Jim Steinmeyer
Heinemann, £16.99NOT many people get a whole new concept named after them, but Charles Fort did. On a snowy night in 1931, the reclusive 57-year-old author was lured to a rare public appearance at a New York hot
el, expecting to launch his latest book. In fact, it was the inaugural dinner of a group dedicated to investigating paranormal phenomena from spontaneous human combustion to UFOs: the Fortean Society.
Long before The X-Files, Fort was, as Steinmeyer's excellent biography dubs him, "the man who invented the supernatural".
Steinmeyer attributes Fort's character to his troubled childhood: he and his two younger brothers were harshly treated by their domineering father.
Determined to pursue a literary career, Fort became a journalist in his teens, travelled extensively, married his childhood sweetheart and earned a meagre living in New York as a short-story writer. His break came when he was discovered by novelist Theodore Dreiser, who thought Fort looked "almost a duplicate of Oliver Hardy", but with the genius of Edgar Allen Poe. Encouraged by Dreiser, Fort published a realistic portrayal of working-class life, The Outcast Manufacturers. "In spite of its faults," writes Steinmeyer, "the novel is refreshing and addictive."
Yet Fort was still unsure of himself, keeping "boxes of metaphors, tens of thousands of little pieces of paper on which were written descriptive sentences… searching for a system that would guarantee success".
At the age of 39, he embarked on "a new sort of education". Instead of metaphors, he began filing information gleaned from New York Public Library. Some items defied classification: luminous rain; sea-water traces on the Sphinx; footprints of unknown creatures…
He came up with an explanation. The people of Mars, he claimed, are controlling us with energy rays. "I've given up fiction," Fort wrote to Dreiser. "I am convinced that everything is a fiction."
Dreiser thought Fort's new work, X, was "one of the greatest books I have ever read". But it was never published, nor its successor, Y, in which Fort attributed Earth's wonders to an intelligence at the North Pole. Fort destroyed both manuscripts. Fort's great innovation, so influential on all subsequent writers about the paranormal, was that instead of trying to come up with an explanation, he would simply present the "evidence", leaving readers to make up their own minds.
The result, in 1919, was The Book Of The Damned, a survey of weird phenomena that replaces grand theories with total relativism. Maybe frogs fall down on us from a sea in space – maybe not. Fort offered extracts from published sources to create a bamboozling picture of the inexplicable.
Screenwriter Ben Hecht thought it brilliant, the work of "an inspired clown", while HG Wells judged Fort "one of the most damnable bores who ever cut scraps from out of the way newspapers". In The Book Of The Damned, and three more books that followed, Fort presented himself (and his readers) as the open-minded antidote to scientific certainty. Even Catholics approved of his swipes at Darwin, not noticing his equally heavy swipes at religion. Another devotee was the novelist Booth Tarkington, mistakenly described by Steinmeyer as Nobel Prize-winning, though his Pulitzer made him an influential ally.
Ever the shy recluse, Fort lived out his remaining years in New York with the wife he called "Momma", no children, but a number of parrots (he considered writing a book about them). His inventions included "topeacho" – a preserve made of tomatoes and peaches – and a form of draughts using 400 pieces on a board of 800 squares.
He never approved of the word "Fortean", but coined another, "teleportation". He died of leukaemia in 1932, his last words an enigmatic plea to his absent friend: "Drive them out, Dreiser, drive them out!"
Steinmeyer has produced a meticulously researched, marvellously readable window on the life of this extraordinary man. Was he a genius or a crank? Fort's message is that we should not always seek solutions, because there might be none. That is Steinmeyer's verdict on the man himself.
The full article contains 688 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
