Charles Fort: Dogma be Damned
by Skylaire Alfvegren
Continued...
Novelist Theodore Dreiser, who had bought Fort’s short stories when he was a magazine editor, strong-armed his own publisher into releasing The Book of the Damned. It was unlike anything ever put into print, and hit those that “got it” like an intellectual lightning bolt. Ben Hecht, then writing for the Chicago Daily News, proclaimed, “I am the first disciple of Charles Fort… Henceforth, I am a Fortean. He has made a terrible onslaught upon the accumulated lunacy of fifty centuries. The onslaught will perish. The lunacy will survive, entrenching itself behind the derisive laughter of all good citizens.”
Pulitzer-winning author Booth Tarkington was so struck by Fort’s writing that he penned the introduction to his second book, New Lands, crowing, “Here indeed was a ‘brush dipped in earthquake and eclipse’.”
Neither crank nor skeptic, Fort was not an enemy of science, nor a marvel-monger, as some labelled him. “He was wrongly dubbed the arch-enemy of science, when he makes it perfectly clear that his targets were the demagogues and the public [who insisted] on the sanctity of dogma and authority,” Rickard notes.
Tiffany Thayer began corresponding with Fort after the release of New Lands, and became a notorious novelist before tricking Fort into attending the first meeting of the Fortean Society in 1931, ostensibly formed to celebrate the publication of Fort’s third book, Lo! (working title: God is an Idiot.) Focusing largely on the lunacy of astronomers, it remains Fort’s most popular book.
Thayer formed the Society to “widen the scope of Fortean inquiry,” continue the work of gathering data, “perpetuate dissent” and foster the Fortean viewpoint—that of “enlightened skepticism.” The Society attracted the era’s intelligentsia: Dreiser, Ben Hecht, Tarkington, Burton Rascoe, John Cowper Powys, H. L. Mencken, Oliver Wendell Holmes. Thayer asked the ever-humble Fort what he called himself. Neo-astronomer? Philosopher? Fort replied, “I’m just a writer.” Wild Talents, focused largely on human marvels, was Fort’s last book. He died suddenly after its release, probably of undiagnosed leukemia.
After a go at Hollywood screenwriting, Thayer returned to the East Coast and began publishing The Fortean Society Magazine in 1937. Although Thayer was a cranky editorialist, subsribers were enthusiastic and began the grand tradition of mailing in newspaper clippings of strange phenomena.
Rechistened Doubt in 1940, the magazine and its inspiration enjoyed a renaissance the following year with the publication of Fort’s complete books. More famous names were brought into the Fortean fold: Arthur Miller, architect Frank Lloyd Wright, mondo zoologist Ivan Sanderson, inventor Buckminster Fuller. Henry Miller hawked his watercolors in the magazine’s pages for “any amount of money.”
