Michael Dirda

Steinmeyer's engrossing biography dwells a little too long on Fort's childhood as the son of a well-off Albany merchant, but it makes up for this by briskly recounting the author's youthful adventures (riding the rails all over the East Coast, shipping out to England and South Africa) and describing his desperate years as a magazine short story writer, somewhat in the vein of O. Henry. Eventually, a family inheritance saved Fort (and his stolid, loyal wife) from near starvation and allowed him to embark on his life's true work.

Fort's two earliest excursions into paranormal reporting sound far more mystical and outré than his later writing. In X-- that was the intended title -- he speculated about a mysterious evolutionary force and postulated a race of beings on Mars. Dreiser, who read the manuscript, judged the book a masterpiece of daring thought and gorgeous prose, and he was appalled when Fort destroyed it. A subsequent volume, called Y, took up the possible existence of a hidden world at the North Pole. As evidence, Fort cited "blond Eskimos, warm climates near the North Pole, and Perry's peculiar explorations." Fort even speculated that Kaspar Hauser, the strange boy who appeared in Nuremberg in 1828, may have come from that other world. "Hauser exhibited odd traits like supernatural senses, but could barely communicate and did not recall any family. . . . He was killed under puzzling circumstances -- stabbed as he walked in the middle of a snowy park; no other footprints in the snow, no murder weapon."

Eventually, Fort wired Dreiser that he had written Z, which later appeared as The Book of the Damned. Here Fort posited "intermediate existence," or what he sometimes referred to as "existence of the hyphen," explaining that our lives reveal "an attempt by the relative to be the absolute." Like Schrödinger's dead-and-alive cat, things could be positive-negative, real-unreal, soluble-insoluble. I don't quite get this, but as the years went by, Fort came to believe increasingly in a kind of monism, a mystical connectedness of all things.

During his lifetime Fort's admirers ranged from the journalist Ben Hecht to the inventor R. Buckminster Fuller. His successors included Robert Ripley, who commercialized a whole range of oddities in his "Believe it or Not!" newspaper columns and, from my own childhood, Frank Edwards, whose book Stranger Than Science frightened more than one 12-year-old into sleepless nights. On a larger scale, Fort's legacy was initially preserved through the Fortean Society and its magazine, Fate, edited by the forgotten novelist Tiffany Thayer. Today, the standard-bearer is the British magazine Fortean Times. A recent issue dealt, in part, with statues that bleed.

Jim Steinmeyer is best known as a historian of magic ( Hiding the Elephant) and as a creator of illusions for Doug Henning and David Copperfield, among others. His biography, drawing heavily at times from Damon Knight's pioneering life of Fort, balances neatly between skepticism and sympathy. Steinmeyer views Fort as a representative 1920s figure, but to me he seems in a slightly earlier mode: The antiquary with a hobby horse. Fort and his 40,000 slips of paper recall Marx researching economics in the British Library, H.W. Fowler compiling his picky Modern English Usage, the editors of the Variorum Shakespeare and the Oxford English Dictionary noting arcane interpretations and elaborate etymologies, J.G. Frazer tracing hanged gods and ancient ritual in The Golden Bough.

In all his works Fort aimed to undermine the sanctimony and swagger of modern science -- but also to offer some diverting intellectual entertainment. Are his books, then, mere crackpot pseudo-science? To give a Fortean answer: Yes and no. Are they fun to read? Yes, just plain yes. ·

Michael Dirda's e-mail address is mdirda@gmail.com