Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned, New York (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Ben Hecht saw iconoclastic author Fort (1874–1932) as an inspired clown who thumbed his nose at science as well as religion, and Fort's imaginative books exerted a strong influence on science fiction, notably novelist Eric Frank Russell. Stage magic historian Steinmeyer (Hiding the Elephant) captures Fort's wry humor, skepticism and wildest notions. Surviving fragments of Fort's unpublished autobiography illuminate his strict Albany, N.Y., childhood. In 1892, Fort became a New York City reporter and editor before his world travels and 1896 marriage. He was befriended by Theodore Dreiser, who shepherded Fort's short stories and first novel into print. Fort also pored through diverse journals to document the paranormal and anomalies rejected by the scientific establishment. Shoe boxes packed with 40,000 slips of paper served as a basis for The Book of the Damned (1919), which saw print because Dreiser threatened to leave his publisher unless the company also published Fort. As more compilations of oddities appeared, Fort developed a cult following, and the so-called Forteans issued journals long after their leader's death. Steinmeyer has emerged from the archives with a wonderful, prismatic portrait of the man who once wrote, To this day, it has not been decided if I am a humorist or a scientist. 8 pages of b&w photos. (May)
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From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Michael Dirda

Charles Fort (1874-1932) isn't remembered today for his humorous, slice-of-life stories set in turn-of-the-century New York. He isn't remembered for his best friend's -- the great American novelist Theodore Dreiser's -- estimation of his genius as "simply stupendous." And he certainly isn't remembered for his novel The Outcast Manufacturers or his abortive memoir Many Parts. No, Charles Fort is remembered -- in some quarters revered -- because he created what biographer Jim Steinmeyer calls "a new kind of ghost story . . . in which it is the cold, hard data that haunts."

For the last half of his adult life, this walrus-like, myopic amateur scholar spent his afternoons at the New York Public Library or the British Museum, combing through newspapers, magazines, medical reports and learned journals for news items that were . . . weird. Inexplicable. That revealed a lot more strangeness in the world than the received wisdom of science would acknowledge. How is it that fish, frogs, lizards, snakes, eels, insects, worms and blood have been known to fall from the sky? And not just once. Fort sought patterns of anomaly, repetitions of the supposedly impossible, and he wondered about them. His approach to these mysteries was itself an oddity, both reportorial and logical, but also humorous and playful. Could there be, he speculated, a kind of "Super-Sargasso Sea" in the upper atmosphere where detritus floats around before falling to Earth? If so, how do things get up there in the first place? In four volumes -- The Book of the Damned (1919), New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931) and Wild Talents (1932) -- Fort suggested that our comfortable known world was neither comfortable nor known.

"His accounts of mysterious airships," writes Steinmeyer, "formed the canon when, decades later, this phenomenon became a public obsession as Flying Saucers or UFOs. Charles Fort created the word 'teleportation,' inspired the term 'Bermuda Triangle,' and popularized accounts of spontaneous human combustion, visions of cities in the sky, the Mary Celeste [ghost ship] mystery." It was Fort who suspected that our world might be a kind of petting zoo for the amusement of aliens. Human beings, he notoriously concluded, were "property. . . . We belong to something." He also guessed that there might be some kind of invisible barrier around the Earth and that the Earth itself might actually be stationary, that the planets were much closer to us than we suspected, and that, in general, there were more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in anyone's philosophy.

Fort's mature books were based on thousands of notes scribbled on small pieces of paper, which he painstakingly categorized and carefully filed in shoe boxes. Despite his often outrageous conjectures, he usually walked the tightrope of non-committed agnosticism. As he says near the beginning of Lo!: "I shall be accused of having assembled lies, yarns, hoaxes and superstitions. To some degree, I think so, myself. To some degree I do not. I offer the data." Indeed, he does. For instance, when discussing the mysterious hoof-like marks that appeared all over Devonshire one morning in 1855 (and that were made by some kind of biped), he quotes from contemporary accounts in Notes and Queries, the Times of London and the Illustrated London News.

Despite an owlish antiquarian obsessiveness, Fort wrote with a kind of jazzy syncopation, riffing from one report or anecdote to the next, the whole held loosely together by his quizzical humor and personality. After describing several accounts of people who had gone out for a walk and suddenly found themselves 30 miles away without knowing how this had come about, he concludes with what seems a knowing wink: "If human beings ever have been teleported, and, if some mysterious appearances of human beings be considered otherwise unaccountable, an effect of the experience is effacement of memory." He also confessed that "a naive, little idea of mine is that so many ghosts in white garments have been reported, because persons, while asleep, have been teleported in their nightclothes."

Steinmeyer's engrossing biography dwells a little too long on Fort's childhood as the son of a well-off Albany merchant, but it makes up for this by briskly recounting the author's youthful adventures (riding the rails all over the East Coast, shipping out to England and South Africa) and describing his desperate years as a magazine short story writer, somewhat in the vein of O. Henry. Eventually, a family inheritance saved Fort (and his stolid, loyal wife) from near starvation and allowed him to embark on his life's true work.

Fort's two earliest excursions into paranormal reporting sound far more mystical and outré than his later writing. In X -- that was the intended title -- he speculated about a mysterious evolutionary force and postulated a race of beings on Mars. Dreiser, who read the manuscript, judged the book a masterpiece of daring thought and gorgeous prose, and he was appalled when Fort destroyed it. A subsequent volume, called Y, took up the possible existence of a hidden world at the North Pole. As evidence, Fort cited "blond Eskimos, warm climates near the North Pole, and Perry's peculiar explorations." Fort even speculated that Kaspar Hauser, the strange boy who appeared in Nuremberg in 1828, may have come from that other world. "Hauser exhibited odd traits like supernatural senses, but could barely communicate and did not recall any family. . . . He was killed under puzzling circumstances -- stabbed as he walked in the middle of a snowy park; no other footprints in the snow, no murder weapon."

Eventually, Fort wired Dreiser that he had written Z, which later appeared as The Book of the Damned. Here Fort posited "intermediate existence," or what he sometimes referred to as "existence of the hyphen," explaining that our lives reveal "an attempt by the relative to be the absolute." Like Schrödinger's dead-and-alive cat, things could be positive-negative, real-unreal, soluble-insoluble. I don't quite get this, but as the years went by, Fort came to believe increasingly in a kind of monism, a mystical connectedness of all things.

During his lifetime Fort's admirers ranged from the journalist Ben Hecht to the inventor R. Buckminster Fuller. His successors included Robert Ripley, who commercialized a whole range of oddities in his "Believe it or Not!" newspaper columns and, from my own childhood, Frank Edwards, whose book Stranger Than Science frightened more than one 12-year-old into sleepless nights. On a larger scale, Fort's legacy was initially preserved through the Fortean Society and its magazine, Fate, edited by the forgotten novelist Tiffany Thayer. Today, the standard-bearer is the British magazine Fortean Times. A recent issue dealt, in part, with statues that bleed.

Jim Steinmeyer is best known as a historian of magic (Hiding the Elephant) and as a creator of illusions for Doug Henning and David Copperfield, among others. His biography, drawing heavily at times from Damon Knight's pioneering life of Fort, balances neatly between skepticism and sympathy. Steinmeyer views Fort as a representative 1920s figure, but to me he seems in a slightly earlier mode: The antiquary with a hobby horse. Fort and his 40,000 slips of paper recall Marx researching economics in the British Library, H.W. Fowler compiling his picky Modern English Usage, the editors of the Variorum Shakespeare and the Oxford English Dictionary noting arcane interpretations and elaborate etymologies, J.G. Frazer tracing hanged gods and ancient ritual in The Golden Bough.

In all his works Fort aimed to undermine the sanctimony and swagger of modern science -- but also to offer some diverting intellectual entertainment. Are his books, then, mere crackpot pseudo-science? To give a Fortean answer: Yes and no. Are they fun to read? Yes, just plain yes.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Tarcher; Reprint edition (May 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1585426407
• ISBN-13: 978-1585426409
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #551,703 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Riding on a comet..., May 4, 2008

By	Mark Newbold (Pittsburg, KS United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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At last a major biography worthy of the man who introduced us to the truly amazing and inexplicable world we inhabit. Not since Damon Knight's 1970 bio has Fort been given his due. Fort came from an odd childhood of upper class indulgence and Dickensian cruelty perpetuated by his father. Fort's personal individuation was one of rebellion against social norms and mindless restrictions leading him to an "on the road" existence of travel, train yards, and down and outs from the backroads of America to cattle ships to Britain.

Fort was Bohemia's bohemian who struggled as a newspaper reporter, starving novelist and hermit in a domestic life surrounded by his devoted wife and research notes. Theodore Drieser was the champion that finally realized the unique genius possessed by Fort and supported him with unwaivering friendship through the remainder of Fort's short but prolific life.

But did he "invent" the supernatural as alleged by the title? Like an eccentric Zen master, Fort directly pointed at the documented realities that intrude into a well ordered empirical universe with distinctly uncomfortable implications. Continuing with the zen metaphor, Fort's "stick that heals" was one of curiosity and doubt. He had possessed a healthy minded agnosticism that was interested in everything because everything is interesting. Rather than "invent" Fort more accurately precipitated what has become known as the supernatural. Among the phenomena he documented were aerial phenonmena later to be called UFO's, vanishing lands, people, vessels and mysterious falls of substances that should not fall upon us are now pillars of the supernatural that continue to baffle and delight.

Fort was a pioneer of an art and/or science that provided us with a lens to view the curious and wonderful world around us in ways not dreamed of in our philosophy. Mr. Steinmeyer, an established writer of magical wonders, is to be thanked for this work that brings the enigmatic Charles Fort to a new generation of readers and potential forteans. Highly recommended.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Engaging Portrait of a Difficult Figure, July 1, 2008

By	R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

If you have a taste for giant lights in the sky or in the ocean, flying ships "shaped like a Mexican cigar", or secret polar civilizations; or especially, if you want to know more about how rain could come down colored red, black, or yellow, or could include a storm of eels or pebbles or frogs, then Charles Fort is your man. And if you want explanations, you might find it satisfactory that Fort instructs about the blood that dripped from the sky, "... our whole solar system is a living thing: that showers of blood upon this earth are its internal hemorrhages. - Or vast living things in the sky, as there are vast living things in the oceans..." Fort gets high points for curiosity, and no points for explication, but ninety years after his strange ideas were first put in print, his name is still known by students of the paranormal, whether the name be reviled or praised. In _Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural_ (Tarcher / Penguin), Jim Steinmeyer has given a jolly story of this remarkably strange man. Steinmeyer has written about various aspects of the history of magic, and he designs magic illusions for famous magicians, but this is an appreciative, no-nonsense biography, quite anomalously fitting for a subject who surrounded himself with at least some nonsensical tales taken as fact.

Fort was born in 1874, and grew up in Albany, N.Y. His father was a grocer, a dandy, and a bully, and following a terrible row at home when he was eighteen, Fort left home for good to see the world. When he returned, he started writing stories for magazines, often in the popular vein of O. Henry. He had some success, got some stories published, but the pay was small. He was saved artistically by none other than the author of _An American Tragedy_, Theodore Dreiser, who became his best friend. It is strange that the dour Dreiser, famous for naturalistic and pessimistic fiction, should have admired Fort's stories, but when Fort began working on his strange metaphysics, Dreiser gave his estimation of Fort's genius as "simply stupendous", and he coached, corrected, and ushered Fort's work into print. Fort loved going to the library and researching, and he collected on scraps of paper any oddity that struck his fancy, phenomena that he designated beyond the explanatory power of science. Steinmeyer shows that Fort's speculations fit into the fizzy 1920s, and his book sold well. Fort insisted that "... nothing ever has been proved. Because there is nothing to prove." With everything all connected, the distinctions which science made were arbitrary and pointless. The _New York Tribune_ titled its laudatory review of the book "Science Mocked". Steinmeyer concedes that at a time when Gugliemo Marconi and Percival Lowell were telling the public about the endeavors of the Martians, Fort may have had a point. Generally, however, he had little real knowledge of how science worked, and his dismissal of science overall was fatuous. He was more appropriately skeptical of spiritualism, and he refused to be drawn on biblical miracles, because he drew the line at anything happening before 1800. He despised conspiracy theorists.

Fort was shy, and despite his confident prose and extraordinary speculations, he did not enjoy being with others much. Even Dreiser only met with him a score of times. He liked going to the movies. He devised a game called Super-checkers and was pleased with it; it had 400 pieces on a board of 800 squares. He had to play himself in solitaire, because no one else took it up. He hated using the telephone, and he hated dealing with doctors, thus hastening his own death in 1932, at age 57. By that time, he had published three other books along the lines of _The Book of the Damned_. He had a following, although his shyness kept him from enjoying it. There is a British periodical _Fortean Times_ that publishes Fort's style of oddities, but perhaps does not pay attention to the witticisms with which Fort wrote them up; it seems impossible to tell exactly what Fort took seriously and what he didn't. Steinmeyer's entertaining biography gives plenty of details on the enigmatic life of an oddball misfit. There are scientists and literary figures that occasionally hobnobbed with Fort, and many who wrote about him (some in praise), so he was an influential figure. He is thought by skeptics to be credulous and naïve, but his writing is full of contradictions and paradoxes. It is tough to give a portrait of a man who could write, "I shall be accused of having assembled lies, yarns, hoaxes and superstitions. To some degree, I think so, myself. To some degree I do not," or "I believe nothing of my own that I have ever written," but Steinmeyer has nicely placed Fort within his times and charted his effects on the years thereafter.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Disturbing Portrait, May 19, 2008

By	Rory Coker (Austin, TX USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Magician and magical historian Jim Steinmeyer has written a carefully "agnostic" biography of that infamous agnostic of pseudoscience, Charles Hoy Fort. By this I mean that Steinmeyer essentially never intrudes with summations, analyses, judgments or conclusions... he gives the facts and lets them speak for themselves. In dealing with Fort, this is probably the correct approach.

Fort was the product of a horrific childhood that would leave almost anyone seriously mentally ill, and indeed as an adult he found no part of society into which he could fit. Dropping out of high school (failing math and science, naturally) he worked as a newspaper reporter, and then tried to make a living as a writer of magazine fiction. His work during this period usually consisted of slice-of-life accounts (including one published novel) of daily existence in the slums and tenements of New York.

At some point he turned to the writing of conventionally crazy pseudoscience, in the now-lost manuscripts he called X and Y. In X he argued that all life on earth is designed, evolved and controlled by intelligent creatures living on Mars. In Y he argued that there is a super-race living in a huge depression at the North Pole. In both works he used the technique familiar from Ignatius Donnelly (and later Immanuel Velikovsky), namely the backing of these wild claims by overwhelming (yet actually irrelevant) numbers of citations from obscure records and documents. Either manuscript could easily have been configured as science fiction, but despite hints from his good friend, novelist Theodore Dreiser, Fort refused to make the conversions. Neither was ever published in any form.

Instead, an inheritance gave him leisure to write the four pseudoscience works for which he is best known, beginning with THE BOOK OF THE DAMNED. (He also appears to have written at least two other books in this vein, which he later destroyed, "M and F" and "WW".) The four published works follow the pattern of X and Y in consisting mainly of summaries of accounts of supposedly amazing phenomena, drawn from old magazines and newspapers, but differ in championing no particular scenario or hobbyhorse. They are well-written, in a somewhat annoyingly "cute" style, and often quite deliberately funny.

Fort really started something, but it's difficult to say precisely just what. Most pseudoscience books of the 20th Century have had a superficially Fortean structure, but actually they jump back to Donnelly, using the structure to support just one particular crazy scenario.

Fort is an important figure in the history of early 20th Century pure-quill craziness, and this carefully-researched biography is very welcome.