Albany, New York, 6 August 1874. Charles Hoy Fort was born into a prosperous family and difficult circumstances. His mother, Agnes Hoy, died before he was five, leaving Toddy, as he was called, and his two younger brothers to the widowed Charles Nelson Fort. The paternal Fort was strict, physically abusive, bringing tears to Toddy’s eyes, blood to his nose — a tyrannical figure who cowed his sons into compliance but not respect or love. Impish from an early age, Fort developed an independent streak, perhaps in reaction to his father’s despotism, an intransigence that matured into a skepticism toward all forms of authority. He rejected religion — and what was taught at school. A compulsion to collect overcame him when he was young, another trait that would organize his adulthood, collecting and contumacy. Fort dropped out of high school, moved to Brooklyn, where, as he had at home, he worked as a journalist. In 1893, he used a small inheritance to travel, covering thirty thousand miles in three years. “All this to accumulate an experience and knowledge of life.” In 1896, illness forced his return to Brooklyn. He got reacquainted with Annie Filing, whom he’d known in Albany. She nursed him back to health. They married in October. The couple struggled to eke out a living, Annie becoming a laundress, Fort a dishwasher.¹

As Fort’s physical purview shrank, metaphysical and imaginative realms expanded before him. It was about this time that he met his gods.² These gods — he named four in correspondence — drove him: they were orthogenetic, he said, working toward an unseen goal, transforming the rebellious son of an Albany grocer into the “enfant terrible of science.” Decomposition. Amorpha. Syntheticus. Equalization. The pantheon may have been a private joke, but if so, the lie became a kind of truth.³ Decomposition, he said later, was the god immediately in charge of the world, “this beautifully rotten existence of ours.”⁴ What better symbol for a life of toil and unfulfilled dreams?

Amid these trials, he began to scratch out short stories, breaking into the magazine market in 1905, mostly with closely observed stories about tenement life in New York. Theodore Dreiser, then an editor with the publishing house Street & Smith, thought Fort’s “were the best humorous short stories that I have ever seen produced in America.”⁵ He became a patron, buying some of Fort’s stories for the publisher’s flagship magazine Smith’s, offering critiques, cajoling and encouraging. He arranged the publication of Fort’s novel, The Outcast Manufacturers, in 1909. A few years later, another pair of inheritances stabilized the Forts’ financial situation, freeing both Charles and Annie from the need to work. Fort attributed this turn of fortune to the arrival of the goddess Amorpha, who prized orderliness. The new situation provoked a crisis. Fort fancied himself a bohemian, but now Annie demanded creature comforts: bigger apartments, bathrooms, more respectable neighbors — bourgeois amenities that Fort scorned.

He wanted, on some level, the kind of life Dreiser was living, outsize and outrageous. Dreiser’s writing exposed and excoriated the social and religious systems that immiserated the poor, the immigrants. His novel Sister Carrie had him proclaimed a literary genius, his virtues trumpeted by the influential critic H. L. Mencken. A succession of novels followed, and essays and plays and poems. Dreiser moved through literary circles, took up residence in Greenwich Village, adopted radical views.⁶ In 1915, his novel The Genius, which fictionalized the dissolution of his marriage and his many infidelities, incited bluenoses, who had it banned. Fort told Dreiser he longed for that kind of notoriety. In a world ruled by Decomposition, one should luxuriate in decadence, he thought.

The form Fort’s writing had taken since the arrival of Amorpha, he knew, was unlikely to cause such a frenzy. It became increasingly abstract.⁷ He’d been unable to write a second novel and, now liberated from the need to sell short stories, he spent his days in the library, endlessly digressing through the study of “all the arts and sciences”, wearing out “eyesight and pencils and breeches” as he took notes on everything from evolution to calculus.⁸ These he put to use supporting a theory he’d developed: “That all things are one; that all phenomena are governed by the same law.”⁹ Or, as he put it in the book that eventually emerged from this note-taking:

But it is our expression that there are no positive differences: that all things are like a mouse and a bug in the heart of a cheese. Mouse and a bug: no two things could seem more unlike. They’re there a week, or they stay there a month: both are then only transmutations of cheese. I think we’re all bugs and mice, and are only different expressions of an all-inclusive cheese.¹⁰

Fort had become a monist, his theory exemplifying what philosophers call existence monism: only the universe exists; all the common objects of life are mere parts of this whole. In a fundamental way, they are not real.¹¹ He played with the idea in one story, a scientific romance about a human blood cell that realizes it is part of a vast, interconnected system, just as the human in which it lives is part of a cosmic order. The heterodox lymphocyte is shouted down by conservative cells. Fort titled the story “A Radical Corpuscle”. He saw himself as a radical, too, aligned with other nonconformists of the era who offered similar philosophies.¹²

Over time, Fort’s readings expanded from what was known to what was not, from the lawed to the lawless. He kept uncovering anomalies, reports of raining frogs, mysterious disappearances, baffling objects in the sky. These fascinated him, and he started taking notes on them too, worrying over their meaning. Setting aside fiction, Fort now concerned himself with the nature of existence. “I see this all as a travail”, he said, “of emerging more or less a metaphysician from a story writer.”¹³ He arranged the tens of thousands of notes hoarded about his apartment according to some thirteen hundred categories. Compelled “orthogenetically”, he turned in November 1915 to synthesizing his notes, his thoughts on the anomalous.

Under the thrall of his third god, Syntheticus, Fort spent the next six months working on a new book. The manuscript is lost, but his biographers have pieced together the argument. Fort suggested that existence was organized by an undiscovered force, what he called X, that created all things: “you, me, all animals, plants, the earth and its fullness, its beauty and variety and strangeness”, as Dreiser said.¹⁴ Sent by Martians, for reasons unknown, X was often invisible, its operation mistaken for natural law or free will. But by studying the anomalous, Fort could detect X’s presence, hypothesize the existence of the mysterious ray. In a hundred thousand words, Fort reinterpreted human history in light of this force. He was pushing toward a new genre of writing, as revolutionary as Dreiser’s, though less profane.

From “X”, he moved on to “Y”, financial security allowing for productivity — days spent at the library, evenings devoted to shuffling notes, writing, before Annie served a simple, hearty meal, the night capped with a stroll, the movies, a late snack of cheese and beer. “Y”, Fort said, was a complement to “X”. Although reconstruction of this manuscript is even less sure, the remnants more fragmentary, it seems that Y was connected to a place Fort called Y-land, somewhere near the North Pole. Attempts by explorers to travel though the vast and harsh Arctic, he said, would bring about a new era. Humanity and the citizens of Y-land would merge, their coupling neutralizing the force of X. What would follow would not be free will, though, but rather a state of nirvana.

Fort’s theorizing had an immediate effect on Dreiser. Like Fort, Dreiser did not believe in free will — the characters in his books are motivated by base emotions, biochemical reactions — but for all his materialism, he still longed to discover a transcendental realm, a source of ultimate meaning, an enriching one unlike the mean religion of his youth.¹⁵ Fort’s orthogenetic gods helped him solve this conundrum, unite the mundane and the spiritual:

I once believed, for instance, that nature was a blind, stumbling force or combination of forces which knew not what or whither. I drew that conclusion largely from the fumbling nonintelligence (relatively speaking) of men and all sentient creatures. Of late years I have inclined to think just the reverse, i.e., that nature is merely dark to us because of her tremendous subtlety and our own very limited powers of comprehension.¹⁶

There was a force, Dreiser concluded — “Ontogenetic Orthogenesis” or “autogenetic orthogenesis” — that drove reality toward some higher, if unknown, good.¹⁷ Dreiser illustrated these themes in a pair of plays, The Dream and Phantasmagoria, both of which present existence as the dream of the gods, thus synthesizing his realism and transcendence, humanity bereft of free will yet still in the palm of divinity.¹⁸ Convinced that “X” was “one of the greatest books I have ever read”, Dreiser assumed the burden of getting it published.¹⁹ He shopped “X”, then “X” and “Y”, to editors, publishers, even a movie studio, all to no avail.²⁰

Meanwhile, Fort fretted. He vacillated between concern that his gods had abandoned him and worry that they, or some related cosmic force, were preventing the publication of his manuscripts. He fretted, but, for the moment, he was not ready to quit. In December 1916, he decided on his next project, “a study of—occult things you know—things that have been called souls or spirits.”²¹ Its composition, though, proved difficult. At the end of each day, after hours at the library, he could not bring himself to write. He wasn’t sure how to apply “the kind of brains I have” to the subject. “Mine is a coarse and more cynical mind than those that have heretofore examined such phenomena, also it has some other qualities and a different attitude toward what is called the scientific method.”²² He thought of this book as “Z”.

Over the next several years, Fort transformed the manuscript into The Book of the Damned. Beyond breaking the alphabetic naming convention, he presented his material in a new fashion. The bulk of the book comprises the strange reports he’d gathered, particularly stories of things that fell from the sky, interwoven with attacks on Euclidean geometry, Darwinian evolution, Newtonian mechanics, geology. Though superficially confusing, a mass of disparate mysteries, there is an underlying argument, Fort’s eccentric theorizing not absent, just less prominent. The Book of the Damned advanced Fort’s monism. His quarrel with science centers on its failure to recognize the universe’s wholeness. Scientists mutilate reality, cut it into pieces, some called truth, others damned as false. Christianity, in days past, had used the same process to create its own regime of Truth — a Religious Dominant now superseded by an equally incomplete Scientific Dominant. “Demons and angels and inertias and reactions are all mythological characters; But that, in their eras of dominance, they were almost as firmly believed in as if they had been proved.”²³ In rescuing the excluded, damned facts, Fort aimed to demonstrate the continuity of existence, to complete the puzzle by providing the missing pieces. He hoped to initiate a new Dominant, one that recognized the universal continuum.

This new era would not be a featureless state, all forces offset; rather, it was to be in dynamic equilibrium, a constant flux. The dynamo powering the turmoil was the instability of the categories “true” and “false.” True things — what he called “heavenly” objects — were forever being declared untrue, while the untrue — the damned — were regularly resurrected as true.²⁴ Existence, as it was experienced by humanity, was intermediate between the heavenly and the damned, roiled by constant transformation. “We are not realists”, he writes. “We are not idealists. We are intermediatists— that nothing is real, but that nothing is unreal.”²⁵ The intermediate realm, life itself, is purgatory. Fort was, in this sense, mapping the universe’s metaphysical departments, as though he were a modern-day Dante. He told Dreiser, when he sent him a copy of the manuscript, “The Book of the Damned . . . is a religion.”²⁶

In erecting this strange theology, Fort teetered on the edge of pure crankery, inventing a new system, as he had done in “X” and “Y”, as did authors of books on Atlantis or the Earth’s hollow core. But The Book of the Damned was playful, slippery, so unlike the earnest tomes common to the genre. If there is no difference between the real and the unreal, anything is possible, and just as likely impossible. “So there it is. I’ve given up fiction, you see”, he told Dreiser. “Or in a way I haven’t. I am convinced that everything is fiction; so here I am in the same old line.”²⁷ Perhaps there was a Super-Sargasso Sea in the upper atmosphere into which were carried objects from earth—frogs, fish, leaves—and from which they later rained. Perhaps the universe was a living thing, rains of blood its bleeding. Perhaps in 1903 the earth, in its orbit about the sun, passed through the remains of a world destroyed in an interplanetary dispute, the particles falling as rains of dust and redness. Perhaps humanity was controlled. “I think we’re property”, Fort wrote.²⁸ Or, perhaps not; so skeptical he could not accept even his own authority, he had given up theorizing. “We have expressions: we don’t call them explanations: we’ve discarded explanations with beliefs.”²⁹

Dreiser was impressed. “Wonderful, colorful, inspiring”, he congratulated. “Like a peak or open tower window commanding vast realms.”³⁰ Around the time he received Fort’s manuscript, Dreiser had taken up with a new publisher, Boni & Liveright, which was intent on limbering up the ossified business of publishing, introducing new methods, taking risks on experimental writers, American and European. According to Dreiser, he forced the publisher to put out The Book of the Damned on the threat of his leaving. Probably that was not the only reason; Dreiser so frequently vowed to leave for another house if he didn’t get his way that his fulminations must have registered as bluff.³¹ Whatever the cause, Boni & Liveright added The Book of the Damned to its fall list, while Fort tinkered with the manuscript into May; it stayed on the list even when a printer’s strike roiled the industry. Originally scheduled for an October release, the book did not appear until the first day of December 1919, in time for the Christmas rush.³² Fort’s first book in a decade was priced at a reasonable one dollar. Sales were brisk, a second printing coming in January. “One of the most amazing books ever issued”, said a reviewer for the Philadelphia Inquirer.³³

For a few months in early 1920, Fort and his book, with its eyebrow-raising title, were a minor sensation. It was an incongruous start to what would be a difficult decade for Fort, the last full one he lived. The Book of the Damned was reviewed in numerous publications, from the prestigious to the middling to the local. The reviews were mostly — though not entirely — positive, or at least offered befuddled appreciation.

“As I read it I became more and more conscious of the fact that I was in the presence of a genius who, if he has hit a bull’s eye in his overwhelming deductions, will easily jostle Euclid, Columbus and Darwin off their pedestals”, wrote the maverick journalist Benjamin DeCasseres.³⁴ The playwright and novelist Booth Tarkington, whose novel The Magnificent Ambersons won the 1919 Pulitzer Prize, read the book while sick with the flu, having picked it up by mistake — studying criminology during his convalescence, Tarkington was misled by the title — and was blown away.³⁵ “Who in the name of frenzy is Charles Fort?” he asked. “He’s ‘colossal’—a magnificent nut, with Poe and Blake and Cagliostro and St. John trailing way behind him. And with a gorgeous madman’s humor!”³⁶ The most effulgent praise came from Ben Hecht in the Chicago Daily News. He too asked, “Who is Charles Fort?” before offering his own reply:

Charles Fort is an inspired clown who, to the accompaniment of a gigantic snare drum, has bounded into the arena of science and let fly at the pontifical seats of wisdom with slapstick and bladder. He has plucked the false whiskers off the planets. He has re-invented a god. He has exposed the immemorial hoax that bears the name of sanity.³⁷

Hecht, a journalist and reviewer, fancied himself an alienist, a “lunacy expert”, and he saw in Fort someone who refused to be confined by rationality but embraced the wisdom of the fool.³⁸ Hecht promised readers willing to brave The Book of the Damned that they would be rewarded with the liberation of madness. “For every five people who read this book four will go insane.”