Science: Shoe Box Notes

The late Charles Fort, born in Albany in 1874, was a short story writer who developed a hobby into a passion. He became a contumacious heckler of science. For 23 years he grubbed in libraries and museums for reports of curious phenomena which science could not explain, made bales of notes from which he compiled chaotic books such as Wild Talents, The Book of the Damned, Lo! New Lands. Charles Fort demanded that science explain why statues shed blood, why frogs and periwinkles fall to earth in rainstorms, why eels appear in landlocked water. What about the swan which mysteriously appeared in Central Park after the celebrated Dorothy Arnold mysteriously disappeared? What about the Chippewa Indian who prayed for food for his child, promptly drew milk from his breast?

Fort himself believed that the earth was nearly stationary, that the stars were quite close and nothing but holes in a gelatinous shell around the earth, that objects might be instantaneously moved from place to place by “teleportation.” But he once denied “that I mean anything by anything.”

Science itself might almost have predicted the names of those to whom all this appealed. Theodore Dreiser, Ben Hecht, Edgar Lee Masters, Burton Rascoe, John Cowper Powys, Booth Tarkington, Harry Elmer Barnes, Harry Leon Wilson and Tiffany Thayer were present one night at a dinner given in Fort’s honor by Publisher J. David Stern. Fort himself said almost nothing, quietly sipped ginger ale. The others enthusiastically laid plans for a Fortean Society which would propagate Fortism to the ends of the earth. The exhilaration of that dinner passed. In 1932 Fort died in The Bronx. But one man kept his discipleship alive. This was Tiffany Thayer, whose gaudy, perfervid novels (Thirteen Men, Thirteen Women, Illustrious Corpse, etc.) are not unlike the writings of Charles Fort, and who keeps a 9-ft. python as a pet (see cut).

Last week Fortism had its renaissance in Vol. 1, No. 1 of a slim journal called The Fortean Society Magazine, edited by Tiffany Thayer. The lead article, written by Publisher Thayer, purported to prove that Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan were “murdered”—i. e., went astray in the Pacific because geodesists do not really know how to make accurate maps of the earth’s surface. A black-bordered rectangle bore the legend: “These honored dead were Forteans: OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES — LINCOLN STEFFENS.” The magazine also announced that astronomers played down a recent eclipse of Venus by the moon for fear that laymen would discover that the universe is not running according to man-made schedule; that Alexander (“Town Crier”) Woollcott is an ardent Fortean who gives away dozens of Fort’s books to friends; that Booth Tarkington would discuss Fortism in the next issue. No better and no worse than the rest of the magazine were the words of Charles Fort himself, piously printed from his jumbled notes just as they were found in the shoe boxes where he kept them.