Charles Fort: Believe it or Not

It was Charles Fort’s proudest moment when, in 1920, he walked into the New York Public Library and picked up a copy of his just-published work, The Book of the Damned. But when he asked the librarian what the classification numbers on the spine meant and got the answer “Eccentric Literature,” Fort exploded in anger, demanding — to no avail — to be filed among the sciences. For months he griped about it and one day, in a fit of the sulks, he took the fruits of his painstaking research — 40,000 handwritten notes, each one ripped or folded to exactly 1 1⁄2 by 2 1⁄2 inches, that filled the cardboard boxes lining his apartment — and burned the lot.

That anecdote, related in Jim Steinmeyer’s biography Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural, gets to the frustrated and obsessive heart of a writer whose chronicles of paranormal phenomena cocked a snook at conventional science, helped to launch the “believe it or not” school of journalism and changed science fiction forever. Born in Albany, New York, in 1874, the son of an upwardly mobile grocer, Fort didn’t quite fit in from the start. A keen writer but a poor student, he jacked in journalism and hit the road, traveling to England and South Africa. In 1896 he returned to New York City and began cranking out short stories and increasingly experimental novels before conceiving of a new kind of literary adventure. He spent the best part of a decade plundering library archives for records of anomalous events, filing his notes in 1,300 boxes labeled with words such as EQUILIBRIUM and CATALYSTS.

In The Book of the Damned, Fort stated his intent on Page 1: “A procession of the damned. By the damned, I mean the excluded. We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded. Battalions of the accursed . . . will march.” And march they did, through that and three further books: eyewitness accounts of fish, frogs and periwinkles, flakes of beef and tons of butter falling from the sky; visions of cities in the air; people appearing, disappearing or bursting into flames. Weirder yet were Fort’s suggested explanations, such as teleportation (a word he coined), an invisible sea above the earth that harbors lost things, or his suspicion that the earth is farmed by aliens. Libraries were not alone in classing The Book of the Damned as the work of a crank. The New York Times called it “a quagmire of pseudo-science,” while H.G. Wells said Fort “writes like a drunkard.”

Ordinary readers, though, were spellbound by Fort’s stories and no doubt cheered the shells of sarcasm he lobbed at prevailing scientific certitudes: “The fittest survive. What is meant by the fittest? Not the strongest; not the cleverest — Weakness and stupidity everywhere survive . . . ‘Fitness,’ then, is only another name for ‘survival.’ Darwinism: That survivors survive.” As for Fort’s own theories, sharp readers spotted the tongue in his cheek — playwright Ben Hecht called him “an inspired clown who . . . has bounded into the arena of science and let fly at the pontifical sets of wisdom with a slapstick and bladder.”

New York publishing in 1920 was, like the world at large, thirsty for new and outlandish ideas. Astronomers claimed to see signs of life on Mars; Einstein was theorizing that space and time were the same thing. Even so, The Book of the Damned only made print because Fort’s friend, Theodore Dreiser, threatened to leave his publisher if the firm didn’t take it on. Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie was revered as a milestone of modern fiction, yet in retrospect, it’s Fort’s streaming, unshackled style that chimes with the age of Joyce and Dadaism.

And despite his scorn for it, Fort evidently grasped the metaphorical implications of the tough science of the day. The hyphens that run amuck in his work are not just stylistic affectation; Fort used the word “hyphenated” to describe a state of uncertainty between existence and nonexistence — a key notion in quantum mechanics. In Wild Talents, Fort wrote: “Not a bottle of catsup can fall from a tenement-house fire-escape in Harlem, without being noted — not only by the indignant people downstairs, but — even though infinitesimally — universally — maybe — Affecting the price of pajamas, in Jersey City: the temper of somebody’s mother-in-law, in Greenland; the demand, in China, for rhinoceros horns.” Today we call it Chaos Theory.

Fort’s name lives on in The Fortean Times, a British magazine founded in 1973 to record the strange phenomena — like crop circles or Madonnas-in-the-toast — that are now a staple of the tabloid press. But we’re too steeped in irony and uncomfortable with doubt to appreciate his message today. “It wasn’t the myriad of Fort’s phenomena that stunned readers,” writes Steinmeyer, “but one underlying suggestion that human beings have always found to be hair-raising: The world is actually irrational.” He may not have made it to the science section, but Irrationalism gets classed under Philosophy these days, which is a shelf or two nearer the mark — maybe.