A minor Fortean—whose story nonetheless leads to an interesting Fortean nexus: a knot interrelating Forteanism and other cultural arenas.
We’re talking about Reider Thurston Sherwin. I have not been able to verify his life story before 1930—but there are clues, just not definitive facts. According to later records, Sherwin was born in Norway during the 1880s or so—various documents place his birth at 1884, 1888, and 1892. His first name was variously written as Richard, Reibar, Reidar, and Reider. He migrated to the United States around 1913—this according to a later census, I can find no contemporary documents—possibly with a sister (mentioned in his obituary) named Lily. Supposedly, he became naturalized—again according to a census, not contemporary documents—and served in the Great War—ditto.
On 19 June 1920, he married Josephine Hampel, daughter of a German immigrant father and American mother. Born in 1880—and therefore older than Reider, whatever his own birthdate—she was a teacher, chosen to serve on the Teacher’s Counsel just a few weeks before her wedding date. The couple do not seem to have had any children, which is not really surprising given that Josephine had just turned 40. The marriage record is the first documentation of Sherwin’s American life I can find. He and Josephine also appear in the 1925 New York census, where he is listed as a credit man. Josephine was still working as a teacher, indicating a degree of independence on her part. They were living in Jackson Heights, Queens county.
We’re talking about Reider Thurston Sherwin. I have not been able to verify his life story before 1930—but there are clues, just not definitive facts. According to later records, Sherwin was born in Norway during the 1880s or so—various documents place his birth at 1884, 1888, and 1892. His first name was variously written as Richard, Reibar, Reidar, and Reider. He migrated to the United States around 1913—this according to a later census, I can find no contemporary documents—possibly with a sister (mentioned in his obituary) named Lily. Supposedly, he became naturalized—again according to a census, not contemporary documents—and served in the Great War—ditto.
On 19 June 1920, he married Josephine Hampel, daughter of a German immigrant father and American mother. Born in 1880—and therefore older than Reider, whatever his own birthdate—she was a teacher, chosen to serve on the Teacher’s Counsel just a few weeks before her wedding date. The couple do not seem to have had any children, which is not really surprising given that Josephine had just turned 40. The marriage record is the first documentation of Sherwin’s American life I can find. He and Josephine also appear in the 1925 New York census, where he is listed as a credit man. Josephine was still working as a teacher, indicating a degree of independence on her part. They were living in Jackson Heights, Queens county.
He may also have been a tinkerer. Patent 1,502,214—dated 22 July 1924—is attributed to Reidar T. Sherwin of Jackson Heights, Queens, New York. It had been filed on 26 November 1923. The patent described a device to keep automobiles from skidding. According to the plans, there was to be a box full of sand attached to the car which, at the driver’s discretion, could be opened up, dropping sand in front of the rear wheels to better their grip—and prevent skidding. Certainly, the idea represents a kind go genius—a very naive one, that is. The idea that cars would be driving around the city, dropping bunches of sand—that there would be dispensaries of sand for constant refilling—the idea just wasn’t thought through very well.
By 1929, the family had relocated to 5 Bogert Place, in Yonkers, where they would spend the rest of their lives, The City Directory had Reider as a credit man still; Josephine did not have a separate listing, so it is impossible to tell if she continued to work. She wasn’t working the next year, according to the 1930 census; Reider’s job was described as an accountant. Their ages had changed, both listed as being born in 1892—thus the age of their first marriage, which is listed as 28, refers to their marriage to each other, in 1920, since Josephine, at least, had shaved twelve years off her age. The years later, in 1940, she had adjusted her age again, though not so dramatically: she called herself 56, rather than 60. (Reider also listed himself as 56.) Josephine still was not listed as working outside of the home—though it was noted she had spent at least five years in college. Reider, who had only finished high school, was still working as an accountant, for a textile outfit. He made $5,000 that year—about the equivalent of $84,000 in 2015. He also said that he had income from other sources. In short, the Sherwins were very comfortable.
The comfortable financial situation might go some way to explain why 1940 was also the year that Sherwin announced his amateur interest in linguistics. It was an . . . unusual interest, one that would consume him for the rest of his life, and bring him into connection with the Fortean Society, as well as tie him into the worlds of poetry and language reform, albeit by extension. At some point, Sherwin was speaking with someone else, who referred to a place name—the place is unknown—remarking that the name was derived from an Indian (read: Native American) word. Sherwin noted that the name sounded like it came from a Norwegian dialect, which got him thinking. Soon enough, he had tracked down a number of dictionaries of the Algonquin language, noting that the words were incredibly similar Norwegian words. Not necessarily in the way they were spelled but in the sound. Indeed, he could derive every Algonquin word he came across from a Norwegian antecedent.
Sherwin published “The Viking and the Red Man” in 1940—it was put out by Funk & Wagnalls, a reputable publisher. Over the next seventeen years, he would self-publish seven more volumes. Of these, I have only seen the third and 6th-8th, but understand they all follow a similar format. The introductory matter lays out Sherwin’s argument that Norse visitors to North America way back around the year 1,000 impressed their language onto the Native Americans they met as they moved West. The exact mechanism by which the small group of foreign invaders converted the natives to a new language is not clear, at least from my reading. The bulk of the book is a list—it’s basically a dictionary: something an accountant might choose to write. It shows how “Algonquin” words—there is confusion over the exact identity of the Native Americans—parallel words of Old Norse.
The book was not well received by the academic community. A review in Scandinavian Studies savaged it. The reviewer pointed out that Sherwin could not account for the mechanism by which Indians chose to speak a new language; nor did he seem to understand the way languages spread in a historical way, merging and mixing rather than supplanting. Sherwin apparently did not know Old Norse, nor Algonquin, but rather worked from various Algonquin dictionaries (into French and English) and his own understanding of Norwegian dialects.
Later Sherwin’s studies would be combined with other controversial histories, in particular the translation of the so-called “Walam Olum,” by 19th-century naturalist Constanin Rafinesque, which purported to be the origin myth of the Lenape people. Together Rafinesque’s theories and Sherwin’s seem to give credence to the idea that Christian ideas spread to North America long before Columbus made his visit. There continue to be advocates of such a view—I may not be doing it full justice in its width and depth, I admit—but the ideas are well outside the mainstream and not accepted by academics or acknowledged scholars of the Norse, Norse settlement of North America, or Native American history.
Apparently, the writing of these works took up all of Sherwin’s time after 1940. I find a few mentions of him in newspapers, always attached to the publication of his book, but not much else from the years leading up to World War II, or after. He and Josephine had settled comfortably in Yonkers; presumably, see retired at some point—he did have a social security number. And he wrote. Josephine seems to have helped—he called her his “steadfast collaborator.” I can kind of relate to his quixotic quest—after all, here I am, scribbling away about various Forteans, words, words, and more words about a relatively fringe subject.
Josephine died in 1956. Sherwin treasured her memory, dedicating each of the last three volumes to her. There’s a suggestion that he remarried, too. His own obituary mentions his sister, Lilly Johnson, as well as a surviving wife, Delight Sherwin. (There’s a name!) I cannot find any records relating to her, though, so leave it as a mystery.
Reider died a little more than a year after his first wife. The Bronxville, NY “Review Press-Reporter,” ran his obituary on page 13 of the 16 May 1957 edition:
“Reider T. Sherwin was an Author
Reidar [sic] T. Sherwin, an author, of 5 Bogert Place, Bronxville, died Monday, May 13, in Lawrence Hospital following a short illness. A native of Norway, he leaves his wife, Delight Sherwin and a sister, Mrs. Lilly Johnson.
“Services will be conducted at the Fred H. McGrath and Son Funeral Home, Bronxville, on Thursday, May 16 at 10 A.M. with burial in the Evergreen Cemetery, Brooklyn.”
*********
I do not know that Sherwin ever had any interest in Fort, or read Fort. Certainly, his late-life avocation had a Fortean flavor: disproving history as it was taught, and erecting a brand new and different structure on the remains. New Lands, indeed. Though by all lights, Reider was committed to his alternative history in a way that Fort was not to his alternative cosmology; nor does Reider seem to have been after a larger philosophical point in the way that Fort was pressing the case for monism. Nonetheless, his hobby fits well enough into the Fortean mold.
That is especially true the way that Thayer developed Forteanism in the years after Fort’s passing. Late in 1948, Thayer published Doubt #22. He admitted to Russell that the British science fiction writer probably wouldn’t like it—at the time Thayer was pushing himself to finish his book on the Mona Lisa and just didn’t have enough time for Doubt. (As it happened, the Mona Lisa book still wouldn’t come out for years.) So what he published—I haven’t seen it—was a bibliography of books purporting pre-Columbus contact between Europe and America. For whatever reason, Thayer found the idea worthy of contemplation. Given that the book he was working on—projected to be one of 21 volumes!—was set in 1400s Italy, he may have had some personal reasons, but nothing I have come across to this point.
Likely, then, Thayer approached Sherwin, after the first volumes of his book came out. Because Sherwin’s name—which appears only twice in Doubt—first shows up in issue 18, from July 1947, more than a year before Thayer published his bibliography. Already Sherwin is listed as a MFS—Member of the Fortean Society—which would indicate that—if indeed it was Thayer who approached Sherwin—Sherwin agreed to be associated with the Society and paid some dues. Comfortable as he was, financially, or seemed to be, the dues would not have been a hardship and—to add speculation on top of speculation—perhaps Sherwin thought he had found a sympathetic audience, perhaps even a way of publicizing his books, which otherwise seemed to provoke no comment after the negative reception of the first volume, even turning off publishers.
At any rate, that is what Thayer provided—advertising. Under the title “Pre-Colon Lingo,” he wrote, “The Algonquin Indians speak Norwegian, and you may take our word for it, or read the four volumes MFS Reider T. Sherwin has written to prove it.” The Society was selling all four books, each for $2.50. Thayer admitted that Sherwin was not a trained philologist, but his work had sparked an interest among scholars. Apparently he was referring to those who wrote forewords to the first three editions, Charles Earle Funk—the publisher; William B. Goodwin, who helped establish that the Vikings landed in Vinalnd; and Olaf M. Norlie, a Lutheran minister. H. L. Mencken—not incidentally one of Thayer’s heroes—did cite Sherwin approvingly in the supplement to his “American Language,” which Thayer may have known about. Beyond that, though, I’m not sure who Thayer meant, since Sherwin’s reception by academics seems to have ben quite cold. Still, he was impressed by how “marvelously alike” the thousands of words in the vocabularies were. He then went on to point out other books in a similar vein: Jennings C. Wise, “The Mystery of Columbus” (ironically, Wise may have been among those who ratted Thayer out to the FBI for his seditious writing) and Leo Wiener who in 1920 published four volumes arguing African medicine men had brought Arabic science to America and Mrs. John B. Shipley who argued Icelanders had discovered America.
Reider only appeared once more in Doubt, of which I am aware. (I have not seen #22, and it is likely he was listed there.) That was in Doubt 21, June 1948, in a passing comment. Thayer was rhapsodizing about a new Fortean he had found, the German Ernst Fuhrmann who, among many, many other things, argued that, at some point in the distant past, all people shared a common language. Thayer continued—whether this is speculative or an accurate account of Fuhrmann’s ideas is unclear—“This makes him both critical and appreciative of MFS Sherwin’s Viking and Red Man, which attempts to prove that the Algonquin Indians spoke Norse. Fuhrmann says--so did everybody else, only it wasn’t Norse, but a much older tongue.”
That Sherwin seemed to have little interest in Forteanism—that he was not mentioned again in Doubt after 1948—that he does not seem to have mentioned Fort in any of his writings—none of that means his Fortean career ended in 1948. In many ways, it was just beginning, though he remained on the fringes of Fortean Society, connecting it with other cultural realms that were themselves not quite Fortean.
To understand what happened with Sherwin’s ideas, it is helpful to understand what was happening with linguistics at the time. In the late nineteenth-century, though the early parts of the twentieth, there had been a movement to create a universal language, something to overcome the barriers of culture and nation. These attempts culminated in Esperanto. By the 1930s—though enthusiasm for Esperanto would continue, especially in science fiction circles—the leading edge of popular linguistics had changed directions. Anika Okrent writes, “In the post-Esperanto era [the 1930s and 1940s], language was being accused of everything from genocide to tooth decay. Now the problem with language was its dangerous grip on thought. But what was the solution? Not to invent a new language. No one took that idea seriously anymore. . . . This time, the solution was to bring language into line with reality, to polish the grime and the rust off the tools, teach people how to use them properly, and path them into service for the truth.”
Sherwin’s ideas fit into this trend—but were also overshadowed—swallowed up—by it. He had clarified, in his own mind, the Algonquin language, making known a larger truth: that the Norse had come first to America, shaped the way its aboriginal people spoke, and thought. Others were doing something similar with language, though in a grander way. The trend had been growing since the 1920s, with “The Meaning of Meaning” and reached its apex in the thirties with Alfred Korzybski’s “General Semantics,” and its various popularizations. Many Forteans were taken with Korzybski’s ideas and, after first dismissing them, even Thayer seemed to come around to the idea that Korzybski’s program was in line with Fort: he was a rich man’s For, coining new sesquipedalian words left and right while Fort had been content with demotic English.
Roughly put, Korzybski’s idea was that language was often so abstract that it got in the way of a person’s understanding of reality: it became its own system, tenuously tethered to reality. The goal of his “General Semantics”—which became an institute, training others in the practice—was to make people aware of the problems caused by language and to undo its errors. There is something more than a family relationship between General Semantics, and Dianetics, as it was developed by L. Ron Hubbard, although that also drew on older (discredited) theories of genetics and Freudian, thought, too. Both, though, were quite popular in science fiction and, indeed, Fortean circles, and both were of a piece with the linguistic trends of their day: to clear out of the mind the irrationalities created (at least in part) by language and bring the person’s understanding closer to reality.
These various strands of Fortean skepticism and linguistic reform met in the person of Charles Olson, a poet. (It’s striking how much Fortean history intersects with the history of mid-20th-century poetry.) As far as I can tell, Olson never mentioned or read Fort—and we have a good idea of what he read and who he cited, as his papers and library were donated to universities and have been the subject of academic investigation. But he was ensconced in a Fortean network. Olson was profoundly influenced by Ezra Pound—Thayer’s friend, who did mention Fort in at least one of his poetic works—and Olson’s first book of poetry was published by the Fortean Caresse Crosby. It was titled Y & X, the very names that Fort gave to his first two books of non-ficiton—books the would be burned—but that seems to be only a coincidence—perhaps of some inscrutable Fortean significance, though. In time, he would teach at Black Mountain College, the experimental educational outpost that would help spawn the Beats, and influenced later poets, some of Fortean bent, such as Robert Duncan.
In 1950, Olson published a manifesto, “Projective Voice,” that picked up from Pound’s poetic ideas and married them to current concerns about language. Early in his career, Pound had been associated with the poetic movement know as Imagism, which promoted clear, concise language and thought that the form of a poem should evolve out of its contents, making room for free verse. Pound’s imagism matured into what has been called an ideogrammatic technique—based upon his reading of Chinese characters—that expressed abstract principles through concrete images. He put these to use most favorably in his “Cantos,” a series of 120 connected poems—each a Cantos—that was left unfinished at the time of his death.
Olson’s “Projective Voice” also had structure emerging from content—the lay-out of his open-verse poems was distinctive—and, critically, worried over the relationship between word and image. “ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION. It means exactly what it says, is a matter of, at all points (even, I should say, of our management of daily reality as of the daily work) get on with it, keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen.” As explained by his friend, Robert Creeley, what Olson meant was that what held a poem together was not logic, not syntax or form, but the procession of immediate images—and, indeed, as Olson push into later, more than the image, the succession of sound was important. (One is tempted to think of Fort’s Procession of the Damned.) Olson found his ideal language not in Chinese ideograms, as with Pound, but in the language of the Mayans: as with so many of the Beats, he was drawn south, down Mexico way.
He put these ideas into practice with his own long series of poems—the idea, not the execution, modeled on Pound’s “Cantos”—which he called “Maximus.” Olson began the poems in 1950, but they would not be fully published until after his death, from complications this alcoholism, in 1970. We know that during the time of their composition Olson read his Korzybski, and seems to have been especially influenced by our man Reider T. Sherwin: he collected all 8 volumes and annotations of “Maximus” find reason to cite Sherwin a number of times. The connection between Olson and Sherwin seems self-explanatory, and had nothing to do with whether Sherwin was in any sense right or wrong in his linguistic hypotheses. (I do not know what Olson thought of Sherwin’s veracity.) For Sherwin, sound was the first clue to linguistic families—and for Olson sound was what helped to connect one image to the next; for Sherwin, a word could be decomposed into an exact object; for Olson, the best poetic words were those that were the most concrete. The form of Sherwin’s book was artificial and too academic, but otherwise he was practicing a kind of Projective Voice Avant la Lettre.
And just so a renegade linguist and minor Fortean became part of a larger poetic project—a larger linguistic project—with its own ramifying roots, some of those leading back to Forteanism.
By 1929, the family had relocated to 5 Bogert Place, in Yonkers, where they would spend the rest of their lives, The City Directory had Reider as a credit man still; Josephine did not have a separate listing, so it is impossible to tell if she continued to work. She wasn’t working the next year, according to the 1930 census; Reider’s job was described as an accountant. Their ages had changed, both listed as being born in 1892—thus the age of their first marriage, which is listed as 28, refers to their marriage to each other, in 1920, since Josephine, at least, had shaved twelve years off her age. The years later, in 1940, she had adjusted her age again, though not so dramatically: she called herself 56, rather than 60. (Reider also listed himself as 56.) Josephine still was not listed as working outside of the home—though it was noted she had spent at least five years in college. Reider, who had only finished high school, was still working as an accountant, for a textile outfit. He made $5,000 that year—about the equivalent of $84,000 in 2015. He also said that he had income from other sources. In short, the Sherwins were very comfortable.
The comfortable financial situation might go some way to explain why 1940 was also the year that Sherwin announced his amateur interest in linguistics. It was an . . . unusual interest, one that would consume him for the rest of his life, and bring him into connection with the Fortean Society, as well as tie him into the worlds of poetry and language reform, albeit by extension. At some point, Sherwin was speaking with someone else, who referred to a place name—the place is unknown—remarking that the name was derived from an Indian (read: Native American) word. Sherwin noted that the name sounded like it came from a Norwegian dialect, which got him thinking. Soon enough, he had tracked down a number of dictionaries of the Algonquin language, noting that the words were incredibly similar Norwegian words. Not necessarily in the way they were spelled but in the sound. Indeed, he could derive every Algonquin word he came across from a Norwegian antecedent.
Sherwin published “The Viking and the Red Man” in 1940—it was put out by Funk & Wagnalls, a reputable publisher. Over the next seventeen years, he would self-publish seven more volumes. Of these, I have only seen the third and 6th-8th, but understand they all follow a similar format. The introductory matter lays out Sherwin’s argument that Norse visitors to North America way back around the year 1,000 impressed their language onto the Native Americans they met as they moved West. The exact mechanism by which the small group of foreign invaders converted the natives to a new language is not clear, at least from my reading. The bulk of the book is a list—it’s basically a dictionary: something an accountant might choose to write. It shows how “Algonquin” words—there is confusion over the exact identity of the Native Americans—parallel words of Old Norse.
The book was not well received by the academic community. A review in Scandinavian Studies savaged it. The reviewer pointed out that Sherwin could not account for the mechanism by which Indians chose to speak a new language; nor did he seem to understand the way languages spread in a historical way, merging and mixing rather than supplanting. Sherwin apparently did not know Old Norse, nor Algonquin, but rather worked from various Algonquin dictionaries (into French and English) and his own understanding of Norwegian dialects.
Later Sherwin’s studies would be combined with other controversial histories, in particular the translation of the so-called “Walam Olum,” by 19th-century naturalist Constanin Rafinesque, which purported to be the origin myth of the Lenape people. Together Rafinesque’s theories and Sherwin’s seem to give credence to the idea that Christian ideas spread to North America long before Columbus made his visit. There continue to be advocates of such a view—I may not be doing it full justice in its width and depth, I admit—but the ideas are well outside the mainstream and not accepted by academics or acknowledged scholars of the Norse, Norse settlement of North America, or Native American history.
Apparently, the writing of these works took up all of Sherwin’s time after 1940. I find a few mentions of him in newspapers, always attached to the publication of his book, but not much else from the years leading up to World War II, or after. He and Josephine had settled comfortably in Yonkers; presumably, see retired at some point—he did have a social security number. And he wrote. Josephine seems to have helped—he called her his “steadfast collaborator.” I can kind of relate to his quixotic quest—after all, here I am, scribbling away about various Forteans, words, words, and more words about a relatively fringe subject.
Josephine died in 1956. Sherwin treasured her memory, dedicating each of the last three volumes to her. There’s a suggestion that he remarried, too. His own obituary mentions his sister, Lilly Johnson, as well as a surviving wife, Delight Sherwin. (There’s a name!) I cannot find any records relating to her, though, so leave it as a mystery.
Reider died a little more than a year after his first wife. The Bronxville, NY “Review Press-Reporter,” ran his obituary on page 13 of the 16 May 1957 edition:
“Reider T. Sherwin was an Author
Reidar [sic] T. Sherwin, an author, of 5 Bogert Place, Bronxville, died Monday, May 13, in Lawrence Hospital following a short illness. A native of Norway, he leaves his wife, Delight Sherwin and a sister, Mrs. Lilly Johnson.
“Services will be conducted at the Fred H. McGrath and Son Funeral Home, Bronxville, on Thursday, May 16 at 10 A.M. with burial in the Evergreen Cemetery, Brooklyn.”
*********
I do not know that Sherwin ever had any interest in Fort, or read Fort. Certainly, his late-life avocation had a Fortean flavor: disproving history as it was taught, and erecting a brand new and different structure on the remains. New Lands, indeed. Though by all lights, Reider was committed to his alternative history in a way that Fort was not to his alternative cosmology; nor does Reider seem to have been after a larger philosophical point in the way that Fort was pressing the case for monism. Nonetheless, his hobby fits well enough into the Fortean mold.
That is especially true the way that Thayer developed Forteanism in the years after Fort’s passing. Late in 1948, Thayer published Doubt #22. He admitted to Russell that the British science fiction writer probably wouldn’t like it—at the time Thayer was pushing himself to finish his book on the Mona Lisa and just didn’t have enough time for Doubt. (As it happened, the Mona Lisa book still wouldn’t come out for years.) So what he published—I haven’t seen it—was a bibliography of books purporting pre-Columbus contact between Europe and America. For whatever reason, Thayer found the idea worthy of contemplation. Given that the book he was working on—projected to be one of 21 volumes!—was set in 1400s Italy, he may have had some personal reasons, but nothing I have come across to this point.
Likely, then, Thayer approached Sherwin, after the first volumes of his book came out. Because Sherwin’s name—which appears only twice in Doubt—first shows up in issue 18, from July 1947, more than a year before Thayer published his bibliography. Already Sherwin is listed as a MFS—Member of the Fortean Society—which would indicate that—if indeed it was Thayer who approached Sherwin—Sherwin agreed to be associated with the Society and paid some dues. Comfortable as he was, financially, or seemed to be, the dues would not have been a hardship and—to add speculation on top of speculation—perhaps Sherwin thought he had found a sympathetic audience, perhaps even a way of publicizing his books, which otherwise seemed to provoke no comment after the negative reception of the first volume, even turning off publishers.
At any rate, that is what Thayer provided—advertising. Under the title “Pre-Colon Lingo,” he wrote, “The Algonquin Indians speak Norwegian, and you may take our word for it, or read the four volumes MFS Reider T. Sherwin has written to prove it.” The Society was selling all four books, each for $2.50. Thayer admitted that Sherwin was not a trained philologist, but his work had sparked an interest among scholars. Apparently he was referring to those who wrote forewords to the first three editions, Charles Earle Funk—the publisher; William B. Goodwin, who helped establish that the Vikings landed in Vinalnd; and Olaf M. Norlie, a Lutheran minister. H. L. Mencken—not incidentally one of Thayer’s heroes—did cite Sherwin approvingly in the supplement to his “American Language,” which Thayer may have known about. Beyond that, though, I’m not sure who Thayer meant, since Sherwin’s reception by academics seems to have ben quite cold. Still, he was impressed by how “marvelously alike” the thousands of words in the vocabularies were. He then went on to point out other books in a similar vein: Jennings C. Wise, “The Mystery of Columbus” (ironically, Wise may have been among those who ratted Thayer out to the FBI for his seditious writing) and Leo Wiener who in 1920 published four volumes arguing African medicine men had brought Arabic science to America and Mrs. John B. Shipley who argued Icelanders had discovered America.
Reider only appeared once more in Doubt, of which I am aware. (I have not seen #22, and it is likely he was listed there.) That was in Doubt 21, June 1948, in a passing comment. Thayer was rhapsodizing about a new Fortean he had found, the German Ernst Fuhrmann who, among many, many other things, argued that, at some point in the distant past, all people shared a common language. Thayer continued—whether this is speculative or an accurate account of Fuhrmann’s ideas is unclear—“This makes him both critical and appreciative of MFS Sherwin’s Viking and Red Man, which attempts to prove that the Algonquin Indians spoke Norse. Fuhrmann says--so did everybody else, only it wasn’t Norse, but a much older tongue.”
That Sherwin seemed to have little interest in Forteanism—that he was not mentioned again in Doubt after 1948—that he does not seem to have mentioned Fort in any of his writings—none of that means his Fortean career ended in 1948. In many ways, it was just beginning, though he remained on the fringes of Fortean Society, connecting it with other cultural realms that were themselves not quite Fortean.
To understand what happened with Sherwin’s ideas, it is helpful to understand what was happening with linguistics at the time. In the late nineteenth-century, though the early parts of the twentieth, there had been a movement to create a universal language, something to overcome the barriers of culture and nation. These attempts culminated in Esperanto. By the 1930s—though enthusiasm for Esperanto would continue, especially in science fiction circles—the leading edge of popular linguistics had changed directions. Anika Okrent writes, “In the post-Esperanto era [the 1930s and 1940s], language was being accused of everything from genocide to tooth decay. Now the problem with language was its dangerous grip on thought. But what was the solution? Not to invent a new language. No one took that idea seriously anymore. . . . This time, the solution was to bring language into line with reality, to polish the grime and the rust off the tools, teach people how to use them properly, and path them into service for the truth.”
Sherwin’s ideas fit into this trend—but were also overshadowed—swallowed up—by it. He had clarified, in his own mind, the Algonquin language, making known a larger truth: that the Norse had come first to America, shaped the way its aboriginal people spoke, and thought. Others were doing something similar with language, though in a grander way. The trend had been growing since the 1920s, with “The Meaning of Meaning” and reached its apex in the thirties with Alfred Korzybski’s “General Semantics,” and its various popularizations. Many Forteans were taken with Korzybski’s ideas and, after first dismissing them, even Thayer seemed to come around to the idea that Korzybski’s program was in line with Fort: he was a rich man’s For, coining new sesquipedalian words left and right while Fort had been content with demotic English.
Roughly put, Korzybski’s idea was that language was often so abstract that it got in the way of a person’s understanding of reality: it became its own system, tenuously tethered to reality. The goal of his “General Semantics”—which became an institute, training others in the practice—was to make people aware of the problems caused by language and to undo its errors. There is something more than a family relationship between General Semantics, and Dianetics, as it was developed by L. Ron Hubbard, although that also drew on older (discredited) theories of genetics and Freudian, thought, too. Both, though, were quite popular in science fiction and, indeed, Fortean circles, and both were of a piece with the linguistic trends of their day: to clear out of the mind the irrationalities created (at least in part) by language and bring the person’s understanding closer to reality.
These various strands of Fortean skepticism and linguistic reform met in the person of Charles Olson, a poet. (It’s striking how much Fortean history intersects with the history of mid-20th-century poetry.) As far as I can tell, Olson never mentioned or read Fort—and we have a good idea of what he read and who he cited, as his papers and library were donated to universities and have been the subject of academic investigation. But he was ensconced in a Fortean network. Olson was profoundly influenced by Ezra Pound—Thayer’s friend, who did mention Fort in at least one of his poetic works—and Olson’s first book of poetry was published by the Fortean Caresse Crosby. It was titled Y & X, the very names that Fort gave to his first two books of non-ficiton—books the would be burned—but that seems to be only a coincidence—perhaps of some inscrutable Fortean significance, though. In time, he would teach at Black Mountain College, the experimental educational outpost that would help spawn the Beats, and influenced later poets, some of Fortean bent, such as Robert Duncan.
In 1950, Olson published a manifesto, “Projective Voice,” that picked up from Pound’s poetic ideas and married them to current concerns about language. Early in his career, Pound had been associated with the poetic movement know as Imagism, which promoted clear, concise language and thought that the form of a poem should evolve out of its contents, making room for free verse. Pound’s imagism matured into what has been called an ideogrammatic technique—based upon his reading of Chinese characters—that expressed abstract principles through concrete images. He put these to use most favorably in his “Cantos,” a series of 120 connected poems—each a Cantos—that was left unfinished at the time of his death.
Olson’s “Projective Voice” also had structure emerging from content—the lay-out of his open-verse poems was distinctive—and, critically, worried over the relationship between word and image. “ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION. It means exactly what it says, is a matter of, at all points (even, I should say, of our management of daily reality as of the daily work) get on with it, keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen.” As explained by his friend, Robert Creeley, what Olson meant was that what held a poem together was not logic, not syntax or form, but the procession of immediate images—and, indeed, as Olson push into later, more than the image, the succession of sound was important. (One is tempted to think of Fort’s Procession of the Damned.) Olson found his ideal language not in Chinese ideograms, as with Pound, but in the language of the Mayans: as with so many of the Beats, he was drawn south, down Mexico way.
He put these ideas into practice with his own long series of poems—the idea, not the execution, modeled on Pound’s “Cantos”—which he called “Maximus.” Olson began the poems in 1950, but they would not be fully published until after his death, from complications this alcoholism, in 1970. We know that during the time of their composition Olson read his Korzybski, and seems to have been especially influenced by our man Reider T. Sherwin: he collected all 8 volumes and annotations of “Maximus” find reason to cite Sherwin a number of times. The connection between Olson and Sherwin seems self-explanatory, and had nothing to do with whether Sherwin was in any sense right or wrong in his linguistic hypotheses. (I do not know what Olson thought of Sherwin’s veracity.) For Sherwin, sound was the first clue to linguistic families—and for Olson sound was what helped to connect one image to the next; for Sherwin, a word could be decomposed into an exact object; for Olson, the best poetic words were those that were the most concrete. The form of Sherwin’s book was artificial and too academic, but otherwise he was practicing a kind of Projective Voice Avant la Lettre.
And just so a renegade linguist and minor Fortean became part of a larger poetic project—a larger linguistic project—with its own ramifying roots, some of those leading back to Forteanism.
