Lifestyles
Scott argues that the hill tribes who escaped from the paddy state built lifestyles that embodied their sense of liberty and protected it, going so far as to claim that ethnic identities and orality were both created traditions that helped the tribes remain free from the state. There is a strong romantic element to this argument—Scott has much to say about the egalitarian rule of such tribes, but nothing on inter-tribe conflict or sexual discrimination, to pick two examples. Nonetheless, the core of this argument seems sound, and is applicable to the Forteans living in San Francisco’s Bohemian enclaves—especially since many of the Forteans were extremely influenced by Romantic ideology. George Haas, for example, modeled his life on that of a Romantic traveler, and hurried to join World War II so that he could travel through the South Pacific, collecting treasures. Back in Oakland, he built his identity, in part, around these experiences. He converted to Buddhism. He worked as an organic gardener—at a time when that was certainly on the fringe. And, in correspondence, he adopted the sobriquet gi eitch—an homage to H. P. Lovecraft who renamed the people who wrote him with alien-sounding titles based on their real names, in this case gi eitch representing his initials. Haas had so thoroughly adopted this lifestyle that when Clark Ashton Smith and his wife came to visit, Carol was surprised that Haas was not Japanese. After all, he had that odd sounding name, was a gardener, and a Buddhist. This lifestyle sat easily with his Fortean interests. As a Buddhist, Haas said, he understood that nothing was permanent, which included scientific theories. Organic gardening, of course, was an explicit challenge to the agricultural sciences. Robert Barbour Johnson lived a similarly off-beat life, although the axes around which it turned were different. In his youth, he had worked for circuses as an animal trainer. Once in San Francisco, he made much of his earnings turning those experiences into art: he painted and sold circus scenes, constructed miniature circuses, wrote several stories for Blue Book about circus history, and even trained his own housecat to perform tricks.
In contrast to Haas, many of the Forteans and members of Bay Area Bohemia were sorely disappointed by America’s entry into World War II. Kenneth Rexroth became a conscientious objector, as did Philip Lamantia. Miller famously wrote—and Bern Porter published—the fiercely anti-war screed Murder the Murderers. Charles Fort’s texts offered no direct support for Pacificism, but Thayer’s version of Forteanism, as spelled out in Doubt certainly did. Thayer argued that the entire war was a hoax perpetrated by financiers. Miriam Allen de Ford, for one, disliked his turning of Doubt into a pacifist rag, even though she agreed in large part with his stand. Rexroth, too, worried about the way that militarization empowered the state—which then restricted the spaces in which Americans could be individuals, could plumb their own infinite vastness—and that was a large part of what was behind his founding of the libertarian circle. Philip Lamantia’s disgust with the war was deeply tied to his disgust with science—and so part of his turn toward Forteanism. In his personal papers, Lamantia said that he died in 1945—not coincidentally the year the world entered the age of atomic weapons. In his letter asking for conscientious objector status, Lamantia wrote that the nineteenth-century dream of perfecting man through science had reached its inevitable conclusion in the atomic bomb, and that conclusion was tragic. The state, he said, was evil. Lamantia rooted his understanding of humankind’s predicament in a religious vision. God, he said, was reality—was nature: a view consonant with Fort’s monism. But through consciousness humans had separated themselves from nature, from the whole. Another autobiographical note, dated the end of August 1961, makes the connection more explicit. The apocalypse had already come, he said, and so humans needed to find a new way of life, “Anything not identifiable with the stupid, synthetic half/life of postAtomicBomb man, his exploded his cities, literature, art, his corny mis/education, his phantom governments, his corny reasoning, sick politics . . .”
Perhaps the embodiment of the Fortean lifestyle can be found in the personal histories of Garen and Kirk Drussai. Both were born under different names: Garen was born Clara Hettler and Kirk was Gerald Polenz. They seem to have changed their names upon moving to Hollywood, where Garen took an additional step in altering her identity: she was ashamed of her New York accent and so took locution lessons to rid herself of it. Apparently, Garen and Kirk met while in Hollywood. According to Tiffany Thayer, their marriage was brought about by a shared interest in Forteanism and Doubt proudly announced their nuptials. Kirk had earlier met Thayer while in New York, and was one of the motive forces behind the founding of Chapter 2. Garen was trying to become a writer, and some of her stories had an obvious Fortean influence. Her first story—published in Boucher’s Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction—“Extra-Curricular” (1952) reads like a catalog of Fortean odd events. Only at the end does the reader learn they are all tied together by a student of the future who was playing around with a time machine, messing with the past. Another of Drussai’s stories appeared in Doubt. “The Tainted” was set in a society in which young boys practiced at becoming warriors so that they could be drafted into an interplanetary conflict at age thirteen. The grandfather, who could remember as far back as the Korean War, bemoaned these developments, seeing the gunplay of the current generation as different from his, because they no longer understood it was play. And he was right: at the end, a small boy gets hold of a real gun and kills his mother. When Garen became pregnant, the Drussais paid membership in the Fortean Society for their unborn child. Milo Drussai, as he would become known, was, in Tiffany Thayer’s words, the Virginia Dare of the Fortean Society—a prophecy that perhaps the off-beat lifestyles adopted by the Forteans would spread.
Scott argues that the hill tribes who escaped from the paddy state built lifestyles that embodied their sense of liberty and protected it, going so far as to claim that ethnic identities and orality were both created traditions that helped the tribes remain free from the state. There is a strong romantic element to this argument—Scott has much to say about the egalitarian rule of such tribes, but nothing on inter-tribe conflict or sexual discrimination, to pick two examples. Nonetheless, the core of this argument seems sound, and is applicable to the Forteans living in San Francisco’s Bohemian enclaves—especially since many of the Forteans were extremely influenced by Romantic ideology. George Haas, for example, modeled his life on that of a Romantic traveler, and hurried to join World War II so that he could travel through the South Pacific, collecting treasures. Back in Oakland, he built his identity, in part, around these experiences. He converted to Buddhism. He worked as an organic gardener—at a time when that was certainly on the fringe. And, in correspondence, he adopted the sobriquet gi eitch—an homage to H. P. Lovecraft who renamed the people who wrote him with alien-sounding titles based on their real names, in this case gi eitch representing his initials. Haas had so thoroughly adopted this lifestyle that when Clark Ashton Smith and his wife came to visit, Carol was surprised that Haas was not Japanese. After all, he had that odd sounding name, was a gardener, and a Buddhist. This lifestyle sat easily with his Fortean interests. As a Buddhist, Haas said, he understood that nothing was permanent, which included scientific theories. Organic gardening, of course, was an explicit challenge to the agricultural sciences. Robert Barbour Johnson lived a similarly off-beat life, although the axes around which it turned were different. In his youth, he had worked for circuses as an animal trainer. Once in San Francisco, he made much of his earnings turning those experiences into art: he painted and sold circus scenes, constructed miniature circuses, wrote several stories for Blue Book about circus history, and even trained his own housecat to perform tricks.
In contrast to Haas, many of the Forteans and members of Bay Area Bohemia were sorely disappointed by America’s entry into World War II. Kenneth Rexroth became a conscientious objector, as did Philip Lamantia. Miller famously wrote—and Bern Porter published—the fiercely anti-war screed Murder the Murderers. Charles Fort’s texts offered no direct support for Pacificism, but Thayer’s version of Forteanism, as spelled out in Doubt certainly did. Thayer argued that the entire war was a hoax perpetrated by financiers. Miriam Allen de Ford, for one, disliked his turning of Doubt into a pacifist rag, even though she agreed in large part with his stand. Rexroth, too, worried about the way that militarization empowered the state—which then restricted the spaces in which Americans could be individuals, could plumb their own infinite vastness—and that was a large part of what was behind his founding of the libertarian circle. Philip Lamantia’s disgust with the war was deeply tied to his disgust with science—and so part of his turn toward Forteanism. In his personal papers, Lamantia said that he died in 1945—not coincidentally the year the world entered the age of atomic weapons. In his letter asking for conscientious objector status, Lamantia wrote that the nineteenth-century dream of perfecting man through science had reached its inevitable conclusion in the atomic bomb, and that conclusion was tragic. The state, he said, was evil. Lamantia rooted his understanding of humankind’s predicament in a religious vision. God, he said, was reality—was nature: a view consonant with Fort’s monism. But through consciousness humans had separated themselves from nature, from the whole. Another autobiographical note, dated the end of August 1961, makes the connection more explicit. The apocalypse had already come, he said, and so humans needed to find a new way of life, “Anything not identifiable with the stupid, synthetic half/life of postAtomicBomb man, his exploded his cities, literature, art, his corny mis/education, his phantom governments, his corny reasoning, sick politics . . .”
Perhaps the embodiment of the Fortean lifestyle can be found in the personal histories of Garen and Kirk Drussai. Both were born under different names: Garen was born Clara Hettler and Kirk was Gerald Polenz. They seem to have changed their names upon moving to Hollywood, where Garen took an additional step in altering her identity: she was ashamed of her New York accent and so took locution lessons to rid herself of it. Apparently, Garen and Kirk met while in Hollywood. According to Tiffany Thayer, their marriage was brought about by a shared interest in Forteanism and Doubt proudly announced their nuptials. Kirk had earlier met Thayer while in New York, and was one of the motive forces behind the founding of Chapter 2. Garen was trying to become a writer, and some of her stories had an obvious Fortean influence. Her first story—published in Boucher’s Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction—“Extra-Curricular” (1952) reads like a catalog of Fortean odd events. Only at the end does the reader learn they are all tied together by a student of the future who was playing around with a time machine, messing with the past. Another of Drussai’s stories appeared in Doubt. “The Tainted” was set in a society in which young boys practiced at becoming warriors so that they could be drafted into an interplanetary conflict at age thirteen. The grandfather, who could remember as far back as the Korean War, bemoaned these developments, seeing the gunplay of the current generation as different from his, because they no longer understood it was play. And he was right: at the end, a small boy gets hold of a real gun and kills his mother. When Garen became pregnant, the Drussais paid membership in the Fortean Society for their unborn child. Milo Drussai, as he would become known, was, in Tiffany Thayer’s words, the Virginia Dare of the Fortean Society—a prophecy that perhaps the off-beat lifestyles adopted by the Forteans would spread.
