Martin Gardner, from his 1932 yearbook. Surprised by Fort, but irritated by the Forteans.
Whether he was a Fortean himself—well, that depends on how you define matters.
Martin Gardner was born 21 October 1914 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to James Henry Gardner, a petroleum geologist, and Willie Wilkerson Spiers. He had a younger brother and a younger sister. Gardner grew up on the Tulsa area. The family was fairly well off, employing servants and maids. As a youth, he developed an interest in puzzles and, around the age of ten, discovered Hugo Gernsback’s “Science and Invention”; he enjoyed Jules Verne and Sherlock Holmes, too, and when, in 1926, the first issue of “Amazing Stories” was advertised, he was a subscriber. Gardner also had an interest in magic.
He attended Central High School, in Tulsa, where he practiced both gymnastics and tennis. At some point, he had cataract surgery, which made continuing to play tennis difficult. While in high school, he gave his physics teacher the run of “Amazing Stories” that he had collected. In 1930, when he was not yet 16, his first published writing appeared, a letter to “Science and Invention” in April, and a magic trick in “Sphix,” the following month. He would go on to write something on the order of a hundred books over the rest of his long life, many of these collections of essays he wrote for a number of different publications on a wide range of topics. He also spent some time at the University of Central Oklahoma; the 1932 yearbook described him as “an able cartoonist with an adept mind for science.”
Whether he was a Fortean himself—well, that depends on how you define matters.
Martin Gardner was born 21 October 1914 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to James Henry Gardner, a petroleum geologist, and Willie Wilkerson Spiers. He had a younger brother and a younger sister. Gardner grew up on the Tulsa area. The family was fairly well off, employing servants and maids. As a youth, he developed an interest in puzzles and, around the age of ten, discovered Hugo Gernsback’s “Science and Invention”; he enjoyed Jules Verne and Sherlock Holmes, too, and when, in 1926, the first issue of “Amazing Stories” was advertised, he was a subscriber. Gardner also had an interest in magic.
He attended Central High School, in Tulsa, where he practiced both gymnastics and tennis. At some point, he had cataract surgery, which made continuing to play tennis difficult. While in high school, he gave his physics teacher the run of “Amazing Stories” that he had collected. In 1930, when he was not yet 16, his first published writing appeared, a letter to “Science and Invention” in April, and a magic trick in “Sphix,” the following month. He would go on to write something on the order of a hundred books over the rest of his long life, many of these collections of essays he wrote for a number of different publications on a wide range of topics. He also spent some time at the University of Central Oklahoma; the 1932 yearbook described him as “an able cartoonist with an adept mind for science.”
That year, he went to the University of Chicago, supposedly a temporary stop on the way to Cal Tech, though he stayed and finished. Gardner was a Pentecostalist when he moved north, and flipped through a couple of different fundamentalist sects while in Chicago, even spending some time as a Seventh-Day Adventist. A philosophy major, his classes disabused him of his fundamentalist faith—though he would remain a theist throughout his life—a story that he covered in his semi-autobiographical novel “The Flight of Peter Fromm,” which he published in 1973. He also took a geology class, which overcome his doubts of evolution and moved them to doubts about creationism. In a much later interview, Gardner speculated that this transformation, and particularly his coming to see as false the geological theories of George McCready Price, which argued for a Biblical-literalist view of the world, got him interested in debunking false and pseudoscience.
Also in college, Gardner began his filing system, parallel to Fort’s own. This would be the basis for much of his writing over the years. He explained, “Yes, my files are my number one trade secret. It began in college with 3 3 5 file cards that I kept in ladies shoe boxes. I had a habit then (this was before copy machines) of destroying books by slicing out paragraphs and pasting them on cards. A friend once looked through my cards on American literature and was horrified to discover I had destroyed several rare first editions of books by Scott Fitzgerald. When I began to earn some money I moved the cards into metal file cabinets, and started to preserve complete articles and large clippings and correspondence in manila folders.”
Upon graduating, Gardner returned to Tulsa where he worked for the Tulsa Tribune as a journalist, though he found the job boring. At some point, he returned to Chicago, though the chronology is a little unclear; he was still in Tulsa for the 1940 census, captured twice, actually, once at his parents home—where he was listed as a waiter—and once as a guest at someone else’s home, where his job was given as soda fountain jerk. In Chicago, he worked briefly as a case worker for the Relief Administration, and then at the University of Chicago’s press department. He circulated in science fiction circles, and with fellow magicians.
In 1942, Gardner joined the war effort as yeoman with the navy. He stayed in the service for four years, and then returned to Chicago. He considered going back to work for the University’s Press Relations, but wrote a story, first, which was published by Esquire magazine, then headquartered in Chicago. It was called “The Horse on the Escalator” and appeared in the October 1946 issue. Using money from the G.I. Bill, he took some courses at the University—though because he was always intent to be a writer, did not compete a graduate degree. One seminar was with the Viennese philosopher Rudolf Carnap—a logical positivist—whose sequestering of science and metaphysics allowed Gardner to divide his faith from his interest in science. He saw belief in God as a way of escaping the despair of existentialism, an approach to life he would later trace back to William James and the pragmatists.
His second story was “The No-Sided Professor,” a science fiction story. It appeared in the January 1947 issue of Esquire.” The No-Sided Professor” was reprinted in the February 1951 issue of “The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction” (edited by Fortean Anthony Boucher) and that magazine’s best-of collection in 1952, as well as being widely reprinted in later years. “Esquire,” though, was his main gig, paying him enough for his stories for him to make ends meet. April 1947 saw “The Conspicuous Turtle” appear; October, “Flo’s Freudian Slips”; January 1948, “The Lady Says, ‘Check!’; March 1948, “The Loves of Lady Coldpence.”
Amid this output, Gardner moved to New York City—around 1947. He made a connection with the city’s active circle of magicians, and also continued writing for “Esquire,” as well as extending out into new areas. He had a piece in the 1949 “Arkham Sampler,” a weird fiction publisher, and an article on Houdini in “Argosy,” the fiction magazine which was reinventing itself as a men’s adventure magazine. There was also a story in “The London Mystery Magazine,” the second in his Monte Featherstone series. H wrote about science fiction for the Chicago-based ‘zine “The Journal of Science-Fiction.” Gardner gave up freelancing some time after coming to New York city, going to work for the children magazine “Humpty Dumpty” as a writer and editor.
In 1950, he contribute an article to “Antioch Review” called the Hermit Scientist, about modern-day pseudoscientists who aped the tradition of Medieval scholars in working alone; at that time, hermeticism had been a defense against a dogmatic church; now it was a sign of pathology, the Hermit scientist imagining himself as either supporting fundamentalist religion against science, or offering some deluded form of a new scientist. I do not know if Gardner had yet discovered and read through Mencken’s works, but he would in time, and was heir to the same ironic tradition—a tradition that also included, of course, Fort and his defender Benjamin De Casseres. In each case, the author was using irony to puncture pretensions—Fort the pretensions of science, De Casseres science and the state, and Gardner pseudoscientists: Velikovsky and Hubbard and Wilhelm Reich and the maverick geologist whom Gardner himself had once found useful, George McCready Price.
A friend from high school, John Eliot, was a literary agent, and he encouraged Gardner to expand this article into a book, which he did in his spare time. He was also having to write a whole variety of articles for “Humpty Dumpty,” and was studying math and geometry: as part of his magazine duties, he was writing a column on paper folding and cutting to entertain children, this itself possibly growing out of his interest in magic. And he continued to keep up with his friends in magic; one, Bill Simon, introduced him to Charlotte Greenwald. Martin and Charlotte were married in October of 1952. The same year as his marriage, the next month, his first book appeared, “In the Name of Science.” Although it did attract a few positive reviews, the book sold poorly and, as he remembered, the publisher remaindered it fairly quickly.
Martin and Charlotte’s first son was born in 1955; three years later, they would have a second son. In January of 1955, Gardner published “Royal Historian of Oz,” in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Five years later, he would put out “The Annotated Alice,” which was an annotated version of “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass”; it proved, by far, his most popular book. In December 1956, he started writing a column for “Scientific American,” on mathematical games, building on his interest in puzzles and his paper-folding games for “Humpty Dumpty”; the column lasted twenty-five years, and made him famous.
On 22 August 1957, Dover published a revised version of his debunking book, “Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science.” This time it caught on, a fact that Gardner explained as resulting from Long John Nebel’s radio show. So often was the book name-checked and disparaged on the late night, parapsychologically-inclined program, that people went out and bought it. He said, much later, “I remember one night, when I had gotten out of bed to change a diaper on our first born, I turned on the radio and heard John Campbell, then editor of Astounding Science Fiction, say “Mr. Gardner is a liar.” I had a chapter about his role in introducing L. Ron Hubbard’s dianetics.”
Gardner left “Humpty Dumpty” some time in the 1950s and returned to freelancing; he cultivated connections—he knew the science fiction anthologist Everett F. Bleiler, from Chicago, for instance, and got him a job at Dover. (Dover itself would reprint Fort’s complete books in 1974, with an introduction by Damon Knight.) In 1976, Gardner was a founding member of CSICOP—the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, which worried that the authority of science was being swamped by a new Medievalism that valued superstition over critical reasoning. The Committee eventually putout a magazine, Skeptical Inquirer, to which Gardner contributed, as he continued to plow the debunking field. He put out “Science: Good, Bad, and Bogus” in 1981. In 1983, having retired from “Scientific American,” he started a column with “Skeptical Inquirer,” originally called “Notes of a Psy-Watcher” before being changed to “Notes of a Fringe Watcher.” His columns were adapted into three books, The New Age: Notes of a Fringe Watcher (1988); On the Wild Side (1992); Weird Water and Fuzzy Logic: More Notes of a FringeWatcher (1996). By this point, Gardner had perfected his ironic style, one that was—his word—glib, following the Menckian diktat, “One horse-laugh is worth ten-thousand syllogisms.”
As well, Gardner continued his other forms of writing, book reviews, autobiographical musings, working through the first decade of the new millennium. Charlotte died in 2000.
Martin Gardner died 22 May 2010 in Norman, Oklahoma. He was 95
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I do not know when Martin Gardner first discovered Fort; this is usual for most of these biographies. He was a reader of science fiction with an interest in puzzles and pseudoscience, and so may have noted the serialization of “Lo!” in Astounding; that was in 1934, when he was at the University of Chicago. Or he may have noticed some mention of Fort in some other magazine. Exactly when Gardner discovered Fort, though, is not a particularly interesting question—the more fruitful avenue is making sense of how Gardner understood Fort. The parapsychologist George P. Hansen noted that “Gardner has also been the single most powerful antagonist of the paranormal in the second half of the twentieth century.” And yet, his approach to Fort was always ambivalent.
Gardner was aware of Fort and the Fortean Society by the time he wrote the article for the “Antioch Review.” It’s possible he heard about both, if he had not yet, from reading Bergen Evans “Natural History of Nonsense.” Oddly, though, I have not seen Gardner crediting that book, though it came out in 1946, and Evans was a professor at nearby Northwestern University, who wrote for “The American Mercury,” which had been started by Mencken and to which Mencken was again contributing, after an earlier departure. (Gardner did review a sequel, of sorts, by Bergan Evans, in 1954; and Evans did plug “In the Name of Science.”) At any rate, while Gardner spent most of the article on Velikovsky and Price—whom he accused of using pseudoscience as a handmaiden to religious fundamentalism—and Reich and Hubbard—whom he accused of using pseudoscience to create secular delusions—he mentioned the Forteans in the last line.
It’s an unusual rhetorical trick, the rest of the article never mentioning Fort, Forteans, or the Society, so that the conclusion doesn’t make a lot of sense to anyone not already in the know; the Society wasn’t particularly famous in 1950, even as it had hit its stride. Perhaps Gardner had just come across the Fortean Society, and so inserted a reference where he could. He argued that none of the pseudosciences he covered, though one was perniciously clever, and others were promoted by indefatigable men of a cranky brilliance, would last very long, rather following earlier crackpot ideas into disrepute and oblivion: which, in its way, was another word for acceptance among Forteans—creatures of disrepute and, if not oblivion, then a museum of failed ideas. He wrote, “The current flurry of discussion about Velikovsky and Hubbard will soon subside, and their books will begin to gather dust on library shelves. Perhaps Tiffany Thayer will appoint them honorary members of the Fortean Society, that remarkable institution devoted to the writings of Charles Fort, dedicated to the frustration of science, and the haven of lost causes.”
If Gardner had just recently discovered Fort and the Fortean Society when he was writing the essay, he was much more familiar within two years, when his book was published. He spent an entire chapter on Fort and the Forteans, and showed a familiarity with all of Fort’s books (certain quotations no doubt ending up on his filing cards) and the run of “Doubt,” to that time. What stands out, though, is that Gardner seems to have approached Fort expecting pseudoscientific babble, but was surprised by his obduracy and humor—so much so that Fort seems to have become part of Gardner’s permanent mental architecture. He was not so warmly inclined to the Fortean Society, though. Gardner was less sure that pseudoscience would be passing; he thought it had found a niche, was undermining the authority of science; and so Thayer’s haven of lost causes was also a haven of potential revolutionaries.
“The Book of the Damned,” he said, “was written in a curious, breathless style. At times, it broke into passages of profound wisdom, high humor, and beautiful phrasing.” It was hard to take the measure of Fort, entirely—one imagines that Gardner found the ambiguity as exciting, in its way, as he did that in Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. “More meaning than meets the eye lurks behind Fort’s madness. Fort was an Hegelian. In the last analysis, existence—not the universe we observe, but everything there is—is a unity. . . . Fort was not a religious man, but he granted that the totality of things might be an organism with intelligence. . . . There is, then, a final reality and truth. But for us, the little bugs and mice, there are only the broken lights, the half-truths and the phantom realities.” And so Fort offered his theories, but didn’t believe in them: “Fort doubted everything—including his own speculations.”
Perhaps, then, he was “taking Fort too seriously, and are only falling into another one of his traps. He was far from an ignorant man, and his discussion of such topics as the ‘principle of uncertainty’ in modern quantum theory indicate a firm grasp of the subject matter. Opposition to the notion that electrons move at ‘random’ is not in fashion at the moment. Nevertheless, Fort’s jibes are in harmony with more technical criticisms of Einstein and Bertrand Russell! Even when Fort made a scientific boner, as he did occasionally, it is hard to know whether he made it deliberately or without knowing better.”
Gardner could see some ways that Fort’s ideas informed a healthy Forteanism: “When his more astute admirers insist that he was not the arch-enemy of science he was reputed to be, but only the enemy of scientists who forget the ephemeral character of all knowledge, they are emphasizing the sound and healthy aspect of Forteanism. It is true that no scientific theory is above doubt. It is true hat all scientific ‘facts’ are subject to endless revision as new ‘data’ are uncovered. No scientist worthy of the name thinks otherwise.” There was a darker side, too, however: “But it is also true that scientific theories can be given high or low degrees of confirmation. Fort was blind to this elementary fact—or pretended to be blind to it—and it is this blindness which is the spurious and unhealthy side of Forteanism . . . When a Fortean seriously believes that all scientific theories are equally absurd, all the rich humor of the Society gives way to an ignorant sneer.”
This ignorant sneer—nothing like his own horse laugh, he implied—was all the Fortean Society had been reduced to. The proper approach to Fort was to treat the whole thing as a lark—like the Baker Street Irregulars, he said, and their fancy that Sherlock Holmes actually existed. But the joke was not needed right now, when science was so fragile—“If we lived in an age in which the majority of citizens had a clear comprehension of science, there might be some point in preserving an organization to remind scientists of their limitations. The astrology magazines on the stands and the sales of Velikovsky’s books are sufficient reminders of how far we are from such an age. It was all very amusing in 1931.” And, besides, the Society wasn’t so funny, anymore, but took itself seriously, arguing against tonsillectomies and vivisection while Thayer injects his “un-Fortean” political prejudices.
Fort himself might be worth contemplating, but “why the Fortean Society continues to exist is hard to understand.” Indeed, Forteanism was at an end. He noted that some people saw Fort’s influence on science fiction, but he did not agree. Fort he said—although the evidence here is not clear at all—never “read a line of it.” Which may explain why, in Gardner’s estimation, Fort’s speculations were so wan: “It is true that about a dozen novels and scores of short stories have been based on his ideas, but these works are more of the ‘weird tale’ variety than science fiction. A few Fortean terms like ‘teleportation’ have become staple science-fantasy property, but in general his ideas have proved too mundane to serve as useful story gimmicks.” Sprinkled throughout the rest of the book were further reasons the Fortean Society no longer served a purpose: it promoted all manner of bunk, from Drayson to Crehore.
A few of the laudatory reviews agreed with Gardner’s assessment of Fort—even while reserving objections to other of his targets. A reviewer for the Nebraska “Lincoln Star” wrote “Readers will recognize many old warhorses beloved of the gullible (e.g. the late Charles Fort). Occasionally you may disagree with the author, as in his rejection of dowsing, or water-divining. But the fact is that man was, is and probably always will be a sucker for the pseudoscientists and as long as that is so, books of this kind are a salutary necessity.” P. Schuyler Miller, in Astounding, wrote “Charles Fort gets the chapter he merits. Though the author tends to consider him a hoaxer rather than a crackpot, his writings have nourished many a wild theorist.” (And also implies that he doesn’t quite agree with Gardner’s dismissal of ESP.) Writing in “The Quarterly Review of Biology,” Bentley Glass said, “J. B. Rhine will hardly like to see his efforts to study extra-sensory perception and psychokinesis classed with the wild imaginings of Immanuel Velikovsky or Charles Fort, nor with the fad of diabetics or the persistent faith in dowsing for water or minerals with a forked twig. Yet if Gardner is rude and journalistic in his sweeping attacks, he also possesses rather good critical judgment, and his blade is sharp.”
Some Forteans took the criticism in stride, too—clearly thinking they might be among Fort’s more astute admirers. In the late 1960s, Vincent Gaddis wrote to Damon Knight, “Gardner seems to understand the Fortean philosophy better than many . . . Very few can understand the Fortean idea of suspended judgment—of being an absolute agnostic. They think Fort was a nut who believed the yarns and theories (he called them suggestions) he wrote about. He didn’t, and he said quite plainly that if anything he had written was ‘proved’ to be true, he would set about gathering data to disprove the ‘proof.’ I’m sure you understand this.”
Even Thayer thought Gardner’s judgment sound. In the October 1953 issue of Doubt (#42), he recommended it, under the heading “New Books”:
“IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE, by Martin Gardner, contains a lively, long chapter on Fort and Forteanism. The author got a little sore at YS, and took a few snipes at him, but we don’t hold that against him. The book is full of meat, and the observations on Fort are in general very fair-minded and admiring. By all means, read it. In the Name of Science, from the Society, $4.00.” That’s right—Thayer was selling the book, too.
Not every Fortean took Gardner in stride, though, especially after the second edition of his book gained traction. There were the reputed denunciations of Long John Nebel and his various guests. In 2001, George P. Hansen would offer view of Gardner that reflected Gardner’s view of Fort—admiring, but also worried over the pernicious effects of his thoughts, and the way his thumb could too often be on the scale in favor of his preferred interpretations. Between these—between Nebel and Hansen—came the anthroposophist, lawyer, and Darwin critic, the Fortean Norman Macbeth. He wrote about Gardner’s book in a 1965 Anthroposophical newsletter.
MacBeth was concerned with Gardner’s attacks on alternative forms of knowledge, generally, which he thought was inconsistent—the inconsistency always favoring mainstream science—and callow. But he also devoted a paragraph to Gardner’s interpretation of Fort and the the Forteans, which paragraph he titled “obtuseness.” It reads, in part, “Mr. Gardner (43) recognizes the nature, and apparently admits the justification, of Fort’s ‘self-appointed mission’ of undamning the damned, by which he ‘meant all those views which are excluded by dogmatic science — the “lost souls” of data.’ He quotes (53) Fort’s own words: ‘if nobody looks up, or checks up, what the astronomers tell us, they are free to tell us anything that they want to tell us.’ Nevertheless, between these passages Mr. Gardner wonders (51) why the Fortean Society continues to exist despite his own conviction that there is no ‘point in preserving an organization to remind scientists of their limitations.’”
Gardner continued to have a complicated relationship with Fort and Forteanism throughout his very long career. When CSICOP initially formed, it included the sociologist Marcello Truzzi, who was less interested in debunking pseudoscience than explaining why people believed it—he had strongly Fortean inclinations, and was taken with the philosophy of Paul Feyerabend, who argued against a unitary scientific method. Gardner and the rest of CSICOP eventually broke with Truzzi, and Gardner looked affectionately—but condescendingly—on Truzz’s Fortean-inflected “Zetetic Scholar,” a kind-of competitor of Skeptical Inquirer. In a 1983 book, he admitted that he did not think Fort offered a serious challenge to science—his was “preposterous spoofing.” And in a 1987 newspaper article, he’s quoted as thinking Forteanism’s problems had remained unchanged over the last three-and-a-half decades: Forteans “spend a vast amount of time giving evidence for points of view that are far down n the continued of being true. If course, it’s possible that there are sea serpents . . . but is it something that’s probable, and worth making a big to-do over? That’s the real question.” Indeed, the problem might be even worse, as he saw that neither Velikovsky nor Hubbard were forgotten, and pseudoscience continued to gain power and authority as against science proper.
But Fort had also wormed himself into Gardner’s way of thinking, and quotes from him were ready to hand, a way of explaining and thinking about the world. He started a 1978 book review—covering several books on the kind of catastrophic geology that was central to Velikovsky and remained important to creationists—with a nod to Fort and the pragmatists: “‘All things,’ said Charles Peirce, ‘swim in continua.’ At what wave length does blue become green? When does a child become a grownup? Are viruses alive? Do cows think? It is also obvious that there are discrete ‘things’ that swim in these spectrums, and sometimes jump from one part of a spectrum to another. Day fades into night, but a flicked switch produces instant darkness. One can imagine a hippopotamus changing by imperceptible degrees into a violet, but, as Charles Fort once asked, who would send a lady a bouquet of hippopotami?”
Fort received a mention in a puzzle Gardner proposed that was run in “Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine” in 1984 (and collected in a 1987 book). There was a passing reference to Fort in his 1999 book “The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener,” which he numbered as his favorite. That the remark is incidental is the point: Fort was just there, in his head, not something he had to dwell upon or study. Which raises the question of how to interpret Gardner’s relationship to Fort and the nature of Forteanism.
The nest answer to this quandary comes, I think, from Hansen, who notes that Gardner did not so much oppose pseudoscientific views as much as wanting to keep them quarantined. By how own admission, Gardner was a Mysterian, someone who thought that consciousness could never be explained by humans, or fully replicated by computers. He also believed in the power of prayer, but thought that it should not be investigated by scientific methods. Gardner was drawn to strict scientific rationalism but was also—in Hansen’s words—“too sophisticated to be a rationalist.” He wanted to preserve a space for mystical, paranormal forces to interact. He was a gatekeeper, of a sort, who wanted to make sure that neither science nor mysticism overstepped its bounds.
And so it is tempting to see Gardner’s relationship to Fort and Forteanism as a parallel to his relationship with God and fundamentalism. Perhaps I am wrong—admittedly, this is not a rigorous, full-scope biography of Gardner. But I also think the parallel is more than just suggestive. In the same way that Gardner wanted to preserve his belief in God, prayer, and the afterlife, but also disparage fundamentalism and the overreach of Christian politics into the wider intellectual world, so he wanted to preserve his own—undoubtedly astute—appreciation of Fort while dismissing what might be called fundamentalist Forteans and keep their views out of the intellectual world. He was a Fortean, but of a very specific type, unwilling to associated with other Forteans, keeping his own counsel.
Also in college, Gardner began his filing system, parallel to Fort’s own. This would be the basis for much of his writing over the years. He explained, “Yes, my files are my number one trade secret. It began in college with 3 3 5 file cards that I kept in ladies shoe boxes. I had a habit then (this was before copy machines) of destroying books by slicing out paragraphs and pasting them on cards. A friend once looked through my cards on American literature and was horrified to discover I had destroyed several rare first editions of books by Scott Fitzgerald. When I began to earn some money I moved the cards into metal file cabinets, and started to preserve complete articles and large clippings and correspondence in manila folders.”
Upon graduating, Gardner returned to Tulsa where he worked for the Tulsa Tribune as a journalist, though he found the job boring. At some point, he returned to Chicago, though the chronology is a little unclear; he was still in Tulsa for the 1940 census, captured twice, actually, once at his parents home—where he was listed as a waiter—and once as a guest at someone else’s home, where his job was given as soda fountain jerk. In Chicago, he worked briefly as a case worker for the Relief Administration, and then at the University of Chicago’s press department. He circulated in science fiction circles, and with fellow magicians.
In 1942, Gardner joined the war effort as yeoman with the navy. He stayed in the service for four years, and then returned to Chicago. He considered going back to work for the University’s Press Relations, but wrote a story, first, which was published by Esquire magazine, then headquartered in Chicago. It was called “The Horse on the Escalator” and appeared in the October 1946 issue. Using money from the G.I. Bill, he took some courses at the University—though because he was always intent to be a writer, did not compete a graduate degree. One seminar was with the Viennese philosopher Rudolf Carnap—a logical positivist—whose sequestering of science and metaphysics allowed Gardner to divide his faith from his interest in science. He saw belief in God as a way of escaping the despair of existentialism, an approach to life he would later trace back to William James and the pragmatists.
His second story was “The No-Sided Professor,” a science fiction story. It appeared in the January 1947 issue of Esquire.” The No-Sided Professor” was reprinted in the February 1951 issue of “The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction” (edited by Fortean Anthony Boucher) and that magazine’s best-of collection in 1952, as well as being widely reprinted in later years. “Esquire,” though, was his main gig, paying him enough for his stories for him to make ends meet. April 1947 saw “The Conspicuous Turtle” appear; October, “Flo’s Freudian Slips”; January 1948, “The Lady Says, ‘Check!’; March 1948, “The Loves of Lady Coldpence.”
Amid this output, Gardner moved to New York City—around 1947. He made a connection with the city’s active circle of magicians, and also continued writing for “Esquire,” as well as extending out into new areas. He had a piece in the 1949 “Arkham Sampler,” a weird fiction publisher, and an article on Houdini in “Argosy,” the fiction magazine which was reinventing itself as a men’s adventure magazine. There was also a story in “The London Mystery Magazine,” the second in his Monte Featherstone series. H wrote about science fiction for the Chicago-based ‘zine “The Journal of Science-Fiction.” Gardner gave up freelancing some time after coming to New York city, going to work for the children magazine “Humpty Dumpty” as a writer and editor.
In 1950, he contribute an article to “Antioch Review” called the Hermit Scientist, about modern-day pseudoscientists who aped the tradition of Medieval scholars in working alone; at that time, hermeticism had been a defense against a dogmatic church; now it was a sign of pathology, the Hermit scientist imagining himself as either supporting fundamentalist religion against science, or offering some deluded form of a new scientist. I do not know if Gardner had yet discovered and read through Mencken’s works, but he would in time, and was heir to the same ironic tradition—a tradition that also included, of course, Fort and his defender Benjamin De Casseres. In each case, the author was using irony to puncture pretensions—Fort the pretensions of science, De Casseres science and the state, and Gardner pseudoscientists: Velikovsky and Hubbard and Wilhelm Reich and the maverick geologist whom Gardner himself had once found useful, George McCready Price.
A friend from high school, John Eliot, was a literary agent, and he encouraged Gardner to expand this article into a book, which he did in his spare time. He was also having to write a whole variety of articles for “Humpty Dumpty,” and was studying math and geometry: as part of his magazine duties, he was writing a column on paper folding and cutting to entertain children, this itself possibly growing out of his interest in magic. And he continued to keep up with his friends in magic; one, Bill Simon, introduced him to Charlotte Greenwald. Martin and Charlotte were married in October of 1952. The same year as his marriage, the next month, his first book appeared, “In the Name of Science.” Although it did attract a few positive reviews, the book sold poorly and, as he remembered, the publisher remaindered it fairly quickly.
Martin and Charlotte’s first son was born in 1955; three years later, they would have a second son. In January of 1955, Gardner published “Royal Historian of Oz,” in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Five years later, he would put out “The Annotated Alice,” which was an annotated version of “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass”; it proved, by far, his most popular book. In December 1956, he started writing a column for “Scientific American,” on mathematical games, building on his interest in puzzles and his paper-folding games for “Humpty Dumpty”; the column lasted twenty-five years, and made him famous.
On 22 August 1957, Dover published a revised version of his debunking book, “Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science.” This time it caught on, a fact that Gardner explained as resulting from Long John Nebel’s radio show. So often was the book name-checked and disparaged on the late night, parapsychologically-inclined program, that people went out and bought it. He said, much later, “I remember one night, when I had gotten out of bed to change a diaper on our first born, I turned on the radio and heard John Campbell, then editor of Astounding Science Fiction, say “Mr. Gardner is a liar.” I had a chapter about his role in introducing L. Ron Hubbard’s dianetics.”
Gardner left “Humpty Dumpty” some time in the 1950s and returned to freelancing; he cultivated connections—he knew the science fiction anthologist Everett F. Bleiler, from Chicago, for instance, and got him a job at Dover. (Dover itself would reprint Fort’s complete books in 1974, with an introduction by Damon Knight.) In 1976, Gardner was a founding member of CSICOP—the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, which worried that the authority of science was being swamped by a new Medievalism that valued superstition over critical reasoning. The Committee eventually putout a magazine, Skeptical Inquirer, to which Gardner contributed, as he continued to plow the debunking field. He put out “Science: Good, Bad, and Bogus” in 1981. In 1983, having retired from “Scientific American,” he started a column with “Skeptical Inquirer,” originally called “Notes of a Psy-Watcher” before being changed to “Notes of a Fringe Watcher.” His columns were adapted into three books, The New Age: Notes of a Fringe Watcher (1988); On the Wild Side (1992); Weird Water and Fuzzy Logic: More Notes of a FringeWatcher (1996). By this point, Gardner had perfected his ironic style, one that was—his word—glib, following the Menckian diktat, “One horse-laugh is worth ten-thousand syllogisms.”
As well, Gardner continued his other forms of writing, book reviews, autobiographical musings, working through the first decade of the new millennium. Charlotte died in 2000.
Martin Gardner died 22 May 2010 in Norman, Oklahoma. He was 95
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I do not know when Martin Gardner first discovered Fort; this is usual for most of these biographies. He was a reader of science fiction with an interest in puzzles and pseudoscience, and so may have noted the serialization of “Lo!” in Astounding; that was in 1934, when he was at the University of Chicago. Or he may have noticed some mention of Fort in some other magazine. Exactly when Gardner discovered Fort, though, is not a particularly interesting question—the more fruitful avenue is making sense of how Gardner understood Fort. The parapsychologist George P. Hansen noted that “Gardner has also been the single most powerful antagonist of the paranormal in the second half of the twentieth century.” And yet, his approach to Fort was always ambivalent.
Gardner was aware of Fort and the Fortean Society by the time he wrote the article for the “Antioch Review.” It’s possible he heard about both, if he had not yet, from reading Bergen Evans “Natural History of Nonsense.” Oddly, though, I have not seen Gardner crediting that book, though it came out in 1946, and Evans was a professor at nearby Northwestern University, who wrote for “The American Mercury,” which had been started by Mencken and to which Mencken was again contributing, after an earlier departure. (Gardner did review a sequel, of sorts, by Bergan Evans, in 1954; and Evans did plug “In the Name of Science.”) At any rate, while Gardner spent most of the article on Velikovsky and Price—whom he accused of using pseudoscience as a handmaiden to religious fundamentalism—and Reich and Hubbard—whom he accused of using pseudoscience to create secular delusions—he mentioned the Forteans in the last line.
It’s an unusual rhetorical trick, the rest of the article never mentioning Fort, Forteans, or the Society, so that the conclusion doesn’t make a lot of sense to anyone not already in the know; the Society wasn’t particularly famous in 1950, even as it had hit its stride. Perhaps Gardner had just come across the Fortean Society, and so inserted a reference where he could. He argued that none of the pseudosciences he covered, though one was perniciously clever, and others were promoted by indefatigable men of a cranky brilliance, would last very long, rather following earlier crackpot ideas into disrepute and oblivion: which, in its way, was another word for acceptance among Forteans—creatures of disrepute and, if not oblivion, then a museum of failed ideas. He wrote, “The current flurry of discussion about Velikovsky and Hubbard will soon subside, and their books will begin to gather dust on library shelves. Perhaps Tiffany Thayer will appoint them honorary members of the Fortean Society, that remarkable institution devoted to the writings of Charles Fort, dedicated to the frustration of science, and the haven of lost causes.”
If Gardner had just recently discovered Fort and the Fortean Society when he was writing the essay, he was much more familiar within two years, when his book was published. He spent an entire chapter on Fort and the Forteans, and showed a familiarity with all of Fort’s books (certain quotations no doubt ending up on his filing cards) and the run of “Doubt,” to that time. What stands out, though, is that Gardner seems to have approached Fort expecting pseudoscientific babble, but was surprised by his obduracy and humor—so much so that Fort seems to have become part of Gardner’s permanent mental architecture. He was not so warmly inclined to the Fortean Society, though. Gardner was less sure that pseudoscience would be passing; he thought it had found a niche, was undermining the authority of science; and so Thayer’s haven of lost causes was also a haven of potential revolutionaries.
“The Book of the Damned,” he said, “was written in a curious, breathless style. At times, it broke into passages of profound wisdom, high humor, and beautiful phrasing.” It was hard to take the measure of Fort, entirely—one imagines that Gardner found the ambiguity as exciting, in its way, as he did that in Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. “More meaning than meets the eye lurks behind Fort’s madness. Fort was an Hegelian. In the last analysis, existence—not the universe we observe, but everything there is—is a unity. . . . Fort was not a religious man, but he granted that the totality of things might be an organism with intelligence. . . . There is, then, a final reality and truth. But for us, the little bugs and mice, there are only the broken lights, the half-truths and the phantom realities.” And so Fort offered his theories, but didn’t believe in them: “Fort doubted everything—including his own speculations.”
Perhaps, then, he was “taking Fort too seriously, and are only falling into another one of his traps. He was far from an ignorant man, and his discussion of such topics as the ‘principle of uncertainty’ in modern quantum theory indicate a firm grasp of the subject matter. Opposition to the notion that electrons move at ‘random’ is not in fashion at the moment. Nevertheless, Fort’s jibes are in harmony with more technical criticisms of Einstein and Bertrand Russell! Even when Fort made a scientific boner, as he did occasionally, it is hard to know whether he made it deliberately or without knowing better.”
Gardner could see some ways that Fort’s ideas informed a healthy Forteanism: “When his more astute admirers insist that he was not the arch-enemy of science he was reputed to be, but only the enemy of scientists who forget the ephemeral character of all knowledge, they are emphasizing the sound and healthy aspect of Forteanism. It is true that no scientific theory is above doubt. It is true hat all scientific ‘facts’ are subject to endless revision as new ‘data’ are uncovered. No scientist worthy of the name thinks otherwise.” There was a darker side, too, however: “But it is also true that scientific theories can be given high or low degrees of confirmation. Fort was blind to this elementary fact—or pretended to be blind to it—and it is this blindness which is the spurious and unhealthy side of Forteanism . . . When a Fortean seriously believes that all scientific theories are equally absurd, all the rich humor of the Society gives way to an ignorant sneer.”
This ignorant sneer—nothing like his own horse laugh, he implied—was all the Fortean Society had been reduced to. The proper approach to Fort was to treat the whole thing as a lark—like the Baker Street Irregulars, he said, and their fancy that Sherlock Holmes actually existed. But the joke was not needed right now, when science was so fragile—“If we lived in an age in which the majority of citizens had a clear comprehension of science, there might be some point in preserving an organization to remind scientists of their limitations. The astrology magazines on the stands and the sales of Velikovsky’s books are sufficient reminders of how far we are from such an age. It was all very amusing in 1931.” And, besides, the Society wasn’t so funny, anymore, but took itself seriously, arguing against tonsillectomies and vivisection while Thayer injects his “un-Fortean” political prejudices.
Fort himself might be worth contemplating, but “why the Fortean Society continues to exist is hard to understand.” Indeed, Forteanism was at an end. He noted that some people saw Fort’s influence on science fiction, but he did not agree. Fort he said—although the evidence here is not clear at all—never “read a line of it.” Which may explain why, in Gardner’s estimation, Fort’s speculations were so wan: “It is true that about a dozen novels and scores of short stories have been based on his ideas, but these works are more of the ‘weird tale’ variety than science fiction. A few Fortean terms like ‘teleportation’ have become staple science-fantasy property, but in general his ideas have proved too mundane to serve as useful story gimmicks.” Sprinkled throughout the rest of the book were further reasons the Fortean Society no longer served a purpose: it promoted all manner of bunk, from Drayson to Crehore.
A few of the laudatory reviews agreed with Gardner’s assessment of Fort—even while reserving objections to other of his targets. A reviewer for the Nebraska “Lincoln Star” wrote “Readers will recognize many old warhorses beloved of the gullible (e.g. the late Charles Fort). Occasionally you may disagree with the author, as in his rejection of dowsing, or water-divining. But the fact is that man was, is and probably always will be a sucker for the pseudoscientists and as long as that is so, books of this kind are a salutary necessity.” P. Schuyler Miller, in Astounding, wrote “Charles Fort gets the chapter he merits. Though the author tends to consider him a hoaxer rather than a crackpot, his writings have nourished many a wild theorist.” (And also implies that he doesn’t quite agree with Gardner’s dismissal of ESP.) Writing in “The Quarterly Review of Biology,” Bentley Glass said, “J. B. Rhine will hardly like to see his efforts to study extra-sensory perception and psychokinesis classed with the wild imaginings of Immanuel Velikovsky or Charles Fort, nor with the fad of diabetics or the persistent faith in dowsing for water or minerals with a forked twig. Yet if Gardner is rude and journalistic in his sweeping attacks, he also possesses rather good critical judgment, and his blade is sharp.”
Some Forteans took the criticism in stride, too—clearly thinking they might be among Fort’s more astute admirers. In the late 1960s, Vincent Gaddis wrote to Damon Knight, “Gardner seems to understand the Fortean philosophy better than many . . . Very few can understand the Fortean idea of suspended judgment—of being an absolute agnostic. They think Fort was a nut who believed the yarns and theories (he called them suggestions) he wrote about. He didn’t, and he said quite plainly that if anything he had written was ‘proved’ to be true, he would set about gathering data to disprove the ‘proof.’ I’m sure you understand this.”
Even Thayer thought Gardner’s judgment sound. In the October 1953 issue of Doubt (#42), he recommended it, under the heading “New Books”:
“IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE, by Martin Gardner, contains a lively, long chapter on Fort and Forteanism. The author got a little sore at YS, and took a few snipes at him, but we don’t hold that against him. The book is full of meat, and the observations on Fort are in general very fair-minded and admiring. By all means, read it. In the Name of Science, from the Society, $4.00.” That’s right—Thayer was selling the book, too.
Not every Fortean took Gardner in stride, though, especially after the second edition of his book gained traction. There were the reputed denunciations of Long John Nebel and his various guests. In 2001, George P. Hansen would offer view of Gardner that reflected Gardner’s view of Fort—admiring, but also worried over the pernicious effects of his thoughts, and the way his thumb could too often be on the scale in favor of his preferred interpretations. Between these—between Nebel and Hansen—came the anthroposophist, lawyer, and Darwin critic, the Fortean Norman Macbeth. He wrote about Gardner’s book in a 1965 Anthroposophical newsletter.
MacBeth was concerned with Gardner’s attacks on alternative forms of knowledge, generally, which he thought was inconsistent—the inconsistency always favoring mainstream science—and callow. But he also devoted a paragraph to Gardner’s interpretation of Fort and the the Forteans, which paragraph he titled “obtuseness.” It reads, in part, “Mr. Gardner (43) recognizes the nature, and apparently admits the justification, of Fort’s ‘self-appointed mission’ of undamning the damned, by which he ‘meant all those views which are excluded by dogmatic science — the “lost souls” of data.’ He quotes (53) Fort’s own words: ‘if nobody looks up, or checks up, what the astronomers tell us, they are free to tell us anything that they want to tell us.’ Nevertheless, between these passages Mr. Gardner wonders (51) why the Fortean Society continues to exist despite his own conviction that there is no ‘point in preserving an organization to remind scientists of their limitations.’”
Gardner continued to have a complicated relationship with Fort and Forteanism throughout his very long career. When CSICOP initially formed, it included the sociologist Marcello Truzzi, who was less interested in debunking pseudoscience than explaining why people believed it—he had strongly Fortean inclinations, and was taken with the philosophy of Paul Feyerabend, who argued against a unitary scientific method. Gardner and the rest of CSICOP eventually broke with Truzzi, and Gardner looked affectionately—but condescendingly—on Truzz’s Fortean-inflected “Zetetic Scholar,” a kind-of competitor of Skeptical Inquirer. In a 1983 book, he admitted that he did not think Fort offered a serious challenge to science—his was “preposterous spoofing.” And in a 1987 newspaper article, he’s quoted as thinking Forteanism’s problems had remained unchanged over the last three-and-a-half decades: Forteans “spend a vast amount of time giving evidence for points of view that are far down n the continued of being true. If course, it’s possible that there are sea serpents . . . but is it something that’s probable, and worth making a big to-do over? That’s the real question.” Indeed, the problem might be even worse, as he saw that neither Velikovsky nor Hubbard were forgotten, and pseudoscience continued to gain power and authority as against science proper.
But Fort had also wormed himself into Gardner’s way of thinking, and quotes from him were ready to hand, a way of explaining and thinking about the world. He started a 1978 book review—covering several books on the kind of catastrophic geology that was central to Velikovsky and remained important to creationists—with a nod to Fort and the pragmatists: “‘All things,’ said Charles Peirce, ‘swim in continua.’ At what wave length does blue become green? When does a child become a grownup? Are viruses alive? Do cows think? It is also obvious that there are discrete ‘things’ that swim in these spectrums, and sometimes jump from one part of a spectrum to another. Day fades into night, but a flicked switch produces instant darkness. One can imagine a hippopotamus changing by imperceptible degrees into a violet, but, as Charles Fort once asked, who would send a lady a bouquet of hippopotami?”
Fort received a mention in a puzzle Gardner proposed that was run in “Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine” in 1984 (and collected in a 1987 book). There was a passing reference to Fort in his 1999 book “The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener,” which he numbered as his favorite. That the remark is incidental is the point: Fort was just there, in his head, not something he had to dwell upon or study. Which raises the question of how to interpret Gardner’s relationship to Fort and the nature of Forteanism.
The nest answer to this quandary comes, I think, from Hansen, who notes that Gardner did not so much oppose pseudoscientific views as much as wanting to keep them quarantined. By how own admission, Gardner was a Mysterian, someone who thought that consciousness could never be explained by humans, or fully replicated by computers. He also believed in the power of prayer, but thought that it should not be investigated by scientific methods. Gardner was drawn to strict scientific rationalism but was also—in Hansen’s words—“too sophisticated to be a rationalist.” He wanted to preserve a space for mystical, paranormal forces to interact. He was a gatekeeper, of a sort, who wanted to make sure that neither science nor mysticism overstepped its bounds.
And so it is tempting to see Gardner’s relationship to Fort and Forteanism as a parallel to his relationship with God and fundamentalism. Perhaps I am wrong—admittedly, this is not a rigorous, full-scope biography of Gardner. But I also think the parallel is more than just suggestive. In the same way that Gardner wanted to preserve his belief in God, prayer, and the afterlife, but also disparage fundamentalism and the overreach of Christian politics into the wider intellectual world, so he wanted to preserve his own—undoubtedly astute—appreciation of Fort while dismissing what might be called fundamentalist Forteans and keep their views out of the intellectual world. He was a Fortean, but of a very specific type, unwilling to associated with other Forteans, keeping his own counsel.
