Review of "Think to New Worlds" by Joshua Blu Buhs

​Think to New Worlds: The Cultural History of Charles Fort and His Followers
Jason Blu Buhs | University of Chicago Press | June 2024 | 384 pages | ISBN: 978-0226831480

Charles Fort (1874–1932) is probably more famous as an idea than as a man. His grave sits not far from where I write this now, at the Albany Rural Cemetery in Menands, New York. It’s not much to look at—a curving stone bearing his name above a monogram of a blackletter “F” wreathed in laurels, all slowly dissolving beneath a coating of lichens. It’s a stone’s throw from the much more elaborate marker of Pres. Chester Alan Arthur, but what both men share in common is a paucity of visitors who come to pay homage to their mortal remains. By contrast, you can’t visit social media or read a book about the paranormal or earth mysteries without running into someone calling up the shade of America’s greatest crank to conjure the anomalous and clothe conspiracies in the garb of prewar authority. And almost none of them could tell you anything about his life. Fort is a man who became a symbol, representing a certain stubborn resistance to authority, to science, and to the notion of reality as mechanical, material, and knowable.

​Outside the small world of fringe literature, Fort is probably remembered mostly as an obsessive who collected thousands of reports of weird happenings, from rains of frogs to celebrities that disappeared, and published them in rambling books. But the adjective formed from his name is more widely recognizable as a brand of mysterious, cheeky fun. Fort himself claimed never to believe his own ideas.
 
In Think to New Worlds, Jason Blu Buhs (also the author of a book on Bigfoot-hunting culture) skips over the totemic power of Fort to instead provide a nuts-and-bolts account of the literary feuds and failures of members of Tiffany Thayer’s Fortean Society and their rivals from the later 1930s to the middle 1950s. Thayer was a semi-popular novelist of genre fiction and quasi-erotica who found his calling as the near-dictatorial head of the Fortean Society, which he used as an instrument to promote his own paranoid conspiracy theories, eventually leading the U.S. government to investigate him for sedition when he encouraged resistance to civil defense measures during World War II.
 
Although Buhs calls his book a “cultural history” of Forteanism, it is instead a (partial) literary history of a small group of Fortean writers and the books and magazines they produced. Reader, be warned: This is not a book that will teach you anything about the impact of Fort’s ideas on the world beyond the library. (Or in it; he skips many incidents.) You will never hear about how the hoi polloi felt about Fortean mysteries, how science reacted to the media fixating on the bizarre, its involvement with the occult, or even Fortean ideas’ resonance in forms of media beyond a certain style of magazine and book. You won’t hear about comic books, cartoons, or TV shows.
 
(For the rest of this review, I will use “Forteans” and “Forteanism” to refer to the people and ideas associated with the 1931–1959 Fortean Society, not the later neo-Forteans who emerged in the 1970s.)
 
Many readers of Think to New Worlds will be overawed by Buhs’s dizzying assemblage of names and dates and too distracted by his non-chronological storytelling to notice the paucity of depth beneath the surface. Buhs organizes the book thematically in six chapters covering (a) Fort’s life, (b) Thayer’s Fortean Society, (c) literary modernism, (d) UFO books, and (e) paperback books on ancient civilizations and earth mysteries. Each chapter is further (dis)organized into a main narrative, primarily about Thayer’s interaction with fellow writers on that chapter’s theme, intercut with long, disconnected, and often irrelevant profiles of other Forteans writing about a similar subject, though not always at the same time. (Buhs extends his discussion in one chapter to include Morning of the Magicians in the 1960s, a rare excursion outside America, but also outside his time period.) ​The result, while perhaps true to Fort’s own rambling style, is a confusing collage of detail that rarely forms a coherent narrative or has much to say about Forteanism. The book’s writing is equally awkward, toggling between convoluted academese rich with offhand citations of scholars famous only to insiders and pop narrative, feeling more like a lightly revised dissertation than a coherent style.
 
The book begins with a sketch of Fort’s life, his many disappointments, and the struggles he faced in publishing his work before achieving overnight success with The Book of the Damned (1919) before falling on hard times again. Roughly speaking, Buhs works outward from Fort’s life and literary works to the various ways his fans used his legacy to build new forms of art, sometimes as literal fiction and other times as putative nonfiction like the Shaver Mystery, flying saucers, and the Bermuda Triangle that Buhs describes as science fiction in all but name. There isn’t much more to the book than that. Telling the story chronologically rather than thematically might have made the connections between the many names in the book clearer and cut down on repetition, but it would also have made more obvious that this is really the story of Tiffany Thayer and his organization, but Buhs treads lightly on investigating the Fortean Society’s day-to-day operations beyond the personal letters he consulted.
 
Buhs never quite comes to an explicit conclusion, so the one I will assign to him is rather more forceful than any you’ll find in his book: Forteanism, he seems to argue, was mostly a literary and artistic movement primarily among disaffected would-be literati and artists who consciously rejected the authority of cultural elites, particularly scientists and other academics, as much out of a jealous desire to exercise the same influence as an irrational lust for a pre-Victorian world of mystery, romance, and myth. There is a parallel to draw here with modern far-right figures who create their own media and their own “alternative facts” because they were never talented enough to succeed in the mainstream. Unspoken, of course, in Buhs’s book is that the playacting has real consequences when readers not in on the joke take their game-playing for the truth they claim to expose.
 
The trouble is that Buhs, like many writers of our degraded literary age, is afraid to take a stand, except, briefly, in the last page or two of the book, so his discussion rambles pointlessly from one forgotten literary feud to the next. He seems determined to praise the Forteans as the vanguard of postmodernism, but is repeatedly forced to concede that nearly their every notion was factually and scientifically false. He wants to hold them up as heroes fighting against intellectual oppression, but honesty compels him to note time and again that many of the early movement’s major figures were virulent antisemites, racists, homophobes, seditionists, conspiracy theorists, or just plain nasty. The final pages of the book try to draw overbroad conclusions about the supposedly massive impact of Forteanism on the world, blaming Forteans for QAnon and Donald Trump via a legacy of conspiracies.
 
At root, Buhs’s view of Forteanism is both too broad and too narrow. The narrow side we can see easily in Buhs’s emphasis on literature to the exclusion of all other endeavors. Did any early Fortean ever go outside and investigate anything in person? Did any attempt to use Fortean ideas in science? To judge by this book, no. The overbroad side is less obvious unless you know something of history. Buhs places Fort as the cynosure around which all of science fiction and postmodernism revolve, but that is simply untrue. As Buhs’s own book quietly but repeatedly notes, Theosophy was a far more influential belief system among the literary and artistic set, one whose practitioners overlapped to some extent with Forteans—and Theosophy predated The Book of the Damned by nearly half a century. Fort’s own books were not particularly special. He was far from the only writer to create compendia of oddball factoids. The genre has a long history, going back to ancient models like Aelian’s Various Histories and any number of medieval compendia. Josiah Priest’s American Antiquities was among the most famous of such compendia in early America, but the genre was a Victorian staple, especially among lower-budget readers. Fort revived a fading type of book and saw success because he infused it with paranoid anti-authority views that mirrored the distrust of old elites that followed the trauma of the Great War. Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorian smashed verity the same way, but for culture rather than science.
 
Forteanism was never as influential among the elite as Theosophy, as widely advertised as Rosicrucianism, as politically important as the John Birchers, or taken very seriously outside of the community or what we might today term incels and nerds. Its most famous acolyte was probably Henry Miller, whose editor crossed out all his references to Fort. Forteanism lived on mostly because science fiction, fantasy, and horror authors (and Buhs neglects fantasy and horror entirely, though he does cite my 2005 book The Cult of Alien Gods) found in Fort’s book germs of ideas for stories, and readers then read his books. Few think of him as a great philosopher except for those paperback “earth mystery” and paranormal writers who used his books as an easy way to avoid needing to do real research.
 
Before I close this review, I want to return to the notion, undeveloped by Buhs but vitally important I think, that the facts of Fortean ideas mattered less than expressing one’s allegiance to an alternative belief system that stood in opposition to established power structures. There is a good reason that, aside from a few early devotees among the literary elite, the Fortean ranks of the era swelled with second-tier names, people who thought they deserved to be rich and famous and in charge of culture but inexplicably were not. In their Fortean world, they were the adepts, the brilliant writers, the secret-keepers.
 
In my own research for my forthcoming book Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean, I discovered that Dean’s onetime boyfriend, radio director and advertising executive Rogers Brackett, had been a member of the Fortean Society and would mail in to Tiffany Thayer for publication in the magazine Doubt Fortean coincidences he discovered in his travels for his radio show Vox Pop and his theatrical productions. Similarly, authors that Dean read, from the aforementioned Miller to one of Dean’s favorites, Gerald Heard, were devoted Forteans. The magazines he read were littered with Forteana. But while Brackett and his queer artistic and literary friends were Forteans, they also illustrate the limits of Forteanism—that it was mostly an affectation. The same men later developed a wild passion for Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince and treated it exactly as they did Fortean material. They now claimed to live their lives by Prince’s principles and even dressed James Dean as the Prince and pretended to worship him. A few years later, many would be titillated by L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics. The nature of the belief was less important that having one to theatrically perform.
 
Even though James Dean had a lifelong fascination with oddball trivia and paranormal ideas, once he became famous, he never spoke publicly of anything Fortean. It just wasn’t cool.
 
Think to New Worlds, like a Fort tome, contains a great may interesting facts if you dig hard enough, but it never builds them into a coherent account that proves its contention that Forteanism was cool.