We are all familiar with the four 'canonical' texts of Charles Fort, and mostly aware of, if not familiar with, his earlier literary works such as The Outcast Manufacturers and the lively short stories depicting working-class New York tenement life, which were published in magazines and newspapers.
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In this volume Chris Aubeck introduces us to a large and previously uncollected area of Fort's work. It turns out that Fort was a fearsome writer of Letters to the Editor, to newspapers across the world. These were mostly addressed to local US titles like the Chattanooga Daily Times but also to titles like the Kingston, Jamaica Gleaner, the Auckland Star and the Hong Kong Telegraph. These were written at the time he was living in Marchmont Street, London, leading some editors to conclude that he was an eccentric English scientist. The editors of local newspapers in the 1920s (this collection covers 1920 to 1925) seem to have been remarkably amenable to printing long and verbose communiques!
The letters mostly fall into a pattern. They begin by drawing the readers' attention to an anomaly that had perhaps occurred somewhere near the location where the paper was published, and asking if any readers would be able to supply further information on the event. For example a letter published in the Minneapolis Star Tribune on the 29th July, 1924, draws the reader's attention to an incident in the town of Marshall where snakes, later identified as 'West Indian adders' had fallen from the skies.
He presents his favourite idea that these snakes were part of an on-going phenomenon of living things falling from the sky, quoting precise references from a range of scientific journals – the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Comptes Rendu, Recreative Science among others – which were unlikely to be immediately available to the majority of readers of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, but certainly look authoritative and very scientific.
In many of the letters he compares such falls to puzzling objects he imagines being washed up on the shores of Europe before 1492, the date of Columbus's landfall in the Americas. He makes this point so often that Aubeck comments that readers of this book may feel like they are in a time-loop. These pieces of random driftwood greatly puzzled the experts of the time, he says, as they believed that there was no land further to the west from which they could have come.
My first thought is if that was the case, where did they think Columbus was sailing to? Well mostly they thought he was sailing to China, or possibly Hy Brasil or any of a number of other rumoured or imagined lands beyond the Straits of Gibraltar. Any curiously carved paddles or other bits of artificially worked driftwood that floated ashore would just confirm one theory or another, it wouldn't really upset anyone's view of the world.
But Fort suggests that anyone who suggested such a thing would be considered “eccentric fellows of neglected education, but were tolerated unless they persisted” Is there any historical evidence this was the case? Is there indeed any historical evidence that the various odds and ends washed up on the western coasts of Europe before 1492 troubled the thoughts of anyone?
Although the phenomenon Fort describes and his often laboured commentary on them, is amusing and interesting at first, having them repeated in almost identical wording in letter after letter soon becomes wearying. Clearly I was not the only person who thought this. Aubeck adds editorial comments like “here the Lebanon Daily News skips Fort's paragraphs discussing meteorites in general” and “repeats arguments from other letters”.
This might lead me to think that a good portion of this book could be replaced by the comment 'Repeats arguments from other letters', if it were not for editor Chris Aubeck's illuminating 'Notes' which are interspersed through the volume, explaining and amplifying the data presented in Fort's letters. In some cases this demonstrate how Fort misread or misinterpreted the periodicals he mined for anomalies, in other cases Aubeck able to add information from sources which were not available to Fort at the time. This helps to illuminates Fort's logic and the way in which he processed his raw data. Although Aubeck is able to offer a plausible post hoc explanation for many of the phenomena described, in other cases cases he is able to confirm the truly anomalous nature of the data Fort presented.
In reporting falls of various creatures Fort makes great issue of the fact that usually only one species is involved. He sees the explanation for this as being the result of some conscious sorting mechanism and dismisses the most obvious suggestion, that these might have been objects or creature that were drawn up in a whirlwind or waterspout, claiming that if that was the case why would the deposits be of a very specific type rather than a general mixture of wind-borne detritus, and why they should fall so specifically in a limited area?
In his letter describing the fall of snakes in Marshall, Minnesota mentioned above – he claims that the difficulty “is to explain how the snakes could have fallen so alone or unmixed with anything else”. Fortunately Chris Aubeck is at hand to explain exactly why, pointing out issues which may affect this such as the habits and living conditions of the animals, the likelihood that particular species are likely to congregate in large numbers in specific places at different time of the year, and the strength of the whirlwind and the nature of the terrain it scours.
Aubeck uses these consideration to make an important point. Far from being the open-minded philosopher to whom these anomalies are a stimulus to imaginative speculation, Fort is actually “obsessed over both kinds of phenomena [lights in the sky and animals falling from the sky] to support a very particular theory”. He uses the data gathered selectively to bolster the theory, which is reiterated over and over again in these letters, that there are lands in the sky and that the earth does not rotate. This, he claims is demonstrated by the way in which some types of creature or objects fall in the same place over a number of years. He is particularly excited by the falls of small black stones which have been recorded on a number of occasions in Birmingham and Wolverhampton, the two English locations mentioned most in this collection.
Aubeck suggests that if Forteans were more aware of the reason why Fort has assembled random anomalies they might “lose interest in what is basically a meteorological phenomenon.” But then he immediately reassures us that “none of this distracts from the fact that Charles Fort was one of the most original and independent thinkers of the 20th century.”
'Independent thinker' has become something of a euphemism for 'crank' and when we look at Fort's other 'original' ideas the term seems accurate enough. He claims amongst other things that the earth does not go round the sun; it does not revolve on its axis; the sun and planets are very near; the stars are holes in a shell that surrounds the solar system; and there are 'lands in the sky'.
Aubeck asks if these ideas might be dismissed as as 'thought experiments'. Perhaps, if they were throwaway ideas offered as random speculation, but instead they were referred to again and again in his books. They are an essential part of his concept of the cosmos, and not simply jokes to amuse and stimulate the reader's imagination. Fort saw his work as 'a symbolic critique of scientific authority'. The intensity of his research, the effort put into it, dominating his life, destroying his eyesight was not just an exercise in 'original thinking', it was a crusade. I wonder if Fort felt in science the dogmatic and cruel nature of his father, and it became a stifling, controlling force that he spent his life trying to destroy? But I'm no Freudian analyst so I'll leave it there.
As in his book Saucers, Chris Aubeck has done an amazingly thorough job mining the depths of the archives to present us with these intriguing examples of Fort's writing, but perhaps this is a book mainly aimed at the specialist and the completist. Most of the actual cases recounted in these letters are more fully described in the four classic volumes we all have in our libraries - but without the additional insights offered by the editor's Notes. Maybe it is really for the hard-core Fortean, but it also gives us all an intriguing insight into the motives and obsessions of the individual who provides the fuel for our own obsessions!
A remarkable book exploring the mind of a remarkable individual.
- John Rimmer
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