Dilettante, apostate, mystic, apologist for the British empire—and important to understanding the career of Forteanism, in its earlier incarnations, even as he was kept at arm’s length by the Society that bore Fort’s name.
Norman Vincent Dagg was born 19 December 1897 in Houghton-le-Spring, Druham, England, making him younger than most of the first generation of Forteans—the Founders and their contemporaries—but older than Thayer. There’s a German reference to him as “Nell” and some science fiction studies reference him as William: this seems to be a misinterpretation of his signature, the N. V. looking like Wm., for William. Professionally, he was known as N. V. (I’m not sure if he recognized the initials as a homonym.) His father, Thomas, was a coal miner, according to the 1901 Census of England. His mother was Florence Charlton. He had four siblings, Dora, William, John, and Thomas, all younger. By 1911, Thomas (then 38) had moved into management and was an Assistant Superintendent of Assurance, which presumably meant he had moved into the insurance business.
I have no information on Dagg’s childhood, and the access to England’s records from where I live are marginal. So I have no idea where he went to school, or what his life might have been like. His parents were religious, at least officiously, having baptized him in January of 1898; Anglican, I assume. He joined World War as part of the Royal Scots (Lothian Division), 9th Battalion—the Highlanders. They were in France by February 1915 and were part of the horrible trench warfare there, involved in the various battles of the Somme as well as other parts of the war that ground men into meat. A private, he received two metals. I am not sure which parts of the war Dagg fought in, exactly, or how long he served. But likely it wasn’t pleasant.
Norman Vincent Dagg was born 19 December 1897 in Houghton-le-Spring, Druham, England, making him younger than most of the first generation of Forteans—the Founders and their contemporaries—but older than Thayer. There’s a German reference to him as “Nell” and some science fiction studies reference him as William: this seems to be a misinterpretation of his signature, the N. V. looking like Wm., for William. Professionally, he was known as N. V. (I’m not sure if he recognized the initials as a homonym.) His father, Thomas, was a coal miner, according to the 1901 Census of England. His mother was Florence Charlton. He had four siblings, Dora, William, John, and Thomas, all younger. By 1911, Thomas (then 38) had moved into management and was an Assistant Superintendent of Assurance, which presumably meant he had moved into the insurance business.
I have no information on Dagg’s childhood, and the access to England’s records from where I live are marginal. So I have no idea where he went to school, or what his life might have been like. His parents were religious, at least officiously, having baptized him in January of 1898; Anglican, I assume. He joined World War as part of the Royal Scots (Lothian Division), 9th Battalion—the Highlanders. They were in France by February 1915 and were part of the horrible trench warfare there, involved in the various battles of the Somme as well as other parts of the war that ground men into meat. A private, he received two metals. I am not sure which parts of the war Dagg fought in, exactly, or how long he served. But likely it wasn’t pleasant.
Nor do I know what he was doing in the years immediately after the war. In 1922, he married Harriet Elizabeth Lishman, also from Hougthon-le-Spring. She was a little older than him, having been born in 1893. They had four children, Theodore (1923), Norma (1926), Trevor (1928), and Pauline (1930). There’s evidence he was running some type of business, but it was liquidated in May of 1924—which, given Britain’s inter-war economy doesn't reflect on him at all. Likely, given other scant evidence, he had been working as a tailor. This would have been in Sunderland, in the same county and about 7 miles from his natal town. The liquidation was reported to be voluntary. I know nothing more of Dagg’s activities in the 1920s.
In the 1930s, Dagg was involved with both music and journalism, albeit journalism of a particular bent. Some biographical vignettes, all based on sketchy information, have him as an amateur musician, and there are citations of him conducting orchestral arrangements early in the decade. He also championed the work of Havergal Brian, a British classical composer. He wrote the BBC in 1934 and 1935, asking for Brian to receive more attention, for example, and would analyze his first symphony later in the decade. He was writing for “Musical Opinion” on Brian as well, and presumably on other currents of British music; this was in the middle of the decade.
He started his own publication in 1937, The Modern Mystic (which would carry Dagg’s opinion of Brian’s first symphony, Gothic, in 1938). As the title suggested, Dagg was intrigued by modern occultism, particularly Anthroposophy, which was the German Rudolf Steiner’s interpretation of Theosophy. By accounts—I have not seen any copies of the publication—Dagg refused to formally associate with any particular group, but wanted to explore the wide world of the occult. And he published a wide array of writers, including Alan Watts and Henry Miller (himself later a Fortean), who had various mystical leanings. It was resolutely against spiritualism and mediums, though—too vulgar—insistent that Victorian materialism was passing away and some new cycle about to reiterate. The magazine ran until 1940, purportedly curtailed by the onset of the war. The magazine was published by King Littlewood and King Press, which seems to have specialized in literature relating to the end of the current economic system and mystical writings, including mystical Christianity. Dagg also traveled to the United States at least twice in the late 1930s, listing his occupation as journalist. I don’t know what drew him across the Atlantic.
By 1941, Dagg was back to editing, if not before. He was running the magazine “Tomorrow,” for King, Littlewood and King Press. The magazine had been around since 1939, which raises the question, Was Dagg editing it that early? I have seen no copies of the magazine and so cannot check. Other sources indicate that he was there in 1941, though, at least, and that would fit with the folding of his “Modern Mystic.” “Tomorrow” focused on social credit and was subtitled (variants of) “A Journal for the World Citizen of the New Age. It should not be confused with a similarly named publication by Fortean Eileen J. Garrett or a number of science fiction publications that also used the name. The magazine was also associated with two bookstores (which may or may not have been actually owned by Dagg) in York and London.
“Social Credit” is a theme that comes up fairly frequently within the history of Forteans. Developed by the Canadian C. H. Douglas, with the intention of dispersing political and economic power to individuals (and away from the sate). Among other platforms, social creditors were for the doing-away with banks and the banking system, and the providing of consumers with enough money to keep the role system of production rolling—making the industrial system responsive solely to consumers. Douglas’s ideas were developed in the middle of the 1920s and associated with his particular view of Christianity. It was first promulgated in the British publication “The New Age,” which had a decidedly Theosophical bent. “Social Credit” never became a major movement, but was a strong fringe one, attracting, Ezra Pound, the Duke of Bedford, and others interested in so-called monetary reform.
Although the idea of “social credit” could be taken in either liberal or conservative directions, Dagg made “Tomorrow” very conservative. “Fascism in Britain” (1948) described it as “fanatically anti-American, anti-Russian, and anti-Jewish.” There was a strong link between “scoail credit” and anti-Semitism generally—though not universally—in the sense that Jews were condemned as usurers and money-lenders, and so scapegoated by social creditors who did not like banking. In 1946, “Tomorrow” absorbed another social credit magazine, “Sovereignty,” helmed by A. E. Day and Victor Burgess, both also associated with British Fascism and anti-Semitism. Other of Dagg’s known contacts were also deeply conservative, including Peter Arthur David Baker (with whom he talked about anthroposophy, according to Baker’s memoirs) and Arthur Nelson Field, a New Zealand white supremacist and Fascist. The magazine was a so-called “sixpenny monthly,” making it widely affordable.
The link between Theosophical ideas, social credit, and modern literature formed a stable (if heterogenous) tradition within British cultural history in the first half of the twentieth century, held together by a distrust of democracy, parliament, the masses, and state socialism; and pining for an intellectual elite to lead the world—Nietzschean supermen, of a sort. (See Tom Villis, Reaction and the Avant-Garde, 2006.) True to form, “Tomorrow” published not only on economics, but literature, too. Eric Frank Russell, the science fiction writer, was published in the magazine frequently between 1941 and 1952, for example. Russell was not a canonical modernist writer, and science fiction is often dismissed as simply genre fiction untouched by the waves of literary innovation, but as with other writers of science fiction was influenced by the modernist movement. He was also an advocate of social credit.
There is a lot here that is unknown. I do not know how Dagg came to his conservatism, if it had been with him most of his life or something to which he converted, nor do I know anything about how he came to advocate for social credit. His eldest son joined the RAF during World War II and was killed, which had to be heart-rending, but I am not sure how (or if) it affected his politics. “Tomorrow” is something of a shadowy publication, and I have found no bibliographic sources that say when it stopped publishing, but I have found references to it as late as 1964. Nor do I know how long Dagg edited “Tomorrow.” I do have references to him in that position through the early 1950s, but I’m not sure if he continued or if he went on to other things. There are also poorly sourced reports that he ended up joining the British National Party. Supposedly, he hooked up with one of Pound’s associates, George Toms Olarenshaw, but I have seen no product of that partnership.
Dagg died in March 1962. He was nine months shy of his sixty-fifth birthday.
There are only scant connections between Dagg’s biography and the Fortean Society. And if one were to look to “Doubt,” the connection would seem minor indeed. Dang warrants but a single mention in the magazine. That was in Doubt 16 (January 1947). The mention was squirreled away in a list under the title “Books and Pamphlets Received”: Thayer said he had received copies of “Tomorrow,” the British publication of MFS Dagg and associates, and noted that “Tomorrow” advertised the British Fortean Society—mostly, it would seem, through the efforts of Russell. A minor Fortean, then? Except not. Correspondence showed that he was an important one—metonymically, if nothing else—even as Thayer disliked him very much.
I do not know when Dagg came to read Charles Fort—or if he ever really did. Nor do I know that he was especially fond of him. It seems likely that Russell may have introduced Dagg to Fort, but it is also possible that Dagg had come across Fort’s writings earlier in his career, as he explored the occult and mysticism—“Modern Mystic” included articles on Fortean staples such as levitation and teleportation as well as Lemuria and Atlantis. Apparently, there were ways of reading Fort available to those of a conservative, even Fascist leaning, as there were other associated with the Society. Some were active, such as Henry Christian Bump. Others were hardly mentioned, such as George Sylvester Vierick. The Duke of Bedford was sympathetic to the German cause, and also a Society member. And Ezra Pound, who never seemed to be a member, but was accused of helping the Fascist cause, was a hero of both Tiffany Thayer and the Fortean James Blish. (Indeed, at one point Blish labeled himself a theoretical Fascist, meaning he liked the ideas in theory more than practice; but he also recommended voting Norman Thomas, the socialist candidate for president.) So it is not inconceivable that Dagg found something worthy in Fort and joined the Society out of admiration. Too much is unknown on this point.
But Dagg does illustrate how Forteanism was spread under Thayer’s management. Thayer tried to target libraries and college campuses. But it seems that much of his effort was on bookstores—getting them to sell both Doubt and, after 1941, The Books of Charles Fort in its collected edition. In the Bay Area he had daliel’s and Paul Elder’s bookshop. He had Ben Abrams selling the books at his place first in Chicago, later in New York. And he had contact with a number of large bookstores throughout New England. Britain, though, because of the war, presented a challenge: the exchange rate and laws against exporting cash made it difficult for individuals to order the books from American stores or catalogs. So there had to be found a publisher willing to import them into the country.
Russell arranged for King, Littlewood & King to be that publisher, and to sell the books at the stores associated with it in London and York. He had a letter to that effect published in the British science fiction fanzine “Futurian War Digest” (August 1941):
"It is very doubtful whether any individual reader in this country will be able to obtain the book from USA, owing to the restrictions on the export of cash. Anyway I've taken the steps necessary to make the book available to British readers ... Import licences can be got by bona fide publishers, so I'm arranging for a number of copies to be imported and distributed on behalf of the Fortean Society by King, Littlewood & King Ltd. of Fishery Rd., Bray, Berks. These people are publishers of books and magazines and - directly they've obtained supplies - will be advertising the omnibus in their sixpenny monthly TOMORROW, also running a fairly long review of the book written by me.”
The evidence, such as it is, suggests that King, Littlewood & King did their job, at least early on—though not necessarily to good effect, and with an eye on its own bottom line. In July 1943, Dagg wrote to William Sloane at Henry Holt (which had published the Fort omnibus for the Fortean Society). Apparently, this was in response to a letter from June, but I have not found it in the Holt archives. Dagg notes that he has received all the books and made payment; he also worried about the effect of the war on sales and the exchange rate—but was willing to take a flyer and issue a British edition of the Books of Charles Fort. King, Littlewood & King had a sense of the American market, he implied, since it was selling a book on reincarnation there (at least when German U-boats let the supply ships through). All he wanted was assurance that he would then get first rights to each of Fort’s individual books.
Sloane wrote back later that month, saying that Holt would consider working with King, Littlewood & King, but could only deal with the rights to the single volume. The old copyrights to each of Fort’s individual books were “extremely confused.” As it happened, nothing ever came of Dagg’s plan to issue a British version of Fort’s books. Nonetheless, the cross-Atlantic correspondence was a problem for the Fortean Society. In August 1943, the U.S. Post office censorship inspection saw a copy of the Fortean Society magazine #7 on its way to Dagg. The lead story was “Socratic Method”: a list of questions posed by Thayer suggesting that the War was being orchestrated by government and financial interests for their own gain. Already the earlier issue (coming out long before, in January 1942), had gotten him FBI attention thanks to founder J. David Stern; this one caused Aaron Sussman and Booth Tarkington to cut ties—which really shook Thayer. The FBI continued to monitor the Society, and Thayer was appropriately paranoid about corresponding on Fortean letterhead, but there was nothing more than a passive investigation at this point. (This was the same month Harry Leon Wilson, Jr., son of the Founding Fortean, was set to go to trial for refusing to register for the draft.)
Shortly thereafter, in October 1943, “Tomorrow” published a positive review of Russell’s “Sinister Barrier,” a book that explicitly worked out Fortean themes (“I think we are property.”) Russell contributed a number of pieces to “Tomorrow,” beyond his review of Fort. His biographer lists 17 between 1940 and 1952, some explicitly Fortean: In addition to Russell’s review of The Books, his “Fort the Colossus” (reprinted from “Spaceways”) ran twice, in May-June 1940 and July 1942. “Higher than the Apes” (July 1941); “Super-Flotsam” (October 1941); “Invisible Death” (May 1942); “Heavens Above” (October 1943); “Shades of Night” (November 1946); and “Flying Saucers” (March 1952). In many cases it seems that Russell was trying out ideas, and a number of these would be later republished, in abridged form elsewhere. “Invisible Death,” appeared in Fate, for example, Ray Palmer’s Fortean magazine. And proving the connection between rightward-leaning politics, modernism, and Forteanism, “Shades of Night,” appeared in James Blish’s fanzine “Tumbrils” as “How High is the Sky.” “Tumbrils was also where Blish defended Pound from his many naysayers.
There is some evidence that social credit was an important issue among British Forteans, which would make “Tomorrow” an important magazine. A "News Review” article on 10 June 1948 discussing “The Philosophy of Fort,” noted: “London Forteans are criticizing their Liverpool colleagues for their too-ready acceptance of Social Credit dogmas. Liverpool members, assert the Londoners, tend to approach problems and discussions from a viewpoint of destructive criticism. The Londoners prefer constructive criticism. There’s no way to tell who the source for the article is—“The Londoners”—nor how extensive were their feelings (or, if one, feeling). Whomever it was, though, clearly aimed at Eric Frank Russell, as the most obvious of the Liverpool Forteans, and a supporter of social credit.
By early 1948, King, Littlewood & King was having difficulty importing The Books. Russell passed on a check from a potential buyer, but H. Littlewood admitted that couldn’t deliver for four months, as there was “a long list and we are only allowed to import under licence a small quantity each quarter.” The publisher was also selling copies of “Doubt” out of its bookstores. In June, they received more licenses, and hoped to get the books out more quickly. At the same time, Russell was also supplying “Tomorrow” with manuscripts from others. He and Dagg were also swapping tidbits on Fort: there were bad floods in March 1947, ruining much of Dagg’s furniture, and Dagg reminded Russell of one of Fort’s mock prophecies: When Britain loses India, she is in for a series of hard winters. Likely, that had a repp-bottomed resonance for a nationalist such as Dagg. He also told Russell about a rain of mud in France.
Thayer was increasingly unhappy with Dagg, though. In 1947, he learned that one of Ezra Pound’s associates, George Toms Olarenshaw had joined Dagg. “Perhaps some good will come of that.” Then, in 1948, he started taking minor jabs, at least minor for Thayer. In July 1948 he quipped to Russell, “Funny--on your side folks are accusing us of being Fascists (because of Dagg, I guess), and over here they think we’re commies, god knows why.” A month later, he was cursing drag for perpetuating the story that Fort was short—Thayer wanted everyone to know he was tall, over six-foot. Later in the year, though, he was wishing Dagg ill—that the magazines would outsell him; that a sweet English couple must be part American—and Dagg should know that; that every time Dagg wrote something, Thayer lit a fire “in his heart to Trotsky.” The nationalist Dagg was driving Thayer to wits end:
“Last night I wrote a cable throwing Dagg out of the Society. Today I did not send it.
However, let us replace him and his lousy sheet Tomorrow as quickly as possible. The August issue was finally too much . . . . ‘the original Soviet (was) financed by American private bankers’ . . . . ‘the Royal Family (is) above politics.’ I can hear Windsor Castle rocking with laughter. An article in DOUBT #23 will be ‘DISCLAIMER,’ settling the hash of all who do not carry their Forteanism into their daily lives--chiefly Dagg and Hecht. They represent the poles in that dispute. We’ll clean house.”
The tension between Thayer and Dagg seemed to have put Russell in a bit of a pickle, but unfortunately not enough of Russell’s own writing exists to flesh it out; instead, a lot must be inferred. There’s evidence that, in addition to sharing friendly notes on Fort, Dagg could be irritable to Russell. An undated note from Dagg in Russell’s papers at Liverpool reads, “It enchants me It gripes me. The whole thing gives me the bellyache; but as it is undoubtedly gorgeous, stupendous, earth-shaking and in technicolour, I’d better use it with more than the accustomed alacrity, etc.” And then in 1949, Russell seems to have confided something to Dagg about Thayer and Ben Hecht—who was causing no end of trouble for Thayer after he became a Zionist and took out a newspaper advertisement praising Jewish terrorists who were attacking British military personnel, upsetting Russell greatly. Dagg replied,
“What you tell me about Thayer is interesting. My own hunch is that there is Yiddish blood there somewhere. Apart from Gt. Britain, Hecht is a menace to the U.S.A. and it is certainly in Thayer’s power to ‘sack’ him from the Fortean rolls?” [sic] He continued, “Thanks for writing to me. As I’ve told you before, whilst in the very nature of things I cannot pay what you are worth or anything like it, I like very much to have you in the paper.”
Ironically, Thayer, like Russell, was mildly anti-Semitic in the way of the day for proper Anglo-Saxons. They swapped jokes about Jews, called some Hebes, and complained about the “RefuJews” moving into America and Britain after the war had destroyed so much of continental Europe. Russell’s anti-Semitism seems to have had a sharper edge—Thayer was too much of an iconoclast to hate any one group too strenuously (unless they be scientists) and, at times, took pains to declaim against all ethnicities and nationalisms as worthless. In July 1947, for example, Thayer had written Russell:
“Dear Boy: I’m not going to quarrel with you about Ben Hecht, or about Jews in general, or about Palestine in particular. The Fortean view seems to me to be that anybody witless enough to put on a uniform (whether textile or mental) is fair game for anybody with guts to shoot at. The only reason I don’t kill cops is because I would be killed for doing it. British soldiers and office holders have no more damned ‘right’ to be in Palestine telling other people what to do than U S soldiers and slobs have to be in the Philipines [sic] or Alaska or North America proper. As a pale-face, I am a guest of the Amerinds here. God alone knows who was ‘host’ to the red man before that. I think Ben Hecht is making himself ridiculous by narrowing his view to support only one kind of humans [sic], no matter what kind that is, but I can’t get steamed up about it. I can (and will, if you think proper) write a leader for the next issue repudiating his sectarianism. I don’t know what else I could do. His connection with the Society is in the grain from the beginning. It couldn’t be expunged, even if we agreed that it ‘should’ be. My own best judgment is that the less we say about it the better. We can’t lay down rules for any individual’s conduct. No more can we practice exclusionism, no because we’re socially conscious or democratic but because Fort’s first principle is all-inclusiveness. I sympathize with your difficulty, dealing with patriots, but I’ll b damned if I can see any reason for you to become patriotic at your age. Our papers can’t mislead me about anything for the simple reason that I never read them, but I think you over-estimate the power of ‘public opinion.’ Your public is no more peace-minded now than the American public was all through the war. It did us no good. It won’t do you folks any good now. Mind what I say. When the word goes out, you’ll fight, as you always have.”
The back and forth would continue during the late 1940s, but Thayer did take the time to renounce—if not defenestrate—Hecht in Doubt 23, December 1948.
“Pro-Semitic Note”
“Ben Hecht’s war in Palestine has brought the Society a good deal of criticism, especially in England. The cry is to throw him out and step on him.
“We can’t do that.
“The Fortean Society has no more disciplinary power over its members than Charles Fort has over his readers, and no more inclination to curb individual action and expression than Charles Fort had.
“We are happy to point out, however, that the view Ben Hecht has taken is a very narrow one and highly un-Fortean. He has taken sides in a tribal war between the two principal branches of the Semitic race. That we deplore as discriminatory and exclusionistic. Indeed, some of our best friends are Arabs.”
“More renunciations”
“Because of their public acts subsequent to being honored by the Fortean Society, we take this means of disavowing Fortean support for the published opinions of--
“Ben Hecht
“James Burnham
“Norman Thomas
“Taylor Caldwell.”
It is notable here that Dagg was not among those denounced. That’s likely because Dagg was still useful to the Society, though increasingly less so. (It’s possible Russell intervened, but he doesn’t seem to have been Dagg’s biggest fan, either.) In May 1949, Thayer was wondering about reprinting a piece Russell ran in “Tomorrow.” That must have been “Moonstruck!” I haven’t seen that article, but based on what he wrote for “Tumbrils,” it was likely an argument against trying to reach the moon, since it was naught but a cold hard rock. Dang must not have allowed the piece to be reprinted, since it did not appear in Doubt, which would have lowered Thayer’s opinion of him even more. And then his other chief utility, getting the books into England and selling Doubt, began to waver.
In February 1950, or thereabouts, it seems that Russell asked Thayer to help Dagg in distributing the books. But Thayer was unpersuaded. He had another in—Michael Houghton at the Atlantis Bookstore. Apparently, Dagg had not been keeping up with the orders, nor had he been a good correspondent. Throughout the rest of the year, Thayer continued to ask Russell if he had heard from Dagg, and told him to send interested Forteans to Houghton’s store; Thayer was hooking Houghton up with the publisher Holt to make sure the books were crossing the Atlantic. Early the next year, with Dagg still incommunicado, Thayer was perplexed that one of the two stores associated with Dagg was returning Doubt without even attempting to sell the magazine, the other was taking them on.
Confusion continued to rein through the early 1950s, with Dagg seeming to have completely cut himself off from the Fortean Society. He kept asking Russell if he’d heard from him, even suggesting that Russell make his way to the bookstore in York. Then, in May 1952, matters became worse: “Only NOW do I learn that Houghton, Atlantis, is not supplying THE BOOKS to Britons. What are they, in that store, nothing but breath-holding Yogis? Years ago I thought we had them in economically sound association with Holt. Well-I’ll go after Holt from this end, but have you enough gumption to go through the necessary red-tape to fill these orders within the law? Sweet suffering Orion, it must be possible some way.Won’t you really bear down on it?” So, Dagg was still necessary, and still out of reach. As Thayer was planning a trip to England and Europe around this time, Russell apparently asked him if he wished to meet with Dagg. Thayer testily replied, “I don’t want to see Dagg. I only want his godam [sic] store to stock THE BOOKS.” To get around the problem of Dagg’s inconsistencies, Thayer had Russell sending out extra copies of Doubt randomly: “Surplus DOUBTs” is a contradiction in terms. Don’t send ‘em to those MPs who show intelligence. Send ‘em to the Tory bastards who need a kass in the . .”
By the early 1950s, then, Dagg was no longer associated with the Fortean Society. Was he still a Fortean? Likely. There’s no reason to doubt he’d lost his interest in the occult and the unexplained. More generally, though, he seems to have dropped out of public life, at least as far as I can find. Presumably he was still working for the publisher, still working with the bookstore, but he left no traces for me to follow.
In the 1930s, Dagg was involved with both music and journalism, albeit journalism of a particular bent. Some biographical vignettes, all based on sketchy information, have him as an amateur musician, and there are citations of him conducting orchestral arrangements early in the decade. He also championed the work of Havergal Brian, a British classical composer. He wrote the BBC in 1934 and 1935, asking for Brian to receive more attention, for example, and would analyze his first symphony later in the decade. He was writing for “Musical Opinion” on Brian as well, and presumably on other currents of British music; this was in the middle of the decade.
He started his own publication in 1937, The Modern Mystic (which would carry Dagg’s opinion of Brian’s first symphony, Gothic, in 1938). As the title suggested, Dagg was intrigued by modern occultism, particularly Anthroposophy, which was the German Rudolf Steiner’s interpretation of Theosophy. By accounts—I have not seen any copies of the publication—Dagg refused to formally associate with any particular group, but wanted to explore the wide world of the occult. And he published a wide array of writers, including Alan Watts and Henry Miller (himself later a Fortean), who had various mystical leanings. It was resolutely against spiritualism and mediums, though—too vulgar—insistent that Victorian materialism was passing away and some new cycle about to reiterate. The magazine ran until 1940, purportedly curtailed by the onset of the war. The magazine was published by King Littlewood and King Press, which seems to have specialized in literature relating to the end of the current economic system and mystical writings, including mystical Christianity. Dagg also traveled to the United States at least twice in the late 1930s, listing his occupation as journalist. I don’t know what drew him across the Atlantic.
By 1941, Dagg was back to editing, if not before. He was running the magazine “Tomorrow,” for King, Littlewood and King Press. The magazine had been around since 1939, which raises the question, Was Dagg editing it that early? I have seen no copies of the magazine and so cannot check. Other sources indicate that he was there in 1941, though, at least, and that would fit with the folding of his “Modern Mystic.” “Tomorrow” focused on social credit and was subtitled (variants of) “A Journal for the World Citizen of the New Age. It should not be confused with a similarly named publication by Fortean Eileen J. Garrett or a number of science fiction publications that also used the name. The magazine was also associated with two bookstores (which may or may not have been actually owned by Dagg) in York and London.
“Social Credit” is a theme that comes up fairly frequently within the history of Forteans. Developed by the Canadian C. H. Douglas, with the intention of dispersing political and economic power to individuals (and away from the sate). Among other platforms, social creditors were for the doing-away with banks and the banking system, and the providing of consumers with enough money to keep the role system of production rolling—making the industrial system responsive solely to consumers. Douglas’s ideas were developed in the middle of the 1920s and associated with his particular view of Christianity. It was first promulgated in the British publication “The New Age,” which had a decidedly Theosophical bent. “Social Credit” never became a major movement, but was a strong fringe one, attracting, Ezra Pound, the Duke of Bedford, and others interested in so-called monetary reform.
Although the idea of “social credit” could be taken in either liberal or conservative directions, Dagg made “Tomorrow” very conservative. “Fascism in Britain” (1948) described it as “fanatically anti-American, anti-Russian, and anti-Jewish.” There was a strong link between “scoail credit” and anti-Semitism generally—though not universally—in the sense that Jews were condemned as usurers and money-lenders, and so scapegoated by social creditors who did not like banking. In 1946, “Tomorrow” absorbed another social credit magazine, “Sovereignty,” helmed by A. E. Day and Victor Burgess, both also associated with British Fascism and anti-Semitism. Other of Dagg’s known contacts were also deeply conservative, including Peter Arthur David Baker (with whom he talked about anthroposophy, according to Baker’s memoirs) and Arthur Nelson Field, a New Zealand white supremacist and Fascist. The magazine was a so-called “sixpenny monthly,” making it widely affordable.
The link between Theosophical ideas, social credit, and modern literature formed a stable (if heterogenous) tradition within British cultural history in the first half of the twentieth century, held together by a distrust of democracy, parliament, the masses, and state socialism; and pining for an intellectual elite to lead the world—Nietzschean supermen, of a sort. (See Tom Villis, Reaction and the Avant-Garde, 2006.) True to form, “Tomorrow” published not only on economics, but literature, too. Eric Frank Russell, the science fiction writer, was published in the magazine frequently between 1941 and 1952, for example. Russell was not a canonical modernist writer, and science fiction is often dismissed as simply genre fiction untouched by the waves of literary innovation, but as with other writers of science fiction was influenced by the modernist movement. He was also an advocate of social credit.
There is a lot here that is unknown. I do not know how Dagg came to his conservatism, if it had been with him most of his life or something to which he converted, nor do I know anything about how he came to advocate for social credit. His eldest son joined the RAF during World War II and was killed, which had to be heart-rending, but I am not sure how (or if) it affected his politics. “Tomorrow” is something of a shadowy publication, and I have found no bibliographic sources that say when it stopped publishing, but I have found references to it as late as 1964. Nor do I know how long Dagg edited “Tomorrow.” I do have references to him in that position through the early 1950s, but I’m not sure if he continued or if he went on to other things. There are also poorly sourced reports that he ended up joining the British National Party. Supposedly, he hooked up with one of Pound’s associates, George Toms Olarenshaw, but I have seen no product of that partnership.
Dagg died in March 1962. He was nine months shy of his sixty-fifth birthday.
There are only scant connections between Dagg’s biography and the Fortean Society. And if one were to look to “Doubt,” the connection would seem minor indeed. Dang warrants but a single mention in the magazine. That was in Doubt 16 (January 1947). The mention was squirreled away in a list under the title “Books and Pamphlets Received”: Thayer said he had received copies of “Tomorrow,” the British publication of MFS Dagg and associates, and noted that “Tomorrow” advertised the British Fortean Society—mostly, it would seem, through the efforts of Russell. A minor Fortean, then? Except not. Correspondence showed that he was an important one—metonymically, if nothing else—even as Thayer disliked him very much.
I do not know when Dagg came to read Charles Fort—or if he ever really did. Nor do I know that he was especially fond of him. It seems likely that Russell may have introduced Dagg to Fort, but it is also possible that Dagg had come across Fort’s writings earlier in his career, as he explored the occult and mysticism—“Modern Mystic” included articles on Fortean staples such as levitation and teleportation as well as Lemuria and Atlantis. Apparently, there were ways of reading Fort available to those of a conservative, even Fascist leaning, as there were other associated with the Society. Some were active, such as Henry Christian Bump. Others were hardly mentioned, such as George Sylvester Vierick. The Duke of Bedford was sympathetic to the German cause, and also a Society member. And Ezra Pound, who never seemed to be a member, but was accused of helping the Fascist cause, was a hero of both Tiffany Thayer and the Fortean James Blish. (Indeed, at one point Blish labeled himself a theoretical Fascist, meaning he liked the ideas in theory more than practice; but he also recommended voting Norman Thomas, the socialist candidate for president.) So it is not inconceivable that Dagg found something worthy in Fort and joined the Society out of admiration. Too much is unknown on this point.
But Dagg does illustrate how Forteanism was spread under Thayer’s management. Thayer tried to target libraries and college campuses. But it seems that much of his effort was on bookstores—getting them to sell both Doubt and, after 1941, The Books of Charles Fort in its collected edition. In the Bay Area he had daliel’s and Paul Elder’s bookshop. He had Ben Abrams selling the books at his place first in Chicago, later in New York. And he had contact with a number of large bookstores throughout New England. Britain, though, because of the war, presented a challenge: the exchange rate and laws against exporting cash made it difficult for individuals to order the books from American stores or catalogs. So there had to be found a publisher willing to import them into the country.
Russell arranged for King, Littlewood & King to be that publisher, and to sell the books at the stores associated with it in London and York. He had a letter to that effect published in the British science fiction fanzine “Futurian War Digest” (August 1941):
"It is very doubtful whether any individual reader in this country will be able to obtain the book from USA, owing to the restrictions on the export of cash. Anyway I've taken the steps necessary to make the book available to British readers ... Import licences can be got by bona fide publishers, so I'm arranging for a number of copies to be imported and distributed on behalf of the Fortean Society by King, Littlewood & King Ltd. of Fishery Rd., Bray, Berks. These people are publishers of books and magazines and - directly they've obtained supplies - will be advertising the omnibus in their sixpenny monthly TOMORROW, also running a fairly long review of the book written by me.”
The evidence, such as it is, suggests that King, Littlewood & King did their job, at least early on—though not necessarily to good effect, and with an eye on its own bottom line. In July 1943, Dagg wrote to William Sloane at Henry Holt (which had published the Fort omnibus for the Fortean Society). Apparently, this was in response to a letter from June, but I have not found it in the Holt archives. Dagg notes that he has received all the books and made payment; he also worried about the effect of the war on sales and the exchange rate—but was willing to take a flyer and issue a British edition of the Books of Charles Fort. King, Littlewood & King had a sense of the American market, he implied, since it was selling a book on reincarnation there (at least when German U-boats let the supply ships through). All he wanted was assurance that he would then get first rights to each of Fort’s individual books.
Sloane wrote back later that month, saying that Holt would consider working with King, Littlewood & King, but could only deal with the rights to the single volume. The old copyrights to each of Fort’s individual books were “extremely confused.” As it happened, nothing ever came of Dagg’s plan to issue a British version of Fort’s books. Nonetheless, the cross-Atlantic correspondence was a problem for the Fortean Society. In August 1943, the U.S. Post office censorship inspection saw a copy of the Fortean Society magazine #7 on its way to Dagg. The lead story was “Socratic Method”: a list of questions posed by Thayer suggesting that the War was being orchestrated by government and financial interests for their own gain. Already the earlier issue (coming out long before, in January 1942), had gotten him FBI attention thanks to founder J. David Stern; this one caused Aaron Sussman and Booth Tarkington to cut ties—which really shook Thayer. The FBI continued to monitor the Society, and Thayer was appropriately paranoid about corresponding on Fortean letterhead, but there was nothing more than a passive investigation at this point. (This was the same month Harry Leon Wilson, Jr., son of the Founding Fortean, was set to go to trial for refusing to register for the draft.)
Shortly thereafter, in October 1943, “Tomorrow” published a positive review of Russell’s “Sinister Barrier,” a book that explicitly worked out Fortean themes (“I think we are property.”) Russell contributed a number of pieces to “Tomorrow,” beyond his review of Fort. His biographer lists 17 between 1940 and 1952, some explicitly Fortean: In addition to Russell’s review of The Books, his “Fort the Colossus” (reprinted from “Spaceways”) ran twice, in May-June 1940 and July 1942. “Higher than the Apes” (July 1941); “Super-Flotsam” (October 1941); “Invisible Death” (May 1942); “Heavens Above” (October 1943); “Shades of Night” (November 1946); and “Flying Saucers” (March 1952). In many cases it seems that Russell was trying out ideas, and a number of these would be later republished, in abridged form elsewhere. “Invisible Death,” appeared in Fate, for example, Ray Palmer’s Fortean magazine. And proving the connection between rightward-leaning politics, modernism, and Forteanism, “Shades of Night,” appeared in James Blish’s fanzine “Tumbrils” as “How High is the Sky.” “Tumbrils was also where Blish defended Pound from his many naysayers.
There is some evidence that social credit was an important issue among British Forteans, which would make “Tomorrow” an important magazine. A "News Review” article on 10 June 1948 discussing “The Philosophy of Fort,” noted: “London Forteans are criticizing their Liverpool colleagues for their too-ready acceptance of Social Credit dogmas. Liverpool members, assert the Londoners, tend to approach problems and discussions from a viewpoint of destructive criticism. The Londoners prefer constructive criticism. There’s no way to tell who the source for the article is—“The Londoners”—nor how extensive were their feelings (or, if one, feeling). Whomever it was, though, clearly aimed at Eric Frank Russell, as the most obvious of the Liverpool Forteans, and a supporter of social credit.
By early 1948, King, Littlewood & King was having difficulty importing The Books. Russell passed on a check from a potential buyer, but H. Littlewood admitted that couldn’t deliver for four months, as there was “a long list and we are only allowed to import under licence a small quantity each quarter.” The publisher was also selling copies of “Doubt” out of its bookstores. In June, they received more licenses, and hoped to get the books out more quickly. At the same time, Russell was also supplying “Tomorrow” with manuscripts from others. He and Dagg were also swapping tidbits on Fort: there were bad floods in March 1947, ruining much of Dagg’s furniture, and Dagg reminded Russell of one of Fort’s mock prophecies: When Britain loses India, she is in for a series of hard winters. Likely, that had a repp-bottomed resonance for a nationalist such as Dagg. He also told Russell about a rain of mud in France.
Thayer was increasingly unhappy with Dagg, though. In 1947, he learned that one of Ezra Pound’s associates, George Toms Olarenshaw had joined Dagg. “Perhaps some good will come of that.” Then, in 1948, he started taking minor jabs, at least minor for Thayer. In July 1948 he quipped to Russell, “Funny--on your side folks are accusing us of being Fascists (because of Dagg, I guess), and over here they think we’re commies, god knows why.” A month later, he was cursing drag for perpetuating the story that Fort was short—Thayer wanted everyone to know he was tall, over six-foot. Later in the year, though, he was wishing Dagg ill—that the magazines would outsell him; that a sweet English couple must be part American—and Dagg should know that; that every time Dagg wrote something, Thayer lit a fire “in his heart to Trotsky.” The nationalist Dagg was driving Thayer to wits end:
“Last night I wrote a cable throwing Dagg out of the Society. Today I did not send it.
However, let us replace him and his lousy sheet Tomorrow as quickly as possible. The August issue was finally too much . . . . ‘the original Soviet (was) financed by American private bankers’ . . . . ‘the Royal Family (is) above politics.’ I can hear Windsor Castle rocking with laughter. An article in DOUBT #23 will be ‘DISCLAIMER,’ settling the hash of all who do not carry their Forteanism into their daily lives--chiefly Dagg and Hecht. They represent the poles in that dispute. We’ll clean house.”
The tension between Thayer and Dagg seemed to have put Russell in a bit of a pickle, but unfortunately not enough of Russell’s own writing exists to flesh it out; instead, a lot must be inferred. There’s evidence that, in addition to sharing friendly notes on Fort, Dagg could be irritable to Russell. An undated note from Dagg in Russell’s papers at Liverpool reads, “It enchants me It gripes me. The whole thing gives me the bellyache; but as it is undoubtedly gorgeous, stupendous, earth-shaking and in technicolour, I’d better use it with more than the accustomed alacrity, etc.” And then in 1949, Russell seems to have confided something to Dagg about Thayer and Ben Hecht—who was causing no end of trouble for Thayer after he became a Zionist and took out a newspaper advertisement praising Jewish terrorists who were attacking British military personnel, upsetting Russell greatly. Dagg replied,
“What you tell me about Thayer is interesting. My own hunch is that there is Yiddish blood there somewhere. Apart from Gt. Britain, Hecht is a menace to the U.S.A. and it is certainly in Thayer’s power to ‘sack’ him from the Fortean rolls?” [sic] He continued, “Thanks for writing to me. As I’ve told you before, whilst in the very nature of things I cannot pay what you are worth or anything like it, I like very much to have you in the paper.”
Ironically, Thayer, like Russell, was mildly anti-Semitic in the way of the day for proper Anglo-Saxons. They swapped jokes about Jews, called some Hebes, and complained about the “RefuJews” moving into America and Britain after the war had destroyed so much of continental Europe. Russell’s anti-Semitism seems to have had a sharper edge—Thayer was too much of an iconoclast to hate any one group too strenuously (unless they be scientists) and, at times, took pains to declaim against all ethnicities and nationalisms as worthless. In July 1947, for example, Thayer had written Russell:
“Dear Boy: I’m not going to quarrel with you about Ben Hecht, or about Jews in general, or about Palestine in particular. The Fortean view seems to me to be that anybody witless enough to put on a uniform (whether textile or mental) is fair game for anybody with guts to shoot at. The only reason I don’t kill cops is because I would be killed for doing it. British soldiers and office holders have no more damned ‘right’ to be in Palestine telling other people what to do than U S soldiers and slobs have to be in the Philipines [sic] or Alaska or North America proper. As a pale-face, I am a guest of the Amerinds here. God alone knows who was ‘host’ to the red man before that. I think Ben Hecht is making himself ridiculous by narrowing his view to support only one kind of humans [sic], no matter what kind that is, but I can’t get steamed up about it. I can (and will, if you think proper) write a leader for the next issue repudiating his sectarianism. I don’t know what else I could do. His connection with the Society is in the grain from the beginning. It couldn’t be expunged, even if we agreed that it ‘should’ be. My own best judgment is that the less we say about it the better. We can’t lay down rules for any individual’s conduct. No more can we practice exclusionism, no because we’re socially conscious or democratic but because Fort’s first principle is all-inclusiveness. I sympathize with your difficulty, dealing with patriots, but I’ll b damned if I can see any reason for you to become patriotic at your age. Our papers can’t mislead me about anything for the simple reason that I never read them, but I think you over-estimate the power of ‘public opinion.’ Your public is no more peace-minded now than the American public was all through the war. It did us no good. It won’t do you folks any good now. Mind what I say. When the word goes out, you’ll fight, as you always have.”
The back and forth would continue during the late 1940s, but Thayer did take the time to renounce—if not defenestrate—Hecht in Doubt 23, December 1948.
“Pro-Semitic Note”
“Ben Hecht’s war in Palestine has brought the Society a good deal of criticism, especially in England. The cry is to throw him out and step on him.
“We can’t do that.
“The Fortean Society has no more disciplinary power over its members than Charles Fort has over his readers, and no more inclination to curb individual action and expression than Charles Fort had.
“We are happy to point out, however, that the view Ben Hecht has taken is a very narrow one and highly un-Fortean. He has taken sides in a tribal war between the two principal branches of the Semitic race. That we deplore as discriminatory and exclusionistic. Indeed, some of our best friends are Arabs.”
“More renunciations”
“Because of their public acts subsequent to being honored by the Fortean Society, we take this means of disavowing Fortean support for the published opinions of--
“Ben Hecht
“James Burnham
“Norman Thomas
“Taylor Caldwell.”
It is notable here that Dagg was not among those denounced. That’s likely because Dagg was still useful to the Society, though increasingly less so. (It’s possible Russell intervened, but he doesn’t seem to have been Dagg’s biggest fan, either.) In May 1949, Thayer was wondering about reprinting a piece Russell ran in “Tomorrow.” That must have been “Moonstruck!” I haven’t seen that article, but based on what he wrote for “Tumbrils,” it was likely an argument against trying to reach the moon, since it was naught but a cold hard rock. Dang must not have allowed the piece to be reprinted, since it did not appear in Doubt, which would have lowered Thayer’s opinion of him even more. And then his other chief utility, getting the books into England and selling Doubt, began to waver.
In February 1950, or thereabouts, it seems that Russell asked Thayer to help Dagg in distributing the books. But Thayer was unpersuaded. He had another in—Michael Houghton at the Atlantis Bookstore. Apparently, Dagg had not been keeping up with the orders, nor had he been a good correspondent. Throughout the rest of the year, Thayer continued to ask Russell if he had heard from Dagg, and told him to send interested Forteans to Houghton’s store; Thayer was hooking Houghton up with the publisher Holt to make sure the books were crossing the Atlantic. Early the next year, with Dagg still incommunicado, Thayer was perplexed that one of the two stores associated with Dagg was returning Doubt without even attempting to sell the magazine, the other was taking them on.
Confusion continued to rein through the early 1950s, with Dagg seeming to have completely cut himself off from the Fortean Society. He kept asking Russell if he’d heard from him, even suggesting that Russell make his way to the bookstore in York. Then, in May 1952, matters became worse: “Only NOW do I learn that Houghton, Atlantis, is not supplying THE BOOKS to Britons. What are they, in that store, nothing but breath-holding Yogis? Years ago I thought we had them in economically sound association with Holt. Well-I’ll go after Holt from this end, but have you enough gumption to go through the necessary red-tape to fill these orders within the law? Sweet suffering Orion, it must be possible some way.Won’t you really bear down on it?” So, Dagg was still necessary, and still out of reach. As Thayer was planning a trip to England and Europe around this time, Russell apparently asked him if he wished to meet with Dagg. Thayer testily replied, “I don’t want to see Dagg. I only want his godam [sic] store to stock THE BOOKS.” To get around the problem of Dagg’s inconsistencies, Thayer had Russell sending out extra copies of Doubt randomly: “Surplus DOUBTs” is a contradiction in terms. Don’t send ‘em to those MPs who show intelligence. Send ‘em to the Tory bastards who need a kass in the . .”
By the early 1950s, then, Dagg was no longer associated with the Fortean Society. Was he still a Fortean? Likely. There’s no reason to doubt he’d lost his interest in the occult and the unexplained. More generally, though, he seems to have dropped out of public life, at least as far as I can find. Presumably he was still working for the publisher, still working with the bookstore, but he left no traces for me to follow.
