A founder of the Society, not much of a Fortean.
John Cowper Powys was once much better known, though there remains a coterie of devoted fans. Born to a reverend in Derbyshire 8 October 1872, Powys was part of a famously talented family of 11 children. He graduated from Cambridge in 1894. He was a teacher and published some poetry. In 1905, he started lecturing in America, winning renown for his philosophical, literary, and historical talks. He was friendly with Theodore Dreiser from early in the century. Although married, Powys took up with a number of women, and established a second long-term relationship in the early 1920s, with a much younger woman. He published his first novel in 1915, then books of literary criticism, autobiographical works, philosophy, and more novels. Powys’s breakthrough move was 1929’s Wolf Solent.
Powys traveled between Britain and the U.S. until the early 1930s. He had anarchist leanings, supporting Emma Goldman and the Republicans in Spain, and staking out positions against both the fascists and Stalinists. (Powys, though, was anti-Semitic, and unhappy when a girlfriend went to work for the Little Blue Books, which was put out by a Jewish man.) He settled in Wales in 1935, and many of his later books were set here, set in the deep past. They are Romantic, with mystic and ecstatic themes. He had a divided reputation, his books not fitting easily into the modernist canon— one biographer said that they were analogically structured, the plot determined by the references, and so surrealistic, in a way—though he had admirers, including Dreiser and Henry Miller. He ha also attracted a number of biographers, and his richly documented life has allowed for experimental investigations of the twentieth-century temper.
John Cowper Powys was once much better known, though there remains a coterie of devoted fans. Born to a reverend in Derbyshire 8 October 1872, Powys was part of a famously talented family of 11 children. He graduated from Cambridge in 1894. He was a teacher and published some poetry. In 1905, he started lecturing in America, winning renown for his philosophical, literary, and historical talks. He was friendly with Theodore Dreiser from early in the century. Although married, Powys took up with a number of women, and established a second long-term relationship in the early 1920s, with a much younger woman. He published his first novel in 1915, then books of literary criticism, autobiographical works, philosophy, and more novels. Powys’s breakthrough move was 1929’s Wolf Solent.
Powys traveled between Britain and the U.S. until the early 1930s. He had anarchist leanings, supporting Emma Goldman and the Republicans in Spain, and staking out positions against both the fascists and Stalinists. (Powys, though, was anti-Semitic, and unhappy when a girlfriend went to work for the Little Blue Books, which was put out by a Jewish man.) He settled in Wales in 1935, and many of his later books were set here, set in the deep past. They are Romantic, with mystic and ecstatic themes. He had a divided reputation, his books not fitting easily into the modernist canon— one biographer said that they were analogically structured, the plot determined by the references, and so surrealistic, in a way—though he had admirers, including Dreiser and Henry Miller. He ha also attracted a number of biographers, and his richly documented life has allowed for experimental investigations of the twentieth-century temper.
That same biographer deduced the central concerns of his literary project, the themes that appeared and reappeared in his writings in slightly different forms: “Isolating the self from the ‘herd’ by the development of a ‘crystal core of inviolability,’ the ‘I am I’ that nothing and no one can touch, and therefore cannot hurt, is as far from mystic or primitive union as it is possible to get. And yet, in these same books of philosophy, Powys called for a breaking down of the boundaries between the real and the imaginary, between the civilized ‘self’ and the ‘other.’ His In Defence of Sensuality was a first attempt to resolve these radically opposite live visions. Here he demanded the development of a new kind of ego--one that would reject its narrow concern with consciousness, one that ‘steps sideways out of the human-consciousness groove into the backward consciousness of animal-vegetable life.’ He called it an ichthyosauraus ego,’ a term he probably filched from [his brother] Llewelyn’s Impassioned Clay, in which Llewelyn refers to the ‘ichthyosauraus’ which ‘looked out at the world with its cold, self-enwrapt lizard’s eye.’ … But John Powys was attempting to push the idea further. ‘Ichthyosaurus ego’ is a clever term, an attempt to hold in creative suspension two opposing ideas: the solitary apartness of of the reptile, at the same time, the immersion in the natural world that characterizes primitive beings. His ‘ichthyosaurus ego’ would retain its individuality while being part of the magical world of the unconsciousness. In a moment of self-awareness and self-loathing, he told Llewelyn once, ‘I am for having it both ways. I ought to have it engraved on my tomb, ‘He had it both ways.’”
John Cowper Powys died 17 June 1963; he was 90 years old.
****************
Powys had plenty of occasions to come encounter Fort or his writings as he crisscrossed the country giving lectures. He knew Dreiser from early in the century, and all through the time that Dreiser was nurturing Fort’s writing career. He was in Chicago during that city’s so-called Literary Renaissance, and was friendly with Ben Hecht, the first Fortean, as well as others later associated with the Society, including Edgar Lee Masters. In the early 1920s, he was with Dreiser in California, both being treated by the quack doctor, Albert Abrams, who was investigated by another future Fortean, Maynard Shapley, acting on behalf of Scientific American. (H. L. Mencken dismissed the whole episode as the unhappy confluence of Dreiser’s credulity and Abrams’ Jewish money grubbing.)
He certainly could have come across Fort’s writing on his own, which was amenable to his own thought. There was the emphasis on individuality, for example, and the analogical reasoning which proved so attractive to surrealists. As well, Powys—again wanting it both ways—could be philosophically pluralist, emphasizing the diversity of individuals, but also monistic, which set him against the Machine and the determinisms of science. There is no evidence that he read any of Fort, though, until Dreiser introduced him to Fort’s writing—but not, as far as I no, the man—at the every end of 1930.
On the 24th of November, Powys had lunch with Edgar Lee Masters (“he was very nice”), who then took Powys over to see Dreiser. This was in New York, after many of the literary lights of the Chicago renaissance had moved to Gotham. Powys wrote in his diary, He embraced Dreiser and Dreiser looked over his shoulder like a Brontosaurus embraced by a Mastiff’s sturdy paws. We talked of Charles Fort and his queer ideas about other beings. Mr. Dreiser had made them publish Mr. Fort’s book by threats of leaving them.” In his autobiography, published a number of years later, he added: with Dreiser, “all is abnormal, sub-normal, super-normal. He is a German who admires Russia. He is a realist who admires Mr. Charles Fort. He is a ruler of men who is happiest with women.”
A couple weeks later, reading the newspapers, Powys thought of Fort again—there were poisonous fogs in Belgium, which would be used as part of the publicity for the Fortean Society when it was announced at the end of the month. Again Powys put his thoughts in his diary: “There is a mysterious Fog in England and also in Belgium explained as a Dissipated Comet containing Cynagonen. Is it the gas in a comet tail? Is it? Is it? Up in one place down in another. Panic in the Meuse valley Brussels. Panic! What can it be? a Poisonous Toy from what? Sensational statements. A narrow dark cloud 1897; 1902 the same thing occurred. See Mr. Charles Fort . . . what is this? Eh? Ha? Miss McNeill brought the Paper with others—all was well! ‘France’s recent mud rain due to the Sahara!’ Thus do agitations of Guilty Consciences die down as quick as they rise.”
Around this time, Dreiser was sending out copies of Fort’s books to friends—Harry Elmer Barnes, H. G. Wells, and Powys—in preparation for the Fortean Society, the founding of which was scheduled for some time in January. Apparently, this was the first opportunity Powys had to read Fort’s “Book of the Damned.” On the 15th of December—a week after he had noted those strange fogs—Powys wrote a letter to Dreiser about Fort, taking part of the day; it was later reprinted in the Fortean Society magazine. (At least I assume the letter int he magazine was the same as the one he sent Dreiser; the timing and circumstances fit.)
Powys (presumably) wrote, “I am indeed struck sharply and starkly by the curious genius of Mr. Charles Fort; and here in the ‘Times’ of yesterday or today comes on the front page an allusion to one of those ‘red rains’ with its automatic explanation of ‘African sandstorm’ blamed exactly as Mr. Fort points out, with his exquisitely humorous ‘up on one place, down in another place’ of the conventional rendering (The Determinant: The Dominant) by hide-bound, excluding and damning scientists!
“Mr. Charles Fort’s book does not only liberate the mind from those sublimated herd-dogmas of science along the particular lines he deals with in his enormous pilings-up of evidence to the contrary, but it also liberates the mind from all sorts of other prepossessions and idolatries of the market place. In fact, his ‘Book of the Damned’ is a book that sets a person’s intellect with a wholesome jerk upon its own feet. From this book, with its drastic mental ‘keel-hauling,’ a person learns to think for himself and to look at the whole of life with that direct physionomic [sic] eye which Spengler so significantly praises Goethe for using. One is left after reading ‘Book of the Damned’ with that open-mind towards the mystery of life which allows for all manner of strange and even ‘improper’ occurences [sic]. Such occurences [sic], suggesting that there are super-human if not supernatural, agencies at work, seem to me most powerfully suggested if not proved by this extraordinary book, and this their proof, so shocking to the mind enslaved by the ‘Dominant’ or the pseudoscientific code, seems to afford a wonderful liberation to my mind, such as few books bring.
“The style of the book, too, with its laconic humor and sardonic implications, seems exactly the right one to give the reader the sort of disconcerting shudder (or pleasing shock) that creates that curious awe in the mind, int he presence of this inexplicable universe, which Goethe in ‘Faust’ declares to be one of man’s noblest attributes. In fine, I haven’t read for a long while any book that has given me more of mental and imaginative ‘shaking up,’ and that’s the kind of thing, like butting your head into ice-cold water, that is wonderfully good for the human intelligence, so apt to fall into dull, flat, planed-out grooves and to take the smooth, casual, conventionally explained procession of events for granted.
“I hope that the author will receive encouragement enough make him go on and go still further.”
Dreiser was happy with the letter and on 21 December wrote to tell Powys so, also inviting him to join the nascent Fortean Society. The purpose was to separate Fort’s books from those of cranks, pass data on to Fort; make certain that science took Fort’s ideas seriously; and curate the data after Fort’s death. Dreiser made certain to note that Powys was under no obligation to join, or be associated at all—the letter was still great, and helpful. Powys, though, apparently did agree to join, and though early announcements of the Society’s founding meeting said that he would be present, he did not make the gathering, for whatever reason, but sent along encouragement: the Society was the New Protestant church, breaking free from the hoary dogma of science and liberating the individual.
Powys exaggerated his enjoyment of Fort—he was known for slippages in his thoughts, attendees at his lectures noting, for instance, that he used the same phrases of praise for very different writers—but Fort did make an impression: he became part of Powys’s mental furniture, if not a significant piece. There was a reference to Fort in his 1934 autobiography: “Just as if I had been one of Mr. Charles Fort’s disconcerting visitors, what really paid me for lecturing was not the fees I shared with Arnold, but the actual sensation got from it and the life-energy I imbibed from it.” And there he was in a page from Powys’s 1935 journal, wondering if part of a lost manuscript had been spirited away fry “Charles Fort’s Rulers” at the same time saying he and his lover were “devoted Fortians.”
And there he was in 1937, shocked to learn that the Fortean Society had died—and that Thayer was not sharing Fort’s notes, as had been promised; they deserved to be public, and Dreiser deserved more respect. And there he was in his diary again, this from October 1938: “I must relate a queer experience of a ‘Charles Fortian’ character if you, my unknown reader of this Diary have ever heard of the great Mr Charles Fort of New York. For as I stood by the Gorsedd there was a rushing and mighty wind & Something like an invisible airplane fell with a crash so close to me that I jumped back in dismay & startlement—and in vain now I ponder on this & cannot think of any natural explanation! It is one of those inexplicable events that occur upon this earth.”
Likely there were more references, in correspondence, journals, or his published writing, but I have not seen them. (He wrote a lot.) Or—to borrow a Powys’ habit and have it both ways—perhaps after a decade, Fort was pushed so far into the recesses of his brain, he never came to mind, even as a reference to drive his thoughts forward. Because Powys was never part of the Society, and Dreiser died in the mid-1940s, leaving little reason for him to contemplate Fort. Which isn’t to say there weren’t Fortean aspects to his later writing, just more tangential. He was drawn to Rabelais, just as Thayer was, and there was a certain Rabelasian quality to Fort.
A couple of his later novels have Fortean traits—though Thayer, at least, turned on Powys, carping to Eric Frank Russell, “You know Powys is too old to do anything. The past ten of his more recent books are maundering.” The 1954 book Atlantis, though set in ancient Greece, announced a kind of Fortean interest with lost continents in its title. And 1952’s The Inmates was about people as Fortean damned facts. Set in a lunatic asylum, it describe a cast of highly eccentric people sympathetically. As one review put it, “Its farcical and memorable characters, its wisdom that suddenly becomes the height of absurdity, its nonsense that turns into criticism of the behavior of living men succeed better than most fictional attempts to discuss what is wrong with the world.”
And what could be more Fortean than that?
John Cowper Powys died 17 June 1963; he was 90 years old.
****************
Powys had plenty of occasions to come encounter Fort or his writings as he crisscrossed the country giving lectures. He knew Dreiser from early in the century, and all through the time that Dreiser was nurturing Fort’s writing career. He was in Chicago during that city’s so-called Literary Renaissance, and was friendly with Ben Hecht, the first Fortean, as well as others later associated with the Society, including Edgar Lee Masters. In the early 1920s, he was with Dreiser in California, both being treated by the quack doctor, Albert Abrams, who was investigated by another future Fortean, Maynard Shapley, acting on behalf of Scientific American. (H. L. Mencken dismissed the whole episode as the unhappy confluence of Dreiser’s credulity and Abrams’ Jewish money grubbing.)
He certainly could have come across Fort’s writing on his own, which was amenable to his own thought. There was the emphasis on individuality, for example, and the analogical reasoning which proved so attractive to surrealists. As well, Powys—again wanting it both ways—could be philosophically pluralist, emphasizing the diversity of individuals, but also monistic, which set him against the Machine and the determinisms of science. There is no evidence that he read any of Fort, though, until Dreiser introduced him to Fort’s writing—but not, as far as I no, the man—at the every end of 1930.
On the 24th of November, Powys had lunch with Edgar Lee Masters (“he was very nice”), who then took Powys over to see Dreiser. This was in New York, after many of the literary lights of the Chicago renaissance had moved to Gotham. Powys wrote in his diary, He embraced Dreiser and Dreiser looked over his shoulder like a Brontosaurus embraced by a Mastiff’s sturdy paws. We talked of Charles Fort and his queer ideas about other beings. Mr. Dreiser had made them publish Mr. Fort’s book by threats of leaving them.” In his autobiography, published a number of years later, he added: with Dreiser, “all is abnormal, sub-normal, super-normal. He is a German who admires Russia. He is a realist who admires Mr. Charles Fort. He is a ruler of men who is happiest with women.”
A couple weeks later, reading the newspapers, Powys thought of Fort again—there were poisonous fogs in Belgium, which would be used as part of the publicity for the Fortean Society when it was announced at the end of the month. Again Powys put his thoughts in his diary: “There is a mysterious Fog in England and also in Belgium explained as a Dissipated Comet containing Cynagonen. Is it the gas in a comet tail? Is it? Is it? Up in one place down in another. Panic in the Meuse valley Brussels. Panic! What can it be? a Poisonous Toy from what? Sensational statements. A narrow dark cloud 1897; 1902 the same thing occurred. See Mr. Charles Fort . . . what is this? Eh? Ha? Miss McNeill brought the Paper with others—all was well! ‘France’s recent mud rain due to the Sahara!’ Thus do agitations of Guilty Consciences die down as quick as they rise.”
Around this time, Dreiser was sending out copies of Fort’s books to friends—Harry Elmer Barnes, H. G. Wells, and Powys—in preparation for the Fortean Society, the founding of which was scheduled for some time in January. Apparently, this was the first opportunity Powys had to read Fort’s “Book of the Damned.” On the 15th of December—a week after he had noted those strange fogs—Powys wrote a letter to Dreiser about Fort, taking part of the day; it was later reprinted in the Fortean Society magazine. (At least I assume the letter int he magazine was the same as the one he sent Dreiser; the timing and circumstances fit.)
Powys (presumably) wrote, “I am indeed struck sharply and starkly by the curious genius of Mr. Charles Fort; and here in the ‘Times’ of yesterday or today comes on the front page an allusion to one of those ‘red rains’ with its automatic explanation of ‘African sandstorm’ blamed exactly as Mr. Fort points out, with his exquisitely humorous ‘up on one place, down in another place’ of the conventional rendering (The Determinant: The Dominant) by hide-bound, excluding and damning scientists!
“Mr. Charles Fort’s book does not only liberate the mind from those sublimated herd-dogmas of science along the particular lines he deals with in his enormous pilings-up of evidence to the contrary, but it also liberates the mind from all sorts of other prepossessions and idolatries of the market place. In fact, his ‘Book of the Damned’ is a book that sets a person’s intellect with a wholesome jerk upon its own feet. From this book, with its drastic mental ‘keel-hauling,’ a person learns to think for himself and to look at the whole of life with that direct physionomic [sic] eye which Spengler so significantly praises Goethe for using. One is left after reading ‘Book of the Damned’ with that open-mind towards the mystery of life which allows for all manner of strange and even ‘improper’ occurences [sic]. Such occurences [sic], suggesting that there are super-human if not supernatural, agencies at work, seem to me most powerfully suggested if not proved by this extraordinary book, and this their proof, so shocking to the mind enslaved by the ‘Dominant’ or the pseudoscientific code, seems to afford a wonderful liberation to my mind, such as few books bring.
“The style of the book, too, with its laconic humor and sardonic implications, seems exactly the right one to give the reader the sort of disconcerting shudder (or pleasing shock) that creates that curious awe in the mind, int he presence of this inexplicable universe, which Goethe in ‘Faust’ declares to be one of man’s noblest attributes. In fine, I haven’t read for a long while any book that has given me more of mental and imaginative ‘shaking up,’ and that’s the kind of thing, like butting your head into ice-cold water, that is wonderfully good for the human intelligence, so apt to fall into dull, flat, planed-out grooves and to take the smooth, casual, conventionally explained procession of events for granted.
“I hope that the author will receive encouragement enough make him go on and go still further.”
Dreiser was happy with the letter and on 21 December wrote to tell Powys so, also inviting him to join the nascent Fortean Society. The purpose was to separate Fort’s books from those of cranks, pass data on to Fort; make certain that science took Fort’s ideas seriously; and curate the data after Fort’s death. Dreiser made certain to note that Powys was under no obligation to join, or be associated at all—the letter was still great, and helpful. Powys, though, apparently did agree to join, and though early announcements of the Society’s founding meeting said that he would be present, he did not make the gathering, for whatever reason, but sent along encouragement: the Society was the New Protestant church, breaking free from the hoary dogma of science and liberating the individual.
Powys exaggerated his enjoyment of Fort—he was known for slippages in his thoughts, attendees at his lectures noting, for instance, that he used the same phrases of praise for very different writers—but Fort did make an impression: he became part of Powys’s mental furniture, if not a significant piece. There was a reference to Fort in his 1934 autobiography: “Just as if I had been one of Mr. Charles Fort’s disconcerting visitors, what really paid me for lecturing was not the fees I shared with Arnold, but the actual sensation got from it and the life-energy I imbibed from it.” And there he was in a page from Powys’s 1935 journal, wondering if part of a lost manuscript had been spirited away fry “Charles Fort’s Rulers” at the same time saying he and his lover were “devoted Fortians.”
And there he was in 1937, shocked to learn that the Fortean Society had died—and that Thayer was not sharing Fort’s notes, as had been promised; they deserved to be public, and Dreiser deserved more respect. And there he was in his diary again, this from October 1938: “I must relate a queer experience of a ‘Charles Fortian’ character if you, my unknown reader of this Diary have ever heard of the great Mr Charles Fort of New York. For as I stood by the Gorsedd there was a rushing and mighty wind & Something like an invisible airplane fell with a crash so close to me that I jumped back in dismay & startlement—and in vain now I ponder on this & cannot think of any natural explanation! It is one of those inexplicable events that occur upon this earth.”
Likely there were more references, in correspondence, journals, or his published writing, but I have not seen them. (He wrote a lot.) Or—to borrow a Powys’ habit and have it both ways—perhaps after a decade, Fort was pushed so far into the recesses of his brain, he never came to mind, even as a reference to drive his thoughts forward. Because Powys was never part of the Society, and Dreiser died in the mid-1940s, leaving little reason for him to contemplate Fort. Which isn’t to say there weren’t Fortean aspects to his later writing, just more tangential. He was drawn to Rabelais, just as Thayer was, and there was a certain Rabelasian quality to Fort.
A couple of his later novels have Fortean traits—though Thayer, at least, turned on Powys, carping to Eric Frank Russell, “You know Powys is too old to do anything. The past ten of his more recent books are maundering.” The 1954 book Atlantis, though set in ancient Greece, announced a kind of Fortean interest with lost continents in its title. And 1952’s The Inmates was about people as Fortean damned facts. Set in a lunatic asylum, it describe a cast of highly eccentric people sympathetically. As one review put it, “Its farcical and memorable characters, its wisdom that suddenly becomes the height of absurdity, its nonsense that turns into criticism of the behavior of living men succeed better than most fictional attempts to discuss what is wrong with the world.”
And what could be more Fortean than that?
