcott gave out Fort’s books by the dozen. Woollcott was drawn to Fort by his epigrammatic writing style and the need for skepticism in this, the age of science. He wrote later, “Consider the spectacle of all America recently prostrate before the figure of Herr Einstein. There are not fifty men in this country capable of grasping just what it is that this German mathematician’s calculations and intuitions have brought him to. The rest of us have been told that it is something prodigiously important and profound and we accept that fact. I merely wish to suggest in this context, that when we accept it, we do so by a simple act of faith--accept it, that is, in exactly the same spirit that the medieval peasants did the story that the priest told them about Jonah and the whale.”
At base Fort may have charmed Woollcott because he tapped into his youth. Hopkins noted, “The principles, practices, and social status of the Phalanx powerfully affected Alexander Woollcott’s character, particularly upon the emotional side. He breathed in nonconformity with the soft air of his first habitat. Throughout his life he was a hot and often unreasoning partisan of the underdog, a passionate supporter of minority rights, a devoted crusader for free speech and independent thought.” Who was a bigger underdog than Fort, attacking science without the firm grounding of Christian philosophy? Who better expressed independent thought?
When Tiffany Thayer—at J. David Stern’s instigation—began to make plans for the Fortean Society in late 1930, Woollcott was not among those first named as founders. It was only after publicity for the Society started to emerge that Woollcott was announced as interested in the Society (probably at Thayer’s instigation). Woollcott was not present at the first—and only—meeting of the Fortean Society on 26 January 1931. However, near the end of the evening Thayer announced that both Woollcott and Harry Leon Wilson had joined.
By this time, Woollcott had recovered from the stock market crash. McCall’s paid him $2,500 each month for his column of reviews. (That’s over $38,000 in 2013-dollars!) Random House’s Bennett Cerf—certainly no fan of Alec—admitted that Woollcott could turn unknown books into bestsellers with his enthusiastic reviews. Woollcott did not get around to reviewing Fort’s Lo!—the raison d’être of the Fortean Society, after all—until the April issue, perhaps because he spent the early part of 1931 in Japan and China. He spent almost his entire column on it, though, and rehearsed Fort’s usual virtues, described the Society, and its various—and unlikely members.
Although it was in that review that Woollcott heralded the need for skeptics of science, there is a suggestion in his own biography that skepticism may not have been what held him to Fort any longer. He had spent five days on the Yellow Sea reading all 1,500 pages of H.G. Wells the science of life and had become an enthusiastic promoter of the book, speaking about iron his radio show and buying it for friends. Alec was sad that his own education had bypassed biology but glad to catch up (everything except the section on genetics was easy enough for him to follow). Wells, of course, disdained Fort—which doesn’t mean Woollcott necessarily followed him in that, but the point is that at the very time Woollcott was promoting Lo!, he was being seduced by science, finding it both fascinating and explicable. Later int he 1930s, he would become an enthusiastic promoter of Gustav Eckstein, a professor of physiology at the University of Cincinnati and author of a charming book on his life with the canaries that were his scientific subjects.
Also in 1931, he was entertaining a new enthusiasm one that would—unbeknownst to him—open up into a field of study decades hence. The September issue of The New Yorker carried his column on an urban legend—what Alec called folklore in the making. The article told the story of a girl who had dreamed, three times, of an ugly-faced hearse driver who asked if she was ready. When, visiting New York later on, she saw the same face on an elevator operator, and he asked if she was ready, she bolted—and saved her life. The elevator crashed and killed the riders. Woollcott would go on to write about several more such stories he had collected. There is a sense, then, he was doing exactly what Fort did: rescuing stories from being forgotten, putting them into print where they would be preserved. (Several were later collected in When Rome Burns, acknowledged by some folklorists to be among the first books on urban legends, though it did not include the elevator story.)
The connection to Fort is even stronger if a vanishing girl is taken into account. Dorothy Arnold was a New York socialite who famously disappeared while walking through Central Park in 1910. Fort coyly suggested there was a relationship between the vanishing and the appearance of a swan in the park that same day. Woollcott knew of Fort’s version of the story—he referenced it in his McCall’s review of Lo!—and he also used it to introduce a number of his recountings of urban legends. It could be, then, that Woollcott was beginning to see Fort in a new way: not as a gadfly of science—though he was certainly that—but a repository and communicator or folklore in the making. If interpretation is correct, then Woollcott would no longer have been concerned with the rightness of Fort’s views—he considered folklore necessarily false, often built on lies all the way down—but still enlightening.
After his review of Lo!, Woollcott did not publicly mention Fort again, as far as I can tell. He produced the collection of his essays, While Rome Burns, two readers of his favorite short stories for public consumption, and another for GIs heading off to World War II, but Fort was not noted. This quiet is particularly notable because through the 1930s Woollcott, much to the chagrin of his editors, was recycling previous material, stories about his friends, his dogs, his favorite mysteries. (That is, when he wasn’t ignoring his writing to act.) Eventually, his career was “saved” (in Hopkins’s phrase) by radio, and he had a chance to regale a new audience with his stories and reviews.
In 1937, Thayer, back from Hollywood, was gearing up for a re-invigorated Fortean Society. Dreiser was irritated, and his lawyer was considering legal maneuvers to stop Thayer and get back Charles Fort’s notes, which Thayer had absconded with: they had been willed to the Fortean Society, and he considered himself its true scion. As part of the investigation, Arthur Ross Leoanrd, esq., wrote to founding members of the Society and asked for their interpretation of the events of 1931. Contradicting himself, Woollcott, who had said in his McCall’s piece that the January meeting was to be the first annual, now said that the Fortean Society meeting had been a one-shot to publicize Lo!. He continued, “It was at Tiffany Thayer’s suggestion that I lent my name to the Fortean Society which was represented to me as a jocular organization designed chiefly to call attention to Mr. Fort’s forthcoming book. I have no evidence that the society still functions.”
That was in July. Two months later, the first issue of the Fortean Society Magazine appeared, and Woollcott was the featured founder. Occasionally it is incorrectly stated that he edited this issue or another one, but according to Woollcott he did not even read the first issue of the Fortean Society. When the omnibus edition of Fort’s writings came out in 1941, Thayer contemplated having Woollcott promote it at Ben Abrams’s Argus Book Store in Chicago, but Abrams was dyspeptic about the book, and never coordinated an event. (In his own review of the collected books, Hecht viciously said that the Forteans Societies only apostles were the footling Dresier and Woollcott—“that fearless champion of the obvious is lying fallow just now, waiting for some Tweedledum to defend.”) Alec continued to ignore the Fortean Society and Thayer and his publications until February 1942, when he came across the sixth issue and Thayer’s “Circus Day.”
According to Hopkins, Woollcott was a pacifist. There is little to support that contention, given his volunteering for the Great War, and when World War II seemed certain, Woollcott wholly supported the Allies. He told William Allen White—the newspaperman and opponent of American isolationists—“Perhaps it is the doom, the obligation and the privilege of each generation to lay its own Hitler by the heels, and since England and France have put their hands to this task, the most that we can do to help them is the least we should do. I am one of those who believe that by by such help, given now and without stint, we shall best defend all that we are and most of what we have. It seems to me that the isolationists are not only faithless to this country’s tradition, but frivolously indifferent to the freedom and well-being of all Americans for a hundred years to come.”
That there was a certain amount of conservatism to this view can be seen in a letter that he wrote to Tarkington, in which he compared Nazism to Christian Science: alternative theories, underdogs, these no longer thrilled him as they once had. Now they were the babblings of idiots. “And have you ever noticed how closely ‘Mein Kampf,’ as a phenomenon in publishing, parallels a somewhat earlier inspired work called ‘Science and Health?’ Each was a wild illiterate rehash of work by others. Each was carried to an enormous circulation, not because anyone read it with pleasure but because its author had arrived at a position where the reading of it was compulsory. Each eventually underwent a revising process at the hands of a ghost writer. It was Mrs. Eddy who thought of making a textual change each year so that the faithful would have to keep buying new editions. And she, too, was known as ‘The Leader.’ In fact, such entranced followers as the late Mrs. Stetson used to start their letters to her (as I would mine to the late Edmund Lester Pearson) ‘My Precious Leader.’”
Science was no longer something to be mocked, but a key to victory. In 1941 he wrote, “If I were regularly or intermittently on any General Electric program, I think I should make a report at least once every five weeks from Schenectady, throwing each time into narrative form in language comprehensible to laymen, some of the wonders that are being accomplished there. For that company at Schenectady is just as much a university as Harvard or Chicago and I think it might be said that the people have a right to hear what is going on there.” Alec did not get to do the investigations into General Electric’s inventions, but he was a a promoter of the war in his radio gigs.
And so when he read “Circus Day is Over,” he was apoplectic. He wrote Tarkington,
“My dear Mr. Tarkington:
“You and I (to say nothing of Harry Leon Wilson) are among the nine men listed at the masthead of ‘The Fortean Magazine”, which is described as the official organ of the Fortean Society and which is edited by Tiffany Thayer, an erratic author who lacks either intelligence or integrity and perhaps both. It is possible that we are listed as founders of the society, but the chance layman would think of us, I am afraid, as associate editors.
The issue dated January, 1942 is the only one I have ever examined and its leading article signed by Thayer is a piece of such vicious folly that I would as soon be left in the position of endorsing, sight unseen, the works of George Sylvester Viereck.
My first step is indicated by the letter of which I enclose a carbon. Thayer’s address, in case you want to follow suit, is Box 192, Grand Central Annex, New York. Perhaps I should condense his article for you, in case that issue of ‘The Fortean Magazine” escapes your attention. The nubbin of it concerns the present Duke of Windsor. That he renounced his birthright for the love of a woman was given given out by the lie-mongering press. ‘Who was present in Windsor Castle to hear the leaders of the world’s great nations--the United States, Germany, his own England, Italy, and Japan--tell Edward Windsor that a repetition of 1914-1918 was going to be necessary to prevent the people of the world from claiming their birthright?’ Etc.etc.”
And to Thayer he said,
“My dear Thayer:
The Fortean Society is an organization in the proceedings of which, if any, I have never taken part. While the old man was still alive and might enjoy being made a fuss over, I did not object to being listed as a founder. But today I happened to read the January issue of The Fortean Society Magazine and your own signed piece with which you lead the issue. I dislike being associated with such twaddle and now ask you remove my name from the unidentified list of nine names which you carry on your masthead and which might be thought of by the unwary as a list of associate editors.
I am willing to go to the trouble and expense of bringing action against you to compel your doing so, but must assume that you will drop it out because I ask you to.
Will you let me know about this by a note dropped to me at this address?”
Apparently unhurt by the swipe that Hecht took at him, Woollcott also wrote to the first Fortean, telling him that, apparently Thayer had been getting criticism from among the Forteans for Woollcott’s support of the war an “has promised to strike my name from the masthead.” Now that he had more free time—he joked—Alec offered to become the charter member in “any Hechtean Society now forming.”
Thayer honored his request. When the next issue of The Fortean Society Magazine appeared, in June 1943, Woollcott was no longer listed among the founders. There were now only seven: Hecht, Tarkington, Sussman, Rascoe, Powys, Wilson, and Thayer himself. He wouldn’t be listed among the Forteans again until 1944, and even then as something of a footnote. He was a founder, but his place had been taken by Scott Nearing.
Woollcott knew none this, though, just as he would know none of the subsequent celebrations of the Fortean Society mentioning him as a prominent member. While doing a radio program on the rise of Hitler, Woollcott suffered a heart attack and died a few hours later at the hospital.
Born in 1887, Alec, as he came to be known, was raised in the Phalanx, the limping remains of a nineteenth-century socialist community in Colts Neck Township, New Jersey. Education there was informal, but Woollcott was well read. In New Jersey, and then again in Kansas City, Missouri, where his family moved when he was in high school, Woollcott was drawn to the arts—literature, writing, acting—and seen as something of a sissy, and, to resist this stereotype, stupidly got into many fights, in which he was beat quite handily. He went to a small liberal arts college in Hamilton, New York—he was so fond of the place, his remains are interred there—where he continued to develop his writing and acting skills. Through the devices of an older alum (and his future biographer), Woollcott got a job with the New York Times when he graduated—though he had to resign it shortly thereafter because of mumps. He did land a job in journalism eventually, though.
Although Woollcott did not qualify as a soldier, he joined the American efforts in the Great War, first working in a hospital, later transferred to Stars and Stripes. His letters from this time are amazingly vacant—not, primarily, because of the censors but merely because he did not have much to say. He also had not yet developed the wit for which he would become famous. But, he made a good contact—this may have been Woollcott’s greatest gift, at least early on, cultivating important friendships. Also working at Stars and Stripes was Harold Ross, who would become editor of The New Yorker after the War.
After the War, Alec returned to New York and found work as a drama critic. He became more adept at clever word play, too, and soon was known as a member of the Algonquin Round Table. His wit, though, may have ill-served him, even as he won plaudits. Samuel Hopkins, his biographer, suggests that Alec was consumed with a great amount of self-hatred (and suggests this may be from homosexual inclinations; although Alec had affairs with women, he never married)—and the self-hatred he covered with an acerbic personality. A friend said, “What began as a defense mechanism led to the invention of the almost wholly artificial character, Alexander Woollcott, persistently enacted before the world until it became a profitable investment.”
Beneath the facade, though, was a man drawn to the treacly, the nostalgic, and the maudlin. The persona, though, could turn off others—who did not recognize his jabs as meaningless effluvia, but took them seriously. In time, he would wear down Ross and others at The New Yorker (as well as other editors) with his constant squealing over editorial cuts, threatening to resign if he did not get his way, taking too long with revisions. He came to be known as “The Gila Monster” among editors. But still he prospered, writing for a number of important New York publications, including The New Yorker.
By his own admission, his work as a drama critic stunted his development as a writer—although this may be a case of Alec blaming the job for what were personal problems. But the mid-1920s saw him hit his professional stride. His letters from the time—scant, because he was in New York with most of those whom he considered friends—show him developing his style: a seemingly irrelevant anecdote, the connection to the thought at hand, and the devastating finishing line. But his letters, like his writing more generally, was . . . not quite vacuous, but akin to it. His profiles were expressions of enthusiasm, his journalism never defined by fidelity to facts, his reviews encomiums. His letters showed very little of anything beyond the superficial. No longer was he well-read: rather than read widely in the new literature, he returned, again and again, to his favorites, to Dickens and Austen.
In 1932, he confessed “You see I am not a book reviewer at all. For too many years I was a dramatic critic, a post nicely calculated to rot the mind. After my flight from Times Square, I invented this page in The New Yorker where, as a kind of town crier, I can say anything that is on my mind, The trouble is that there isn’t often much on it. But every once in a while I have the satisfaction, which is the breath of the journalist’s nostril, of hearing bells ring all over the country. Then I know that I have had the good fortune to say something which a lot of people had wanted to have said. Said for them, that is.”
As a reviewer, member of the Algonquin Table, and bon vivant, Woollcott had many friends in New York’s art community, chief among them probably Dorothy Parker, but he was also friendly with future members of the Fortean Society Ben Hecht, Theodore Dreiser, Booth Tarkington, and Charles Norris. He tirelessly promoted authors he liked, handing out their books, writing encomiums for them in his columns, thrusting them on influential friends. Well paid, he lost a lot in the stock market crash of 1929 but shrugged off the turn in fortune—he was never obsessed with money and, like both Tarkington and Harry Leon Wilson, incredibly generous. One of his favorite charities was one that raised dogs to help the blind—an issue especially close to his heart after Tarkington almost lost his vision in the late 1920s.
It was Tarkington who turned him onto dogs—in particular poodles, which became fashionable among the literary set. And it was Tarkington who, according to Alec, turned him on to Fort some time in the mid-1920s, 1924 or 1925, handing him a copy of The Book of the Damned. Thayer said that Woollcott gave out Fort’s books by the dozen. Woollcott was drawn to Fort by his epigrammatic writing style and the need for skepticism in this, the age of science. He wrote later, “Consider the spectacle of all America recently prostrate before the figure of Herr Einstein. There are not fifty men in this country capable of grasping just what it is that this German mathematician’s calculations and intuitions have brought him to. The rest of us have been told that it is something prodigiously important and profound and we accept that fact. I merely wish to suggest in this context, that when we accept it, we do so by a simple act of faith--accept it, that is, in exactly the same spirit that the medieval peasants did the story that the priest told them about Jonah and the whale.”
At base Fort may have charmed Woollcott because he tapped into his youth. Hopkins noted, “The principles, practices, and social status of the Phalanx powerfully affected Alexander Woollcott’s character, particularly upon the emotional side. He breathed in nonconformity with the soft air of his first habitat. Throughout his life he was a hot and often unreasoning partisan of the underdog, a passionate supporter of minority rights, a devoted crusader for free speech and independent thought.” Who was a bigger underdog than Fort, attacking science without the firm grounding of Christian philosophy? Who better expressed independent thought?
When Tiffany Thayer—at J. David Stern’s instigation—began to make plans for the Fortean Society in late 1930, Woollcott was not among those first named as founders. It was only after publicity for the Society started to emerge that Woollcott was announced as interested in the Society (probably at Thayer’s instigation). Woollcott was not present at the first—and only—meeting of the Fortean Society on 26 January 1931. However, near the end of the evening Thayer announced that both Woollcott and Harry Leon Wilson had joined.
By this time, Woollcott had recovered from the stock market crash. McCall’s paid him $2,500 each month for his column of reviews. (That’s over $38,000 in 2013-dollars!) Random House’s Bennett Cerf—certainly no fan of Alec—admitted that Woollcott could turn unknown books into bestsellers with his enthusiastic reviews. Woollcott did not get around to reviewing Fort’s Lo!—the raison d’être of the Fortean Society, after all—until the April issue, perhaps because he spent the early part of 1931 in Japan and China. He spent almost his entire column on it, though, and rehearsed Fort’s usual virtues, described the Society, and its various—and unlikely members.
Although it was in that review that Woollcott heralded the need for skeptics of science, there is a suggestion in his own biography that skepticism may not have been what held him to Fort any longer. He had spent five days on the Yellow Sea reading all 1,500 pages of H.G. Wells the science of life and had become an enthusiastic promoter of the book, speaking about iron his radio show and buying it for friends. Alec was sad that his own education had bypassed biology but glad to catch up (everything except the section on genetics was easy enough for him to follow). Wells, of course, disdained Fort—which doesn’t mean Woollcott necessarily followed him in that, but the point is that at the very time Woollcott was promoting Lo!, he was being seduced by science, finding it both fascinating and explicable. Later int he 1930s, he would become an enthusiastic promoter of Gustav Eckstein, a professor of physiology at the University of Cincinnati and author of a charming book on his life with the canaries that were his scientific subjects.
Also in 1931, he was entertaining a new enthusiasm one that would—unbeknownst to him—open up into a field of study decades hence. The September issue of The New Yorker carried his column on an urban legend—what Alec called folklore in the making. The article told the story of a girl who had dreamed, three times, of an ugly-faced hearse driver who asked if she was ready. When, visiting New York later on, she saw the same face on an elevator operator, and he asked if she was ready, she bolted—and saved her life. The elevator crashed and killed the riders. Woollcott would go on to write about several more such stories he had collected. There is a sense, then, he was doing exactly what Fort did: rescuing stories from being forgotten, putting them into print where they would be preserved. (Several were later collected in When Rome Burns, acknowledged by some folklorists to be among the first books on urban legends, though it did not include the elevator story.)
The connection to Fort is even stronger if a vanishing girl is taken into account. Dorothy Arnold was a New York socialite who famously disappeared while walking through Central Park in 1910. Fort coyly suggested there was a relationship between the vanishing and the appearance of a swan in the park that same day. Woollcott knew of Fort’s version of the story—he referenced it in his McCall’s review of Lo!—and he also used it to introduce a number of his recountings of urban legends. It could be, then, that Woollcott was beginning to see Fort in a new way: not as a gadfly of science—though he was certainly that—but a repository and communicator or folklore in the making. If interpretation is correct, then Woollcott would no longer have been concerned with the rightness of Fort’s views—he considered folklore necessarily false, often built on lies all the way down—but still enlightening.
After his review of Lo!, Woollcott did not publicly mention Fort again, as far as I can tell. He produced the collection of his essays, While Rome Burns, two readers of his favorite short stories for public consumption, and another for GIs heading off to World War II, but Fort was not noted. This quiet is particularly notable because through the 1930s Woollcott, much to the chagrin of his editors, was recycling previous material, stories about his friends, his dogs, his favorite mysteries. (That is, when he wasn’t ignoring his writing to act.) Eventually, his career was “saved” (in Hopkins’s phrase) by radio, and he had a chance to regale a new audience with his stories and reviews.
In 1937, Thayer, back from Hollywood, was gearing up for a re-invigorated Fortean Society. Dreiser was irritated, and his lawyer was considering legal maneuvers to stop Thayer and get back Charles Fort’s notes, which Thayer had absconded with: they had been willed to the Fortean Society, and he considered himself its true scion. As part of the investigation, Arthur Ross Leoanrd, esq., wrote to founding members of the Society and asked for their interpretation of the events of 1931. Contradicting himself, Woollcott, who had said in his McCall’s piece that the January meeting was to be the first annual, now said that the Fortean Society meeting had been a one-shot to publicize Lo!. He continued, “It was at Tiffany Thayer’s suggestion that I lent my name to the Fortean Society which was represented to me as a jocular organization designed chiefly to call attention to Mr. Fort’s forthcoming book. I have no evidence that the society still functions.”
That was in July. Two months later, the first issue of the Fortean Society Magazine appeared, and Woollcott was the featured founder. Occasionally it is incorrectly stated that he edited this issue or another one, but according to Woollcott he did not even read the first issue of the Fortean Society. When the omnibus edition of Fort’s writings came out in 1941, Thayer contemplated having Woollcott promote it at Ben Abrams’s Argus Book Store in Chicago, but Abrams was dyspeptic about the book, and never coordinated an event. (In his own review of the collected books, Hecht viciously said that the Forteans Societies only apostles were the footling Dresier and Woollcott—“that fearless champion of the obvious is lying fallow just now, waiting for some Tweedledum to defend.”) Alec continued to ignore the Fortean Society and Thayer and his publications until February 1942, when he came across the sixth issue and Thayer’s “Circus Day.”
According to Hopkins, Woollcott was a pacifist. There is little to support that contention, given his volunteering for the Great War, and when World War II seemed certain, Woollcott wholly supported the Allies. He told William Allen White—the newspaperman and opponent of American isolationists—“Perhaps it is the doom, the obligation and the privilege of each generation to lay its own Hitler by the heels, and since England and France have put their hands to this task, the most that we can do to help them is the least we should do. I am one of those who believe that by by such help, given now and without stint, we shall best defend all that we are and most of what we have. It seems to me that the isolationists are not only faithless to this country’s tradition, but frivolously indifferent to the freedom and well-being of all Americans for a hundred years to come.”
That there was a certain amount of conservatism to this view can be seen in a letter that he wrote to Tarkington, in which he compared Nazism to Christian Science: alternative theories, underdogs, these no longer thrilled him as they once had. Now they were the babblings of idiots. “And have you ever noticed how closely ‘Mein Kampf,’ as a phenomenon in publishing, parallels a somewhat earlier inspired work called ‘Science and Health?’ Each was a wild illiterate rehash of work by others. Each was carried to an enormous circulation, not because anyone read it with pleasure but because its author had arrived at a position where the reading of it was compulsory. Each eventually underwent a revising process at the hands of a ghost writer. It was Mrs. Eddy who thought of making a textual change each year so that the faithful would have to keep buying new editions. And she, too, was known as ‘The Leader.’ In fact, such entranced followers as the late Mrs. Stetson used to start their letters to her (as I would mine to the late Edmund Lester Pearson) ‘My Precious Leader.’”
Science was no longer something to be mocked, but a key to victory. In 1941 he wrote, “If I were regularly or intermittently on any General Electric program, I think I should make a report at least once every five weeks from Schenectady, throwing each time into narrative form in language comprehensible to laymen, some of the wonders that are being accomplished there. For that company at Schenectady is just as much a university as Harvard or Chicago and I think it might be said that the people have a right to hear what is going on there.” Alec did not get to do the investigations into General Electric’s inventions, but he was a a promoter of the war in his radio gigs.
And so when he read “Circus Day is Over,” he was apoplectic. He wrote Tarkington,
“My dear Mr. Tarkington:
“You and I (to say nothing of Harry Leon Wilson) are among the nine men listed at the masthead of ‘The Fortean Magazine”, which is described as the official organ of the Fortean Society and which is edited by Tiffany Thayer, an erratic author who lacks either intelligence or integrity and perhaps both. It is possible that we are listed as founders of the society, but the chance layman would think of us, I am afraid, as associate editors.
The issue dated January, 1942 is the only one I have ever examined and its leading article signed by Thayer is a piece of such vicious folly that I would as soon be left in the position of endorsing, sight unseen, the works of George Sylvester Viereck.
My first step is indicated by the letter of which I enclose a carbon. Thayer’s address, in case you want to follow suit, is Box 192, Grand Central Annex, New York. Perhaps I should condense his article for you, in case that issue of ‘The Fortean Magazine” escapes your attention. The nubbin of it concerns the present Duke of Windsor. That he renounced his birthright for the love of a woman was given given out by the lie-mongering press. ‘Who was present in Windsor Castle to hear the leaders of the world’s great nations--the United States, Germany, his own England, Italy, and Japan--tell Edward Windsor that a repetition of 1914-1918 was going to be necessary to prevent the people of the world from claiming their birthright?’ Etc.etc.”
And to Thayer he said,
“My dear Thayer:
The Fortean Society is an organization in the proceedings of which, if any, I have never taken part. While the old man was still alive and might enjoy being made a fuss over, I did not object to being listed as a founder. But today I happened to read the January issue of The Fortean Society Magazine and your own signed piece with which you lead the issue. I dislike being associated with such twaddle and now ask you remove my name from the unidentified list of nine names which you carry on your masthead and which might be thought of by the unwary as a list of associate editors.
I am willing to go to the trouble and expense of bringing action against you to compel your doing so, but must assume that you will drop it out because I ask you to.
Will you let me know about this by a note dropped to me at this address?”
Apparently unhurt by the swipe that Hecht took at him, Woollcott also wrote to the first Fortean, telling him that, apparently Thayer had been getting criticism from among the Forteans for Woollcott’s support of the war an “has promised to strike my name from the masthead.” Now that he had more free time—he joked—Alec offered to become the charter member in “any Hechtean Society now forming.”
Thayer honored his request. When the next issue of The Fortean Society Magazine appeared, in June 1943, Woollcott was no longer listed among the founders. There were now only seven: Hecht, Tarkington, Sussman, Rascoe, Powys, Wilson, and Thayer himself. He wouldn’t be listed among the Forteans again until 1944, and even then as something of a footnote. He was a founder, but his place had been taken by Scott Nearing.
Woollcott knew none this, though, just as he would know none of the subsequent celebrations of the Fortean Society mentioning him as a prominent member. While doing a radio program on the rise of Hitler, Woollcott suffered a heart attack and died a few hours later at the hospital.
