Subject: Charles Fort. May 9, 2008.
I have found that a lot of my friend who are open
minded have read about Charles Fort. He often wrote
about strange things falling from the clear sky such
as fish, frogs and periwinkles. I enjoyed his
writings. He would often tell of something that
happened but wouldn't explain what made them happen.
He would let you come to your own conclusion.
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CHARLES FORT: A Chronology
Born, Albany, NY., on 6th August.
- Aged 15. Wrote to Jules Verne for his autograph.
1892
- Aged 18. Left home to escape tyrannical father.
Worked on an NY newspaper.
1893
- Aged 19. Made editor of a Long Island paper. Quit
to hitchhike around the world.
- Aged 22. After travelling through Southern USA,
Scotland, Wales and London, he reached Capetown, South
Africa.
Contracted malaria. Returned to NY. Married Anna.
- Aged 23. Lived in Bronx in dire poverty. Survived
by small jobs, journalism, and broke chairs for
firewood. Wrote 10 novels and collected 25,000 notes,
but burned them.
1900
- Aged 26. Completed autobiography 'Many Parts'.
1905
- Aged 31. Fort, trying to sell his work, meets
magazine editor Theodore Dreiser. They become firm
friends.
1906
- Aged 32. Virtually a hermit, between home and NY
Public Library. Began 'grand tour' of scientific
journals.
- Aged 41. Writes 'X' and ' Y '. Dreiser encourages
him to begin.
1916
- Aged 42. Fort's luck turned. A modest inheritance
from an uncle allows him to concentrate on writing.
1919
- Aged 45. Dreiser gets his publisher to issue
1920
- Aged 46. In a depression, he burns his 40,000
notes. He and Anna stay in London for six months, then
back to NY.
- Aged 47. Move back to London in December. Stay for
eight happy and productive years. Works daily in
British Museum Library. NL published. Speaks at
Speaker's Corner for amusement.
1924
- Aged 54. First correspondence with Thayer.
- Aged 55. Back in Bronx from London.
1931
- Aged 57. published. Thayer and Sussman form Fortean
Society. Beginnings of illness.
1932
- Aged 58. Delivers Admitted to Royal Hospital, NY,
where he dies on 3rd May of "unspecified weakness",
probably leukemia.
1937
- Anna dies. They had no children.
CHARLES FORT: The Hermit of the Bronx
Charles Fort was born into a fairly prosperous family
of Dutch immigrants who owned a wholesale grocery
business in Albany, New York State. He was the eldest
of three brothers - the others being Clarence, and the
youngest, Raymond. Their mother died within a few years
of Clarence's birth and Fort's father married again
during Fort's teens.
Beatings by his tyrannical father helped set him
against authority and dogma, as he declares in the
remaining fragments of his autobiography Many Parts.
Escaping home at the age of 18, he worked as a re****ter
in New York City before hitch-hiking through Europe
"to put some capital into the bank of experience." In
1896, aged 22, he contracted malaria in South Africa
and returned to New York where he married Anna Filan
(or Filing), an English servant girl in his father's
house.
Fort and Anna settled down to a life of dire poverty
in a succession of tiny apartments in the Bronx and
Hell's Kitchen quarters of New York City. He took odd
jobs between infrequent sales of his stories (most of
which are now lost) to newspapers and magazines. At
times things were so bad the Forts had to use their
furniture for firewood. Where Anna "knew all her
neighbours' affairs", Fort himself had very few
friends. He virtually lived as a hermit, chasing
references at the library until it closed and writing
up his notes at home, pottering over them into the
night. Were it not for Anna's insistence that he
accompany her to the movies most evenings and the
visits from Thayer and Dreiser, he had no social life.
His books are full of little asides that shed light
on his daily life; for example, in (Ch.18) he says has
cut down on smoking and almost given up drinking his
home brewed beer because it went flat so quickly. His
concentration was quickly soured by doubt, which was
rare but drastic when it occurred, plunging him into a
depression. Twice, he burned his collection of tens of
thousands of notes because "They were not what I
wanted." Undaunted, he would begin his exhaustive
reading and note-taking all over again, but in a new
direction.
In 1921, the Forts set sail for London, where he and
Anna lived close to the British Museum (at 39A,
Marchmont Street). For eight years, he undertook his
'grand tour' of the Museum's holdings several more
times, at each pass widening his horizons to new
subjects and new correlations.
He began to think that space travel was inevitable,
sending letters to the New York Times on the subject
and even speaking on it at Hyde Park Corner.
Fort returned to New York in 1929, striking up an
acquaintance with Tiffany Thayer, with whom he had
corresponded. Thayer, a young and ebullient novelist,
often visited the Forts, talking into the night,
lubricated by home-brewed beer, surrounded by Fort's
collection of mounted specimens of giant spiders and
objects said to have fallen from the sky and the great
wall of shoe boxes where Fort's notes roosted.
Fort grew progressively blind. On 3rd of May 1932, he
was admitted to hospital suffering from "unspecified
weakness". He died within a few hours, apparently of
leukemia. He took notes almost to the end - the last
one said simply: "Difficulty shaving. Gaunt places in
face." After Fort died, Anna lost her interest in
living and survived him by only five years.
Several times in his books, Fort refers to
poltergeist-like events in their apartments in the
Bronx and in London; inexplicable noises would be heard
and pictures fell off walls. Dreiser once interviewed
Anna after Fort's death and asked her if she had had
any further strange experiences. She told him of
rapping sounds and voices and then said ...
"One afternoon [..] his aunt came over and she
annoyed me terrible about this money. She said I had no
right to it. I went to bed crying and in the night I
thought he was sitting on a little bench or couch [..]
He said: 'Hello, Momma,' and I was never so glad to see
anybody in my whole life."
Charles Fort is buried in the family plot in a
cemetary in Albany, New York.
DESCRIPTIONS OF FORT
We have very few descriptions of Fort. He was a
complex and private man, dedicated to his work. His
autobiographical fragments, Many Parts, reveal a
turbulent childhood through which he stumbled and
brawled, resisting parental authority and any other
imposition he thought unjust or foolish. Yet the key
elements of his later brilliance are all in place: his
powers of observation, his creative imagination, his
facility with words and descriptions, and even his
compassion for people who did not have his own inner
strength.
Fort was not averse to making his size work to his
advantage. Mr X found a letter by Raymond, Fort's
youngest brother, written sometime after 1937. Raymond
recalls Fort telling him of having to fight a duel with
a Frenchman in South Africa. As he knew nothing of
swords or pistols, Fort chose to fight with his fists.
Raymond wrote: "The Frenchman was pretty well battered
up as my brother knew how to use his fists and
possessed unbounded courage."
Part 1.
John Winston. johnfw@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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