Damon Knight. Charles Fort, Prophet of the Unexplained. Gollancz, 1970.
Whilst sorting out a bundle of old papers I came across this review in a letter which Peter Rogerson had sent to the Merseyside UFO Bulletin in 1970. Somehow it had been overlooked and misfiled. I make no apologies for publishing this book review now, 52 years after its subject's original publication date - a record even for Magonia!
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Quite apart from publishing it as a tribute to my late friend, it is, like most of Peter's writing, making points which are every bit as valid today as when they were written. I have always felt that Peter had the UFO 'mystery' pretty well sorted out in the 1980s, and ever since then the rest of us have just been 'standing on his shoulders'. J.R.
Charles Hoy Fort was born in Albany, the capital of New York State, in 1874, the eldest of three sons. His father, Charles Nelson Fort, a local 'gentleman of note' was a tyrant with the lovable characteristics of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. Shortly after the birth of their youngest boy Clarence he had taken his wife to the State Governor’s Ball. The strain was too much and she died a few weeks later.
Grief mingled with guilt seems to have driven the elder Fort into a gloomy aloofness, destroying any emotions of love or kindness for his children. He beat them on the slightest pretext; when they were too old to beat, he would imprison them. Knight quotes from Fort’s unpublished autobiography Many Parts: “No longer beating us, but locking us in a little, dark room, giving us bread and water, sentencing us to several days or several weeks of solitude...”
Fort referred to his father as ‘them’, himself as ‘us’, his brother Raymond as ‘the other kid’, the young Clarence as ‘the little kid’. Already he had begun to identify his father with the vast impersonal world of authority. Fort and authority became enemies, he saw through the lot; the religion in whose name his father had beaten him, the schools where individuality was crushed, learning being reduced to an arid rota of unprovable ‘facts’ backed by the divine authority of dead, fossilised professors.
Fort laughed at all this, became the class comedian and was punished further. Behind all these lies was the society which threw his ten year old brother Clarence into a ‘House of Correction’ for four years, following some minor offence, not specified. Fort became a part-time reporter with a local paper, then had one last, violent quarrel with his father, and left home.
He toured the world on $25 monthly allowance left by his grandfather, writing and doing an endless variety of casual work, returning to New York in 1896, where he met and married Anna Filing, an English girl from Sheffield. Here they lived in dire poverty; Fort wrote his short stories of New York tenement life, and The Outcast Manufacturers, his only published novel – a failure.
Fort now began what was the preoccupation for the rest of his life, and started to collect press cuttings of strange, inexplicable events. Around them he wrote two ‘crank’ manuscripts; X which argued that humanity was controlled by Martians using unknown rays, and Y which revolved around the notion of a secret civilization at the South Pole. These seemed to be the precursors of the ‘ETH’ and the ‘Hollow Earth’ theories. Despite the enthusiasm of his friend Theodore Dreiser, no publisher would touch them, and Fort destroyed all copies and began work on The Book of the Damned.
This work and its successor New Worlds, were gigantic satires on the authoritarian spirit which had reduced science to the level of a religious cult. The unorthodox were suppressed, so Fort would champion them. With deadly humour he raised up a science of total absurdity to mirror the lunacies of officialdom. He raged against the ‘dictatorship of the consensus’ which operated to suppress dissent in all walks of life, the dictatorship whose only slogan was “Don’t rock the boat”.
He saw with absolute clarity that the authority of the priests and the professors was essentially that of his father beating his sons into submission, and that the ‘damned data’ were being swept under the carpet as he and his brothers had been and as the tenement dwellers still were, because they were offensive to the eye of authority, and a blot on the nice, respectable, ordered world.
In his later books, Lo! - the planned title of which was God is an Idiot – and Wild Talents, Fort tried to express his own feelings of continuity in the universe and significant events, Through their joking, tongue-in-cheek theories he began to evolve a philosophy of of significance and continuity, which bears similarity to Jung's concept of synchronicity.
Knight portrays Fort as a far more human individual than the austere figure portrayed by Tiffany Thayer in his introduction to The Books of Charles Fort. Fort’s aloofness is caused not by arrogance but rather by a desire to avoid hurting people. Thayer comes off very badly in Knight's analysis; he was a nihilist who despised all authority, he desired martyrdom and was against everything. The politicians, churches, scientists, doctors, military, everyone, everywhere, were all in one giant conspiracy to destroy liberty.
In his eyes World Wart II was a hoax between Roosevelt and Hitler to crush dissent in America; water fluoridation was a plot; the Jesuits were trying to seize power, etc., etc. That Thayer was an idealist and that his ideal of dissent was admirable cannot be disputed, but the irrational and absurd extremism to which it went reduced himself and the Fortean Society – with which Fort would have no truck whatsoever – to absurdity. It also foreshadowed the paranoia of those who see major social problems as ‘machinations of negative space people’.
With Thayer’s death Forteanism declined, though a few writers continued in Fort’s footsteps, for example Ivan T. Sanderson who has formed SITU, a scientific society to continue Fort’s work. There was also an ill-fated International Fortean Society, lead by the Willis brothers, who seem to have been as paranoic and arrogant as Thayer at his worst.
No biography of Charles Fort would have been complete without an examination of ‘the data’, and Knight provides appetising samplers along with a computer analysis of Fort’s 1877-1892 data. This suggests the phenomena has some correlation with the oppositions, conjugations and quadrature of Mars; an idea which should appeal to ufologists.
In this context Knight speculates on the growing study of ‘cycles’ in various phenomena. He also adds his own ‘way-out’ theories about ‘parallel earths’, in the best Fortean tradition, and reviews some startling scientific ideas. There is also a chapter on the persecution of Velikovsky.
This first published biography of Charles Fort is definitely recommended, both as a sensitive study of a man who stood up for freedom of thought at a time when this was unwelcome, and whose ideas have had a not inconsiderable affect on later generations, but also as a highly stimulating study of controversial phenomena.
It is only fitting that Fort himself should have the last words, in a letter written to the science-fiction writer Edmond Hamilton. One hopes they will strike home in certain places:
“… so far as I know, mine are about the only books of impoliteness to scientific dogmas written by one who has not the theological bias. Every now and then I get a letter from someone who thinks I am some kind of fundamentalist, simply because I don’t take in, without questioning, everything that scientists tell us; but I think I made it plain in the books that I am not out to restore Moses … that we shall ever organize does not seem likely to me … The great trouble is that the majority of persons who are attracted [to Forteana] are the ones we do not want: the spiritualists, fundamentalists, persons who are revolting against science, not in the least because they are affronted by the myth-stuff of the sciences, but because scientists either oppose or do not encourage them”.
- Peter Rogerson. Written June 1971, first published May 2022.
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