Charles Hoy Fort | |
|---|---|
 Fort in 1920 | |
| Born | Charles Hoy Fort (1874-08-06)August 6, 1874 Albany, New York, US |
| Died | May 3, 1932(1932-05-03) (aged 57) The Bronx, New York City, US |
| Occupation | Anomalistics researcher |
Charles Hoy Fort (August 6, 1874 – May 3, 1932) was an American writer and researcher who specialized inanomalous phenomena. The terms "Fortean" and "Forteana" are sometimes used to characterize various such phenomena. Fort's books sold well and are still in print. His work continues to inspire admirers, who refer to themselves as "Forteans", and has influenced some aspects ofscience fiction.[1]
Fort's collections of scientific anomalies, includingThe Book of the Damned (1919), influenced numerous science-fiction writers with theirskepticism and as sources of ideas. "Fortean" phenomena are events which seem to challenge the boundaries of accepted scientific knowledge, and theFortean Times (founded asThe News in 1973 and renamed in 1976) investigates such phenomena.
Fort was born in Albany, New York, in 1874,[2] ofDutch ancestry. His father, a grocer, was an authoritarian, and in his unpublished autobiographyMany Parts, Fort mentions the physical abuse he endured from his father.[3] Fort's biographer,Damon Knight, suggested that his distrust of authority began in his treatment as a child. Fort developed a strong sense of independence during his early years.[citation needed]
As a young adult, Fort wanted to be anaturalist, collectingsea shells, minerals, and birds. Although Fort was described as curious and intelligent, he was not a good student. Anautodidact, his considerable knowledge of the world was mainly due to his extensive personal reading.[4]
At age 18, Fort leftNew York to embark on a world tour to "put some capital in the bank of experience".[5] He travelled through the western United States,Scotland, andEngland, until becoming ill inSouthern Africa. When he returned home, he was nursed by Anna Filing, whom he had known since childhood. They were married on October 26, 1896, at anEpiscopal church.[6] For a few years, the newly married couple lived in poverty in the Bronx while Fort tried to earn a living writing stories for newspapers and magazines. In 1906, he began to collect accounts of anomalies.[5]
His uncle Frank A. Fort died in 1916,[7] and a modest inheritance gave Fort enough money to quit his variousday jobs and to write full-time.[2] In 1917, Fort's brother Clarence died; his portion of the same inheritance was divided between Fort and his other brother, Raymond.[8]
Fort's experience as a journalist,[2] coupled with his wit and contrarian nature, prepared him for his real-life work, ridiculing the pretensions of scientificpositivism and the tendency of journalists and editors of newspapers andscientific journals to rationalize.[9]
Fort wrote 10 novels, although only one,The Outcast Manufacturers (1909), a tenement tale, was published. Reviews were mostly positive, but it was unsuccessful commercially.[10] During 1915, Fort began to write two books, titledX andY, the first dealing with the idea that beings onMars were controlling events on Earth, and the second with the postulation of a sinister civilization extant at the South Pole.[11] These books caught the attention of writerTheodore Dreiser, who tried to get them published, but to no avail.[11] Discouraged, Fort burnt the manuscripts, but soon began work on the book that would change the course of his life,The Book of the Damned (1919), which Dreiser helped to get published. The title referred to "damned" data that Fort collected, phenomena for which science could not account, and that was thus rejected or ignored.[12]
Fort and Anna lived intermittently in London between 1920[13] and 1928,[14] so Fort could carry out research in theReading Room of theBritish Museum.[5] Fort lived most of his life in the Bronx. He was, like his wife, fond of movies, and often took her from their Ryer Avenue apartment to a movie theater nearby, stopping at an adjacent newsstand for an arm full of various newspapers. Fort frequented the parks near the Bronx, where he sifted through piles of clippings. He often rode the subway down to the main Public Library on Fifth Avenue, where he spent many hours reading scientific journals, newspapers, and periodicals from around the world. Fort also had literary friends who gathered at various apartments, including his own, to drink and talk.[15]
Fort was pleasantly surprised to find himself the subject of acult following.[16] Talk arose of the formation of a formal organization to study the type of odd events related by his books. Jerome Clark writes, "Fort himself, who did nothing to encourage any of this, found the idea hilarious. Yet he faithfully corresponded with his readers, some of whom had taken to investigating reports of anomalous phenomena and sending their findings to Fort".[17] HistorianMitch Horowitz has compared the trajectory of Fort's literary career toEdgar Allan Poe's: "Through his pioneering of paranormal reportage, Fort did for weird facts (or alleged ones) what Edgar Allan Poe did for horror literature: created a genre where none was recognized. The two authors led strangely similar lives of near-penury, uneven but notable literary praise during otherwise struggling careers, and elevation to iconic status after death."[18]
Suffering from poor health and failing eyesight, Fort distrusted doctors and did not seek medical help for his worsening health. Rather, he emphasized completingWild Talents.[19]
After he collapsed on May 3, 1932, Fort was rushed toRoyal Hospital. Later that same day, Fort's publisher visited him to show him the advance copies ofWild Talents. Fort died only hours afterward, probably ofleukemia.[5] He was interred in the Fort family plot in Albany, New York.[5]
For more than 30 years, Fort visited libraries in New York City and London, assiduously reading scientific journals, newspapers, and magazines, collecting notes onphenomena that were not explained well by the accepted theories and beliefs of the time.
Fort took thousands of notes during his lifetime. In his undated short story "The Giant, the Insect and The Philanthropic-looking Old Gentleman" (first published by theInternational Fortean Organization in issue No. 70 of theINFO Journal: Science and the Unknown), Fort spoke of having often toyed with the idea of burning a collection of some 48,000 notes, and of one day letting "several" notes be blown away by the wind because he couldn't be bothered to save them (they were supposedly returned to him by a gentleman on a neighboring park bench).[20] The notes were kept on cards and scraps of paper in shoeboxes, in Fort's cramped handwriting.[8] More than once, depressed and discouraged, Fort destroyed his work, but began anew. Some notes were published by theFortean Society magazineDoubt, and upon the death of its editorTiffany Thayer in 1959, most were donated to the New York Public Library, where they are still available to researchers.[21] Material created by Fort has also survived as part of the papers of Theodore Dreiser, held at the University of Pennsylvania.[22]
From this research, Fort wrote four books:The Book of the Damned (1919),New Lands (1923),Lo! (1931), andWild Talents (1932). One book was written betweenNew Lands andLo! but it was abandoned and absorbed intoLo!.
Fort suggested that a Super-Sargasso Sea exists, into which all lost things go,[2] and justified his theories by noting that they fit the data as well as the conventional explanations. As to whether Fortbelieved this theory, or any of his other proposals, he himself noted, "I believe nothing of my own that I have ever written".[4]
Notable literary contemporaries of Fort's openly admired his writing style and befriended him. Among these were:Ben Hecht,John Cowper Powys,Sherwood Anderson,Clarence Darrow, andBooth Tarkington, who wrote the foreword toNew Lands.
After Fort's death, the writerColin Wilson said that he suspected that Fort took few if any of his "explanations" seriously, and noted that Fort made "no attempt to present a coherent argument". He described Fort as "a patron saint of cranks"[23] while at the same time he compared Fort toRobert Ripley, a popular contemporarycartoonist and writer who found major success publishing similar oddities in a syndicated newspaper panel series namedRipley's Believe It or Not!
Wilson called Fort's writing style "atrocious" and "almost unreadable", yet despite his objections to Fort's prose, he allowed that "the facts are certainly astonishing enough." In the end, Fort's work gave him "the feeling that no matter how honest scientiststhink they are, they are still influenced by variousunconscious assumptions that prevent them from attaining true objectivity. Expressed in a sentence, Fort's principle goes something like this: People with a psychological need tobelieve in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological neednot to believe in marvels."[24]
By contrast,Jerome Clark, wrote that Fort was "essentially asatirist hugelyskeptical of human beings'—especially scientists'—claims to ultimate knowledge".[25] Clark described Fort's writing style as a "distinctive blend of mocking humor, penetrating insight, and calculated outrageousness".[26] Fort was skeptical of sciences and wrote his own mocking explanations to defy scientists who used traditional methods.[2]
In a review ofLo!,The New York Times wrote: "Reading Fort is a ride on a comet; if the traveler returns to earth after the journey, he will find, after his first dizziness has worn off, a new and exhilarating emotion that will color and correct all his future reading of less heady scientific literature."[12]
Examples of the odd phenomena in Fort's books include many occurrences of the sort variously referred to asoccult,supernatural, andparanormal. Reported events includeteleportation (a term Fort is generally credited with inventing),[27][28]falls of frogs, fishes, and inorganic materials,[2]spontaneous human combustion,[2]ball lightning[2] (a term explicitly used by Fort),poltergeist events,unaccountable noises and explosions,levitation,unidentified flying objects,unexplained disappearances,giant wheels of light in the oceans, and animals found outside their normal ranges (seephantom cat). He offered many reports ofout-of-place artifacts (OOPArts), strange items found in unlikely locations. He was also perhaps the first person to explain strange human appearances and disappearances by the hypothesis ofalien abduction, and was an early proponent of theextraterrestrial hypothesis, specifically suggesting that strange lights or objects sighted in the skies might be alien spacecraft.
Fort's work has inspired some people to consider themselves "Forteans". The first of these was Hecht, a screenwriter, who in a review ofThe Book of the Damned, declared, "I am the first disciple of Charles Fort... henceforth, I am a Fortean".[29]
Precisely what is encompassed by the term "Fortean" is a matter of great debate; the term is widely applied to people ranging from Fortean purists dedicated to Fort's methods and interests, to those with open and active acceptance of the actuality of paranormal phenomena, a belief with which Fort may not have agreed. Most generally, Forteans have a wide interest in unexplained phenomena, concerned mostly with the natural world, and have a developed "agnosticskepticism" regarding the anomalies they note and discuss. For Hecht, as an example, being a Fortean meant hallowing a pronounced distrust of authority in all its forms, whether religious, scientific, political, philosophical, or otherwise. It did not, of course, include an actual belief in the anomalous data enumerated in Fort's works.
TheFortean Society was initiated at the Savoy-Plaza Hotel in New York City on January 26, 1931, by some of Fort's friends, including such significant writers as Hecht, Dreiser, andAlexander Woollcott, and organized by fellow American writer Thayer, half in earnest and half in the spirit of great good humor, like the works of Fort himself. The board of founders included Dreiser, Hecht, Tarkington, Powys,Aaron Sussman, formerPuck editorHarry Leon Wilson, Woollcott, andJ. David Stern, publisher ofThe Philadelphia Record. Active members of the Fortean Society included prominent science-fiction writers such as Knight andEric Frank Russell.
Fort, however, rejected the society and refused the presidency, which went to his friend Dreiser; he was lured to its inaugural meeting by false telegrams. As a strict nonauthoritarian, Fort refused to establish himself as an authority, and further objected on the grounds that those who would be attracted by such a group would be spiritualists, zealots, and those opposed to a science that rejected them; it would attract those whobelieved in their chosen phenomena—an attitude exactly contrary to Forteanism. Fort did hold unofficial meetings and had a long history of getting together informally with many of New York City's literati such as Dreiser and Hecht at their apartments, where they would talk, have a meal, and then listen to brief reports.[7]
The magazineFortean Times (first published in November 1973) is a proponent of Fortean journalism, combining humor, skepticism, and serious research into subjects that scientists and other respectable authorities often disdain. Another such group is the International Fortean Organization (INFO), which was formed during the early 1960s (incorporated in 1965) by brothers and writers Ron and Paul Willis, who acquired much of the material of the Fortean Society, which had largely ceased by 1959 with the death of Thayer. INFO publishes theINFO Journal: Science and the Unknown and organizes the FortFest, the world's first continuously running conference on anomalous phenomena dedicated to the spirit of Charles Fort. INFO, since the mid-1960s, also provides audio CDs and filmed DVDs of notable conference speakers, includingColin Wilson,John Michell,Graham Hancock,John Anthony West,William Corliss,John Keel, andJoscelyn Godwin. Other notable Fortean societies include theLondon Fortean Society,Edinburgh Fortean Society, in Edinburgh and theIsle of Wight.
Religious scholars such asJeffrey J. Kripal and Joseph P. Laycock view Fort as a pioneering theorist who helped define "paranormal" as a discursive category and provided insight into its importance in human experience. Consistently critical of how science studied abnormal phenomena in his day, Fort remains a point of reference for those who engage in such studies today.[2][30][31]
More than a few modern authors of fiction and nonfiction who have written about the influence of Fort are sincere devotees of Fort. One of the most notable is British philosopher John Michell, who wrote the introduction to the edition ofLo!, published by John Brown in 1996.[32] Michell says: "Fort, of course, made no attempt at defining a world-view, but the evidence he uncovered gave him an 'acceptance' of reality as something far more magical and subtly organized than is considered proper today."Stephen King also uses the works of Fort to illuminate his main characters, notablyIt andFirestarter. InFirestarter, the parents of apyrokinetically gifted child are advised to read Fort'sWild Talents rather than the works of baby doctorBenjamin Spock.
Loren Coleman is a well-knowncryptozoologist, author ofThe Unidentified (1975) dedicated to Fort, andMysterious America, whichFortean Times termed a Fortean classic. Coleman terms himself the first Vietnam era conscientious objector to base his pacificist ideas on Fortean thoughts.Jerome Clark has described himself as a "skeptical Fortean".[33]Mike Dash is another Fortean, bringing his historian's training to bear on all manner of odd reports, while being careful to avoid uncritically acceptingany orthodoxy, be it that of fringe devotees or mainstream science. Science-fiction writers of note includingPhilip K. Dick,Robert Heinlein, andRobert Anton Wilson were also fans of the work of Fort.Alfred Bester's teleportation-themed novel,The Stars My Destination, pays homage to the coiner of the term by naming the first teleporter "Charles Fort Jaunte".[34] Fort's work, of compilation and commentary on anomalous phenomena has been carried on byWilliam R. Corliss, whose self-published books and notes bring Fort's collections up to date.[1]
In 1939,Eric Frank Russell first published the novel which becameSinister Barrier, in which he names Fort explicitly as an influence. Russell included some of Fort's data in the story.[35] In chapter 3 ofWilliam Gaddis’s 1955 novelThe Recognitions, protagonist Wyatt Gwyon twice quotes from Fort’sThe Book of the Damned--“By the damned, I mean the excluded”; “By prostitution, I mean usefulness”—and paraphrases him from the same book: “Charles Fort says maybe we’re fished for, by supercelestial beings.”[36]Ivan T. Sanderson, Scottish naturalist and writer, was a devotee of Fort's work, and referenced it heavily in several of his own books on unexplained phenomena, notablyThings (1967), andMore Things (1969).Louis Pauwels andJacques Bergier'sThe Morning of the Magicians was also heavily influenced by Fort's work and mentions it often. Author Donald Jeffries referenced Charles Fort repeatedly in his 2007 novelThe Unreals.[37] Joe Milutis writes a short chapter in his bookFailure, a Writer's Life on Charles Fort, characterising Fort's prose as "well-nigh unreadable, yet strangely exhilarating".[38]
Noted UK paranormalist, Fortean, and ordained priestLionel Fanthorpe presented theFortean TV series onChannel 4, between 1997 and 1998.[39]Paul Thomas Anderson's popular movieMagnolia (1999) has an underlying theme of unexplained events, taken from the 1920s and '30s works of Charles Fort. Fortean author Loren Coleman has written a chapter about this motion picture, entitled "The Teleporting Animals andMagnolia", in one of his recent books.[40] The film has many hidden Fortean themes, notably "falling frogs". In one scene, one of Fort's books is visible on a table in a library and an end credit thanks him by name.[41] In the 2011 filmThe Whisperer in Darkness, Fort is portrayed byAndrew Leman.[42]
American crime and science-fiction authorFredric Brown included an excerpt from Fort's bookWild Talents as anepigraph to his novelCompliments of a Fiend. In that quote, Fort speculated about the disappearance of two people named Ambrose and wondered "was someone collecting Ambroses?" Brown's novel concerns the disappearance of a character named Ambrose, and the kidnapper calls himself the "Ambrose collector" as an obvioushomage to Fort.[43]
InBlue Balliett's bestselling children's novel,Chasing Vermeer, Fort is given several mentions throughout the book, such as Fort'sLo! being found and thoroughly read by one of the book's protagonists, and being an inspiration to the main characters.[44]
Fort published five books during his lifetime, including one novel. All five are available on-line (seeExternal links section below).
Posthumous editions:
Media from Commons
Quotations from Wikiquote
Texts from Wikisource
Data from Wikidata
