I’ve looked a little bit at Robert Barbour Johnson’s writings---his mainstream work for Blue Book, his first short story for Weird Tales.  As far as I can tell, still no one has punctured the pseudonym(s?) he used for the shudder pulps.

Now, I want to take a closer look at some of his weird stories, which presumably reflected the influence of Fort most of all.  I’ve already noted that his first story (although published second), “They” probably grew out of a Fortean understanding of a weird stretch of land on the Monterey Peninsula.

After “They,” Johnson wrote “Lead Soldiers” and “Mice.”  I have not seen either of these.  As far as I can tell, neither was ever reprinted, although Johnson noted that “Lead Soldiers” provoked Lovecraft to write him a fan letter.  That story was about Mussolini’s threatening to invade Ethiopia.  “Mice,” according to Johnson,” was based on an old French legend he had heard about a curse ending in a nobleman being consumed by mice.  He set it in Louisiana, since he had lived there, and based the main character on the detective writer (and friend) Roman MacDougald.

Thereafter came a couple year gap, which Johnson blames on the editor of Weird Tales unaccountable animosity.   In the late 1930s, he wrote three more stories for Weird Tales.  The first published was “The Silver Coffin.”

Tame by today’s standards, “The Silver Coffin” is about a scion of a Southern family who is turned into a vampire; he sets himself up in a silver coffin, which he cannot escape, and sets up a trust fund so that the coffin will always be watched over—until, eventually, he dies of starvation.  One day, there develops a crack, and he slips out to feast upon local children.  The coffin is reinforced with steel.  The climax of the story comes when the narrator and visitor see the coffin begin to rattle and hear the screams inside; they are afraid the vampire will escape, but he only tips over the coffin, which is enough to have the visitor faint.

The story is told in much the same way as “They”: a visitor meets someone whose job it is to guard a horrible secret; this narrator tells the story of how he came to be in the position to the visitor, who hardly says a word.  Very little action occurs in the course of the story.  The whole point seems to be the creation of a feeling of foreboding.

Johnson’s next story, “Far Below,” is told in much the same way.  A man visits the New York subway—although Johnson notes he based it on “Forest Hill Tunnel” in San Francisco—where he meets what amounts to an occult police: a former zoologist who has been tasked to guard a stretch of subway tunnel that is constantly attacked by some bizarre creatures, part ape, part mole.  These Johnson borrowed from Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model,” although the idea of an occult police may have come from Fort, who wrote about such a force in Book of the Damned.  At the end of the story, the visitor notes that the former zoologist is himself turning into one of the creatures.

The story was well-received, and continues to be.  It was chosen as the best story ever to appear in Weird Tales, received encomiums from critic S. T. Joshi, and was widely reprinted.  Again, though, the story is tame by modern standards, lacks action—opting instead to create mood—and distances the reader through Johnson’s narrative device.  Nonetheless, it does manage to make subways feel weird—uncanny.

Johnson’s final story for Weird Tales was “Lupa.”  Like “The Silver Coffin,” “Lupa” was written while Johnson was in San Diego—which he said had a weird vibe in those days just before the war.  It, however, has not been reprinted, and so I have not seen it: original copies of Weird Tales are much too expensive. 

For the most part, Johnson seems to have focused on his writing for Blue Book in the years after World War II.  He did write a weird tale for Ray Palmer’s Mystic, which was something of a spin-off of the very Fortean Fate, at least as best as I can tell.  The story appeared in the second issue.  (Johnson complained he was never paid for it, which, if true, was not unusual.)  The story was called “The Strange Case of Monica Lilith.”

Johnson varied his narrative technique in this story, at least from what I’ve read of his other material.  The story is reported as if from the books of Charles Fort, which again distances the reader and sometimes can lapse into monologue, but also allows for more action.  Monica Lilith is hardly in the story at all.  She is described as a typical celebrity diva who maintains a suite at a prestigious resort in Tahoe.  She has only three quirks that make her stand out from the mass of others of her ilk: her fear of water, refusal to show her shoulders, and an odd pet that no one has ever seen.  Lilith dies one day merely by coming in contact with the Lake; her autopsy reveals that she had a third nipple on her shoulder.  After that, events get really weird: there are mysterious fires and wrecked rooms.  Staff and guests are driven away.  It comes to pass that her pet is angered at Lilith’s death and is wreaking vengeance.  And the pet is no normal pet, but something out of a Bosch painting, a demon familiar that apparently suckled at Lilith’s breath.  Eventually, it is caught and killed . . . and the story forgotten.

After this story, Johnson seems to  publish almost nothing.  His run at Blue Book ended.  Weird Tales was no more, as were the shudder pulps.  He did do an article for a fanzine on the death of fantastic fiction, and his essay on the Fortean society was reprinted.  But then, in 1964, The Magazine of Horror published his “The Life-After-Death of Thaddeus Warde.”  It was reprinted two years later in America, and also was translated into the French.

In this story, Thaddeus Warde, a member of the idle rich, seems to die of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.  He is embalmed and buried—but crawls back to the surface to hunt down the man who killed and cuckolded him.

The story itself lacks drama, and the surprise ending is no surprise.  It is an attempt, again, to evoke a feeling of oddness.  It is told as a case report, just as his previous story had been, like something out of Fort: this story proving that death is not the end, although what drives one into the afterlife is not the happy thoughts of spiritualism or religion. 

Early in my work on Robert Barbour Johnson I read his short The Magic Park about the Golden Gate Park.   At the time, I did not get a whole lot out of it.  It’s not clear what the book is supposed to be.  He touches on the history of the park—but then goes on to say that while he would love to do a fully detailed historical reconstruction, that is not what his book is about.  He sometimes writes as if it is a guidebook—but then admits that’s impossible, since the park has no beginning and no end: it is fifty-two blocks long and eight blocks wide, and one can enter or leave at any point.  He touches on some of the main attractions—the Academy of Sciences, the bison and elk enclosures, the DeYoung Museum—but then admits that these are not always as interesting as the quail and rabbits running about and, besides, gives no directions how to get there.

In essence, it’s a paean to the park, a love song.

And in that sense, it can be understood as part of what Kevin Starr called the enchantment of San Francisco, the making of the myth of Baghdad by the Bay.  In other words, part of the same project that engaged Herb Caen, whom Johnson claimed as an acquaintance, at the very least.

What makes the park magic, to Johnson, is not is natural becauty: it’s that the park was created by human hands, a green oasis crafted from seaside wastelands where, he says, nothing had lived before.  He imagines that the whole endeavor started as a joke on the park superintendent, John McLaren, a Scotsman who came to San Francisco in the late nineteenth-century to make his fortune as a . . . landscape architect.  Such a carer seemed out of place in the (very provincial) and rough San Francsco of the time, Johnson suggests, and McLaren could only have gotten the job of creating a park from the city on a lark.  But he showed them!

There are obvious Fortean tones in this history of the park.  First, there is the little guy battling mainstream and making good.  There is the sense that all of creation is a cosmic joke.  And a sense that what counts is art, not nature, and that through art magic can be conjured.

The book also has some more obvious Fortean analogues.  Johnsons spends time talking about the ghosts and unusual things that have been reported in the area—and some even caught, as when an Arctic Owl was found to haunt the park, although officialdom had dismissed the possibility.

Johnson’s view of the park, then, is an attempt to find an enchanted geography in a world where such enchantment seemed impossible—the park operates for him the same way that the ptach of uncanny ground near Monterey did.

I contacted the California State Military Museum in Sacramento to see if I could get more information on Robert Barbour Johnson's (short) stint in the army during World War II.

According to Dan Sebby, Director and Curator, the unit to which Johnson was assigned--Service Command Unit (SCU) 1952) was the permanent garrisoning party stationed at Fort Rosecrans, and so Johnson would have been involved not with the artillery batteries that were stationed at the Fort but to housekeeping services.

A few posts down, I mentioned Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, and noticed that I did not have a tag for him, which makes me think that dropping his name there might have been confusing.  So let me explain his connection.

As far as I know, LaVey was not a Fortean, at least not explicitly.  But, he did have a collection of the works of Ben Hecht, a writer who ran in Tiffany Thayer's circle and was a founding member of the first Fortean Society.

By itself, that doesn't say much: lots of people read Hecht.  But, LaVey was also in San Francisco by the 1950s and spent time with George Haas, Robert Barbour Johnson, and Clark Ashton Smith.  There's a semi-famous picture of them together, which LaVey titled, "Headmasters in a School for Ghouls."  By the 1960s, Haas told Ashton Smith's wife that he no longer heard from Lavey--"since he became Satan."

But, it's clear there was a substantive connection between LaVey and the Bay Area Forteans and so understanding something about LaVey--who has more written about him--helps explain the Forteans.

I’ve been doing some reading on San Francisco geography, as well—soon to be supplemented by reading on LA geography—to get a sense of how the city (and Bay Area more generally) is organized and try to fit that in with what I know of the California Forteans.  And some interesting patterns have emerged.

Berkeley geographer Richard A. Walker recognizes four residential types.   He writes, “This civic landscape springs from the distinctive class, political and cultural nature of the Bay Area—relatively wealthy, petty bourgeois, bohemian, cosmopolitan, labourist, environmentalist, egalitarian, anti-modern—and embodies the contradictions of the libertine capitalism that is a local trademark.”

The first, and most iconic, category is the Victorian homes.  These resulted from the work of middle class reformers in the 1850s and 1860s, who saw San Francisco as too raw, too libertine, and sought to impose a more appropriate look for the city.  These were not the “modern” buildings of, say, Los Angeles.  Rather they were ornate and gaudy—Thorstein Veblen was thinking of them when he was at Stanford and writing the Theory of the Leisure Class.  Many of these were burned in 1906.  But the rich never abandoned downtown San Francisco as they did so many other inner cities, and so they remained as a tribute to the class identity of the nineteenth century rich.

A second category is what Walker calls ecotopian suburbs.  This is composed of the mock cabin and craftsman houses tucked into hills and surrounded by oaks, redwoods, and eucalyptus.  These areas, although they look natural, were made: the coast range of the Bay Area was mostly grass, and so homeowners and developers had to plant all the trees, as well as building the houses.  The inspiration for these places, Walker argues, is Yosemite and Big Trees.  Ecotopian suburbs can be found in parts of San Francisco, in the Oakland Hills, in Berkeley, and Marin.  These are the homesteads of the libertarian, bohemian middle class.  They combine mysticism, Romanticism, and Masonic ideals and stand in opposition to LA, once again: there the wave of modernist architecture expunged the arts and crafts movement.  In San Francisco, there was a conscious anti-modern movement.

A number of Bay Area Forteans are associated with this ideal.  Polly Lamb lived in Oakland; Anthony Boucher was in Berkeley—both in just these kinds of spots.  Most prominent, probably, is George Haas.  He idealized Big Trees State Park.  He built organic gardens around his Oakland home.  There were certainly anti-modern strains to his thought.

The third category is the suburb proper.  Oakland does not fit into this category because in the late nineteenth century that city wrestled with San Francisco for industrial dominance, and soon developed its own urban infrastructure: it was its own city, taking advantage of new sectors that developed after San Francisco came of age, especially food canning, auto building, and electrical manufacturing.

San Francisco did try to push South but was stopped by the presence of many elite estates in San Mateo County, which prevented the movement.  This fits into the Fortean story, too, for their developed a Bohemian connection between the Bay Area and less developed places to the south, especially Carmel, but also San Mateo.  These places retained their Bohemian, mystical vibe.  Marin did, too: remember, the Golden Gate Bridge wasn’t completed until 1936, and for many seemed unnecessary.

Instead, development marched East, and the Bay Area did well: even as San Francisco’s manufacturing declined, around 1910 the region was only outpaced by Detroit (cars!), Cleveland, and its competitor to the South, LA.  Again, new sectors allowed the outlying areas to compete with their older neighbors, food processing, oil, and chemical work, especially.  Good wages and an extensive trolley system allowed workers to move East and North into new tract homes.

Past Alameda county, Contra Costa county developed its suburbs more slowly.  Places like Hercules and Rodeo were essentially company towns, with workers shacking up on business property.  (San Francisco financiers had a level of control this far out that they did not have in the East Bay, as much of the money for Contra Costa’s development came from the City.)  To tie in with the earlier connections, these suburbs also came to be supported by defense procurements as fortress California also built out in this direction.  But there is still some connection to Forteana even here, as Jack Parsons, the occultist rocket-developer from LA came north to work at Hercules Powder Company.

The fourth category is multi-family housing.  The university in Berkeley and the industrial areas in Oakland—especially with the coming of World War II—supported such dwellings, but the center for this residential type was San Francisco.  Apartments and residential hotels came into their own during the 1890s—before that, the need was taken care of by boarding out rooms.

The small rooms pushed people into the community: in places dominated by apartment buildings and residential hotels there was more life on the streets.  People ate out.  They went to coffee.  They went to movies.  These zones of dense dwelling, cheap entertainment, and public life are where experimental lifestyles took root.  This was the natural habitat of Bohemians, beats, hippes, gays: political rebels and public intellectuals.  (San Francisco was rich in such areas and so has a rich history of experimentation, with the Barbary Coast of the mid-nineteetnh century, the turn of the century Bohemianism, as well as the more obvious later manifestations.)

The Fortean connections here are obvious.  Miriam Alan de Ford lived in a hotel for most of her life, within walking distance of the library (urbanism made Forteanism easier, as there were vast collections of facts to study).  One thinks, also, of Kenneth MacNichol with his writers studio in the heart of one of San Francisco’s art districts, and Robert Barbour Johnson living in a little apartment and making appearances at the literary hotspots—indeed, it was this scene that drew him to San Francisco in the first place.

With the depression, and the drying up of investments, these areas began to decline.  Jobs moved to the suburbs, leaving the area old, infirm, and with decreasing political clout.  In the late 1940s and 1950s, the rich began to see these areas as blights in need of redevelopment.  And so there were fights between them and the remaining rebels, especially the beats in North Beach—what Kenneth Starr says was a battle between Provincials and Baghdadders.  Some of Old San Francisco was saved, and freeways were not allowed to cut through the old downtown.  But, the most iconic Bohemian place was lost.  This was the Montgomery Block, a warren of rooms housed by artists and such.  (Likely, a number of the people who attended MacNichols’s Fortean meetings lived here.)  In 1959, the structure—which had survived the 1906 fire—was bulldozed for a parking lot.  Later, the Trans-America Building was built there.  

I finished reading The Compleat Boucher, a collection of al of Anthony Boucher’s short fantasy and science fiction.  It helps give a sense of the man.  There are some references to liberal politics, for example, and a lot of complaining against tyranny—which was relatively common during this era of science fiction.  There’s also a fair amount of Christian references—the story of Balaam seems to have been a favorite—and some light mocking of Catholicism.  Of course, there are many references to Berkeley and to academia, as well as Sherlock Holmes: “The Greatest Tertian” imagines a Martian anthropologist sifting through the ruins of Earth after the fourth planet had invaded and deducing that Sherlock Holmes and Shakespeare were the same person, the greatest of humans, and surely would have prevented the invasion if he had been alive.  (For Baker Street Irregulars, he rewrites some of the Holmesian cannon so that the master’s failures are explained by the action of Martian spies.)  The Manana Club makes an appearance, as does Dr. Deringer, the Holmesian character from Rocket to the Morgue.

Two themes predominate.  First, Boucher was inordinately fond of stories about time travel and its paradoxes.  He also dealt with the trouble that came from magic—in these cases magic being an obvious stand in for scientific and technological advancement.   In all but one story, magic created more problems than it solved—in fact, it was usually the decision to conjure where the protagonist went wrong.  The magicians or demons or fairies or other creatures called upon to perform the magic also warned their masters that there was no way to specify their wishes clearly enough to avert catastrophe, but they never listened.  And so the hero of “The Scrawny One” is transformed intot he richest man in the world—just as he asked—by being put inside the dying body of the world’s richest man, while the demon took over the old body.  The one force in the world that could obey magic was love, as was the case in “Nellthu,” a short short story from 1955.  The woman in the tale—the only one in all of Boucher’s stories to have magic work for her—wished that the demon she invoked would fall totally and unselfishly in love with her—which meant that the demon kept her well, made her beautiful and good in bed, and let her fool around, serving her all day every day.  Love, too, was the one force that could undue time paradoxes, as was the case in “Transfer Point” (1950).

Boucher’s most widely acclaimed story is “The Quest for St. Aquin,” (1959), but I don’t think it his best.  Indeed, he had dealt with similar themes in the 1954 story “Balaam,” which is tighter.  In my estimation, he produced his best works in the early 1940s, with the stories published in 1943 and 1945 having the most to recommend them: “Pelagic Spark,” “Expedition,” and “Sanctuary,” all from 1943, and the weird tales, “The Pink Caterpillar” and “Mr. Lupesco” from 1945.  (It’s no surprise that his best work would have been produced relatively early, since this would have been when he was most under the influence of the Manana Club.)  He published his best potential story in 1943, “We Print the Truth,” which only failed because at certain moments Boucher chose not to tell his story but to comment on it as a story.   This . . . tweeness, I guess is the word, seems common to mystery writing of the time, and it unfortunately infected a lot of his writing.  “St. Aquin,” I think, was sometimes played for jokes—especially insiderish jokes—at the expense of the story.  Naiveté also marred much of his science fiction.  He imagined aliens from other planets as mammals or insects, for example, which while not as clichéd as BEMs was still uninspired.

What was inspired, I would argue, was his attempts at mixing the genres of mystery and science fiction.  John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding, famously said at about this time that the two could not be mixed, because science fiction allowed one to play too much with the premises and so cheat the reader.  Asimov later took up the challenge and proved that one could write a science fiction mystery, and he’s widely credited with creating the new form, but I think in that Boucher is poorly served.  He seems to have been reluctant to completely take on Campbell—even referencing approvingly his statement in one story—and his mysteries did not always use as well worked-out science fiction as Asimov’s but he was clearly doing science fiction mysteries.

And this mixing, I think, had a lot to do with Fort.  The classic mystery is composed in the Holmesian fashion, to show that what was improbable was possible—was in fact the truth.  Boucher’s mysteries are meant to prove that some parts of the impossible are possible—just as he said in Rocket to the Morgue.  The mysteries, for instance, prove that time travel is possible.   There’s a connection here, too, with weird tales, in that Boucher sometimes does not allow himself a simple, rational explanation for the weirdnesses at the heart of the stories—but shows that the supernatural, too, is alive in the human world.

That weird tales and Fort were in his mind is unmistakable.  He wrote a number of stories for Weird Tales, which meant he was keeping up with that market.  His stories also referenced Fort.   In “The Chronokinesis of Jonathan Hull,” for example, a man of the future writes “The Co-ordinating Concordance to the Data of Charles Fort,” which implies that Fort’s ideas were later confirmed.  More subtly, “The Tenderizers,” posits—in a classic Lovecraftian manner—that there are some msyerious “they” controlling weird writers, making them tell of horrors so that the “they” can savor the fine bouquet of our fear.  And after they have been used up, the writers are harvested—which accounts for Ambrose Bierce’s mysterious disappearance in Mexico.  Any reader of Fort would remember that he suggested—jokingly—some cosmic force was collecting Bierces.  The stories “Sanctuary” and “The Pink Caterpillar” reverse the tale, reporting on mysterious appearances.  Another of Boucher’s stories plays with the classic Fortean maxim, “I think we are property.”  In “Conquest,” humans ingratiate themselves with a race of alien giants by becoming their pets—and thus will be able to sabotage the giants when galactic destroyers show up.

For the current purpose of understanding the San Francisco Forteans, another of Boucher’s Fortean references may be most useful.  In 1952’s “The Anomaly of the Empty Man,” Lamb, private detective who thrives on bizarre cases is bamboozled by his current one and so goes to the “Monkey Block”—Montgomery Block, an artist’s enclave on the edge of China Town and North Beach—right near where Robert Barbour Johnson and some others lived.  He is looking for a particular studio, “Verner’s Varieites,” which is run by the eccentric Dr. Verner, who oversees singers and sculptors and writers.   Verner is “Half Robert Burton and Half Charles Fort.”  He had been a world traveler and lover of many women and now stood at a lectern, writing—with a quill pen--The Anatomy of Nonscience, a sequel to Fort’s four books.  In general, Boucher suggests that Forteanism was common in the arts community of San Francisco—an expected part of the weirdness, maybe affected, maybe not.  But, I think that Kenneth MacNichol may also have been a model for Dr. Verner.  We know that Boucher was fond of using real people as models, that MacNichol had traveled the globe and gone through many loves, and was a dedicated Fortean.  He also worked right near the Monkey Block.  This San Francisco Fortean again connects mystery and science fiction writing.  He is related to Sherlock Holmes—they are supposed to be cousins—but uses the more Fortean mantra, that some part of the impossible must be possible.

It’s impossible that Boucher got this idea from the San Francisco Forteans—he was using it when he was in LA—but it captures nicely what he got out of Fort.

When Robert Johnson discovered Charles Fort is not known.  But, recently I had a chance to go through some of the Eric Frank Russell papers, and a letter to him from Tiffany Thayer makes clear that the San Francisco branch of the Fortean Society was in full swing by the late 1940s.  He wrote (in 18 FS, which, according to Thayer's idiosyncratic marking of time is 1949), "Our San Francisco--Chapter Two--is going great guns.  Meetings that last all night and so on."

Johnson, of course, was in San Francisco at the time, and should have been familiar with some of those who had an interest in matters Fortean.  He was not, however, "a 'joiner,' by nature," he told Damon Knight.  "And have always stubborny refused to hold any office in the very few organizations to which I have belonged.  In my judgement, it takes up too much time, for a writer; and distracts too much from his own work."

But, he must have joined relatively soon after its founding, because he was there in 1951 when Thayer excommunicated Chapter Two.

As Johnson has it, his interest in Fort was two-fold.  First, Fort provided a great number of story ideas.  In 1951, he told the Berkeley, California, Elves,' Gnomes' and Little Men's Science-Fiction, Chowder and Marching Society, "It was recently proposed to form a club that would be called, 'Writers Who Have Stolen lots from Charles Fort.'  The idea was dropped, however, when it was realized that such a group would include virtually every writer in the imaginative field, including many now deceased."

Johnson was also interested in damn facts--which, as he tells it, was the cause of Chapter Two's eviction from the Fortean Society sometime in 1950 or 1951.  The group dutifully collected reports of anamolous events and even gathered ice that fell on Oakland in the middle of summer.  These reports they passed on to Thayer, who complained that his Society was more interested in political things ("other rebellions") than traditional damned facts.  Apparently upset over the direction of the San Francisco chapter, Thayer withdrew their charter; the Bay Area Forteans resigned en masse and reconstituted themselves as Chapter Two.

Su upset over Thayer's direction was Johnson, that he never bought any issues of Doubt and publically complained to the Berkeley group.  That complaint was later  published in the groups fanzine Rhodomagnetic Digest, then reprinted in If and Anubius--indicating the continued interest in Fort among science ficiton and fantasy enthusiasts.

According to Johnson's later recollections, Chapter Two continued to meet until the death of Kenneth MacNichol and Polly Lamb.  He dates this as 1957 for MacNichol and 1958 for Lamb--giving Chapter Two a lifespan of eight or nine years--but his memory, as should be obvious by now, cannot always be trusted, and the official records on this matter are still unclear.  Further research is necessary.  Which is perfect, because Kenneth MacNichol is the next subject.

After the War, Johnson returned to his basement apartment at 1443 Montgomery--at least that's what Don Herron's timeline would have--and resumed his literary life.  Not that he took care of his books.  Again according to Herron, the first thing he did with a new book was break its spine so that it was easier to read.  And George Haas once discovered that he had been using a slice of bacon (!) as a bookmark.

In the late 1940s, he signed a contract with Blue Book magazine for six circus stories and novellas each year.  He wrote in The Weird Tales Story that he made "ten times" as much as he did for any of his weird writing.  At the time, Weird Tales  paid about 1.5 cents per word for stories.  According to Paul Reynolds's The Middle Man, Blue Book was paying about 7.5 cents per word--not quite ten times as much, but still a substantial increase.

Blue Book, at the time, was filling a niche between the pulps and the slicks such as Redbook and Saturday Evening Post, offering quality fiction at a lower cost and open to lesser known authors than those magazines.  Its competitor was Argosy.  Argosy was one of the first pulps; it had declined seriously by the end of the 1930s and was purchased by Popular Publications--the upstart company where Rogers Terrill worked.  Eventually, he was given command of that magzine and raised its quality--surprising given his earlier interest in the sexploitation pulps.  One wonders whether Johnson did not avoid Argosy because of his poast associations with Terrill.

At any rate, this seems to have been Johnson's main--if not only--source of income  through the late 1940s and early 1950s.  He published five stories there in 1948, five in 1949, and then three each in 1950 and 1951.  (Kennicott left in 1952).  Johnson continued to publish then, contributing articles to the Fortean-inflected Mystic, Short Story, Short Story for Men, andThe Magazine of Horror.  (There are probably others, too, still yet uncatalogued.)  He even sent a story to Weird Tales--a cursed story, as he was to later remember.  An earlier version had been destroyed--along with the agent--during the London blitz; another had been accepted at some magazine that then folded.  As fate would have it, Weird Tales accepted Johnson's story, but also went out of business before publishing the story.  That was in 1954, a time that generally witnessed the passing or transformation fo all the pulps.

Four years later, Johnson was of the opinion--put down in the fanzine New Frontiers--that the heyday of weird fiction was gone.  Certainly, examples of it would still be published, but only his generation was blessed with magazines that provided only weird fiction.

It is tempting to see the end of Weird Tales as signalling an end of Johnson's creative outputs.  The record bears that out--but then the record could be wrong, and the absence of available evidence make this seem a more definitive period.

Be that as it may, by the mid-1960s, he had moved to 2040 Franklin Street, Apartment 803, and only saw Haas occassionally, the last recorded connection between them in 1970, when they discussed the possibility of escaped circus gorillas being mistaken for Bigfoot.  When R. Alain Evarts tracked him down, he did not want to talk about the past or himself.  Johnson's friends reported to Evarts that he had become reclusive and obese.  Rumors abounded; that he was paranoid, told stories of having no social security card, avoided paying taxes, and had moved to Salinas, California.

Not all of this is true.  He did have a social security card, which he applied for in 1971, caliming he was born in 1906 so that he could start receiving benefits in August of that year.  Whether he was paranoid or claimed to have been an intelligence officer in World War II cannot be verified.  But, he seems to have moved to Salinas.  At least, there's a death certificate from there for a Robert B. Johnson, whose birth was listed as 19 August 1907 in Kentucky, and whose death was given as 26 December 1987 (the SSDI has a different date), caused by a heart attack secondary to pneumonia. 

)Whatever else Johnson was up to in the 1930s, he says that he drifted to San Diego for a time--there's no record of this, but also no reason to disbelieve him--and, while there, started writing for Weird Tales again, producing a letter for the May 1939 issue and three stories, "Lupa," "Silver Coffin," and "Far Below."  Lupa included a nude scene in hopes that it would make the cover--Weird Tales's covers at the time featured nudes.  Apparently, it was acceptable to finesse a nude scene into a story for Weird Tales, by Johnson's reckoning, but not so much for Terror Tales.  "Far Below" was an homage to H.P. Lovecraft, was once named as the best story printed in Weird Tales and was widely anthologized.  ("The Silver Coffin" was also anthologized.)

That ended Johnson's association with Weird Tales (but not weird tales), with "Lupa" appearing in January 1941 (by which time Farnsworth Wright was no longer editor, part of a series of cost-cutting measures that also led to a decline in quality).

In 1940, he published his The Magic Park, about the Golden Gate Park.

He was drafted into the US Army as a private on 6 November 1942 (Serial Number: 39112693).  According to his enlistment record, he was back in San Francisco at the time and gave his birthdate as 1905--making him 37 rather than his (actual?) 35.  If it wasn't a mistake, why he would give a wrong age is not clear.  It's also unknown what he did in the military.