New Lands (2 page)

Fort played Loki to Science's Wotan, disliking and distrusting scientists as much as he did his father. Two reasons he expressed are that science refused to admit that there are no natural in-between states (at least, in those pre-Schrodinger days); but even more so, that scientists considered their opinions infallible as Papal edicts. Further, and more obnoxiously, they would ignore contradictory evidence. So Fort, in response, lays out the Data, taken from the individual notes he had been gathered over so many years. Starting off by describing a series of ever-more colorful rainfalls -- yellow, black, green, red -- Fort proceeds, to such phenomena as pink snow, snowflakes a foot across, falls of icicles and lumps of ice, rains of fishes, rains of fresh meat, rains of frogs, unlikely objects dug out of Native American burial mounds, cigar-shaped bodies seen crossing the sun, animals feeling earthquakes before they occurred; odd lights in the sea or in the sky -- nearly all with cited references.

As the steady accretion of data drifts ever higher Fort relates his evolving thoughts on the one theory he appears to have taken more seriously than his others -- certainly he continued to develop it. He proposes, here, that all things exist in an Intermediate state: "quasi-existence, neither real nor unreal." Steinmeyer deftly sums up Intermediatism as the belief that everything is in fact "part of a hyphenated existence, between positive-negative, or animal-vegetable, or even yellow-red." Most notably of all, between reality and unreality -- that one should be so perpetually distinguishable from the other cannot be assumed a given. Fort himself is exemplary, being at once crank and genius, solemn and hilarious, modernist and postmodernist; one of the first writers of the century to recognize what we now call cognitive dissonance. And, for one so driven to focus upon science, when he turns his attention to other aspects of the Data he makes some of his most unsettling observations.

There have been suggestions of an occult control upon the minds of the inhabitants of this earth. Let anybody who does not like the idea that his mind may be most subtly controlled, without his knowledge of it, think back to what propagandists did with his beliefs in the years 1914-1918. Also, he need not think so far back as that.

Nor, do we.

***

The Book of the Damned
sold well enough, going into a second printing. One day Fort went to the Library's Reference Room, where he spent so many years doing research, and asked to see a copy. The librarian noted it was filed under "Literature, Crank." The librarian assured him it could not be considered otherwise. "Forces are moving me," he wrote Dreiser, explaining that he'd burned the tens of thousands of his notes and forever taken leave of the institution. In late 1920 he and Anna moved to London, where almost immediately he headed for the Main Reference Room of the British Library to begin taking a new series of notes. Their life in London was no more exciting than it was in New York; in the evenings he and Anna had quiet dinners, or went to the movies. He wrote his second book,
New Lands,
which Boni & Liveright published in 1923. Focusing to a large degree on the theories and foibles of astronomers, filled with so many cited references as
The Book of The Damned
, the mounting of the data combined with the near-uniformity of the subject matter makes this the most challenging of Fort's books when read more than once. Yet between star and telescope his style continues to strengthen, and ideas continue to tumble forth, to be taken up again later on.

Lost tribes and the nations that have disappeared from the face of this earth -- that the skies have reeked with terrestrial civilizations, spreading out in celestial stagnations, where their remains to this day may be. The Mayans -- and what became of them? Bones of the Mayans, picked white as frost by space-scavengers, regioned to this day in a sterile luxuriousness somewhere, spread upon existence like the pseudo-breath of Death, crystalized on a sky-plane.

In their flat in Marchmont Street Fort had many thousands of new notes, which he stored in a pigeonholed cabinet, filed in accordance with his own systems. Along with his continuing trips to the library he began corresponding with readers and nascent Forteans who wished to pass along their appreciation and, more importantly, clippings about or even records of their own researches into local phenomena. Although science fiction writers of the thirties and later tended to view Fort as Fort may have viewed the average astronomer, among his early correspondents were later SF writers Miriam Allen DeFord, Maynard Shipley, Edmond Hamilton, and Eric Frank Russell. Tiffany Thayer wrote, as well, and so began that exchange. Dreiser visited the Forts shortly after the publication of
An American Tragedy
. He was deeply saddened when Fort told him he'd burned both
X
and
Y
along with the 40,000 notes when he left New York.

***

Fort finished his next book in 1924. Called, initially,
Skyward Ho!
it remained in typescript for many years. Boni & Liveright turned it down, sales of
New Lands
being (understandably) much lower than those of his first book. He and Anna moved back to New York in 1928, finding a place on West 124th Street. He returned to the Main Reference Room and began anew to take notes, although by now his eyesight was so worsening that it was harder and at last impossible to do research or even read, every day. Much of his time he spent creating and developing a game he called Super-checkers, which involved a large cloth gingham sheet and many, many thumbtacks pierced through with cardboard to serve as pieces ("slightly less than 400 pieces on a game surface of 800 squares" notes Steinmeyer). One of the few photos of Fort shows him contentedly sitting alongside the sheet. But by the next year his eyesight had so worsened that he found himself no longer able to devote such attention to the original sources, and so his visits decreased. Though he took fewer notes, he continued to write.

The Forts moved to Ryer Avenue, off the Grand Concourse in the Bronx (still standing) and there Tiffany Thayer appeared in person for a visit in 1930, soon after his first own bestselling novel was published. They talked. Fort told him of his manuscript
Skyward Ho!
Like Dreiser, Thayer didn't hesitate, taking the manuscript to his publisher, Claude Kendall, and convinced him to bring it out. As no one was keen about the title, Thayer and Fort batted about several possibilities before the former made the winning suggestion.

Without telling the honoree, Thayer founded the Fortean Society, intending to publicize both the book and Fort in general. The first meeting of the Society took place toward the end of January 1931. In attendance were Thayer, Dreiser, Alexander Woolcott, Ben Hecht, Dunninger the magician; neither Tarkington nor UK novelist John Cowper Powys could attend but sent messages. Fort was pretty much hoodwinked into attending but evidently took it well, sitting quietly in a chair smoking a cigar while Dreiser did most of the talking, and looking at the first copies he'd seen of
Lo!

***

Wigwams on an island -- sparks in their columns of smoke.

Centuries later -- the uncertain columns are towers. What once were fluttering sparks are

the motionless lights of windows. According to critics of Tammany Hall, there has been monstrous corruption on this island: nevertheless, in the midst of it, this regularization has occurred. A woodland sprawl has sprung to stony attention.

Lo!
Fort's greatest work, is the one the inexperienced Fortean should read first. His mastery of the Data is complete, and with a voice as distinct as any in American literature, he presents the data and his theories about the data with unexcelled beauty and precision, it is a work both personal and cosmic. Here he streamlines the theory of Intermediateness, speaking now not only of what he calls the oneness "in all confusions" but how reality-unreality forever iterates in ways perpetually expected-unexpected. He now brings to the entirety of the work what seems to be a much deeper understanding, and appreciation, and acceptance of the world.

Wise men have tried other ways. They have tried to understand our state of being, by grasping at its stars, or its arts, or its economics. But, if there is an underlying oneness of all things, it does not matter where we begin, whether with stars, or laws of supply and demand, or frogs, or Napoleon Bonaparte. One measures a circle, beginning anywhere.

Among the data contained in his third book is naturally, much regarding rains of the unexpected -- fish, snakes, winkles tossed across country lanes by "a disgruntled fishmonger"; astronomical phenomena, odd weather and the like -- but as well a far broader range of material: accounts of odd animals seen at sea or on land, mysterious attacks by what appear to have been animals, mysterious appearances of things and people, a multichapter account of the phenomena -- spontaneous combustion, lights in the sky, poltergeists, unseen. murderous wild animals, mysterious disappearances, manifestations of psychotic mania, speaking in tongues and so forth -- taking place during the Wales Revival of 1904-05. And, of course, the cow that gave birth to two lambs -- or, rather, wool-covered calves. As William Gibson created the word "cyberspace" so Fort observes here that a possible way in which frogs and the like may fall to earth absent of windstorms would be "a transportory force which I shall call teleportation." And, he continued to toss off notions that would later in the century settle in the minds of readers to come, carrying them to far different places than probably even Fort foresaw.

Unknown, luminous things, or beings, have often been seen, sometimes close to this earth and sometimes high in the sky. It may be that some of them were living things that occasionally come from somewhere else in our existence, but that others were lights on the vessels of explorers, or voyagers, from somewhere else.

***

By late 1931, Fort, growing progressively blinder, finished the manuscript of a new book,
Wild Talents
, his most personal book in many ways; the phenomena here pertain almost exclusively to the individual's specific reactions
vis-a-vis
the Fortean. He uses some of his most straightforward language to offer some of his most provocative ideas. As you read the book it can almost seem that the more he studied the actions of people at large -- whether they be disappearing mysteriously, bursting into flame, having stones thrown at them by unseen agencies, being stabbed by unseen assailants, possibly turning into other animals -- the less he was troubled by the behavior of astronomers. In
Wild Talents
Fort's humor pours forth, most unforgettable as he describes in chapter five the steps he takes in approaching The Data, beginning:

"Good morning!" said the dog. He disappeared in a thin, greenish vapor.

I have this record, upon newspaper authority.

It can't be said -- and therefore will be said -- that I have a marvelous credulity for newspaper yarns.

But I am so obviously offering everything in this book, as fiction. That is, if there is fiction.

And ending:

I draw my line at the dog who said "Good morning!" and disappeared in a thin, greenish vapor. He is a symbol of the false and arbitrary and unreasonable and inconsistent -- though of course also the reasonable and consistent -- limit, which everybody must somewhere set, in order to pretend to be.

You can't fool me with that dog-story.

Among the delights to be found in these pages is his account of having one day stared at a picture in his apartment and (seemingly) causing it to fall from the wall, and his proffering of the eternal question "Was somebody collecting Ambroses?" And, in his most perfect expression of the underlying oneness of all things, a metaphor by the end of the last century had pretty much become received wisdom:

Not a bottle of catsup can fall from a tenement-house fire-escape, in Harlem, without being noted -- not only by the indignant people downstairs, but--even though infinitesimally -- universally -- maybe--

Affecting the price of pajamas, in Jersey City; the temper of somebody's mother-in-law, in Greenland; the demand, in China, for rhinoceros horn for the cure of rheumatism -- maybe --

And, although by this point he was already being seen with a certain suspicion by more of its practitioners (for example run down, if interested, the musings of First Fan Sam Moskowitz, who believed Fort to be a less rabid version of Richard Shaver), Fort courteously tosses down one last useful concept to science fiction literature and film before riding off on his comet:

Girls at the front--and they are discussing their usual not very profound subjects. The alarm--the enemy is advancing.

Command to the poltergeist girls to concentrate--and under their chairs they stick their wads of chewing gum.

A regiment bursts into flames, and the soldiers are torches. Horses snort smoke from the combustion of their entrails.

Reinforcements are smashed under cliffs that are teleported from the Rocky Mountains. The snatch of Niagara Falls--it pours upon the battlefield.

The little poltergeist girls reach for their wads of chewing gum.

***

Fort's final note reads: "Difficulty shaving. Gaunt places in face." It is thought now that he suffered from undiagnosed leukemia. On May 3 1932, he was taken to the hospital. Thayer brought him the first copy of
Wild Talents
, hot off the press. He died, a few hours later.

Some time after that Dreiser came to the apartment to see Anna, asking if Charles had been in touch. There'd been raps, and noises: one day, she said, his aunt came and told her she'd get none of his money, and she went to bed crying. In the middle of the night woke up, and saw him sitting there. "He said, 'Hello, Momma' and I was never so glad to see anybody in my whole life.'" She survived him by five years.

Dreiser and Thayer met to discuss what should happen to Fort's notes, to his manuscripts, to the preservation of his memory. To no one's surprise they wildly disagreed, Thayer forever alienating the better-known author, who refused to have anything more to do with matters Fortean. It wasn't long before Thayer was publishing the first issues of his zine,
Doubt,
nominally undertaken in order to print the remainder of the notes. But no sooner did the second World War begin than Thayer, an isolationist, conspiracy theorist, and crank of the third order, started using the pages to publish his musings on Pearl Harbor, on the draft, on the income tax, so on, so forth; to presenting theories so incomprehensible as to make Lawson's "Zig-Zag-And-Swirl" theory seem to be quantum mechanics, works posing a Hebraic origin for Native Americans, and so on -- after a while, naturally, there was no more room to reprint Fort's notes. By the time the last issue appeared in the late 1950s, around the same time the hardcover
Books of Charles Fort
went out of print, Thayer had managed to drive away most everyone.