A Fortean associated with the Society seemingly to pay science fiction’s—and late 20th century fantastic fiction’s, generally—debt to Charles Fort. And perhaps to find more customers.
August Derleth is well known to aficionados of weird and fantastic literature, almost too well known to warrant much biographical information. Almost. He was born 24 February 1909 to William Julius and Rose Louise Volk Derleth and grew up in Sauk City, Wisconsin, making him a generational and regional peer of Thayer, and more than forty years Fort’s junior. Three of his grandparents and both of his parents had been born in Wisconsin; the fourth grandparent, his mother’s father, came from Germany. He was named after his father’s father. William and Rose married in 1907; William worked as a blacksmith, repairing agricultural machinery, and in a wagon shop. The family did well enough that they owned their home by 1920, free and clear. August had one sister, Hildred, born two years after him.
August Derleth is well known to aficionados of weird and fantastic literature, almost too well known to warrant much biographical information. Almost. He was born 24 February 1909 to William Julius and Rose Louise Volk Derleth and grew up in Sauk City, Wisconsin, making him a generational and regional peer of Thayer, and more than forty years Fort’s junior. Three of his grandparents and both of his parents had been born in Wisconsin; the fourth grandparent, his mother’s father, came from Germany. He was named after his father’s father. William and Rose married in 1907; William worked as a blacksmith, repairing agricultural machinery, and in a wagon shop. The family did well enough that they owned their home by 1920, free and clear. August had one sister, Hildred, born two years after him.
The young Derleth enjoyed reading—he frequented the public library—and writing—drafting his first story as a teenager. He was influenced by writers of the fantastic, but also developed an appreciation for regional American literature. His stories started appearing in Weird Tales in 1926. Derleth continued to write while he attended the University of Wisconsin. Around this time, he also worked for Fawcett Publications, in Minneapolis, which put out fantastic fiction. The 1930 census had him still living at home, and not working. A decade later, he was still there. That was not indolence, though.
Derleth became an incredibly—almost supernaturally—productive author, even if his work was mostly derivative. Wikipedia has him publishing more than 150 short stories and 100 books. Probably his most distinctive was his regional literature, based on his life in Wisconsin. (He ran in the same circle as another writer of place from Sauk City, Aldo Leopold). He is best known, though, for his weird tales. Derleth was an early devotee of H.P. Lovecraft, and continued to write-smith in the same vein for much of his career. S. T. Joshi, the great Lovecraft scholar, complains he was derivative, while remaking Lovecraft’s mythos of unknowable alien beings into Christian (or Manichean) avatars. He also wrote mystery fiction, which was also derivative, in this case of the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. A more positive way to characterize Derleth’s output is to say he was a gifted mimic and amazing typist: he claimed to write around a million words per year. In addition, he published critical and non-fiction works. In 1939, he co-founded Arkham House publisher with Donald Wandrei, another Lovecraft fan, and they reprinted Lovecraft as well as other writers of weird fiction.
Although writing consumed an inordinate amount of Derleth’s time, he had other avocations—and vocations. He taught at the University of Wisconsin for a time. He ran a Ranger’s club, and did other community service work. He fenced, swam, played chess, and collected stamps and comic-strips. He enjoyed hiking. He wrote corresponded with other writers and battled in the science fiction ‘zines and magazines. He also won a Guggenheim fellowship, sponsored by, among others, Sinclair Lewis—opponent of Theodore Dreiser, founder of the Fortean Society. By 1945, Lewis had turned on Derleth, though.He didn’t like Derleth’s arrogance, which was—as best I can tell—not uncommon with those who met him. Derleth married in 1953, had two children, and divorced in 1959.
Derleth continued writing until his death in 1971.
He is mentioned only three times in Doubt, although that is not indicative of his views on Fort or Forteanism. All three relate to science fiction—which is. The first two mentions come in Doubt 13 (Winter 1945). On page 187 he is quoted saying that the publication of the Derleth-Lovecraft joint (Derleth’s finishing and revising of Lovecraft story) The Lurker at the Threshold, had “a brief Fortean tie-up.” The following page has Thayer reservedly recommending science fiction as the best available Fortean literature, and Derleth as an important contributor: “Until a more authentic, or--better, perhaps--a more completely Fortean art form is developed, let us take considerable pride in the productions of our worshipful brothers who write what is called scientifiction and who trace their inspiration straight to Charles Fort without reference to Poe or Jules Verne. Outstanding among these is MFS August Derleth, writer, editor, publisher.” A few issues later—Doubt 21—Thayer mentioned Derleth once agin, in the same context:
“The volume is THE CHECKLIST OF FANTASTIC LITERATURE/a Bibliography of Fantasy, Weird, and Science Fiction Books Published in the English Language, and if we wee to match its “Listing by Author” against the Society’s rolls, we should certainly find upwards of twenty members represented ... YS is here, Russell and Abe Merritt--and Doreal and Derleth get editorial acknowledgement for assistance in the work. It was worth doing. It has been well done. Get your copy from the Society, bound in cloth, xvii and 455 pp. $6.00” (ellipse in original).
Derleth had a more expansive notion of the relationship between Fort and science fiction than Thayer let on—although Thayer’s full views may have been in accord. He may've had other views on Fort, too, as he left more than 70 cubic feet of material to the Wisconsin Historical Society upon his death, some of which is restricted for another six-and-a-half years, but traveling there and going through it hasn’t been a priority of mine. It is likely that Derleth read Fort at the suggestion of Lovecraft, who had discovered him in the 1920s and found him a stimulant for the imagination. It is also likely that Derleth’s views on Fort were influenced by Lovecraft. Lovecraft was a strict materialist and Derleth was religious, and both seemed loathe to follow Fort’s skepticism against both of those so-called prior Dominants. (Another weird writer of Derleth’s acquaintance, Clark Ashton Smith, also thought of Fort as an imaginative prompt.)
Derleth’s clearest expression of Fort’s value came in a 1952 article for College English on the state of science fiction. After bemoaning the hackneyed plots of older science fiction, he wrote,
“Writers now show a concern for matters philosophic, sociologic, psychiatric, and ethnological; and several of them, notably Robert A. Heinlein, with his ‘Future History’ series, Isaac Asimov with his ‘Foundation’ series, and A. E. Van Vogt with his ‘Weapon Shops of Isher’ stories, have set out ambitiously to portray the history of future galaxies. Above all a sort of Fortean challenge to the imagination has resulted in fresh, new themes, as well as different approaches to the more standard themes of science-fiction.
In a sense, perhaps, Charles Fort did more to stimulate the imagination of writers and readers alike than any other writer. His persistent amassing of curious facts inexplicable to science, set forth in such books as Lo!, New Lands, The Book of the Damned, and Wild Talents, undoubtedly had a catalytic influence on many writers. Certainly something of his attitude influenced Dr. David H. Keller, who, however lacking in outstanding skill, managed to put into his stories in the genre a healthy and subtly delightful edge of satire at the expense of human foibles. Perhaps the fruition of experiments in atomic fission only completed a process of scientific inquiry and challenge inaugurated among writers and readers by Fort.”
This sense of Fort as a prod to the imagination—though not someone to necessarily take seriously—Derleth communicated in his stories. He dropped Fort’s name in a couple of stories. A reference to Fort crops up in The Lurker at the Threshold (“A very large, though usually suppressed, body of occurrences antipodally contradictory to the total scientific knowledge of mankind, which occur daily in all parts of the world, some of which have been collected and chronicled in two remarkable books by a comparative unknown named Charles Fort—The Book of the Damned and New Lands”). Another shows up in one of his Sherlock Holmes homages, “The Adventure of the Missing Tenants,” which appeared in 1929, while Fort was still alive (“A favourite gambit of investigators, like Charles Fort, of curious, unexplained facts: that of strange, motiveless disappearances... as vanishings into ‘holes in space’ or into other dimensions, or some such phenomenal ‘openings’ in time and space”). He got a call-out in the 1966 short story “The Dark Brotherhood” (“Even here on this planet life takes many forms. I asked him then whether he had read the works of Charles Fort. He had not”). His 1958 story, “The Seal of R’lyeh” mentions Fort, too. (“The fictions of H P Lovecraft had, it seemed to me, the same relation to truth as the facts, so inexplicable to science, reported by Charles Fort”).
The last reference is especially interesting because it casts light on how Derleth was using Fort. He was a source— a way to give the stories verisimilitude, a paratextual attempt to blur the boundaries between fiction and non-. But Derleth never meant that Fort was to really be taken seriously: he was part of the story world. His writings were as true as those of Lovecraft’s: that is, they created a mythos—were part of a mythos, a virtual world—but not part of ours. It was the same technique Lovecraft had himself used, inventing texts such as the Necronomicon.
Fort, then, in Derleth’s estimation, presented a body of lore that helped to create science fiction—both by giving science fiction writers new ideas, and by giving heft to those ideas, a pseudo-scientific rigor.
Derleth became an incredibly—almost supernaturally—productive author, even if his work was mostly derivative. Wikipedia has him publishing more than 150 short stories and 100 books. Probably his most distinctive was his regional literature, based on his life in Wisconsin. (He ran in the same circle as another writer of place from Sauk City, Aldo Leopold). He is best known, though, for his weird tales. Derleth was an early devotee of H.P. Lovecraft, and continued to write-smith in the same vein for much of his career. S. T. Joshi, the great Lovecraft scholar, complains he was derivative, while remaking Lovecraft’s mythos of unknowable alien beings into Christian (or Manichean) avatars. He also wrote mystery fiction, which was also derivative, in this case of the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. A more positive way to characterize Derleth’s output is to say he was a gifted mimic and amazing typist: he claimed to write around a million words per year. In addition, he published critical and non-fiction works. In 1939, he co-founded Arkham House publisher with Donald Wandrei, another Lovecraft fan, and they reprinted Lovecraft as well as other writers of weird fiction.
Although writing consumed an inordinate amount of Derleth’s time, he had other avocations—and vocations. He taught at the University of Wisconsin for a time. He ran a Ranger’s club, and did other community service work. He fenced, swam, played chess, and collected stamps and comic-strips. He enjoyed hiking. He wrote corresponded with other writers and battled in the science fiction ‘zines and magazines. He also won a Guggenheim fellowship, sponsored by, among others, Sinclair Lewis—opponent of Theodore Dreiser, founder of the Fortean Society. By 1945, Lewis had turned on Derleth, though.He didn’t like Derleth’s arrogance, which was—as best I can tell—not uncommon with those who met him. Derleth married in 1953, had two children, and divorced in 1959.
Derleth continued writing until his death in 1971.
He is mentioned only three times in Doubt, although that is not indicative of his views on Fort or Forteanism. All three relate to science fiction—which is. The first two mentions come in Doubt 13 (Winter 1945). On page 187 he is quoted saying that the publication of the Derleth-Lovecraft joint (Derleth’s finishing and revising of Lovecraft story) The Lurker at the Threshold, had “a brief Fortean tie-up.” The following page has Thayer reservedly recommending science fiction as the best available Fortean literature, and Derleth as an important contributor: “Until a more authentic, or--better, perhaps--a more completely Fortean art form is developed, let us take considerable pride in the productions of our worshipful brothers who write what is called scientifiction and who trace their inspiration straight to Charles Fort without reference to Poe or Jules Verne. Outstanding among these is MFS August Derleth, writer, editor, publisher.” A few issues later—Doubt 21—Thayer mentioned Derleth once agin, in the same context:
“The volume is THE CHECKLIST OF FANTASTIC LITERATURE/a Bibliography of Fantasy, Weird, and Science Fiction Books Published in the English Language, and if we wee to match its “Listing by Author” against the Society’s rolls, we should certainly find upwards of twenty members represented ... YS is here, Russell and Abe Merritt--and Doreal and Derleth get editorial acknowledgement for assistance in the work. It was worth doing. It has been well done. Get your copy from the Society, bound in cloth, xvii and 455 pp. $6.00” (ellipse in original).
Derleth had a more expansive notion of the relationship between Fort and science fiction than Thayer let on—although Thayer’s full views may have been in accord. He may've had other views on Fort, too, as he left more than 70 cubic feet of material to the Wisconsin Historical Society upon his death, some of which is restricted for another six-and-a-half years, but traveling there and going through it hasn’t been a priority of mine. It is likely that Derleth read Fort at the suggestion of Lovecraft, who had discovered him in the 1920s and found him a stimulant for the imagination. It is also likely that Derleth’s views on Fort were influenced by Lovecraft. Lovecraft was a strict materialist and Derleth was religious, and both seemed loathe to follow Fort’s skepticism against both of those so-called prior Dominants. (Another weird writer of Derleth’s acquaintance, Clark Ashton Smith, also thought of Fort as an imaginative prompt.)
Derleth’s clearest expression of Fort’s value came in a 1952 article for College English on the state of science fiction. After bemoaning the hackneyed plots of older science fiction, he wrote,
“Writers now show a concern for matters philosophic, sociologic, psychiatric, and ethnological; and several of them, notably Robert A. Heinlein, with his ‘Future History’ series, Isaac Asimov with his ‘Foundation’ series, and A. E. Van Vogt with his ‘Weapon Shops of Isher’ stories, have set out ambitiously to portray the history of future galaxies. Above all a sort of Fortean challenge to the imagination has resulted in fresh, new themes, as well as different approaches to the more standard themes of science-fiction.
In a sense, perhaps, Charles Fort did more to stimulate the imagination of writers and readers alike than any other writer. His persistent amassing of curious facts inexplicable to science, set forth in such books as Lo!, New Lands, The Book of the Damned, and Wild Talents, undoubtedly had a catalytic influence on many writers. Certainly something of his attitude influenced Dr. David H. Keller, who, however lacking in outstanding skill, managed to put into his stories in the genre a healthy and subtly delightful edge of satire at the expense of human foibles. Perhaps the fruition of experiments in atomic fission only completed a process of scientific inquiry and challenge inaugurated among writers and readers by Fort.”
This sense of Fort as a prod to the imagination—though not someone to necessarily take seriously—Derleth communicated in his stories. He dropped Fort’s name in a couple of stories. A reference to Fort crops up in The Lurker at the Threshold (“A very large, though usually suppressed, body of occurrences antipodally contradictory to the total scientific knowledge of mankind, which occur daily in all parts of the world, some of which have been collected and chronicled in two remarkable books by a comparative unknown named Charles Fort—The Book of the Damned and New Lands”). Another shows up in one of his Sherlock Holmes homages, “The Adventure of the Missing Tenants,” which appeared in 1929, while Fort was still alive (“A favourite gambit of investigators, like Charles Fort, of curious, unexplained facts: that of strange, motiveless disappearances... as vanishings into ‘holes in space’ or into other dimensions, or some such phenomenal ‘openings’ in time and space”). He got a call-out in the 1966 short story “The Dark Brotherhood” (“Even here on this planet life takes many forms. I asked him then whether he had read the works of Charles Fort. He had not”). His 1958 story, “The Seal of R’lyeh” mentions Fort, too. (“The fictions of H P Lovecraft had, it seemed to me, the same relation to truth as the facts, so inexplicable to science, reported by Charles Fort”).
The last reference is especially interesting because it casts light on how Derleth was using Fort. He was a source— a way to give the stories verisimilitude, a paratextual attempt to blur the boundaries between fiction and non-. But Derleth never meant that Fort was to really be taken seriously: he was part of the story world. His writings were as true as those of Lovecraft’s: that is, they created a mythos—were part of a mythos, a virtual world—but not part of ours. It was the same technique Lovecraft had himself used, inventing texts such as the Necronomicon.
Fort, then, in Derleth’s estimation, presented a body of lore that helped to create science fiction—both by giving science fiction writers new ideas, and by giving heft to those ideas, a pseudo-scientific rigor.
