The first couple of Forteanism. An update and extension on something I wrote in 2011 (!).
Miriam Allen deFord was born in 1888 to a pair of Philadelphia doctors, Moses deFord and Frances Allen. She was the oldest of three children. Her paternal grandfather had emigrated from France, and she remembers the Northeast Philadelphia neighborhood she grew up in as being mostly French. Moses made helped put himself through college and medical school teaching French classes, which is how he met Frances Allen—she was one of his students. Frances Allen descended from a long line of Philadelphia Quakers. They were engaged around 1883; Moses attended Jefferson Medical College (graduating 1886) and encouraged Frances’s interest in medicine. When he started his second year of school, she started her first at the Women’s Medical College of Philadelphia (now part of Drexel University). She graduated in 1887, the year that they married.
Miriam Allen deFord was born in 1888 to a pair of Philadelphia doctors, Moses deFord and Frances Allen. She was the oldest of three children. Her paternal grandfather had emigrated from France, and she remembers the Northeast Philadelphia neighborhood she grew up in as being mostly French. Moses made helped put himself through college and medical school teaching French classes, which is how he met Frances Allen—she was one of his students. Frances Allen descended from a long line of Philadelphia Quakers. They were engaged around 1883; Moses attended Jefferson Medical College (graduating 1886) and encouraged Frances’s interest in medicine. When he started his second year of school, she started her first at the Women’s Medical College of Philadelphia (now part of Drexel University). She graduated in 1887, the year that they married.
rHer parents practiced from home (her father eventually opened an office downtown) treating mostly dockworkers and textile workers. As deFord remembered it much later, the neighborhood was quite rough. Indeed, she was abused quite bit by one boy, who attempted to rape her. Later, she was moved to a more respectable part of the city, although that that incident—as well as her mother’s quiet example—helped shape her into a feminist. Despite the unconventional lifestyle (certainly for the 1890s and 1900s), de Ford averred that her family was not radical, nor did it draw from any radical traditions. It was her, later, who turned toward radicalism.
Her independence started to show in high school, when she preferred courses in English to the scientific ones that would be needed for her to become a doctor and continue the family business. She also worked for the suffragette movement stuffing envelopes, starting when she was around 14—although in this case it was at her mother’s urging. She took to doing more for the movement, PR work and marching. She became a journalist, working first for the Philadelphia North American while attending Wellesley for one year. (After her scholarship ran out, she went on to Temple.)
In 1912, graduated from college, she moved to Boston and took a number of odd jobs. Her passion was writing, but not necessarily journalism, so she looked for jobs that had some writing component, but did all manner of things. She also continued her activism, taking to the soapbox for women’s suffrage as well as women’s rights more generally—such as the right for women to control their own income. Two years after arriving in Boston, she met her future first husband, William Armistead Nelson Collier, Jr., who, she said was a “sort of a combination of Southern aristocrat and anarchist”; he more fully introduced her to radical causes. (He was also a mystic.) They married and moved to San Diego (which, ironically, paused her suffragetting, as California already allowed women to vote).
De Ford spent a few years moving around Southern California, taking odd jobs, and becoming involved in radical causes. She joined the IWW to protest the Great War. (maybe she came across—or heard of—Frank Pease, the future Fortean.) Theoretically, her marriage with Armistead was an open one, but only he ever slept around, which became too much for her. She spent some time with friends in Spokane, Washington, doing more soapboxing and—as she had throughout this period—continuing to write. Finally, her father reached out to her, saying he had finagled a job in Baltimore writing for an olive company. Broke and frustrated, de Ford agreed.
Her surrender to her father, however, only made her more radical. In Baltimore, she became associated with the Socialist Party of Maryland and, through it, met Maynard Shipley. Both de Ford and Shipley were still married to other people—and de Ford was still shy and prudish about matters sexual—but they became lovers. (Armistead would later stay with de Ford and Shipley for six weeks, while they were living together under the guise of being brother and sister, provoking the neighbors by announcing he was rooming with his wife and her lover!) In light of the draft taking many men from work, de Ford applied to be an insurance adjuster. She was accepted, sent to Chicago for training, and then on to San Francisco. In Chicago, she made connections with many anarchists. Shipley went on a lecture four for the socialist party, declaiming against the war. In California, both their marriages officially ended (it took three years for a divorce to be consummated; Shipley’s wife died before the three years were up); they married.
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Maynard Shipley was born on 1 December 1872 in Baltimore, Maryland, making him about 16 years older than Miriam, and two years older than Fort himself. He was the fourth of six sons. Elmon Shipley, the family’s patriarch, could trace his American ancestors back to seventeenth-century Maryland. His mother, Sarah Armitage Jerome, came from a prominent Baltimore family. In Miriam Allen de Ford’s biography of Shipley, she wrote Elmon was “about as bad a husband and father as can be imagined—a domestic tyrant, a philanderer, and a paragon of refined selfishness.” Elmon made a good living and was religious for a time, but eventually moved into the wholesale liquor business, which had him out of church and becoming a free-thinker. This last influenced Maynard greatly. In 1887, Elmon deserted the family.
The next years of Shipley’s life were difficult, very difficult. He moved from job to job, including spending a horrid six-months working on a farm. He had a serious falling out with his mother. He ended his schooling—but not his education. He read widely and wrote philosophical essays. (A few of these he had a chance to publish while working on a small Baltimore publication.) Around 1890, his father—who had been in contact with the family since moving to the state of Washington—accepted his (ex-)wife’s offer to take on Maynard, and so the boy went West.
Maynard Shipley continued to live a hardscrabble life in the West, although he did find his most permanent profession: shoe salesman. He also continued his independent studies. And, made room for romance. A good looking boy, he had many girlfriends. Eventually, he settled on one girl, Mary Josephine Beede, the daughter of a theater owner. They married in 1893 under duress—Beede’s father was threatening to move the family to South Africa—and against the wishes of both families. (Shipley’s mother and four of his brothers had also come West, and were living with his father again.) The Beede’s left for the San Francisco Bay Area rather than South Africa, and soon their daughter and son-in-law followed, though they found only more hardship in the Golden State. Maynard and Josephine divorced in 1896.
After his marriage ended, Shipley moved back and forth between Seattle and San Francisco until 1902, when he started to attend Stanford, paying his way by teaching piano (which he had also taught himself). Shipley’s interest had been turning increasingly toward criminology and the death penalty, and he studied this as well as biology, but found himself not cut out for academia. He left Stanford but stayed in Palo Alto, unofficially connected to the school so he could continue to study in his spare time. He became an opponent of capital punishment, arguing that it had no deterrent value. In 1902, he married again, Eugenie Marie Hagg, a private language teacher. They ran a prepatory school for a time, then moved to Reno.
It was in Nevada that he discovered socialism. Both he and Eugenie joined the party. But it cost them: they lost students. Pressed for work, Shipley moved to Oakland, where he worked for the Socialist Party, including two years editing its California organ, The World. He was also criss-crossing the state, soapboxing. And continuing his studies in criminology and natural science. His marriage, though, was failing, and around 1913 he deserted Eugenie, returning once more to Washington (though his parents had by now moved back East, and his mother had died) and then East again. Through this his interest remained unchanged, although like the Socialist Party generally, he opposed the Great War. Lime Miriam, he may also have come in contact or heard of the future Fortean Frank Pease.
De Ford and Shipley only stayed in the socialist party and San Francisco for a short time. They moved out of the city in 1920 for Sausalito. They left the Socialist Party in 1922, thinking it had moved too far right. While never a member of the communist party, de Ford believed in revolution, not reformation. After leaving the party, their activism slowed. (It was also curtailed by Shipley’s heart attack that year.) de Ford worked for the insurance company until 1923, when she was forced out because of her radical ties. She had been doing journalism even as a claims adjuster, though, and she continued that, along with other odd jobs. Shipley was lecturing. They also found Haldemann and Julius’s Little Blue Books, and both wrote a number of volumes. In 1924, their extra time became focused on the Science League, founded by Shipley to combat the spread of anti-evolutionist sentiment and laws. They continued with that until 1932.
Shipley died in 1934. De Ford grieved in Hawaii for a time, visited her family in the East, and then returned to San Francisco. She continued to move from job to job and develop her writing. De Ford had been writing detective fiction for the pulps since the 1920s and was very interested in crime writing. She dabbled in true crime as well as writing about a number of leftist martyrs who had been wronged by the justice system. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, inspired by having typed up so much of Shipley’s science material, she drifted into science fiction, mentored by Anthony Boucher. By this point, she was living in the Ambassador Hotel and writing full time.
She lived there until her own death, in 1975, shuttling between her room and the nearby San Francisco Public Library to do more, and more research, even as the Tenderloin area in which the Ambassador was located became increasingly impoverished and dangerous.
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It is easy to date de Ford and Shipley’s first acquaintance with Fort and Fortean thought—two of the few Forteans about whom it is possible to say that. They came across his book in 1921—likely drawn to it, as Booth Tarkington had been, because the title made it seem to be about criminals, or criminology. De Ford discovered the book at a library in Oakland. It had been published not-quite two years before, in December 1919. She flipped through the book, found it intriguing, and took it home to Shipley, in Sausalito. “My husband and I sat up all night, reading the book aloud to each other, unable to put it down,” she wrote later.
What was the attraction?
Shipley was primarily drawn to the catalog of odd facts—he had little time for Fort’s theories, whether meant as jokes or not. Although obviously a committed scientist, Shipley was open to expanding the known laws to account for unusual phenomena. For instance, in 1919—the same year Fort published The Book of the Damned—he investigated Dr. Albert Abrams for The Scientific American. Abrams was a San Francisco doctor who claimed amazing results with “electronic medicine”—winning as converts, among others, Fort’s patron, Theodore Dreiser, and another early Fortean John Cowper Powys (much to the chagrin of H.L. Mencken, who ranked Abrams another “Jew” doctor out to bilk the world). At first, Shipley—who de Ford admits several times was quite naïve—accepted Abrams findings. Eventually, though, he concluded that the doctor was both a charlatan and a dupe.
In her biography of him, de Ford writes that he had several unusual experiences himself. His house in Mill Valley, for instance, was haunted. She said,
“Many times have I seen solid objects fly through the air in broad daylight, or start vibrating rapidly when he approached them. I have seen heavily rusted windows open without apparent cause on clear, still days, and then never open again, no matter how high the wind, after Maynard ‘asked’ them to stop. There was a bed in that furnished house in which no one could sleep, because of the overwhelming feeling that some other unseen and hostile person was already in it. There was a pear that danced upon an empty table. There was a door that opened daily at the same hour, following a sound like that of a wet mop being thrown against it. There were raps and puffs of smoke and the tinkle of an invisible bell.
“Maynard tried in every way to explain these occurrences on known material grounds. When a hanging vase containing some wild blackberry branches swung back and forth, without stopping, for two days and nights, he studied it as a manifestation of ‘Plant Movement and Radiant Energy,’ and wrote an account of it under that title for The Scientific American. But too many of these happenings had no possible explanation within the limits of known scientific laws. There were besides, throughout his life, strange mental phenomena too numerous and exact for coincidence—his ability, for example, to tell me in Sausalito just what unexpected letters were in our postoffice box in San Francisco, or his faculty for telling time to the exact minute when he woke suddenly at night—or perhaps his invariable success in predicting the result of every heavyweight championship prize-fight for thirty years, though he never saw one! Certainly neither of us could disbelieve in the actuality of telepathy, whatever its modus operandi, when for so many years we constantly answered each other’s unspoken questions and remarks, sang tunes running through the other’s mind, or awoke at the same moment from the same odd dream. . . .
“These so-called psychic experiences in Mill Valley, and later to a lesser extent in San Francisco and our two Sausalito houses, would have made anyone less determinedly skeptical and rigidly scientific-minded a convinced Spiritualist. Even when he was on a lecture tour, strange things sometimes happened. Once in Woodland, California, he had a room in a lodging-house over a grocery. All night he was kept awake by the sound of hammering and sawing in the store below. In the morning he found no evidence of any construction or repair. But the landlady looked at him queerly and asked if he had been able to sleep in the room she had given him.
“It is no wonder that for a long time he was inclined to believe that ‘this mundane existence of ours is neither the beginning nor the end of the drama of life. . . . We do not, and cannot, while clothed with flesh, know things in themselves. The universe is a multidimensional world, and we three-dimensional simians can see but as “through a glass darkly.”’ In the end, however, he became convinced that though such phenomena as he had witnessed were indubitably real and not hallucinatory, they were not extra-physical, since ‘matter’ and ‘spirit’ are monistically one, and that some day they would be understood and reduced to law.”
Fort, it is worth remembering, was also a monist, and this was one of his chief arguments in The Book of the Damned: that all the world is one.
Enthralled, Shipley wrote to Fort in care of his publisher (to praise the mass of facts and dispute the conclusions Fort had drawn from them.) In 1922, de Ford investigated some Fortean occurrences for him: stones were raining from the sky in Chico, California, and she went there to investigate, even witnessing a rock fall form “some invisible point in the sky and land gently at my feet.” She wrote Fort about her experiences, and he queried her, teaching her “something of his obstinate search for verification.” Her observations appeared in Fort’s second book, New Lands! (1923).
The three continued their correspondence until 1932, when Fort died. De Ford continued clipping stories of Fortean phenomena from newspapers and sharing these with Fort. She cameoed again in his final book, Wild Talents (1932), having sent him an article about a room in New Jersey where it rained buckshot. Shipley reviewed Lo! (1931) in the New York Times—not the first review of Fort in the Times, but the first positive one. Shipley called him the “Enfant Terrible,” of science, bringing skeletons to the dinner table: that is to say, unearthing inconvenient facts. He continued to dispute Fort’s theorizing, and didn’t mention his monism, but appreciated the data he compiled, which was worth considering—which expanded the imagination, including the scientific imagination, which could become sclerotic and narrow. His final judgment seems to be rooted in a Romantic view of nature, one that prized the kind of imaginative spur provided by Fort: “Reading Fort is a ride on a comet; if the traveler return to earth after the journey, he will find, after his first dizziness has worn off, a new and exhilarating emotion that will color and correct all his future reading of less heady scientific literature.” That assessment echoed the epitaph English chemist Humphry Davy wrote for the poet Lord Byron:
Of some great comet he might well have been
The habitant, that thro’ the mighty space
Of kindling enter rolls; now visiting
Our glorious sun, by wondering myriads seen
Of planetary beings; then in a race
Vying with light in swiftness, like a king
Of void and chaos, rising up on high
Above the stars in awful majesty.
Miriam continued to think about Fort, and his ideas, as well as the more mystical ideas some of the experiences she shared with Shipley suggested. In October 1935, still stinging from Shipley’s death—she would not remarry, though she lived another four decades—she wrote about the possibility of life after death for the magazine “The Forum.” The article was called “Do We Survive?,” and though outwardly a journalistic-cum-philosophical musing on the soul’s continued existence after the body was gone, the piece was infused with references to her late husband, their life together, and the mad philosopher Fort.
She began by noting her own sense of loss, her own hope to meet Shipley again, her own search for peace. If only she could be sure, then continued existence, she said, would be easy—she could bear anything, knowing they might someday, somehow be together. But that togetherness, she said, must be a meeting of their personalities. She was uninterested in Fortean monism—which she referred to only obliquely: “Certainly the chemical elements of which our bodies are composed continue, after our death, to exist in other combinations. But that is not what any human being means by survival. It is of no interest to me that the oxygen and hydrogen and phosphorus which once helped to make up the texture of a man's hand or gave the blue light to his eyes are now recombined in the green of a leaf or the wetness of a river.”
The possibility of life after death, the perpetuation of the spirit for all eternity seemed impossible, and yet Shipley had convinced her that the universe own existence was impossible—or, we might addend, improbable in the extreme. Plus there were all those weird events she had experienced—“I have seen stranger things than ghosts: I have seen a pear dance on a bare table; I have seen a stove lifter sail clear across a room in broad daylight with no one near it; I have seen a hanging vase keep swinging night
and day from Tuesday to Friday with no hand touching it; I have seen windows with heavily rusted hasps, which a strong man had to force open and which a severe windstorm could not shake, swing wide without warning on a clear, still day.”
The trouble was, she could not say what those things meant. Was she hallucinating? Maybe these were what would be called Fortean phenomena—though she did not use the term, referring to Fort again only tangentially—by which she meant the same thing as her late husband: that these were fully explicable events which had not yet been explained, events that awaited their scientists, their science. In which case she had been “privileged to witness some faint accidental adumbration of what may be a commonplace of physics twenty years from now, as if by some peculiar combination of circumstances someone had in 1900 heard music by some uncontrolled technique that now we recognize as controlled radio broadcasting.”
What she could not credit, at least not yet, was that these were manifestations of a spiritual realm. The American Society for Psychical Research had also found intriguing phenomena, but no credible tie to spirits she said; nor had the future Fortean Hereford Carrington, who had seen so many incredible events, but still could not unequivocally say the spiritual world existed. Even Fort—here she called him out by name—credited the facts that he collected in “Wild Talents” but explained them by witchcraft, not the activities of spirits. As for her, she—like Houdini—had set up a test: she wanted Maynard to give her a sign, something only he could no, trivial or not, and that would convince her. Nothing had come to that point, though. It was a tragic flaw in life, she admitted, but perhaps it was not cruelty, but something else: this was the closest she could allow herself to finding comfort in the possibility of life after death. Perhaps we could not access the spiritual realm—perhaps it seemed like it did not exist, and the world thus cruel and empty—but maybe it really was there, just too inexorable for us, as living humans, to approach or experience given our limited senses.
Fort, then, was a crucial thinker for de Ford, influencing her ideas about fundamental existential questions. Part of her appreciation for Fort was the same as Shipley’s: that he had compiled a mass of important, overlooked data. Indeed, she would use the same words as her late husband, referring to Fort as the “Enfant Terrible,” of science, and also as a enzyme in the body of science, stimulating, making it go, catalyzing thought. It seems, though, that she was also more willing than Shipley to credit his odd theories—his idea about witchcraft, for example, being a wild talent—and even to see some of the playfulness in his writing—although this last may have only dawned on de Ford as her own life changed and opened her to new ways of thinking.
In 1942, she and her friend Earle Walbridge were tasked with writing many of the biographies in “Twentieth Century Authors,” put out by H. W. Wilson—which included a bit on Fort, in contrast to “The Oxford Companion to American Literature which, to Miriam’s irritation, failed to include Fort (and also Stanley Waterloo, John Stapleton Cowley-Brown, and Alexander Harvey). Walbridge wrote the first version of Fort’s biography but, as de Ford explained, when the editors learned that she knew Fort personally, they asked her to write another version, which is what appeared. While waiting for “Twentieth Century Authors” to appear in print—this was in September, 1942—she took a moment to write into the Saturday Review and comment on Fort:
"Fort was a strange genius, often wrongheaded but with nothing of the charlatan about him. I have all his four books and many of his letters, written in the same characteristic
gnomic style which he used in the books. They are the most fascinating reading in the world, especially if one have sufficient grounding in science to be able to check on his interpretations; his facts, without the sometimes grotesque interpretations, were always carefully authenticated, however startling they might be.”
This assessment continued the line of thought developed by Shipley in his “Times” article: that it was the facts that mattered, not the Fortean theories. But towards the end of her watering letter, she returned to Fort, and seemed to concede the possible veracity of his “Wild Talents” thesis, just as she had in 1935—Fort, she insisted, “had no doubt at all of the existence of his special brand of witchcraft!” This would have been in contrast to Fort’s other theories, which he himself was quick to declaim in the very books where he also proclaimed them.
“Twentieth Century Authors” appeared a few months later, in December 1942. The article on Fort was relatively brief, citing as its sources Thayer’s introduction to the omnibus edition of Fort’s books—published in April 1941—H. Allen Smith’s “Low Man on the Totem Pole,” which had a brief chapter on the founding of the Fortean Society; “The Fortean Society Magazine,” not yet re-named Doubt; and an unnamed article from Time magazine, dated 23 February 1931 (it was a review of Lo!). The biography read, in whole:
“Fort, Charles Hoy (August 9, 1874- May 3, 1932), American critic of science, was born in Albany, New York, and was largely self-educated. As a boy he was an amateur naturalist, then became a reporter, and wrote short stories which were published in the Broadway Magazine when Theodore Dreiser was its editor. In 1896 he married Anna Filan, who survived him by five years; they had no children. It was about 1908 that he began the incredible work of research which resulted in his four published books—the last issued after his death. Gradually he evolved a series of very bizarre theories on scientific phenomena; but what people forget, who (like Edmund Pearson) classify him as a ‘literary freak and curiosity,” is that all these theories were firmly grounded in established, documented, and apparently reliable facts and occurrences. He toiled for years in the British Museum, literally blinded himself, and for several years was unable to work at all until his sight was recovered. During his last years he lived in the Bronx, New York, a large but shy, reticent, gray-haired man with spectacles and a walrus mustache, surrounded by hundreds of boxes of notes and clippings, still working long hours in the library to collect more data. His recreation from these labors was principally a game he invented and called super-checkers. He died at fifty-seven of enlargement of the heart.
It is impossible to describe in brief compass the nature or contents of Fort’s books. Both he and his disciples have been called credulous and gullible, and undoubtedly Fort was insufficiently grounded in science, particularly in astronomy, to justify many of his generalizations: but the work he did may some day prove an invaluable source for later investigators. (William Seabrook, in Witchcraft, echoes many of Fort’s statements in Wild Talents.) He himself called it ‘a kind of non-fictional fiction. . . . Maybe I am a pioneer in a new writing that instead of old-fashioned heroes and villains will have floods and bugs and stars and earthquakes for its characters and motifs.” His style was as strange as his subjects, peculiarly his own—a sort of court reporter’s jargon (he was an expert shorthand reporter) that yet managed to convey his constant excitement. He was no solemn fanatic; he had great humor, was as caustic as he was daring. The Fortean Society, founded by Tiffany Thayer (he is still secretary) in 1931, included such men as Booth Tarkington, Theodore Dreiser, Ben Hecht, Alexander Woollcott, and John Cowper Powys (none of them, it may be noted, a scientist.) ‘One of the most original and courageous thinkers in the world today,’ J. David Stern called him.
‘Portents, the horrors and mysteries of Nature, disappearances, strange forms of demise—these were Fort’s sustenance,’ said Idwal Jones. ‘He compiled books in an apocalyptic prose, and in a cold excitement recited wonders that would have frozen the blood of Sir John Mandeville.’ ‘He is rash; he ventures where angels fear to tread; often his daring overtops his knowledge,’ wrote Maynard Shipley in the New York Times Book Review. ‘But his data—if not his conclusions—are throughly grounded and well documented, and he is perhaps the enzyme orthodox science most needs. . . . . He is the enfant terrible of science, bringing the family skeleton to the dinner table when distinguished guests are present. . . . Reading Fort is a ride on a comet. . . . Discount everyone of his hypotheses, and the solid body of his data remains—a lifework in itself.’”
The review, thus repeated the view of Fort that de Ford had come to by 1935: that his facts were solid, most of his theories kooky, but his ideas about witchcraft—or wild talents—might be worth pondering, even substantial. The quote about Fort inventing a new genre of writing comes from a letter he wrote to Shipley and de Ford, and suggests that she, at least, was thinking of his books in literary terms, too—as something which could not be measured on a scale of true and false at all. This idea seemed to deepen in her, even if she did not express so directly.
The following year, 1943, Miriam met, via correspondence, Anthony Boucher, the author, editor, and Fortean fan. He lived just across the Bay, in Berkeley. Boucher investigated reports of stones falling on a house in Oakland—between Berkeley and San Francisco—in August of 1943. The falls made the papers, and inspired the San Francisco Chronicle’s book reviewer—a friend of Boucher’s—to write about Fort. Apparently, Boucher wrote to de Ford to compare notes, since she had gone to Chico a couple of decades before. They started corresponding: not only did they share an interest in Fort, but also in mysteries, and de Ford was thinking of starting to write science fiction and fantasy. Boucher was established in those fields, and would co-found “The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction” in 1949. Literary questions soon overwhelmed Fortean ones, and both lost interest in the Oakland anomalies, Boucher never finding the time to go back out and continue his investigation.
Over the coming years, de Ford would continue her non-fiction and mystery writing, but, under Boucher’s tutelage, come also into science fiction and fantasy, although, she admitted to him in a 1953 note, “it isn’t really my field.” The influence of Fort upon her writing is clear, if unstated. (Note that I have not surveyed her entire corpus of writing, given that it is huge and was published in many places that are now hard to track down.) “Henry Martindale, Great Dane,” for example, published by Beyond in 1954 (and later reprinted as "Gone to the Dogs”), opens with a woman being hit on the nose by a button—like one of those mysterious Fortean rainfalls---and then moves to consider her husband, who had become a talking dog—another figure from Fort’s writings. It may be that the connection between her writing career and Fortean phenomena was what made de Ford fascinated by Fort in the first place. After all, the story of the buckshot rain in New Jersey—isn’t it just the classic locked-room mystery of the 1920s? One gets the feeling that what de Ford liked best about Fort was that he told a darn good story. He showed what it was like, as Shipley said, in a visceral way, to ride a comet—a science fiction dream, but a dream of transcendence and radicalism, too.
For a long time, de Ford toiled on a piece about Fort for Boucher’s MFSF. It finally appeared, after several iterations, in January 1954. (It was reprinted in French in November 1955.) The title was borrowed from Shipley: “Charles Fort: Enfant Terrible of Science.” The 11-page article began with her and Shipley’s discovery of Fort in 1921, then moved on to describing his mass of facts, and their undeniability—as proven to her by her own interactions with Fort. There followed a bit more biography—along with her admission that she had not read Fort’s fiction—before getting to his key themes, one of which was intimately tied to the development of science fiction. The first was his monism (“the underlying oneness in all this confusion.”) The second—the science fictional one—was that humans might be property.
From that point, de Ford moved on to Fort as a gadfly, which he confessed in a letter she partially reproduced. Here she was admitting not only that his theories might be strange, but purposefully so. It’s as though her acquaintance with science fiction, in which authors played with Fort’s ideas rather than contested them or tried to prove them capital-T-true showed her the lability of his imagination—or made it more apparent, at least. She quoted Joseph Henry Jackson—the Chronicle’s book reviewer—from 1943, that Fort’s purpose was to make science less dogmatic, to make scientists accept their own fallibility. She realized that Fort himself was not a Fortean—that he disbelieved his own theories. This was a marked change in view from the one Shipley put forth in the Times, which fixated on those theories.
De Ford then drifted back to biography, covering in many more words the same highpoint she had in her 1942 overview of his life, again coming back to the skepticism he expressed about himself and his ideas. She moved on to give long excerpts of his books, showing his odd, disjointed style. She then reproduced parts of a letter to Shipley thanking him for his Times review, and noting that Shipley could never be a professor because he was too much of a freethinker himself, before going on to quote extensively Fort’s thought on inventing a new genre of writing. She fleshed out this idea with further epistolary excerpts. All along, she was feeling for the correct way to evaluate him, to keep him from being lumped with the cranks, but also being given too much credit as a scientist. (She thought the Fortean Burton Rascoe was most culpable in his evaluation.) Again, she noted the lack of scientists in the early Fortean Society.
In the end, she thought the best evaluation was that Fort was an inventive writer: he “leveled at the scientists and in large part hit the literary folk.” One cannot but assume that this evaluation had a lot to do with de Ford’s own career arc, in which she was now finding Fort a useful spur to her literary career, an innovator of science fiction more than science and new forms of physics. Indeed, in her conclusion, she does not offer the possibility of a new science that could explain his facts, or the odd experiences of her and Shipley. She does note that an open-mind is good for science, but her main interest is that humanity should learn the truth about itself—a literary exercise more than a scientific one.
Some of these thoughts were echoed, sans Fort—but in a Fortean context, nonetheless—in 1957. That year de Ford published “Science Fiction Comes of Age” in “The Humanist” magazine. She ha contributed to that magazine before, and, indeed, “The Humanist” had been allied with the Fortean Society for some time. De Ford argued that science fiction was leaving behind the tropes of the past—bug-eyed monsters, gallant heroes, damsels in distress—to explore ethical, sociological, and philosophical ideas. In her view, the best science fiction extrapolated from known science facts and was typically liberal—no room for xenophobes! This perspective squeezed out Fort some—his admirers could be liberal or not, and his known facts were not so much accepted. It is true, though, that she allowed his facts to be correct, and so they could be the source of extrapolation. As well, the emphasis on literary quality and the development of ideas echoed some of the same ideas she quoted from Fort, so that her definition of science fiction in the article may not have been as broad as the definition she used in her everyday life and, indeed, in her own writing.
Worth noting is that de Ford was critical of Thayer and his Fortean Society. Too dogmatic, she thought, and too political—critiques that were shared among other Bay Area Forteans, including Boucher. (Boucher thought that Thayer’s introduction to “Lo!” was of a much more Fortean cast than his introduction tot he omnibus edition of Fort’s books.) It wasn’t so much that she disagreed with Thayer—she admitted in the article for MFSF that she “might even agree with some of his extra scientific views.” But she thought the Fortean Society should be free of them—these were areas (controversial or not) in which Fort had never expressed himself, and so had nothing to do with expanding the Fortean circle.
As late as 1947, Thayer extended an olive branch and offered de Ford (and, posthumously, Shipley) membership in the Society because they “were among the very few whom Charles Fort actually liked.” Apparently, though, de Ford refused. As a result, her name never appeared in Doubt. Shipley’s did only once, briefly, and as a side comment. In Doubt 17 (March 1947), Thayer noted that he remembered Shipley “Kindly (in spite of his orthodoxy) as an acquaintance of Charles Fort . . . [He] was an old-style evolutionist who attempted to foist his conception of Darwinism upon United States public schools. He was, nevertheless, a great admirer of Fort.”
Given de Ford’s enduring affection for her late husband, it is really no wonder that she would refuse to join the Society. Thayer’s comment would have been read by her as an attack—so if it came before his offer, she would have refused, and if after then she would have likely resigned. But though they were not in the Fortean Society—and though they had very particular and limited interpretations of Fort’s writings—Miriam Allen de Ford and Maynard Shipley were indubitably Forteans.
Her independence started to show in high school, when she preferred courses in English to the scientific ones that would be needed for her to become a doctor and continue the family business. She also worked for the suffragette movement stuffing envelopes, starting when she was around 14—although in this case it was at her mother’s urging. She took to doing more for the movement, PR work and marching. She became a journalist, working first for the Philadelphia North American while attending Wellesley for one year. (After her scholarship ran out, she went on to Temple.)
In 1912, graduated from college, she moved to Boston and took a number of odd jobs. Her passion was writing, but not necessarily journalism, so she looked for jobs that had some writing component, but did all manner of things. She also continued her activism, taking to the soapbox for women’s suffrage as well as women’s rights more generally—such as the right for women to control their own income. Two years after arriving in Boston, she met her future first husband, William Armistead Nelson Collier, Jr., who, she said was a “sort of a combination of Southern aristocrat and anarchist”; he more fully introduced her to radical causes. (He was also a mystic.) They married and moved to San Diego (which, ironically, paused her suffragetting, as California already allowed women to vote).
De Ford spent a few years moving around Southern California, taking odd jobs, and becoming involved in radical causes. She joined the IWW to protest the Great War. (maybe she came across—or heard of—Frank Pease, the future Fortean.) Theoretically, her marriage with Armistead was an open one, but only he ever slept around, which became too much for her. She spent some time with friends in Spokane, Washington, doing more soapboxing and—as she had throughout this period—continuing to write. Finally, her father reached out to her, saying he had finagled a job in Baltimore writing for an olive company. Broke and frustrated, de Ford agreed.
Her surrender to her father, however, only made her more radical. In Baltimore, she became associated with the Socialist Party of Maryland and, through it, met Maynard Shipley. Both de Ford and Shipley were still married to other people—and de Ford was still shy and prudish about matters sexual—but they became lovers. (Armistead would later stay with de Ford and Shipley for six weeks, while they were living together under the guise of being brother and sister, provoking the neighbors by announcing he was rooming with his wife and her lover!) In light of the draft taking many men from work, de Ford applied to be an insurance adjuster. She was accepted, sent to Chicago for training, and then on to San Francisco. In Chicago, she made connections with many anarchists. Shipley went on a lecture four for the socialist party, declaiming against the war. In California, both their marriages officially ended (it took three years for a divorce to be consummated; Shipley’s wife died before the three years were up); they married.
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Maynard Shipley was born on 1 December 1872 in Baltimore, Maryland, making him about 16 years older than Miriam, and two years older than Fort himself. He was the fourth of six sons. Elmon Shipley, the family’s patriarch, could trace his American ancestors back to seventeenth-century Maryland. His mother, Sarah Armitage Jerome, came from a prominent Baltimore family. In Miriam Allen de Ford’s biography of Shipley, she wrote Elmon was “about as bad a husband and father as can be imagined—a domestic tyrant, a philanderer, and a paragon of refined selfishness.” Elmon made a good living and was religious for a time, but eventually moved into the wholesale liquor business, which had him out of church and becoming a free-thinker. This last influenced Maynard greatly. In 1887, Elmon deserted the family.
The next years of Shipley’s life were difficult, very difficult. He moved from job to job, including spending a horrid six-months working on a farm. He had a serious falling out with his mother. He ended his schooling—but not his education. He read widely and wrote philosophical essays. (A few of these he had a chance to publish while working on a small Baltimore publication.) Around 1890, his father—who had been in contact with the family since moving to the state of Washington—accepted his (ex-)wife’s offer to take on Maynard, and so the boy went West.
Maynard Shipley continued to live a hardscrabble life in the West, although he did find his most permanent profession: shoe salesman. He also continued his independent studies. And, made room for romance. A good looking boy, he had many girlfriends. Eventually, he settled on one girl, Mary Josephine Beede, the daughter of a theater owner. They married in 1893 under duress—Beede’s father was threatening to move the family to South Africa—and against the wishes of both families. (Shipley’s mother and four of his brothers had also come West, and were living with his father again.) The Beede’s left for the San Francisco Bay Area rather than South Africa, and soon their daughter and son-in-law followed, though they found only more hardship in the Golden State. Maynard and Josephine divorced in 1896.
After his marriage ended, Shipley moved back and forth between Seattle and San Francisco until 1902, when he started to attend Stanford, paying his way by teaching piano (which he had also taught himself). Shipley’s interest had been turning increasingly toward criminology and the death penalty, and he studied this as well as biology, but found himself not cut out for academia. He left Stanford but stayed in Palo Alto, unofficially connected to the school so he could continue to study in his spare time. He became an opponent of capital punishment, arguing that it had no deterrent value. In 1902, he married again, Eugenie Marie Hagg, a private language teacher. They ran a prepatory school for a time, then moved to Reno.
It was in Nevada that he discovered socialism. Both he and Eugenie joined the party. But it cost them: they lost students. Pressed for work, Shipley moved to Oakland, where he worked for the Socialist Party, including two years editing its California organ, The World. He was also criss-crossing the state, soapboxing. And continuing his studies in criminology and natural science. His marriage, though, was failing, and around 1913 he deserted Eugenie, returning once more to Washington (though his parents had by now moved back East, and his mother had died) and then East again. Through this his interest remained unchanged, although like the Socialist Party generally, he opposed the Great War. Lime Miriam, he may also have come in contact or heard of the future Fortean Frank Pease.
De Ford and Shipley only stayed in the socialist party and San Francisco for a short time. They moved out of the city in 1920 for Sausalito. They left the Socialist Party in 1922, thinking it had moved too far right. While never a member of the communist party, de Ford believed in revolution, not reformation. After leaving the party, their activism slowed. (It was also curtailed by Shipley’s heart attack that year.) de Ford worked for the insurance company until 1923, when she was forced out because of her radical ties. She had been doing journalism even as a claims adjuster, though, and she continued that, along with other odd jobs. Shipley was lecturing. They also found Haldemann and Julius’s Little Blue Books, and both wrote a number of volumes. In 1924, their extra time became focused on the Science League, founded by Shipley to combat the spread of anti-evolutionist sentiment and laws. They continued with that until 1932.
Shipley died in 1934. De Ford grieved in Hawaii for a time, visited her family in the East, and then returned to San Francisco. She continued to move from job to job and develop her writing. De Ford had been writing detective fiction for the pulps since the 1920s and was very interested in crime writing. She dabbled in true crime as well as writing about a number of leftist martyrs who had been wronged by the justice system. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, inspired by having typed up so much of Shipley’s science material, she drifted into science fiction, mentored by Anthony Boucher. By this point, she was living in the Ambassador Hotel and writing full time.
She lived there until her own death, in 1975, shuttling between her room and the nearby San Francisco Public Library to do more, and more research, even as the Tenderloin area in which the Ambassador was located became increasingly impoverished and dangerous.
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It is easy to date de Ford and Shipley’s first acquaintance with Fort and Fortean thought—two of the few Forteans about whom it is possible to say that. They came across his book in 1921—likely drawn to it, as Booth Tarkington had been, because the title made it seem to be about criminals, or criminology. De Ford discovered the book at a library in Oakland. It had been published not-quite two years before, in December 1919. She flipped through the book, found it intriguing, and took it home to Shipley, in Sausalito. “My husband and I sat up all night, reading the book aloud to each other, unable to put it down,” she wrote later.
What was the attraction?
Shipley was primarily drawn to the catalog of odd facts—he had little time for Fort’s theories, whether meant as jokes or not. Although obviously a committed scientist, Shipley was open to expanding the known laws to account for unusual phenomena. For instance, in 1919—the same year Fort published The Book of the Damned—he investigated Dr. Albert Abrams for The Scientific American. Abrams was a San Francisco doctor who claimed amazing results with “electronic medicine”—winning as converts, among others, Fort’s patron, Theodore Dreiser, and another early Fortean John Cowper Powys (much to the chagrin of H.L. Mencken, who ranked Abrams another “Jew” doctor out to bilk the world). At first, Shipley—who de Ford admits several times was quite naïve—accepted Abrams findings. Eventually, though, he concluded that the doctor was both a charlatan and a dupe.
In her biography of him, de Ford writes that he had several unusual experiences himself. His house in Mill Valley, for instance, was haunted. She said,
“Many times have I seen solid objects fly through the air in broad daylight, or start vibrating rapidly when he approached them. I have seen heavily rusted windows open without apparent cause on clear, still days, and then never open again, no matter how high the wind, after Maynard ‘asked’ them to stop. There was a bed in that furnished house in which no one could sleep, because of the overwhelming feeling that some other unseen and hostile person was already in it. There was a pear that danced upon an empty table. There was a door that opened daily at the same hour, following a sound like that of a wet mop being thrown against it. There were raps and puffs of smoke and the tinkle of an invisible bell.
“Maynard tried in every way to explain these occurrences on known material grounds. When a hanging vase containing some wild blackberry branches swung back and forth, without stopping, for two days and nights, he studied it as a manifestation of ‘Plant Movement and Radiant Energy,’ and wrote an account of it under that title for The Scientific American. But too many of these happenings had no possible explanation within the limits of known scientific laws. There were besides, throughout his life, strange mental phenomena too numerous and exact for coincidence—his ability, for example, to tell me in Sausalito just what unexpected letters were in our postoffice box in San Francisco, or his faculty for telling time to the exact minute when he woke suddenly at night—or perhaps his invariable success in predicting the result of every heavyweight championship prize-fight for thirty years, though he never saw one! Certainly neither of us could disbelieve in the actuality of telepathy, whatever its modus operandi, when for so many years we constantly answered each other’s unspoken questions and remarks, sang tunes running through the other’s mind, or awoke at the same moment from the same odd dream. . . .
“These so-called psychic experiences in Mill Valley, and later to a lesser extent in San Francisco and our two Sausalito houses, would have made anyone less determinedly skeptical and rigidly scientific-minded a convinced Spiritualist. Even when he was on a lecture tour, strange things sometimes happened. Once in Woodland, California, he had a room in a lodging-house over a grocery. All night he was kept awake by the sound of hammering and sawing in the store below. In the morning he found no evidence of any construction or repair. But the landlady looked at him queerly and asked if he had been able to sleep in the room she had given him.
“It is no wonder that for a long time he was inclined to believe that ‘this mundane existence of ours is neither the beginning nor the end of the drama of life. . . . We do not, and cannot, while clothed with flesh, know things in themselves. The universe is a multidimensional world, and we three-dimensional simians can see but as “through a glass darkly.”’ In the end, however, he became convinced that though such phenomena as he had witnessed were indubitably real and not hallucinatory, they were not extra-physical, since ‘matter’ and ‘spirit’ are monistically one, and that some day they would be understood and reduced to law.”
Fort, it is worth remembering, was also a monist, and this was one of his chief arguments in The Book of the Damned: that all the world is one.
Enthralled, Shipley wrote to Fort in care of his publisher (to praise the mass of facts and dispute the conclusions Fort had drawn from them.) In 1922, de Ford investigated some Fortean occurrences for him: stones were raining from the sky in Chico, California, and she went there to investigate, even witnessing a rock fall form “some invisible point in the sky and land gently at my feet.” She wrote Fort about her experiences, and he queried her, teaching her “something of his obstinate search for verification.” Her observations appeared in Fort’s second book, New Lands! (1923).
The three continued their correspondence until 1932, when Fort died. De Ford continued clipping stories of Fortean phenomena from newspapers and sharing these with Fort. She cameoed again in his final book, Wild Talents (1932), having sent him an article about a room in New Jersey where it rained buckshot. Shipley reviewed Lo! (1931) in the New York Times—not the first review of Fort in the Times, but the first positive one. Shipley called him the “Enfant Terrible,” of science, bringing skeletons to the dinner table: that is to say, unearthing inconvenient facts. He continued to dispute Fort’s theorizing, and didn’t mention his monism, but appreciated the data he compiled, which was worth considering—which expanded the imagination, including the scientific imagination, which could become sclerotic and narrow. His final judgment seems to be rooted in a Romantic view of nature, one that prized the kind of imaginative spur provided by Fort: “Reading Fort is a ride on a comet; if the traveler return to earth after the journey, he will find, after his first dizziness has worn off, a new and exhilarating emotion that will color and correct all his future reading of less heady scientific literature.” That assessment echoed the epitaph English chemist Humphry Davy wrote for the poet Lord Byron:
Of some great comet he might well have been
The habitant, that thro’ the mighty space
Of kindling enter rolls; now visiting
Our glorious sun, by wondering myriads seen
Of planetary beings; then in a race
Vying with light in swiftness, like a king
Of void and chaos, rising up on high
Above the stars in awful majesty.
Miriam continued to think about Fort, and his ideas, as well as the more mystical ideas some of the experiences she shared with Shipley suggested. In October 1935, still stinging from Shipley’s death—she would not remarry, though she lived another four decades—she wrote about the possibility of life after death for the magazine “The Forum.” The article was called “Do We Survive?,” and though outwardly a journalistic-cum-philosophical musing on the soul’s continued existence after the body was gone, the piece was infused with references to her late husband, their life together, and the mad philosopher Fort.
She began by noting her own sense of loss, her own hope to meet Shipley again, her own search for peace. If only she could be sure, then continued existence, she said, would be easy—she could bear anything, knowing they might someday, somehow be together. But that togetherness, she said, must be a meeting of their personalities. She was uninterested in Fortean monism—which she referred to only obliquely: “Certainly the chemical elements of which our bodies are composed continue, after our death, to exist in other combinations. But that is not what any human being means by survival. It is of no interest to me that the oxygen and hydrogen and phosphorus which once helped to make up the texture of a man's hand or gave the blue light to his eyes are now recombined in the green of a leaf or the wetness of a river.”
The possibility of life after death, the perpetuation of the spirit for all eternity seemed impossible, and yet Shipley had convinced her that the universe own existence was impossible—or, we might addend, improbable in the extreme. Plus there were all those weird events she had experienced—“I have seen stranger things than ghosts: I have seen a pear dance on a bare table; I have seen a stove lifter sail clear across a room in broad daylight with no one near it; I have seen a hanging vase keep swinging night
and day from Tuesday to Friday with no hand touching it; I have seen windows with heavily rusted hasps, which a strong man had to force open and which a severe windstorm could not shake, swing wide without warning on a clear, still day.”
The trouble was, she could not say what those things meant. Was she hallucinating? Maybe these were what would be called Fortean phenomena—though she did not use the term, referring to Fort again only tangentially—by which she meant the same thing as her late husband: that these were fully explicable events which had not yet been explained, events that awaited their scientists, their science. In which case she had been “privileged to witness some faint accidental adumbration of what may be a commonplace of physics twenty years from now, as if by some peculiar combination of circumstances someone had in 1900 heard music by some uncontrolled technique that now we recognize as controlled radio broadcasting.”
What she could not credit, at least not yet, was that these were manifestations of a spiritual realm. The American Society for Psychical Research had also found intriguing phenomena, but no credible tie to spirits she said; nor had the future Fortean Hereford Carrington, who had seen so many incredible events, but still could not unequivocally say the spiritual world existed. Even Fort—here she called him out by name—credited the facts that he collected in “Wild Talents” but explained them by witchcraft, not the activities of spirits. As for her, she—like Houdini—had set up a test: she wanted Maynard to give her a sign, something only he could no, trivial or not, and that would convince her. Nothing had come to that point, though. It was a tragic flaw in life, she admitted, but perhaps it was not cruelty, but something else: this was the closest she could allow herself to finding comfort in the possibility of life after death. Perhaps we could not access the spiritual realm—perhaps it seemed like it did not exist, and the world thus cruel and empty—but maybe it really was there, just too inexorable for us, as living humans, to approach or experience given our limited senses.
Fort, then, was a crucial thinker for de Ford, influencing her ideas about fundamental existential questions. Part of her appreciation for Fort was the same as Shipley’s: that he had compiled a mass of important, overlooked data. Indeed, she would use the same words as her late husband, referring to Fort as the “Enfant Terrible,” of science, and also as a enzyme in the body of science, stimulating, making it go, catalyzing thought. It seems, though, that she was also more willing than Shipley to credit his odd theories—his idea about witchcraft, for example, being a wild talent—and even to see some of the playfulness in his writing—although this last may have only dawned on de Ford as her own life changed and opened her to new ways of thinking.
In 1942, she and her friend Earle Walbridge were tasked with writing many of the biographies in “Twentieth Century Authors,” put out by H. W. Wilson—which included a bit on Fort, in contrast to “The Oxford Companion to American Literature which, to Miriam’s irritation, failed to include Fort (and also Stanley Waterloo, John Stapleton Cowley-Brown, and Alexander Harvey). Walbridge wrote the first version of Fort’s biography but, as de Ford explained, when the editors learned that she knew Fort personally, they asked her to write another version, which is what appeared. While waiting for “Twentieth Century Authors” to appear in print—this was in September, 1942—she took a moment to write into the Saturday Review and comment on Fort:
"Fort was a strange genius, often wrongheaded but with nothing of the charlatan about him. I have all his four books and many of his letters, written in the same characteristic
gnomic style which he used in the books. They are the most fascinating reading in the world, especially if one have sufficient grounding in science to be able to check on his interpretations; his facts, without the sometimes grotesque interpretations, were always carefully authenticated, however startling they might be.”
This assessment continued the line of thought developed by Shipley in his “Times” article: that it was the facts that mattered, not the Fortean theories. But towards the end of her watering letter, she returned to Fort, and seemed to concede the possible veracity of his “Wild Talents” thesis, just as she had in 1935—Fort, she insisted, “had no doubt at all of the existence of his special brand of witchcraft!” This would have been in contrast to Fort’s other theories, which he himself was quick to declaim in the very books where he also proclaimed them.
“Twentieth Century Authors” appeared a few months later, in December 1942. The article on Fort was relatively brief, citing as its sources Thayer’s introduction to the omnibus edition of Fort’s books—published in April 1941—H. Allen Smith’s “Low Man on the Totem Pole,” which had a brief chapter on the founding of the Fortean Society; “The Fortean Society Magazine,” not yet re-named Doubt; and an unnamed article from Time magazine, dated 23 February 1931 (it was a review of Lo!). The biography read, in whole:
“Fort, Charles Hoy (August 9, 1874- May 3, 1932), American critic of science, was born in Albany, New York, and was largely self-educated. As a boy he was an amateur naturalist, then became a reporter, and wrote short stories which were published in the Broadway Magazine when Theodore Dreiser was its editor. In 1896 he married Anna Filan, who survived him by five years; they had no children. It was about 1908 that he began the incredible work of research which resulted in his four published books—the last issued after his death. Gradually he evolved a series of very bizarre theories on scientific phenomena; but what people forget, who (like Edmund Pearson) classify him as a ‘literary freak and curiosity,” is that all these theories were firmly grounded in established, documented, and apparently reliable facts and occurrences. He toiled for years in the British Museum, literally blinded himself, and for several years was unable to work at all until his sight was recovered. During his last years he lived in the Bronx, New York, a large but shy, reticent, gray-haired man with spectacles and a walrus mustache, surrounded by hundreds of boxes of notes and clippings, still working long hours in the library to collect more data. His recreation from these labors was principally a game he invented and called super-checkers. He died at fifty-seven of enlargement of the heart.
It is impossible to describe in brief compass the nature or contents of Fort’s books. Both he and his disciples have been called credulous and gullible, and undoubtedly Fort was insufficiently grounded in science, particularly in astronomy, to justify many of his generalizations: but the work he did may some day prove an invaluable source for later investigators. (William Seabrook, in Witchcraft, echoes many of Fort’s statements in Wild Talents.) He himself called it ‘a kind of non-fictional fiction. . . . Maybe I am a pioneer in a new writing that instead of old-fashioned heroes and villains will have floods and bugs and stars and earthquakes for its characters and motifs.” His style was as strange as his subjects, peculiarly his own—a sort of court reporter’s jargon (he was an expert shorthand reporter) that yet managed to convey his constant excitement. He was no solemn fanatic; he had great humor, was as caustic as he was daring. The Fortean Society, founded by Tiffany Thayer (he is still secretary) in 1931, included such men as Booth Tarkington, Theodore Dreiser, Ben Hecht, Alexander Woollcott, and John Cowper Powys (none of them, it may be noted, a scientist.) ‘One of the most original and courageous thinkers in the world today,’ J. David Stern called him.
‘Portents, the horrors and mysteries of Nature, disappearances, strange forms of demise—these were Fort’s sustenance,’ said Idwal Jones. ‘He compiled books in an apocalyptic prose, and in a cold excitement recited wonders that would have frozen the blood of Sir John Mandeville.’ ‘He is rash; he ventures where angels fear to tread; often his daring overtops his knowledge,’ wrote Maynard Shipley in the New York Times Book Review. ‘But his data—if not his conclusions—are throughly grounded and well documented, and he is perhaps the enzyme orthodox science most needs. . . . . He is the enfant terrible of science, bringing the family skeleton to the dinner table when distinguished guests are present. . . . Reading Fort is a ride on a comet. . . . Discount everyone of his hypotheses, and the solid body of his data remains—a lifework in itself.’”
The review, thus repeated the view of Fort that de Ford had come to by 1935: that his facts were solid, most of his theories kooky, but his ideas about witchcraft—or wild talents—might be worth pondering, even substantial. The quote about Fort inventing a new genre of writing comes from a letter he wrote to Shipley and de Ford, and suggests that she, at least, was thinking of his books in literary terms, too—as something which could not be measured on a scale of true and false at all. This idea seemed to deepen in her, even if she did not express so directly.
The following year, 1943, Miriam met, via correspondence, Anthony Boucher, the author, editor, and Fortean fan. He lived just across the Bay, in Berkeley. Boucher investigated reports of stones falling on a house in Oakland—between Berkeley and San Francisco—in August of 1943. The falls made the papers, and inspired the San Francisco Chronicle’s book reviewer—a friend of Boucher’s—to write about Fort. Apparently, Boucher wrote to de Ford to compare notes, since she had gone to Chico a couple of decades before. They started corresponding: not only did they share an interest in Fort, but also in mysteries, and de Ford was thinking of starting to write science fiction and fantasy. Boucher was established in those fields, and would co-found “The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction” in 1949. Literary questions soon overwhelmed Fortean ones, and both lost interest in the Oakland anomalies, Boucher never finding the time to go back out and continue his investigation.
Over the coming years, de Ford would continue her non-fiction and mystery writing, but, under Boucher’s tutelage, come also into science fiction and fantasy, although, she admitted to him in a 1953 note, “it isn’t really my field.” The influence of Fort upon her writing is clear, if unstated. (Note that I have not surveyed her entire corpus of writing, given that it is huge and was published in many places that are now hard to track down.) “Henry Martindale, Great Dane,” for example, published by Beyond in 1954 (and later reprinted as "Gone to the Dogs”), opens with a woman being hit on the nose by a button—like one of those mysterious Fortean rainfalls---and then moves to consider her husband, who had become a talking dog—another figure from Fort’s writings. It may be that the connection between her writing career and Fortean phenomena was what made de Ford fascinated by Fort in the first place. After all, the story of the buckshot rain in New Jersey—isn’t it just the classic locked-room mystery of the 1920s? One gets the feeling that what de Ford liked best about Fort was that he told a darn good story. He showed what it was like, as Shipley said, in a visceral way, to ride a comet—a science fiction dream, but a dream of transcendence and radicalism, too.
For a long time, de Ford toiled on a piece about Fort for Boucher’s MFSF. It finally appeared, after several iterations, in January 1954. (It was reprinted in French in November 1955.) The title was borrowed from Shipley: “Charles Fort: Enfant Terrible of Science.” The 11-page article began with her and Shipley’s discovery of Fort in 1921, then moved on to describing his mass of facts, and their undeniability—as proven to her by her own interactions with Fort. There followed a bit more biography—along with her admission that she had not read Fort’s fiction—before getting to his key themes, one of which was intimately tied to the development of science fiction. The first was his monism (“the underlying oneness in all this confusion.”) The second—the science fictional one—was that humans might be property.
From that point, de Ford moved on to Fort as a gadfly, which he confessed in a letter she partially reproduced. Here she was admitting not only that his theories might be strange, but purposefully so. It’s as though her acquaintance with science fiction, in which authors played with Fort’s ideas rather than contested them or tried to prove them capital-T-true showed her the lability of his imagination—or made it more apparent, at least. She quoted Joseph Henry Jackson—the Chronicle’s book reviewer—from 1943, that Fort’s purpose was to make science less dogmatic, to make scientists accept their own fallibility. She realized that Fort himself was not a Fortean—that he disbelieved his own theories. This was a marked change in view from the one Shipley put forth in the Times, which fixated on those theories.
De Ford then drifted back to biography, covering in many more words the same highpoint she had in her 1942 overview of his life, again coming back to the skepticism he expressed about himself and his ideas. She moved on to give long excerpts of his books, showing his odd, disjointed style. She then reproduced parts of a letter to Shipley thanking him for his Times review, and noting that Shipley could never be a professor because he was too much of a freethinker himself, before going on to quote extensively Fort’s thought on inventing a new genre of writing. She fleshed out this idea with further epistolary excerpts. All along, she was feeling for the correct way to evaluate him, to keep him from being lumped with the cranks, but also being given too much credit as a scientist. (She thought the Fortean Burton Rascoe was most culpable in his evaluation.) Again, she noted the lack of scientists in the early Fortean Society.
In the end, she thought the best evaluation was that Fort was an inventive writer: he “leveled at the scientists and in large part hit the literary folk.” One cannot but assume that this evaluation had a lot to do with de Ford’s own career arc, in which she was now finding Fort a useful spur to her literary career, an innovator of science fiction more than science and new forms of physics. Indeed, in her conclusion, she does not offer the possibility of a new science that could explain his facts, or the odd experiences of her and Shipley. She does note that an open-mind is good for science, but her main interest is that humanity should learn the truth about itself—a literary exercise more than a scientific one.
Some of these thoughts were echoed, sans Fort—but in a Fortean context, nonetheless—in 1957. That year de Ford published “Science Fiction Comes of Age” in “The Humanist” magazine. She ha contributed to that magazine before, and, indeed, “The Humanist” had been allied with the Fortean Society for some time. De Ford argued that science fiction was leaving behind the tropes of the past—bug-eyed monsters, gallant heroes, damsels in distress—to explore ethical, sociological, and philosophical ideas. In her view, the best science fiction extrapolated from known science facts and was typically liberal—no room for xenophobes! This perspective squeezed out Fort some—his admirers could be liberal or not, and his known facts were not so much accepted. It is true, though, that she allowed his facts to be correct, and so they could be the source of extrapolation. As well, the emphasis on literary quality and the development of ideas echoed some of the same ideas she quoted from Fort, so that her definition of science fiction in the article may not have been as broad as the definition she used in her everyday life and, indeed, in her own writing.
Worth noting is that de Ford was critical of Thayer and his Fortean Society. Too dogmatic, she thought, and too political—critiques that were shared among other Bay Area Forteans, including Boucher. (Boucher thought that Thayer’s introduction to “Lo!” was of a much more Fortean cast than his introduction tot he omnibus edition of Fort’s books.) It wasn’t so much that she disagreed with Thayer—she admitted in the article for MFSF that she “might even agree with some of his extra scientific views.” But she thought the Fortean Society should be free of them—these were areas (controversial or not) in which Fort had never expressed himself, and so had nothing to do with expanding the Fortean circle.
As late as 1947, Thayer extended an olive branch and offered de Ford (and, posthumously, Shipley) membership in the Society because they “were among the very few whom Charles Fort actually liked.” Apparently, though, de Ford refused. As a result, her name never appeared in Doubt. Shipley’s did only once, briefly, and as a side comment. In Doubt 17 (March 1947), Thayer noted that he remembered Shipley “Kindly (in spite of his orthodoxy) as an acquaintance of Charles Fort . . . [He] was an old-style evolutionist who attempted to foist his conception of Darwinism upon United States public schools. He was, nevertheless, a great admirer of Fort.”
Given de Ford’s enduring affection for her late husband, it is really no wonder that she would refuse to join the Society. Thayer’s comment would have been read by her as an attack—so if it came before his offer, she would have refused, and if after then she would have likely resigned. But though they were not in the Fortean Society—and though they had very particular and limited interpretations of Fort’s writings—Miriam Allen de Ford and Maynard Shipley were indubitably Forteans.
