Fascinating Insights into an Odd Character

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	• Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural Jim Steinmeyer Tarcher, 2008 - 352 pages average customer review:based on 5 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Disturbing Portrait

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.

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An Engaging Portrait of a Difficult Figure

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.

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Riding on a comet...

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.

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Fascinating Insights into an Odd Character

Steinmeyer does a good job of encapsulating the life of Fort, who must not have been the easiest person to research. While a little short on Fort's actual motivation to catalog the world's oddest phenomena, the book provides fascinating accounts of Fort's troubled childhood, adult poverty, note-taking methodology and his strange and lengthy friendship with fellow author Theodore Dreiser. The subtitle "The Man Who Invented the Supernatural" is misleading, but I suspect it may not have been Steinmeyer's idea. It's a fast and curious look into the life of one our grand eccentrics.

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The seminal biography of the twentieth century?s premier chronicler of the paranormal, Charles Fort?a man whose very name gave rise to an adjective, fortean, to describe the unexplained.

By the early 1920s, Americans were discovering that the world was a strange place.

Charles Fort could demonstrate that it was even stranger than anyone suspected. Frogs fell from the sky. Blood rained from the heavens. Mysterious airships visited the Earth. Dogs talked. People disappeared. Fort asked why, but, even more vexing, he also asked why we weren?t paying attention.

Here is the first fully rendered literary biography of the man who, more than any other figure, would define our idea of the anomalous and paranormal. In Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural, the acclaimed historian of stage magic Jim Steinmeyer goes deeply into the life of Charles Fort as he saw himself: first and foremost, a writer.

At the same time, Steinmeyer tells the story of an era in which the certainties of religion and science were being turned on their heads. And of how Fort?significantly?was the first man who challenged those orthodoxies not on the grounds of some counter-fundamentalism of his own but simply for the plainest of reasons: they didn?t work. In so doing, Fort gave voice to a generation of doubters who would neither accept the ?straight story? of scholastic science nor credulously embrace fantastical visions. Instead, Charles Fort demanded of his readers and admirers the most radical of human acts: Thinking.

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