An Australian Fortean.
Voltaire Molesworth was born, according to biographical remembrances, 18 October 1924 in Sydney, Australia. I know virtually nothing about his early life. Supposedly, his father was a journalist as well as a politician. Apparently, though, he was a fan of science fiction and weird literature, particularly that of H.P. Lovecraft. He married in 1946, Laura, a librarian. Both were active in the Sydney Futurians—an Australian science fiction fan group modeled on the Futurians on New York. Vol, as he was called, was the fifth member; Laura was a librarian and active in the “Femme Fan Group,” which produced its own ‘zine. I have seen a few of the Sydney Futurians magazine. It started in the late 1940s as a way to share science fiction publications among members. (Laura ran the library.) Vol started editing the ‘zine in the second half of 1948 and ended a few months later. As of October that year, he owned 40 Arkham House books, 15 others, 8 pocketbooks, 42 or so fanzines, six “Weird Tale” issues, six “Startling” issues, and 29 issues of “Astounding.” His latest acquisition was latest acquisitions was Clark Ashton Smith’s “Lost Worlds” (1944).
Voltaire Molesworth was born, according to biographical remembrances, 18 October 1924 in Sydney, Australia. I know virtually nothing about his early life. Supposedly, his father was a journalist as well as a politician. Apparently, though, he was a fan of science fiction and weird literature, particularly that of H.P. Lovecraft. He married in 1946, Laura, a librarian. Both were active in the Sydney Futurians—an Australian science fiction fan group modeled on the Futurians on New York. Vol, as he was called, was the fifth member; Laura was a librarian and active in the “Femme Fan Group,” which produced its own ‘zine. I have seen a few of the Sydney Futurians magazine. It started in the late 1940s as a way to share science fiction publications among members. (Laura ran the library.) Vol started editing the ‘zine in the second half of 1948 and ended a few months later. As of October that year, he owned 40 Arkham House books, 15 others, 8 pocketbooks, 42 or so fanzines, six “Weird Tale” issues, six “Startling” issues, and 29 issues of “Astounding.” His latest acquisition was latest acquisitions was Clark Ashton Smith’s “Lost Worlds” (1944).
Molesworth himself made his living in publishing. By accounts, he was a journalist, and the letterhead of the one extant letter from him to Eric Frank Russell advertised “TOPS Publishing Company,” which was apparently a producer of fashion magazines. He also dabbled in science fiction. His first known publication was a letter in the 1941 issue of “Captain Future.” In 1943 he started putting out chap books, which coalesced into a couple of series and some one-offs. The “Ape of God” series—which I have not seen—made up of “Ape of God” and “Monster at Large,” retold the story of Frankenstein, now set in Australia. The “Radio Record” series (also unseen: “The Stratosphere Patrol”; “Spaceward Ho!,” and “The Three Rocketeers”) had humans piloting newly invented craft into space where they met Venusians. He also wrote “”The Wizard Returns,” “Prelude to Death,” “Satan’s Understudy,” “Wolfblood,” “Blinded They Fly,” “Let There Be Monsters,” and “An Outline History of Australian Fandom,” as well as a few later letters to science fiction magazines.
The bulk of these were written when Molesworth was in his late teens, the rest his early twenties. (They appeared from 1943 to 1951.) According to Steven Paulsen, Molesworth bridged the gap between science fiction and weird tales. The “Radio Record” series was straight science fiction; “Blinded They Fly” and “Let There Be Monsters” owed much to Lovecraft. The “Ape of God” series mixed the elements, as Mary Shelley had; others of his work—I’m not sure which, exactly—dealt with “The Wizard,” who seems to have been something of a paranormal investigator. Most (all?) of these books were short, more than thirty but less than 100 pages.
In time, Molesworth developed other ambitions. Paulsen has him writing two literary novels, neither of which was published. By the 1960s, both Laura and Molesworth were moving out of fandom.
Voltaire Molesworth died young, 14 July 1964, aged only 39. Laura lived on for a long time after, passing in 2009.
*******************
Molesworth apparently came to Fort on his own, and was blown away. He wrote to Russell, “I first read “Lo!” years ago in Astounding, and later sent to the U.S.A. for the big volume, “The Books of Charles Fort,” with Tiffany Thayer’s introduction.” He told Thayer: “For myself, I am a young man whose mind was unlocked by the philosophy of Charles Fort, one who has been to university and come sadly away: who has worked for newspaper and edited magazines, and murmured E Pur Si Muove; who has thought considerably and written without consideration, and now is seeking to become a little child.”
Fort inspired Molesworth. He said he wrote some articles on Fort for “local magazines” and even convinced a newspaper to publish extracts from “New Lands” during the flying saucer flap, but I have not seen these. He himself was “compiling data—my deadline being June 1932, my sphere Australia and its near neighbors.” He had dreams of producing a Fortean book himself, in the mold of R. DeWitt Miller’s “Forgotten Mysteries.” His array of data, judging by what he wrote to Russell, covered the usual Fortean gamut, from astronomical and meteorological anomalies to crytpzoological specimens to weird rains, all explained away by the dogmatic in nonsensical terms. (Thayer said that as early as 1943 Molesworth was putting out articles in such Fortean topics as an Australian Rip Van Winkle; people who lived with bullets in brain; the bunyip; and other monsters.) He was also trying to collect Fort’s work himself, and announced the Sydney Futurian’s October 1948 issue that he had recently obtained a first edition of “Lo!,” which could not have been easy in Australia.
Molesworth seems to have approached the Society in the late 1940s, apparently either missing the reference to in in the omnibus edition of The Books or deciding that writing directly to America was too difficult. Rather, he saw an advertisement in a ‘zine that mentioned Russell’s address and so approached the Society through him. (The exact date is not known since he did not date his letter to Russell.) At the time, he asked for a few spare issues of Doubt and promised that he would soon enough send on a subscription, but that would require work and he was excited to know there was a Society of devoted Forteans out there. He wanted to make contact: “I will become a regular subscriber before the month is out, but I cannot go to the Post office [sic] and perform the complications necessary to send money to U.K. for several days. But I do not wish to delays this letter until then.” (He signed off, “Yours damnably.”)
Russell seems to have passed notice to Thayer, who replied in a letter from late 1947 (It was dated 21 December 1947, but according to the Fortean calendar, not the usual one) that he would go after Molesworth as a member. A few months late, in Doubt 21, dated June 1948, Thayer introduced the new MFS under title “We Like Aussies,” which included the above-quoted introduction. But for all the effort, there doesn’t seem to have been much of a connection made: Molesworth’s Fortean endeavors would remain mostly confined to the Antipodes. [Begin Update.] He only got two more mentions in Doubt, and those in 1949. The second of these was in Doubt 27, winter 1949. Between the two appearances, he contributed material on frog falls (which were dismissed by experts as frogs appearing from marshes and burrows _after_ rains) that was included with his introduction and another on a fish with claws and paws that was the substance of his final credit.
His largest contribution was in Doubt 24 (April 1949), when he submitted a paper for matriculation at the Fortean University. This was an idea of Thayer’s that intrigued him for much of 1948, a way to organize Fortean thought—but not to systematize it. The various departments proposed for this invisible college served as umbrellas under which Fortean phenomena could be categorized. But the departments themselves were often contradictory. And even within the departments, the idea was not figure out a solution to the various subjects—say Drayson’s problem—but to continue to study it. By the time that Molesworth’s letter appeared, Thayer was (seemingly) becoming bore with the idea, and filling Doubt with excerpts of letters from members, which suggests that he saw Molesworth’s contribution more as filler than extending the idea of the Fortean University.
Molesworth’s contribution did not obviously tie into any of the departments as Thayer laid them out, nor did Molesworth explicitly say to which field of thought he believed he was contributing. The paper started with an quote from Dewey: “If inquiry begins in DOUBT, it terminates in the institution of conditions which remove need for DOUBT.” (Capitals Molesworth’s.) The extract from Dewey was apposite, but contradicted Thayer’s idea of maintaining doubt, of suspending belief. It was a tip-off that the entire paper would be relatively confused. Molesworth opened his argument with the discussion of a meteor seen over Brisbane in late July 1948. After summarizing various reports, he made note of an experimental aircraft reported over Alabama, and suggested that there was time for the plane to have reached Australia since its last appearance in America. He spent a paragraph drawing parallels between the reported aircraft and the reported meteor, explaining neither.
The paper then shifted focus. He returned to the newspaper that had reported on the Brisbane meteor and noted that in the early 1930s, the paper had similarly reported meteors in July and August. SP maybe the meteors appeared seasonally? There followed a long description of an August1933 report, followed by the report of a brilliant meteor that passed . . . four months early in March. (What happened to the seasonal hypothesis.) The meteor was supposedly so bright one could read a newspaper by it. There were also reports that the meteor was accompanied by a sea plane. Molesworth went on to note that, indeed, the meteor from August 1933 also generated reports of aircraft when it (possibly) moved over Fiji.
But then he twists again, discovering reports from August 1931 that turns his thoughts to seasonality once more. There were reports of a mysterious plane going to ground on the northern part of Tasmania. But then no plane was reported missing, adding to the mystery. But Molesworth, again, resists interpretation and at this point concludes his speculating with hope for more research: “One is tempted to examine further the files around July-August, being certain to find the august [sic] visitations of these jet-shooting monoplane-shaped objects interpreted in terms of ‘brilliant meteors.’”
It is at this point it is clear that Molesworth was trying to write in the vein of Fort himself, proposing and rejecting ideas, puckish in his refusal to conclude. But Molesworth lacked the artistry of Fort, the writerly ability to sit above his subject and sort. His ideas came out as confused and never fully developed. He does not let on until the conclusion what he aims for, and even then it is not clear of the significance. Is he suggesting visitations from another planet? Why must it be that the planes are interpreted as meteors, rather than meteors as planes? Molesworth ended his submission with a single question: “Do I matriculate?” Thayer turned it over to the readership to decide. As far as I can tell, there was never a result published in Doubt itself—Thayer was bored with the subject, after all—but Thayer may have written to Molesworth directly.
All of this—the rejection when he hoped to expand the Fortean Society through the antipodes, the cool response to his matriculation at the Fortean University—may go some distance to explaining why Molesworth appeared only once more in Doubt. For all Thayer saying that he “liked Aussies,” his reception was less than welcoming. But that doesn’t mean Molesworth gave up on Fort and Forteana, even if he did stop contributing to the Society—even if he did give up on the Society. [End Update.]
In 1951, he published “Blinded They Fly,” which was dedicated to both Fort and Lovecraft. Indeed, there’s a sense in which Molesworth’s Forteanism was wrapped inside his love for Lovecraft: that the world was weirder than experts allowed, inhabited by beings we could not fully hope to know, with motivations humans could not fully ken. In October 1948, he noted that he was writing a story of the Cthulhu Mythos set among the Australian Aborigine, which resonates with his interest in mysterious creatures such as the Bunyip: inhabitants of the land older than time itself. He had promised Thayer reports on the “Bathurst Screamer,” the “Yamba crocodile,” and the Bunyip.
The story concerns Robert Mundorf, a resident of Oakland, California who is one part Charles Fort, one part H. P. Lovecraft. Mundorf has spent his life in libraries—and voluminous correspondence—tracking down reports of the strange. He has puzzled these together into an argument that the earth was inhabited by . . . beings . . . before humans, beings that may have overlapped with the early humans, giving rise to the stories of pagan gods, beings which may still live in untrodden places. Unlike Fort, though, Mundorf investigates some of the reports himself, and in one case traveled to Death Valley, where he was swept up by a cyclone—like a fish soon to fall—and deposited into an ancient cave, where he saw pictograms representing alien gods and proving early humans had a firm grasp of the galaxy’s structure. He also met what sees to have been one of these old gods, escaping it only by falling through some vortex that mysteriously transported him back to his home in Oakland.
Thirteen years later, Mundorf receives a letter from Stephen Cox, an Australian journalist who has been inspired to make a similar collection of odd reports and even dreams of compiling them into a book. During his researches, he learns of an Australian cave which matches the particulars of the one described by Mundorf. Cox invites Mundorf to investigate, and together they make their way to the place, where Mundorf finds the same drawings, and even a scrap of material that proves—somehow—this was the very same cave he visited years before. Meanwhile, Cox, who has scampered away to investigate, is devoured by the octopodal god. Mundorf shoots the creature, flees, falls—and finds himself dropping to the ground before his own him, in Oakland, California.
I find no more connections between Molseworth and Forteanism after the publication of this chap book. But I take his letter to Russell as a truth. He said that there were Forteans scattered across Australia, though none knew of the Society. This place was the ragged edge of the Fortean Society—as Germany was, where Julian Parr spread the word. Molesworth probably inspired others with his fusion of Lovecraft and Fort. But that influence never fed back into the Fortean fold, but rather was dispersed. Fort and Lovecraft both reached into Australian culture—made it here as well as New Zealand, where Guy Powell was anxious to be an evangelist. But whatever happened, whether Fort became well known or quickly forgotten, belongs to a different history.
The bulk of these were written when Molesworth was in his late teens, the rest his early twenties. (They appeared from 1943 to 1951.) According to Steven Paulsen, Molesworth bridged the gap between science fiction and weird tales. The “Radio Record” series was straight science fiction; “Blinded They Fly” and “Let There Be Monsters” owed much to Lovecraft. The “Ape of God” series mixed the elements, as Mary Shelley had; others of his work—I’m not sure which, exactly—dealt with “The Wizard,” who seems to have been something of a paranormal investigator. Most (all?) of these books were short, more than thirty but less than 100 pages.
In time, Molesworth developed other ambitions. Paulsen has him writing two literary novels, neither of which was published. By the 1960s, both Laura and Molesworth were moving out of fandom.
Voltaire Molesworth died young, 14 July 1964, aged only 39. Laura lived on for a long time after, passing in 2009.
*******************
Molesworth apparently came to Fort on his own, and was blown away. He wrote to Russell, “I first read “Lo!” years ago in Astounding, and later sent to the U.S.A. for the big volume, “The Books of Charles Fort,” with Tiffany Thayer’s introduction.” He told Thayer: “For myself, I am a young man whose mind was unlocked by the philosophy of Charles Fort, one who has been to university and come sadly away: who has worked for newspaper and edited magazines, and murmured E Pur Si Muove; who has thought considerably and written without consideration, and now is seeking to become a little child.”
Fort inspired Molesworth. He said he wrote some articles on Fort for “local magazines” and even convinced a newspaper to publish extracts from “New Lands” during the flying saucer flap, but I have not seen these. He himself was “compiling data—my deadline being June 1932, my sphere Australia and its near neighbors.” He had dreams of producing a Fortean book himself, in the mold of R. DeWitt Miller’s “Forgotten Mysteries.” His array of data, judging by what he wrote to Russell, covered the usual Fortean gamut, from astronomical and meteorological anomalies to crytpzoological specimens to weird rains, all explained away by the dogmatic in nonsensical terms. (Thayer said that as early as 1943 Molesworth was putting out articles in such Fortean topics as an Australian Rip Van Winkle; people who lived with bullets in brain; the bunyip; and other monsters.) He was also trying to collect Fort’s work himself, and announced the Sydney Futurian’s October 1948 issue that he had recently obtained a first edition of “Lo!,” which could not have been easy in Australia.
Molesworth seems to have approached the Society in the late 1940s, apparently either missing the reference to in in the omnibus edition of The Books or deciding that writing directly to America was too difficult. Rather, he saw an advertisement in a ‘zine that mentioned Russell’s address and so approached the Society through him. (The exact date is not known since he did not date his letter to Russell.) At the time, he asked for a few spare issues of Doubt and promised that he would soon enough send on a subscription, but that would require work and he was excited to know there was a Society of devoted Forteans out there. He wanted to make contact: “I will become a regular subscriber before the month is out, but I cannot go to the Post office [sic] and perform the complications necessary to send money to U.K. for several days. But I do not wish to delays this letter until then.” (He signed off, “Yours damnably.”)
Russell seems to have passed notice to Thayer, who replied in a letter from late 1947 (It was dated 21 December 1947, but according to the Fortean calendar, not the usual one) that he would go after Molesworth as a member. A few months late, in Doubt 21, dated June 1948, Thayer introduced the new MFS under title “We Like Aussies,” which included the above-quoted introduction. But for all the effort, there doesn’t seem to have been much of a connection made: Molesworth’s Fortean endeavors would remain mostly confined to the Antipodes. [Begin Update.] He only got two more mentions in Doubt, and those in 1949. The second of these was in Doubt 27, winter 1949. Between the two appearances, he contributed material on frog falls (which were dismissed by experts as frogs appearing from marshes and burrows _after_ rains) that was included with his introduction and another on a fish with claws and paws that was the substance of his final credit.
His largest contribution was in Doubt 24 (April 1949), when he submitted a paper for matriculation at the Fortean University. This was an idea of Thayer’s that intrigued him for much of 1948, a way to organize Fortean thought—but not to systematize it. The various departments proposed for this invisible college served as umbrellas under which Fortean phenomena could be categorized. But the departments themselves were often contradictory. And even within the departments, the idea was not figure out a solution to the various subjects—say Drayson’s problem—but to continue to study it. By the time that Molesworth’s letter appeared, Thayer was (seemingly) becoming bore with the idea, and filling Doubt with excerpts of letters from members, which suggests that he saw Molesworth’s contribution more as filler than extending the idea of the Fortean University.
Molesworth’s contribution did not obviously tie into any of the departments as Thayer laid them out, nor did Molesworth explicitly say to which field of thought he believed he was contributing. The paper started with an quote from Dewey: “If inquiry begins in DOUBT, it terminates in the institution of conditions which remove need for DOUBT.” (Capitals Molesworth’s.) The extract from Dewey was apposite, but contradicted Thayer’s idea of maintaining doubt, of suspending belief. It was a tip-off that the entire paper would be relatively confused. Molesworth opened his argument with the discussion of a meteor seen over Brisbane in late July 1948. After summarizing various reports, he made note of an experimental aircraft reported over Alabama, and suggested that there was time for the plane to have reached Australia since its last appearance in America. He spent a paragraph drawing parallels between the reported aircraft and the reported meteor, explaining neither.
The paper then shifted focus. He returned to the newspaper that had reported on the Brisbane meteor and noted that in the early 1930s, the paper had similarly reported meteors in July and August. SP maybe the meteors appeared seasonally? There followed a long description of an August1933 report, followed by the report of a brilliant meteor that passed . . . four months early in March. (What happened to the seasonal hypothesis.) The meteor was supposedly so bright one could read a newspaper by it. There were also reports that the meteor was accompanied by a sea plane. Molesworth went on to note that, indeed, the meteor from August 1933 also generated reports of aircraft when it (possibly) moved over Fiji.
But then he twists again, discovering reports from August 1931 that turns his thoughts to seasonality once more. There were reports of a mysterious plane going to ground on the northern part of Tasmania. But then no plane was reported missing, adding to the mystery. But Molesworth, again, resists interpretation and at this point concludes his speculating with hope for more research: “One is tempted to examine further the files around July-August, being certain to find the august [sic] visitations of these jet-shooting monoplane-shaped objects interpreted in terms of ‘brilliant meteors.’”
It is at this point it is clear that Molesworth was trying to write in the vein of Fort himself, proposing and rejecting ideas, puckish in his refusal to conclude. But Molesworth lacked the artistry of Fort, the writerly ability to sit above his subject and sort. His ideas came out as confused and never fully developed. He does not let on until the conclusion what he aims for, and even then it is not clear of the significance. Is he suggesting visitations from another planet? Why must it be that the planes are interpreted as meteors, rather than meteors as planes? Molesworth ended his submission with a single question: “Do I matriculate?” Thayer turned it over to the readership to decide. As far as I can tell, there was never a result published in Doubt itself—Thayer was bored with the subject, after all—but Thayer may have written to Molesworth directly.
All of this—the rejection when he hoped to expand the Fortean Society through the antipodes, the cool response to his matriculation at the Fortean University—may go some distance to explaining why Molesworth appeared only once more in Doubt. For all Thayer saying that he “liked Aussies,” his reception was less than welcoming. But that doesn’t mean Molesworth gave up on Fort and Forteana, even if he did stop contributing to the Society—even if he did give up on the Society. [End Update.]
In 1951, he published “Blinded They Fly,” which was dedicated to both Fort and Lovecraft. Indeed, there’s a sense in which Molesworth’s Forteanism was wrapped inside his love for Lovecraft: that the world was weirder than experts allowed, inhabited by beings we could not fully hope to know, with motivations humans could not fully ken. In October 1948, he noted that he was writing a story of the Cthulhu Mythos set among the Australian Aborigine, which resonates with his interest in mysterious creatures such as the Bunyip: inhabitants of the land older than time itself. He had promised Thayer reports on the “Bathurst Screamer,” the “Yamba crocodile,” and the Bunyip.
The story concerns Robert Mundorf, a resident of Oakland, California who is one part Charles Fort, one part H. P. Lovecraft. Mundorf has spent his life in libraries—and voluminous correspondence—tracking down reports of the strange. He has puzzled these together into an argument that the earth was inhabited by . . . beings . . . before humans, beings that may have overlapped with the early humans, giving rise to the stories of pagan gods, beings which may still live in untrodden places. Unlike Fort, though, Mundorf investigates some of the reports himself, and in one case traveled to Death Valley, where he was swept up by a cyclone—like a fish soon to fall—and deposited into an ancient cave, where he saw pictograms representing alien gods and proving early humans had a firm grasp of the galaxy’s structure. He also met what sees to have been one of these old gods, escaping it only by falling through some vortex that mysteriously transported him back to his home in Oakland.
Thirteen years later, Mundorf receives a letter from Stephen Cox, an Australian journalist who has been inspired to make a similar collection of odd reports and even dreams of compiling them into a book. During his researches, he learns of an Australian cave which matches the particulars of the one described by Mundorf. Cox invites Mundorf to investigate, and together they make their way to the place, where Mundorf finds the same drawings, and even a scrap of material that proves—somehow—this was the very same cave he visited years before. Meanwhile, Cox, who has scampered away to investigate, is devoured by the octopodal god. Mundorf shoots the creature, flees, falls—and finds himself dropping to the ground before his own him, in Oakland, California.
I find no more connections between Molseworth and Forteanism after the publication of this chap book. But I take his letter to Russell as a truth. He said that there were Forteans scattered across Australia, though none knew of the Society. This place was the ragged edge of the Fortean Society—as Germany was, where Julian Parr spread the word. Molesworth probably inspired others with his fusion of Lovecraft and Fort. But that influence never fed back into the Fortean fold, but rather was dispersed. Fort and Lovecraft both reached into Australian culture—made it here as well as New Zealand, where Guy Powell was anxious to be an evangelist. But whatever happened, whether Fort became well known or quickly forgotten, belongs to a different history.
