God Dissolve (and Forgive) Your Fortean Society
Of course, the main reaction to Fort’s publications and the founding of the Fortean Society was a collective shrug. But, in addition to those who took up Fort’s cause, there were detractors. One set of readers seemed to have missed—or dismissed without comment—his monism, which made his books nothing more than miscellany of the bizarre, interesting only in so far as one finds the weird worth considering. Laurence Stallings (1894-1968), for example, admitted in his review of Wild Talents that he could suss out no underlying metaphysics and so found the book “dull.” The journalist and book reviewer Bruce Catton (1899-1978) offered the back-handed compliment that Lo! and Wild Talents were “interesting” but otherwise “silly,” “outlandish,” and “nonsense.” Librarian Edmund Pearon (1880-1937) included Fort’s first two books in his own compendium Queer Books in the category “freaks and curiosities of nature.” H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) thought Fort “enormously ignorant of elementary science.” When, after Fort’s death, journalist H. Allen Smith (1907-1976) listed Mencken as among those devoted to the Bronx heretic, Mencken chastised, “This was liberal of a virulence sufficient to shock humanity. As a matter of fact, I looked upon Fort as a quack of the most obvious sort and often said so in print. As a Christian I forgive the man who wrote the story and the news editor who passed it. But both will suffer in Hell.”
Seeing Fort in this light gave the Fortean Society a particular cast—it was a joke, the fraternal order of the ostentatiously odd. Journalist Richard G. Massock (1901-1979) reported on the founding of the Fortean Society in his column “Seen and Heard about New York,” making it seem like nothing more serious than a gathering of boisterous litterateurs. Time magazine declared Fort a “prophet of footless negation” and joked that “science itself might have predicted the names of those to whom all this appealed”: “a group of literary exhibitionists.” At least one newspaper saw Thayer’s attack on science after Earhart’s disappearance as a sad attempt at publicity. The Greeley Daily Tribune and Republican titled a short blurb on the matter “This All Publicity It Gets Today.” In 1947, Broadway impresario Billy Rose (1899-1966) suggested the Fortean Society as an antidote to the world’s travails. Writing in his nationally syndicated column, he said that, with the break-up of the Big Four Conference in London he was joining Thayer’s group, dedicated as it was to the “snicker and sneer”: “If I’m going to go down the drain, I may as well go down laughing. In 1945, the clear thinkers finished killing 30,000,000 people. Now they’re choosing up sides to kill 300,000,000. If that’s all our clear thinkers can show me, I might as well join up with the loonies. At least their jokes are better.”
Others understood that, while often funny, Fort was more than a humorist, and had critiques of him—and the Fortean Society—that accounted for Fort’s more serious points, including his monism, but found them unpersuasive or uninteresting. Anticipating the publication of Lo! and the founding of the Fortean Society, Dreiser sent a copy of The Book of the Damned and Lo! to H. G. Wells (1866-1946), in hopes that the eminent science writer might provide publicity for the new book. Wells returned The Book of the Damned and threw away Lo! “Fort seems to be one of the most damnable bores who ever cut scraps from out of the way newspapers.” Wells maintained that there was no such thing as scientific orthodoxy. “Scientific workers are first rate stuff and very ill paid,” he said, and concluded, “God dissolve (and forgive) your Fortean Society.” The science and mathematics writer Martin Gardner (1914-2010) was more sympathetic to Fort in his book In the Name of Science (1952), one of the founding texts in the nascent skeptic movement that would culminate in the founding of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal in 1976. Gardner’s book was preceded into print by Bergen Evans’s (1904-1978) Natural History of Nonsense (1946). But whereas Evans only briefly mentioned Fort, Gardner devoted an entire chapter to the Forteans. Gardner respected Fort’s sense of humor, and his intelligence—noting that he was one of the first commenters on quantum mechanics, and that he understood the material. He also recognized Fort’s metaphysical project, even if he did not, ultimately, find monism persuasive. What he did not understand, though, was the Fortean Society. He found Thayer too earnest, without his mentor’s limber imagination. “Why the Fortean Society continues to exist is hard to understand,” he said. “If we lived in an age in which the majority of citizens had a clear comprehension of science, there might be some point in preserving an organization to remind scientists of their limits. . . . It was all very amusing in 1931, Now, the Society’s magazine, Doubt, has become a dreary prolongation of a joke that should have been buried with Fort.”
Of course, the main reaction to Fort’s publications and the founding of the Fortean Society was a collective shrug. But, in addition to those who took up Fort’s cause, there were detractors. One set of readers seemed to have missed—or dismissed without comment—his monism, which made his books nothing more than miscellany of the bizarre, interesting only in so far as one finds the weird worth considering. Laurence Stallings (1894-1968), for example, admitted in his review of Wild Talents that he could suss out no underlying metaphysics and so found the book “dull.” The journalist and book reviewer Bruce Catton (1899-1978) offered the back-handed compliment that Lo! and Wild Talents were “interesting” but otherwise “silly,” “outlandish,” and “nonsense.” Librarian Edmund Pearon (1880-1937) included Fort’s first two books in his own compendium Queer Books in the category “freaks and curiosities of nature.” H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) thought Fort “enormously ignorant of elementary science.” When, after Fort’s death, journalist H. Allen Smith (1907-1976) listed Mencken as among those devoted to the Bronx heretic, Mencken chastised, “This was liberal of a virulence sufficient to shock humanity. As a matter of fact, I looked upon Fort as a quack of the most obvious sort and often said so in print. As a Christian I forgive the man who wrote the story and the news editor who passed it. But both will suffer in Hell.”
Seeing Fort in this light gave the Fortean Society a particular cast—it was a joke, the fraternal order of the ostentatiously odd. Journalist Richard G. Massock (1901-1979) reported on the founding of the Fortean Society in his column “Seen and Heard about New York,” making it seem like nothing more serious than a gathering of boisterous litterateurs. Time magazine declared Fort a “prophet of footless negation” and joked that “science itself might have predicted the names of those to whom all this appealed”: “a group of literary exhibitionists.” At least one newspaper saw Thayer’s attack on science after Earhart’s disappearance as a sad attempt at publicity. The Greeley Daily Tribune and Republican titled a short blurb on the matter “This All Publicity It Gets Today.” In 1947, Broadway impresario Billy Rose (1899-1966) suggested the Fortean Society as an antidote to the world’s travails. Writing in his nationally syndicated column, he said that, with the break-up of the Big Four Conference in London he was joining Thayer’s group, dedicated as it was to the “snicker and sneer”: “If I’m going to go down the drain, I may as well go down laughing. In 1945, the clear thinkers finished killing 30,000,000 people. Now they’re choosing up sides to kill 300,000,000. If that’s all our clear thinkers can show me, I might as well join up with the loonies. At least their jokes are better.”
Others understood that, while often funny, Fort was more than a humorist, and had critiques of him—and the Fortean Society—that accounted for Fort’s more serious points, including his monism, but found them unpersuasive or uninteresting. Anticipating the publication of Lo! and the founding of the Fortean Society, Dreiser sent a copy of The Book of the Damned and Lo! to H. G. Wells (1866-1946), in hopes that the eminent science writer might provide publicity for the new book. Wells returned The Book of the Damned and threw away Lo! “Fort seems to be one of the most damnable bores who ever cut scraps from out of the way newspapers.” Wells maintained that there was no such thing as scientific orthodoxy. “Scientific workers are first rate stuff and very ill paid,” he said, and concluded, “God dissolve (and forgive) your Fortean Society.” The science and mathematics writer Martin Gardner (1914-2010) was more sympathetic to Fort in his book In the Name of Science (1952), one of the founding texts in the nascent skeptic movement that would culminate in the founding of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal in 1976. Gardner’s book was preceded into print by Bergen Evans’s (1904-1978) Natural History of Nonsense (1946). But whereas Evans only briefly mentioned Fort, Gardner devoted an entire chapter to the Forteans. Gardner respected Fort’s sense of humor, and his intelligence—noting that he was one of the first commenters on quantum mechanics, and that he understood the material. He also recognized Fort’s metaphysical project, even if he did not, ultimately, find monism persuasive. What he did not understand, though, was the Fortean Society. He found Thayer too earnest, without his mentor’s limber imagination. “Why the Fortean Society continues to exist is hard to understand,” he said. “If we lived in an age in which the majority of citizens had a clear comprehension of science, there might be some point in preserving an organization to remind scientists of their limits. . . . It was all very amusing in 1931, Now, the Society’s magazine, Doubt, has become a dreary prolongation of a joke that should have been buried with Fort.”
