​Surprised by Fort, but irritated by the Forteans.

Whether he was a Fortean himself—well, that depends on how you define matters.

Martin Gardner was born 21 October 1914 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to James Henry Gardner, a petroleum geologist, and Willie Wilkerson Spiers. He had a younger brother and a younger sister. Gardner grew up on the Tulsa area. The family was fairly well off, employing servants and maids. As a youth, he developed an interest in puzzles and, around the age of ten, discovered Hugo Gernsback’s “Science and Invention”; he enjoyed Jules Verne and Sherlock Holmes, too, and when, in 1926, the first issue of “Amazing Stories” was advertised, he was a subscriber. Gardner also had an interest in magic.

He attended Central High School, in Tulsa, where he practiced both gymnastics and tennis. At some point, he had cataract surgery, which made continuing to play tennis difficult. While in high school, he gave his physics teacher the run of “Amazing Stories” that he had collected. In 1930, when he was not yet 16, his first published writing appeared, a letter to “Science and Invention” in April, and a magic trick in “Sphix,” the following month. He would go on to write something on the order of a hundred books over the rest of his long life, many of these collections of essays he wrote for a number of different publications on a wide range of topics. He also spent some time at the University of Central Oklahoma; the 1932 yearbook described him as “an able cartoonist with an adept mind for science.”

​He was vast—he contained multitudes—and only one small part was Fortean.

Raymond Alfred Palmer was born 1 August 1910 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Roy Clarence and the former Helena Martha Anna Steber. He would later fetishize his birth year, suggesting that he had seen Haley’s comet while still in utero, though in his memory he was held by his grandmother and shown the comet out the window. It is tempting to suggest, though no doubt too pat, that Palmer’s nostalgia was a reaction to what was otherwise a difficult childhood in many ways. The elder Palmer was a skilled laborer. In 1911, the family added a baby girl. Palmer was famously beautiful as a youngster, honored on a milk carton as one of Milwaukee’s healthiest babies. A brother would follow, in 1918, by which time Ray was suffering much. (Another brother would be born around 1929.)

When he was seven, Ray was in an accident with a truck that badly damaged his spine. Operations would follow, pain, and a slow recovery that was never complete: he was left a hunchback and short, never growing more than about four feet tall. Amid his convalescence, Ray’s mother died; Ray resented his father, blaming him for slow medical treatment, for drinking too much and tomcatting around. Unable to go to school, Palmer—who had learned to read very young—escaped into books, and especially the newly developing genre of science fiction. By his own admission, Palmer was a fanciful child, and there is every reason to believe that the line, for him, between reality and imagination was incredibly thin; fantastic literature was a natural fit.

​Henry Louis Mencken was born 12 September 1880 in Baltimore. He would grow up to be one of the most important public intellectuals of the early twentieth century, elitist, anti-democratic, and curmudgeonly, a foe of religion, contained Victorian values, bad thinking, loose language, and also the pseudosciences. Poke around a bit on line, and you’ll fine any number of references to him admiring Fort and being a member of the Fortean Society. This is wrong, very wrong.

A life-long journalist, but also an editor, writer of books, and translator of Nietzsche, in 1908 Mencken became associated with the magazine The Smart Set. A few years later, he and George Jean Nathan became co-editors, fashioning the magazine into an important voice of modernist literature. Among those published in its pages—and there were many notables—was the Fortean enthusiast Benjamin DeCasseres. Mencken also championed Theodore Dreiser, valuing his attacks on American moral hypocrisy, even as he found his writing more often than not ponderous.

​A fabulist and Fortean.

Ivan Terence Sanderson was born 20 January 1911 in Edinburgh, Scotland, to Arthur Buchanan Sanderson, a whiskey maker, and Stella W. W. Robertson. According to Sanderson himself, he was a mosaic twin, born with three kidneys, and this may be true, but given Sanderson’s penchant for exaggeration, it is hard to accept without evidence. After World War I, his father moved to Kenya and turns da fair into a game preserve. He and Stella divorced in 1920, and Ivan was raised mostly by his mother, though he also visited his father. By accounts, Stella was strong-willed and controlling. After attending private schools, Ivan entered Eton College in 1924, were he continued his studies until 1927 in the natural sciences.

In 1925, his father died. According to Sanderson, he was killed by a rhinoceros while helping the husband-and-wife team of filmmakers Martin and Osa Johnson. Sanderson’s admirer, Richard Grigonis notes that this isn’t actually correct, and the story Sanderson told about the death gets the details wrong in many ways, all favoring a better, more colorful story. The elder Sanderson was injured by a rhinoceros, but survived resigned his position with the movie-making team, and went to Nairobi for rehabilitation. He died 2-4 months later—accounts differ—either from complications or pneumonia (possibly different ways of saying the same thing).

​A (con)founding Fortean.

Benjamin DeCasseres was born 3 April 1873 in Philadelphia to David DeCasseres and the former Charlotte (Lottie) Davis. DeCasseres—spelled many ways, though Benjamin preferred it without the spaces—was an old Spanish-Portuguese Jewish family with deep roots in America and a collateral connection to the philosopher Baruch Spinoza. David, who had been born in Jamaica, was a bookkeeper; Charlotte had been born in Pennsylvania, to parents from Hungary and Bavaria. Benjamin was the oldest of four children, two sisters and a brother, Irma, Edith, and Walter.

The family faced a good deal of upheaval in the early 1880s. Benjamin was attending the local schools. In 1880, aged only 3, Edith DeCasseres, his youngest sister, died. Two years later, the family had another child—that was Walter. In 1886, when he was 13, Benjamin dropped out of school and went to work for the Philadelphia Press, first as an office boy, but working his way up to proofreader. He stayed in the business until 1899. In early 1900, Walter was apparently trying to follow in Benjamin’s footsteps, and had called at a print shop, but presumably had been turned down, which is when tragedy revisited the family: he went missing February 4th. His body was later found floating in the Delaware River; police assumed he had drowned himself after not being able to find work. He was 18. News reports of the discovery appeared in the newspaper on Benjamin’s 27th birthday.

​Bookish and fascinated by Fort, though he fairly quickly lost track of trends among Forteans.

Joseph Henry Jackson was born 21 July 1894 in Madison, New Jersey to Herbert Hallet Jackson and Marion Agnes Brown. He had a younger brother named Gordon, born in 1898. At the time of the 1900 census, Herbert was an iron merchant. Later, Marion tutored music. In 1910, when he was about 16, Joseph was a stock runner. He attended Peddie, a private boarding school, and Lafayette College, in Easton Pennsylvania, from 1915 to 1917. His father died in 1914. He served in the U.S. ambulance corps during World War I, and afterwards moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where ehe lived with his younger brother and mother. 

After a brief stint in advertising, Jackson was associated with Sunset magazine from 1920 to 1928, serving as editor for his last two years there—and so began his love affair with the West. On 20 June 1923, he married Charlotte Emanuella Cobden, in Berkeley; they had a daughter, Marion, name dafter his mother, in 1927. In 1924, while still with Sunset, he reviewed books—the program was “The Bookman’s Guide”—over Pacific Coast radio. He started in Oakland, before moving to San Francisco, then becoming syndicated. Jackson continued the radio work until 1943. He reviewed books of the San Francisco “Argonaut” from 1929 to 1930. In 1930, he went to work reviewing books for the San Francisco Chronicle (“A Bookman’s Notebook”), continuing until his death. His reviews were also carried by the Los Angeles Times starting in 1948.

​John Wood Campbell, Jr., was born 8 June 1910 in Newark, New Jersey to John W. Campbell and the former Dorothy Strahern. Raised in middle class material comfort—his father was an engineer—but great emotional turmoil, caught in the triangle between a distant father, an unpredictable mother, and a resentful aunt (his mother’s twin), Campbell turned to science and engineering: by accounts, he was reading astronomy and physics books as early as eight years old, and tinkering on bicycles. He would always appreciate scientists and engineers as cultural heroes, doing what needed to be done, changing and perfecting the human race. Campbell went to the private Blair Academy and did not do well, but got into MIT anyway.

He discovered science fiction in his teens. The genre was just beginning to take shape. There were scientific romances and adventure stories from older generations—Poe and Verne—as well as stories along those lines being produced by contemporary authors—Wells, Burroughs, Doyle—but it was Hugo Gernsback who was consolidating science fiction into a recognizable genre. His Amazing Stories came out in 1926. At MIT, Campbell wanted to buy a car, but his father refused, and so he turned to writing stories for the new science fiction market, and found himself successful enough. He finished MIT (did he?) but also continued writing under a couple of names.

His John W. Campbell byline went with stories of what he called, in a clever spoonerism, “thud and blunder,” tales of galactic derring-do and adventure. Under a pseudonym, Don A. Stuart, he worked out more thoughtful, though also deeply pessimistic, narratives. These often lacked a robust plot, but made of for it with their considerations of the limits of science and human knowledge. He also used the names Karl van Campen and Arthur McCann.

​A partnered pair of science fictional Forteans.

Fredric Brown was born 29 October 1906 in Cincinnati. He graduated from Hanover College in Indiana, and settled for a long time in Milwaukee, where he worked in the printing trade, also doing proofreading. He married a woman named Helen Ruth in 1929, and they started a family, Helen giving birth to a two boys. Apparently, Brown had only known Helen through correspondence before they married. The Depression was hard on the Brown’s, and Fredric eked by, while also turning out short mysteries, that he began to sell to magazines in the 1930s. He once hoboed to Los Angeles trying to drum up work, and did turns as a detective and dish washer.

He sold his first short story in 1937, and there followed a mess of tales, their fates difficult to follow. But by the early 1940s, he had hit a groove. Brown was part of Allied Authors, a competitor of the Milwaukee Fictioneers, the later of which included Ray Palmer, Stanley Weinbaum, Roger Herman Shoar (who wrote under the name Ralph Milne Farley), and Robert Bloch, among others. As Bloch remembered Brown from the early 1940s, he was small and fine-boned, with a neat mustache. His apartment had a Siamese cat named Ming Tah, a wooden recorder that he played, a chess set, and a typewriter. Brown enjoyed his alcohol quite a bit.

Beginning in 1943, according to his biographer, “Brown’s short story output from this point on is more manageable, as he began to rework several themes that reveal interesting facets of his concerns.” In addition to mysteries, Brown wrote science fiction, fantasies, and hybrids of the various genres. He was known for his word play and trick endings, and much admired for his craftsmanship. Ideas could be difficult, though, and Bloch remembers Brown hopping on buses and riding across the country when he was was blocked, looking for inspiration. He became an innovator by being contrarian and focusing on the small bore: rather than penning grand space operas, he looked at the problems of science, the failures of rocketry.

​Another science fictional Fortean.

Richard Burton Matheson is a well-known writer, and so there is not much to add to his biography beyond the outlines that can be found in his obituaries and on Wikipedia.

He was born 20 February 1926 in Allendale, New Jersey, to Norwegian immigrants, his father a tile layer and speakeasy operator. The Mathson’s divorced when Richard was eight, and he moved to Brooklyn with his mother, where he attended local schools. Matheson had an early interest in music, writing hundreds of songs in his teens, which followed his literary pursuits: his first story appeared in the Brooklyn Eagle not long after his parents divorced. He also had an interest in physics and studied engineering at Brooklyn Technical High School. 

Matheson enlisted in the army’s pre-engineering program at Cornell to avoid being drafted into the infantry, but ended up in the infantry anyway when the program was cancelled in 1944. He was in combat in Germany. Medically discharged in 1945, Matheson was directionless, ending up back at home for a time before going to journalism school in Missouri. When he graduated in 1949, though, he remained at loose ends; college had stripped him of the Christian Science faith his mother had embraced after her divorce and shared with her children, nor could he find a job in journalism. Like so many writers, he took a job to support his avocation, doing menial night work to free his days. He broke through into the field of fantastic fiction after a fairly brief apprenticeship: his first sale was the now-classic “Born of Man and Woman,” to the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which was co-edited by Fortean Anthony Boucher. 

Not long after, Matheson moved to southern California—better weather, the movies—and became associated with a group of writers there, “The Fictioneers,” as well as the so-called Southern California Sorcerers, a group of fantastic fiction writers that included Charles Beaumont and Ray Bradbury, among others. (I do not know the relationship between the Fictioneers and the Sorcerers.) He married Ruth Ann Woodson in 1952; they had four children. For a short period, Matheson also worked at Douglas Aircraft and also as a linotype operator.

​What new can be said about Ezra Pound? That he was, in a manner of speaking, a Fortean.

Certainly, there is little reason to rehearse his biography, for my purposes, beyond drawing out those Fortean affinities. Acres of forest have fallen to print not only his voluminous work but the equally voluminous commentary—literary criticism and biographies, one of the latter three books, long, in the neighborhood of 2,000 pages.

So, thumbnailed: He was born 20 October 1885 in Hailey, Idaho but relocated to Pennsylvania before he had turned five. Whipsmart, he matriculated at the University of Pennsylvania when he was 15, but finished at Hamilton College, graduating in 1905. (Fortean Society Founder Alexander Woollcott graduated from the same school in 1909). Pound was deeply interested in literature and music. During these years, he traveled back and forth to Europe, soaking up its culture and preferring its arts to what he saw as America’s juvenile outpourings.