Is there anybody out there, Mr Fort?
CHARLES FORT: THE MAN WHO INVENTED THE SUPERNATURAL by Jim Steinmeyer (William Heinemann, £16.99)
By Harry Pearson
Last updated at 2:57 PM on 28th May 2008
For many of us, the paranormal will, like cheese fondue and Mateus Rose, be forever associated with the 1970s. This was, after all, the decade of Erich Von Daniken, Charles Berlitz and the TV series The Mysterious World Of Arthur C. Clarke.
The Seventies were, as a scientist at Loch Ness recently told a friend of mine, ‘a very credulous era’. This is a fact, as anyone who ever bought a Ronco button-o-matic will testify.
The truth, however, is that the paranormal was fashionable in the 1920s, making it the psychic equivalent of Oxford bags – those wide baggy trousers.
The man credited with kick-starting the weird world as we know it is Charles Fort. Fort’s name may at first seem unfamiliar, but once you know his followers dubbed themselves Forteans, his place in the universe becomes altogether clearer.
Jim Steinmeyer – who wrote a well-received history of the Golden Age of stage magic – has produced a richly entertaining and illuminating biography of the author who brought spontaneous combustion, water-divining and UFOs into the public domain.
His book is sub-titled The Man Who Invented The Paranormal. This is a bold claim, especially since writers have been focusing on the weird and the monstrous since Beowulf.
The difference is, of course, that Edgar Allen Poe, Arthur Machen and co. wrote of the paranormal as fiction. Fort wrote of it as fact; meticulously cataloguing the bizarre and the unexplained on thin strips of paper, which he filed in shoeboxes lining the wall of his New York study.
(Whether he invented the paranormal or not, Fort may well be the world’s first geek.)
Without Fort there would, in all likelihood, have been no Bermuda Triangle, no Chariots of the Gods. Agent Fox Mulder, of X Files fame, is his spiritual grandson.
The man who invented the word ‘teleporter’ was born in Albany, New York, in 1874, the son of a prosperous grocer. His mother died when he was a child, and his father tended towards the brutal end of autocratic, beating his three sons regularly and locking them in a darkened cellar for days at a stretch. Charles escaped into journalism and pulp fiction.
By the age of 20, Fort’s appearance – stocky, moustached, bespectacled, nervously agitated – variously called to mind Teddy Roosevelt and Oliver Hardy.
As a writer, he had a gift for amusing similes and the vernacular speech of tenement life. It was this that caught the attention of Theodore Dreiser, then editing periodicals, but soon to emerge as one of the most influential novelists of the age.
Theodore Dreiser may have brought gritty naturalism into modern fiction with Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy, but his personal beliefs tended towards the mystical. (He had, according to his friend H. L. Mencken, a head filled with ‘Bohemian mush’.)
So when Fort unexpectedly presented his admirer with the manuscript of X – a book in which he expounds the theory that martians are manipulating humans by telepathic rays in some kind of inter-planetary equivalent of Big Brother – Dreiser embraced it as a work of genius rather than tossing it out of the window with a loud guffaw.
Charles Fort
Neither X nor its follow-up Y survives, but the other fruits of Fort’s shoeboxes were published to a predictable mixture of acclaim and derision throughout the 1920s. The Book Of The Damned, New Lands, Lo! and Wild Talents are all bizarre, combining lists of unexplained events – fish falling from the sky, rains of blood, phantom cats, the footprints of a goat-like biped found in the snow in South Devonshire – with Fort’s baroque musings on what it might all mean.
Could the falling fish come from a vast heavenly sea located between New York and the moon? Might the shower of blood be the result of a ferocious battle between galactic whales?
Whether the author took all this quite as seriously as some of those who followed him did is open to doubt. He was a mischievous man with a lifelong hatred of authority.
By the 1920s, scientific rationalism was assuming the role of a strict, po-faced patriarch that brooked no disagreement. Fort’s work may well have been a satire of science after the style of Jonathan Swift’s Laputa.
We will never know for certain, and that seems to have been the way Fort, who died of leukaemia in 1932, wanted it.
Steinmeyer conjures up his subject’s world with wit and empathy, and subtly tracks the events that formed Fort’s singular character. The man emerges as eccentric, funny, self-effacing and contradictory. Even the most devoted sceptic will enjoy his company.
