P. E. Cleator Henry Louis Mencken was born 12 September 1880 in Baltimore. He would grow up to be one of the most important public intellectuals of the early twentieth century, elitist, anti-democratic, and curmudgeonly, a foe of religion, contained Victorian values, bad thinking, loose language, and also the pseudosciences. Poke around a bit on line, and you’ll fine any number of references to him admiring Fort and being a member of the Fortean Society. This is wrong, very wrong.
A life-long journalist, but also an editor, writer of books, and translator of Nietzsche, in 1908 Mencken became associated with the magazine The Smart Set. A few years later, he and George Jean Nathan became co-editors, fashioning the magazine into an important voice of modernist literature. Among those published in its pages—and there were many notables—was the Fortean enthusiast Benjamin DeCasseres. Mencken also championed Theodore Dreiser, valuing his attacks on American moral hypocrisy, even as he found his writing more often than not ponderous.
A life-long journalist, but also an editor, writer of books, and translator of Nietzsche, in 1908 Mencken became associated with the magazine The Smart Set. A few years later, he and George Jean Nathan became co-editors, fashioning the magazine into an important voice of modernist literature. Among those published in its pages—and there were many notables—was the Fortean enthusiast Benjamin DeCasseres. Mencken also championed Theodore Dreiser, valuing his attacks on American moral hypocrisy, even as he found his writing more often than not ponderous.
H. L. Mencken Also in 1908, Philip Ellaby Cleator was born, in the Cheshire town of Wallasey, on 7 June. Almost thirty years younger than Mencken, separated from Baltimore by an ocean, the two would never meet: but they would become friends. Cleator’s father was a structural engineer, from whom he received a love of science; his mother was a credible painter, from whom he received an appreciation for art. An uncle passed on a fascination with history. As a youth, Cleator came down with tuberculosis—the disease killed his uncle—and convalesced in the country. He fell behind in school. and never felt close to his peers, losing his breath with any exertion and so unable to play.
Mencken was perturbed—and amused—by American stupidity. In 1917, he wrote a hoax article on how the modern bathtub was introduced during the Millard Fillmore administration, seventy five years before. (This was not his only hoax article.) By way of explanation, he wrote, later, “One recalls the gaudy days of 1914-1918. How much that was then devoured by the newspaper readers of the world was actually true? Probably not one per cent. Ever since the war ended learned and laborious men have been at work examining and exposing its fictions.”
Among the credulous, he classed, in sadness more than anger, his friend Theodore Dreiser. Early in the 1920s, Dreiser with another future Fortean, John Cowper Powys, visited a San Francisco quack, John Abrams, who claimed to be able to diagnose and treat any disease with a black box of his own devising. (Abrams was exposed by a panel of luminaries, under the aegis of the magazine “Scientific American,” that included yet another future Fortean, Maynard Shipley.) Mencken himself investigated and deemed Abrams merely “the usual Jew doctor,” unable to match results with promises. And yet Dreiser continued to visit him. And pay him.
Just before Dreiser’s involvement with Abrams, he had been championing Charles Fort to friends and influencers, first Fort’s (now lost) manuscript “X,” and then “The Book of the Damned,” which Dreiser would convince his publisher to put out. Mencken told Dreiser that Fort seemed “o be enormously ignorant of elementary science.” When Mencken finally got ahold of Fort’s book, after it was published, he was nonplussed, writing Dreiser, “I have just read Fort’s _Book of the Damned_ and note your remarks upon the slip cover. If they are authentic, what is the notion that yougatser from this book? Is it that Fort seriously maintains there there is an Upper Sargasso Sea somewhere in the air, and that all of the meteors, blood, frogs and other things he lists, dropped out of it? The thing leaves me puzzled.”
The relationship between Mencken and Dreiser was under a great deal of strain. Mencken explained to the book reviewer Burton Rascoe, in 1920, “[Dreiser and I] remained on good terms so long as I was palpably his inferior--a mere beater of drums for him. But when I began to work out notions of my own it quickly appeared that we were much unlike. Dreiser is a great artist, but a very ignorant and credulous man. He believes, for example, in the Ouija board. My skepticism, and, above all, my contempt for the peasant, eventually offended him. We are still, of course, very friendly, but his heavy sentimentality and his naive yearning to be a martyr make it impossible for me to take him seriously—that is, as man. As artist, I believe that he has gone backward—but he is still a great man.”
Not everyone could see the daylight between Mencken and Fort, though. In “The Nation,” April 1920, Preserved Smith reviewed six books of what he considered arrant silliness, including a book by Jacob Boehme, two books on ghosts, Mencken’s translation of Nietzsche, and—worst of all—Fort’s “Book of the Damned.”
Tiffany Thayer was six years older than Cleator, a veteran of regional theatre and a budding writer when he made his way to Chicago just as Mencken and Dreiser were jousting over Fort and Abrams. He split the difference between Mencken and Dreiser: not much of a fan of Dreiser, if at all, he was gaga over Fort (and Fort’s first disciple, Ben Hecht, who, like Mencken, was enthralled with Nietzsche and writing against American proprieties); he was also a big fan of Mencken: he too wanted to debunk American bromides. In 1922 he wrote, “My ambition is to be able to respect books of my own authorship as much as I respect the writings of Ben Hecht, H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Charles Fort.”
Mencken and Nathan co-founded a new magazine in 1924, “American Mercury,” which continued to brick-throwing at Victorian values and American idiots. DeCasseres would write for it. Two years later, he admitted that his article about the bathtub was a hoax—but many people did not believe his confession and, even so, the original story continued to make the rounds, confirming his cynicism about newspapers and the perspicacity of his countrymen.
Having made his way through school Cleator was at loose ends until he went to work for his father. His head looked upwards, though. Sometime in the mid-1920s he’d seen a film about radium, and its possible use as a fuel. He remembered the end of the movie showed something like a rocket, driven by radium, shooting into the heavens. Rockets, of course, were the stuff of science fiction—serious scientists did not think them a useful means of interplanetary exploration. (Fort didn’t think such expeditions would be hard at all, at least that seemed to be what he was saying: the planets were only a few hundred miles away.) In 1930, Cleator, a voracious reader, discovered Mencken’s “Treatise of the Gods” and was blown away: a different kind of rocket ship. As fast as he could, he made his way through the rest of Mencken’s books. The following year, 1931, Cleator tried his hand at writing, finding a market for his scientific essays in “Chambers’ Journal.”
Tiffany Thayer had only done a little bit of writing through the 1920s, otherwise spending his time selling books and working in advertising. In 1930, he broke through with “Thirteen Men” and would follow with a raft of scurrilous potboilers through the 1930s. In 1931, Contempo, a small, modernist literary magazine, noted that he was being compared with the likes of Mencken as a satirist. Ben Hecht was also a point of comparison. Also in 1931, Fort’s third book, “Lo!,” was finally published after some delay. Thayer by this point had become a friend, and wrote the introduction. In the course of that small essay he noted, “I tried to learn once, what H. L. Mencken had said of The Book of the Damned. He was going around busting things. One would think there would be some affinity. I could not learn. Now, Mr. Fort tells me that he called it ‘poppycock' or something similar. Upon analysis that is understandable. Mr. Mencken, like Voltaire, had to "believe" in science and its pronouncements to carry on against religion. It is incomprehensible to him that they may both be products of the same imbecilic urge to worship what is not readily explainable.”
Not that Mencken was particularly fond of the way modern science was developing. He stood up for evolution against fundamentalist critiques; and he still had his boyhood love of chemistry. But modern physics (and higher mathematics), those seemed hardly different to him than theology, moving beyond facts to abstruse theories. He pointed out that the physicist Oliver Lodge had been taken by spiritualism, and that Einstein’s relativity was akin to phrenology. Mencken made a number of these points in a 1931 review of physicist James Jeans’s “Mysterious Universe.”
Cleator’s interest in rocketry deepened. In that consequential year, 1931, he made contact with the American Interplanetary Society, which had bene founded by a couple of science fiction authors. In 1932, he wrote a piece on rockets for “Chambers’” and urged its quick publication—it would come out in January 1933.
Charles Fort died in May 1932, just after his fourth book, “Wild Talents,” was published. In a brief write up, the journalist H. Allen Smith numbered Mencken among Fort’s admirers. Mencken wrote him, “Your story describing the funeral of Charles Fort lists me as one of his customers. This was a libel of virulence sufficient to shock humanity. As a matter of fact, I looked upon Fort as a quack of the most obvious sort and often said so in print. As a Christian I forgive the man who wrote the story and the news editor who passed it. But both will suffer in hell.” Indeed, that very month, in the introductory essay for “American Mercury,” Mencken had cause to criticize Fort. He was mulling over the tendency of literary types to fall for communism, and noted an overlap of those who did so with those who found themselves championing Fort. (No doubt he was thinking of Dreiser, who was a dyed-in-the-wool Fortean and flirted with communism.) He wrote, in part:
“But when the Reds over in the Marxian Utopia began hang- ing priests and converting churches into laundries and pool-halls, they cooked their goose in America. No true American, white or black, ever wants to be mistaken for an atheist, even when he is consciously subversive. The Klan itself had formal ecclesiastical approval, and all the other pietistic orders, from the Freemasons down, are heavily orthodox. Thus Communism, colliding with two ineradicable American prejudices, encounters hard sledding, and I doubt that it is making any considerable progress.
“This is a pity, for the ideas underlying it, though chiefly insane, are at all events interesting, and deserve to be heard freely. At their worst they are surely quite as rational as the ideas behind chiropractic, Christian Science, Farm Relief and the Single Tax. Democracy itself, in fact, is but little better supported. Yet democracy is preached day in and day out by whole herds of eminent and respectable men, including bishops and archbishops, Senators and Presidents, whereas Communism has to depend for exposition upon greasy nobodies from the East Side, and literary daredevils who also believe, two times out of three, in table-tapping, the New Humanism and the cosmogony of Charles Fort, and were but lately ready to bleed and die for Liberalism.
“Thus it takes on a subterranean and un-real character, and its potential usefulness as a means of alarming and chastening the Babbitts of the land, whether industrial, political or ecclesiastical, is not realized. They yell more or less, to be sure, even now, but their yells are plainly falsetto: there is no genuine terror in them. Life would be much more amusing among us if the Communist grand wizards were propagandists of greater dignity and skill, and could thus spread a greater uneasiness. Until the death of the late Victor L. Berger there was always a Socialist in Congress—usually, alas, only one, and that one a mild one. But though he was mild and unsupported, he often gave very good shows, and made the black headlines. As for me, I'd like to see thirty or forty head of Communists there, well organized, their tongues oiled, and full of sin. Certainly they would do better than the bogus Liberals who now operate under the name of Progressives.”
As if to put an exclamation point on his disdain for Fort, and erase any confusion lingering from Smith’s story—another example of journalism with consequential errors—Mencken wrote a withering review of “Wild Talents” for the August issue of “American Mercury.” It was titled “Nonsense as Science,” and seemed to be intent to separate his own work from Fort’s, and prevent the kids of conflation practiced by Preserved Smith a dozen years earlier:
“The vogue of the late Mr. Fort (he had the misfortune to die a few months ago) will undoubtedly get him his page or two from the future historian of American credulity. He seems to have specialized in fetching literati, and when he reached the common goal of all of us his obsequies were conducted by an eminent novelist. The speeches made upon the occasion were not reported in full in the press, but no doubt they depicted the deceased as a very acute fellow, and an effective agent of the Only True Truth. His method of attaining it was twofold. First he derided as false all of the facts amassed by the ordinary methods of the laboratory, and second he set up in place of them a mass of marvels borrowed from such scientific sources as the Sunday supplements of the Hearst papers, the London News of the World, Dr. Hostetter's Family Almanac, and the current literature of the spiritualists, theosophists and Seventh Day Adventists. This material, in the course of twelve years, he arranged in four volumes, the last of which, now under review, appeared shortly before his death. The others were entitled ‘Lo!', ‘New Lands’, and ‘The Book of the Damned.’
“His scheme of operation was somewhat subtle, and showed no little humor. He seldom denied overt evidences in an overt manner, and he seldom argued flatly that his own creepy surmises had any objective validity. Instead, he simply set forth the former in as suspicious a manner as possible, and then let the latter work their wicked will upon his customers. The process is well displayed in Chapter VIII of ‘Wild Talents’. He begins by recount- ing several more or less proved cases of the perversion called vampirism, which causes its votaries to suck the blood of their victims. Then he proceeds to a mocking account of the kissing-bug craze of 1899, and shows on the testimony of Dr. L. O. Howard that there were but ‘six insects in the United States that could inflict dangerous bites or punctures, and all of them were of uncommon occurrence.’ Then he turns to the hypodermic-needle uproar of 1912 and 1913, with its palpably incredible tales of old maids beset by white slavers in dark movie parlors. Then he returns quietly to his vampires, and lets the necessary inference sink in. It is that vampires are not only common, but also able to make themselves invisible—that they glutted themselves upon children playing in the streets in the days when kissing-bugs were blamed, and upon virgins in film houses in the era of white slavery. There is no argument. The kissing-bugs and needle-men are simply played down delicately, and the vampires played up.
“Every other chapter in the four books is pretty much of a piece with this Chapter VIII. In one of them various mysterious fires are described, and there is a vague and inconclusive discussion of ‘fire-geniuses’, who are depicted as atavistic reversions to a type common in the early days of man, when there were no matches, and persons who had "vestigial organs and structures" capable of making fire were ‘valuable members of a savage community.’ In another there is an account of the appearance of several wild animals of unknown species in the woods near Mineola, L. I., and it is followed by an equally vague discourse upon werewolves. In a third a series of banal stories of people who have suddenly disappeared, leaving no trace, is coupled with an even more banal dissertation upon ‘long-distance death-rays that are not electro-magnetic’. And so on, and so on. The materials are copious, and readily at hand. The more sensational newspapers supply the data, and the explanations are furnished by the works of Sir Oliver Lodge, the Rev. Dr. Montague Summers, and the author of ‘Aunt Jemimah's Dream-Book’. There is even a chapter on the Keely perpetual motion machine of fifty years ago, closing with a hint that Keely may have ‘operated his motor by a development of mere willing or visualizing, whether consciously or not knowing how he got his effects, succeeding spasmodically sometimes, failing often, according to the experience of all pioneers.’
“The remarkable thing about all this highfalutin balderdash is not that a quack with his tongue in his cheek should set it down solemnly in four volumes, but that it should be reviewed with all gravity in a presumably civilized country, and accepted as gospel by a considerable body of presumably sane men. It offers melancholy evidence that the human race has still a long way to go before it will deserve to be called rational. There is in all of us a congenital and almost unconquerable resistance to fact, and in not a few of us it takes the form of an eager acceptance of non-fact. A really sound idea has a truly dreadful time of it in this world. Nine-tenths of all human beings reject it instinctively, and most of the rest make elaborate efforts to dilute and debase it. If it is something new in physics, then it must be mauled until it fits into one of the musty pigeon-holes of the theologians. If it has to do with medicine, then it collides horribly with the accumulated wisdom of ten thousand generations of old wives. And if it has to do with the operations of the human mind, then it turns out that the human mind resents bitterly any prying into its operations, and refuses to admit whatever is not flattering to it. Long ago, in a moment of depression, I defined the truth as something somehow discreditable to someone. But that did not go far enough. The general feeling of the race seems to be that the truth is discreditable to all of us, and not only discreditable, but also extremely dangerous. The easiest way to get a reputation as a misanthrope is to say something that is palpably and indubitably true.
“Along with this aversion from fact goes a curious affection for its opposite. Every science is accompanied by a grotesque Doppelgänger, an obscene and scandalous ghost. Hardly had the New Physics reached the first page of the New York Times before it began to sprout a New Theology, with a mathematical God compounded of straight curves and curved straight lines. Medicine, since the earliest days, has been hemmed in and devoured by a whole horde of such monsters, and even today, in the very shadow of the Harvard Medical School, it is beset by a dozen of them—Christian Science, osteopathy, homeopathy, chiropractic, and so on. Even theology has not escaped, for on the one side it is tailed by the reductio ad absurdum of spiritualism, and on the other by such bogus revelations as the New Thought. Most of these cults are relatively small, but in the aggregate they must account for a very large proportion of the race. The medical quackeries alone have enormous followings, and some time ago a writer in one of the women's magazines estimated that fully 20,000,000 Americans, when they come down with chills and fever, bar out the regular doctors, or resurrection men, and send for magicians.
“In June [sic], writing in this place, I permitted myself certain observations upon the credulity which induces certain American litterateurs, chiefly of the more footling and bewildered sort, to embrace the imbecilities of Communism. One of the things I remarked was the protean quality of that credulity. It is never satisfied with one kind of nonsense: it invariably leaps from one to another, and then to a third, and so on to an nth. Thus it does not surprise me to hear that some of the customers of Communism are also customers of Mr. Fort. He had on his shelves the precise goods that they crave, and if he had lived longer he would have got the patronage of many more of them. He was apparently headed, indeed, for a grand synthesis of all the current quackeries, with the addition of some novelties of his own. He knew how to make even the most extravagant nonsense palatable to believing minds, and he was clever enough to get into his statement of them a specious appearance of enlightened and even of scientific skepticism. Thus he flattered his natural clients while he bagged them. It is a pity that he had to die before his great labor was completed. There was in him more than one hint of the special talent of St. Thomas Aquinas.”
In 1933, Cleator started advertising in the Liverpool Echo for others to join a British rocket society. He would eventually get off the ground, with Les Johnson, The British Interplanetary Society, in October. It was small at first, but would grow. The following year, in January, he traveled to Germany to meet members of its rocket Society, VfR. Willy Ley—soon to emigrate to America, where he would write on rocketry, and also cryptozoological subjects—gave him a list of people from around the world who might be interested in the BIS. Among them was A. M. Low, one of Cleator’s countrymen (whom rumor later had it, Rupert T. Gould introduced to Fort’s books.)
As the BIS continued to grow, gaining adherents particularly among early British science fiction fans, Cleator continued to write. In March 1934, Hugo Gernsback’s “Wonder Stories” published his story “Martian Madness.” That month also saw the magazine “Scoops” publish his essay “We Shall Travel to the Planets.” In June “Scoops” ran another essay, “Rocketing into Space.” Written around this time was yet another essay, “Spaceward,” which appeared in the August 1937 issue of the science fiction magazine “Thrilling Wonder Stories.” He also put out his first book, 1936’s “Rockets Through Space: The Dawn of Interplanetary Travel.” Although Cleator was an amateur with little schooling, the book was serious enough to be reviewed in the leading science journal, “Nature.”
But the review emphasized that rocketry remained a subject of eye-rolling disdain among professional scientists. Indeed, that amateurs nurtured the flame of rocketry against official dismissal, and yet rockets became important in the post-War years, would be a point in Ivan Sanderson’s argument for himself—and Forteans generally—against scientific convention. All the weird things that he championed, all the anomalies and mysterious animals, these were just another iteration of rocketry, with the amateurs seeing further than the professionals. The “Nature” review, by Richard van der Riet Woolly—he would become the Astronomer Royal in 1956—deemed rocketry “unorthodox,” and the “difficulties of so fundamental nature that we are forced to dismiss the notion as essentially unpractical.” “Starting with the most open mind in the world, one must remain convinced that the time is not yet ripe for organising ‘interplanetary societies’ to discuss such projects as these.” He felt himself “compelled to join the ranks of those whom Mr. Cleator stigmatises as visionless reactionaries and to ‘throw cold water’ on the idea of interplanetary travel under present conditions.”
In 1933, Mencken had left the “American Mercury.” He continued to do journalism, particularly for the “Baltimore Sun,” and work on books. In 1936, he received from Cleator a copy of “Rockets Through Space,” he wrote back, thanking Cleator for the book, and admitting that he thought Cleator’s the most practical approach to what seemed an impractical problem. Out of this exchange came a correspondence that would last more than a decade, until a stroke, in November 1948, rendered Mencken pretty much unable to read or write on his own. Mencken shared with Cleator his frustrations with the American public’s stupidity and his own struggles to put out supplements to “The American Language.” Cleator was enthusiastic, attempting to draw Mencken back into writing his “Prejudices” series by offering to collaborate—Cleator was in his late 20s, Mencken in his fifties, and well established—and sending clippings, examples of his own writing, and plans for future projects, books and plays and histories. They commiserated with one another over the increasing size of government and its bumbling ways.
In September 1937, Thayer put out the first issue of a magazine for the Fortean Society, which he had recently reconvened. The introductory number included a quote from Mencken, who remained a hero to Thayer: humans were “congenitally opposed to enlightenment,” the Sage of Baltimore had written. Thayer was inclined to agree, but would not fully admit until every last human had been exposed to Fort’s ideas—which were the very definition of fully enlightened. The language in the early issues had the ring of Mencken, as did the subjects, dwelling as one article did on the state of Tennessee and evolution—more than a decade earlier, Mencken had covered the so-called Scopes monkey trial in that state. In the third issue, dated January 1940, Thayer wrote, for example, “One state Representative in Tennessee was smart enough . . . to introduce a bill for the repeal of the State’s anti-evolution law. the rest of the Representatives were smart enough to defeat it. The sharecroppers don’t have much, but God is still their father.”
All this while, Thayer continued to praise Mencken and try to woo him into the Society. Thayer made Mencken a Named Fellow in 1941—an honorary award that went to non-Members of the Society. In January 1945, he told another member that Mencken had not only rejected overtures from Dreiser and Thayer himself, but also Hecht: “I’m afraid he has too much of the old-fashioned Village-atheist’s respect for urinalysis to take up with the likes of Fort.” But, “we like him whether he likes us or not.” The following year, he reviewed a revised version of Mencken’s “Treatise on the Gods”—the book that had enticed Cleator into becoming a Mencken fan. Well, it wasn’t actually a review, but a groveling: “Although now a man grown, Your Secretary is embarrassed, nay, palsied by dread of the task of ‘reviewing’ the new, revised edition of H. L. Mencken’s Treatise on the Gods. How does it befall that one who wrote for upwards of twenty years with no higher hope than to elicit a single truncated syllable of praise from the Zoilus of Baltimore is, now, after thirty-seven years of trying, asked to judge that judge. . . I would sooner kick my old grandfather in the groin.”
The book, Thayer said, was great. Except—“Reading this new version of the near-classic informs the attentive plainly why H. L. Mencken refused to accept Fellowship with the Forteans when he was Named many years ago. It is his prejudice that ideas partake of that quality of coins which limits them to but two faces. All that fall non-heads must be tails. What is not true must be false. What is not black is white: whereas Fort’s essence is twilight and dawn-stuff, the quasi, the eternal ‘cocked-dice.’” And so, to ridicule religion, Thayer thought, Mencken needed to plant himself firmly on the ground of science, which prejudiced him against Fort.
In 1945, Theodore Dreiser died. Mencken wrote to his widow, Helen, reminiscing about him, some of their disagreements softened by the years—but not when it came to Dreiser’s credulity. In December, he sent her a letter that read, in part, “I could never, of course, follow him into his enthusiasms for such things as spiritualism, Communism and the balder- dash of Charles Fort, but that never made any difference between us, for some of my ideas were just as obnoxious to him.”
The war years were hard on Cleator. There were the deprivations and the bombings—for a time, he hightailed it out of London for the countryside. His attempts to have his works published failed and failed again with the restrictions on paper and other supplies. He continued to write Mencken, though, who himself continued to prophesy the fate of the world—war would not come, it would be over soon—before becoming irritated in August of 1944, and venting at the press in way that was all too reminiscent not only of his earlier writing, but of Thayer’s articles in his magazine: “I refuse to make any more bets on the duration of the war. It is impossible, over here, to find out what is actually going on. The newspapers seldom print unintelligent discussion of the business: their news pages are full of highfalutin.” Cleator was also locked in a battle between his conscience and the state. Though not religious, he was a pacifist and opposed to joining the war effort—Mencken also opposed World War II, as he had opposed World War I, and Thayer did, too, while supporting conscientious objectors. Cleator was on the brink of being jailed for his stance, when an examination determined he was medically unfit, anyway.
No wonder, then, he wrote in a 1949 issue of the Journal of the BIS that he was an “agnostic, sceptic and pacifist—a one-time idealist whose disillusionment is now complete.” But despite the hardships of the war, he continued to work on his rocket advocacy (and continued to write), getting some articles in magazines put out by the arch-British science fiction fan Walter Gillings. The Society was coming into its own, as rocketry became accepted by even mainstream scientists in the light of what the Germans had managed to do during the war. In July of 1947, Arthur C. Clarke, who was a long-standing member of the BIS, tried to disabuse Eric Frank Russell, the Fortean, of his notions about the Society being nothing more than a club of guys who liked to play with explosives: it was real science:
“It’s pretty obvious, by the way, that you and Les [?] have a completely wrong idea of what the BIS is nowadays. We are no longer interested in making rockets and blowing ourselves up in backyards. I very much doubt if the Society, as a Society, will ever do any experimental work. Why should it, when its members are being paid up to ł1,000 a year (more win one case I know) to produce rockets for the government with infinitely greater resources than those which any society could produce? There is no more point in having a rocket society in the old sense, and the BIS is now growing up (though a number of the old-timers regret this.) It is rapidly becoming what we intended it to be—the professional society of rocket engineers. I can mention one Ministry of Supply branch were more than fifty percent of the members belong to the BIS! This also goes for a large proportion of the heads of branches as well. We think that the Society’s job is much more important now than ever it was before. We are out to keep the interplanetary idea from being submerged in the guided missile racket. Above all we want to get the world ready for the idea of astronautics before it happens, and we want to hep prevent an outburst of interplanetary imperialism (see recent American comments.) This is the Society’s most important function, and is the reason why people like Shaw and Stapledon are members. And it’s the reason why you should still support it even if you can only understand about half the stuff we print in the JOURNAL.”
Olaf Stapledon, another science fiction writer and member of the Society, said, “Since its reorganisation two years ago, the British Interplanetary Society has taken itself more seriously than it did in its pre-war days, when its membership was smaller and derived almost entirely from the ranks of science fiction fandom. . . But still, at its meetings, may occasionally be heard an apologetic wail from one of those who frankly confess to caring less about exhaust velocities, trajectories and mass-ratios than, for instance, the probable conditions--or life--which the Columbuses of Space will encounter on Venus. And between the abstruse formulae-filled papers in the dignified-looking B.I.S. Journal may be found fairly speculative astronomical articles, chatty news snippets, and cynical commentaries by founder P.E. Cleator (the science fiction author), which save it from becoming completely dull to the unqualified minority.”
As a representative for space exploration—a subject that existed on the fault line between science and speculation, between technology and Theosophy—Cleator received a number of crank letters. Ruminations on these was one of the cynical commentaries he added to the BIS Journal, “Messages from Mars in Morse.” Seemingly belonging to this tribe of crackpots, in Cleator’s estimation (and Mencken’s) was the Fortean Society. It seems that Cleator was not familiar with the Society, though moving in the circles that he did, he must have at least heard of Fort and the Fortean Society—both were mentioned in science fiction magazines (including one by Gillings) and there were overlapping members. Nonetheless, he was perplexed—or amused at the silliness, one might say—when he received, unprompted a copy of Doubt 15—maybe sent to him by Russell, or maybe Thayer was doing a membership push by sending copies of the magazine to important people in the BIS.
Cleator wrote to Mencken,“Some infidel has recently sent me a copy of DOUBT (No. 15), published, I gather, by the Fortean Society. I note on page 222 thereof that you have been elected a Named Fellow for the year 4 F.S. If you happen to be unaware of this elevation, and are interested, let me know, and I’ll mail the journal to you.” He went on to say that, according to the material he’d been sent, others either given the same recognition or made posthumous Forteans included Ambrose Bierce, Samuel Coleridge Taylor, Edward Gibbon, James Joyce, Rudyard Kipling, and Thorstein Veblen. (Much later, Cleator added that this was the same Veblen known as “the _Doctor obscurus_ about whose polysyllabic literary outpourings Mencken had published a scathing condemnation in the first of his _Prejudice_ books.”) Mencken more or less told Cleator to pay the magazine—and its sponsoring Society—no mind: “The Fortean Society is a one-man outfit run by a foolish fellow named Thayer. He insists upon treating me with respect, though I can’t recall ever mentioning Fort without denouncing him.”
And, it was true, Thayer continued to treat Mencken with respect, peppering his name in the magazine, though with decreasing intensity. He lightly chided “the good HL” for not doubting the historicity of Jesus Christ—Thayer did, and new others who did as well. When balls of fire were seen over Baltimore, Thayer wondered if “God is after Mencken.”
With rocketry now something more than an arcane pursuit of enthusiasts, there started to be more public shuffling about its future. In America, Robert L. Farnsworth, who billed himself as a Fortean, championed the idea of America taking the lead and claiming the moon for herself. (There were others who attempted to stake claims on it through the American government.) This bumptious approach to space exploration irritated the more restrained members of the BIS. Arthur C. Clarke wrote a condemnation of Farnsworth and his stumping. Cleator criticized Farnsworth in the January 1947 issue of the Bulletin of the BIS 1947; he sent his piece on to Mencken, which prompted Mencken to revisit the place of the Fortean Society in American culture: “The followers of Charles Fort have a national organization called the Fortean Society, and it includes many dignitaries. The late Theodore Dreiser, the novelist, was a leading member. These idiots devote themselves on the one hand to sneering at all reputable science, and on the other to whooping up Fort’s nonsense. Farmsworth [sic] is a new one to me, but your account of him does not surprise me.”
Something there was an itch that needed to be scratched, because Mencken returned to the subject again a few months later—perhaps prompted by an exchange of letters between Cleator and Thayer—in May. While far short of an endorsement, this analysis of the Society—and it was brief—was the closest to positive. Perhaps he recognized that he and Thayer (and Fort, to an extent) had a similar criticism of the mass media, and its inability to put forward facts—although he had made the problem worse at times, with his hoaxes. Mostly, though, it seems that he almost appreciated Thayer’s political stance, which was foursquare against World War II and suspicious of the powers-that-be, sensing some kind of grand conspiracy. On the 8th of the month, he wrote to Cleator, “The _Fortean Magazine_ is operated single-handed and alone by a strange fellow named Tiffany Thayer. He has shown an almost incredible mixture of intelligence and imbecility. As the war was coming on he wrote about it with great realism and complete plausibility, but nevertheless he insists that Fort was a great scientific reformer and that all other scientists are frauds and scoundrels. I am glad that he noted the fact that I am not a member of his organization.”
On 23 November 1948, Mencken suffered the stroke that effectively ended his life as a public intellectual and his correspondence with Cleator. He passed away 29 May 1956. Thayer eulogized him in his magazine, though without much enthusiasm—the devotion he had once felt obviously now gone. “What malicious Fate is aiming her shafts at Baltimore? First, H. L. Mencken, then—in the same 24 hours--a fire that killed ten, and now our Accepted Fellow. Dr. Robert Lindner.”
In 1953, Cleator published “Into Space,” put out by George Allen & Unwin. An American edition came out the following year. P. Schuyler Miller reviewed it for the science fiction magazine “Astounding,” praising it for its well-considered opinions on the future of space flight, but bemoaning the fact that it had come out too late, after many much lesser books had already been published, and so it was unlikely to get the kind of attention it deserved. Creator would continue his interest in rocketry—he wrote books on the space race and space flight—and association with the Society he had co-founded. But his writing would become more extensive. He put out books on robotics, history, archeology, treasure hunting, castles, metallurgy, weapons, and linguistics.
Mencken was perturbed—and amused—by American stupidity. In 1917, he wrote a hoax article on how the modern bathtub was introduced during the Millard Fillmore administration, seventy five years before. (This was not his only hoax article.) By way of explanation, he wrote, later, “One recalls the gaudy days of 1914-1918. How much that was then devoured by the newspaper readers of the world was actually true? Probably not one per cent. Ever since the war ended learned and laborious men have been at work examining and exposing its fictions.”
Among the credulous, he classed, in sadness more than anger, his friend Theodore Dreiser. Early in the 1920s, Dreiser with another future Fortean, John Cowper Powys, visited a San Francisco quack, John Abrams, who claimed to be able to diagnose and treat any disease with a black box of his own devising. (Abrams was exposed by a panel of luminaries, under the aegis of the magazine “Scientific American,” that included yet another future Fortean, Maynard Shipley.) Mencken himself investigated and deemed Abrams merely “the usual Jew doctor,” unable to match results with promises. And yet Dreiser continued to visit him. And pay him.
Just before Dreiser’s involvement with Abrams, he had been championing Charles Fort to friends and influencers, first Fort’s (now lost) manuscript “X,” and then “The Book of the Damned,” which Dreiser would convince his publisher to put out. Mencken told Dreiser that Fort seemed “o be enormously ignorant of elementary science.” When Mencken finally got ahold of Fort’s book, after it was published, he was nonplussed, writing Dreiser, “I have just read Fort’s _Book of the Damned_ and note your remarks upon the slip cover. If they are authentic, what is the notion that yougatser from this book? Is it that Fort seriously maintains there there is an Upper Sargasso Sea somewhere in the air, and that all of the meteors, blood, frogs and other things he lists, dropped out of it? The thing leaves me puzzled.”
The relationship between Mencken and Dreiser was under a great deal of strain. Mencken explained to the book reviewer Burton Rascoe, in 1920, “[Dreiser and I] remained on good terms so long as I was palpably his inferior--a mere beater of drums for him. But when I began to work out notions of my own it quickly appeared that we were much unlike. Dreiser is a great artist, but a very ignorant and credulous man. He believes, for example, in the Ouija board. My skepticism, and, above all, my contempt for the peasant, eventually offended him. We are still, of course, very friendly, but his heavy sentimentality and his naive yearning to be a martyr make it impossible for me to take him seriously—that is, as man. As artist, I believe that he has gone backward—but he is still a great man.”
Not everyone could see the daylight between Mencken and Fort, though. In “The Nation,” April 1920, Preserved Smith reviewed six books of what he considered arrant silliness, including a book by Jacob Boehme, two books on ghosts, Mencken’s translation of Nietzsche, and—worst of all—Fort’s “Book of the Damned.”
Tiffany Thayer was six years older than Cleator, a veteran of regional theatre and a budding writer when he made his way to Chicago just as Mencken and Dreiser were jousting over Fort and Abrams. He split the difference between Mencken and Dreiser: not much of a fan of Dreiser, if at all, he was gaga over Fort (and Fort’s first disciple, Ben Hecht, who, like Mencken, was enthralled with Nietzsche and writing against American proprieties); he was also a big fan of Mencken: he too wanted to debunk American bromides. In 1922 he wrote, “My ambition is to be able to respect books of my own authorship as much as I respect the writings of Ben Hecht, H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Charles Fort.”
Mencken and Nathan co-founded a new magazine in 1924, “American Mercury,” which continued to brick-throwing at Victorian values and American idiots. DeCasseres would write for it. Two years later, he admitted that his article about the bathtub was a hoax—but many people did not believe his confession and, even so, the original story continued to make the rounds, confirming his cynicism about newspapers and the perspicacity of his countrymen.
Having made his way through school Cleator was at loose ends until he went to work for his father. His head looked upwards, though. Sometime in the mid-1920s he’d seen a film about radium, and its possible use as a fuel. He remembered the end of the movie showed something like a rocket, driven by radium, shooting into the heavens. Rockets, of course, were the stuff of science fiction—serious scientists did not think them a useful means of interplanetary exploration. (Fort didn’t think such expeditions would be hard at all, at least that seemed to be what he was saying: the planets were only a few hundred miles away.) In 1930, Cleator, a voracious reader, discovered Mencken’s “Treatise of the Gods” and was blown away: a different kind of rocket ship. As fast as he could, he made his way through the rest of Mencken’s books. The following year, 1931, Cleator tried his hand at writing, finding a market for his scientific essays in “Chambers’ Journal.”
Tiffany Thayer had only done a little bit of writing through the 1920s, otherwise spending his time selling books and working in advertising. In 1930, he broke through with “Thirteen Men” and would follow with a raft of scurrilous potboilers through the 1930s. In 1931, Contempo, a small, modernist literary magazine, noted that he was being compared with the likes of Mencken as a satirist. Ben Hecht was also a point of comparison. Also in 1931, Fort’s third book, “Lo!,” was finally published after some delay. Thayer by this point had become a friend, and wrote the introduction. In the course of that small essay he noted, “I tried to learn once, what H. L. Mencken had said of The Book of the Damned. He was going around busting things. One would think there would be some affinity. I could not learn. Now, Mr. Fort tells me that he called it ‘poppycock' or something similar. Upon analysis that is understandable. Mr. Mencken, like Voltaire, had to "believe" in science and its pronouncements to carry on against religion. It is incomprehensible to him that they may both be products of the same imbecilic urge to worship what is not readily explainable.”
Not that Mencken was particularly fond of the way modern science was developing. He stood up for evolution against fundamentalist critiques; and he still had his boyhood love of chemistry. But modern physics (and higher mathematics), those seemed hardly different to him than theology, moving beyond facts to abstruse theories. He pointed out that the physicist Oliver Lodge had been taken by spiritualism, and that Einstein’s relativity was akin to phrenology. Mencken made a number of these points in a 1931 review of physicist James Jeans’s “Mysterious Universe.”
Cleator’s interest in rocketry deepened. In that consequential year, 1931, he made contact with the American Interplanetary Society, which had bene founded by a couple of science fiction authors. In 1932, he wrote a piece on rockets for “Chambers’” and urged its quick publication—it would come out in January 1933.
Charles Fort died in May 1932, just after his fourth book, “Wild Talents,” was published. In a brief write up, the journalist H. Allen Smith numbered Mencken among Fort’s admirers. Mencken wrote him, “Your story describing the funeral of Charles Fort lists me as one of his customers. This was a libel of virulence sufficient to shock humanity. As a matter of fact, I looked upon Fort as a quack of the most obvious sort and often said so in print. As a Christian I forgive the man who wrote the story and the news editor who passed it. But both will suffer in hell.” Indeed, that very month, in the introductory essay for “American Mercury,” Mencken had cause to criticize Fort. He was mulling over the tendency of literary types to fall for communism, and noted an overlap of those who did so with those who found themselves championing Fort. (No doubt he was thinking of Dreiser, who was a dyed-in-the-wool Fortean and flirted with communism.) He wrote, in part:
“But when the Reds over in the Marxian Utopia began hang- ing priests and converting churches into laundries and pool-halls, they cooked their goose in America. No true American, white or black, ever wants to be mistaken for an atheist, even when he is consciously subversive. The Klan itself had formal ecclesiastical approval, and all the other pietistic orders, from the Freemasons down, are heavily orthodox. Thus Communism, colliding with two ineradicable American prejudices, encounters hard sledding, and I doubt that it is making any considerable progress.
“This is a pity, for the ideas underlying it, though chiefly insane, are at all events interesting, and deserve to be heard freely. At their worst they are surely quite as rational as the ideas behind chiropractic, Christian Science, Farm Relief and the Single Tax. Democracy itself, in fact, is but little better supported. Yet democracy is preached day in and day out by whole herds of eminent and respectable men, including bishops and archbishops, Senators and Presidents, whereas Communism has to depend for exposition upon greasy nobodies from the East Side, and literary daredevils who also believe, two times out of three, in table-tapping, the New Humanism and the cosmogony of Charles Fort, and were but lately ready to bleed and die for Liberalism.
“Thus it takes on a subterranean and un-real character, and its potential usefulness as a means of alarming and chastening the Babbitts of the land, whether industrial, political or ecclesiastical, is not realized. They yell more or less, to be sure, even now, but their yells are plainly falsetto: there is no genuine terror in them. Life would be much more amusing among us if the Communist grand wizards were propagandists of greater dignity and skill, and could thus spread a greater uneasiness. Until the death of the late Victor L. Berger there was always a Socialist in Congress—usually, alas, only one, and that one a mild one. But though he was mild and unsupported, he often gave very good shows, and made the black headlines. As for me, I'd like to see thirty or forty head of Communists there, well organized, their tongues oiled, and full of sin. Certainly they would do better than the bogus Liberals who now operate under the name of Progressives.”
As if to put an exclamation point on his disdain for Fort, and erase any confusion lingering from Smith’s story—another example of journalism with consequential errors—Mencken wrote a withering review of “Wild Talents” for the August issue of “American Mercury.” It was titled “Nonsense as Science,” and seemed to be intent to separate his own work from Fort’s, and prevent the kids of conflation practiced by Preserved Smith a dozen years earlier:
“The vogue of the late Mr. Fort (he had the misfortune to die a few months ago) will undoubtedly get him his page or two from the future historian of American credulity. He seems to have specialized in fetching literati, and when he reached the common goal of all of us his obsequies were conducted by an eminent novelist. The speeches made upon the occasion were not reported in full in the press, but no doubt they depicted the deceased as a very acute fellow, and an effective agent of the Only True Truth. His method of attaining it was twofold. First he derided as false all of the facts amassed by the ordinary methods of the laboratory, and second he set up in place of them a mass of marvels borrowed from such scientific sources as the Sunday supplements of the Hearst papers, the London News of the World, Dr. Hostetter's Family Almanac, and the current literature of the spiritualists, theosophists and Seventh Day Adventists. This material, in the course of twelve years, he arranged in four volumes, the last of which, now under review, appeared shortly before his death. The others were entitled ‘Lo!', ‘New Lands’, and ‘The Book of the Damned.’
“His scheme of operation was somewhat subtle, and showed no little humor. He seldom denied overt evidences in an overt manner, and he seldom argued flatly that his own creepy surmises had any objective validity. Instead, he simply set forth the former in as suspicious a manner as possible, and then let the latter work their wicked will upon his customers. The process is well displayed in Chapter VIII of ‘Wild Talents’. He begins by recount- ing several more or less proved cases of the perversion called vampirism, which causes its votaries to suck the blood of their victims. Then he proceeds to a mocking account of the kissing-bug craze of 1899, and shows on the testimony of Dr. L. O. Howard that there were but ‘six insects in the United States that could inflict dangerous bites or punctures, and all of them were of uncommon occurrence.’ Then he turns to the hypodermic-needle uproar of 1912 and 1913, with its palpably incredible tales of old maids beset by white slavers in dark movie parlors. Then he returns quietly to his vampires, and lets the necessary inference sink in. It is that vampires are not only common, but also able to make themselves invisible—that they glutted themselves upon children playing in the streets in the days when kissing-bugs were blamed, and upon virgins in film houses in the era of white slavery. There is no argument. The kissing-bugs and needle-men are simply played down delicately, and the vampires played up.
“Every other chapter in the four books is pretty much of a piece with this Chapter VIII. In one of them various mysterious fires are described, and there is a vague and inconclusive discussion of ‘fire-geniuses’, who are depicted as atavistic reversions to a type common in the early days of man, when there were no matches, and persons who had "vestigial organs and structures" capable of making fire were ‘valuable members of a savage community.’ In another there is an account of the appearance of several wild animals of unknown species in the woods near Mineola, L. I., and it is followed by an equally vague discourse upon werewolves. In a third a series of banal stories of people who have suddenly disappeared, leaving no trace, is coupled with an even more banal dissertation upon ‘long-distance death-rays that are not electro-magnetic’. And so on, and so on. The materials are copious, and readily at hand. The more sensational newspapers supply the data, and the explanations are furnished by the works of Sir Oliver Lodge, the Rev. Dr. Montague Summers, and the author of ‘Aunt Jemimah's Dream-Book’. There is even a chapter on the Keely perpetual motion machine of fifty years ago, closing with a hint that Keely may have ‘operated his motor by a development of mere willing or visualizing, whether consciously or not knowing how he got his effects, succeeding spasmodically sometimes, failing often, according to the experience of all pioneers.’
“The remarkable thing about all this highfalutin balderdash is not that a quack with his tongue in his cheek should set it down solemnly in four volumes, but that it should be reviewed with all gravity in a presumably civilized country, and accepted as gospel by a considerable body of presumably sane men. It offers melancholy evidence that the human race has still a long way to go before it will deserve to be called rational. There is in all of us a congenital and almost unconquerable resistance to fact, and in not a few of us it takes the form of an eager acceptance of non-fact. A really sound idea has a truly dreadful time of it in this world. Nine-tenths of all human beings reject it instinctively, and most of the rest make elaborate efforts to dilute and debase it. If it is something new in physics, then it must be mauled until it fits into one of the musty pigeon-holes of the theologians. If it has to do with medicine, then it collides horribly with the accumulated wisdom of ten thousand generations of old wives. And if it has to do with the operations of the human mind, then it turns out that the human mind resents bitterly any prying into its operations, and refuses to admit whatever is not flattering to it. Long ago, in a moment of depression, I defined the truth as something somehow discreditable to someone. But that did not go far enough. The general feeling of the race seems to be that the truth is discreditable to all of us, and not only discreditable, but also extremely dangerous. The easiest way to get a reputation as a misanthrope is to say something that is palpably and indubitably true.
“Along with this aversion from fact goes a curious affection for its opposite. Every science is accompanied by a grotesque Doppelgänger, an obscene and scandalous ghost. Hardly had the New Physics reached the first page of the New York Times before it began to sprout a New Theology, with a mathematical God compounded of straight curves and curved straight lines. Medicine, since the earliest days, has been hemmed in and devoured by a whole horde of such monsters, and even today, in the very shadow of the Harvard Medical School, it is beset by a dozen of them—Christian Science, osteopathy, homeopathy, chiropractic, and so on. Even theology has not escaped, for on the one side it is tailed by the reductio ad absurdum of spiritualism, and on the other by such bogus revelations as the New Thought. Most of these cults are relatively small, but in the aggregate they must account for a very large proportion of the race. The medical quackeries alone have enormous followings, and some time ago a writer in one of the women's magazines estimated that fully 20,000,000 Americans, when they come down with chills and fever, bar out the regular doctors, or resurrection men, and send for magicians.
“In June [sic], writing in this place, I permitted myself certain observations upon the credulity which induces certain American litterateurs, chiefly of the more footling and bewildered sort, to embrace the imbecilities of Communism. One of the things I remarked was the protean quality of that credulity. It is never satisfied with one kind of nonsense: it invariably leaps from one to another, and then to a third, and so on to an nth. Thus it does not surprise me to hear that some of the customers of Communism are also customers of Mr. Fort. He had on his shelves the precise goods that they crave, and if he had lived longer he would have got the patronage of many more of them. He was apparently headed, indeed, for a grand synthesis of all the current quackeries, with the addition of some novelties of his own. He knew how to make even the most extravagant nonsense palatable to believing minds, and he was clever enough to get into his statement of them a specious appearance of enlightened and even of scientific skepticism. Thus he flattered his natural clients while he bagged them. It is a pity that he had to die before his great labor was completed. There was in him more than one hint of the special talent of St. Thomas Aquinas.”
In 1933, Cleator started advertising in the Liverpool Echo for others to join a British rocket society. He would eventually get off the ground, with Les Johnson, The British Interplanetary Society, in October. It was small at first, but would grow. The following year, in January, he traveled to Germany to meet members of its rocket Society, VfR. Willy Ley—soon to emigrate to America, where he would write on rocketry, and also cryptozoological subjects—gave him a list of people from around the world who might be interested in the BIS. Among them was A. M. Low, one of Cleator’s countrymen (whom rumor later had it, Rupert T. Gould introduced to Fort’s books.)
As the BIS continued to grow, gaining adherents particularly among early British science fiction fans, Cleator continued to write. In March 1934, Hugo Gernsback’s “Wonder Stories” published his story “Martian Madness.” That month also saw the magazine “Scoops” publish his essay “We Shall Travel to the Planets.” In June “Scoops” ran another essay, “Rocketing into Space.” Written around this time was yet another essay, “Spaceward,” which appeared in the August 1937 issue of the science fiction magazine “Thrilling Wonder Stories.” He also put out his first book, 1936’s “Rockets Through Space: The Dawn of Interplanetary Travel.” Although Cleator was an amateur with little schooling, the book was serious enough to be reviewed in the leading science journal, “Nature.”
But the review emphasized that rocketry remained a subject of eye-rolling disdain among professional scientists. Indeed, that amateurs nurtured the flame of rocketry against official dismissal, and yet rockets became important in the post-War years, would be a point in Ivan Sanderson’s argument for himself—and Forteans generally—against scientific convention. All the weird things that he championed, all the anomalies and mysterious animals, these were just another iteration of rocketry, with the amateurs seeing further than the professionals. The “Nature” review, by Richard van der Riet Woolly—he would become the Astronomer Royal in 1956—deemed rocketry “unorthodox,” and the “difficulties of so fundamental nature that we are forced to dismiss the notion as essentially unpractical.” “Starting with the most open mind in the world, one must remain convinced that the time is not yet ripe for organising ‘interplanetary societies’ to discuss such projects as these.” He felt himself “compelled to join the ranks of those whom Mr. Cleator stigmatises as visionless reactionaries and to ‘throw cold water’ on the idea of interplanetary travel under present conditions.”
In 1933, Mencken had left the “American Mercury.” He continued to do journalism, particularly for the “Baltimore Sun,” and work on books. In 1936, he received from Cleator a copy of “Rockets Through Space,” he wrote back, thanking Cleator for the book, and admitting that he thought Cleator’s the most practical approach to what seemed an impractical problem. Out of this exchange came a correspondence that would last more than a decade, until a stroke, in November 1948, rendered Mencken pretty much unable to read or write on his own. Mencken shared with Cleator his frustrations with the American public’s stupidity and his own struggles to put out supplements to “The American Language.” Cleator was enthusiastic, attempting to draw Mencken back into writing his “Prejudices” series by offering to collaborate—Cleator was in his late 20s, Mencken in his fifties, and well established—and sending clippings, examples of his own writing, and plans for future projects, books and plays and histories. They commiserated with one another over the increasing size of government and its bumbling ways.
In September 1937, Thayer put out the first issue of a magazine for the Fortean Society, which he had recently reconvened. The introductory number included a quote from Mencken, who remained a hero to Thayer: humans were “congenitally opposed to enlightenment,” the Sage of Baltimore had written. Thayer was inclined to agree, but would not fully admit until every last human had been exposed to Fort’s ideas—which were the very definition of fully enlightened. The language in the early issues had the ring of Mencken, as did the subjects, dwelling as one article did on the state of Tennessee and evolution—more than a decade earlier, Mencken had covered the so-called Scopes monkey trial in that state. In the third issue, dated January 1940, Thayer wrote, for example, “One state Representative in Tennessee was smart enough . . . to introduce a bill for the repeal of the State’s anti-evolution law. the rest of the Representatives were smart enough to defeat it. The sharecroppers don’t have much, but God is still their father.”
All this while, Thayer continued to praise Mencken and try to woo him into the Society. Thayer made Mencken a Named Fellow in 1941—an honorary award that went to non-Members of the Society. In January 1945, he told another member that Mencken had not only rejected overtures from Dreiser and Thayer himself, but also Hecht: “I’m afraid he has too much of the old-fashioned Village-atheist’s respect for urinalysis to take up with the likes of Fort.” But, “we like him whether he likes us or not.” The following year, he reviewed a revised version of Mencken’s “Treatise on the Gods”—the book that had enticed Cleator into becoming a Mencken fan. Well, it wasn’t actually a review, but a groveling: “Although now a man grown, Your Secretary is embarrassed, nay, palsied by dread of the task of ‘reviewing’ the new, revised edition of H. L. Mencken’s Treatise on the Gods. How does it befall that one who wrote for upwards of twenty years with no higher hope than to elicit a single truncated syllable of praise from the Zoilus of Baltimore is, now, after thirty-seven years of trying, asked to judge that judge. . . I would sooner kick my old grandfather in the groin.”
The book, Thayer said, was great. Except—“Reading this new version of the near-classic informs the attentive plainly why H. L. Mencken refused to accept Fellowship with the Forteans when he was Named many years ago. It is his prejudice that ideas partake of that quality of coins which limits them to but two faces. All that fall non-heads must be tails. What is not true must be false. What is not black is white: whereas Fort’s essence is twilight and dawn-stuff, the quasi, the eternal ‘cocked-dice.’” And so, to ridicule religion, Thayer thought, Mencken needed to plant himself firmly on the ground of science, which prejudiced him against Fort.
In 1945, Theodore Dreiser died. Mencken wrote to his widow, Helen, reminiscing about him, some of their disagreements softened by the years—but not when it came to Dreiser’s credulity. In December, he sent her a letter that read, in part, “I could never, of course, follow him into his enthusiasms for such things as spiritualism, Communism and the balder- dash of Charles Fort, but that never made any difference between us, for some of my ideas were just as obnoxious to him.”
The war years were hard on Cleator. There were the deprivations and the bombings—for a time, he hightailed it out of London for the countryside. His attempts to have his works published failed and failed again with the restrictions on paper and other supplies. He continued to write Mencken, though, who himself continued to prophesy the fate of the world—war would not come, it would be over soon—before becoming irritated in August of 1944, and venting at the press in way that was all too reminiscent not only of his earlier writing, but of Thayer’s articles in his magazine: “I refuse to make any more bets on the duration of the war. It is impossible, over here, to find out what is actually going on. The newspapers seldom print unintelligent discussion of the business: their news pages are full of highfalutin.” Cleator was also locked in a battle between his conscience and the state. Though not religious, he was a pacifist and opposed to joining the war effort—Mencken also opposed World War II, as he had opposed World War I, and Thayer did, too, while supporting conscientious objectors. Cleator was on the brink of being jailed for his stance, when an examination determined he was medically unfit, anyway.
No wonder, then, he wrote in a 1949 issue of the Journal of the BIS that he was an “agnostic, sceptic and pacifist—a one-time idealist whose disillusionment is now complete.” But despite the hardships of the war, he continued to work on his rocket advocacy (and continued to write), getting some articles in magazines put out by the arch-British science fiction fan Walter Gillings. The Society was coming into its own, as rocketry became accepted by even mainstream scientists in the light of what the Germans had managed to do during the war. In July of 1947, Arthur C. Clarke, who was a long-standing member of the BIS, tried to disabuse Eric Frank Russell, the Fortean, of his notions about the Society being nothing more than a club of guys who liked to play with explosives: it was real science:
“It’s pretty obvious, by the way, that you and Les [?] have a completely wrong idea of what the BIS is nowadays. We are no longer interested in making rockets and blowing ourselves up in backyards. I very much doubt if the Society, as a Society, will ever do any experimental work. Why should it, when its members are being paid up to ł1,000 a year (more win one case I know) to produce rockets for the government with infinitely greater resources than those which any society could produce? There is no more point in having a rocket society in the old sense, and the BIS is now growing up (though a number of the old-timers regret this.) It is rapidly becoming what we intended it to be—the professional society of rocket engineers. I can mention one Ministry of Supply branch were more than fifty percent of the members belong to the BIS! This also goes for a large proportion of the heads of branches as well. We think that the Society’s job is much more important now than ever it was before. We are out to keep the interplanetary idea from being submerged in the guided missile racket. Above all we want to get the world ready for the idea of astronautics before it happens, and we want to hep prevent an outburst of interplanetary imperialism (see recent American comments.) This is the Society’s most important function, and is the reason why people like Shaw and Stapledon are members. And it’s the reason why you should still support it even if you can only understand about half the stuff we print in the JOURNAL.”
Olaf Stapledon, another science fiction writer and member of the Society, said, “Since its reorganisation two years ago, the British Interplanetary Society has taken itself more seriously than it did in its pre-war days, when its membership was smaller and derived almost entirely from the ranks of science fiction fandom. . . But still, at its meetings, may occasionally be heard an apologetic wail from one of those who frankly confess to caring less about exhaust velocities, trajectories and mass-ratios than, for instance, the probable conditions--or life--which the Columbuses of Space will encounter on Venus. And between the abstruse formulae-filled papers in the dignified-looking B.I.S. Journal may be found fairly speculative astronomical articles, chatty news snippets, and cynical commentaries by founder P.E. Cleator (the science fiction author), which save it from becoming completely dull to the unqualified minority.”
As a representative for space exploration—a subject that existed on the fault line between science and speculation, between technology and Theosophy—Cleator received a number of crank letters. Ruminations on these was one of the cynical commentaries he added to the BIS Journal, “Messages from Mars in Morse.” Seemingly belonging to this tribe of crackpots, in Cleator’s estimation (and Mencken’s) was the Fortean Society. It seems that Cleator was not familiar with the Society, though moving in the circles that he did, he must have at least heard of Fort and the Fortean Society—both were mentioned in science fiction magazines (including one by Gillings) and there were overlapping members. Nonetheless, he was perplexed—or amused at the silliness, one might say—when he received, unprompted a copy of Doubt 15—maybe sent to him by Russell, or maybe Thayer was doing a membership push by sending copies of the magazine to important people in the BIS.
Cleator wrote to Mencken,“Some infidel has recently sent me a copy of DOUBT (No. 15), published, I gather, by the Fortean Society. I note on page 222 thereof that you have been elected a Named Fellow for the year 4 F.S. If you happen to be unaware of this elevation, and are interested, let me know, and I’ll mail the journal to you.” He went on to say that, according to the material he’d been sent, others either given the same recognition or made posthumous Forteans included Ambrose Bierce, Samuel Coleridge Taylor, Edward Gibbon, James Joyce, Rudyard Kipling, and Thorstein Veblen. (Much later, Cleator added that this was the same Veblen known as “the _Doctor obscurus_ about whose polysyllabic literary outpourings Mencken had published a scathing condemnation in the first of his _Prejudice_ books.”) Mencken more or less told Cleator to pay the magazine—and its sponsoring Society—no mind: “The Fortean Society is a one-man outfit run by a foolish fellow named Thayer. He insists upon treating me with respect, though I can’t recall ever mentioning Fort without denouncing him.”
And, it was true, Thayer continued to treat Mencken with respect, peppering his name in the magazine, though with decreasing intensity. He lightly chided “the good HL” for not doubting the historicity of Jesus Christ—Thayer did, and new others who did as well. When balls of fire were seen over Baltimore, Thayer wondered if “God is after Mencken.”
With rocketry now something more than an arcane pursuit of enthusiasts, there started to be more public shuffling about its future. In America, Robert L. Farnsworth, who billed himself as a Fortean, championed the idea of America taking the lead and claiming the moon for herself. (There were others who attempted to stake claims on it through the American government.) This bumptious approach to space exploration irritated the more restrained members of the BIS. Arthur C. Clarke wrote a condemnation of Farnsworth and his stumping. Cleator criticized Farnsworth in the January 1947 issue of the Bulletin of the BIS 1947; he sent his piece on to Mencken, which prompted Mencken to revisit the place of the Fortean Society in American culture: “The followers of Charles Fort have a national organization called the Fortean Society, and it includes many dignitaries. The late Theodore Dreiser, the novelist, was a leading member. These idiots devote themselves on the one hand to sneering at all reputable science, and on the other to whooping up Fort’s nonsense. Farmsworth [sic] is a new one to me, but your account of him does not surprise me.”
Something there was an itch that needed to be scratched, because Mencken returned to the subject again a few months later—perhaps prompted by an exchange of letters between Cleator and Thayer—in May. While far short of an endorsement, this analysis of the Society—and it was brief—was the closest to positive. Perhaps he recognized that he and Thayer (and Fort, to an extent) had a similar criticism of the mass media, and its inability to put forward facts—although he had made the problem worse at times, with his hoaxes. Mostly, though, it seems that he almost appreciated Thayer’s political stance, which was foursquare against World War II and suspicious of the powers-that-be, sensing some kind of grand conspiracy. On the 8th of the month, he wrote to Cleator, “The _Fortean Magazine_ is operated single-handed and alone by a strange fellow named Tiffany Thayer. He has shown an almost incredible mixture of intelligence and imbecility. As the war was coming on he wrote about it with great realism and complete plausibility, but nevertheless he insists that Fort was a great scientific reformer and that all other scientists are frauds and scoundrels. I am glad that he noted the fact that I am not a member of his organization.”
On 23 November 1948, Mencken suffered the stroke that effectively ended his life as a public intellectual and his correspondence with Cleator. He passed away 29 May 1956. Thayer eulogized him in his magazine, though without much enthusiasm—the devotion he had once felt obviously now gone. “What malicious Fate is aiming her shafts at Baltimore? First, H. L. Mencken, then—in the same 24 hours--a fire that killed ten, and now our Accepted Fellow. Dr. Robert Lindner.”
In 1953, Cleator published “Into Space,” put out by George Allen & Unwin. An American edition came out the following year. P. Schuyler Miller reviewed it for the science fiction magazine “Astounding,” praising it for its well-considered opinions on the future of space flight, but bemoaning the fact that it had come out too late, after many much lesser books had already been published, and so it was unlikely to get the kind of attention it deserved. Creator would continue his interest in rocketry—he wrote books on the space race and space flight—and association with the Society he had co-founded. But his writing would become more extensive. He put out books on robotics, history, archeology, treasure hunting, castles, metallurgy, weapons, and linguistics.
