A revised and (slightly) updated version of an older post. About a Fortean science-fiction author who came to find the Society too dogmatic--or, at least, not dogmatic in the right ways.
E. Hoffman Price was born in 1898 near Fresno California. His father was farmer. The family sold its orchard in 1905 and moved to San Jose. Later, his parents would separate, and he would stay with his mother, only meeting his father later in life. It may be—not to dabble too much in psychohistory (psychobabble)--that the absence of a father figure made Price obsessed with his own manliness. At any rate, his later memoirs--The Book of the Dead, Trooper of the 15th Horse, the introduction to his collection Far Lands, Other Days, and short columns for fan publications in the 1970s—certainly perseverate on what it takes to be a man.
As he remembers his boyhood, he had his life plans established by a young age. By the age of 7 he had decided to become a writer, was practicing a primitive form of yoga, and was enthralled with astrology. This last may have been the gift of an Armenian neighbor in San Jose. But there were other influences—Sunday school in part:
E. Hoffman Price was born in 1898 near Fresno California. His father was farmer. The family sold its orchard in 1905 and moved to San Jose. Later, his parents would separate, and he would stay with his mother, only meeting his father later in life. It may be—not to dabble too much in psychohistory (psychobabble)--that the absence of a father figure made Price obsessed with his own manliness. At any rate, his later memoirs--The Book of the Dead, Trooper of the 15th Horse, the introduction to his collection Far Lands, Other Days, and short columns for fan publications in the 1970s—certainly perseverate on what it takes to be a man.
As he remembers his boyhood, he had his life plans established by a young age. By the age of 7 he had decided to become a writer, was practicing a primitive form of yoga, and was enthralled with astrology. This last may have been the gift of an Armenian neighbor in San Jose. But there were other influences—Sunday school in part:
“In Sunday school, we had been warned not only against worshipping graven images, but also, against such menaces as the Witch of Endor, and, [sic] the Chaldeans who served the Sun and Moon and stars, and Hosts of Heaven. Fortune tellers and ‘spiritualists’ were included in the ban. I had always been partial to graven images, serving the Sun and Moon and Stars, as an astrologer, of course, and strange women, and wine that is red.
In his writings, though, he suggests that there was something more fateful about his life. In 1903, for example, when he was five, he snuck a drink of alcohol, which he liked; upon catching him, his mother cried, “You’re going to be a wine-biber and a whoremonger like your Grandfather.” Nine years later, he met a Gypsy in San Jose who told his fortune: he would have many women, much work, and little money.
During his time in San Jose, Price worked at several odd jobs—as a delivery boy, in a theater—and indulged his interest in science fiction and engineering. For a time, he attended San Jose Normal School, though he did not like it. Around this time, he decided that he would be a pulp writer rather than a more literary one, which meant, he thought, he needed a knowledge of the world, as well as competence with swords, horses, and guns. In 1917—at the age of 19, and while the world was at war—he joined the 15th Cavalry. That took him to the Philippines, to Mexico, and to France, as part of the AEF. His friend and fellow science fiction writer Jack Williamson called him a “genuine soldier of fortune.”
His time in the service allowed him to indulge and develop his interests. Whorehouses became a “home away from home.” He became interested in Turkish rugs, Arabic culture, and what he called Asiatic philosophy and religion, eventually becoming a Buddhist. He also found a taste for exotic food and drink. One could say that he was marking himself out of the mainstream—he was also a Theosophist—but, really, it’s probably more fair to say, with Williamson, he just “enjoyed being different.” After all, he also considered himself a conservative Republican. Done with his time in the 15th Cavalry, he went to West Point, graduating in 1923.
Fresh from school, he took a job with Union Carbide in Newark as an engineer. At night, he wrote, selling some of his early work to Droll Stories and—that for which he is probably best known--Weird Tales. “Being a regular contributor to Weird Tales was a way of living, a life style,” he said later. “So, of course, was being a full-dress pulp writer in the ‘regular’ or ‘real’ magazines of those days, but with the WT clique, it was more so.” During the 1920s, Price was transferred to New Orleans. He continued to write, as well as continuing to sate his need for travel: Price obtained a car and started driving all around the country, meeting writers he admired and others in the fictioneering fraternity.
He was fired from Union Carbide in 1932 and decided at this point that he would be a full time fictioneer. Price approached this as a professional, not an artist. He honed his craft studying how-to books by Walter Pitkin and John Gallishaw. He kept abreast of the markets and learned to write what would sell—what editors wanted. Price moved to California in 1934—no doubt in part because that was home, but also because he knew it was a good place for writers. In California, he deepened his interest in Chinese culture. Already in San Jose, he had played the Chinese lottery. Now he explored San Francisco’s Chinatown, earning, he said later—proudly—his own sobriquet, Tao Fa. Price settled in San Mateo and Redwood City, a southern extension of the Bay Area bohemia.
As time went on, he played with characterization and a sense of place—and started to find better magazines for his work. He moved from Weird Tales to some of the “Spicy” pulps, and then on to Argosy and its competitors (although never Blue Book). All told, he sold about five hundred stories, only about ten percent of which was science fiction or fantasy. The bulk of the rest was adventure—which, eh determined, paid better. Much of his writing had Asian settings. Williamson remembered:
“The Orient still possessed a mystique in those receding times, an aura of enchantment lost forever now, since too many tourists and newsfolk and service people have seen its gritty underside.”
He wrote quickly, field by nicotine: smoking 2 cigarettes per page, he could turn out a 9,000 word story in a day.
While writing, Price compared his annual earning to the Industrial Average: as long as he made three to five times that average, he felt justified in continuing as an author—he aimed for more than $1,000 per month. His best year was 1946. Price noticed that the pulp market was dying and bailed in 1952, becoming a microfilm technician for San Mateo county (for which he earned a pension), as well as freelancing with a private microfilm country and doing wedding photographs. He returned briefly to writing in the 1970s, turning out a few novels and some short stories. He died at his typewriter in 1988.
Price’s flirtation with Forteanism came in the 1940s, and did not outlive that decade: as we can see by now was common. In Price’s case—unlike so many other Forteans—we know how he came to Society: It was through Robert Spencer Carr. Price had known Carr since the 1920s, when both were writing for Weird Tales, and had invited the younger, more naive writer into the cycle of parties WT writers held in the Chicago area. They continued their friendship through many moves, via correspondence and automobile: Price driving to visit Carr and Carr coming from California to New Orleans. They even lived in the Crescent City at the same time.
Carr was quick to to fall in love with movements, ideas, and subjects. When they were in Chicago, he joined the Dill Pickle Club-a radical, socialist-leaning group of intellectuals and tried to entice Price to join. Price thought it too pretentious. Carr became a communist, and Price respected that he actually went to the Soviet Union, but was otherwise uninterested in Communism. Carr was fascinated by the desert tortoise, but Price doesn’t seem to have caught the same bug. It’s not that Price was opposed to joining groups—though eh certainly fashioned himself as a lone wolf: he was in the military, he founded a dinner club with other Weird Tale writers, and he worked (really hard) to create a fraternity of pulp writers by going out of his way to meet other authors (almost exclusively male: hence fraternity). But anything that smacked of intellectualism, that was the least bit pretentious—with these things, he had no truck.
Or almost no connection. For Forteanism fell into the latter camp. Carr convinced Price to join the Fortean Society. Price’s emory is not always great, and he dated their joining to the late 1930s or early 1940s, but other evidence suggests that it was the mid-1940s, after Thayer put out the Fort omnibus edition. Carr was called out in the 1943 column that sang the praises of science fiction writers as Fortean prophets. Carr also convinced another science fiction author to join the Society—Odo B. Stade, who was a great friend of both his and Price’s. (It may also be the case that Price knew the arch-Fortean Don Bloch, but that could also have just been Carr’s mistake.)
Price was mentioned three times in the pages of Doubt. The first came in Doubt 12 (Spring 1945), and concerned a clipping that he had sent in about a comet only faintly visible to the naked eye. This subject was one of Thayer’s hobby-horses—comets (and other astronomical phenomena) that could only be seen by professionals. How easy for them to make up such sightings! Who was to call them on it? The second came in Doubt 14 (Spring 1946), and was a generic credit, untied to any particular report. The third, on the contrary, was a long column that caused some excitement among science fiction fans as proof that Thayer’s rag was worthy of consideration [Ember 27 July 1946.] The column—appearing in Doubt 15 (summer 1946)—concerned the difficulties of translation and focused on many specific mis-translations that Price himself had uncovered. The point was, Facts we took as given were often based on mistranslations and so couldn’t be taken at face value. We had to question everything: a very Fortean point of view, and a perspective that played to Price’s view of himself as the smartest guy in any room, the only one with common sense and painfully acquired knowledge.
This image of himself seems to have colored Price’s remembrance of his time with the Fortean Society, and eventual break. He wrote,
“A dozen years had failed to subdue [Carr’s] passion for groups and causes and movements to achieve real or imaginary enlightenments. His missionary spirit now concentrated on Charles Fort, and Tiffany Thayer’s recently organized Fortean Society, an outfit dedicated to dissent, the rejection of demonstrably false concepts and acceptances. I quickly learned, after sending in my dues, and reading several issues of Doubt, the Society’s official organ, that the organization was more dogmatic than those it assailed, and consisted of minds more regimented than those it sought to liberate. Finally, not even scientists and astronomers were as ignorant of basic principles as were some Fortean liberators. Conceding all this, Bob strung along with Forteanism, on the principal that despite their compounded sillinesses, they might at times achieve some good.”
This memory hides Price’s own contributions to Forteanism. He didn’t just peek behind the curtain and decide the wizard was a Midwestern blow-hard. He contributed. Several times, likely over the course of a year—it’s possible he sent all the material in at once and Thayer used the various elements in different issues—and even allowed the Society to print an article for free, which went against his general mercenary tendencies. So we can put some weight on his later remembrance, but cannot take it at face value.
It is likely that Price became bored with Thayer’s dissent-for-dissent’s sake, with no critical stance or perspective—that was true of other Forteans, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he lived when he was in the Society. But the Society wasn’t completely at odds with his own ideas. He also felt that those in power were often deluded, and that common sense was not as common as it should be. He was open to the idea of dissent from the mainstream, but not a total abdication of perspectives. Pricer had worked hard to create his persona, and from that perspective had a particular view of the world—which institutions worked, which cultures were reliable—and so was not ready for complete skepticism.
Not that Thayer’s skepticism was complete. He was likely to latch onto an idea largely because it was not accepted—and then champion the idea. Even if he did so ironically—which was his claim, though doesn’t always seem to be the case—it was still a matter of him staking out a position. And in al the cases I can think of, those positions were largely in accord with his own left-libertarian views. Price’s conservatism would have put him at odds with these ideas, especially as they clashed with military values, which Price still held dear.
It is not a surprise, then, that a rightist—even a whore-mongering, alcohol-imbibing, Asian-loving Buddhist conservative—might have balked at Thayer’s version of Forteanism and exempted himself from the Society.
Another Fortean who did not make it through the 1940s.
In his writings, though, he suggests that there was something more fateful about his life. In 1903, for example, when he was five, he snuck a drink of alcohol, which he liked; upon catching him, his mother cried, “You’re going to be a wine-biber and a whoremonger like your Grandfather.” Nine years later, he met a Gypsy in San Jose who told his fortune: he would have many women, much work, and little money.
During his time in San Jose, Price worked at several odd jobs—as a delivery boy, in a theater—and indulged his interest in science fiction and engineering. For a time, he attended San Jose Normal School, though he did not like it. Around this time, he decided that he would be a pulp writer rather than a more literary one, which meant, he thought, he needed a knowledge of the world, as well as competence with swords, horses, and guns. In 1917—at the age of 19, and while the world was at war—he joined the 15th Cavalry. That took him to the Philippines, to Mexico, and to France, as part of the AEF. His friend and fellow science fiction writer Jack Williamson called him a “genuine soldier of fortune.”
His time in the service allowed him to indulge and develop his interests. Whorehouses became a “home away from home.” He became interested in Turkish rugs, Arabic culture, and what he called Asiatic philosophy and religion, eventually becoming a Buddhist. He also found a taste for exotic food and drink. One could say that he was marking himself out of the mainstream—he was also a Theosophist—but, really, it’s probably more fair to say, with Williamson, he just “enjoyed being different.” After all, he also considered himself a conservative Republican. Done with his time in the 15th Cavalry, he went to West Point, graduating in 1923.
Fresh from school, he took a job with Union Carbide in Newark as an engineer. At night, he wrote, selling some of his early work to Droll Stories and—that for which he is probably best known--Weird Tales. “Being a regular contributor to Weird Tales was a way of living, a life style,” he said later. “So, of course, was being a full-dress pulp writer in the ‘regular’ or ‘real’ magazines of those days, but with the WT clique, it was more so.” During the 1920s, Price was transferred to New Orleans. He continued to write, as well as continuing to sate his need for travel: Price obtained a car and started driving all around the country, meeting writers he admired and others in the fictioneering fraternity.
He was fired from Union Carbide in 1932 and decided at this point that he would be a full time fictioneer. Price approached this as a professional, not an artist. He honed his craft studying how-to books by Walter Pitkin and John Gallishaw. He kept abreast of the markets and learned to write what would sell—what editors wanted. Price moved to California in 1934—no doubt in part because that was home, but also because he knew it was a good place for writers. In California, he deepened his interest in Chinese culture. Already in San Jose, he had played the Chinese lottery. Now he explored San Francisco’s Chinatown, earning, he said later—proudly—his own sobriquet, Tao Fa. Price settled in San Mateo and Redwood City, a southern extension of the Bay Area bohemia.
As time went on, he played with characterization and a sense of place—and started to find better magazines for his work. He moved from Weird Tales to some of the “Spicy” pulps, and then on to Argosy and its competitors (although never Blue Book). All told, he sold about five hundred stories, only about ten percent of which was science fiction or fantasy. The bulk of the rest was adventure—which, eh determined, paid better. Much of his writing had Asian settings. Williamson remembered:
“The Orient still possessed a mystique in those receding times, an aura of enchantment lost forever now, since too many tourists and newsfolk and service people have seen its gritty underside.”
He wrote quickly, field by nicotine: smoking 2 cigarettes per page, he could turn out a 9,000 word story in a day.
While writing, Price compared his annual earning to the Industrial Average: as long as he made three to five times that average, he felt justified in continuing as an author—he aimed for more than $1,000 per month. His best year was 1946. Price noticed that the pulp market was dying and bailed in 1952, becoming a microfilm technician for San Mateo county (for which he earned a pension), as well as freelancing with a private microfilm country and doing wedding photographs. He returned briefly to writing in the 1970s, turning out a few novels and some short stories. He died at his typewriter in 1988.
Price’s flirtation with Forteanism came in the 1940s, and did not outlive that decade: as we can see by now was common. In Price’s case—unlike so many other Forteans—we know how he came to Society: It was through Robert Spencer Carr. Price had known Carr since the 1920s, when both were writing for Weird Tales, and had invited the younger, more naive writer into the cycle of parties WT writers held in the Chicago area. They continued their friendship through many moves, via correspondence and automobile: Price driving to visit Carr and Carr coming from California to New Orleans. They even lived in the Crescent City at the same time.
Carr was quick to to fall in love with movements, ideas, and subjects. When they were in Chicago, he joined the Dill Pickle Club-a radical, socialist-leaning group of intellectuals and tried to entice Price to join. Price thought it too pretentious. Carr became a communist, and Price respected that he actually went to the Soviet Union, but was otherwise uninterested in Communism. Carr was fascinated by the desert tortoise, but Price doesn’t seem to have caught the same bug. It’s not that Price was opposed to joining groups—though eh certainly fashioned himself as a lone wolf: he was in the military, he founded a dinner club with other Weird Tale writers, and he worked (really hard) to create a fraternity of pulp writers by going out of his way to meet other authors (almost exclusively male: hence fraternity). But anything that smacked of intellectualism, that was the least bit pretentious—with these things, he had no truck.
Or almost no connection. For Forteanism fell into the latter camp. Carr convinced Price to join the Fortean Society. Price’s emory is not always great, and he dated their joining to the late 1930s or early 1940s, but other evidence suggests that it was the mid-1940s, after Thayer put out the Fort omnibus edition. Carr was called out in the 1943 column that sang the praises of science fiction writers as Fortean prophets. Carr also convinced another science fiction author to join the Society—Odo B. Stade, who was a great friend of both his and Price’s. (It may also be the case that Price knew the arch-Fortean Don Bloch, but that could also have just been Carr’s mistake.)
Price was mentioned three times in the pages of Doubt. The first came in Doubt 12 (Spring 1945), and concerned a clipping that he had sent in about a comet only faintly visible to the naked eye. This subject was one of Thayer’s hobby-horses—comets (and other astronomical phenomena) that could only be seen by professionals. How easy for them to make up such sightings! Who was to call them on it? The second came in Doubt 14 (Spring 1946), and was a generic credit, untied to any particular report. The third, on the contrary, was a long column that caused some excitement among science fiction fans as proof that Thayer’s rag was worthy of consideration [Ember 27 July 1946.] The column—appearing in Doubt 15 (summer 1946)—concerned the difficulties of translation and focused on many specific mis-translations that Price himself had uncovered. The point was, Facts we took as given were often based on mistranslations and so couldn’t be taken at face value. We had to question everything: a very Fortean point of view, and a perspective that played to Price’s view of himself as the smartest guy in any room, the only one with common sense and painfully acquired knowledge.
This image of himself seems to have colored Price’s remembrance of his time with the Fortean Society, and eventual break. He wrote,
“A dozen years had failed to subdue [Carr’s] passion for groups and causes and movements to achieve real or imaginary enlightenments. His missionary spirit now concentrated on Charles Fort, and Tiffany Thayer’s recently organized Fortean Society, an outfit dedicated to dissent, the rejection of demonstrably false concepts and acceptances. I quickly learned, after sending in my dues, and reading several issues of Doubt, the Society’s official organ, that the organization was more dogmatic than those it assailed, and consisted of minds more regimented than those it sought to liberate. Finally, not even scientists and astronomers were as ignorant of basic principles as were some Fortean liberators. Conceding all this, Bob strung along with Forteanism, on the principal that despite their compounded sillinesses, they might at times achieve some good.”
This memory hides Price’s own contributions to Forteanism. He didn’t just peek behind the curtain and decide the wizard was a Midwestern blow-hard. He contributed. Several times, likely over the course of a year—it’s possible he sent all the material in at once and Thayer used the various elements in different issues—and even allowed the Society to print an article for free, which went against his general mercenary tendencies. So we can put some weight on his later remembrance, but cannot take it at face value.
It is likely that Price became bored with Thayer’s dissent-for-dissent’s sake, with no critical stance or perspective—that was true of other Forteans, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he lived when he was in the Society. But the Society wasn’t completely at odds with his own ideas. He also felt that those in power were often deluded, and that common sense was not as common as it should be. He was open to the idea of dissent from the mainstream, but not a total abdication of perspectives. Pricer had worked hard to create his persona, and from that perspective had a particular view of the world—which institutions worked, which cultures were reliable—and so was not ready for complete skepticism.
Not that Thayer’s skepticism was complete. He was likely to latch onto an idea largely because it was not accepted—and then champion the idea. Even if he did so ironically—which was his claim, though doesn’t always seem to be the case—it was still a matter of him staking out a position. And in al the cases I can think of, those positions were largely in accord with his own left-libertarian views. Price’s conservatism would have put him at odds with these ideas, especially as they clashed with military values, which Price still held dear.
It is not a surprise, then, that a rightist—even a whore-mongering, alcohol-imbibing, Asian-loving Buddhist conservative—might have balked at Thayer’s version of Forteanism and exempted himself from the Society.
Another Fortean who did not make it through the 1940s.
