ORT S F LE CHAR The Man Who Invented the Supernatural Jim Steinmeyer Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. New York CHARLES FORT OTHER BOOKS BY JIM STEINMEYER Hiding the Elephant The Glorious Deception CHARLES FORT ORT S F LE CHAR The Man Who Invented the Supernatural Jim Steinmeyer Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. New York JEREMY P. TARCHER/PENGUIN Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Copyright © 2008 by Jim Steinmeyer The crayon sketch of Charles Fort first appeared in The New York Herald, June 5, 1932. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Steinmeyer, Jim, date. Charles Fort : the man who invented the supernatural / Jim Steinmeyer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN: 1-4362-0566-2 1. Fort, Charles, 1874–1932. 2. Parapsychologists—United States—Biography. 3. Supernatural—History. 4. Curiosities and wonders. I. Title. BF1027.F67S73 2007 2008005961 001.9092—dc22 book design by meighan cavanaugh While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third- party websites or their content. For my brother and sister, Harry and Susan, from “the little kid” CONTENTS Author’s Introduction xi 1. But the Damned Will March 1 2. Toddy’s Nose Bleeds So Readily 15 3. Littleness That Was No Longer There 29 4. We Wrapped the Piece of Cake to Keep Always 42 5. Blue Miles, Green Miles, Yellow Miles 56 6. We, Then a Great Famous Man 71 7. Anybody Could Write a True Story 85 8. Leaping Out of a Window, Head First 100 9. “To Work!” Cried Mr. Birtwhistle 115 10. X Exists! 129 11. A Battle Is About to Be Fought 145 12. It Is a Religion 159 13. Children Cry for It 175 14. The London Triangle 189 15. That Frog Would Be God 205 16. The World Has Cut Me Out— I Have Cut Myself Out 218 17. A Welcoming Hand to Little Frogs and Periwinkles 235 18. Not a Bottle of Catsup Can Fall Without Being Noted 251 19. Beginning Anywhere 268 20. Fall In! Forward! March! 280 Acknowledgments 299 Notes and Credits 303 Index 323 AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION And science is a turtle that says its own shell encloses all things. In Technopoly, Neil Postman’s book about the way we think about technology, the author recalled one of his students suffering a hot, muggy day in a room without air -conditioning . When the student was told that the thermometer read ninety- eight degrees Fahrenheit, he quickly replied, “No wonder it’s so hot!” Human beings are nitwits. We process information in notoriously idiotic ways—which ex­ plains the persistence of carnival operators, telephone psychics, used car salesmen, advertising executives, and politicians. Despite the common perception, they don ’t always need to be crooked, be­ cause we’re perfectly capable of watching their skills and misinter­ preting them—adding the skewed angles ourselves. Abraham Lincoln may have been technically right when he said, “You can’t fool all of the people all of the time,” but there’s no pride in so vague, or so small, a proportion of success. One of my favorite constructions is the reassuring phrase “That xii INTRODUCTION makes sense.” Nothing actually “makes” sense, and, more often than not, sense is assigned in retrospect. Because something occurs or exists, we comfort ourselves that it has been perfectly explainable and predictable. The clouds painted on the television weatherman’s map demonstrate how today’s rainstorm “made sense”; an obscure business hiccup explains that Wall Street’s sudden dip “made sense.” For centuries, physicians were bleeding patients; the sun was circling the earth; and priests were offering human sacrifices: these similarly “made sense.” We search for the formula of understanding— we assume that the world is rational and understandable—and we convince ourselves that there is a simple way in which it must all make sense. Psychologists tell us that our brains love to form patterns— assembling information to draw larger conclusions. Our patter n- making abilities are usually offered as proof of highly evolved human thought. But it is that fondness for patterns—the habitual need to look at pieces and infer a larger picture—that causes prob­ lems. If you picked up a quart of paint and, instead of merely asking the color, wondered if it were tartan, polka- dot, or striped paint, you’d have the same analogy. Recognizing our faults, w e’ve gradually evolved the scientific method, a system of checks and balances, taking bits from Aristotle, Bacon, and Descartes. It’s a way of looking at data, conducting experiments, and drawing conclusions. But despite our best inten­ tions and the hallowed status of the scientific method, it can still be subject to individual foibles and pitfalls. It is a process that human beings thought of so they could think about things in reli­ able ways, because humans have such unreliable tendencies when it comes to thinking about things. In other words, it’s the best we’ll do under the circumstances. The author Charles Fort wrote, “I confess to childish liking for INTRODUCTION xiii making little designs, or arrangements of data, myself. And every formal design depends upon blanks, as much as upon occupied spaces.” At a time when people were desperate for patterns, Charles Fort insisted that we should wonder about the patterns we’d been given, and beware the blanks. Charles Fort was a frustrated fiction writer who became ob­ sessed with a new kind of story. “Before the first manifestation of Dadaism and Surrealism,” wrote Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier in their book The Morning of the Magicians, “Charles Fort introduced into science what Tzara, Breton and their disciples were to introduce into art and literature: a defiant refusal to play at a game where everybody cheats, a furious insistence that there is ‘something else.’” “Strip yourself of custom, habit, education, the conventional­ ized mental clothes of millions of years and presto! You are a can­ didate for wonders,” according to Fort’s friend the journalist and poet Benjamin De Casseres. Here Fort, as everywhere in his marvelously beautiful and br ain- stimulating books, puts on the seven- league boots of intuitive apprehen­ sion. He is a man done with clumsy apparatus of thought, the wires, the pulleys, the cranks and winches of reason and standardized experience. Poets and seers carry the patterns of infinity in their souls. Science tags along thousands of years behind. “Fortean,” as an adjective, can apply to a general class of oddi­ ties, and Fort’s name surfaces in discussions of the paranormal. But xiv INTRODUCTION “fortean” usually suggests a cool, wry, open- minded analysis of these mysteries. Today the author is heralded as a godfather of su­ pernatural writing, and even his staunchest critics admire him as a genius of a crank. He’s inspired science fiction stories, served as an example to generations of later authors, and appeared as a character in a comic book. But in writing the actual story of Charles Fort, I’m describing a confluence of specific oddities. Of course, the story includes his notoriously unsettling data, which he relentlessly pried from librar­ ies in New York and London. But it also involves the social climate in which Fort wrote, the audience he was writing for (both his friends and his many unknown readers), and the particular charac­ ter of Charles Fort. Coincidentally, all of these elements were able to combine—the right time and the right place—to produce four memorable and influential books. Fort offered the final fillip. Or that there are no coincidences, in the sense that there are no real discords in either colors or musical notes. That any two colors, or sounds, can be harmonized by intermediately relating them to other colors or sounds. In other words, we’ve simply been missing part of the pattern. Throughout his career, Fort assiduously avoided defini­ tions and classifications, so I’m convinced he would have objected to the title “The Man Who Invented the Supernatural.” For example, he was uncomfortable with the notion of “inven­ tion” and wondered whether Watt really invented the steam engine INTRODUCTION xv or the Wright brothers invented the flying machine. In his book New Lands, Fort wrote, “One of the greatest of secrets that have eventu­ ally been found out was for ages blabbed by all the pots and kettles in the world—but that the secret of the steam engine could not reveal itself until came the time for its co- ordination with the other phenomena and the requirements of the Industrial Age.” Similarly, Fort argued with the word “supernatural.” It was a word, he wrote in Lo!, “that has no place in my vocabulary.