A conventionally religious—and therefore somewhat surprising—Fortean.
Dennis Fitzpatrick Crolly was born 9 November 1875 in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to William Sarsfield and the former Theresa Feeley. William was an Irish immigrant, Theresa from that area of Pennsylvania. Dennis had at least one brother. He attended local Catholic schools,
St. John’s, from 1888-1891, and graduating from St. Thomas (now the University of Scranton) in 1901. According to his recollections, he held a variety of jobs and moved around quite a bit: construction water boy, cash boy, assistant janitor, printer’s devil, railroad construction. And then he moved to New York City, where he was attached to the International Correspondence School, setting him upon a writerly path for the rest of his life.
In 1910, Crolly experienced a Fortean rain, of sorts, when, he walked under the South Washington avenue bridge, wearing his best suit. A shower of hot water and culm rained down upon him. The source wasn’t too mysterious, though: the bridge supported railroad tracks, and he sued the Lackawanna railroad for $500.
For the most part after he went to work for he ICS, Crolly settled in the Scranton area: home. Over his life he would be involved in many civic organizations and become well-known as a motivational speaker. He was also part of the movement protect against mine cave-ins. Newspapers from the area are full of announcements for talks he was to give. By 1914—before he was yet 40— he was a familiar figure about town. The “Scranton Truth” reported in October of that year, “Dennis F. Crolly, of the I.C.S publicity department, is famed for his ties and bachelorhood. He excels in both, according to his friends. He is also an indefatigable worker, and his motto is ‘Loyalty.’ You can find him post every day safely ensconced in his little office on the secon [sic] floor of the I.C.S. Annex building on Wyoming avenue. It is there that he does his valuable work for the company, decides on the shade of the tie he will wear the next day and safe from the guiles of bewitching eligibles [sic]. But withal he is popular, and his appearance in any part of the building generally brings an avalanche of cross-eyeing as he walks about.”
Dennis Fitzpatrick Crolly was born 9 November 1875 in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to William Sarsfield and the former Theresa Feeley. William was an Irish immigrant, Theresa from that area of Pennsylvania. Dennis had at least one brother. He attended local Catholic schools,
St. John’s, from 1888-1891, and graduating from St. Thomas (now the University of Scranton) in 1901. According to his recollections, he held a variety of jobs and moved around quite a bit: construction water boy, cash boy, assistant janitor, printer’s devil, railroad construction. And then he moved to New York City, where he was attached to the International Correspondence School, setting him upon a writerly path for the rest of his life.
In 1910, Crolly experienced a Fortean rain, of sorts, when, he walked under the South Washington avenue bridge, wearing his best suit. A shower of hot water and culm rained down upon him. The source wasn’t too mysterious, though: the bridge supported railroad tracks, and he sued the Lackawanna railroad for $500.
For the most part after he went to work for he ICS, Crolly settled in the Scranton area: home. Over his life he would be involved in many civic organizations and become well-known as a motivational speaker. He was also part of the movement protect against mine cave-ins. Newspapers from the area are full of announcements for talks he was to give. By 1914—before he was yet 40— he was a familiar figure about town. The “Scranton Truth” reported in October of that year, “Dennis F. Crolly, of the I.C.S publicity department, is famed for his ties and bachelorhood. He excels in both, according to his friends. He is also an indefatigable worker, and his motto is ‘Loyalty.’ You can find him post every day safely ensconced in his little office on the secon [sic] floor of the I.C.S. Annex building on Wyoming avenue. It is there that he does his valuable work for the company, decides on the shade of the tie he will wear the next day and safe from the guiles of bewitching eligibles [sic]. But withal he is popular, and his appearance in any part of the building generally brings an avalanche of cross-eyeing as he walks about.”
Around 1915, he started editing the I.C.S. magazine “Ambition,” paying one-cent per word for stories of how the correspondence school had helped students help themselves. He also wrote articles himself, sometimes under the pseudonym Victor Burr, which he had started using in 1911, according to his own memories. “The name attracted me because it was short and seemed to pack a punch,” he said. He did other editorial work around this time, too, putting out “The Catholic Light,” the publication of the Scranton Diocese.
Crolly left I.C.S. in 1918 and took work editing “The Blockade Runner,” newspaper of the U.S. Emergency Fleet Corporation in Baltimore, Maryland. Originally established to reinvigorate America’s merchant marine, it was recruited into war service early on.”The Blockade runner” was a weekly newspaper. According to his obituary, Crolly also did inspirational writing in service of the war effort.
After a year or so in Baltimore on that duty, he was back in Scranton as a special correspondent for a newspaper, covering the steel strike of 191. he moved to Philadelphia, to work in advertising, New York, to work for Funk & Wagnalls, then back to Pennsylvania, in 1925, settling in Wilkes-Barre, some twenty miles from Scranton. It may be that he found something to like about Wilkes-Barre, or had family in the area, or the connection may have been made while he worked for the Emergency Fleet, because also on the staff was William F. Gibbons, a Presbyterian pastor from Wilkes-Barre. He bought the Timberman Advertising Agency and renamed it the Crolly Advertising Service. It was headquartered at the Anthracite Building, with a branch in Scranton.
Through these changes, by his own account, he continued writing for a number of publications, including the “International Truth Society,” a Catholic group out of New York, where he published on philosophical topics, and wrote essays, poetry, satire, and critical essays—these according to him, because I have not seen the magazine in question. Crolly said that he had long nursed an interest in scholarly writing, and “studied history, philosophy, poetry, biography, and life in such odds and ends of time as were available.” Unsurprisingly, he was no fan of the anti-Clericism that went with much modernist writing, and in 1927 chastised the “Wilkes-Barre Times-Leader” for its coverage of the subject:
“What Mr. Upton Sinclair thinks of clergyman is neither important as information nor interesting as news. That the Times-Leader should lend itself to exploitation of Sinclair and his inanities is surprising and a bit disappointing.
“Sinclair is a good deal of an egoist and a good deal of an ass. He is congenitally incapable of writing anything above the level of contemptible, so what he means to present as characters necessarily become caricatures. It is a reflection upon the taste and judgment of our time that his offerings are so generally accepted as oracles.
“The simple fact is that you owe an apology to your readers.”
In 1932, Crolly started contributing to that newspaper more formally, when he became a columnist, using the pen name “Victor Burr.” He had originally contributed to the publisher’s personal column, “Parting Shots” before getting his own, titled “Wandering Through the Year.” Four years later, Crolly moved to the Scranton tribune. (This newspaper had complicated history, having merged with and renamed itself the Scranton Republican in 1910, only to go back to the Scranton Tribune in 1936, such that Crolly is said to have written for both the Republican and the tribune during this time.) There he was, by his own reckoning, a columnist and chief editorial writer from 1936 to 1938. In 1938, he published his only book, “Wandering Through the Year,” which I have not read. I have not traced out the vagaries of his career after his point.
In February 1941, his car skidded on some slick pavement and he was in a serious accident. Crolly was unconscious for several days, at least, and hospitalized for a month with a fractured skull. A few years later, Crolly retired from his advertising agency. It may have been around this time that Crolly, a life-long bachelor, moved in with his brother Patrick. On 19 November 1949, only a few days after his birthday, Crolly was admitted to Mercy Hospital in Scranton. I do not know the cause of admission, but his heart was bad: he had heart failure, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease. Crolly never left the hospital.
He died 20 December 1949 at 1:51 a.m. Dennis Fitzpatrick Crolly was 79 years old.
*******
Crolly does not seem to fit the mold of the typical Fortean, or slide easily into the spectrum of actually existing Forteans. To be sure, there were Forteans of a religious temperament, though very often their beliefs took the form of American metaphysical religions that developed in the nineteenth century—spiritualism, occultism, and especially Theosophy. And there were certainly some Forteans who maintained a place in traditional religious communities. But Burr was so public about his Catholicism, and Fort so opposed to religion—seeing it not only as passé but as twice-removed from relevance: the religious dominant superseded by the scientific dominant, which was now giving way to the era of the hyphen, in his language. As much as any other modernist writer and skeptic, Fort saw religion as a thing of the past, pointless superstition.
Nor does Crolly’s literary inclinations seem to pull him toward Fort. I have no evidence that he was interested in science fiction whatsoever, which is the genre in which Fort was most celebrated. But Fort also found a place in surrealist and avant-garde literature, and Crolly does not seem too taken by those—admittedly, mine is a superficial assessment, and Crolly may have been the biggest James Joyce fan in all of Scranton, for all I know. But his disparaging of Upton Sinclair—whom Tiffany Thayer recruited to be in the Fortean Society—for example and his own writerly stylings suggest otherwise. There are examples of Crolly’s verse in Pennsylvania newspapers from the time he was there, and tends toward the sentimental and seems a world removed from modernist experiments.
Certainly Crolly might have come across Fort in his autodidactic foraging through the philosophical literature; his books were reviewed widely enough that they may have caught Crolly’s attention, especially “Lo!,” which had the publicity send-off of the founding of the Fortean Society in January of 1931. But there’s likely an incitement to read Fort act came closer to Crolly’s home. On 6 July 1932, the “Wilkes-Barre Times-Leader” ran a syndicated column by Charles Driscoll (“The World and All”) that mentioned Fort. Driscoll had it that Fort “accused scientists of using ridiculous explanations of things and phenomena they know nothing about.”
While admitting that he could not “follow Mr. Fort all the way in his skepticism of scientific data,” the weight of his column came down on Fort’s side. The topic was ball lightning. Driscoll said he knew many people who had witnessed this weird weather event. But the meteorologist Charles Fitzhugh Talman—who would joust with Fort over organic rain, as well—dismissed ball lightning as optical illusion. Or perhaps the effect of lightning on a wire conductor. Driscoll was irritated: “Only a scientist would venture to offer such silly explanations of well-observed phenomena.” he then went on to recount some of the testimony he had received about ball lightning.
That word, testimony, is mine, not Driscoll’s but points to what may have drawn Crolly to the article: stripped of its details, the story was about a personal experience, testified to by individuals of integrity, which scientists dismissed. Easy enough to translate this into an explicitly religious vocabulary. And the article highlighted Fort as someone who was striking back against the scientists—Fort as an ally, then, against anticlerical and anti-religious conclusions. That might have been enough to convince Crolly to read Fort.
If this speculation is correct, it should not be a surprise, then, that Crolly mentioned Fort in a column a month later, 11 August 1932. He started out with a poem of his own, then a dig at scientists: “If you haven’t been reading the modern book-writing scientists, you haven’t missed much.” Their problem, he said, was that they had “disproved everything without proving anything.” There are those scientists, he continued, who believed that the universe was winding down, matter dispersing into nothingness. (Briefly, and confusingly, he contrasts this with the view of those who think matter fecund, constantly evolving, which does not fit with his “scientists do not prove anything” claim.) And then he brings in Fort.
Straight away, he has to distance himself from Fort’s own anti-clerical proclivities, but it’s worth it because he’s a god hammer for hitting scientists: “Charles Fort may not like the theologians, but he likes the dictatorial scientists quite as little.” He glosses Fort’s collection of anomalies, and adds that Fort is not sure of anything--he is only offering guesses, which would seem to ally him with the scientists who prove nothing, but Crolly finds Fort’s “guesses . . . as interesting as they are whimsical.” But before he can get to beating the scientists, Crolly twists again, bringing in Benjamin De Casseres and marking him as a false John the Baptist. He imagines de Casseres saying, “There is no God but Fort, and De Casseres is his prophet.” By now, the whole argument is throughly confused as a matter of logic—but not as a matter of emotion.
Crolly turns once more, this time back to those scientists who are certain the universe is headed toward certain collapse, and those scientific acolytes who accept scientific pronouncements uncritically. All of which winds up with Crolly respecting the scientist as Driscoll thought a scientist should be in his earlier column: modest and willing to admit ignorance. The point seemed to be that science had overreached, and Fort was a reasonable corrective, but the column read as if he had not thought everything through yet, as though he had just found Fort, liked him, and was trying to make sense of what Fortean ideas meant.
He was still puzzling it out later in the year, when the subject of science and Fort again made it into his column, this a few days after his 57th birthday, 12 November 1932. Fort was here only as a small line, reduced to his emotional essence—and untying the logical pretzel Crolly had earlier knotted himself into. The point of the article was that science would never understand the beginning of the universe or its end (so this a bookmark to the first column, which focused on the end of time). He emphasized again that he respected science as an intellectual exercise, and its more modest conclusion, but not its attempts to usurp the traditional role of religion in giving the biography of the infinite. And he thought Fort agreed with him: “Charles Fort shrieks in derision at the scientists for attempting to assign cosmic causes, much more a cosmic Cause, and one finds it not impossible to share a grin with Charles.” That weird locution—not impossible—suggests again that Crolly appreciated Fort’s attacks on science, but was leery of aligning to much with his skepticism.
Two-and-a-half years would pass before Crolly returned to Fort in his column, and by this point the earlier confusion had been pared away, but only at the cost of weirdly classifying Fort. The article was (again) on the ambitions of modern physicists to explain the ultimate cause and disposition of matter, but this time more theologically situated, more conservative: “It is interesting to speculate upon the fact that all man’s troubles began when he began to seek knowledge independently of God,” he began, and ended, “Blessed indeed are the poor in spirit, the humble of heart. Not by questioning do they try to find out God; but they have his promise that through simple and humble faith they shall come to see him.”
In between, he took on physical scientists, again, for their lack of humility. He mentioned the two groups, once more, those who saw the universe winding down, and those who saw it continually evolving. The problem, then, wasn’t that scientists had disproved much without proving anything, but that they were overreaching. Fair enough. But now Fort, who in Crolly’s classificatory scheme was among those who denied anything was knowable, was slotted in with the scientists! After glossing the two groups, he added. “Charles Fort is the Allah of absolute Chance, and Benjamin de Casseres is his prophet. Many of the guesses made and promulgated about the origin and nature of the material universe, although protected by the aegis of great names, are so whimsical and extravagant that the common sense of the layman forces him to reject them with laughter or contempt.” The whimsy that once made Fort amusing to him was now proof that he was a scientist of a sort, no longer really an ally.
Clearly this was an itch that continued to bother Crolly, for he took up the same matter the next month, May of 1935, and structured the argument in the same way, obsessing over those who prophesied the certain doom of the universe (and, to a lesser extent, those who contemplated its creative evolution). He rejiggered Fort’s place in this schema once more. After rehearsing the battle, and before concluding that real scientists know that they cannot speak to the universe’s ultimate fate, he mulled over Fort, this time siding him with those who valued intuition over reasoning: “Edgar Allen Poe, in his ‘Eureka,’ anticipated Charles Fort and Benjamin de Casseres. Both these gentlemen would admit it.” He went on to say that Poe denounced Aristotelian and and Baconian reasoning, dismissing both induction and deduction; rather, true knowledge was made “through inspired guesswork.”
In July, he came to the question again—the same question—this time prompted by an Associated Press story of a scientific challenge to Einstein’s ideas; but by now Crolly was seeming exhausted with the matter. Still, there was the same conjunction of physical theories about the ultimate cause and end of the universe; theology; and the by-now de river addition of Charles Fort. He started with the article, then moved to Einstein—whom he said was anticipated by Crolly himself in linking space and time—before moving to Newton’s admirable humility before returning to Einstein, with praise for his recent public pronouncements, which also seemed humble. And then came Fort—now the cosmic jeering section, trumpeter of the great Bronx cheer:
“Just to mention the name of a great ‘scientist’ to Charles Fort is to make him seethe and boil over with indignation. Mr. Fort hates the ceaseless searching for ‘laws’ or for ‘a law.’ To him, it would appear, there is neither any law nor any need of a law—neither any system nor any need of a system. Mr. Fort is the arch-priest of the fortuitous. He convulses with laughter over what he appears to regard as the ‘poking about’ of the scientists. He scourges the hypotheses and prophecies that today are advanced and tomorrow have to be withdrawn, pours the vials of his bitterness on the multitude that will not learn from disillusionment. Fort worships the god of the fortuitous, and no other god can he find in the heavens, on earth, or in the waters beneath the earth.”
This time, Fort’s position had changed such that he was no longer on Crolly’s side and no longer with the scientists. Now he stood alone, against Crolly and the humble students of natural laws. He concluded, “I cannot conceive of God’s [sic] being given to irony. But it does seem to me that the one and only God must often look down with commiseration upon his children, so busy about the many things, so careless of the One. Not for a moment would I interfere with the speculations of the scientists—not for a moment shall they dim my conviction of the true reality and absolute authority of the living God.”
I do not know if Crolly continued to contemplate Fort and his place in metaphysics; I do not know how much Crolly really understood Fort—or how much he kew about him. (He wrote as though Fort were still alive.) But for a few years in the 1930s, Fort seemed to get under his skin, and attach in his mine to the speculations of physicists, though he was unclear on how Fort fit with them. It is too much to say that he was a Fortean, with all that implies, but he definitely belongs in the larger Fortean community.
Crolly left I.C.S. in 1918 and took work editing “The Blockade Runner,” newspaper of the U.S. Emergency Fleet Corporation in Baltimore, Maryland. Originally established to reinvigorate America’s merchant marine, it was recruited into war service early on.”The Blockade runner” was a weekly newspaper. According to his obituary, Crolly also did inspirational writing in service of the war effort.
After a year or so in Baltimore on that duty, he was back in Scranton as a special correspondent for a newspaper, covering the steel strike of 191. he moved to Philadelphia, to work in advertising, New York, to work for Funk & Wagnalls, then back to Pennsylvania, in 1925, settling in Wilkes-Barre, some twenty miles from Scranton. It may be that he found something to like about Wilkes-Barre, or had family in the area, or the connection may have been made while he worked for the Emergency Fleet, because also on the staff was William F. Gibbons, a Presbyterian pastor from Wilkes-Barre. He bought the Timberman Advertising Agency and renamed it the Crolly Advertising Service. It was headquartered at the Anthracite Building, with a branch in Scranton.
Through these changes, by his own account, he continued writing for a number of publications, including the “International Truth Society,” a Catholic group out of New York, where he published on philosophical topics, and wrote essays, poetry, satire, and critical essays—these according to him, because I have not seen the magazine in question. Crolly said that he had long nursed an interest in scholarly writing, and “studied history, philosophy, poetry, biography, and life in such odds and ends of time as were available.” Unsurprisingly, he was no fan of the anti-Clericism that went with much modernist writing, and in 1927 chastised the “Wilkes-Barre Times-Leader” for its coverage of the subject:
“What Mr. Upton Sinclair thinks of clergyman is neither important as information nor interesting as news. That the Times-Leader should lend itself to exploitation of Sinclair and his inanities is surprising and a bit disappointing.
“Sinclair is a good deal of an egoist and a good deal of an ass. He is congenitally incapable of writing anything above the level of contemptible, so what he means to present as characters necessarily become caricatures. It is a reflection upon the taste and judgment of our time that his offerings are so generally accepted as oracles.
“The simple fact is that you owe an apology to your readers.”
In 1932, Crolly started contributing to that newspaper more formally, when he became a columnist, using the pen name “Victor Burr.” He had originally contributed to the publisher’s personal column, “Parting Shots” before getting his own, titled “Wandering Through the Year.” Four years later, Crolly moved to the Scranton tribune. (This newspaper had complicated history, having merged with and renamed itself the Scranton Republican in 1910, only to go back to the Scranton Tribune in 1936, such that Crolly is said to have written for both the Republican and the tribune during this time.) There he was, by his own reckoning, a columnist and chief editorial writer from 1936 to 1938. In 1938, he published his only book, “Wandering Through the Year,” which I have not read. I have not traced out the vagaries of his career after his point.
In February 1941, his car skidded on some slick pavement and he was in a serious accident. Crolly was unconscious for several days, at least, and hospitalized for a month with a fractured skull. A few years later, Crolly retired from his advertising agency. It may have been around this time that Crolly, a life-long bachelor, moved in with his brother Patrick. On 19 November 1949, only a few days after his birthday, Crolly was admitted to Mercy Hospital in Scranton. I do not know the cause of admission, but his heart was bad: he had heart failure, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease. Crolly never left the hospital.
He died 20 December 1949 at 1:51 a.m. Dennis Fitzpatrick Crolly was 79 years old.
*******
Crolly does not seem to fit the mold of the typical Fortean, or slide easily into the spectrum of actually existing Forteans. To be sure, there were Forteans of a religious temperament, though very often their beliefs took the form of American metaphysical religions that developed in the nineteenth century—spiritualism, occultism, and especially Theosophy. And there were certainly some Forteans who maintained a place in traditional religious communities. But Burr was so public about his Catholicism, and Fort so opposed to religion—seeing it not only as passé but as twice-removed from relevance: the religious dominant superseded by the scientific dominant, which was now giving way to the era of the hyphen, in his language. As much as any other modernist writer and skeptic, Fort saw religion as a thing of the past, pointless superstition.
Nor does Crolly’s literary inclinations seem to pull him toward Fort. I have no evidence that he was interested in science fiction whatsoever, which is the genre in which Fort was most celebrated. But Fort also found a place in surrealist and avant-garde literature, and Crolly does not seem too taken by those—admittedly, mine is a superficial assessment, and Crolly may have been the biggest James Joyce fan in all of Scranton, for all I know. But his disparaging of Upton Sinclair—whom Tiffany Thayer recruited to be in the Fortean Society—for example and his own writerly stylings suggest otherwise. There are examples of Crolly’s verse in Pennsylvania newspapers from the time he was there, and tends toward the sentimental and seems a world removed from modernist experiments.
Certainly Crolly might have come across Fort in his autodidactic foraging through the philosophical literature; his books were reviewed widely enough that they may have caught Crolly’s attention, especially “Lo!,” which had the publicity send-off of the founding of the Fortean Society in January of 1931. But there’s likely an incitement to read Fort act came closer to Crolly’s home. On 6 July 1932, the “Wilkes-Barre Times-Leader” ran a syndicated column by Charles Driscoll (“The World and All”) that mentioned Fort. Driscoll had it that Fort “accused scientists of using ridiculous explanations of things and phenomena they know nothing about.”
While admitting that he could not “follow Mr. Fort all the way in his skepticism of scientific data,” the weight of his column came down on Fort’s side. The topic was ball lightning. Driscoll said he knew many people who had witnessed this weird weather event. But the meteorologist Charles Fitzhugh Talman—who would joust with Fort over organic rain, as well—dismissed ball lightning as optical illusion. Or perhaps the effect of lightning on a wire conductor. Driscoll was irritated: “Only a scientist would venture to offer such silly explanations of well-observed phenomena.” he then went on to recount some of the testimony he had received about ball lightning.
That word, testimony, is mine, not Driscoll’s but points to what may have drawn Crolly to the article: stripped of its details, the story was about a personal experience, testified to by individuals of integrity, which scientists dismissed. Easy enough to translate this into an explicitly religious vocabulary. And the article highlighted Fort as someone who was striking back against the scientists—Fort as an ally, then, against anticlerical and anti-religious conclusions. That might have been enough to convince Crolly to read Fort.
If this speculation is correct, it should not be a surprise, then, that Crolly mentioned Fort in a column a month later, 11 August 1932. He started out with a poem of his own, then a dig at scientists: “If you haven’t been reading the modern book-writing scientists, you haven’t missed much.” Their problem, he said, was that they had “disproved everything without proving anything.” There are those scientists, he continued, who believed that the universe was winding down, matter dispersing into nothingness. (Briefly, and confusingly, he contrasts this with the view of those who think matter fecund, constantly evolving, which does not fit with his “scientists do not prove anything” claim.) And then he brings in Fort.
Straight away, he has to distance himself from Fort’s own anti-clerical proclivities, but it’s worth it because he’s a god hammer for hitting scientists: “Charles Fort may not like the theologians, but he likes the dictatorial scientists quite as little.” He glosses Fort’s collection of anomalies, and adds that Fort is not sure of anything--he is only offering guesses, which would seem to ally him with the scientists who prove nothing, but Crolly finds Fort’s “guesses . . . as interesting as they are whimsical.” But before he can get to beating the scientists, Crolly twists again, bringing in Benjamin De Casseres and marking him as a false John the Baptist. He imagines de Casseres saying, “There is no God but Fort, and De Casseres is his prophet.” By now, the whole argument is throughly confused as a matter of logic—but not as a matter of emotion.
Crolly turns once more, this time back to those scientists who are certain the universe is headed toward certain collapse, and those scientific acolytes who accept scientific pronouncements uncritically. All of which winds up with Crolly respecting the scientist as Driscoll thought a scientist should be in his earlier column: modest and willing to admit ignorance. The point seemed to be that science had overreached, and Fort was a reasonable corrective, but the column read as if he had not thought everything through yet, as though he had just found Fort, liked him, and was trying to make sense of what Fortean ideas meant.
He was still puzzling it out later in the year, when the subject of science and Fort again made it into his column, this a few days after his 57th birthday, 12 November 1932. Fort was here only as a small line, reduced to his emotional essence—and untying the logical pretzel Crolly had earlier knotted himself into. The point of the article was that science would never understand the beginning of the universe or its end (so this a bookmark to the first column, which focused on the end of time). He emphasized again that he respected science as an intellectual exercise, and its more modest conclusion, but not its attempts to usurp the traditional role of religion in giving the biography of the infinite. And he thought Fort agreed with him: “Charles Fort shrieks in derision at the scientists for attempting to assign cosmic causes, much more a cosmic Cause, and one finds it not impossible to share a grin with Charles.” That weird locution—not impossible—suggests again that Crolly appreciated Fort’s attacks on science, but was leery of aligning to much with his skepticism.
Two-and-a-half years would pass before Crolly returned to Fort in his column, and by this point the earlier confusion had been pared away, but only at the cost of weirdly classifying Fort. The article was (again) on the ambitions of modern physicists to explain the ultimate cause and disposition of matter, but this time more theologically situated, more conservative: “It is interesting to speculate upon the fact that all man’s troubles began when he began to seek knowledge independently of God,” he began, and ended, “Blessed indeed are the poor in spirit, the humble of heart. Not by questioning do they try to find out God; but they have his promise that through simple and humble faith they shall come to see him.”
In between, he took on physical scientists, again, for their lack of humility. He mentioned the two groups, once more, those who saw the universe winding down, and those who saw it continually evolving. The problem, then, wasn’t that scientists had disproved much without proving anything, but that they were overreaching. Fair enough. But now Fort, who in Crolly’s classificatory scheme was among those who denied anything was knowable, was slotted in with the scientists! After glossing the two groups, he added. “Charles Fort is the Allah of absolute Chance, and Benjamin de Casseres is his prophet. Many of the guesses made and promulgated about the origin and nature of the material universe, although protected by the aegis of great names, are so whimsical and extravagant that the common sense of the layman forces him to reject them with laughter or contempt.” The whimsy that once made Fort amusing to him was now proof that he was a scientist of a sort, no longer really an ally.
Clearly this was an itch that continued to bother Crolly, for he took up the same matter the next month, May of 1935, and structured the argument in the same way, obsessing over those who prophesied the certain doom of the universe (and, to a lesser extent, those who contemplated its creative evolution). He rejiggered Fort’s place in this schema once more. After rehearsing the battle, and before concluding that real scientists know that they cannot speak to the universe’s ultimate fate, he mulled over Fort, this time siding him with those who valued intuition over reasoning: “Edgar Allen Poe, in his ‘Eureka,’ anticipated Charles Fort and Benjamin de Casseres. Both these gentlemen would admit it.” He went on to say that Poe denounced Aristotelian and and Baconian reasoning, dismissing both induction and deduction; rather, true knowledge was made “through inspired guesswork.”
In July, he came to the question again—the same question—this time prompted by an Associated Press story of a scientific challenge to Einstein’s ideas; but by now Crolly was seeming exhausted with the matter. Still, there was the same conjunction of physical theories about the ultimate cause and end of the universe; theology; and the by-now de river addition of Charles Fort. He started with the article, then moved to Einstein—whom he said was anticipated by Crolly himself in linking space and time—before moving to Newton’s admirable humility before returning to Einstein, with praise for his recent public pronouncements, which also seemed humble. And then came Fort—now the cosmic jeering section, trumpeter of the great Bronx cheer:
“Just to mention the name of a great ‘scientist’ to Charles Fort is to make him seethe and boil over with indignation. Mr. Fort hates the ceaseless searching for ‘laws’ or for ‘a law.’ To him, it would appear, there is neither any law nor any need of a law—neither any system nor any need of a system. Mr. Fort is the arch-priest of the fortuitous. He convulses with laughter over what he appears to regard as the ‘poking about’ of the scientists. He scourges the hypotheses and prophecies that today are advanced and tomorrow have to be withdrawn, pours the vials of his bitterness on the multitude that will not learn from disillusionment. Fort worships the god of the fortuitous, and no other god can he find in the heavens, on earth, or in the waters beneath the earth.”
This time, Fort’s position had changed such that he was no longer on Crolly’s side and no longer with the scientists. Now he stood alone, against Crolly and the humble students of natural laws. He concluded, “I cannot conceive of God’s [sic] being given to irony. But it does seem to me that the one and only God must often look down with commiseration upon his children, so busy about the many things, so careless of the One. Not for a moment would I interfere with the speculations of the scientists—not for a moment shall they dim my conviction of the true reality and absolute authority of the living God.”
I do not know if Crolly continued to contemplate Fort and his place in metaphysics; I do not know how much Crolly really understood Fort—or how much he kew about him. (He wrote as though Fort were still alive.) But for a few years in the 1930s, Fort seemed to get under his skin, and attach in his mine to the speculations of physicists, though he was unclear on how Fort fit with them. It is too much to say that he was a Fortean, with all that implies, but he definitely belongs in the larger Fortean community.
