Shroyer as a freshman in high school. More of a friend of Eric Frank Russell than a Fortean—but, nonetheless, a Fortean.
Frederick Benjamin Shroyer was born 28 October 1916 in Decatur, Indiana, to Benjamin Frederick Shroyer and Hulda Mutschler. Benjamin was laborer and salesman; Hulda was the daughter of German immigrants. The family also had a daughter, Catherine, some 7 years Frederick’s junior. In 1920, Hulda’s father—also Fred—lived with the Shroyers, as did Hulda’s sister, Ella. At that time, Benjamin was an engineer for a sugar factory and they mortgaged their home. Ten years later, according tot he next census, Ella had moved out; Fred Mutschler was still there. Benjamin was a wholesale merchant for a meat packing company, and owned his one outright. It was worth $4,500. Fredrick attended Decatur High School. I believe he then went to the University of Michigan.
Frederick Benjamin Shroyer was born 28 October 1916 in Decatur, Indiana, to Benjamin Frederick Shroyer and Hulda Mutschler. Benjamin was laborer and salesman; Hulda was the daughter of German immigrants. The family also had a daughter, Catherine, some 7 years Frederick’s junior. In 1920, Hulda’s father—also Fred—lived with the Shroyers, as did Hulda’s sister, Ella. At that time, Benjamin was an engineer for a sugar factory and they mortgaged their home. Ten years later, according tot he next census, Ella had moved out; Fred Mutschler was still there. Benjamin was a wholesale merchant for a meat packing company, and owned his one outright. It was worth $4,500. Fredrick attended Decatur High School. I believe he then went to the University of Michigan.
Shroyer belonged to a precocious generation of science fiction fans. He had a letter published in Weird Tales in 1932, when he wasn’t yet 16. In 1934, he began a correspondence with Eric Frank Russell that would last until Russell died. Though the two men only met once and though their correspondence dragged, sometimes only a letter each year, they considered the other their best friend in the world. Shroyer put out a couple of ‘zines, “The Burpocratic Bulletin” and “The Fantasy Digest.” In 1938, he was interviewed for the ‘zine “Imagination!,” put out by the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society. He was cagy with the interviewer, though, making it difficult to get too much firm information from the piece. He said that he didn’t like reformers and moralists—a predilection which would persist—but did like Anatole France and drinking. Apparently, he had a very large collection of fantasy books. Later, Eric Frank Russell would turn him on to the English magazine “The Free Thinker,” a secularist rag that had helped bond Russell and another Fortean, Ed Simpson. (As early as 1938, he was known in science fiction circles for denying the existence of the supernatural.)
I am not sure what had drawn Shroyer to southern California in the late 1930s. Work, perhaps? Whatever it was, the July 1938 “Imagination!” had him going back to Kokomo, Indiana. And the 1940 census had him in Decatur, living with his father, mother, and sister. He was credited with finishing college and classed as a “new worker.” (Benjamin was working as an engineer again, for a packing company. Neither of the women were listed as employed.) He married some time during the decade, and divorced. “The war and all that,” he told Russell by way of explanation. He played around with science fiction publishing, being involved with the early plans for Erle Korshak’s Shasta Publishers and in 1947 heading up Carcosa House—which only produced one book, and the promise of one more. (Shroyer asked to publish Russell’s “Sinsiter Barrier” in America, but the novel already had a publisher.) During the late 1940s, he also finished a Master’s Degree at the University of Southern California (on the Irish gothic writer Sheridan Le Fanu). The turn toward academia had him slowly drifting away from science fiction. In 1949, he married Patricia Grace Connor, a fellow USC student.
The University of Liverpool owns a large cache of letters to Eric Frank Russell from Shroyer. These begin in 1947. (Russell’s biographer suggests that Shroyer may have set the seeds for Russell’s best-known book, Sinister Barrier, by asking, If everyone wants peace, why don’t we get it?) The early letters are jocular, and overly affectionate, full of ethnic jokes and blasts at the Vatican. Shroyer seems to have been especially worried about a conservative Catholic movement in America. He was irritated by the rise of Joe McCarthy and disappointed by the failure of Henry A. Wallace. He was amazed by the popularity of science fiction—which he saw only from afar now, reported in Time and the Saturday Evening Post—and recommended that Russell sell as many of his stories as he could as many times as possible. (He was friendly with Henry Kuttner and Catherine Moore, science fiction writers in L.A., and told them the same.) In 1949, he applied to the University of London—for courses starting in 1950—where he hoped to do as his Ph.D. a biography of Le Fanu. (He already had a publisher.) Shroyer was palpably excited that he would finally meet Russell.
As it happened, events went a different direction. California was short on teachers just as its school were being overwhelmed by war babies and its colleges by returning soldiers. Shroyer took a job at Los Angeles State College (later, California State University LA) where he taught—he told Russell—everything from Anglo-Saxon to Semantics, and the Romantic Movement. At the same time, he was working on his Ph.D. (Kuttner and Moore turned to academia, too.) Meanwhile, he continued to supply Russell with some of the goods he couldn’t get on the other side of the Atlantic—provisions were difficult in post-War England—among them Esquire magazine. Shroyer was also in the Air Force reserves, which made him twitchy about world politics. In three decades, the planet had been dragged into worldwide war twice and he was sure another was yet to come. The events in Korea, the jingoism of McCarthy, these worried him.
Still, he continued to teach and settle into domestic life, In 1951, he and Patricia bought a house. They had a cat, Catman the Good Grey Purret. He avoided recall by the air force (because, he thought, his ex-in-laws had reported him as a communist, since he was inclined toward pacifism and criticizing the Church.) He read some science fiction, but usually only if it was something by Russell—those were about the only science fiction magazines he bought anymore, the ones that advertised a story by Russell. Fans, he said, were “a putrid, pallid bunch at best.” Madeline Gwynn Shroyer was born 17 November 1953, the Shroyer’s only child. Frederick continued to nurse hopes of going to England to study Le Fanu and applied for a Ford Foundation grant (he had finished his dissertation on him, at USC). In 1956, he finished his first novel, “Wall to the Nightside,” which was published the following year. He told Russell,
“It, and the heroine, are laid in the Mid-West during the late Thirties. I put a lot of blood and memory in it, and I rewrote it until I hated the goddamned thing, but now I’m satisfied. It runs about 115,00 words, and I don’t believe there is a spot of padding in it. Now to sit back and see what happens.”
In the summer of 1958, Shroyer finally made his (one and only) trip to visit the Russells. He later said it was like resuming a conversation that had been ongoing—for some two dozen years by that point. When he returned, Shroyer continued to write, and also become involved with television. (He and Upton Sinclair, a friend, did at least one show together.) In addition, he was literary editor for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. The nomination of JFK as a democrat drove him to the Republicans—it seems he was leery of Kennedy’s Catholicism. He had more novels published, more reviews, and anthologies, including, in 1965, a book of short stories co-edited with Dorothy Parker. He finally retired in 1975.
Frederick B. Shroyer died 24 August 1983, aged 66, survived by his wife, daughter, and two grandchildren. A scholarship fund was started in his name.
**********************
Frederick Shroyer’s introduction to Fort and Forteanism is unknown, though it seems likely to have been facilitated by Eric Frank Russell. The time of their acquaintance covers Russell re-acquaintance with and embrace of Forteanism, but the correspondence does not: it picks up in the middle of their friendship, the first letters (all Shroyer’s) from 1947. That seems to be about the time that Shroyer joined the Society—which makes sense. After World War II was when Thayer finally got the magazine and Society on firm-footing and a regular schedule. A letter from Thayer to Russell dated 21 January 1947 notes Shroyer’s address, which suggests that was when he started receiving copies of Doubt. (The only other references to Shroyer int he correspondence between Thayer and Russell was Thayer wondering how their finally meeting in person went.)
Shroyer’s name occurs four times in Doubt, and a likely mis-print, Royer, twice more. The first mention came in Doubt 21 (June 1948) in reference to his science fiction activities. Thayer notes, under the heading “Fantastics,” that there was a new book of interest for those “Forteans who, like Fort himself, delight in elaborating upon damned themes.” The book was Everett Bleiler’s “The Checklist of Fantastic Literature.” Thayer noted that the book, the original impetus for Shasta, was dedicated to Shroyer, who had the honorific MFS. Two other mentions came in that same issue. The first was that Shroyer was going to meet fellow Fortean Dallas Ten Broeck in Los Angeles. (This was while Ten Broeck was on the way to New York, where he would meet Thayer.) The second was that Shroyer had contributed an idea for the tie of Thayer’s mock educational institution, the Fortean University. Shroyer suggested it have a blue background with gold question marks. Thayer noted it was “staid,” especially in comparison to others, such as one with a red background, and yellow vortex that encircled a Fortean leprechaun which was tweaking its ears and sticking out its tongue.
Two issues later, Thayer credited a pair of contributions to Royer. I find no other mention of such a name in Doubt. It’s altogether possible there was someone with that surname who appeared once in the magazine—there are several names that show up only once in the course of Doubt’s history—but given the closeness of the names, it seems possible that the member being referred to was actually Shroyer. If so, it showed that his Fortean interests were common to other members. His name first appeared in a list of members who had contributed to the story of Wonet. The second appearance, on the next page, was again in a long list of members, in this case ones who had sent in material on what Thayer called “sky objects,” but were generally being referred to as flying saucers.
Shroyer’s final contribution—and undoubtedly attributable to him—showcased his ironic wit. He noted the famed animal collector, Frank (“Bring ‘em Back Alive”) Buck had died in Houston, Texas, on March 25th. That very same night, in Pomona, California, two elephants escaped from their trainer. Shroyer wrote, “‘Picture the delight of all the beasts in cages when the chitterings of the mice and the exultant cries of the cats informed them that the man who had imprisoned them was dead! How the elephants must have trumpeted and flailed their trunks in beast-like glee. What ecstasy in the zoos! And in Pomona great beasts moved through the night and brought their carnival to frightened men who no longer had the protection of Buck! Pious help us all when Osa [Johnson] and Clyde [Elliott] depart.’” Thayer appended his own question, “Wasn’t that the same date that an elephant in Sarasota killed a small boy?”
Shroyer is thus classed among those Forteans who were active—to varying extents—during the late 1940s, but did not continue their involvement much past the cage of the decade. In his case, though, we have some of the reasons. The primary factor seems to be that he was very busy. It may also be the case that he classed his Fortean activities, somewhat, along with his science fiction fandom, and saw both as childish things to be put away, indulged only infrequently. But is also seems that he didn’t appreciate the direction Thayer was taking the Fortean Society or the stances to which he staked it.
The first mention of the Society in his correspondence with Russell, coincidentally, came two months before his last appearance in Doubt. He noted in a 15 May 1950 letter, “Hear from old Tiffany every once in awhile. I love him more each day. Every time I read one of our so-called newspapers, I pray for him.” (He’d been reading the “Manchester Guardian” and was struck by how much better it was than American newspapers.) This theme would recur—that he liked Thayer as a person, even as a hell-raiser, but just could not follow him down some paths. (The next letter in the series, dated 12 February 1951, includes the line, “I wonder how ling it will be before Thayer gets a heavy hand plumped on his press. Bless his heart. Love that man.”) Interestingly, we learn from the correspondence that Thayer was still flogging the idea of the Fortean University, which dropped out of the pages of Doubt before this time. Shroyer wrote, “Anyway, Thayer has offered me a chair in the Fortean University. I wrote accepting the honor and requesting that I be assigned the chair of Comparative Superstitions. I gather from his recently received card that He [sic] smiled with favor upon my request.” It was an (of course) ironic proposition given that Shroyer did not believe in the supernatural and, more to the point, saw belief in it as positively harmful to the world.
Indeed, concern over renascent religion was another leitmotif in his correspondence with Russell. There is constant worrying over conservative Catholicism, the Vatican, and McCarthy, for example. In June 1953, Shroyer wrote, “It is a thesis of mine that we are entering a new religious Romantic era. There is much sniping at reason and much advocacy of the intuitional method of approaching truth. Science is highly suspect because it continually presents new problems and because it refuses to give definite answers to problems. There is a desire for authority—any authority that will assure the adult babies that everything is fine and definite. Spiritualism is getting a great play, the churches are bulging, and the clergy are becoming sources of information about all things for many. This all sounds rather sad, I realize. But, it is sad.”
He made a similar point, more jokingly, in a letter from October that year: “Seducer of Mountains, Hail. Your timing should be of interest to the Pyramid people: your thrice welcome note arrived as I was poring gems on a paper which was to be sent to you. Conan Doyle would consider this circumstance as final and irrefutable evidence for survival after death, fairies in the garden, and witch-craft on the part of Houdini. To me, a humble man, it is evidence that there is a God who has nothing better to do with his time than arrange that letters should cross in the mail.”
Thayer, he thought, was missing these big trends in American Society, indeed, missing basic facts, and that made him look foolish. On 15 October 1951, he pleaded with Russell, “I’ve been tempted a dozen times to write to Thayer and ask him, for Fort’s sake, to pipe down on this anti-air-raid-precaution campaign of his. With an atom bomb loose in the world, it’s not a bad idea to know how to crawl away from the thing. He’s off his screw, in this case, and he’s making the hole society vulnerable as hell. Can you reason with him? Maybe you don’t agree with me about this. If not, I love you anyway, peaches. This ties in, too, with a former pile of blast from dear TT. Remember the guff about the non-existence of the A bomb? That was silly. There is an A bomb. I’ve seen where one has been. And there wasn’t much left. Sometimes I think TT drinks too much, especially before he stumbles over to his typewriter.”
In the early 1950s, he could sometimes mollify himself that Thayer’s windmill-jousting could still be worthwhile: “I’ve never met the lug, but I like him—very much, even though I think he has a wild hair in his flabby posterior. But, bless our shabby souls, we desperately need wild hairs in this crappy society of which we are a part.” But later in the decade, that was increasingly untrue. His irritation seems to have reached its maximum in 1956. A portion of a letter from 30 April 1956 reads,
“The new Fortean [sic] magazine came today and I’ve just finished it. I wish you’d write an article for it, pointing out that while it is true that scientists can become cultists and obscurantists, nevertheless, the scientific method is the only valid way of discovering what is true. The scientists are under attack by the witch doctors and their ilk, and I think it is time that we support them. I remember noting that the book Science is a Sacred Cow was featured in the windows of the Catholic bookstores and later became a selection of the Catholic-Book-of-the-Month Club. Furthermore, Thayer lacks the ability to discriminate, I think. If someone reported that he found a piece of shit in his back yard, Thayer would make a feature out of it, implying that scientists are nits because they fail to admit that an angel passed over one night. Thayer is a guy with an admirable stick up his add which makes him react against any kind of dogma. And that’s good. But he goes overboard in his reaction and finally comes up with the conviction that anything said by a professional is crap, and anything said by a crack-pot must be unusually significant. In his anti-dogmatism, he is fanatically dogmatic. I could wish that someone like Eric Frank Russell edited the magazine . . .” (Ellipses in original.)
Shroyer was interrupted in his epistle-writing. When he came back to it a few weeks later, the problem of the Fortean Society was still on his mind. He continued on 20 May 1956, 20 May 1956: “[M]ost reports are, in DOUBT, from the press. If there is any more unreliable source of news than the press, I don’t know what it is. During the last year I’ve been in the press a bit—without one exception they garbled what I said. I suspect this is true in the instances DOUBT reports. In other words, I’ll wager it wasn’t a scientist who said they had ‘watched’ the Hydra Cluster—but some half-ass, lame-brain reporter who probably apart from a period spent playing the juke-box in a brothel, has been with the press since he graduated from reform school.”
It wasn’t that he had completely given up on Forteanism or throwing stones at authorities. He thought that there needed to be some balance. He did not want skepticism to become too attached to the mystical and religious inclinations of Forteanism; he wanted it to be allied with rationalism. In fact, Shroyer sits at an interesting point, it seems to me, when secularism and rationalism shed their association with Forteanism and allied itself ever more firmly to science as an institution. Shroyer hoped that alliance did not mean genuine mysteries were ignored. He wanted everyone to recognize that there was a genuine strand of rational Forteanism. It’s not clear to me that this tradition survived very well, but Shroyer thought it embodied in Russell’s book, “Great World Mysteries”: “[I]t’s about time that such mysteries were treated by a master who refuses to be stampeded into the goblin-corner in this crazy, mystical, and scared age of ours.” Russell, he said, “refuses to retreat from reason.”
In opposition to Russell and what he saw as his indefatigable rationalism was Thayer, who had lost his way. In 1956, Thayer published the first three of several projected volumes in his series on Mona Lisa. Shroyer was mildly optimistic: “I see that our friend Thayer just had a three volume novel published. From the advertisements I gather that is [sic] a bawdy opus. I’m glad. Tiffany is at his best exploring bedrooms.” He then noted that there was a revival of interest in James Branch Cabell and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Maybe, he mused, Thayer would profit from this renewed interest in writers of the ‘20s and ‘30s? That was written 30 April 1956. He changed his tune shortly. All Thayer’s faults were on display, in Shroyer’s opinion, having read the book.
He wrote in August 1956: 31 August 1956: “Thayer’s book has laid a great fat egg over here, I gather. The price was against it, and the constant repetition of men-and-women, men-and-ducks, ducks-and-alligators, men-women-ducks-and-oysters together added up to an emetic rather than an aphrodisiac. Jesus Christ, you’d think the guy discovered sex! And that thesaurus erudition he flaunts . . .” Once more, Thayer was thumbing his nose at authorities, trying to show he was the smartest guy in the room—but he was outsmarting himself, and all his rebellious attitude did not add up to anything.
Shroyer could clip the wings of his opinion, but it’s clear he stuck to it through the end of the 1950s. In October 1959, having heard word that Thayer died of a heart attack, he sent sympathy to Russell, praising Thayer for his agitation, but registering—more politely—his reservations: “Sure as hell sorry about Thayer. It was in the papers here. I liked the man immensely, though I disagreed with him in the matter of his attacks on science. The big battle is still science versus religion, and until that one has been won, we’ve got to keep our ranks closed. Anyway, I lay laurels on his barrow. And as the Romans had it, ‘May the earth rest lightly on you’—Tiffany.”
I am not sure what had drawn Shroyer to southern California in the late 1930s. Work, perhaps? Whatever it was, the July 1938 “Imagination!” had him going back to Kokomo, Indiana. And the 1940 census had him in Decatur, living with his father, mother, and sister. He was credited with finishing college and classed as a “new worker.” (Benjamin was working as an engineer again, for a packing company. Neither of the women were listed as employed.) He married some time during the decade, and divorced. “The war and all that,” he told Russell by way of explanation. He played around with science fiction publishing, being involved with the early plans for Erle Korshak’s Shasta Publishers and in 1947 heading up Carcosa House—which only produced one book, and the promise of one more. (Shroyer asked to publish Russell’s “Sinsiter Barrier” in America, but the novel already had a publisher.) During the late 1940s, he also finished a Master’s Degree at the University of Southern California (on the Irish gothic writer Sheridan Le Fanu). The turn toward academia had him slowly drifting away from science fiction. In 1949, he married Patricia Grace Connor, a fellow USC student.
The University of Liverpool owns a large cache of letters to Eric Frank Russell from Shroyer. These begin in 1947. (Russell’s biographer suggests that Shroyer may have set the seeds for Russell’s best-known book, Sinister Barrier, by asking, If everyone wants peace, why don’t we get it?) The early letters are jocular, and overly affectionate, full of ethnic jokes and blasts at the Vatican. Shroyer seems to have been especially worried about a conservative Catholic movement in America. He was irritated by the rise of Joe McCarthy and disappointed by the failure of Henry A. Wallace. He was amazed by the popularity of science fiction—which he saw only from afar now, reported in Time and the Saturday Evening Post—and recommended that Russell sell as many of his stories as he could as many times as possible. (He was friendly with Henry Kuttner and Catherine Moore, science fiction writers in L.A., and told them the same.) In 1949, he applied to the University of London—for courses starting in 1950—where he hoped to do as his Ph.D. a biography of Le Fanu. (He already had a publisher.) Shroyer was palpably excited that he would finally meet Russell.
As it happened, events went a different direction. California was short on teachers just as its school were being overwhelmed by war babies and its colleges by returning soldiers. Shroyer took a job at Los Angeles State College (later, California State University LA) where he taught—he told Russell—everything from Anglo-Saxon to Semantics, and the Romantic Movement. At the same time, he was working on his Ph.D. (Kuttner and Moore turned to academia, too.) Meanwhile, he continued to supply Russell with some of the goods he couldn’t get on the other side of the Atlantic—provisions were difficult in post-War England—among them Esquire magazine. Shroyer was also in the Air Force reserves, which made him twitchy about world politics. In three decades, the planet had been dragged into worldwide war twice and he was sure another was yet to come. The events in Korea, the jingoism of McCarthy, these worried him.
Still, he continued to teach and settle into domestic life, In 1951, he and Patricia bought a house. They had a cat, Catman the Good Grey Purret. He avoided recall by the air force (because, he thought, his ex-in-laws had reported him as a communist, since he was inclined toward pacifism and criticizing the Church.) He read some science fiction, but usually only if it was something by Russell—those were about the only science fiction magazines he bought anymore, the ones that advertised a story by Russell. Fans, he said, were “a putrid, pallid bunch at best.” Madeline Gwynn Shroyer was born 17 November 1953, the Shroyer’s only child. Frederick continued to nurse hopes of going to England to study Le Fanu and applied for a Ford Foundation grant (he had finished his dissertation on him, at USC). In 1956, he finished his first novel, “Wall to the Nightside,” which was published the following year. He told Russell,
“It, and the heroine, are laid in the Mid-West during the late Thirties. I put a lot of blood and memory in it, and I rewrote it until I hated the goddamned thing, but now I’m satisfied. It runs about 115,00 words, and I don’t believe there is a spot of padding in it. Now to sit back and see what happens.”
In the summer of 1958, Shroyer finally made his (one and only) trip to visit the Russells. He later said it was like resuming a conversation that had been ongoing—for some two dozen years by that point. When he returned, Shroyer continued to write, and also become involved with television. (He and Upton Sinclair, a friend, did at least one show together.) In addition, he was literary editor for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. The nomination of JFK as a democrat drove him to the Republicans—it seems he was leery of Kennedy’s Catholicism. He had more novels published, more reviews, and anthologies, including, in 1965, a book of short stories co-edited with Dorothy Parker. He finally retired in 1975.
Frederick B. Shroyer died 24 August 1983, aged 66, survived by his wife, daughter, and two grandchildren. A scholarship fund was started in his name.
**********************
Frederick Shroyer’s introduction to Fort and Forteanism is unknown, though it seems likely to have been facilitated by Eric Frank Russell. The time of their acquaintance covers Russell re-acquaintance with and embrace of Forteanism, but the correspondence does not: it picks up in the middle of their friendship, the first letters (all Shroyer’s) from 1947. That seems to be about the time that Shroyer joined the Society—which makes sense. After World War II was when Thayer finally got the magazine and Society on firm-footing and a regular schedule. A letter from Thayer to Russell dated 21 January 1947 notes Shroyer’s address, which suggests that was when he started receiving copies of Doubt. (The only other references to Shroyer int he correspondence between Thayer and Russell was Thayer wondering how their finally meeting in person went.)
Shroyer’s name occurs four times in Doubt, and a likely mis-print, Royer, twice more. The first mention came in Doubt 21 (June 1948) in reference to his science fiction activities. Thayer notes, under the heading “Fantastics,” that there was a new book of interest for those “Forteans who, like Fort himself, delight in elaborating upon damned themes.” The book was Everett Bleiler’s “The Checklist of Fantastic Literature.” Thayer noted that the book, the original impetus for Shasta, was dedicated to Shroyer, who had the honorific MFS. Two other mentions came in that same issue. The first was that Shroyer was going to meet fellow Fortean Dallas Ten Broeck in Los Angeles. (This was while Ten Broeck was on the way to New York, where he would meet Thayer.) The second was that Shroyer had contributed an idea for the tie of Thayer’s mock educational institution, the Fortean University. Shroyer suggested it have a blue background with gold question marks. Thayer noted it was “staid,” especially in comparison to others, such as one with a red background, and yellow vortex that encircled a Fortean leprechaun which was tweaking its ears and sticking out its tongue.
Two issues later, Thayer credited a pair of contributions to Royer. I find no other mention of such a name in Doubt. It’s altogether possible there was someone with that surname who appeared once in the magazine—there are several names that show up only once in the course of Doubt’s history—but given the closeness of the names, it seems possible that the member being referred to was actually Shroyer. If so, it showed that his Fortean interests were common to other members. His name first appeared in a list of members who had contributed to the story of Wonet. The second appearance, on the next page, was again in a long list of members, in this case ones who had sent in material on what Thayer called “sky objects,” but were generally being referred to as flying saucers.
Shroyer’s final contribution—and undoubtedly attributable to him—showcased his ironic wit. He noted the famed animal collector, Frank (“Bring ‘em Back Alive”) Buck had died in Houston, Texas, on March 25th. That very same night, in Pomona, California, two elephants escaped from their trainer. Shroyer wrote, “‘Picture the delight of all the beasts in cages when the chitterings of the mice and the exultant cries of the cats informed them that the man who had imprisoned them was dead! How the elephants must have trumpeted and flailed their trunks in beast-like glee. What ecstasy in the zoos! And in Pomona great beasts moved through the night and brought their carnival to frightened men who no longer had the protection of Buck! Pious help us all when Osa [Johnson] and Clyde [Elliott] depart.’” Thayer appended his own question, “Wasn’t that the same date that an elephant in Sarasota killed a small boy?”
Shroyer is thus classed among those Forteans who were active—to varying extents—during the late 1940s, but did not continue their involvement much past the cage of the decade. In his case, though, we have some of the reasons. The primary factor seems to be that he was very busy. It may also be the case that he classed his Fortean activities, somewhat, along with his science fiction fandom, and saw both as childish things to be put away, indulged only infrequently. But is also seems that he didn’t appreciate the direction Thayer was taking the Fortean Society or the stances to which he staked it.
The first mention of the Society in his correspondence with Russell, coincidentally, came two months before his last appearance in Doubt. He noted in a 15 May 1950 letter, “Hear from old Tiffany every once in awhile. I love him more each day. Every time I read one of our so-called newspapers, I pray for him.” (He’d been reading the “Manchester Guardian” and was struck by how much better it was than American newspapers.) This theme would recur—that he liked Thayer as a person, even as a hell-raiser, but just could not follow him down some paths. (The next letter in the series, dated 12 February 1951, includes the line, “I wonder how ling it will be before Thayer gets a heavy hand plumped on his press. Bless his heart. Love that man.”) Interestingly, we learn from the correspondence that Thayer was still flogging the idea of the Fortean University, which dropped out of the pages of Doubt before this time. Shroyer wrote, “Anyway, Thayer has offered me a chair in the Fortean University. I wrote accepting the honor and requesting that I be assigned the chair of Comparative Superstitions. I gather from his recently received card that He [sic] smiled with favor upon my request.” It was an (of course) ironic proposition given that Shroyer did not believe in the supernatural and, more to the point, saw belief in it as positively harmful to the world.
Indeed, concern over renascent religion was another leitmotif in his correspondence with Russell. There is constant worrying over conservative Catholicism, the Vatican, and McCarthy, for example. In June 1953, Shroyer wrote, “It is a thesis of mine that we are entering a new religious Romantic era. There is much sniping at reason and much advocacy of the intuitional method of approaching truth. Science is highly suspect because it continually presents new problems and because it refuses to give definite answers to problems. There is a desire for authority—any authority that will assure the adult babies that everything is fine and definite. Spiritualism is getting a great play, the churches are bulging, and the clergy are becoming sources of information about all things for many. This all sounds rather sad, I realize. But, it is sad.”
He made a similar point, more jokingly, in a letter from October that year: “Seducer of Mountains, Hail. Your timing should be of interest to the Pyramid people: your thrice welcome note arrived as I was poring gems on a paper which was to be sent to you. Conan Doyle would consider this circumstance as final and irrefutable evidence for survival after death, fairies in the garden, and witch-craft on the part of Houdini. To me, a humble man, it is evidence that there is a God who has nothing better to do with his time than arrange that letters should cross in the mail.”
Thayer, he thought, was missing these big trends in American Society, indeed, missing basic facts, and that made him look foolish. On 15 October 1951, he pleaded with Russell, “I’ve been tempted a dozen times to write to Thayer and ask him, for Fort’s sake, to pipe down on this anti-air-raid-precaution campaign of his. With an atom bomb loose in the world, it’s not a bad idea to know how to crawl away from the thing. He’s off his screw, in this case, and he’s making the hole society vulnerable as hell. Can you reason with him? Maybe you don’t agree with me about this. If not, I love you anyway, peaches. This ties in, too, with a former pile of blast from dear TT. Remember the guff about the non-existence of the A bomb? That was silly. There is an A bomb. I’ve seen where one has been. And there wasn’t much left. Sometimes I think TT drinks too much, especially before he stumbles over to his typewriter.”
In the early 1950s, he could sometimes mollify himself that Thayer’s windmill-jousting could still be worthwhile: “I’ve never met the lug, but I like him—very much, even though I think he has a wild hair in his flabby posterior. But, bless our shabby souls, we desperately need wild hairs in this crappy society of which we are a part.” But later in the decade, that was increasingly untrue. His irritation seems to have reached its maximum in 1956. A portion of a letter from 30 April 1956 reads,
“The new Fortean [sic] magazine came today and I’ve just finished it. I wish you’d write an article for it, pointing out that while it is true that scientists can become cultists and obscurantists, nevertheless, the scientific method is the only valid way of discovering what is true. The scientists are under attack by the witch doctors and their ilk, and I think it is time that we support them. I remember noting that the book Science is a Sacred Cow was featured in the windows of the Catholic bookstores and later became a selection of the Catholic-Book-of-the-Month Club. Furthermore, Thayer lacks the ability to discriminate, I think. If someone reported that he found a piece of shit in his back yard, Thayer would make a feature out of it, implying that scientists are nits because they fail to admit that an angel passed over one night. Thayer is a guy with an admirable stick up his add which makes him react against any kind of dogma. And that’s good. But he goes overboard in his reaction and finally comes up with the conviction that anything said by a professional is crap, and anything said by a crack-pot must be unusually significant. In his anti-dogmatism, he is fanatically dogmatic. I could wish that someone like Eric Frank Russell edited the magazine . . .” (Ellipses in original.)
Shroyer was interrupted in his epistle-writing. When he came back to it a few weeks later, the problem of the Fortean Society was still on his mind. He continued on 20 May 1956, 20 May 1956: “[M]ost reports are, in DOUBT, from the press. If there is any more unreliable source of news than the press, I don’t know what it is. During the last year I’ve been in the press a bit—without one exception they garbled what I said. I suspect this is true in the instances DOUBT reports. In other words, I’ll wager it wasn’t a scientist who said they had ‘watched’ the Hydra Cluster—but some half-ass, lame-brain reporter who probably apart from a period spent playing the juke-box in a brothel, has been with the press since he graduated from reform school.”
It wasn’t that he had completely given up on Forteanism or throwing stones at authorities. He thought that there needed to be some balance. He did not want skepticism to become too attached to the mystical and religious inclinations of Forteanism; he wanted it to be allied with rationalism. In fact, Shroyer sits at an interesting point, it seems to me, when secularism and rationalism shed their association with Forteanism and allied itself ever more firmly to science as an institution. Shroyer hoped that alliance did not mean genuine mysteries were ignored. He wanted everyone to recognize that there was a genuine strand of rational Forteanism. It’s not clear to me that this tradition survived very well, but Shroyer thought it embodied in Russell’s book, “Great World Mysteries”: “[I]t’s about time that such mysteries were treated by a master who refuses to be stampeded into the goblin-corner in this crazy, mystical, and scared age of ours.” Russell, he said, “refuses to retreat from reason.”
In opposition to Russell and what he saw as his indefatigable rationalism was Thayer, who had lost his way. In 1956, Thayer published the first three of several projected volumes in his series on Mona Lisa. Shroyer was mildly optimistic: “I see that our friend Thayer just had a three volume novel published. From the advertisements I gather that is [sic] a bawdy opus. I’m glad. Tiffany is at his best exploring bedrooms.” He then noted that there was a revival of interest in James Branch Cabell and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Maybe, he mused, Thayer would profit from this renewed interest in writers of the ‘20s and ‘30s? That was written 30 April 1956. He changed his tune shortly. All Thayer’s faults were on display, in Shroyer’s opinion, having read the book.
He wrote in August 1956: 31 August 1956: “Thayer’s book has laid a great fat egg over here, I gather. The price was against it, and the constant repetition of men-and-women, men-and-ducks, ducks-and-alligators, men-women-ducks-and-oysters together added up to an emetic rather than an aphrodisiac. Jesus Christ, you’d think the guy discovered sex! And that thesaurus erudition he flaunts . . .” Once more, Thayer was thumbing his nose at authorities, trying to show he was the smartest guy in the room—but he was outsmarting himself, and all his rebellious attitude did not add up to anything.
Shroyer could clip the wings of his opinion, but it’s clear he stuck to it through the end of the 1950s. In October 1959, having heard word that Thayer died of a heart attack, he sent sympathy to Russell, praising Thayer for his agitation, but registering—more politely—his reservations: “Sure as hell sorry about Thayer. It was in the papers here. I liked the man immensely, though I disagreed with him in the matter of his attacks on science. The big battle is still science versus religion, and until that one has been won, we’ve got to keep our ranks closed. Anyway, I lay laurels on his barrow. And as the Romans had it, ‘May the earth rest lightly on you’—Tiffany.”
