Too little known, too important to ignore: the story of a Fortean.
I know very little about the personal life of Judith L. Gee, but some of it can, perhaps, be reconstructed by a cache of letters in the Eric Frank Russell archives which I first missed (as they are not collected with the rest of the Fortean correspondence.) Her maiden name was likely Lask—at least that was the surname of her brother—and it may be what is what the L stands for. She was Jewish, and her brother lived in Israel, at least as of September 1948.
I know very little about the personal life of Judith L. Gee, but some of it can, perhaps, be reconstructed by a cache of letters in the Eric Frank Russell archives which I first missed (as they are not collected with the rest of the Fortean correspondence.) Her maiden name was likely Lask—at least that was the surname of her brother—and it may be what is what the L stands for. She was Jewish, and her brother lived in Israel, at least as of September 1948.
Apparently, her knowledge of Fort dated back deeply. In a later letter to Thayer, Gee said that her husband had seen Charles Fort during his London years, and knew others from the neighborhood who remembered him. And in a letter to Russell she said she had been introduced to Fort’s writing with an early edition of “Lo!”—which would have been the one put out by Victor Gollancz. (Later she said that her brother had read it, too, and she enrolled him in the Society.) She thought that she “was one of the first buyers [of the complete Charles Fort] when first Littlewood King got them,” paying only Ł1.10.
She was introduced to the Fortean Society by Harold Chibbett. In an undated letter to Russell—but from 1948—Chibbett noted, “Talking about Forteans, I have just uncovered a rabid female of the species, whom you might be able to collar as a member if she is not already one. J. L. Gee, 27a, Goldhurst Terrace, Hampstead, London. I am going along to see her in a few day’s time, and will let you know further.” There was no more correspondence from Chibbett on the matter, but Gee herself wrote to Russell on 27 July 1948:
“I have, I think to thank you for my copy of DOUBT, which I have just received and devoured.
“The post mark is Liverpool, but I am in doubt, whether I have to thank Mr. Chibbett, or the Forteans of New York for passing me on to you. Do please settle this doubt!
“Mr. Chibbett, who has been to see me, has mentioned your name as chief Fortean in England. But, I had written to New York for a copy of their magazine, that is why I question whom I have to thank.”
Although it cannot be stated definitively, the reason for Chibbett’s connection to Gee seems obvious in retrospect: they ran in the same circles. She had written to letters to the British “Occult Review,” unseen by me, which very may have led Chibbett to her. She was keen to continue connecting with the Society and Forteans more generally, asking Russell in her letter how to convert English moneys into $2 American and if he could lend her the entire earlier run of Doubt for an “indefinite period” so that she could “read them in digestible comfort.”
Russell seems to have written back fairly quickly, with a letter that does not survive, dunning her 10 shillings and telling her to see Atlantis Bookshop for back issues of Doubt. She replied twice. One letter came 11th August, after she had returned from holiday. She had “revelled” [sic] in “Doubt,” “with some thing [sic] of the pure unholy delight with which I first read the great Charles himself.” She also enclosed a few clippings, but was unsure if she should continue the practice, since she assumed Russell took the same newspapers and saw the same articles.
Two days later, on 13 August, she wrote again, thanking Russell, noting that she had received copies of Doubt from America (as well as other American magazines, which left her “up to my ears reading them, and growling at interrupters”), and inviting him to visit some time. She said that she knew the Atlantis Bookshop and its owner—Michael Houghton—quite well, but wasn’t sure she could afford to by any books at the time (in another letter she said that “her stars had changed” and she was “too impecunious" to buy all the books that she wanted), and so was still anxious to borrow relevant tomes. She also wondered what had become of N.V. Dagg’s magazine “Tomorrow,” presumably asking because Russell was a frequent contributor. She had subscribed and enjoyed the periodical until it became blatantly anti-Semitic, at which time she dropped it and “suspect[ed] anything that comes from that stable.”
Again, Russell seems to have replied diligently, though perhaps less kindly—once more, the letter does not exist—apparently bristling at being called “chief Fortean” in England and taking issue with Gee’s interest in borrowing books. (Borrowing was a long-time bugaboo of Russell’s, and something he held against science fiction fans: as a writer, he wanted readers to pay for books, so that he could earn a living.) Gee apologized for having “roused [his] ire,” but insisted all books not actively being read are “dead . . . Put on the shelf in both senses of the word.” As a compromise, she suggested pooling resources with other Forteans to build a lending library (something many science fiction fans did). She also included her dues and a clipping from the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune, something she hadn’t seen in the English newspapers. (Her reading papers from Paris and her last name both raise the possibility of Gee having married a French man.)
Gee showed up in Doubt not long after—credited with a clipping about flying saucers in issue 23 (December 1949). Thayer acknowledged her in correspondence with Russell for the first time the next month. She continued to write to both Thayer and Russell and send in a load of clippings, all throughout the rest of the decade and into the 1950s. By my count, she was mentioned 67 times in Doubt, placing her with Mary Bonavia as one of the leading female contributors to the magazine, and a stalwart from which the magazine was built. She sometimes warranted her own column in Doubt, such as in Doubt 51 (January 1956), when Thayer compiled a number of her submissions under the title “Gee has a Field Day”: antibiotics causing cancer, a pearl in a hen’s egg, a reverend who attracted the following of birds and beasts, a wallaby loose in England. The whole gamut of Thayer’s Fortean topics.
As part of her Fortean work, Gee also tried to organize other Forteans, or at least bring them together. She constantly invited Russell too meet with her, and was upset when Thayer passed through without saying hello. She met with Simpson and Boulton, and Shepard, and Chibbett. She sought out Francoise Delisle. She corresponded with Alexander Grant. She wanted her brother to read Doubt in Israel to spread the word among English-speakers there. Russell passed on to her Antony Borrow's “The Glass,” and she, in turn, gave it to a teacher so knowledge of it could get to students (who were, themselves, learning to become teachers). She fantasized about a Fortean bookstore in London, run, she imagined by a retiree who didn’t need the money, but wanted a place where similar-thinking people could meet. In Doubt 24 (April 1949), she advertised for Fortean correspondents (this after asking Russell for a list of members, and probably being rebuffed):
“Also, a member of the female persuasion, a (Mrs.) Judith L. Gee, 27a, Goldhurst Terrace, Hampstead, London, N.W. 6., England, writes ‘Do you think you could publish an appeal from me in DOUBT as a medium between members. After all such oddities as we are, are of interest to one another, and I for one would like to write to fellow members ,all [sic] over the world--but how can I, when there is no media of exchange. [sic]’
“Mrs. Gee would also like to meet London members face to face--if not eye to eye. She concludes: ‘My husband saw Charles Fort in Hyde Park and British Museum when he was in London, and he has spoken to another Hyde Parkean, who remembers him well. Why not send an expedition to contact these people while they still live.”
Gee was not happy with the introduction: she smelled sexism. In a letter dated 12 April 1949, she crabbed to Russell, “What does he mean by ‘member of the female persuasion’? I have heard of the Jewish persuasion, by up till now [sic, the female half of the human race has been that by birth and not ‘persuasion’. But I notice how timorous male Forteans get when dealing with women! Some reversion to their mother-dominated past, no doubt!” Russell and Gee continued to battle over the issue, mostly repeating themselves. The ultimate point was that Gee thought the Fortean Society was too narrow, without enough women or non-whites.
There’s no doubt that sexism did play a role in how Thayer and Russell responded to her. For all the work that Gee did on behalf of Forteanism, for all her willingness to engage Russell in debate—and voice some of the same opinions as his closest friend, the correspondence between Thayer and Russell—admittedly, all from Thayer’s pen—was usual dismissive of her. Chibbett’s letter set the stage: Gee was considered too credulous even by other Forteans, and a bit annoying. She was imperious. But frivolousness and demands were (mosty) overlooked in others. Elsender and Simpson, Brits with similarly esoteric tastes, received more positive affirmations (or at least silence) from Thayer and Russell than Gee.
Thus, in Thayer’s first letter about her, from January 1949, he tells Russell, “Gee writes in such a vein that the only thing I can do is ignore her.” It is not clear what this refers to exactly, but comes in a discussion of anti-Semitism, and so may be Thayer bristling about Gee’s views on the matter. (Thayer too had anti-Semitic tendencies.) A year later, Thayer bitched to Russell that Gee didn’t do what as he said. He complained about her demands and her woo-woo: “Gee gets more astral all the time.” He joked that others with interests in the outer limits of Fortean thought must have been brought in by Gee. And they made light of her sex: “Gee reports that you are flirting with her. Are you trying to beat my time there?” None of this is horrid. It’s the casual sexism of the day, amplified by the other issues, notably religiosity, racism, and anti-Semitism.
Because though Gee was against the government, a minority of one, she also defended liberal politics against Russell’s cynicism. In a letter dated 30 September 1948, she chided him for turning on the Labour Government, which she thought could help the proletariat and industrial workers. In the same correspondence, she took him to task for viewing “Forteans with a jaundiced eye”: “I’m so delighted that there are other people who think along my odd lines, that I’m prepared to overlook all their obvious faults.” And of course she stood foursquare against Russell’s anti-Semitism.
The disagreement first came to the fore over Ben Hecht, the founding member of the Fortean Society—and inventor of the word Fortean—who cheered Israeli attacks on British soldiers. Russell, a former member of the RAF—was apoplectic and wanted Hecht tossed from the Society. (Thayer refused.) It was war, Gee said, and Hecht was not a Brit. No different than the British cheering on those who killed Germans during World War II. “Sorry if his Yank attitude riles you—but it is better to understand than to condemn.” She then pointed to N. V. Dagg, whose magazine Russell wrote for, and she thought was “much worse, because his attitude leads straight to gas-chambers, Dachau, Buchenwald, etc.” So she agreed with Thayer—though she was confused and thought she didn’t—that Forteans should not b expelled: the tent was a big one.
Letters continued back and forth through 1948. It is hard to know exactly what Russell said, as his side of the correspondence was not saved, but it seems that he said anti-Semitism was, at least in part, the fault of the Jews, who made themselves targets by their actions. (And simultaneously seems to have downplayed how many Jews were killed by the Nazis.) Gee disagreed, arguing that Jews had been scapegoats for a neurotic West, and in founding Israel were doing just what Russell wanted: “removing ourselves!” Indeed, she expressed some sympathy for the British desire to rid the nation of Jews—suggesting that she herself was considering, at least, moving to Israel, just as her brother had.
Later, in 1950, the subject recurred when Russell defended Ezra Pound against the charges of anti-Semitism by hand-waving away the existence of anti-Semitism. Like Russell’s best friend, Frederick Shroyer, who was also aghast at Russell’s anti-Semitism, Gee could not imagine how Russell married Fortean tolerance with anti-Semitism: “For a fervent Fortean, with the wide tolerance, disdain for herd mentality, and clear sight about propaganda, not to see the exceptional disaster of anti-semitism is I declare a terrible blind spot.”
Not that Gee was completely tolerant herself. She looked askance at homosexuals—they were perverts. She disliked racism of any sort, but thought that anti-Semitism was worse than American treatment of blacks or Native Americans. Northern Europeans, she thought, were the cause of much of the world’s misery: they were the driving force behind American, South African, and Australian racism. “Wherever the nordic whites have gone with their queer unfounded sense of superiority and touch me not—there has always been trouble for the natives of that country.” And like Shroyer, she could not abide Catholics. She was of the opinion that Protestant England was being used by Catholics: that was the root of anti-Semitism, she said. It was the Catholics who were trying to involve America in another war. The Ford Foundation was run by Catholics. Germany was brought low by the Catholics. Catholics and communists were driving toward another World War. And so she carped at Thayer for ignoring the very real threat posed by the Soviet Union and for dismissing civil defense as mere propaganda.
Politics, of course, were closely intertwined with Forteanism, even if Forteans themselves ranged from fascists to communists. But at the core were beliefs in unusual phenomena. Gee’s interest in Fortean subjects was wide, long-lived, and not hemmed in by any particular method. She was, it is true, wedded to astrology, and soon after joining the Society bought from it a volume on Nostradamus. And she wrote for Astrology: the Astrologer's Quarterly (1950). But she could also explain mysteries by recourse to alternate dimensions, aliens, and weird talents such as teleportation. She accepted the reality of reincarnation. She claimed to ability to control the weather: "My method is simplicity itself. It is the non-acceptance of clouds and rain…. So when I want sun shine, I just see the sun shining … the clouds parting and dispersing and blue skies triumphant.” In 1957, she was a member of the Fairy Investigation Society. In 1957, she was a member of the Fairy Investigation Society. In the 1970s, she contributed letters to Fate magazine about a so-called UFO prophet, Ted Owens. Not everything tantalized her, though—she hated Doubt 22, which was about pre-Columbian discoveries of America. Who cares, she asked—it is there, and that’s the important point.
It is hard to figure out entirely from the letters that she wrote, but it seems that Gee alloyed mysticism and pragmatism (with quite a bit of credulity.) She considered herself “half mystic” and thought humans were “only the material projections in space-time of Greater Selves and all that that means.” At the same time, she felt tied to the earth, uninterested in space exploration and related flights of fancy. She told Russell, “I’m earthly. I have no desire to go off exploring other worlds, and praise the Holy Mother, loud and long.” The planet, she said, at another time, was something of a proving ground for spiritual beings, a place to be educated as they were reincarnated again and again.
There is some evidence, as well, that her interest in the occult was a way to make life more interesting. After reading an article by Russell on Fort (published in the science fiction magazine “New Frontiers,” and passed on to her by Chibbett), which speculated that Fort might have died young as a result of his investigations. “I too have wondered” this, Gee told him. “It is an interesting and spine-chilling speculation. Shall we too be on that little list?,” she asked. She also cultivated—as Thayer and Russell did—a sense of independence through these beliefs, the idea that she was “in a perpetual minority, and always on the side ‘agin the Govt.’ I can afford to be amused,” she said. At another time, she put the matter into astrological terms: Forteans are Uranians, meaning “fiercely independent—one of the reasons why they have so little influence. They cant [sic] combine and put it over. Of course hey are the perrenial [sic] child of the Emperor’s Clothes story, they see with Charles Fort that man is naked and dressed only in his illusions—but—what are the sane to do in a mad world?”
This last was what kept her connected to Russell at the beginning, and eventually wedged them apart. Russell had a fairly consistent view over the 1940s and 1950s that earth was something like an insane asylum for the rest of the universe. It wasn’t a literal understanding, but a metaphorical one, and fed into his cynicism. Gee obviously sometimes voiced a similar opinion. But in the presence of his continued cynicism, she modified her views, her letters coming to suggest that humans were not living up to their potential, and, eventually, that humans were undergoing mental evolution. It is probably not a coincidence that she wrote fewer letters to Russell in the 1950s, and those became increasingly perfunctory.
Gee was, even in the capacious Fortean Society, member of a small minority.
She was introduced to the Fortean Society by Harold Chibbett. In an undated letter to Russell—but from 1948—Chibbett noted, “Talking about Forteans, I have just uncovered a rabid female of the species, whom you might be able to collar as a member if she is not already one. J. L. Gee, 27a, Goldhurst Terrace, Hampstead, London. I am going along to see her in a few day’s time, and will let you know further.” There was no more correspondence from Chibbett on the matter, but Gee herself wrote to Russell on 27 July 1948:
“I have, I think to thank you for my copy of DOUBT, which I have just received and devoured.
“The post mark is Liverpool, but I am in doubt, whether I have to thank Mr. Chibbett, or the Forteans of New York for passing me on to you. Do please settle this doubt!
“Mr. Chibbett, who has been to see me, has mentioned your name as chief Fortean in England. But, I had written to New York for a copy of their magazine, that is why I question whom I have to thank.”
Although it cannot be stated definitively, the reason for Chibbett’s connection to Gee seems obvious in retrospect: they ran in the same circles. She had written to letters to the British “Occult Review,” unseen by me, which very may have led Chibbett to her. She was keen to continue connecting with the Society and Forteans more generally, asking Russell in her letter how to convert English moneys into $2 American and if he could lend her the entire earlier run of Doubt for an “indefinite period” so that she could “read them in digestible comfort.”
Russell seems to have written back fairly quickly, with a letter that does not survive, dunning her 10 shillings and telling her to see Atlantis Bookshop for back issues of Doubt. She replied twice. One letter came 11th August, after she had returned from holiday. She had “revelled” [sic] in “Doubt,” “with some thing [sic] of the pure unholy delight with which I first read the great Charles himself.” She also enclosed a few clippings, but was unsure if she should continue the practice, since she assumed Russell took the same newspapers and saw the same articles.
Two days later, on 13 August, she wrote again, thanking Russell, noting that she had received copies of Doubt from America (as well as other American magazines, which left her “up to my ears reading them, and growling at interrupters”), and inviting him to visit some time. She said that she knew the Atlantis Bookshop and its owner—Michael Houghton—quite well, but wasn’t sure she could afford to by any books at the time (in another letter she said that “her stars had changed” and she was “too impecunious" to buy all the books that she wanted), and so was still anxious to borrow relevant tomes. She also wondered what had become of N.V. Dagg’s magazine “Tomorrow,” presumably asking because Russell was a frequent contributor. She had subscribed and enjoyed the periodical until it became blatantly anti-Semitic, at which time she dropped it and “suspect[ed] anything that comes from that stable.”
Again, Russell seems to have replied diligently, though perhaps less kindly—once more, the letter does not exist—apparently bristling at being called “chief Fortean” in England and taking issue with Gee’s interest in borrowing books. (Borrowing was a long-time bugaboo of Russell’s, and something he held against science fiction fans: as a writer, he wanted readers to pay for books, so that he could earn a living.) Gee apologized for having “roused [his] ire,” but insisted all books not actively being read are “dead . . . Put on the shelf in both senses of the word.” As a compromise, she suggested pooling resources with other Forteans to build a lending library (something many science fiction fans did). She also included her dues and a clipping from the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune, something she hadn’t seen in the English newspapers. (Her reading papers from Paris and her last name both raise the possibility of Gee having married a French man.)
Gee showed up in Doubt not long after—credited with a clipping about flying saucers in issue 23 (December 1949). Thayer acknowledged her in correspondence with Russell for the first time the next month. She continued to write to both Thayer and Russell and send in a load of clippings, all throughout the rest of the decade and into the 1950s. By my count, she was mentioned 67 times in Doubt, placing her with Mary Bonavia as one of the leading female contributors to the magazine, and a stalwart from which the magazine was built. She sometimes warranted her own column in Doubt, such as in Doubt 51 (January 1956), when Thayer compiled a number of her submissions under the title “Gee has a Field Day”: antibiotics causing cancer, a pearl in a hen’s egg, a reverend who attracted the following of birds and beasts, a wallaby loose in England. The whole gamut of Thayer’s Fortean topics.
As part of her Fortean work, Gee also tried to organize other Forteans, or at least bring them together. She constantly invited Russell too meet with her, and was upset when Thayer passed through without saying hello. She met with Simpson and Boulton, and Shepard, and Chibbett. She sought out Francoise Delisle. She corresponded with Alexander Grant. She wanted her brother to read Doubt in Israel to spread the word among English-speakers there. Russell passed on to her Antony Borrow's “The Glass,” and she, in turn, gave it to a teacher so knowledge of it could get to students (who were, themselves, learning to become teachers). She fantasized about a Fortean bookstore in London, run, she imagined by a retiree who didn’t need the money, but wanted a place where similar-thinking people could meet. In Doubt 24 (April 1949), she advertised for Fortean correspondents (this after asking Russell for a list of members, and probably being rebuffed):
“Also, a member of the female persuasion, a (Mrs.) Judith L. Gee, 27a, Goldhurst Terrace, Hampstead, London, N.W. 6., England, writes ‘Do you think you could publish an appeal from me in DOUBT as a medium between members. After all such oddities as we are, are of interest to one another, and I for one would like to write to fellow members ,all [sic] over the world--but how can I, when there is no media of exchange. [sic]’
“Mrs. Gee would also like to meet London members face to face--if not eye to eye. She concludes: ‘My husband saw Charles Fort in Hyde Park and British Museum when he was in London, and he has spoken to another Hyde Parkean, who remembers him well. Why not send an expedition to contact these people while they still live.”
Gee was not happy with the introduction: she smelled sexism. In a letter dated 12 April 1949, she crabbed to Russell, “What does he mean by ‘member of the female persuasion’? I have heard of the Jewish persuasion, by up till now [sic, the female half of the human race has been that by birth and not ‘persuasion’. But I notice how timorous male Forteans get when dealing with women! Some reversion to their mother-dominated past, no doubt!” Russell and Gee continued to battle over the issue, mostly repeating themselves. The ultimate point was that Gee thought the Fortean Society was too narrow, without enough women or non-whites.
There’s no doubt that sexism did play a role in how Thayer and Russell responded to her. For all the work that Gee did on behalf of Forteanism, for all her willingness to engage Russell in debate—and voice some of the same opinions as his closest friend, the correspondence between Thayer and Russell—admittedly, all from Thayer’s pen—was usual dismissive of her. Chibbett’s letter set the stage: Gee was considered too credulous even by other Forteans, and a bit annoying. She was imperious. But frivolousness and demands were (mosty) overlooked in others. Elsender and Simpson, Brits with similarly esoteric tastes, received more positive affirmations (or at least silence) from Thayer and Russell than Gee.
Thus, in Thayer’s first letter about her, from January 1949, he tells Russell, “Gee writes in such a vein that the only thing I can do is ignore her.” It is not clear what this refers to exactly, but comes in a discussion of anti-Semitism, and so may be Thayer bristling about Gee’s views on the matter. (Thayer too had anti-Semitic tendencies.) A year later, Thayer bitched to Russell that Gee didn’t do what as he said. He complained about her demands and her woo-woo: “Gee gets more astral all the time.” He joked that others with interests in the outer limits of Fortean thought must have been brought in by Gee. And they made light of her sex: “Gee reports that you are flirting with her. Are you trying to beat my time there?” None of this is horrid. It’s the casual sexism of the day, amplified by the other issues, notably religiosity, racism, and anti-Semitism.
Because though Gee was against the government, a minority of one, she also defended liberal politics against Russell’s cynicism. In a letter dated 30 September 1948, she chided him for turning on the Labour Government, which she thought could help the proletariat and industrial workers. In the same correspondence, she took him to task for viewing “Forteans with a jaundiced eye”: “I’m so delighted that there are other people who think along my odd lines, that I’m prepared to overlook all their obvious faults.” And of course she stood foursquare against Russell’s anti-Semitism.
The disagreement first came to the fore over Ben Hecht, the founding member of the Fortean Society—and inventor of the word Fortean—who cheered Israeli attacks on British soldiers. Russell, a former member of the RAF—was apoplectic and wanted Hecht tossed from the Society. (Thayer refused.) It was war, Gee said, and Hecht was not a Brit. No different than the British cheering on those who killed Germans during World War II. “Sorry if his Yank attitude riles you—but it is better to understand than to condemn.” She then pointed to N. V. Dagg, whose magazine Russell wrote for, and she thought was “much worse, because his attitude leads straight to gas-chambers, Dachau, Buchenwald, etc.” So she agreed with Thayer—though she was confused and thought she didn’t—that Forteans should not b expelled: the tent was a big one.
Letters continued back and forth through 1948. It is hard to know exactly what Russell said, as his side of the correspondence was not saved, but it seems that he said anti-Semitism was, at least in part, the fault of the Jews, who made themselves targets by their actions. (And simultaneously seems to have downplayed how many Jews were killed by the Nazis.) Gee disagreed, arguing that Jews had been scapegoats for a neurotic West, and in founding Israel were doing just what Russell wanted: “removing ourselves!” Indeed, she expressed some sympathy for the British desire to rid the nation of Jews—suggesting that she herself was considering, at least, moving to Israel, just as her brother had.
Later, in 1950, the subject recurred when Russell defended Ezra Pound against the charges of anti-Semitism by hand-waving away the existence of anti-Semitism. Like Russell’s best friend, Frederick Shroyer, who was also aghast at Russell’s anti-Semitism, Gee could not imagine how Russell married Fortean tolerance with anti-Semitism: “For a fervent Fortean, with the wide tolerance, disdain for herd mentality, and clear sight about propaganda, not to see the exceptional disaster of anti-semitism is I declare a terrible blind spot.”
Not that Gee was completely tolerant herself. She looked askance at homosexuals—they were perverts. She disliked racism of any sort, but thought that anti-Semitism was worse than American treatment of blacks or Native Americans. Northern Europeans, she thought, were the cause of much of the world’s misery: they were the driving force behind American, South African, and Australian racism. “Wherever the nordic whites have gone with their queer unfounded sense of superiority and touch me not—there has always been trouble for the natives of that country.” And like Shroyer, she could not abide Catholics. She was of the opinion that Protestant England was being used by Catholics: that was the root of anti-Semitism, she said. It was the Catholics who were trying to involve America in another war. The Ford Foundation was run by Catholics. Germany was brought low by the Catholics. Catholics and communists were driving toward another World War. And so she carped at Thayer for ignoring the very real threat posed by the Soviet Union and for dismissing civil defense as mere propaganda.
Politics, of course, were closely intertwined with Forteanism, even if Forteans themselves ranged from fascists to communists. But at the core were beliefs in unusual phenomena. Gee’s interest in Fortean subjects was wide, long-lived, and not hemmed in by any particular method. She was, it is true, wedded to astrology, and soon after joining the Society bought from it a volume on Nostradamus. And she wrote for Astrology: the Astrologer's Quarterly (1950). But she could also explain mysteries by recourse to alternate dimensions, aliens, and weird talents such as teleportation. She accepted the reality of reincarnation. She claimed to ability to control the weather: "My method is simplicity itself. It is the non-acceptance of clouds and rain…. So when I want sun shine, I just see the sun shining … the clouds parting and dispersing and blue skies triumphant.” In 1957, she was a member of the Fairy Investigation Society. In 1957, she was a member of the Fairy Investigation Society. In the 1970s, she contributed letters to Fate magazine about a so-called UFO prophet, Ted Owens. Not everything tantalized her, though—she hated Doubt 22, which was about pre-Columbian discoveries of America. Who cares, she asked—it is there, and that’s the important point.
It is hard to figure out entirely from the letters that she wrote, but it seems that Gee alloyed mysticism and pragmatism (with quite a bit of credulity.) She considered herself “half mystic” and thought humans were “only the material projections in space-time of Greater Selves and all that that means.” At the same time, she felt tied to the earth, uninterested in space exploration and related flights of fancy. She told Russell, “I’m earthly. I have no desire to go off exploring other worlds, and praise the Holy Mother, loud and long.” The planet, she said, at another time, was something of a proving ground for spiritual beings, a place to be educated as they were reincarnated again and again.
There is some evidence, as well, that her interest in the occult was a way to make life more interesting. After reading an article by Russell on Fort (published in the science fiction magazine “New Frontiers,” and passed on to her by Chibbett), which speculated that Fort might have died young as a result of his investigations. “I too have wondered” this, Gee told him. “It is an interesting and spine-chilling speculation. Shall we too be on that little list?,” she asked. She also cultivated—as Thayer and Russell did—a sense of independence through these beliefs, the idea that she was “in a perpetual minority, and always on the side ‘agin the Govt.’ I can afford to be amused,” she said. At another time, she put the matter into astrological terms: Forteans are Uranians, meaning “fiercely independent—one of the reasons why they have so little influence. They cant [sic] combine and put it over. Of course hey are the perrenial [sic] child of the Emperor’s Clothes story, they see with Charles Fort that man is naked and dressed only in his illusions—but—what are the sane to do in a mad world?”
This last was what kept her connected to Russell at the beginning, and eventually wedged them apart. Russell had a fairly consistent view over the 1940s and 1950s that earth was something like an insane asylum for the rest of the universe. It wasn’t a literal understanding, but a metaphorical one, and fed into his cynicism. Gee obviously sometimes voiced a similar opinion. But in the presence of his continued cynicism, she modified her views, her letters coming to suggest that humans were not living up to their potential, and, eventually, that humans were undergoing mental evolution. It is probably not a coincidence that she wrote fewer letters to Russell in the 1950s, and those became increasingly perfunctory.
Gee was, even in the capacious Fortean Society, member of a small minority.
