The Ironic Imagination
Fort’s works were understood ironically, as well—as worth considering, even if they weren’t accepted. Michael Saler calls this kind of play “the ironic imagination” and identifies it as one way moderns reconciled science and enlightenment—by the willing suspension of belief, allowing one to experience enchantment even if it was known to be false. The ironic imagination thus was a space in which individuality could be expressed away from Benjamin De Casseres (1873-1945) called in the “Fortean Fantasy” the “new Trinity”: “Reason, experience, and hard-boiled facts.” Exploration of this playful space occurred in such mundane, black and white spaces as the pages of the Oakland Tribune. In 1947The Tribune did a large, unserious spread on the flying saucer craze. The article quoted David Bascom (1912-1985), an advertising man, inventor—and jokester. Later in his career, he would hang pictures of his ulcer over desks stuffed with eight phones, most of which did not work but looked impressive. After taking up fishing, he invented his own fly—“a wretched mess,” he called it, and started advertised it. His fliers for the fly soon grew into an environmentally-conscious but otherwise silly newspaper, which he put out under the pseudonym Milford Poltroon. with such searching articles as “Is Smokey the Bear a Communist Spy?” It was the last bastion of Yellow Journalism, he announced gleefully. Much later, still as Poltroon, he wrote two fishing parodies and a book of witty ways to answer the telephone. Back in 1947, Bascom told the Tribune that he had seen a UFO—but it was not shaped like a saucer: :it was a gravy boat. A year later, in response to a series of letters on the moon published in the same paper, Bascom was moved to write his own missive. He expressed mock amazement at the “misinformed writers” who had clearly been exposed to the “completely erroneous information” in science and astronomy texts. Such books, he said, obviously could not be taken seriously: they had it that tomatoes were poisonous, flying machines and submarines were impossible, and kangaroos avoided migraines by eating fresh salmon. Rather, Bascom went on, the moon was made of green cheese. Tongue firmly in cheek, Bascom goes on to say that the moon’s craters are made by the nibbling of rats and the air composed of Cheddaroxide, which can be converted into gasses breathable by humans with “a common cheese-gas converter” added to any gas mask. In support of this contention, Bascom cited Charles Fort.
The pulp writer Kathleen Ludwick (1870-?) had a similar understanding of Fort, judging by her letter to the Tribune. Responding to an editorial about flying saucers that mentioned Fort, Ludwick wrote, “Well, shiver my timbers! Was I astounded, amazed to read the reference to Charles Fort, the Apostle of Doubt, the High Priest of Skepticism, in the Tribune!” She went on to say that she had independently reached Fort’s conclusion that astronomical objects must be much closer than astronomers declaimed. After all, how could she see a moon that was a quarter of a million miles away? Or a sun 93 million miles away? And so, she speculated, if the heavens were close and the places there not planets but, as Fort had it in his second book, “new lands,” then that gave a clue as to the flying saucer’s identity. Perhaps, she suggested, some enemy nation had sent radio-active material into the sky, but then dismissed the possibility because the enemy nation would be harmed just as well. Most likely, she concluded, the saucers were an advertising stunt, “like this horrendous monster of the airways that has been seen hovering over Oakland at night advertising some brand of gasoline.” She wanted such stunts to stop.
The kind of play engaged in by Bascom and Ludwick might seem incidental—a way to step outside a world awash in scientific determinisms and gaudy advertising. But the effect of Fort on the ironic imagination was anything but insignificant. Fort had a profound influence on the writing of science fiction, in San Francisco, certainly, but more generally as well. "It was recently proposed to form a club that would be called, 'Writers Who Have Stolen lots from Charles Fort,'” Robert Barbour once joked. “The idea was dropped, however, when it was realized that such a group would include virtually every writer in the imaginative field, including many now deceased.” Miriam Allen de Ford was among those who would have belonged to such a club. After Shipley’s death, she took to writing more and more for pulps and her 1954 story “Henry Martindale, Great Dane,” about a man who transforms into a dog explicitly references Fort. Another member of such a group would be Anthony Boucher (1911-1968), who mentored de Ford in her science fiction writing. Born William Anthony Parker White, Boucher made a name for himself both in the field of mystery writing and in science fiction and fantasy, in which he is probably best known as one of the founding editors of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, a highly literate pulp that set the standard for literary quality in fantastic writing after World War II. A number of Boucher’s stories were Fortean, including one which relied on two characters having the same fingerprint—a Fortean happenstance noted in Thayer’s Doubt.
Not everyone appreciated Fort’s contribution to science fiction. Sam Moskowitz (1920-1997), one of the most famous fans, dismissed Fort’s originality by showing that ideas he developed had been present in earlier fantastic literature, and laughed at Fortean astronomy in light of the launch of Sputnik, which proved beyond a doubt that space was vast. But Moskowitz misses the point. Whether or not earlier fantastic fiction exhibited some of the same themes as Fort, and whether or not Fort was right or wrong, his influence was immense. Historian of science fiction Adam Roberts argues that there are two traditions in science fiction—the story of technology and the Fortean story. Science fiction writers in the post war years read Fort and were influenced by him to take as their starting point some odd thing and extrapolate a fictional world in which that odd thing was a given. This made Fortean science fiction a literature of dissent. The odd thing at the base of the story—a man becoming a dog, two men with the same fingerprint—might not be true in the non-fictional world. But considering it, playing with the idea, took science fiction writers and readers to an imaginative place where the science of the real world was not dominant, a place where their imagination and individuality could roam free.
Fort’s works were understood ironically, as well—as worth considering, even if they weren’t accepted. Michael Saler calls this kind of play “the ironic imagination” and identifies it as one way moderns reconciled science and enlightenment—by the willing suspension of belief, allowing one to experience enchantment even if it was known to be false. The ironic imagination thus was a space in which individuality could be expressed away from Benjamin De Casseres (1873-1945) called in the “Fortean Fantasy” the “new Trinity”: “Reason, experience, and hard-boiled facts.” Exploration of this playful space occurred in such mundane, black and white spaces as the pages of the Oakland Tribune. In 1947The Tribune did a large, unserious spread on the flying saucer craze. The article quoted David Bascom (1912-1985), an advertising man, inventor—and jokester. Later in his career, he would hang pictures of his ulcer over desks stuffed with eight phones, most of which did not work but looked impressive. After taking up fishing, he invented his own fly—“a wretched mess,” he called it, and started advertised it. His fliers for the fly soon grew into an environmentally-conscious but otherwise silly newspaper, which he put out under the pseudonym Milford Poltroon. with such searching articles as “Is Smokey the Bear a Communist Spy?” It was the last bastion of Yellow Journalism, he announced gleefully. Much later, still as Poltroon, he wrote two fishing parodies and a book of witty ways to answer the telephone. Back in 1947, Bascom told the Tribune that he had seen a UFO—but it was not shaped like a saucer: :it was a gravy boat. A year later, in response to a series of letters on the moon published in the same paper, Bascom was moved to write his own missive. He expressed mock amazement at the “misinformed writers” who had clearly been exposed to the “completely erroneous information” in science and astronomy texts. Such books, he said, obviously could not be taken seriously: they had it that tomatoes were poisonous, flying machines and submarines were impossible, and kangaroos avoided migraines by eating fresh salmon. Rather, Bascom went on, the moon was made of green cheese. Tongue firmly in cheek, Bascom goes on to say that the moon’s craters are made by the nibbling of rats and the air composed of Cheddaroxide, which can be converted into gasses breathable by humans with “a common cheese-gas converter” added to any gas mask. In support of this contention, Bascom cited Charles Fort.
The pulp writer Kathleen Ludwick (1870-?) had a similar understanding of Fort, judging by her letter to the Tribune. Responding to an editorial about flying saucers that mentioned Fort, Ludwick wrote, “Well, shiver my timbers! Was I astounded, amazed to read the reference to Charles Fort, the Apostle of Doubt, the High Priest of Skepticism, in the Tribune!” She went on to say that she had independently reached Fort’s conclusion that astronomical objects must be much closer than astronomers declaimed. After all, how could she see a moon that was a quarter of a million miles away? Or a sun 93 million miles away? And so, she speculated, if the heavens were close and the places there not planets but, as Fort had it in his second book, “new lands,” then that gave a clue as to the flying saucer’s identity. Perhaps, she suggested, some enemy nation had sent radio-active material into the sky, but then dismissed the possibility because the enemy nation would be harmed just as well. Most likely, she concluded, the saucers were an advertising stunt, “like this horrendous monster of the airways that has been seen hovering over Oakland at night advertising some brand of gasoline.” She wanted such stunts to stop.
The kind of play engaged in by Bascom and Ludwick might seem incidental—a way to step outside a world awash in scientific determinisms and gaudy advertising. But the effect of Fort on the ironic imagination was anything but insignificant. Fort had a profound influence on the writing of science fiction, in San Francisco, certainly, but more generally as well. "It was recently proposed to form a club that would be called, 'Writers Who Have Stolen lots from Charles Fort,'” Robert Barbour once joked. “The idea was dropped, however, when it was realized that such a group would include virtually every writer in the imaginative field, including many now deceased.” Miriam Allen de Ford was among those who would have belonged to such a club. After Shipley’s death, she took to writing more and more for pulps and her 1954 story “Henry Martindale, Great Dane,” about a man who transforms into a dog explicitly references Fort. Another member of such a group would be Anthony Boucher (1911-1968), who mentored de Ford in her science fiction writing. Born William Anthony Parker White, Boucher made a name for himself both in the field of mystery writing and in science fiction and fantasy, in which he is probably best known as one of the founding editors of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, a highly literate pulp that set the standard for literary quality in fantastic writing after World War II. A number of Boucher’s stories were Fortean, including one which relied on two characters having the same fingerprint—a Fortean happenstance noted in Thayer’s Doubt.
Not everyone appreciated Fort’s contribution to science fiction. Sam Moskowitz (1920-1997), one of the most famous fans, dismissed Fort’s originality by showing that ideas he developed had been present in earlier fantastic literature, and laughed at Fortean astronomy in light of the launch of Sputnik, which proved beyond a doubt that space was vast. But Moskowitz misses the point. Whether or not earlier fantastic fiction exhibited some of the same themes as Fort, and whether or not Fort was right or wrong, his influence was immense. Historian of science fiction Adam Roberts argues that there are two traditions in science fiction—the story of technology and the Fortean story. Science fiction writers in the post war years read Fort and were influenced by him to take as their starting point some odd thing and extrapolate a fictional world in which that odd thing was a given. This made Fortean science fiction a literature of dissent. The odd thing at the base of the story—a man becoming a dog, two men with the same fingerprint—might not be true in the non-fictional world. But considering it, playing with the idea, took science fiction writers and readers to an imaginative place where the science of the real world was not dominant, a place where their imagination and individuality could roam free.
