Burton Rascoe wrote a review of Fort's Lo!, but its history is a bit confusing. Jim Steinmeyer, in his biography of Fort, says that it ran in the New York Herald Tribune. As proof, he cites Damon Knight's biography of Fort--except Knight doesn't say that the review appeared there. Instead, he cites the review that appeared in The Fortean''s October 1941 issue. Rascoe's review may indeed have appeared in the Herald Tribune, but I've yet to see evidence.
More: According to Google Books, a version of the review appeared in the little magazine Contempo. It may be that this was a reprint of the original. However, from the snippet viewable on Google, it is clear that the review differed in some ways from what Tiffany Thayer printed in The Fortean. Chief among them is that in Contempo Rascoe referred to Lo!. In The Fortean, the review never mentions Lo!, but instead The Books of Charles Fort. (The introduction to the review is also very different.)
Whether Thayer made this change on his own to support his getting Fort's complete works published, or Rascoe approved the changes, I don't know.
At any rate, here is the review as it appeared in The Fortean:
“My expression is (to use the phrasal reservation of Charles Fort) that this book may or may not be one of the great books of the world, and that, since at the moment I am convinced that it is,it is high time (to use the Fortean formula of skepticism) for me to begin to doubt it. For, says Charles Fort, ‘I cannot accept the products of minds as subject matter for beliefs.’ But I accept ‘with reservations that give me freedom to ridicule the statement at any other time,’ that Charles Fort has engaged in investigations which make Einstein’s seem piddling and that this book os the ‘De Revolutionibus’ and the ‘Principia’ of a new era of discovery where in there will be an entirely new arrangement of our patterns of thinking. Though where did I get the idea that the ‘De Revolutionibus’ and the ‘Principia’ were important, or comparatively important, or of an importance equal to this book or that it might annoy somebody for me to mention the ‘Principia’ and [The Books of Charles Fort] in the same breath? And where did I get the idea that it would be salutary to have a new era of discovery or a new arrangement of our patterns of thinking?
You will excuse me, but I cannot keep up the pretense of pursuing the Fortean process of really rational thinking of the attitude of mind which makes Charles Fort so singularly provocative a challenger of our sluggish, almost amoeba-like method of arriving at somatic death through an interval of accepting buncombe, from the cradle, as wisdom and scientific knowledge. I must frankly revert to type and to the species journalist. A Fortean of Forteans, willing to make the requisite gesture of shaking my finger at Charles Fort at any time I feel like doing so, and willing also to distrust whatever he says that seems too reasonable and full of common sense, because all the fallacies in the world are founded on reasonableness and common sense, I must yet, until I break up old habits of acceptances by habits of doubt, remain a journalist awed, impressed, fascinated, amused by what I consider one of the most amazing (a very good and handy journalistic word, ‘amazing’) books I have ever read.
You can read [The Books of Charles Fort] in almost any way you like or in any mood your temperament dictates and whatever way you read it, it is my expression that it is a great book. You make take it as pure fantasy and you will find it gorgeous stuff, full of poetic imagery, eloquent in the grand manner, beautiful to read. You may take it as an intellectual hoax and still you must admit it is a marvelously contrived one, satirical, subtle, full of laughs at the expense of the big-wigs of science. You may take it as a sort of pseudo-divine revelation with Charles Fort as a mere ‘agent’ of a higher force seeking to impart knowledge to us, and you will have to admit that Charles Fort opens up new, magic casements upon resplendent vistas.
Charles Fort gives us a great new list of thinkables while at the same time showing us the absurdity of things we have been thinking or rather accepting without thinking. Not many years ago it was thinkable that I might talk to someone in Europe without moving from my chair in Larchmont, but there were certainly not many who would have agreed then that such a thing was thinkable. Charles Fort suggests that it is thinkable that when and if we know more about what he calls teleportation, a merchant in London might transfer almost instantly a carload of oranges from California to his warehouse in Limehouse simply by taking thought, ‘wishing’ the event. He entertains the notion that people have been transferred from one region to another; that the celebrated Casper Hauser, whose mysterious history the Encyclopedia Britannica admits science has been unable to explain, may have been a visitor from another planet, that the mystery of Dorothy Arnold might be explained by teleportation, that the miracle of the stigmata is a fact and not a hoax, pious fraud of hallucination, that frogs and snakes and snails and crabs and periwinkles have rained out of clear skies, that the Children of Israel not only were nourished by ‘manna’ that fell from the heavens but that in our own time ‘manna’ or an edible plant of unknown origin capable of being ground into excellent flour has fallen upon the same arid plains in Asia Minor.
Charles For, by gathering and investigating curious data of earthly phenomena which science excludes or ‘explains’ rationalistically, opens up new worlds of speculation. He says that he does not ‘believe’ a thing in his book, he merely offers the data; but then he does not believe the astronomers and physicists and geologists and paleonthologists [sic], who also, by the way, do not believe one another. Dr. R. A. Milliken, who believes in Cosmic Rays and a Creator and that new energy is always being created, finds himself at odds with Jeans and Eddington--of whom one believes in a Creator and the other doesn’t, neither believes in Cosmic Rays, and both agree that the universe is running down like a clock.
But it is not so much the strange data that Charles Fort offers of unexplained phenomena or the world of mystery he leads us into--the suggestion of teleportation and of the nearness of other planets to our own, of visitations from other planets and the dealing of death and plague by process of thought--that stimulates and delights me most in his books. It is his inveterately inquiring mind, his truly scientific skepticism, his showing up of the complete absurdity of common processes of deduction and of the dogmas we have all more or less accepted. He shows us, for example, that there is no such thing as a law of cause and effect, of supply and demand, and so on. He shakes up all of our complacencies; he gives a rude jolt to our articles of faith. He spares no one, not even himself. If you are a materialist or a mechanist, he gives aid and comfort to the enemy, the religionists and the mystics. But if you are a religionist or a mystic, he gives aid and comfort to the enemy also. I can well imagine H. L. Mencken and Bishop Manning reacting in the same degree, if not in kind, of fury at some of the ‘suggestions’ of Charles Fort. But, on the other hand, whoever heard of a stranger collection of bed fellows united under the same banner than Booth Tarkington and Ben Hecht, Harry Leon Wilson and Tiffany Thayer, John Cowper Powys and Louis Sherwin, Gorham Munson and myself, all of whom see something portentious [sic] and exciting in the curious delvings and speculations of a quiet, enigmatic, humorous-minded man who lived almost like a hermit in the Bronx?
You will excuse me, but I cannot keep up the pretense of pursuing the Fortean process of really rational thinking of the attitude of mind which makes Charles Fort so singularly provocative a challenger of our sluggish, almost amoeba-like method of arriving at somatic death through an interval of accepting buncombe, from the cradle, as wisdom and scientific knowledge. I must frankly revert to type and to the species journalist. A Fortean of Forteans, willing to make the requisite gesture of shaking my finger at Charles Fort at any time I feel like doing so, and willing also to distrust whatever he says that seems too reasonable and full of common sense, because all the fallacies in the world are founded on reasonableness and common sense, I must yet, until I break up old habits of acceptances by habits of doubt, remain a journalist awed, impressed, fascinated, amused by what I consider one of the most amazing (a very good and handy journalistic word, ‘amazing’) books I have ever read.
You can read [The Books of Charles Fort] in almost any way you like or in any mood your temperament dictates and whatever way you read it, it is my expression that it is a great book. You make take it as pure fantasy and you will find it gorgeous stuff, full of poetic imagery, eloquent in the grand manner, beautiful to read. You may take it as an intellectual hoax and still you must admit it is a marvelously contrived one, satirical, subtle, full of laughs at the expense of the big-wigs of science. You may take it as a sort of pseudo-divine revelation with Charles Fort as a mere ‘agent’ of a higher force seeking to impart knowledge to us, and you will have to admit that Charles Fort opens up new, magic casements upon resplendent vistas.
Charles Fort gives us a great new list of thinkables while at the same time showing us the absurdity of things we have been thinking or rather accepting without thinking. Not many years ago it was thinkable that I might talk to someone in Europe without moving from my chair in Larchmont, but there were certainly not many who would have agreed then that such a thing was thinkable. Charles Fort suggests that it is thinkable that when and if we know more about what he calls teleportation, a merchant in London might transfer almost instantly a carload of oranges from California to his warehouse in Limehouse simply by taking thought, ‘wishing’ the event. He entertains the notion that people have been transferred from one region to another; that the celebrated Casper Hauser, whose mysterious history the Encyclopedia Britannica admits science has been unable to explain, may have been a visitor from another planet, that the mystery of Dorothy Arnold might be explained by teleportation, that the miracle of the stigmata is a fact and not a hoax, pious fraud of hallucination, that frogs and snakes and snails and crabs and periwinkles have rained out of clear skies, that the Children of Israel not only were nourished by ‘manna’ that fell from the heavens but that in our own time ‘manna’ or an edible plant of unknown origin capable of being ground into excellent flour has fallen upon the same arid plains in Asia Minor.
Charles For, by gathering and investigating curious data of earthly phenomena which science excludes or ‘explains’ rationalistically, opens up new worlds of speculation. He says that he does not ‘believe’ a thing in his book, he merely offers the data; but then he does not believe the astronomers and physicists and geologists and paleonthologists [sic], who also, by the way, do not believe one another. Dr. R. A. Milliken, who believes in Cosmic Rays and a Creator and that new energy is always being created, finds himself at odds with Jeans and Eddington--of whom one believes in a Creator and the other doesn’t, neither believes in Cosmic Rays, and both agree that the universe is running down like a clock.
But it is not so much the strange data that Charles Fort offers of unexplained phenomena or the world of mystery he leads us into--the suggestion of teleportation and of the nearness of other planets to our own, of visitations from other planets and the dealing of death and plague by process of thought--that stimulates and delights me most in his books. It is his inveterately inquiring mind, his truly scientific skepticism, his showing up of the complete absurdity of common processes of deduction and of the dogmas we have all more or less accepted. He shows us, for example, that there is no such thing as a law of cause and effect, of supply and demand, and so on. He shakes up all of our complacencies; he gives a rude jolt to our articles of faith. He spares no one, not even himself. If you are a materialist or a mechanist, he gives aid and comfort to the enemy, the religionists and the mystics. But if you are a religionist or a mystic, he gives aid and comfort to the enemy also. I can well imagine H. L. Mencken and Bishop Manning reacting in the same degree, if not in kind, of fury at some of the ‘suggestions’ of Charles Fort. But, on the other hand, whoever heard of a stranger collection of bed fellows united under the same banner than Booth Tarkington and Ben Hecht, Harry Leon Wilson and Tiffany Thayer, John Cowper Powys and Louis Sherwin, Gorham Munson and myself, all of whom see something portentious [sic] and exciting in the curious delvings and speculations of a quiet, enigmatic, humorous-minded man who lived almost like a hermit in the Bronx?
