Steven Moore’s vibrant “Wild Talents: Pynchon, Gaddis, and Charles Fort” traces the connection between the two vaunted authors to Charles Fort, a US writer who specialized in anomalous phenomena.

Wild Talents: Pynchon, Gaddis, and Charles Fort — Steven Moore

The fifth episode of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) dramatizes a séance held—per Steven Weisenburger (36)—on the evening of 18 December 1944 at a London pub called Snoxall’s. Among those present is straight-arrow Roger Mexico, who works for a secret psychological warfare agency, where he doesn’t get along with his fellow employees: “They’re all wild talents—clairvoyants and mad magicians, telekinetics, astral travelers, gatherers of light” (GR 40). It seems to have escaped Pynchon’s red-eyed annotators that “wild talents” is the title of a book by contrarian American paranormalist Charles Fort, first published in 1932 (as he lay dying), often reprinted, and one I suspect Pynchon knew. He may have picked up the Ace paperback published in 1968, whose back-cover sales pitch targeted hippies like him:

Like Fort’s three previous books named on the cover, Wild Talents is an eclectic compilation of newspaper reports of bizarre incidents, unsolved crimes, and so-called coincidences. Chapter 2 opens:

I am a collector of notes upon subjects that have diversity—such as deviations from concentricity in the lunar crater Copernicus, and a sudden appearance of purple Englishmen—stationary meteor-radiants, and a reported growth of hair on the bald head of a mummy—and “Did the girl swallow the octopus?”
But my liveliest interest is not so much in things, as in relations of things. I have spent much time thinking about the alleged pseudo-relations that are called coincidences. What if some of them should not be coincidences? (Note 1)

—a question asked throughout Gravity’s Rainbow, especially by protagonist Tyrone Slothrop, who is not assured, for example, when a “110% company man” for Shell International Petroleum dismisses one of his many concerns with “It’s only a ‘wild coincidence,’ Slothrop” (241). Like Pynchon, Fort feels, “In the explanation of coincidence there is much of laziness, and helplessness, and response to an instinctive fear that scientific dogma will be endangered,” and goes on to make the bold claim “that there never has been a coincidence. That is, in anything like a final sense. By a coincidence is meant a false appearance, or suggestion, or relations among circumstances. But anybody who accepts that there is an underlying oneness of all things, accepts that there are no utter absences of relations among circumstances—” (847, 849–50).

The “underlying oneness of all things,” the conviction “that everything is connected” (GR 703), is a thesis that appeals to many mystics and even to some scientists, but Fort complains that the latter too quickly dismiss unexplainable coincidences, or feebly explain them away. Scorning “scientific procedure” and inept police investigations, Fort turns for answers to denizens of the occult—poltergeists, invisible people, vampires, werewolves, miracle healers, fakirs, psychic criminals, dowsers—and to such notions as teleportation, human-animal metamorphoses, spontaneous combustion and pyrokinesis, “psychic bombardment,” telekinesis, animism, “secret rays,” telepathy, spirit-photography, clairvoyance, and modern instances of witchcraft.

By witchcraft, Fort means what is now called psychokinesis, the alleged ability to move physical objects by one’s mind—“the action of mind upon matter,” as he puts it (1055)—and that is what he means by “wild talent,” wild as in uncultivated, uncontrolled, unrecognized: “by a wild talent I mean something that comes and goes, and is under no control, but that may be caught and trained” (1049). Near the end of his book, Fort offers this often unconscious power as an explanation for many of the strange phenomena he has tabulated, and calls for the cultivation of this talent for good:

All around are wild talents, and it occurs to nobody to try to cultivate them, except as expressions of personal feelings, or as freaks for which to charge admission. (Note 2) I conceive of powers and the uses of human powers that will some day transcend the stunts of music halls and séances and sideshows, as public utilities have passed beyond the toy-stages of their origins. Sometimes I tend to thinking constructively—or batteries of witches teleported to Nicaragua, where speedily they cut a canal by dissolving trees and rocks—the tumults of floods, and then magic by which they cannot touch houses—cyclones that smash villages, and then cannot push feathers. (1041)

If only wild talents could be harnessed as “public utilities,” Fort envisions in his concluding chapter “setting batteries of disciplined sorcerers at work, bewitching into useful revolutions all the motors of the world,” but admits, “Probably it will be some time before any college professor, of whatever we think we mean by importance, will admit that, by witchcraft, or by the development of what are now only wild talents, all the motors of this earth may be set going and kept at work” (1055–56).

Throughout the book Fort has noted the presence of young girls around many “poltergeist disturbances”—furniture moved around, pictures falling from the wall, fires spontaneously igniting (but not stopped-up toilets, caused by poltergeists on page 639 of Gravity’s Rainbow)—and exhibits a fondness for these “poltergeist girls.” While he argues that the wild talents of these teenage witches should be cultivated for good, not evil, he admits they might have other uses. He ends chapter 27 with this fanciful—dare I say Pynchonesque?—passage:

But of course not that witchcraft would be practiced in warfare. Oh, no: witchcraft would make war too terrible. Really, the Christian thing to do would be to develop the uses of the new magic, so that in the future a war could not even be contemplated.
Later: A squad of poltergeists girls—and they pick a fleet out of the sea, or out of the sky—if, as far back as the year 1923, something picked French aeroplanes out of the sky—arguing that some nations that renounced fleets as obsolete would go on building them, just the same.
Girls at the front—and they are discussing their usual not very profound subjects. The alarm—the enemy is advancing. Command to the poltergeist girls to concentrate—and under their chairs they stick their wads of chewing gum.
A regiment bursts into flames, and the soldiers are torches. Horses snort smoke from the combustion of their entrails. Reinforcements are smashed under cliffs that are teleported from the Rocky Mountains. The snatch of Niagara Falls—it pours upon the battlefield. The little poltergeist girls reach for their wads of chewing gum. (1042)

I think it is significant, if only coincidental, that the only self-identifying witch in Gravity’s Rainbow—a “very young” girl with the groovy name Geli Tripping—is described as an “apprentice witch” (329). (Note 3) Asked by Slothrop if she is a real witch, she modestly answers, “I think I have tendencies” (293), cognizant of her own wild talent, which she is in the process of cultivating. Fort would be disappointed that ultimately Geli, her apprenticeship completed, uses witchcraft not for civic purposes but to cast an old-fashioned love spell. But at least she’s a good witch, not one of those evil, career-minded types that Pynchon criticizes: “There are the two distinct sorts of witch, and Geli is the World-choosing sort” (718). The brief episode in which she casts her erotic spell is one of the loveliest in the novel. Coming near the end of a long novel dark with death and destruction, perversion and paranoia, it is a joy to behold Geli in daylight near a stream as she fastens “the silk crotch from her best underpants across the eyes” of her beloved and utters a binding spell: “She fixes on Tchitcherine’s memory and his wayward eyes, and lets it build, pacing her orgasm to the incantation, so that by the end, naming the last Names of Power, she’s screaming, coming, without help from her fingers, which are raised to the sky. . . . The stream rushes. A bird sings” (734).

As the above extracts from Fort demonstrate, the paradoxographer’s prose is peculiar. Regarding him as “one of the great comic stylists of his age,” Colin Bennett writes: “His style is unique. Following the chain of his thought is rather like following a jazz chorus. He moves sideways, takes backwards steps, allows himself (like many a good mind) to get completely lost, and then rights himself quickly, only to chase immediately some wild goose that has appeared from a totally unexpected direction” (19)—not unlike Pynchon himself. Fort reveals a healthy skepticism toward many of the incidents he reports on, exposing some of them as pranks or hoaxes, just as Pynchon often mocks his supernatural material. The notorious sadomasochist encounter between Katje Borgesius and Brigadier Pudding (part 2, episode 4) is “a satirical inversion of the Kabbalistic ascent to the Merkabah,” Jehovah’s throne (Weisenburger 144); Pynchon often refers mysteriously to an alternative dimension he calls the Other Side, but at one point degrades it to a tourist site: “one of these archetypes gets to look pretty much like any other, oh you hear some of these new hires, the seersucker crowd come in the first day, ‘Wow! Hey—that’s th-th’ Tree o’ Creation! Huh? Ain’t it! Je-eepers!’” (411); he deflates time-honored divination practices when describing Säure Bummer’s gift for “the difficult art of papyromancy, the ability to prophesy through contemplating the way people roll reefers” (442); he parodies Mircea Eliade’s concept of a “holy Center” (508: see Weisenburger 272); and near the end of the novel, the revered Chinese I Ching (Book of Changes) is the butt of one of Pynchon’s wonderfully awful puns, this one regarding “devotees of the I Ching who have a favorite hexagram tattooed on each toe, who can never stay in one place for long, can you guess why? Because they always have I Ching feet!" (746). (Note 4)

For artistic purposes, Pynchon opposed Preterite occult traditions to Elect science, stateless paganism to State-sanctioned religion, and dressed up his book in mystical frippery to tip the reader off that, while set during the 1940s, Gravity’s Rainbow is also very much about the psychedelic 1960s, as Weisenburger and Luc Herman have demonstrated in their brilliant book. They offer a sensible justification for Pynchon’s use of such material:

The sociopolitical ideas implicit in this novel’s references to and scenes of tarot readings, astrological divination, fantasist surrogacy, trance speaking, spirit possession, and out-of-body journeys (by Lyle Bland), no matter how whacky all of them may seem or be, include at least the following three. First, the persistent suggestion that models for intersubjective communication and solidarity may exist outside routinized channels. Second, that the very apersonality and non-intentionality of the divinatory processes of non-Western societies might have something to teach first world people. And third, that people might also learn from those practices’ acausal, nondeterminist, and recursive ways of knowing what is right and just to do. (Here, sing choruses of the never-ending “Sold on Suicide.) (166; cf. GR 320)

As Leni Pökler tells her scientist husband when he demystifies her belief in astrology, it’s not to be taken literally; it’s all “Metaphor. Signs and symptoms. Mapping on to different coordinate systems, I don’t know . . .” (159). Or as Pynchon tells us at the beginning of his spooktacular novel, “it’s all theatre” (3).

Fort even anticipates the drift of some of Pynchon’s scientists toward the occult. In chapter 10 Fort accuses “the science of physics” of being “an attempted systematization of the principles of magic. . . . There are alarmed scientists, who try to confine their ideas of magic to the actions of electronic particles, or waves . . .” (905) but there are others who go off the deep end:

Everywhere is the tabooed, or the disregarded. The monks of science dwell in smuggeries that are walled away from event-jungles. Or some of them do. Nowadays a good many of them are going native. There are scientific dervishes who whirl amok, brandishing startling statements; but mostly they whirl not far from their origins, and their excitements are exaggerations of old-fashioned complacencies. (918–19)

I wish there were more than circumstantial evidence to indicate Pynchon read Wild Talents. We hear nothing further of the “purple Englishmen” Fort mentions at the beginning of his second chapter; I had hoped they were the inspiration for Pynchon’s Gavin Trefoil—present at the séance of “wild talents”—who by means of autochromaticism “can change his color from most ghastly albino up through a smooth spectrum to very deep, purplish, black” (147). Also attending that séance is medium Carroll Eventyr, who later feels “a victim of his freak talent” (145, my emphasis). In chapter 18 of Wild Talents, Fort refers to a book on “pre-natal markings” by a Dr. Weissmann, but this respected German evolutionary biologist (1834–1914) shares nothing but a surname with Pynchon’s decadent, death-obsessed Captain Weissmann (who first appeared in Pynchon’s V.). Ivan Pavlov’s experiments on dogs are mentioned throughout the first third of Gravity’s Rainbow, but not his embarrassingly unsuccessful experiments on white mice, which Fort describes in chapter 24—though there are some lab mice at “The White Visitation,” who put on quite a show on pages 229–30. Fort offers dowsing as an example of practical witchcraft (chap. 29), though I doubt he meant Slothrop’s gift for dowsing rockets, “the stiff cock in his pants sprung fine as a dowser’s wand trying to point up at what was hanging there in the sky for everybody” (490).

Forty years after the publication of Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon reprised Fort’s title phrase. A character in Bleeding Edge possesses an almost supernatural ability to analyze and identify odors of all kinds, which makes protagonist Maxine Tarnow nervous: “Wild talents like überschnozz here, she learned long ago at the New York campus of Fraud University, can often be nutcases also” (235).

How might Pynchon have learned of Wild Talents? It and Fort’s three previous books had been published in a thick omnibus in 1941, which Pynchon might have stumbled upon. But he more likely clocked him among the motley crew of cranks and mystics rediscovered by the counterculture in the Sixties, along with Madame Blavatsky, Aleister Crowley, A. E. Waite, George Gurdjieff, Wilhelm Reich, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Alan Watts, and others of that ilk. There’s an entire chapter devoted to Fort in The Morning of the Magicians, an influential book by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier first published in French in 1960, then in English in 1963. “A bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic and Channel,” ex-Blondie bass guitarist Gary Lachman notes, “The Morning of the Magicians sparked the mass interest in ‘all things occultly marvellous’ that characterized the time and influenced some of the leading figures in popular culture” (7). Their 14-page overview of Fort’s life and work is entertaining and enticing, and probably sent many readers to bookstores in search of Fort’s books, perhaps including Pynchon. (Note 5) Beginning in the mid-Sixties Fort’s books were individually reprinted in mass-market format, and went through several printings into the 1970s. Given the erudite array of occult beliefs and mystical traditions on display in Gravity’s Rainbow, it’s hard to believe that Pynchon didn’t come across him. And finally, while “wild talents” is not a statistically improbable phrase, it is distinctive enough to assume Pynchon found it somewhere, and that somewhere is most likely Charles Fort—perhaps by way of an older American novelist.

But before we get to him, let’s just savor for a moment the idea that what is arguably the greatest American novel of the 20th century was written by a long-haired, dope-smoking hippie. Right on!

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Pynchon was not the first novelist to allude to Charles Fort. British writer Eric Frank Russell’s Sinister Barrier—serialized in 1939, published in book form in 1943—names Fort in the text and draws on his speculations. Frederic Brown’s Compliments of a Fiend (1950) opens with an epigraph from Wild Talents, which generates the plot of this mystery novel. In 1954, Illinois author Wilson Tucker published a popular novel entitled Wild Talent, a “story of telepathy and ESP wherein Paul Breen discovers that he has special powers. As a loyal American he lends his powers to the U.S. government, but soon finds out the government is not to be trusted” (publisher’s description).

In 1955, the only Pynchon-grade novel to allude to Fort appeared: The Recognitions by William Gaddis. If Pynchon read it, as some allege, he would have learned of Fort there. In chapter three, the wife of protagonist Wyatt Gwyon watches him reading:

The book was a large one, but she could not make out its title. It might have been anything; just as his tension must be for her presence, since he appeared to read everything with the same casual concentration. When she interrupted, there was no way of knowing whether he was looking up from Diogenes Laërtius or No Orchids for Miss Blandish. She might be breaking a thread in Berkeley’s New Theory of Vision, joining a rain of falling objects from the supercelestial geography of Charles Fort, or only echoing a voice in some cheap paper novel like Les Damnés de la Terre. Mendelssohn’s Elijah continued from the radio. She swallowed. Immediately, he cleared his throat, a vicarious measure which left her unrelieved. If she asked, he might look up with, —Fort says, “By the damned, I mean the excluded”. . . but she would have to ask, —Excluded from what? —“By prostitution, I seem to mean usefulness . . .” (82–83).

Gaddis is quoting from The Book of the Damned (1919), which begins:

A procession of the damned.
By the damned, I mean the excluded.
We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded.
Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have exhumed, will march. You'll read them—or they'll march. [...]
The Power that has said to all these things that they are damned, is Dogmatic Science. (Note 6)

Fort’s “supercelestial geography” is a hypothetical cosmic Sargasso Sea floating above the earth, and the remark about prostitution is “from chap. 3 of The Book of the Damned; Fort chides scientists for not pursuing ‘pure science’ and instead tempering their findings to the needs of society, as if ‘nothing has justification for being, unless it serve, or function for, or express the relation of, some higher aggregate. So Science functions for and serves society at large, and would, from society at large, receive no support, unless it did so divert itself or dissipate and prostitute itself. It seems by prostitution I mean usefulness’” (38). (Note 7)

A few pages later, Wyatt tells his wife, “—Charles Fort says maybe we’re fished for, by supercelestial beings . . .” (88), which is

Fort's tongue-in-cheek response to a report of a triangular-shaped UFO with chains attached to the bottom, which was dismissed by the authorities as a partly collapsed balloon. Fort wonders if “something was trawling overhead?” then wryly speculates: “I think we're fished for. It may be that we're highly esteemed by super-epicures somewhere. It makes me more cheerful when I think that we may be of some use after all” (Book of the Damned, 264–65). The phrase “maybe we're fished for” will recur throughout the novel. (ibid., 113)

Fort’s wry speculation reminds Wyatt of something he heard as a child from his erudite father, “—that tale about the sky being a sea, a celestial sea, and a man coming down a rope to undo an anchor that’s gotten caught on a tombstone” (33), which Gaddis learned from William Richard Lethaby’s Architecture, Mysticism, and Myth (1892). As Wyatt tells Basil Valentine,

—When I was sick in bed, he read to me from Otia Imperialia. The twelfth century, Gervase of Tilbury, when people could believe that our atmosphere was a celestial sea, a sea to the people who lived above it. This story was about some people coming out of church, and they saw an anchor dangling by a rope from the sky. The anchor caught in the tombstones, and then they watched and saw a man coming down the rope, to unhook it. But when he reached the earth they went over to him and he was dead . . . He looked up at both of them from the glass. —Dead as though he’d been drowned. (252–53).

During the first half of the novel, Wyatt becomes increasingly crazed by the suspicion he is damned, beyond redemption, and begins grasping at straws from his wide reading. As Pynchon would later do, Gaddis favors compound allusions and interdisciplinary, transhistorical mashups, here combining a 12th-century fable (Note 8) with Fort’s 20th-century speculation, and then free-associating them with a line from a 16th-century play and Jesus’ 1st-century promise to his apostles: “—Yes, yes, that’s it. That’s it! Flesh, remember? flesh, how thou art fishified. (Note 9) He’d jumped to his feet. —Listen, do you understand? We’re fished for! On this rock, remember? and I shall make thee a fisher of men?” (375, quoting Matt 4:19).

Gaddis seems to have read (or at least dipped in to) Wild Talents as well, for there is a reference in chapter 14 to an obscure book mentioned on page 457 of The Recognitions entitled Frank, Bishop of Zanzibar that had long eluded scholarly identification. Fort offers an episode from it as an example of alleged “poltergeist persecution.”

Like Pynchon, like Fort, Gaddis expresses contempt for the scientific community’s arrogant confidence in its findings, its heartless objectivity, its inhumane experiments on humans and animals, and its dismissal of anything that can’t be explained by science. Plus, like rocket scientist Franz Pökler, they have “this way of removing all the excitement from things” (GR 159). There are several passages like this one about halfway through The Recognitions, which sounds like something out of Fort:

Science assures us that it is getting nearer to the solution of life, what life is, that is (“the ultimate mystery”), and offers anonymously promulgated submicroscopic chemistry in eager substantiation. But no one has even begun to explain what happened at the dirt track in Langhorne, Pennsylvania about twenty-five years ago, when Jimmy Concannon’s car threw a wheel, and in a crowd of eleven thousand it killed his mother. (551)

Gaddis doesn’t delve as deeply into the occult as Pynchon does, but he shared with the younger writer a predilection for myths, folklore, and heterodox beliefs—especially anything that exposes Christianity as just another superstition—sometimes drawing upon the same books (Frazer, Graves, Waite) as Pynchon did. As I wrote in a 1983 essay comparing the two:

The extent of Gaddis’s preoccupation with religion in his novel is indicated by the range of source books he used in the process of composition: from the fourth-century theological romance attributed to Saint Clement from which The Recognitions takes its name, to the Apocryphal New Testament, Lethaby’s Architecture, Mysticism and Myth, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, Frazer’s Golden Bough, Phythian-Adams’s Mithraism, Lang’s Magic and Religion, Kramer and Sprenger’s Malleus Maleficarum, Conybeare’s Magic, Myth, and Morals, Marsh’s Mediæval and Modern Saints and Miracles, the Pilgrim Hymnal, Summers’s Physical Phenomena of Mysticism, and Graves’s previously mentioned White Goddess. In addition, there are over a hundred citations to the Bible and references to elements of almost every religious and occult tradition, from the Egyptian Book of the Dead to the writings of the early Church fathers, the Koran, legends of the Buddha and Krishna, Gnostic speculations, Saint Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises, hermetic alchemy, a calendar’s worth of saints’ lives, witchcraft manuals, Fortean hypotheses, mystical numerology, ghosts, and even a Satanic invocation from A. E. Waite’s Book of Black Magic and of Pacts. All this led early reviewers to complain that the novel was “shrouded in mysticism” and filled with “pagan mumbo-jumbo,” charges that would later be leveled against Gravity’s Rainbow by its comparatively fewer detractors. (“‘Parallel, Not Series,’” 438)

The publication in 2013 of The Letters of William Gaddis revealed further examples of the younger Gaddis’s interests in irrational beliefs and barmy books. In a 1948 letter from Panama to his mother, he thanks her for sending him a copy of The Book of Fate, an early 19th-century fortune-telling book said to have been translated from an ancient scroll found in an Egyptian tomb, and translated for Napoleon, who allegedly often consulted it. Gaddis’s attitude toward such nonsense is expressed in his letter: “of course it is in a way preposterous, and foolishness. But quite exactly what I wanted, and thank you” (Letters 98–99), and he did indeed use it for a few arcane references in the novel. But he also asked her to mail him his copy of Worth Smith’s Miracle of the Ages (1934), described by Gaddis’s editor as “a cranky book that translates apocalyptic messages from the Great Pyramid of Giza (predicting Armageddon in 1953), which WG took seriously and cites a few times in R” (Letters 69–70). Smith warned “The final ‘woe’ will begin August 20, 1953. That will be a period during which the whole earth is to be ‘cleansed of its pollutions,’ and which will prepare the people of the earth for the actual beginning of Christ’s Millennial Rule” (chap. 9). In his letters Gaddis expresses apocalyptic fears throughout this period, and in early summer 1953 sent this somber warning to an ex-girlfriend:

Please do not take this as an impertinence; nor as a joke, until afterward, if it is by then possible to take anything lightly.
I implore you to heed the day 20 August of this year as a day of catastrophe, of impersonal and grand proportions, and protect yourself from its possible consequences insofar as this is to be done.
It seems that simply residency in a capital is dangerous; and if you are working in the city do take that day off; and if you are living in the city, do if it is possible plan to spend that day abroad, in open country somewhere.
I do sincerely [hope] that we can laugh about this one day, and very much doubt it. (Letters 236)

After the world survived and The Recognitions was published, Gaddis’s interest in the occult waned, though he did draw upon the aforementioned Malleus Maleficarum for some facetious witchcraft references in J R (1975). His later letters, however, reveal a surprising belief in astrology—an irrational, unscientific contrivance that even some intelligent, cultured people follow. Gravity’s Rainbow is star-spangled with references to that old Babylonian hustle.

Unlike Gaddis, Pynchon never lost his relish for the supernatural and occult. You’ve got your Thanatoids, astrologers, and a Godzilla figure in Vineland (1990); a talking dog and mechanical duck, ghosts, Feng shui and ley lines, the hollow earth theory, and a “were-beaver” in Mason & Dixon (1997), which recalls the equally ludicrous “were-elves” of Gravity’s Rainbow; (Note 10) and time-travel, the fourth dimension, spiritualism, tarot cards, telluric mysticism, bilocation, and the otherworldly “Trespassers” in Against the Day (2006). As Kathryn Hume has shown, Pynchon abandoned such special effects for the more realistic Inherent Vice (2009), and in Bleeding Edge (2013) he limited himself to passing references to Zen, Kabbalah, UFOs, time-travel, astrology, ghosts, and a woman who can “foresmell things that’re going to happen” (236). (Note 11) Why? Hume suggests maybe he simply grew up, outgrew the jejune theatricality of the occult. I’d like to think that, like Gaddis, he never actually believed in such nonsense—he is way too scientifically literate for that—but found myth, magic, and mysticism useful as perfervid metaphors, as reifications of extreme psychological states—as did Gothic novelists in the 18th century—abandoning these outdated tropes and magic-show props when they no longer suited his artistic needs. (Note 12) As Fort showed in baffling detail, the real, fact-based material world is strange enough without bringing in “the Qlippoth, Shells of the Dead” (GR 176), and in recent years we’ve seen the grave dangers of believing in conspiracy theories, “alternative facts,” secret societies, disinformation, deranged paranoia, and “big lies,” which is all religion and the occult ever were in the first place. “God is the original conspiracy theory,” as Scott Sanders began his early essay on Gravity’s Rainbow.

Pynchon and Gaddis are “wild talents” not in Fort’s original sense, but in their daring willingness to incorporate such exotic material into their novels, which previously had been confined to science fiction, fantasy, and occult novels. At any rate, it is an extraordinary coincidence that two of the greatest American novels of the 20th century evoke Charles Fort, of all people, despite what he thought of coincidences.

***

1 Page 846 in The Complete Books of Charles Fort, where Wild Talents occupies pp. 843–1062; hereafter cited parenthetically. Speaking of wild coincidences: I am not the Steve Moore who in the 1990s edited the journal Fortean Studies and a few anthologies culled from the Fortean Times.

2 Cf. Fort’s use of “freaks” with Roger Mexico’s on “all those Psi Section freaks” at “The White Visitation,” meaning the same “wild talents” he described earlier at that séance; “who are all these people. . . . Freaks! Freeeaks!” (124–25).

3 Weisenburger notes the Sixties vibe of her name (182), but not that it probably comes from the Gilbert & Sullivan song “Gayly Tripping, Lightly Skipping” (HMS Pinafore, act 1). Pynchon mentions the duo a few times in the novel.

4 As I noted decades ago, Pynchon was anticipated by James Joyce in Finnegans Wake: “I feel sprits of itchery outching” (439.22–23).

5 They give this example of one of Fort’s typical reports: “screams are heard in the sky over Naples on 22nd November, 1821” (94; their paraphrase, not Fort’s actual words), which is startlingly close to the famous opening line of Gravity’s Rainbow. And get this: the author’s note at the end says “Jacques Bergier, a nuclear physicist and chemical engineer, was a member of the Resistance during World War II, and was involved in the destruction of the German atomic plant at Peenemünde”!

6 The Complete Books of Charles Fort, 3, where The Book of the Damned occupies pp. 3–310.

7 Moore, Reader’s Guide, 111, now online at http://www.williamgaddis.org/recognitions/I3anno1.shtml

8 Actually, early 13th per scholars today.

9 In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1597), Mercutio greets Romeo’s appearance with: “Without his roe, like a dried herring. O flesh, flesh, how art thou fishified!” (2.4.37).

10 Fort postulates a “werelemer” in chap. 10 of Wild Talents, “wereskunks and werehyenas” in chap. 13.

11 One character writes for a Web site called “Tabloid of the Damned”—too close to Fort’s Book of the Damned to go unnoted.

12 For Pynchon’s belief in “the other kind of magic, the real stuff—long-practiced, all-out, contrary-to-fact, capital M Magic,” see his introduction to Jim Dodge’s Stone Junction (NY: Grove Press, 1997), xiii–xiv.

WORKS CITED

Bennett, Colin. Politics of the Imagination: The Life, Work, and Ideas of Charles Fort. 2002. Rpt. New York: Cosimo Books, 2008.

Fort, Charles. Wild Talents. 1932. Rpt. New York: Ace, 1968. Hypertext edition: http://www.resologist.net/talentei.htm.

———. The Complete Books of Charles Fort. New York: Dover, 1974. Originally published in 1941 as The Books of Charles Fort (Henry Holt and Company).

Gaddis, William. The Recognitions. 1955. Rpt. (with corrections) New York: New York Review Books, 2020.

———. The Letters of William Gaddis: Revised Edition. New York: New York Review Books, 2023.

Herman, Luc, and Steven Weisenburger. “Gravity’s Rainbow,” Domination, and Freedom. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013.

Hume, Kathryn. “Attenuated Realities: Pynchon's Trajectory from V. to Inherent Vice.” Orbit: A Journal of American Literature 2:1 (2013): https://doi.org/10.7766/orbit.v2.1.50.

Lachman, Gary. The Dedalus Book of the 1960s: Turn Off Your Mind. Rev. ed. Sawtry, UK: Dedalus, 2010.

Moore, Steven. “I Ching.” A Wake Newslitter: Studies of James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake” 17 (April 1980): 25.

———. A Reader’s Guide to William Gaddis’s “The Recognitions.” Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. Expanded online edition: https://www.williamgaddis.org/recognitions/trguide.shtml.

———. “‘Parallel, Not Series’: Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis.” Pynchon Notes 11 (February 1983); rpt. in My Back Pages: Reviews and Essays, 427–41. Los Angeles: Zerogram Press, 2017.

Pauwels, Louis, and Jacques Bergier. The Morning of the Magicians. Trans. Rollo Myers. New York: Stein and Day, 1964. Avon published a mass-market paperback edition in 1968.

Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: The Viking Press, 1973.

———. Bleeding Edge. New York: Penguin Press, 2013.

Sanders, Scott. “Pynchon’s Paranoid History.” Twentieth Century Literature 21.2 (May 1975): 177–92.

Smith, Worth. Miracle of the Ages: The Great Pyramid. Holyoke, MA: Elizabeth Towne, 1934.

Weisenburger, Steven C. A “Gravity’s Rainbow” Companion. 2nd edition. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006.

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Steven Moore is the author/editor of several books and essays on William Gaddis; his writings on Thomas Pynchon are collected in My Back Pages: Reviews and Essays. He is also the author of The Novel: An Alternative History—the second volume of which won the Christian Gauss Award for excellence in literary scholarship—and of books on Ronald Firbank and Alexander Theroux. His most recent book is Dalkey Days: A Memoir (Zerogram Press).