In the days of the long forgotten UFO UpDates Internet discussion group, ufologist and Fortean Jerome Clark described much of Magonia's output as 'literary criticism'. He felt that, rather than studying the 'actual existing phenomena', we were more concerned about the manner in which they were described and written about and their influence on society, rather on examining what it is 'up there'.
He was right to an extent of course, because mostly Magonia considered that there was actually nothing 'up there' and the words of the people who described the experience, and the people who subsequently wrote about it, were the only material available for study. If that was true for Magonia, it is even more the case for this book.
In his later life Fort became involved with a number of major figures in the American literary world, most notably Theodore Dreiser and Tiffany Thayer. Dreiser claimed to be key in getting The Book of the Damned published by his publisher Boni and Liveright, allegedly threatening to take his own work to another publisher if they refused. Buhs suggests that Dreiser had used this threat a number of times previously and the publishers were already keen to take on the work on its own merits, making it a priority for publishing after an extended printers' strike.
Fort's 'philosophy', a sort of nihilistic monism, chimed well with the modernist literary movements that had been given extra stimulus after the personal and social destruction of the First World War, which saw empires of thought as well as political empires, collapsing. Beside Dreiser and Thayer others praised Fort's work, including the journalist and screen-writer Ben Hecht, and Booth Tarkington, at the time considered the US's 'greatest living author' remembered now mainly for The Magnificent Ambersons.
But it was Tiffany Thayer who plunged into Fort's philosophy most enthusiastically, in between working on a projected series of twenty-one novels around the life of Mona Lisa. Three volumes of which were published in 1956, over 1200 pages and Mona Lisa had not even been born by the end of it. Despite being “overstuffed with sex, orgies upon orgies” critics were bored by its plot and overwhelmed by its size. No further volumes were published.
Thayer was the force behind the establishment of the Fortean Society, which Groucho-like was famous for the people who refused to join it, including Fort himself. He was also pretty much the force behind destroying the Fortean Society with his endless feuds with members and affiliated groups. At one point he 'excommunicated' the California branch of the society, and attempted to ban them from describing themselves as 'Forteans'.
His incessant need to offend dominated the Society's Journal, Doubt. Under his editorship it became an outlet for his own extreme right-wing, Fascist-adjacent, antisemitic views. His ant-science rhetoric grew even more virulent than Fort's, and his anti-war propaganda – rants about 'World Fraud II' – brought him and the Society to the attention of the FBI. After the War his claims that the A-Bomb and the Russian Sputnik were hoaxes took Fort's scientific contrarianism to pathological levels.
Although at times Buhs inserts transcripts of articles from Doubt (using a different typeface to distinguish them from the main text) we get little idea of its general contents. Mostly we learn about Thayer's editorship and his fractious relationships with other writers, including science-fiction authors, to which a whole section of this book is devoted. Fort's ideas, such as 'we are property', and his belief (perhaps 'alleged belief') that the planets of the solar system are little more than a day or two's travel away from each other, have been a motor for any number of SF stories and novels.
Ufology features here, but it is clear that Thayer had little time for it, seeming to think it was part of the same conspiracy as the atom bomb and the Sputnik, a government plan to maintain a high level defence expenditure. Buhs suggests that he had to be leaned on by his UK associate, the SF author Eric Frank Russell to publish any UFO-related material in Doubt. He quotes Thayer as saying “I am now killing every man, woman or child who says 'saucers' to me”. Thayer seemed to be fearing that Forteanism was slipping away from him, but eventually Thayer slipped away from Forteanism, on 23rd of August, 1959. Perhaps his form of Forteanism was not destined to last into the 'New-Age' 'sixties.
I am not sure how much this book is, as the tile page claims, “a cultural history of Charles Fort and his followers” as an account of the life and literary battles of Tiffany Thayer. It is largely an America account, and apart from Thayer's correspondence with Eric Frank Russell there is little about Forteans and Forteanism outside the USA. Just as there is little or nothing about Fortean influences on other arts, or the sciences. His story largely ends with Thayer's death. There is a fairly brief mention of Ron and Paul Willis, and the International Fortean Organisation and INFO Journal, and an acknowledgement of the arrival of new Fortean topics, such as 'earth mysteries'.
He acknowledges that in the 1970s “a plethora of Fortean books flooded the market”, name-checking Jerome Clark and Loren Coleman.. He gives a brief account of the origin and development of Fortean Times, “more cynical, lighthearted and materialistic than Fate, but working the same beat”. But he concludes that these 'improvisations' appeared in a different world to that which evolved from the original Fortean Society.
This book must be seen as 'literary criticism' in the classical meaning of that term - “the reasoned consideration of literary works and issues” according to Britannica - and at times the reader can get bogged down in the intricacies of American writing and publishing in the 'twenties and 'thirties. Despite that, it will interest anyone seriously interested in the history of Fort's work and its critical reception, as well as the development of Forteanism as a 'philosophy', but I feel it may be of most value to students of early to mid twentieth century American literature, who will probably lose little by missing out the 'case studies' which intersperse each chapter.
However, because of the 'cultural history' of Forteanism, which has been otherwise ignored by academia until recently, they will probably not be the people who will be reading this book.
- John Rimmer
