The Journal of Provincial Thought

Books in review: chimera obscura

            A major event in organized occultism and nether-fringery is about to occur—the publication of hitherto-unseen materials by the Grand Master of Dubiety, Charles Fort, once-famous unknown author championed by such literary luminaries of the 1920s as Theodore Dreiser and H.L. Mencken.  While not as notorious as his contemporaries Maxwell Bodenheim or Joe Gould, Fort was a much more productive literary madman.  

            Fort (1874-1932) created a genre of history-as-collage by fossicking up newspaper accounts from all over the world and from the nineteenth century onward, documenting strange, outré, inexplicable and baffling events.  Typically, he sought out items from local journalism on rains of fish or frogs, red snows, green tides, mysterious lights in the sky moving at high speeds, cases of spontaneous human combustion,  unnerving disappearances (or reappearances) of people, etc., etc.  Living as a recluse, he spent his days in New York and London libraries and archives, and as he gathered and classified his weird chronicles, he also evolved underpinning theories or speculations to explain and unite the events.

            His four published books—The Book of the Damned (1919), New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931) and Wild Talents (1932)—created a rapidly-expanding cult audience, including the burgeoning generation of “Golden Age” science-fiction writers, who raided his books freely for inspiration, so Fort’s ideas passed into the mental  landscape of science fiction and fantasy when they became major genres in popular literature and culture.  In the 1930s and ‘40s, a rabidly loyal Fortean Society disseminated his works and discussed them in lively debates and newsletters.  His ideas of alien invasion and control of the earth (“I think we are property”), of telepathy, teleportation and other mental superpowers became stock material for innumerable stories, novels and films, though few of his followers were as solidly convinced of the obsessive-compulsive paranoiac version of history that Fort outlined and linked to his trove of weird reports.

            Now Novo Atlantis Press of Pied en Bouche, S.D., has unearthed and published a volume left unprinted when Fort died at the nadir of the Great Depression.  Following Fort’s own notes and outline, editor Montague U. Frescott has edited the text, set up in type but never proofread or printed when the original publisher, Harker House, also went belly-up in the deluge of 1931.  The Novo Atlantis production follows Fort’s original work scrupulously, although some pages of proof are missing and many cruxes were created by an incredibly sloppy typesetter.  The untitled volume was named by Mr. Frescott— EGAD!—Lost Works  of Charles Fort.  Buckram-bound, it runs to 223 pages and will retaill for $24.95, publication scheduled for February 31, 2007.

          Here is an excerpt from EGAD! to whet your reading appetite:

                    Chapter One:  Of Purple Cows and Hyperstorms

           I believe we may be emanations from a kind of cloudy supermind, an intelligence as amorphous and ineluctable as a raincloud.  As it dawdles and daydreams, we appear and disappear with all the swiftness of hallucinations.  Take as evidence this report from the Haderpool Bugle-Intelligencer of County Suffolk, England, from June 1889:

          Reports this week of farm folk going missing and then returning under  strange circumstances.  Wenton Baddley, farrier, of Bagwood Dumsted, called on the local constabulary and reported that he had been “transported” from his forge to a remote paddock outside the village.  In a case that recalls Shakespeare’s immortal Mid-summer Night’s Dream, Mr. Baddley said he was “carried away by a malicious spirit” and left to wander in pre-dawn darkness for several hours.

           The local constable, Sgt. Maurice Prenderghast, entered Mr. Baddley’s complaint but said of the incident, “There’s more moonshine than mystery here, I believe.”  Other Bagwood Dumsted residents related incidents echoing Mr. Baddley’s narrative, including a charge of kidnapping once lodged by Miss Millicent Shotover of the village.  Residents feel there is a mysterious agency at work in the region.

           Or consider this bit of enigma from the back files of the Owl Creek (South Carolina) Whig-Tribunal of September 1859:

          Three workers on the farm of Otis Maggie were seen to vanish during a sudden windstorm while occupied with the alfalfa harvest.  Their fellow harvesters raised an alarum.  The events transpired on Tuesday afternoon, and on Wednesday evening, the three men were discovered in the White Mule Tavern at Fothergill’s Crossroads, some six leagues hence.

           The men—Caspar Millinghouse, Rufus B. Barnaby and Francis Kafka—were reported as “dazed” and “unresponsive” to enquiries.  They have returned to work on Maggie’s farm, but the owner has been skeptical of the whole affair and said, “I just want to get the alfalfa cut and stooked, so we can move on to the clover.”  Neighbors called Maggie a “hard-bitten sort” and “a big rube.”

          Regardless of his social standing or opprobrium from fellow agriculturists, Mr. Maggie sounds like my kind of skeptical witness.  Still . . . those weird winds, and the convenient transport to a friendly tavern.  Perhaps these gassy intelligences are not all malice and mischief, hey?

* * * * *

          The edition should satisfy the most scrupulous Fortean, and the material is all unpublished (if often similar to segments in earlier books).  For true believers, there can be no surfeit of the bizarre and cryptic, and Novo Atalntis has provided a moveable feast for all such acolytes.

                        --Democritus Jr.

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egad! lost works of charles fort

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