New Lands

Come, Steam Engine Time

Jack Womack

One summer morning in Lexington in 1964, when I was eight years old and waiting to see if third grade would be any worse than second (it wasn't), I turned on the TV to watch the local morning show. The hostess, a horsey type, resembled a spring bouquet threatened by a shiny egg case of hair. The host was a silvery sportscaster who wore too-short black socks and flashed a zombie Rockette's shins whenever he crossed his legs. That morning they talked not about Derby parties, the fluoride threat, or gelatin salads studded with marshmallows and orange slices, but rather a new paperback by Frank Edwards,
Strange World.

Later that morning I asked my grandmother to buy me the copy of
Strange World
I found, as I knew I would, on the black metal rack at Rexall's drugstore. By sunset I'd read it through twice, poring over tales of the monster apes of Oregon, the Barbados coffins, poltergeists, glowing purple globs in a Philadelphia street and, as per the back blurb, "who --
or what
-- painted 'Remember Pearl Harbor' on an Indiana sidewalk two years before the infamous attack?"

Sense of wonder, awake.

***

As the real 1960s have in the fifty years since been endlessly regooded before being sealed in plastic as The Sixties (™), many of the decade's B and C-list occurrences, fancies and actualities have been lost to memory. Among those was the widespread pre-hippie interest in the occult, the alternate sciences, and alternate consciousness as a whole. Like many paperbacks on those days,
Strange World
sold hundreds of thousands of copies upon release; and then it kept selling. Sales of other such titles rose fast enough that before long there were far fewer nurse novels and westerns on the shelves, their space permanently supplanted by an endless series of books on ESP, psychokinesis, dowsing, witchcraft for home or office, palmistry, the Bermuda Triangle, Edgar Cayce, mysterious disappearances, the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot -- everything save phrenology, for which there was no resurrection.

Midway through the nationwide UFO flap in 1965-67 (the biggest since 1947, when Kenneth Arnold first saw the flying discs over Washington state) Edwards'
Flying Saucers -- Serious Business
appeared, in short time selling millions of copies
in hardcover
. Every publisher got in on the game. But there weren't enough black beauties to keep enough hacks writing overtime to satisfy the demand, and so the backlists were sacked. (Not unlike the coeval demand in those years for "Tolkienesque" fantasy, which until the first generation of rewriters honed their craft was sated only by reprints of Dunsany, Eddings, Robert E.Howard,
Etidorpha
, and, happenstance, Lovecraft). Soon the likes of
Stranger Than Strange As It Seems
were racked side-by-side with elderly-but-durable collections of oddities by Rupert T. Gould, F. DeWitt Miller, and the great Harold T.Wilkins; cryptozoologist Ivan T. Sanderson, noted Space Brothers George Adamski, Howard Menger, and Gray Barker.

One day in 1966 or so I saw a new one of these in Spencer Gifts' racks, and jumped -- masters of the old school were inevitably more entertaining than contemporary scribes, save for the last of the Greats, John "Mothman" Keel. Big shaky yellow letters against a purple background. LO!, the title. Published by Ace Books, always a good sign -- Paperback Library and Pyramid were the other specialists in this field. I paid far less attention to the front cover blurb ("To read Charles Fort is to ride on a comet" --
The New York Times
) than I did to the question posed on this book's back cover:

"
Can Science explain
THE
COW
THAT GAVE
BIRTH
TO
TWO LAMBS??
"

After that, I could have cared less who wrote "Remember Pearl Harbor" on a sidewalk in 1939.

***

At home with the book, I lay on my bed and turned to the first page, expecting to read once again about The Man Who Walked Across A Field, or The Missing Lighthouse Keepers, or the 1897 airships. No.

A naked man in a city street -- the track of a horse in volcanic mud -- the mystery of reindeer's ears – a huge, black form, like a whale, in the sky, and it drips red drops as if attacked by celestial swordfishes – an appalling cherub appears in the sea --

Confusions.

Showers of frogs and blizzards of snails -- gushes of periwinkles down from the sky --

The preposterous, the grotesque, the incredible -- and why, if I am going to tell of hundreds of these, is the quite ordinary so regarded?

An unclothed man shocks a crowd -- a moment later, if nobody is generous with an overcoat, somebody is collecting handkerchiefs to knot around him.

A naked fact startles a meeting of a scientific society -- and whatever it has for loins is soon diapered with conventional explanations.

After a half hour or so I was so unsettled
-- terrified --
by what I read I shoved the book into the back of my bottom dresser drawer, too scared to keep reading yet unwilling to throw it out. It was only after I'd read another ten or twelve successive UFO titles, seeing references to the writer in each that I was ready to try
Lo!
anew.

By the time I finished the book I was a Fortean.

***

Charles Fort (August 9, 1874 - May 3, 1932), was older than my grandparents by nearly a quarter century. Ace reissued each of his books of phenomena --
The Book of the Damned, New Lands, Lo! Wild Talents
-- and in the first reissue was an excerpt from a delirious intro written for the hardcover one-volume
Books of Charles Fort
(1941) by risque novelist Tiffany Thayer, who presented himself as Fort's best friend, no matter that far too often he was anything but.

Thayer tells us Fort had Nietzsche's mustache, wore thick glasses, made homebrew, liked "strong cheeses," had no telephone and but one male friend (his one-time editor and famed American author Theodore Dreiser); that he lived with Anna, his wife of many years, in the Bronx; that in their apartment hung framed specimens of stick insects and giant spiders, a photo of a baseball-sized hailstone, and a glass case holding angel's hair -- shredded metal fiber that fell, somehow, from the sky. First Fortean Fanboy Thayer's description of the preternaturally sedentary writer as one whose "frame called for leather and buckles, that the board should have been bare and brown, washed by slops from heavy tankards and worn by heavy sword-hands" is as restrained as all of Thayer's writing be it fictional, non-fictional, or intermediate (as it, and so much else, so often proves to be).

That was pretty much all I or anybody knew about Fort until the 1970 publication of Damon Knight's
Charles Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained
, which information was considerably expanded upon by Jim Steinmeyer in his
Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural
(2008). At this date we probably know as much as we will ever know of the details of Fort's life; the contents of his mind continue to surprise.

Many Parts
, his unpublished memoir of his Albany, New York childhood is told in a deadpan simultaneously hilarious and brutal. The oldest of three sons, Charles took most of the punishment his upper-middle class father (called "They" by Fort) dished out. The elder Fort starts off as autocratic, slowly turns more authoritarian, can finally be described only as sociopathic Victorian. After the boys' beloved mother died he married a woman none liked, which helped not at all. Charles, fast with his words, received even more of the brunt: daily insults, beatings, slappings, whippings. When he was -- eight? ten? twelve? his father punched him in the nose, whereupon he ran upstairs to the parental bedroom, to wipe his blood all over the white, white sheets. All the boys were repeatedly locked in a pitch-black room to think upon their crimes for a few hours, or few days, or few weeks, fed once a day through a slot in the door. When Fort was sixteen his father and stepmother sent Clarence, the youngest son, to the 19th century equivalent of an unaccredited tough love camp. Soon after one night he stormed out of the house, shattering glass behind him, never returning.

A benevolent uncle helped him get a job at the Brooklyn
World,
where he soon became editor; and as soon took off to travel, going by continental rail, tramp steamer, banana boat: across the U.S., across to London, down to South Africa. While recovering from malaria in Cape Town, he was nursed back to health by a local woman, Anna Filing. He fell in love with her. As it happened, she first met him eight years earlier and fell in love with him at the time, never imagining they'd meet again.

Married, they came to New York City, and he tried to work as a writer in the burgeoning popular magazine market, specializing in humorous short stories set in gritty, family-friendly versions of the same slums in which they lived (Lower Manhattan, at the time, had the highest population density in the world.) In seven years he sold a few stories, making do with odd jobs; at least twice they had to chop up furniture for firewood. In 1905 he met Theodore Dreiser, one of the best-known magazine editors of the day, already notorious as the author of the much-banned novel
Sister Carrie
. They hit it off at once and Dreiser started buying Fort's stories.

Seeking background information to add to his stories, Fort went to the New York Public Library's brand-new main reference room in search of colorful anecdotes with which he could pepper his fiction. He started taking notes.We do not know the first time, or why, he decided to begin reading through runs of scientific journals, and jotting down that information. Even as he continued writing stories for Dreiser, he accumulated his first 40,000 notes.

In 1909 Fort sold and published his only novel,
The Outcast Manufacturers
, about which Dreiser noted regretfully that "the art of luring your readers on" was missing. Set mostly in a tenement in Hell's Kitchen, the story tells of the Birtwhistles, their neighbors, and their mail-order scheme, the Universal Manufacturing Company. For the first two-thirds of the book Fort's magic with language nearly conceals the fact that absolutely
nothing
happens. At that point the very talkative characters are all evicted and tossed onto the street (which may in fact have happened to the Forts in life) -- yet here no great tragedy results, nor much of anything else. Yet throughout the book and most notably at the start of chapter sixteen, the auctorial voice as it will become, as it is, suddenly emerges.

Paddy's Market looks like a torchlight parade going up one side of the avenue and down the other side -- a night parade of flagellants shrieking with self-inflicted torture. Then, heard in the market itself, confused lamentation disintegrates into distinct and mercantile cries -- flagellants scourging themselves only with their arms, beating their breasts only to keep warm -- to rid themselves not of sin, but of cauliflowers and beets.

At age forty-two he inherited enough money from his uncle that he and Anna could live in reasonable comfort for the rest of their lives. Fort, still gathering data at the library, began writing novels. These are assumed to be the Lost Fortean Ur-texts,
X
and
Y
. As their only readers were Dreiser, who sent them off, and the editors who repeatedly rejected them, we will no more know that than we will know the sound of Buddy Bolden. Then, Fort sent Dreiser the manuscript of a new book. Dreiser read it and immediately took it to his own publisher Horace Liveright, claiming later to have demanded that they would either publish the book, or he would take his books and move to a different publisher.

The Book of the Damned
soon went on the Boni & Liveright schedule.

***

A procession of the damned.

By the damned, I mean the excluded.

In the wake of the Great War came the end of the Spanish Flu, came Dada, came the confirmation of the theory of Relativity, came
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
, came Charles Fort; some of the many different expressions of 1919.

The New York Times
, as earlier noted, gave it an ideal blurb (although the full review makes one wonder about the reviewer's intent); Booth Tarkington, author of
The Magnificent Ambersons
, fell for it as did Dreiser (as well as soon-to-be famous screenwriter Ben Hecht). While we are not sure how much of the book either read, H.G.Wells claimed it to be almost comically beneath his attention, and H.L. Mencken thought it nothing but the work of another imbecile American crank.

Cranks write books such as
Cancer: Is the Dog the Cause?
or
We Never Went to the Moon
, or
The Human Gyroscope
.

This is Charles Fort, nearly a century ago, tossing off one of those notions of his to be later re-expressed by others, years later, in other shape and media:

I think we're property.

I should say we belong to something:

That once upon a time, this earth was No-Man's Land, that other worlds explored and colonized here, and fought among themselves for possession, but that now it's owned by something:

That something owns this earth -- all others warned off.

For but a single contemporary iteration of this proposal, see
The X-Files
.

The first chapter, or Overture of
The Book of The Damned
explains that by "the excluded," Fort means The Data. The Data are the foundation of the structure. The Data are concrete examples of phenomena neither explainable by science nor occurring in accordance with scientific laws, said phenomena being accordingly ignored or denied by science.

It remains unclear to what degree Fort himself selected facts to fit his own theories, knowingly or unknowingly, but bear in mind that isn't the point. "You don't read the Bible for literature," said Auden, and you don't read Charles Fort for science. One reads his proposal re: the Super-Sargasso Sea, which hangs in the sky above and around the earth, a place from which things fall (which tale has a charming DC Silver Age ring to it); or his idea that space is in fact something like a rich space jelly but a short distance away --
perhaps
, he adds, always leaving open other possibilities. The most notable possibility being that he was in his own way playing the dozens with scientists, for the hell of it.