Miriam Allen de Ford and Maynard Shipley discovered Charles Fort in 1921. De Ford was at a library in Oakland, where she came across Fort’s The Book of the Damned. It had been published two years before. She flipped through the book, found it intriguing, and took it home to Shipley, in Sausalito. “My husband and I sat up all night, reading the book aloud to each other, unable to put it down,” she wrote later.
What was the attraction?
Shipley was primarily drawn to the catalog of odd facts—he had little time for Fort’s theories, whether meant as jokes or not. Although obviously a committed scientist, Shipley was open to expanding the known laws to account for unusual phenomena. For instance, in 1919—the same year Fort published The Book of the Damned—he investigated Dr. Albert Abrams for The Scientific American. Abrams was a San Francisco doctor who claimed amazing results with “electronic medicine.” At first, Shipley—who de Ford admits several times was quite naïve—accepted Abrams findings. Eventually, though, he concluded that the doctor was both a charlatan and a dupe.
In her biography of him, de Ford writes that he had several unusual experiences himself. His house in Mill Valley, for instance, was haunted. She said,
What was the attraction?
Shipley was primarily drawn to the catalog of odd facts—he had little time for Fort’s theories, whether meant as jokes or not. Although obviously a committed scientist, Shipley was open to expanding the known laws to account for unusual phenomena. For instance, in 1919—the same year Fort published The Book of the Damned—he investigated Dr. Albert Abrams for The Scientific American. Abrams was a San Francisco doctor who claimed amazing results with “electronic medicine.” At first, Shipley—who de Ford admits several times was quite naïve—accepted Abrams findings. Eventually, though, he concluded that the doctor was both a charlatan and a dupe.
In her biography of him, de Ford writes that he had several unusual experiences himself. His house in Mill Valley, for instance, was haunted. She said,
“Many times have I seen solid objects fly through the air in broad daylight, or start vibrating rapidly when he approached them. I have seen heavily rusted windows open without apparent cause on clear, still days, and then never open again, no matter how high the wind, after Maynard ‘asked’ them to stop. There was a bed in that furnished house in which no one could sleep, because of the overwhelming feeling that some other unseen and hostile person was already in it. There was a pear that danced upon an empty table. There was a door that opened daily at the same hour, following a sound like that of a wet mop being thrown against it. There were raps and puffs of smoke and the tinkle of an invisible bell.
“Maynard tried in every way to explain these occurrences on known material grounds. When a hanging vase containing some wild blackberry branches swung back and forth, without stopping, for two days and nights, he studied it as a manifestation of ‘Plant Movement and Radiant Energy,’ and wrote an account of it under that title for The Scientific American. But too many of these happenings had no possible explanation within the limits of known scientific laws. There were besides, throughout his life, strange mental phenomena too numerous and exact for coincidence—his ability, for example, to tell me in Sausalito just what unexpected letters were in our postoffice box in San Francisco, or his faculty for telling time to the exact minute when he woke suddenly at night—or perhaps his invariable success in predicting the result of every heavyweight championship prize-fight for thirty years, though he never saw one! Certainly neither of us could disbelieve in the actuality of telepathy, whatever its modus operandi, when for so many years we constantly answered each other’s unspoken questions and remarks, sang tunes running through the other’s mind, or awoke at the same moment from the same odd dream. . . .
“These so-called psychic experiences in Mill Valley, and later to a lesser extent in San Francisco and our two Sausalito houses, would have made anyone less determinedly skeptical and rigidly scientific-minded a convinced Spiritualist. Even when he was on a lecture tour, strange things sometimes happened. Once in Woodland, California, he had a room in a lodging-house over a grocery. All night he was kept awake by the sound of hammering and sawing in the store below. In the morning he found no evidence of any construction or repair. But the landlady looked at him queerly and asked if he had been able to sleep in the room she had given him.
“It is no wonder that for a long time he was inclined to believe that ‘this mundane existence of ours is neither the beginning nor the end of the drama of life. . . . We do not, and cannot, while clothed with flesh, know things in themselves. The universe is a multidimensional world, and we three-dimensional simians can see but as “through a glass darkly.”’ In the end, however, he became convinced that though such phenomena as he had witnessed were indubitably real and not hallucinatory, they were not extra-physical, since ‘matter’ and ‘spirit’ are monistically one, and that some day they would be understood and reduced to law.”
Fort, it is worth remembering, was also a monist, and this was one of his chief arguments in The Book of the Damned: that all the world is one.
Nowhere does de Ford ever explicitly explain what she found fascinating about Fort. But it is possible to make some informed guesses, based on what she has written.
Part of her interest was the same as Shipley’s: a marveling at the mass of ignored reports. Like her husband, she called Fort the “Enfant Terrible of Science” and both compared him to an enzyme in the body of science—stimulating, making it go, uncomplacent.
She seems more willing to credit Fort’s unorthodox theories, though. His books, she says, including the odd relations he drew among the damned facts, are like the works of Christopher Wren, monuments to genius. She was also more willing than her husband to suggest that Fort’s hypothesizing was playful, and meant to suggest conclusions even he did not believe.
Enthralled, Shipley wrote to Fort in care of his publisher (to praise the mass of facts and dispute the conclusions Fort had drawn from them.) In 1922, de Ford investigated some Fortean occurrences for him: stones were raining from the sky in Chico, California, and she went there to investigate, even witnessing a rock fall form “some invisible point in the sky and land gently at my feet.” She wrote Fort about her experiences, and he queried her, teaching her “something of his obstinate search for verification.” Her observations appeared in Fort’s second book, New Lands! (1923).
The three continued their correspondence until 1932, when Fort died. Shipley reviewed Lo! In the New York Times, famously concluding, “Reading Fort is a ride on a comet; if the traveler return to earth after the journey, he will find, after his first dizziness has worn off, a new and exhilarating emotion that will color and correct all his future reading of less heady scientific literature.” De Ford continued clipping stories of Fortean phenomena from newspapers and sharing these with Fort. She cameoed again in his final book, Wild Talents (1932), having sent him an article about a room in New Jersey where it rained buckshot.
It is probable that de Ford’s interest in Fort continued through the 1930s, after his death and the death of her husband, but there is no evidence. What we do know is that she came to dislike Tiffany Thayer’s Fortean Society for the same reasons as Robert Barbour Johnson and E. Hoffman Price: he was too dogmatic. And this had nothing to do with his particular points of view. I get the sense that Hoffman and Johnson both disliked Thayer’s anti-War stance. De Ford, on the contrary, was also a peace activist.
We also know that Fort facilitated her writing career, in two ways.
First, it was through her study of Forteana that she met Anthony Boucher. In 1943, Boucher investigated a stone fall in Oakland. Apparently, he contacted de Ford to compare notes with her in regards to the Chico events. They started corresponding, drawn together, apparently, by their shared interest in crime stories.
Looking for new markets in which to write, and somewhat influenced by Boucher, de Ford started to experiment with science fiction, although in a letter to Boucher dated 25 January 1953 she admitted “it isn’t really my field.” And this is the second way that Fort helped her writing career: like so many other science fiction authors, she turned to Fort for writing ideas. Fort, she wrote in a 1953 review of his work for Boucher’s Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, “leveled at the scientists and in large part hit the literary folk.” His theme that humans are property, she noted correctly, was terribly influential on science fiction.
“Henry Martindale, Great Dane,” for example, published by Beyond in 1954 (and later reprinted as "Gone to the Dogs”), opens with a woman being hit on the nose by a button—like one of those mysterious Fortean rainfalls---and then moves to consider her husband, who had become a talking dog—another figure from Fort’s writings.
It may be that the connection between her writing career and Fortean phenomena was what made de Ford fascinated by Fort in the first place. After all, the story of the buckshot rain in New Jersey—isn’t it just the classic locked-room mystery of the 1920s? One gets the feeling that what de Ford liked best about Fort was that he told a darn good story. He showed what it was like, as Shipley said, in a visceral way, to ride a comet—a science fiction dream, but a dream of transcendence and radicalism, too.
“Maynard tried in every way to explain these occurrences on known material grounds. When a hanging vase containing some wild blackberry branches swung back and forth, without stopping, for two days and nights, he studied it as a manifestation of ‘Plant Movement and Radiant Energy,’ and wrote an account of it under that title for The Scientific American. But too many of these happenings had no possible explanation within the limits of known scientific laws. There were besides, throughout his life, strange mental phenomena too numerous and exact for coincidence—his ability, for example, to tell me in Sausalito just what unexpected letters were in our postoffice box in San Francisco, or his faculty for telling time to the exact minute when he woke suddenly at night—or perhaps his invariable success in predicting the result of every heavyweight championship prize-fight for thirty years, though he never saw one! Certainly neither of us could disbelieve in the actuality of telepathy, whatever its modus operandi, when for so many years we constantly answered each other’s unspoken questions and remarks, sang tunes running through the other’s mind, or awoke at the same moment from the same odd dream. . . .
“These so-called psychic experiences in Mill Valley, and later to a lesser extent in San Francisco and our two Sausalito houses, would have made anyone less determinedly skeptical and rigidly scientific-minded a convinced Spiritualist. Even when he was on a lecture tour, strange things sometimes happened. Once in Woodland, California, he had a room in a lodging-house over a grocery. All night he was kept awake by the sound of hammering and sawing in the store below. In the morning he found no evidence of any construction or repair. But the landlady looked at him queerly and asked if he had been able to sleep in the room she had given him.
“It is no wonder that for a long time he was inclined to believe that ‘this mundane existence of ours is neither the beginning nor the end of the drama of life. . . . We do not, and cannot, while clothed with flesh, know things in themselves. The universe is a multidimensional world, and we three-dimensional simians can see but as “through a glass darkly.”’ In the end, however, he became convinced that though such phenomena as he had witnessed were indubitably real and not hallucinatory, they were not extra-physical, since ‘matter’ and ‘spirit’ are monistically one, and that some day they would be understood and reduced to law.”
Fort, it is worth remembering, was also a monist, and this was one of his chief arguments in The Book of the Damned: that all the world is one.
Nowhere does de Ford ever explicitly explain what she found fascinating about Fort. But it is possible to make some informed guesses, based on what she has written.
Part of her interest was the same as Shipley’s: a marveling at the mass of ignored reports. Like her husband, she called Fort the “Enfant Terrible of Science” and both compared him to an enzyme in the body of science—stimulating, making it go, uncomplacent.
She seems more willing to credit Fort’s unorthodox theories, though. His books, she says, including the odd relations he drew among the damned facts, are like the works of Christopher Wren, monuments to genius. She was also more willing than her husband to suggest that Fort’s hypothesizing was playful, and meant to suggest conclusions even he did not believe.
Enthralled, Shipley wrote to Fort in care of his publisher (to praise the mass of facts and dispute the conclusions Fort had drawn from them.) In 1922, de Ford investigated some Fortean occurrences for him: stones were raining from the sky in Chico, California, and she went there to investigate, even witnessing a rock fall form “some invisible point in the sky and land gently at my feet.” She wrote Fort about her experiences, and he queried her, teaching her “something of his obstinate search for verification.” Her observations appeared in Fort’s second book, New Lands! (1923).
The three continued their correspondence until 1932, when Fort died. Shipley reviewed Lo! In the New York Times, famously concluding, “Reading Fort is a ride on a comet; if the traveler return to earth after the journey, he will find, after his first dizziness has worn off, a new and exhilarating emotion that will color and correct all his future reading of less heady scientific literature.” De Ford continued clipping stories of Fortean phenomena from newspapers and sharing these with Fort. She cameoed again in his final book, Wild Talents (1932), having sent him an article about a room in New Jersey where it rained buckshot.
It is probable that de Ford’s interest in Fort continued through the 1930s, after his death and the death of her husband, but there is no evidence. What we do know is that she came to dislike Tiffany Thayer’s Fortean Society for the same reasons as Robert Barbour Johnson and E. Hoffman Price: he was too dogmatic. And this had nothing to do with his particular points of view. I get the sense that Hoffman and Johnson both disliked Thayer’s anti-War stance. De Ford, on the contrary, was also a peace activist.
We also know that Fort facilitated her writing career, in two ways.
First, it was through her study of Forteana that she met Anthony Boucher. In 1943, Boucher investigated a stone fall in Oakland. Apparently, he contacted de Ford to compare notes with her in regards to the Chico events. They started corresponding, drawn together, apparently, by their shared interest in crime stories.
Looking for new markets in which to write, and somewhat influenced by Boucher, de Ford started to experiment with science fiction, although in a letter to Boucher dated 25 January 1953 she admitted “it isn’t really my field.” And this is the second way that Fort helped her writing career: like so many other science fiction authors, she turned to Fort for writing ideas. Fort, she wrote in a 1953 review of his work for Boucher’s Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, “leveled at the scientists and in large part hit the literary folk.” His theme that humans are property, she noted correctly, was terribly influential on science fiction.
“Henry Martindale, Great Dane,” for example, published by Beyond in 1954 (and later reprinted as "Gone to the Dogs”), opens with a woman being hit on the nose by a button—like one of those mysterious Fortean rainfalls---and then moves to consider her husband, who had become a talking dog—another figure from Fort’s writings.
It may be that the connection between her writing career and Fortean phenomena was what made de Ford fascinated by Fort in the first place. After all, the story of the buckshot rain in New Jersey—isn’t it just the classic locked-room mystery of the 1920s? One gets the feeling that what de Ford liked best about Fort was that he told a darn good story. He showed what it was like, as Shipley said, in a visceral way, to ride a comet—a science fiction dream, but a dream of transcendence and radicalism, too.
