Robert Spencer Carr. (NYPL Digital Gallery.) There’s a fair amount of misinformation around Robert Spencer Carr, a writer of promise who worked against his talents and went through several different incarnations, one of them as a Fortean.
Robert Spencer Carr was born in 1909. That much seems reliable. And we can say it was on 26 March. Some sources—such as Bleiler’s Science Fiction, The Early Years and Disch’s The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of--have him as the brother of novelist John Dickson Carr, but this is not the case. Usually, his birth place is given as Washington, D.C., but the earliest sources indicate he was actually born in West Virginia. His parents were Frederick N. Carr (also from West Virginia) and Agnes M. Carr (from Indiana), a lawyer and homemaker. According to the 1910 census, the Carr’s were living in West Virginia with his paternal grandparents and a cousin. The family had relocated to DC by the time of the next census. I know nothing about Carr’s childhood, whether it was happy or sad, enchanted or troubled.
By 1925, Carr was living in Ashley, Ohio, and making headlines in Columbus newspapers for becoming a published author. His first known sale was to Weird Tales, which published his “The Composite Brain” in the March 1925 issue. He turned 16 that very month. Weird Tales continued to publish him, “The Flying Halfback” appearing in the September issue of that year, “Spider-Bite” in the June 1926 issue, and his poem “The Caves of Kooli-Kan” in November 1926. But Carr had grander ambitions. He was working on a novel, too, and relocated himself to Chicago, where he could be close to Weird Tales’ editor, Farnsworth Wright, whom he convinced to help edit the manuscript. Life was hard here. He was living in a crime-ridden part of the city, subsisting entirely upon canned milk and potatoes boiled over a gas flame.
Wright took Carr under his wing, although he did not know the degree of his destitution. At the time, a number of writers and artists associated with Weird Tales lived in the area, and Wright introduced Carr to their cycle of parties, hosted under the aegis of a club called “The Varnished Vultures”—after a dish made by writer E. Hoffman Price. The parties were held at different homes throughout Chicago and northern Indiana as time and money permitted. Chunky, round-faced, with horn-rimmed glasses, Carr impressed as spiritually enlightened, meditative. He carried a notebook around with him and jotted down bits of dialogue he heard, for later use in his writing.
Carr fell in love with the group, and their high-falutin’ discussions—about travel and the military and abstruse calculus: he had a religious imagination and no lack of self-regard. Carr saw himself as “The Apostle of the Younger Generation. Price described the Vultures as a limited liability group—liability limited only by how much one could eat or drink—an un-organization without dues, by-laws, or constitution. “No God, no Law, no Order,” either Carr added. His writing continued to appear in Weird Tales: two stories and two poems in 1927, another two stories and a poem in 1928. But he was cashing in on his ambition, too.
In 1927, he sold his novel to The Smart Set, where it was serialized, before being published in book form, translated into German, and made into a movie. The novel was called The Rampant Age and was a diagnosis of the era’s young people. Harry R. Warfel’s American Novelists of Today describes it thusly:
“Rampant Age (1928), his first novel, tells the causes and cure of juvenile delinquency in the jazz age of 1920 in the story of Paul Benton, who moves from the country to a city, attends high school, and joins the fast set. Drinking, petting, and speeding reflect, the author indicates, the parents’ extravagance.”
Other stories of his started to appear in romance magazines, a branching out from the constraints of Weird Tales.
With a huge paycheck, Carr upgraded his lifestyle. He invited to Vultures to a book release party at the Steven’s Hotel, with unlimited food and drink. He took up with the Bohemian Dill Pickle Club—which hosted other other future Forteans including Kenneth Rexroth, Ben Hecht, Sherwood Anderson, and Theodore Dreiser. He moved to a ritzier apartment—but reality hedged him, too. The apartment was too much, and he needed to break the lease. The manager dismissed the idea out of hand—until Wright swooped in and saved him (again), making the manager believe that Carr (young, brash, curly-haired) was mentally unstable. He thought himself a novelist! Took notes on what people said! Sometime in 1928, Carr accepted an offer from Hollywood and moved west to write for the movies.
Carr continued his vagabonding, repeatedly re-inventing himself over the next four years. He married in 1929, and had a daughter before the marriage broke up. He lit out of Hollywood and took up with Price in New Orleans for a bit, struggling along on what he made from the sale of rights to his book. There he was involved in a couple of messy love affairs. He also maintained his dramatic flair, announcing his arrival in the Crescent City by hiring a one-man band to stand on his car’s running boards. He returned to Hollywood, then left it again, mostly giving up on writing for odd jobs: working on newspapers, in factories, as secretary to a psychoanalyst, in employment agencies and travel bureaus, and as a truck driver.
He became a devoted communist—may have been one, in fact, since The Dill Pickle Club was associated with radical economic sentiment. At any rate, in the early 1930s, as the Great Depression settled over the country, he put his ideals into action, moving to New York, where he worked for the Soviet Union’s Intourist agency, founded in 1929 by Joseph Stalin to tourism to the USSR. In the autumn of 1932, he left for Russia, where he taught English, edited guide books, and was a consultant for movies. He traveled the country, learned the language, and went to college there. He worked with documentary film maker Julien Bryan. In 1937, he left the country, via Finland, returning to the US aboard the “Ile de France” on 27 October.
Carr settled—for a time—in New York, where he became involved with another film company. That one eventually went bust, amid much recriminations, according to Price. He married for a second time, this one to last. In November 1939, he reported to Price that he was going to work for Disney, :the only studio where human dignity is recognized, and Time for me has meaning again.” “This makes at least the third surprise appearance of Vishnu on a snow white charger. … I hope to arrive in Hollywood in a week or so, and want to see you in my latest—and, I believe, relatively final—incarnation.” The incarnation lasted for several years. He became plump—though remained athletic; Katherine gave birth to a son, Timothy Spencer, on 17 August 1940. Even when he switched job, as he did in late 1943, he stayed in town, simply moving to 20th Century Fox. He found his way back to writing. He told Price, “Apparently I’m back on the beam, as far as turning out slick paper copy is concerned, but I have a great deal of trouble with pointless themes, lack of conflict, badly engineered story mechanics, and plots that do not even creak—they stall and sit there.” Price, though, refused to help Carr, and Carr doesn’t seem to have needed it. In August 1943, he sold his firs piece to The Saturday Evening Post. (It appeared in the 20 November issue, under the title “Border Incident.”) And wrote a novel for Appleton-Century, The Bells of St. Ivan’s, drawing on his experiences in Russia. The book pleased the publisher enough he received an advance for two more books. He also published “Lie Detector” in Liberty Magazine.
He was close friends with the writer Odo B. Stade and Price, an avid automobilist, lived only a few hundred miles away, in the Bay Area, so they frequently camped and hiked and fished together. Carr developed a fondness for the dessert tortoise, which he tried to push onto his comrades—“The Eternal Teacher and Guru,” Price said. The three also became Forteans—with Thayer calling out Carr’s accomplishments in an article on the connection between Forteanism and science fiction in June 1943—even as Price chafed at Thayer’s dogmatic ignorance. Carr admitted the Society’s limitations, but still hoped it might do the world some good. By this point, it seems, he had come to terms with the limits of ideological systems, including communism. Price reports that Carr considered logic and words as “mental and verbal masturbation.” He seems to have been reaching for something more ineffable: another incarnation.
But first, there was the need to see more of the world. In May 1944, he joined the U.S. Army as a private. Carr was relatively old for service at 36, although still eligible for the draft. He may also have been influenced to join by Hoffman, who had been a professional soldier for many years, and Stade, who had traveled around the world. At any rate, he stayed in the army for two years, and in New York, where he was teaming up with Julien Bryan again. His mind was elsewhere, though. He was imagining a lamasery in Glorieta, New Mexico. Price remembered:
“Bob visualized a retreat for study, contemplation, getting away from it all. He would have a staff of counsellors to whom he referred variously and vaguely as sages, gurus, and, whimsically, as mahatmas. The more we discussed this Center in an area we called Midway Between Heaven and Earth, the further the International Film Foundation submerged and appeared forgotten.”
The Provisional Lamasery was to house “The Order of the Rainbow.”
Why New Mexico? Maybe he had been impressed with it when he traveled from Los Angeles to Hollywood? Maybe he’d been influenced by neighbors—in 1940 he and Katherine lived next to Robert and Constance McKnight, who had lived in Taos. Maybe some other reason. Whatever the cause, Carr saw New Mexico as America’s answer to Tibet, a mountainous region where the veil between this world and the spiritual one was particularly thin. Carr also seems to have been inspired by Maurice Doreal, an Oklahoman who founded the occult fraternity “Brotherhood of the White Temple” in Sedalia, Colorado around the same time. Doreal—ne Claude Doggins—had also come to the occult through fantastic literature, and Carr had been following his teachings from afar for many years, and was hoping to achieve as an Avatar. Tiffany Thayer thought it a competition. He rubbed his hands: “Wait until Doreal reads about our Llamasary in New Mexico, now building, by Robert Spencer Carr . . . We’ve got wrinkles nobody ever thought of before.”
If it was a competition, Doreal won. The material world continued to hedge Carr’s growth. He had to chuck the idea for the lamasery when Appleton-Century asked for another book—one presumes it may have been difficult finding subscribers, as well—and left Glorieta for Santa Fe, where he went to work for The Northern New Mexico Resort Association as advertising manager. He quipped, “The stationery and title mean nothing except that when I am not writing low-grade fiction I help our local dude ranch owners lure the tourists away from Colorado, a truly Fortean pastime.”
Carr, though, was reaching for something more than low-grade fiction. He wanted to write in the popular vein—he continued to send stories to Saturday Evening Post—that took off from unusual events to explore spirituality. He belonged to the class of Forteans who saw the anomalous as a key to metaphysics—not a new era of the hyphen, of indeterminancy, but evidence for a new spiritual view that—in the great Theosophical tradition—alloyed the spiritual and the material, faith and reason. He was pouring these ideas into his fiction, short stories, novellas, and his final novel The Room Beyond.
To be continued.
Robert Spencer Carr was born in 1909. That much seems reliable. And we can say it was on 26 March. Some sources—such as Bleiler’s Science Fiction, The Early Years and Disch’s The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of--have him as the brother of novelist John Dickson Carr, but this is not the case. Usually, his birth place is given as Washington, D.C., but the earliest sources indicate he was actually born in West Virginia. His parents were Frederick N. Carr (also from West Virginia) and Agnes M. Carr (from Indiana), a lawyer and homemaker. According to the 1910 census, the Carr’s were living in West Virginia with his paternal grandparents and a cousin. The family had relocated to DC by the time of the next census. I know nothing about Carr’s childhood, whether it was happy or sad, enchanted or troubled.
By 1925, Carr was living in Ashley, Ohio, and making headlines in Columbus newspapers for becoming a published author. His first known sale was to Weird Tales, which published his “The Composite Brain” in the March 1925 issue. He turned 16 that very month. Weird Tales continued to publish him, “The Flying Halfback” appearing in the September issue of that year, “Spider-Bite” in the June 1926 issue, and his poem “The Caves of Kooli-Kan” in November 1926. But Carr had grander ambitions. He was working on a novel, too, and relocated himself to Chicago, where he could be close to Weird Tales’ editor, Farnsworth Wright, whom he convinced to help edit the manuscript. Life was hard here. He was living in a crime-ridden part of the city, subsisting entirely upon canned milk and potatoes boiled over a gas flame.
Wright took Carr under his wing, although he did not know the degree of his destitution. At the time, a number of writers and artists associated with Weird Tales lived in the area, and Wright introduced Carr to their cycle of parties, hosted under the aegis of a club called “The Varnished Vultures”—after a dish made by writer E. Hoffman Price. The parties were held at different homes throughout Chicago and northern Indiana as time and money permitted. Chunky, round-faced, with horn-rimmed glasses, Carr impressed as spiritually enlightened, meditative. He carried a notebook around with him and jotted down bits of dialogue he heard, for later use in his writing.
Carr fell in love with the group, and their high-falutin’ discussions—about travel and the military and abstruse calculus: he had a religious imagination and no lack of self-regard. Carr saw himself as “The Apostle of the Younger Generation. Price described the Vultures as a limited liability group—liability limited only by how much one could eat or drink—an un-organization without dues, by-laws, or constitution. “No God, no Law, no Order,” either Carr added. His writing continued to appear in Weird Tales: two stories and two poems in 1927, another two stories and a poem in 1928. But he was cashing in on his ambition, too.
In 1927, he sold his novel to The Smart Set, where it was serialized, before being published in book form, translated into German, and made into a movie. The novel was called The Rampant Age and was a diagnosis of the era’s young people. Harry R. Warfel’s American Novelists of Today describes it thusly:
“Rampant Age (1928), his first novel, tells the causes and cure of juvenile delinquency in the jazz age of 1920 in the story of Paul Benton, who moves from the country to a city, attends high school, and joins the fast set. Drinking, petting, and speeding reflect, the author indicates, the parents’ extravagance.”
Other stories of his started to appear in romance magazines, a branching out from the constraints of Weird Tales.
With a huge paycheck, Carr upgraded his lifestyle. He invited to Vultures to a book release party at the Steven’s Hotel, with unlimited food and drink. He took up with the Bohemian Dill Pickle Club—which hosted other other future Forteans including Kenneth Rexroth, Ben Hecht, Sherwood Anderson, and Theodore Dreiser. He moved to a ritzier apartment—but reality hedged him, too. The apartment was too much, and he needed to break the lease. The manager dismissed the idea out of hand—until Wright swooped in and saved him (again), making the manager believe that Carr (young, brash, curly-haired) was mentally unstable. He thought himself a novelist! Took notes on what people said! Sometime in 1928, Carr accepted an offer from Hollywood and moved west to write for the movies.
Carr continued his vagabonding, repeatedly re-inventing himself over the next four years. He married in 1929, and had a daughter before the marriage broke up. He lit out of Hollywood and took up with Price in New Orleans for a bit, struggling along on what he made from the sale of rights to his book. There he was involved in a couple of messy love affairs. He also maintained his dramatic flair, announcing his arrival in the Crescent City by hiring a one-man band to stand on his car’s running boards. He returned to Hollywood, then left it again, mostly giving up on writing for odd jobs: working on newspapers, in factories, as secretary to a psychoanalyst, in employment agencies and travel bureaus, and as a truck driver.
He became a devoted communist—may have been one, in fact, since The Dill Pickle Club was associated with radical economic sentiment. At any rate, in the early 1930s, as the Great Depression settled over the country, he put his ideals into action, moving to New York, where he worked for the Soviet Union’s Intourist agency, founded in 1929 by Joseph Stalin to tourism to the USSR. In the autumn of 1932, he left for Russia, where he taught English, edited guide books, and was a consultant for movies. He traveled the country, learned the language, and went to college there. He worked with documentary film maker Julien Bryan. In 1937, he left the country, via Finland, returning to the US aboard the “Ile de France” on 27 October.
Carr settled—for a time—in New York, where he became involved with another film company. That one eventually went bust, amid much recriminations, according to Price. He married for a second time, this one to last. In November 1939, he reported to Price that he was going to work for Disney, :the only studio where human dignity is recognized, and Time for me has meaning again.” “This makes at least the third surprise appearance of Vishnu on a snow white charger. … I hope to arrive in Hollywood in a week or so, and want to see you in my latest—and, I believe, relatively final—incarnation.” The incarnation lasted for several years. He became plump—though remained athletic; Katherine gave birth to a son, Timothy Spencer, on 17 August 1940. Even when he switched job, as he did in late 1943, he stayed in town, simply moving to 20th Century Fox. He found his way back to writing. He told Price, “Apparently I’m back on the beam, as far as turning out slick paper copy is concerned, but I have a great deal of trouble with pointless themes, lack of conflict, badly engineered story mechanics, and plots that do not even creak—they stall and sit there.” Price, though, refused to help Carr, and Carr doesn’t seem to have needed it. In August 1943, he sold his firs piece to The Saturday Evening Post. (It appeared in the 20 November issue, under the title “Border Incident.”) And wrote a novel for Appleton-Century, The Bells of St. Ivan’s, drawing on his experiences in Russia. The book pleased the publisher enough he received an advance for two more books. He also published “Lie Detector” in Liberty Magazine.
He was close friends with the writer Odo B. Stade and Price, an avid automobilist, lived only a few hundred miles away, in the Bay Area, so they frequently camped and hiked and fished together. Carr developed a fondness for the dessert tortoise, which he tried to push onto his comrades—“The Eternal Teacher and Guru,” Price said. The three also became Forteans—with Thayer calling out Carr’s accomplishments in an article on the connection between Forteanism and science fiction in June 1943—even as Price chafed at Thayer’s dogmatic ignorance. Carr admitted the Society’s limitations, but still hoped it might do the world some good. By this point, it seems, he had come to terms with the limits of ideological systems, including communism. Price reports that Carr considered logic and words as “mental and verbal masturbation.” He seems to have been reaching for something more ineffable: another incarnation.
But first, there was the need to see more of the world. In May 1944, he joined the U.S. Army as a private. Carr was relatively old for service at 36, although still eligible for the draft. He may also have been influenced to join by Hoffman, who had been a professional soldier for many years, and Stade, who had traveled around the world. At any rate, he stayed in the army for two years, and in New York, where he was teaming up with Julien Bryan again. His mind was elsewhere, though. He was imagining a lamasery in Glorieta, New Mexico. Price remembered:
“Bob visualized a retreat for study, contemplation, getting away from it all. He would have a staff of counsellors to whom he referred variously and vaguely as sages, gurus, and, whimsically, as mahatmas. The more we discussed this Center in an area we called Midway Between Heaven and Earth, the further the International Film Foundation submerged and appeared forgotten.”
The Provisional Lamasery was to house “The Order of the Rainbow.”
Why New Mexico? Maybe he had been impressed with it when he traveled from Los Angeles to Hollywood? Maybe he’d been influenced by neighbors—in 1940 he and Katherine lived next to Robert and Constance McKnight, who had lived in Taos. Maybe some other reason. Whatever the cause, Carr saw New Mexico as America’s answer to Tibet, a mountainous region where the veil between this world and the spiritual one was particularly thin. Carr also seems to have been inspired by Maurice Doreal, an Oklahoman who founded the occult fraternity “Brotherhood of the White Temple” in Sedalia, Colorado around the same time. Doreal—ne Claude Doggins—had also come to the occult through fantastic literature, and Carr had been following his teachings from afar for many years, and was hoping to achieve as an Avatar. Tiffany Thayer thought it a competition. He rubbed his hands: “Wait until Doreal reads about our Llamasary in New Mexico, now building, by Robert Spencer Carr . . . We’ve got wrinkles nobody ever thought of before.”
If it was a competition, Doreal won. The material world continued to hedge Carr’s growth. He had to chuck the idea for the lamasery when Appleton-Century asked for another book—one presumes it may have been difficult finding subscribers, as well—and left Glorieta for Santa Fe, where he went to work for The Northern New Mexico Resort Association as advertising manager. He quipped, “The stationery and title mean nothing except that when I am not writing low-grade fiction I help our local dude ranch owners lure the tourists away from Colorado, a truly Fortean pastime.”
Carr, though, was reaching for something more than low-grade fiction. He wanted to write in the popular vein—he continued to send stories to Saturday Evening Post—that took off from unusual events to explore spirituality. He belonged to the class of Forteans who saw the anomalous as a key to metaphysics—not a new era of the hyphen, of indeterminancy, but evidence for a new spiritual view that—in the great Theosophical tradition—alloyed the spiritual and the material, faith and reason. He was pouring these ideas into his fiction, short stories, novellas, and his final novel The Room Beyond.
To be continued.
