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 reporter
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]
Charles Fort. Part 2 of 2. May 9, 2008.
In part one of this article I said Charles Fort
reported in raining fish, frogs and periwinkles form
the clear sky. I looked up the definition of a
perwinkle and found three things.
1. It is a grown cover plant called Vinca. Which
has blue flowers.
2. It is a color similar to blue.
3. It is a snail or slug that is harvested and eaten
by some of the people in England other countries.
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For Tiffany Thayer, Fort was a jolly giant with "the
most magnificent sense of humor that ever made life
bearable for a thinking man." In his exuberant
introduction to BOOKS1 (1941), Thayer describes Fort as
nearly six feet tall, fair, and built like a walrus
with a matching moustache and spectacles as thick as
bottle-ends. "He was an anachronism in modern dress,"
thought Thayer who mentally placed Fort in the era of
swashbuckling Musketeers.
However, Thayer's Fort, "roaring at his subject" and
"packing a belly laugh in either typewriter hand", is
at odds with the "shy and introverted" hermit seen by
others, including Theodore Dreiser, Fort's oldest
friend.
They first met in 1905 when Dreiser was editor of
Smith's Magazine, and Fort was selling some of his
stories. Dreiser, an older and more established writer,
likened him to Oliver Hardy - "that unctuous,
ingratiating mood, those unwieldy, deferential,
twittery mannerisms were Fort's."
One of Dreiser's friends, Marguerite Tjader,
remembered Fort as "a low-set man, dark with a greasy
complexion, [with] scant black hair brushed over a
round dynamic head. His hands were fat and protruded
from filthy shirt-cuffs under a dark nondescript suit.
In spite of all this, there was something fascinating
about him; he seemed utterly alive, carefree and
all-knowing as he talked."
Fort's biographer, Damon Knight, says Fort was "an
utterly peaceable and sedentary man [who] lived quietly
with his wife." By all accounts, Fort and Anna were an
odd couple, but they were devoted to each other.
According to Thayer, Anna lamented her husband's
unsocial bent, knew all her neighbours' affairs, and
organized their daily life with "skill and
imagination", in effect freeing Fort to follow his
star. Thayer said she never read Fort's books, nor
"ever dreamed what went on in her husband's head".
Aaron Sussman, then a young advertising executive who
became fast friend to the elderly Fort in his last
years, told Damon Knight of his visits to the Forts'
apartment in 1930. He recalled Anna as a "bustling
little hostess" who had "a lovely way of speaking to
you [making you] feel she was honored and grateful that
you had taken the time and trouble to come and see
her." To Sussman, Fort was "one of the most innocent
innocents I have ever met [..] a gentle man,
inveterately polite, very tender toward Anna." With his
deep voice and booming laugh, he gave Sussman the
impression of a great mind that had withdrawn from the
world, and yet "He always made you feel wanted; he was
delighted to see you, no matter how busy he was."
BIOGRAPHICAL SOURCES ABOUT FORT
There are only two substantial sources of
biographical information about Fort.
Fort's only auto biographical writing - a fragmented
manuscript called 'Many Parts' - concerns his childhood
in Albany up to his late teens. This was rescued by Mr
X, and published in Fortean Studies, Vol.1, 1994.
Damon Knight's biography Charles Fort: Prophet of the
Unexplained (Doubleday, 1970), which relies on 'Many
Parts' for Fort's early life.
Almost as interesting, though tangential, is Tiffany
Thayer's introduction to BOOKS1, which includes
fascinating asides about Fort.
There may be many other reminiscences of Fort buried
away in the literary archives of prominent Americans
and which have yet to be discovered by some diligent
researcher - perhaps you?. For example, see...
Mike Dash, 'Charles Fort and a Man Named Dreiser,'
Fortean Times (51:40-48).
Mr X, 'The Charles Fort - John Reid Correspondence',
INFO Journal (Autumn 1994).
Most of the facts recounted in these pages come from
these sources.
Jump to annotated bibliography of
http://www.forteana.org/html/fortsbooks.html
Charles Fort's writings.
http://www.forteana.org/
The Charles Fort Institute
Part 2 of 2.
John Winston johnfw@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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