Redux of an earlier series of postings. Some day may be an article.
Toward the middle of Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch, while complaining about all the mail he receives, Henry Miller says, “Perhaps I attract people who are given to experimentation. Perhaps I attract individuals who are struggling manfully to pierce the hocus-pocus which envelops and obstructs our march through life. People are constantly supplying me with startling facts, amazing events, incredible experiences—as if I were another Charles Fort. They struggle, they rebel, they experiment, they get glimpses of truth, they are raised up by spasmodic gusts of self-confidence—and yet they are hopelessly enmeshed.” He tosses out Fort’s name lightly, and never returns to it—even as he spends the last chapter complaining, again, about the abundance of his mail. No scholar has ever worried over this reference. Perhaps it seems a passing fad, or of a piece with Miller’s inclination toward occultism and kooks. Kenneth Rexroth noted in his introduction to Nights of Love and Laughter that Miller was “likely at times to go off the deep end about the lost continent of Mu or astrology of the ‘occult’” at a moment’s notice. Those who even recognized Fort’s name probably chalked the allusion up to this tendency. But the connection between the two American iconoclasts is deeper than that.
Henry Miller reached California in 1942, a year after starting a cross-country trek, two years after being forced out of Europe by war. Writing in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, he was hopeful about where he landed, even as he excoriated his home country. He moved to Beverly Glen, where he met the artist Jean Varda. Varda enticed him to Monterey, and Miller moved to Big Sur in 1944, relocating to different houses in the area several times over the next three years before settling down on Partington Ridge, near Anderson Creek, for fifteen years. The era was a productive one for Miller, although his literary output was less stellar than it had been in the 1930s. Indeed, because of the way he was idolized by the art community of the San Francisco area, he was successfully tempted into publishing pieces that were sometimes little more than literary detritus—damned things, themselves, which otherwise would have passed out of existence.
Miller’s Bohemianism was such that he became something of an icon for others in the San Francisco art scene—and beyond. Conscientious objectors and disillusioned soldiers found their way to San Francisco and, eventually, Big Sur. (Margaret Parton’s Laughter on the Hill gives a glimpse of the dissolute lifestyle of those burned out by the war.) Others wrote—adding to the tidal wave of letters Miller complained about so bitterly. Bern Porter organized a festschrift for Miller, titled The Happy Rock and George Leite contributed a poem to it: “Through screams and the smoking,/Henry Miller, you shine with creation.” When squares looked down their noses at this rising generation, they blamed Miller for leading the children astray: he was at the center of a Cult of Sex and Anarchy, as a Harper’s magazine article had it. Miller saw that he was being turned into an icon, and was not bothered—even encouraged it. He fancied himself a kind of guru—someone who had reached Enlightenment, or, as he said, in the language of Dianetics, a clear—someone not unlike Fort himself. Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch makes only one explicit reference to the scientific gadfly, but a Fortean sense permeates the text. There’s the letters—from “cranks, freaks, nuts and plain lunatics.” There’s his characterization of Anderson Creek as especially weird, or uncanny. Flying saucers are abundant. His neighbors are interested in the same kind of scientific esotericism that filled the columns of Doubt: “Nearly every one seems to be a specialist in some field, be it art, archeology, linguistics, symbolism, Dianetics, Zen Buddhism or Irish folklore.”
All of which raises the question, When did Miller first encounter Fort? There’s no definitive record, but a good guess is possible. Miller missed the hullabaloo around the founding of the Fortean Society because he was in Paris at the time. And he does not seem to have read—or read deeply—most of the founding members of the Society, with the exception of Dreiser and John Cowper Powys. Miller mentions both in Books of My Life, especially praising Powy’s Autobiography—which mentions Fort a couple of times—and he and the Welshman became correspondents; Powys’s letters were among those Miller actually wanted to receive. And maybe that is the connection with Fort. He also knew Caresse Crosby, who was a member of the Fortean Society. We know he had read Fort by the time he reached New Orleans, on his cross-country drive, in 1941, because he recommended to Anais Nin that she read The Book of the Damned. “A very queer book,” he wrote, according to her diary. “You will see. Read it thoroughly—contains starling data and still more starling beliefs.” Thayer had all of Charles Fort’s books reprinted in an omnibus edition that year, but Miller recommended only the first of Fort’s four tomes.
By the time Miller was ensconced in California, Fort was au courant. An acquaintance wrote in a November 1943 letter, “Your speaking of Henry Miller reminds me to say that Janko [Yanko; Jean Varda] met him down there [LA], and Miller speaks of coming here again. I think he is a good man. Charles Fort makes my tired ache, altho I realize I am one of a minority. Many people whose minds I respect admire him: Janko; at one time John [Steinbeck]; Toni [Solomons Jackson].” If enthusiasm for Fort was generally high among Miller’s new acquaintances in California, then his joining the Society in late 1945 makes good sense. And that is what he did: the winter 1945 issue of Doubt announced that Miller had joined the Society, and was offering his watercolors for any price. The Society was also selling copies of his “Plight of the Creative Artist in the United States of America.”
Still, too much stress could be put on Miller’s joining the Society. Thayer was known for trying to get all sorts of people to sign up, and waiving the fees as an enticement, so Miller may not have sought out the Society—perhaps this was another step in the fetishization of Miller. Then, too, it may have just been a financial decision. In 1946, Miller was living on $50 per month from New Directions publishing and whatever he made from his watercolors—so he may have seen Forteans as a new market. He was already well known for sending out begging to letters to all and sundry. But by this point in the story, such a conclusion seems inadequate. Even if Miller was being made into an icon, even if he was just looking for a new place to hawk his wares, there are too many connections—personal, structural, literary, and artistic—to dismiss the connection between Miller and Fort. There was an elective affinity between Miller’s writings, Fort, and Fortean thought, each reflecting the other.
One connection between Miller and the Forteans was that both shared some literary traditions. Miller cherished the Romantic yawps of writers such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton (who influenced Blavatsky and Theosophy) and Arthur Machen. He wrote, “Around 1880 English novelists of imagination—the writers of ‘romances’—began to introduce into their works the so-called and miscalled ‘supernatural’ element. Theirs was a revolt against the fateful tendency of the times, the bitter fruits of which we of this generation our tasting.” One reason he may have thought ‘supernatural elements’ misnamed was because at the same time these stories were being written, other so-called myths were being proven true: Heinrich Schliemann, James Frazer, Annie Besant, and Madame Blavatsky were "busy unveiling the truth in one realm after another, all interlocked, all contributory in breaking the spell of defeat and paralysis in which the doctrines of the Nineteenth Century held us. The new century opens with promise and splendor; the past comes alive again, but tangibly, substantially, and with almost greater reality than the present.” Fort himself took inspiration from French authors of such romances. More importantly, as Forteanism took shape in the years after his death, Theosophy and similar doctrines were folded into it, as were the weird writers who were building on Machen and H. Rider Haggard and other authors of romance. In both the writings of Henry Miller and many Forteans—although not Thayer—flying saucers became akin to Blavatsky’s Ascended Masters—signs of a coming Age of Aquarius.
This love for Romantic writers and thinkers ripened, in Miller, into a kind of monism—not the same as Fort’s monism, but analogous. In Big Sur, he said, “The full reality, that’s God—and man, and the world, and all that is, including the unnameable. I’m for reality. More and more reality. I’m a fanatic about it, if you like.” For both Miller and Fort, circles (and related shapes) symbolized this monism. Fort had everything transforming into everything else—mice into cheese, peaches into apricots—and Miller had a spiral writing architecture that allowed him to encompass everything, not just facts but truth: “I am not following a strict chronological sequence” he wrote in The World of Sex, “but have chosen to adapt a circular or spiral form of time development which enables me to expand freely in any direction at any given moment. The ordinary chronological development seems to me wooden and artificial, a synthetic reconstitution of the facts of life. The facts and events of life are for me only the starting points on the way towards the discovery of truth.” Miller returned to the structure repeatedly in his subsequent books. The point isn’t that he borrowed the symbolism of the circle from Fort—but that reading Fort, he may have recognized a writer with a similar sensitivity.
The most striking resemblance between Fort and Miller, though, is that both, ultimately, were engaged in a similar project: rescuing what had been lost, making holy what had been damned—and creating a more complete understanding of the universe. Miller wrote in Tropic of Cancer: “There is only one thing which interest me vitally now, and that is the recording of all that which is omitted in books . . .” That was Fort’s goal, to remind the world of what had been left out of the books. Fort accomplished his task by collecting forgotten anecdotes. Miller did it, in part, through profanity: curse words had been kept from books—but the inclusion of the damned could clue the reader in to a deeper reality: “When obscenity crops up in art, in literature more particularly, it usually functions as a technical device . . . Its purpose is to awaken, to usher in a sense of reality. In a sense, its use by the artist may be compared to the use of the miraculous by the Masters.” Fort and Miller used these rescued things—rains of blood, swear words—to different ends, Fort to heighten skepticism, Miller to advocate for a transcendental and fundamental truth—but the appreciation of the ignored was similar. As was the hope that by showing the world what had been cast off, reform could come. Miller sometimes wrapped outgoing mail in rejected water paintings, only to find that those were often the most prized by his correspondents. “Strange,” he said, “how people suddenly develop an appreciation for that which is tossed away.”
This Fortean interest in the left-over, the forgotten, brought Miller close to the Fortean Society in several respects. Both championed, for example, the civil liberties of minorities—damned people, as it were—Thayer advocating for the rights of Native Americans in Doubt as Miller did in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. Miller and Thayer were both fascinated by kooks and cranks—The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, with its celebration of Americans with elaborate, yet unusual, philosophies—unsung saints, he suggested—was echoed in the pages of Doubt, with Thayer printing the ruminations of all kinds of heterodox thinkers. The shared interest in the esoteric, the off-trail, underwrote the political anarchism of both Miller and other Forteans—Thayer, certainly, but also the San Francisco Forteans. Having seen the Big Sur community overcome many obstacles with no formal government, Miller concluded, “The less organization the better!” Thayer was bitter in his denunciations of what Eisenhower had not yet named the military-industrial complex. San Francisco Forteans Philip Lamantia and George Leite joined Kenneth Rexroth in becoming conscientious objectors.
Miller declaimed a lot about the need to reach an absolute truth, and absolute surety—but he was willing to get there even by means he knew might be untrustworthy. (“If you do not know where you are going, any road will take you there,” he quoted M. N. Chatterjee as saying in Big Sur—a very Fortean sentiment.) Thus, he accepted astrology not necessarily as an accurate description of nature’s forces, but as a language in which to write poetry. Thus, he learned that Madame Blavatsky’s Ascended Masters were made up, as was Cyril Hoskins claim to be a lama—as was James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon—but all were good for contemplating, for feeling one’s way into the universal. Thayer notoriously poked fun at even his frequent contributors for their beliefs. Fort professed to hold his outlandish theories skeptically. At one point, he quipped, “Now there are so many scientists who believe in dowsing that the suspicion comes to me that it may only be a myth, after all.” Historian Michael Saler calls this skeptical embrace of the improbable the “ironic imagination,” and it was common among the San Francisco Forteans, an appropriate response to the horrors of the world. As Rexroth wrote, “If the whole shebang is a lie anyway, certainly the amusing lies, the lies of the charlatans who have never been able to get the guillotine in their hands, are better than the official lie, the deadly one. Since Hiroshima this attitude needs little apology. Some of our best people prefer alchemy to physics today.”
There are substantial differences between Fort and Miller, too: in their literary styles, and in their understanding of knowledge and truth. Fort wrote in short, sharp sentences, intending to upset the reader, questioning every assumption. Miller wrote in a discursive, confessional style, hoping to bring the reader closer to God. Do not mistake that: they were different, in serious and important ways. But they also shared some concerns; it is clear that most of their similarities were developed in parallel, with Miller likely only discovering Fort in the 1940s, his (one) mention of him and obscure membership in the Fortean Society betokening both the closeness and tremendous distance between the two authors. Even as Miller fashioned himself into a new Fort, he was still a very different writer, with different tools and different aims. But there is little doubt that they belonged together—like non-identical but overlapping circles—at least in the 1940s and 1950s.
Fort’s books, Fortean Society paraphernalia, Miller’s (often banned) works—these circulated along the same paths. Thayer sold Fort’s books—and also offered back issues of George Leite’s literary journal Circle, just as Leite and Bern Porter’s Circle advertised Fort’s book and the Society. In the late 1940s, Leite established a bookstore in Berkeley, daliel’s (always with the lower case d), which sold modern works, surrealist texts, Fort, and Miller. Across the Bay, Paul Elder’s bookstore in San Francisco did a happy business in copies of Doubt as well as Miller’s works. Across the country, in New York, Ben Abramson was also working to sell both authors, although he preferred Miller. Abramson and Thayer had become friends when both were in Chicago, and Abrams was a great fan of Thayer’s work. He thought Thayer’s affection for Fort, though, was misplaced, and griped about not being able to sell Fort’s omnibus volume or issues of Doubt, although he continued to set them out for sale. Abramson also bought copies of Miller’s works carried from Europe by GIs, and sold them under the counter, as it were, as well as publishing Miller’s Aller Retour New York.
It is here, at Abramson’s Argus Bookstore, where the circle is completed—it’s only a single anecdote, but emblematic of what was likely happening at daliel’s and Elder’s and other, more experimental, bookstores. The poet and publisher Jonathan Williams remembers, as a child fascinated with Lovecraft and other writers of the weird—the new romancers, as Miller might have it—he made his way to Argus bookstore after a dispiriting outing to the theater: “And so I was very involved with Lovecraft, and Lovecraft sent me, by chance, to a bookshop where I bought Patchen. The Argus Book Shop, which was one of the great bookshops of its time, run by a man by the name of Ben Abramson, who was a friend of people like Christopher Morley and the Baker Street Irregulars. And Tiffany Thayer. People who wrote ‘strangely’ strange . . . the books of Charles Fort. Then I went there one day, probably the day of the terrible experience of Tristan and The Iceman Cometh, probably that same weekend, and I saw these curious books on the shelf. Kenneth Patchen books, you know. Hand-painted books. The Journal of Albion Moonlight, Sleepers Awake, et al. So I started buying them. Then I started buying Henry Miller books. Because Ben Abramson had all these things. I went from H. P. Lovecraft to Patchen and Miller like overnight, when I was about sixteen.”
The circle never ended.
Toward the middle of Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch, while complaining about all the mail he receives, Henry Miller says, “Perhaps I attract people who are given to experimentation. Perhaps I attract individuals who are struggling manfully to pierce the hocus-pocus which envelops and obstructs our march through life. People are constantly supplying me with startling facts, amazing events, incredible experiences—as if I were another Charles Fort. They struggle, they rebel, they experiment, they get glimpses of truth, they are raised up by spasmodic gusts of self-confidence—and yet they are hopelessly enmeshed.” He tosses out Fort’s name lightly, and never returns to it—even as he spends the last chapter complaining, again, about the abundance of his mail. No scholar has ever worried over this reference. Perhaps it seems a passing fad, or of a piece with Miller’s inclination toward occultism and kooks. Kenneth Rexroth noted in his introduction to Nights of Love and Laughter that Miller was “likely at times to go off the deep end about the lost continent of Mu or astrology of the ‘occult’” at a moment’s notice. Those who even recognized Fort’s name probably chalked the allusion up to this tendency. But the connection between the two American iconoclasts is deeper than that.
Henry Miller reached California in 1942, a year after starting a cross-country trek, two years after being forced out of Europe by war. Writing in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, he was hopeful about where he landed, even as he excoriated his home country. He moved to Beverly Glen, where he met the artist Jean Varda. Varda enticed him to Monterey, and Miller moved to Big Sur in 1944, relocating to different houses in the area several times over the next three years before settling down on Partington Ridge, near Anderson Creek, for fifteen years. The era was a productive one for Miller, although his literary output was less stellar than it had been in the 1930s. Indeed, because of the way he was idolized by the art community of the San Francisco area, he was successfully tempted into publishing pieces that were sometimes little more than literary detritus—damned things, themselves, which otherwise would have passed out of existence.
Miller’s Bohemianism was such that he became something of an icon for others in the San Francisco art scene—and beyond. Conscientious objectors and disillusioned soldiers found their way to San Francisco and, eventually, Big Sur. (Margaret Parton’s Laughter on the Hill gives a glimpse of the dissolute lifestyle of those burned out by the war.) Others wrote—adding to the tidal wave of letters Miller complained about so bitterly. Bern Porter organized a festschrift for Miller, titled The Happy Rock and George Leite contributed a poem to it: “Through screams and the smoking,/Henry Miller, you shine with creation.” When squares looked down their noses at this rising generation, they blamed Miller for leading the children astray: he was at the center of a Cult of Sex and Anarchy, as a Harper’s magazine article had it. Miller saw that he was being turned into an icon, and was not bothered—even encouraged it. He fancied himself a kind of guru—someone who had reached Enlightenment, or, as he said, in the language of Dianetics, a clear—someone not unlike Fort himself. Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch makes only one explicit reference to the scientific gadfly, but a Fortean sense permeates the text. There’s the letters—from “cranks, freaks, nuts and plain lunatics.” There’s his characterization of Anderson Creek as especially weird, or uncanny. Flying saucers are abundant. His neighbors are interested in the same kind of scientific esotericism that filled the columns of Doubt: “Nearly every one seems to be a specialist in some field, be it art, archeology, linguistics, symbolism, Dianetics, Zen Buddhism or Irish folklore.”
All of which raises the question, When did Miller first encounter Fort? There’s no definitive record, but a good guess is possible. Miller missed the hullabaloo around the founding of the Fortean Society because he was in Paris at the time. And he does not seem to have read—or read deeply—most of the founding members of the Society, with the exception of Dreiser and John Cowper Powys. Miller mentions both in Books of My Life, especially praising Powy’s Autobiography—which mentions Fort a couple of times—and he and the Welshman became correspondents; Powys’s letters were among those Miller actually wanted to receive. And maybe that is the connection with Fort. He also knew Caresse Crosby, who was a member of the Fortean Society. We know he had read Fort by the time he reached New Orleans, on his cross-country drive, in 1941, because he recommended to Anais Nin that she read The Book of the Damned. “A very queer book,” he wrote, according to her diary. “You will see. Read it thoroughly—contains starling data and still more starling beliefs.” Thayer had all of Charles Fort’s books reprinted in an omnibus edition that year, but Miller recommended only the first of Fort’s four tomes.
By the time Miller was ensconced in California, Fort was au courant. An acquaintance wrote in a November 1943 letter, “Your speaking of Henry Miller reminds me to say that Janko [Yanko; Jean Varda] met him down there [LA], and Miller speaks of coming here again. I think he is a good man. Charles Fort makes my tired ache, altho I realize I am one of a minority. Many people whose minds I respect admire him: Janko; at one time John [Steinbeck]; Toni [Solomons Jackson].” If enthusiasm for Fort was generally high among Miller’s new acquaintances in California, then his joining the Society in late 1945 makes good sense. And that is what he did: the winter 1945 issue of Doubt announced that Miller had joined the Society, and was offering his watercolors for any price. The Society was also selling copies of his “Plight of the Creative Artist in the United States of America.”
Still, too much stress could be put on Miller’s joining the Society. Thayer was known for trying to get all sorts of people to sign up, and waiving the fees as an enticement, so Miller may not have sought out the Society—perhaps this was another step in the fetishization of Miller. Then, too, it may have just been a financial decision. In 1946, Miller was living on $50 per month from New Directions publishing and whatever he made from his watercolors—so he may have seen Forteans as a new market. He was already well known for sending out begging to letters to all and sundry. But by this point in the story, such a conclusion seems inadequate. Even if Miller was being made into an icon, even if he was just looking for a new place to hawk his wares, there are too many connections—personal, structural, literary, and artistic—to dismiss the connection between Miller and Fort. There was an elective affinity between Miller’s writings, Fort, and Fortean thought, each reflecting the other.
One connection between Miller and the Forteans was that both shared some literary traditions. Miller cherished the Romantic yawps of writers such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton (who influenced Blavatsky and Theosophy) and Arthur Machen. He wrote, “Around 1880 English novelists of imagination—the writers of ‘romances’—began to introduce into their works the so-called and miscalled ‘supernatural’ element. Theirs was a revolt against the fateful tendency of the times, the bitter fruits of which we of this generation our tasting.” One reason he may have thought ‘supernatural elements’ misnamed was because at the same time these stories were being written, other so-called myths were being proven true: Heinrich Schliemann, James Frazer, Annie Besant, and Madame Blavatsky were "busy unveiling the truth in one realm after another, all interlocked, all contributory in breaking the spell of defeat and paralysis in which the doctrines of the Nineteenth Century held us. The new century opens with promise and splendor; the past comes alive again, but tangibly, substantially, and with almost greater reality than the present.” Fort himself took inspiration from French authors of such romances. More importantly, as Forteanism took shape in the years after his death, Theosophy and similar doctrines were folded into it, as were the weird writers who were building on Machen and H. Rider Haggard and other authors of romance. In both the writings of Henry Miller and many Forteans—although not Thayer—flying saucers became akin to Blavatsky’s Ascended Masters—signs of a coming Age of Aquarius.
This love for Romantic writers and thinkers ripened, in Miller, into a kind of monism—not the same as Fort’s monism, but analogous. In Big Sur, he said, “The full reality, that’s God—and man, and the world, and all that is, including the unnameable. I’m for reality. More and more reality. I’m a fanatic about it, if you like.” For both Miller and Fort, circles (and related shapes) symbolized this monism. Fort had everything transforming into everything else—mice into cheese, peaches into apricots—and Miller had a spiral writing architecture that allowed him to encompass everything, not just facts but truth: “I am not following a strict chronological sequence” he wrote in The World of Sex, “but have chosen to adapt a circular or spiral form of time development which enables me to expand freely in any direction at any given moment. The ordinary chronological development seems to me wooden and artificial, a synthetic reconstitution of the facts of life. The facts and events of life are for me only the starting points on the way towards the discovery of truth.” Miller returned to the structure repeatedly in his subsequent books. The point isn’t that he borrowed the symbolism of the circle from Fort—but that reading Fort, he may have recognized a writer with a similar sensitivity.
The most striking resemblance between Fort and Miller, though, is that both, ultimately, were engaged in a similar project: rescuing what had been lost, making holy what had been damned—and creating a more complete understanding of the universe. Miller wrote in Tropic of Cancer: “There is only one thing which interest me vitally now, and that is the recording of all that which is omitted in books . . .” That was Fort’s goal, to remind the world of what had been left out of the books. Fort accomplished his task by collecting forgotten anecdotes. Miller did it, in part, through profanity: curse words had been kept from books—but the inclusion of the damned could clue the reader in to a deeper reality: “When obscenity crops up in art, in literature more particularly, it usually functions as a technical device . . . Its purpose is to awaken, to usher in a sense of reality. In a sense, its use by the artist may be compared to the use of the miraculous by the Masters.” Fort and Miller used these rescued things—rains of blood, swear words—to different ends, Fort to heighten skepticism, Miller to advocate for a transcendental and fundamental truth—but the appreciation of the ignored was similar. As was the hope that by showing the world what had been cast off, reform could come. Miller sometimes wrapped outgoing mail in rejected water paintings, only to find that those were often the most prized by his correspondents. “Strange,” he said, “how people suddenly develop an appreciation for that which is tossed away.”
This Fortean interest in the left-over, the forgotten, brought Miller close to the Fortean Society in several respects. Both championed, for example, the civil liberties of minorities—damned people, as it were—Thayer advocating for the rights of Native Americans in Doubt as Miller did in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. Miller and Thayer were both fascinated by kooks and cranks—The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, with its celebration of Americans with elaborate, yet unusual, philosophies—unsung saints, he suggested—was echoed in the pages of Doubt, with Thayer printing the ruminations of all kinds of heterodox thinkers. The shared interest in the esoteric, the off-trail, underwrote the political anarchism of both Miller and other Forteans—Thayer, certainly, but also the San Francisco Forteans. Having seen the Big Sur community overcome many obstacles with no formal government, Miller concluded, “The less organization the better!” Thayer was bitter in his denunciations of what Eisenhower had not yet named the military-industrial complex. San Francisco Forteans Philip Lamantia and George Leite joined Kenneth Rexroth in becoming conscientious objectors.
Miller declaimed a lot about the need to reach an absolute truth, and absolute surety—but he was willing to get there even by means he knew might be untrustworthy. (“If you do not know where you are going, any road will take you there,” he quoted M. N. Chatterjee as saying in Big Sur—a very Fortean sentiment.) Thus, he accepted astrology not necessarily as an accurate description of nature’s forces, but as a language in which to write poetry. Thus, he learned that Madame Blavatsky’s Ascended Masters were made up, as was Cyril Hoskins claim to be a lama—as was James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon—but all were good for contemplating, for feeling one’s way into the universal. Thayer notoriously poked fun at even his frequent contributors for their beliefs. Fort professed to hold his outlandish theories skeptically. At one point, he quipped, “Now there are so many scientists who believe in dowsing that the suspicion comes to me that it may only be a myth, after all.” Historian Michael Saler calls this skeptical embrace of the improbable the “ironic imagination,” and it was common among the San Francisco Forteans, an appropriate response to the horrors of the world. As Rexroth wrote, “If the whole shebang is a lie anyway, certainly the amusing lies, the lies of the charlatans who have never been able to get the guillotine in their hands, are better than the official lie, the deadly one. Since Hiroshima this attitude needs little apology. Some of our best people prefer alchemy to physics today.”
There are substantial differences between Fort and Miller, too: in their literary styles, and in their understanding of knowledge and truth. Fort wrote in short, sharp sentences, intending to upset the reader, questioning every assumption. Miller wrote in a discursive, confessional style, hoping to bring the reader closer to God. Do not mistake that: they were different, in serious and important ways. But they also shared some concerns; it is clear that most of their similarities were developed in parallel, with Miller likely only discovering Fort in the 1940s, his (one) mention of him and obscure membership in the Fortean Society betokening both the closeness and tremendous distance between the two authors. Even as Miller fashioned himself into a new Fort, he was still a very different writer, with different tools and different aims. But there is little doubt that they belonged together—like non-identical but overlapping circles—at least in the 1940s and 1950s.
Fort’s books, Fortean Society paraphernalia, Miller’s (often banned) works—these circulated along the same paths. Thayer sold Fort’s books—and also offered back issues of George Leite’s literary journal Circle, just as Leite and Bern Porter’s Circle advertised Fort’s book and the Society. In the late 1940s, Leite established a bookstore in Berkeley, daliel’s (always with the lower case d), which sold modern works, surrealist texts, Fort, and Miller. Across the Bay, Paul Elder’s bookstore in San Francisco did a happy business in copies of Doubt as well as Miller’s works. Across the country, in New York, Ben Abramson was also working to sell both authors, although he preferred Miller. Abramson and Thayer had become friends when both were in Chicago, and Abrams was a great fan of Thayer’s work. He thought Thayer’s affection for Fort, though, was misplaced, and griped about not being able to sell Fort’s omnibus volume or issues of Doubt, although he continued to set them out for sale. Abramson also bought copies of Miller’s works carried from Europe by GIs, and sold them under the counter, as it were, as well as publishing Miller’s Aller Retour New York.
It is here, at Abramson’s Argus Bookstore, where the circle is completed—it’s only a single anecdote, but emblematic of what was likely happening at daliel’s and Elder’s and other, more experimental, bookstores. The poet and publisher Jonathan Williams remembers, as a child fascinated with Lovecraft and other writers of the weird—the new romancers, as Miller might have it—he made his way to Argus bookstore after a dispiriting outing to the theater: “And so I was very involved with Lovecraft, and Lovecraft sent me, by chance, to a bookshop where I bought Patchen. The Argus Book Shop, which was one of the great bookshops of its time, run by a man by the name of Ben Abramson, who was a friend of people like Christopher Morley and the Baker Street Irregulars. And Tiffany Thayer. People who wrote ‘strangely’ strange . . . the books of Charles Fort. Then I went there one day, probably the day of the terrible experience of Tristan and The Iceman Cometh, probably that same weekend, and I saw these curious books on the shelf. Kenneth Patchen books, you know. Hand-painted books. The Journal of Albion Moonlight, Sleepers Awake, et al. So I started buying them. Then I started buying Henry Miller books. Because Ben Abramson had all these things. I went from H. P. Lovecraft to Patchen and Miller like overnight, when I was about sixteen.”
The circle never ended.
