The Fortean the universe wants to remain hidden.
Why? There doesn’t seem anything especially infernal about him. Dangerous. But he proved hard to find in the first place, the computer ate my write up of him—twice!—and destroyed another file that would allow me to track him through the pages of Doubt. Finally, my attempt to get a copy of his one short story was stymied by a terrible bookseller.
Nonetheless, I will tempt fate, and write him up again.
Henry Gus Hoernlein was born August 1915 in Baltimore. His father was also a Henry G—although in his case, the G stood for George—and his mother was Catherine. Catherine had immigrated from Germany when she was about three; Henry George’s parents had also come from Germany, but Henry George was born in Maryland. By 1920, Henry Gus had two younger brothers, William and Vernon. The family was supported by Henry George’s steelwork. I cannot find the Hoernleins in the 1930 census, but according to Hoernlein’s own later account, the 1930s were hard on the family, and they survived only on welfare—which they reproached and forced the younger Henry to fetch for the family. By 1940, the family had grown to include two sisters and another brother. Henry Gus was no longer at home, though.
Why? There doesn’t seem anything especially infernal about him. Dangerous. But he proved hard to find in the first place, the computer ate my write up of him—twice!—and destroyed another file that would allow me to track him through the pages of Doubt. Finally, my attempt to get a copy of his one short story was stymied by a terrible bookseller.
Nonetheless, I will tempt fate, and write him up again.
Henry Gus Hoernlein was born August 1915 in Baltimore. His father was also a Henry G—although in his case, the G stood for George—and his mother was Catherine. Catherine had immigrated from Germany when she was about three; Henry George’s parents had also come from Germany, but Henry George was born in Maryland. By 1920, Henry Gus had two younger brothers, William and Vernon. The family was supported by Henry George’s steelwork. I cannot find the Hoernleins in the 1930 census, but according to Hoernlein’s own later account, the 1930s were hard on the family, and they survived only on welfare—which they reproached and forced the younger Henry to fetch for the family. By 1940, the family had grown to include two sisters and another brother. Henry Gus was no longer at home, though.
In 1940, he was living as a boarder in Baltimore, employed, like his father, as a steelworker. He was married. His wife’s name was Birdye, née Meyer in North Carolina on the 19th of July 1936. Her father, Joe, had been born in Germany; her mother was a native of the Bay State. In 1920, the family was in Washington, D.C.; back in Enfield, North Carolina, in 1930; presumably there in 1935, too. According to Birdye’s social security application, she was living in Baltimore by December of 1936, working at Hochschild Kohn’s, a department store.
Birdye, with her unusual name, is helpful in tracking Henry’s later movements. Her name appears in records from Washington state, and newspaper articles also have a Birdie Hoernlein living near Seattle. As it happens, there is, too, a Henry Hoernlein in Renton.
Apparently, Henry had developed a talent for writing, for by the 1950s he was in advertising, for a time advertising and sales promotion supervisor with Sweden Freezer, then joining Trojan Lithograph in Renton. As with other Forteans, he also seems to have had an interest in fantastic literature. He read James Branch Cabell, for example—yet another Fortean fan of Cabell. A 1945 issue of Doc Savage includes a story by a Henry G. Hoernlein called “Letter Home.” I have not seen it: I ordered a copy from an on-line bookstore, but never heard back from the seller. The year that story came out was around the time that he joined the Fortean Society. It was also around the time he suffered what he called a ‘nervous breakdown’ and was placed by thoughts of suicide. (These personal asides all came from a letter he had published in The Public Relations Journal.)
By this point, Hoernlein was well established in the white collar world, having started writing technical military manuals. Although his father had been in a union, and he had once been working class, he was leery of liberal impulses within the government, fearing a lurch toward totalitarianism. The Renton, Washington, city directories from the 1950s list Hoernlein as living alone. Apparently, he and Birdye had divorced, in the early 1950s, if not sooner—although 1951 would be in fitting with other changes in his life, a a new career, a leaving of the Fortean Society. Her name appears in a March 1964 issue of the Jewish Transcript, a Seattle newspaper, which raises the question of her religious beliefs. Likely she was born to a Jewish family, which further raises the probability that Henry Gus was also Jewish. Later in 1964, she married Kenneth S. Keesling in Seattle. Birdye would marry at least once more, Daniel Desjardins. She passed away in 2004.
Hoernlein had an extensive history with the Fortean Society. I had nailed it down pretty well, when the computer decided to eat the two files that contained the information and, also, their on-line back-ups, and then make inaccessible the back up on the external hard drive. Sigh. I think I can reconstruct most of the material, but only an exhaustive re-reading of Doubt would be certain to re-create the data I had compiled before. And it just wouldn’t be worth it. But from what I was able to rescue, a portrait of Hoernlein’s Forteanism does emerge.
Hoernlein was a frequent contributor—“old faithful,” Thayer once called him—his name appearing in the pages of Doubt more than 60 times between 1944 and 1950, which classes him with the many Forteans who were in the 1940s, then dropped out with the coming of the new decade. Thayer mentioned him living in Seattle in 1945, which gives the latest possible date for his move from Baltimore. (1940 would be the earliest.) Also in 1945, he was in a three-way correspondence with Frederick Hehr and Don Bloch, both active and notable Forteans. They were supposed to be passing some thing among themselves, but what that thing was, I don’t know. It is probably also not a coincidence that Hehr was once a sheet metal worker, too. Indeed, it may be that Hehr introduced Hoernlein to Forteanism, although Hoernlein’s own reading in the pulps would have exposed him somewhat. However he came to Fort, Hoernlein made a study of him, and was able to quote him by July 1947.
Many of Hoernlein’s contributions ran to the conventional—or, conventional for Forteans, at any rate. He sent in material on lake monsters; mysterious beasts; flaming lights in the sky; a 25-foot swan; the failure of a geophysical device for locating ore to find the missing bodies of two men; a weird stink in Seattle (which he personally attested to); gases escaping the supposedly extinct volcanoo at Crater Lake, Oregon; pyrotics; grapefruit-sized hail; a cloud that hovered over France for three weeks; rare whale sightings; a fish that short-circuited a telegraph pole, and a cat that did the same at a 24,000 volt substation in Los Cruces, New Mexico, without being killed; controversies over dinosaurs; a fish with a five-inch head, two-inch fins, and no body; unexplained blasts; a sinking Japanese island; an Australian cattle stampede that lasted for weeks; inexplicable earthquakes; fish falls; four-legged fish; lightning strikes; red tides;and several flying saucer reports.
This interest in the anomalous was paired with a skepticism of science. One of his early contributions was a column by astronomer J. Hugh Pruett, which tried to explained astronomical techniques, such as using gravitational theory to find the mass of Jupiter—but which only made Thayer (and presumably Hoernlein) apoplectic with what they saw as double-talk. Another clipping he sent in seemed to approve the claims of a French man that he could calculate faster than an electronic computer. (Thayer relayed a number of such stories.) Other clippings considered an asteroid so fast that, a scientist said, its speed could not be put in terms understandable by the lay public; contrasting reports about the size of an explosion on Mars; comets that might or might not be visible to the naked eye; Auguste Piccard, a French explorer Thayer often made sport of; and a celestial explosion astronomers noticed just by chance. He also contributed a clipping about an earthquake (or maybe not) in Niagara Falls that a scientist attributed to a natural movement of the earth—whatever that meant!
Unfortunately for Hoernlein, his poking fun at science—or science’s popular accomplices, in the form of science writing, science fiction, and movies—revealed actual ignorance. Once he wrote in, “By now you have probably realized that I am not too bright. So—I don’t mind exposing my ignorance farther. Re rocket ships. The boys, from Jules Verne on, keep telling us about ‘initial velocity’ required—roughly seven miles per second, I believe. This is all very lovely, and maybe you would have to go even faster to catch the moon, or Mars, or avoid one of Buck Rogers space-cyclones. But why the hell do they have to go so fast so soon? V-2’s take off a helluva lot more slowly, judging by the movies, and still go up. Or does gravity get stronger as you go up higher? In short, why can’t they start off like a V-2 and steadily increase velocity to an m.s. rate, instead of smacking everybody flat at takeoff? Hanh?” (Shades of Fortean Charles W. Ward, a Fortean engineer who was not convinced that the earth did not move.) The Fortean I.O. Evans set Hoernlein right in a later issue, and warned against using science fiction as a guide to actual science.
Science, though, was not Hoernlein’s only bugaboo: as with many Forteans, his politics ran toward the left branch of libertarianism (which in practice often overlapped with some kinds of anarchism); he distrusted the powers-that-be in general. It may be of only incidental interest, but his father had served during World War I, and went to work with Bethlehem Ship Company for World War II, while I can find no records relating to his own military service: maybe he was also attracted to the Fortean Society’s pacifist stand. The letter he wrote in Public Relations Journal had him worried over the growth of government, and upset that businesses were trying to demonize it with the term ‘welfare state’: Welfare state sounded good to people, especially after the Great Depression. He preferred the term ‘bureaucratic state,’ and feared the US was on the road to totalitarianism. His analysis was rooted, at least in part, in what he had learned from Alfred Korzybski’s General Semantics.
His first contribution to Doubt was sending in the Emanuel M. Josephson’s Your Life is Their Toy, which claimed to expose most medicine and medical advocacy—TB research, cancer studies, the March of Dimes—as various species of grifts. Thayer, who was a vocal proponent of the same liner of politics, loved these contributions: Thayer’s idea Forteanism was political, an acid dissolving all forms of authority, not just science. Hoernlein sent in clippings about a scientist who said people should work more than forty hours per week, as the human body could withstand much more; a Harvard astronomer naming a comet after a Vatican employee; a report that the U.S. purposefully botched autopsies after the bombing of Nagasaki; a baby that died five days after being seen by a doctor—but the coroner said the doctor did nothing wrong; a California proposal to make the reading of the Bible mandatory in schools; the boon missionaries gave to textile companies by encouraging modesty in those to whom they preached.
He was most acute in his attack on chemical pesticides, and the ironies of their use. (Presumably, the story about autopsies in Nagasaki implied that authorities wanted another chemical to seem safer than it was—nuclear fall-out.) He won first prize in Thayer’s modk contest for a story about he U.S. spraying DDT over Kobe, Japan, to stop the spread of sleeping sickness. Swallows were supposedly one of the vectors of the disease—and yet the same paper that reported on the spraying also celebrated the arrival of swallows in Seattle, the birds coming back every year for the past five, as though Seattle was another Capistrano. He won first prize again for a related story. Scientists noticed that flies were developing resistance to DDT—but that the resistance could be stopped with pepper. Thayer acerbically concluded, “So—catch your fly, sprinkle him with extract of pepper, THEN dose him with DDT and he’s a goner.” It was an early example of what would come to be known as the pesticide treadmill, each problem caused by a chemical solved by another, and another.
Like many outsiders, Hoernlein positioned himself as a speaker of common sense: he wasn’t a scientist, didn’t have a scientist’s credentials, probably wasn’t even as smart as a scientist, but he had clear sight. That clear sight led him wrong—as in the case of his commentary on rockets—and it also led him to question other Forteans, although more sympathetically than scientists and politicians. Doubt 21 had published an essay by Ernest W. Brady, “Metaphysics Becomes Magic,” which, in high-falutin’ language, laid out A Kantian argument for taking metaphysics seriously. Hoernlein’s response came in Doubt 26—wrestling not just with Brady, but the philosophical inclinations of many Forteans. He acknowledged that at times he could be led astray by his own thinking; and needed to alloy his (over-)analysis with a rejection of abstractions.
“Just received DOUBT #21 . . . and read it promptly . . . and found myself disturbed by MFS Brady and his his metaphysics. The way it looks to me, Brady’s beating a path through the tough part of the jungle. He’s a good man gone astray: only a good man could go so far astray. Why is it that these good minds keep getting lost in the Cloudcuckooland of multi ordinal abstracts? I’ve done the same myself, many times, and for many years . . . even with Fort to keep me straight.”
Hoernlein found an answer to his question in General Semantics—which, apparently, he had come to through reading the science fiction author A. E. Van Vogt. As he read Korzybski and General Semantics, the brain’s main function was interpreting stimuli and arranging them into patterns. “And the ‘good mind’ abstracts to much: it develops abstracts from abstracts and keeps on wildly stewing in its own juices without attempting to co-relate the developed patterns to limitations of the organism itself, and to unverbalized assumptions all the way down to the engram level” He wasn’t convinced his theory was true, but it was the best he was “capable of at the moment . . . and methodology based on this theory seems to be working out, to the better functioning of this organism I call ‘me.’”
Hoernlein’s perspective—as a novice semanticist—allowed him to see errors, large and small, in Brady’s Forteanism (and, presumably, the Forteanism of others inclined to philosophize abstractly). First, he mentioned that no one could understand Brady because he cited so many different philosophers—in terms of General Semantics, there were no referents. The biggest error, Hoernlein said, was that Brady smuggled religion back into the discussion, referring to a giant magician trying to become self-conscious as the motor of history. “Great flying discs, what a world of unverbalized assumptions . . . Brother Brady here differs no more from conventional ‘religious’ mythology than Communism differs from Capitalism. Communism offers no new concepts: it merely offers a different slant on the same concepts. Questions of degree, not kind.”
There was yet another layer of irony, though—that for all their very different approaches to the problem of existence, Hoernlein and Brady were not so different themselves: “The hell of it is, I think Brother Brady and I would be in general agreement if only he would iron the orthodoxy out of his views, and then communicate in terms I can understand.” Hoernlein recommended—to Brady, and others like him—“read Chase, Hayawaka and Kouzybski. Not once: but several times. Then try again. And better luck next time.”
The letter, in concert with Hoernlein’s other activities, gives us a lot of insight into his thinking, at least during the late 1940s, those strange days after the end of World War II. It is safe to say that Hoernlein was not—as he called himself—“a stupe”—though he did have areas of ignorance (as do we all) and wasn’t afraid to try to score points based on his ignorance. He read, he thought, he worked hard, moving from the working class to the white-collar world. He had a philosophy of life, and he tested it against the world. That sounds pretty smart to me.
And Fort was a central part of that philosophy, again at least in this period of his life. There is a reason that Korzybski’s General Semantics appealed to so many Forteans and science fiction writers—it made some of the same points, that the categories with which humans think are constructed and unreliable. They should be challenged. Korzybski was not skeptical like Fort, though, certain that a science could be founded discovering the best way to think and talk. Fort not so much. Hoernlein tacked between these two impulses. He questioned authority, viewed politicians and scientists with a jaundiced eye, posed problems that they could not solve. And all of this, apparently, was done to counteract his own tendencies to create abstract theories: he wanted to stay grounded. At least in the letter, he suggests that it was Fort keeping him the most grounded. He had adopted Korzybski and his General Semantics as a kind of lodestone, but was skeptical enough to admit the theories might not be right—they just worked for him.
Hoernlein continued to contribute to The Fortean Society for a while after his letter, but not much longer. His last contribution came in 1951. And there’s a final mystery there. That year was also when he switched job, going from advertising—to writing military manuals. It is a long distance between reading Fort, studying Korzybski, and questioning the legitimacy of all authority—to writing military manuals. Perhaps he compartmentalized, and only dropped out of the Fortean Society because he was newly busy, or lost contact when his life was disrupted. Perhaps he had tired of all those recourses to Cloudcuckooland among the Forteans—but even then, why write for the military? Perhaps there was some radical break in his thinking. I don’t know. It’s a mystery.
I can find no records relating to Hoernlein after the mid-1950s, and those are only listings in the city directory. He died in Oregon on 28 August 1972. He was 57.
Birdye, with her unusual name, is helpful in tracking Henry’s later movements. Her name appears in records from Washington state, and newspaper articles also have a Birdie Hoernlein living near Seattle. As it happens, there is, too, a Henry Hoernlein in Renton.
Apparently, Henry had developed a talent for writing, for by the 1950s he was in advertising, for a time advertising and sales promotion supervisor with Sweden Freezer, then joining Trojan Lithograph in Renton. As with other Forteans, he also seems to have had an interest in fantastic literature. He read James Branch Cabell, for example—yet another Fortean fan of Cabell. A 1945 issue of Doc Savage includes a story by a Henry G. Hoernlein called “Letter Home.” I have not seen it: I ordered a copy from an on-line bookstore, but never heard back from the seller. The year that story came out was around the time that he joined the Fortean Society. It was also around the time he suffered what he called a ‘nervous breakdown’ and was placed by thoughts of suicide. (These personal asides all came from a letter he had published in The Public Relations Journal.)
By this point, Hoernlein was well established in the white collar world, having started writing technical military manuals. Although his father had been in a union, and he had once been working class, he was leery of liberal impulses within the government, fearing a lurch toward totalitarianism. The Renton, Washington, city directories from the 1950s list Hoernlein as living alone. Apparently, he and Birdye had divorced, in the early 1950s, if not sooner—although 1951 would be in fitting with other changes in his life, a a new career, a leaving of the Fortean Society. Her name appears in a March 1964 issue of the Jewish Transcript, a Seattle newspaper, which raises the question of her religious beliefs. Likely she was born to a Jewish family, which further raises the probability that Henry Gus was also Jewish. Later in 1964, she married Kenneth S. Keesling in Seattle. Birdye would marry at least once more, Daniel Desjardins. She passed away in 2004.
Hoernlein had an extensive history with the Fortean Society. I had nailed it down pretty well, when the computer decided to eat the two files that contained the information and, also, their on-line back-ups, and then make inaccessible the back up on the external hard drive. Sigh. I think I can reconstruct most of the material, but only an exhaustive re-reading of Doubt would be certain to re-create the data I had compiled before. And it just wouldn’t be worth it. But from what I was able to rescue, a portrait of Hoernlein’s Forteanism does emerge.
Hoernlein was a frequent contributor—“old faithful,” Thayer once called him—his name appearing in the pages of Doubt more than 60 times between 1944 and 1950, which classes him with the many Forteans who were in the 1940s, then dropped out with the coming of the new decade. Thayer mentioned him living in Seattle in 1945, which gives the latest possible date for his move from Baltimore. (1940 would be the earliest.) Also in 1945, he was in a three-way correspondence with Frederick Hehr and Don Bloch, both active and notable Forteans. They were supposed to be passing some thing among themselves, but what that thing was, I don’t know. It is probably also not a coincidence that Hehr was once a sheet metal worker, too. Indeed, it may be that Hehr introduced Hoernlein to Forteanism, although Hoernlein’s own reading in the pulps would have exposed him somewhat. However he came to Fort, Hoernlein made a study of him, and was able to quote him by July 1947.
Many of Hoernlein’s contributions ran to the conventional—or, conventional for Forteans, at any rate. He sent in material on lake monsters; mysterious beasts; flaming lights in the sky; a 25-foot swan; the failure of a geophysical device for locating ore to find the missing bodies of two men; a weird stink in Seattle (which he personally attested to); gases escaping the supposedly extinct volcanoo at Crater Lake, Oregon; pyrotics; grapefruit-sized hail; a cloud that hovered over France for three weeks; rare whale sightings; a fish that short-circuited a telegraph pole, and a cat that did the same at a 24,000 volt substation in Los Cruces, New Mexico, without being killed; controversies over dinosaurs; a fish with a five-inch head, two-inch fins, and no body; unexplained blasts; a sinking Japanese island; an Australian cattle stampede that lasted for weeks; inexplicable earthquakes; fish falls; four-legged fish; lightning strikes; red tides;and several flying saucer reports.
This interest in the anomalous was paired with a skepticism of science. One of his early contributions was a column by astronomer J. Hugh Pruett, which tried to explained astronomical techniques, such as using gravitational theory to find the mass of Jupiter—but which only made Thayer (and presumably Hoernlein) apoplectic with what they saw as double-talk. Another clipping he sent in seemed to approve the claims of a French man that he could calculate faster than an electronic computer. (Thayer relayed a number of such stories.) Other clippings considered an asteroid so fast that, a scientist said, its speed could not be put in terms understandable by the lay public; contrasting reports about the size of an explosion on Mars; comets that might or might not be visible to the naked eye; Auguste Piccard, a French explorer Thayer often made sport of; and a celestial explosion astronomers noticed just by chance. He also contributed a clipping about an earthquake (or maybe not) in Niagara Falls that a scientist attributed to a natural movement of the earth—whatever that meant!
Unfortunately for Hoernlein, his poking fun at science—or science’s popular accomplices, in the form of science writing, science fiction, and movies—revealed actual ignorance. Once he wrote in, “By now you have probably realized that I am not too bright. So—I don’t mind exposing my ignorance farther. Re rocket ships. The boys, from Jules Verne on, keep telling us about ‘initial velocity’ required—roughly seven miles per second, I believe. This is all very lovely, and maybe you would have to go even faster to catch the moon, or Mars, or avoid one of Buck Rogers space-cyclones. But why the hell do they have to go so fast so soon? V-2’s take off a helluva lot more slowly, judging by the movies, and still go up. Or does gravity get stronger as you go up higher? In short, why can’t they start off like a V-2 and steadily increase velocity to an m.s. rate, instead of smacking everybody flat at takeoff? Hanh?” (Shades of Fortean Charles W. Ward, a Fortean engineer who was not convinced that the earth did not move.) The Fortean I.O. Evans set Hoernlein right in a later issue, and warned against using science fiction as a guide to actual science.
Science, though, was not Hoernlein’s only bugaboo: as with many Forteans, his politics ran toward the left branch of libertarianism (which in practice often overlapped with some kinds of anarchism); he distrusted the powers-that-be in general. It may be of only incidental interest, but his father had served during World War I, and went to work with Bethlehem Ship Company for World War II, while I can find no records relating to his own military service: maybe he was also attracted to the Fortean Society’s pacifist stand. The letter he wrote in Public Relations Journal had him worried over the growth of government, and upset that businesses were trying to demonize it with the term ‘welfare state’: Welfare state sounded good to people, especially after the Great Depression. He preferred the term ‘bureaucratic state,’ and feared the US was on the road to totalitarianism. His analysis was rooted, at least in part, in what he had learned from Alfred Korzybski’s General Semantics.
His first contribution to Doubt was sending in the Emanuel M. Josephson’s Your Life is Their Toy, which claimed to expose most medicine and medical advocacy—TB research, cancer studies, the March of Dimes—as various species of grifts. Thayer, who was a vocal proponent of the same liner of politics, loved these contributions: Thayer’s idea Forteanism was political, an acid dissolving all forms of authority, not just science. Hoernlein sent in clippings about a scientist who said people should work more than forty hours per week, as the human body could withstand much more; a Harvard astronomer naming a comet after a Vatican employee; a report that the U.S. purposefully botched autopsies after the bombing of Nagasaki; a baby that died five days after being seen by a doctor—but the coroner said the doctor did nothing wrong; a California proposal to make the reading of the Bible mandatory in schools; the boon missionaries gave to textile companies by encouraging modesty in those to whom they preached.
He was most acute in his attack on chemical pesticides, and the ironies of their use. (Presumably, the story about autopsies in Nagasaki implied that authorities wanted another chemical to seem safer than it was—nuclear fall-out.) He won first prize in Thayer’s modk contest for a story about he U.S. spraying DDT over Kobe, Japan, to stop the spread of sleeping sickness. Swallows were supposedly one of the vectors of the disease—and yet the same paper that reported on the spraying also celebrated the arrival of swallows in Seattle, the birds coming back every year for the past five, as though Seattle was another Capistrano. He won first prize again for a related story. Scientists noticed that flies were developing resistance to DDT—but that the resistance could be stopped with pepper. Thayer acerbically concluded, “So—catch your fly, sprinkle him with extract of pepper, THEN dose him with DDT and he’s a goner.” It was an early example of what would come to be known as the pesticide treadmill, each problem caused by a chemical solved by another, and another.
Like many outsiders, Hoernlein positioned himself as a speaker of common sense: he wasn’t a scientist, didn’t have a scientist’s credentials, probably wasn’t even as smart as a scientist, but he had clear sight. That clear sight led him wrong—as in the case of his commentary on rockets—and it also led him to question other Forteans, although more sympathetically than scientists and politicians. Doubt 21 had published an essay by Ernest W. Brady, “Metaphysics Becomes Magic,” which, in high-falutin’ language, laid out A Kantian argument for taking metaphysics seriously. Hoernlein’s response came in Doubt 26—wrestling not just with Brady, but the philosophical inclinations of many Forteans. He acknowledged that at times he could be led astray by his own thinking; and needed to alloy his (over-)analysis with a rejection of abstractions.
“Just received DOUBT #21 . . . and read it promptly . . . and found myself disturbed by MFS Brady and his his metaphysics. The way it looks to me, Brady’s beating a path through the tough part of the jungle. He’s a good man gone astray: only a good man could go so far astray. Why is it that these good minds keep getting lost in the Cloudcuckooland of multi ordinal abstracts? I’ve done the same myself, many times, and for many years . . . even with Fort to keep me straight.”
Hoernlein found an answer to his question in General Semantics—which, apparently, he had come to through reading the science fiction author A. E. Van Vogt. As he read Korzybski and General Semantics, the brain’s main function was interpreting stimuli and arranging them into patterns. “And the ‘good mind’ abstracts to much: it develops abstracts from abstracts and keeps on wildly stewing in its own juices without attempting to co-relate the developed patterns to limitations of the organism itself, and to unverbalized assumptions all the way down to the engram level” He wasn’t convinced his theory was true, but it was the best he was “capable of at the moment . . . and methodology based on this theory seems to be working out, to the better functioning of this organism I call ‘me.’”
Hoernlein’s perspective—as a novice semanticist—allowed him to see errors, large and small, in Brady’s Forteanism (and, presumably, the Forteanism of others inclined to philosophize abstractly). First, he mentioned that no one could understand Brady because he cited so many different philosophers—in terms of General Semantics, there were no referents. The biggest error, Hoernlein said, was that Brady smuggled religion back into the discussion, referring to a giant magician trying to become self-conscious as the motor of history. “Great flying discs, what a world of unverbalized assumptions . . . Brother Brady here differs no more from conventional ‘religious’ mythology than Communism differs from Capitalism. Communism offers no new concepts: it merely offers a different slant on the same concepts. Questions of degree, not kind.”
There was yet another layer of irony, though—that for all their very different approaches to the problem of existence, Hoernlein and Brady were not so different themselves: “The hell of it is, I think Brother Brady and I would be in general agreement if only he would iron the orthodoxy out of his views, and then communicate in terms I can understand.” Hoernlein recommended—to Brady, and others like him—“read Chase, Hayawaka and Kouzybski. Not once: but several times. Then try again. And better luck next time.”
The letter, in concert with Hoernlein’s other activities, gives us a lot of insight into his thinking, at least during the late 1940s, those strange days after the end of World War II. It is safe to say that Hoernlein was not—as he called himself—“a stupe”—though he did have areas of ignorance (as do we all) and wasn’t afraid to try to score points based on his ignorance. He read, he thought, he worked hard, moving from the working class to the white-collar world. He had a philosophy of life, and he tested it against the world. That sounds pretty smart to me.
And Fort was a central part of that philosophy, again at least in this period of his life. There is a reason that Korzybski’s General Semantics appealed to so many Forteans and science fiction writers—it made some of the same points, that the categories with which humans think are constructed and unreliable. They should be challenged. Korzybski was not skeptical like Fort, though, certain that a science could be founded discovering the best way to think and talk. Fort not so much. Hoernlein tacked between these two impulses. He questioned authority, viewed politicians and scientists with a jaundiced eye, posed problems that they could not solve. And all of this, apparently, was done to counteract his own tendencies to create abstract theories: he wanted to stay grounded. At least in the letter, he suggests that it was Fort keeping him the most grounded. He had adopted Korzybski and his General Semantics as a kind of lodestone, but was skeptical enough to admit the theories might not be right—they just worked for him.
Hoernlein continued to contribute to The Fortean Society for a while after his letter, but not much longer. His last contribution came in 1951. And there’s a final mystery there. That year was also when he switched job, going from advertising—to writing military manuals. It is a long distance between reading Fort, studying Korzybski, and questioning the legitimacy of all authority—to writing military manuals. Perhaps he compartmentalized, and only dropped out of the Fortean Society because he was newly busy, or lost contact when his life was disrupted. Perhaps he had tired of all those recourses to Cloudcuckooland among the Forteans—but even then, why write for the military? Perhaps there was some radical break in his thinking. I don’t know. It’s a mystery.
I can find no records relating to Hoernlein after the mid-1950s, and those are only listings in the city directory. He died in Oregon on 28 August 1972. He was 57.
