Take the Z-Train

PulpFest took place a month ago, but I still haven't finished writing about it and the topics that came up because of it. I'll begin again with this one.

At PulpFest, I talked to a publisher about ideas for collections of stories that have never before been collected. The stories of Allison V. Harding are obvious candidates. Allison V. Harding is supposed to have been Jean Milligan (1919-2004). That supposition is based entirely (I think) on Sam Moskowitz's account of seeing correspondence between Weird Tales magazine and Ms. Milligan before that correspondence was destroyed in the early 1970s while in the possession of editor Leo Margulies. In addition to being a supposed author, Jean Milligan was married to Lamont Buchanan (b. 1919), associate editor and art editor of Weird Tales from September 1942 to September 1949. He succeeded Harry Aveline Perkins.

Allison V. Harding's first story for Weird Tales was "The Unfriendly World" from July 1943. Her last was "Scope" from January 1951. We might call "Scope" an outlier, as it was published almost a year after the second to last, "Take the Z-Train," from March 1950. Note the dates for the first and the second to last: "The Unfriendly World" was published nine months after Buchanan started work for Weird Tales. "Take the Z-Train" came just six months after he finished there. That story may very well have been lined up for publication before he left. From the beginning almost to the end of her career, Allison V. Harding had Lamont Buchanan to guide her stories into publication. I don't think that's any coincidence.

I don't think Jean Milligan was Allison V. Harding. I think Lamont Buchanan was, and I think he used a double layer of cover to hide his identity: first, his wife's maiden name as the name of his pseudonymous author, and second, the address of an attorney--possibly someone in her family--as her address. The address of the attorney may have been why Sam Moskowitz believed Jean Milligan herself to have been an attorney. I haven't found any evidence that she was, but that's not to say that she wasn't.

So what evidence do I have that Lamont Buchanan was Allison V. Harding? Not much. But when I read the last Damp Man story, "The Damp Man Again," from May 1949, it came to me that this was not the writing of a woman but of a man. Not just a man, but a bitter or disaffected man, possibly a man in despair. "Take the Z-Train" is perhaps not so intensely bitter or despairing, but it is a story of a man who has, nonetheless, reached his end. The man is Henry Abernathy, an aging "Junior Assistant Supervisor of Transportation"--a title not unlike Buchanan's own at Weird Tales--and one ready to make a new start in his otherwise gloomy, boring, monotonous, and oppressive life. On his way home from work one evening, Abernathy mistakenly boards the Z train, a conveyance that carries him to what a few years later Rod Serling would call the Twilight Zone.

Like all of the Allison V. Harding stories I have read, the protagonist in "Take the Z-Train" is a man, and the story is told from a man's point of view and in a man's voice. This story is near hopeless, again, the work of a bitter person or one in despair. It closes with a memory or vision from Abernathy's childhood, a vision that is so strange and personal that it is almost incomprehensible to the reader. I sense that this vision was from Lamont Buchanan's own childhood and that it had significance to him that he could only suggest in story form. There may very well have been trauma in his childhood, almost certainly in the childhood of his father, whose name was attached to a scandal among the previous generation. Further back in the Buchanan family--in its mysterious Scottish past--there was yet more deep and strange despair. But those are tales for another time. For now I'll say that "Take the Z-Train," with its meditation on time and age, was a fitting valediction for the writing career of Allison V. Harding.

A cartoon without a caption by Charles Addams depicting the Z train, from the book Creature Comforts and originally published in The New Yorker in the late 1970s or early 1980s. Would Lamont Buchanan, also a New Yorker, have seen this cartoon? If so, would he have remembered the story by Allison V. Harding of many years before?

Text and caption copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Fortean Writers in Weird Tales

The Book of the Damned, the first of Charles Fort's four compilations of weird and unexplained phenomena, was published on December 1, 1919, to mixed reviews. The New York Times wrote:

[Any] conclusion . . . is so obscured in the mass of words and quagmire of pseudo-science and queer speculation that the average reader will find himself either buried alive or insane before he reaches the end. (1)

H.G. Wells, himself a believer in nonsense, called Fort "one of the most damnable bores who ever cut scraps from out-of-the-way newspapers." (2) Theodore Dreiser, Fort's champion, considered him "simply stupendous." (3) Ben Hecht, writing for the Chicago Daily News, was even more effusive:

I am the first disciple of Charles Fort. He has made a terrible onslaught upon the accumulated lunacy of fifty centuries. The onslaught will perish. The lunacy will survive, entrenching itself behind the derisive laughter of all good citizens. I, however, for one, rush to surrender my homage. Whatever the purpose of Charles Fort, he has delighted me beyond all men who have written books in this world. Mountebank or Messiah, it matters not. Henceforth I am a Fortean. (4)

Born on August 6, 1874, in Albany, New York, Charles Fort was an impoverished journalist, novelist, and writer of short stories before turning his attention to all things unexplained--at least in any satisfactory way--by science. Three compilations of these "data" as he called them followed The Book of the Damned. They were: New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931), and Wild Talents (1932). The last arrived in bookstores on May 5, 1932, just two days after Fort's death. Fort's wife survived him, as did his monumental works. Fortean has since become a word to describe the followers of Fort (thanks to Ben Hecht) as well as the phenomena themselves (collectively known as Forteana). Today there are Fortean societies all over the world.

There are also writers of Fortean fiction and have been since the beginning. Weird Tales, "The Unique Magazine," was one place where they could gather. In his remembrance of the editor Farnsworth Wright, E. Hoffman Price wrote:

Inevitably, Farnsworth was thrilled by the works of Charles Fort, the rebel who spent a lifetime trying to shatter the solemn pretenses of science, and in debunking the sacerdotal attitude of scientists. Whether he agreed or disagreed with Fort, I don't know, and it makes no difference; the essence of it was that he admired the iconoclastic approach, the startling phrases, the audacity of the wildman who juggled suns and stars and sciences. (5)

Edmond Hamilton was a young correspondent of Charles Fort and one of the first Fortean writers of fiction. His story "The Earth Owners" from Weird Tales, August 1931, was an early example in the genre (or sub-genre, or sub-sub-genre). Hamilton pointed out that he himself was preceded by George Allan England and his story "The Thing from--'Outside'" from Science and Invention, April 1923, reprinted in Amazing Stories, April 1926. (6) George Allan England (1877-1936) did not contribute to Weird Tales. Some Fortean writers who did include:

• Eando Binder
• Robert Spencer Carr (1909-1994)
• Miriam Allen deFord (1888-1975)
• Vincent H. Gaddis (1913-1997)
• Edmond Hamilton (1904-1977)
• Damon Knight (1922-2002)
• Frank Belknap Long (1901-1994)
• H. Beam Piper (1904-1964)
• Eric Frank Russell (1905-1978)

According to Robert J.M. Rickard, founder and editor of the British magazine Fortean Times: The Journal of Strange Phenomena, "John Campbell, the editor of Astounding Science Fiction . . . encouraged many authors to expand Fort's data and comments into imaginative stories." (7) And of course Raymond A. Palmer, editor of Amazing Stories, Fantastic Adventures, and Fate, modeled on the Fortean magazine Doubt, was also inclined towards Forteana. It's interesting that Campbell, the most scientifically minded of the three editors--Wright, Palmer, and himself--was also the one who fell hardest for pseudoscientific claptrap.

Fort's influence continued beyond the golden age of pulps and science fiction. The novel The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney (1954, 1955), about which I wrote recently, alludes to Fort in recounting stories of frogs falling from the sky, spontaneous human combustion, and of course the manifestation of "mysterious objects" on a farm outside Santa Mira, California. In fact the entire story is framed in Forteana with this as its closing paragraph:

But . . . showers of small frogs, tiny fish, and mysterious rains of pebbles sometimes fall from out of the skies. Here and there, with no possible explanation, men are burned to death inside their clothes. And once in a while, the orderly, immutable sequences of time itself are inexplicably shifter and altered. You read these occasional queer little stories, humorously written, tongue-in-cheek, most of the time; or you hear vague, distorted rumors of them. And this much I know. Some of them--some of them--are quite true. (8)

Charles Fort didn't think much of science or scientists, yet his "data" are now everywhere in science fiction. He inspired writers of fantasy and weird fiction, too, and even appears as a character in the recent movie adaptation of "The Whisperer in Darkness" by H.P. Lovecraft. Between the two--between science and the supernatural--lies pseudoscience, which you might say was invented by Charles Fort. As a believer in the continuity of all things, he would not have recognized a difference among science, pseudoscience, and the supernatural. He may very well have felt comfortable inhabiting those in-between spaces--or as comfortable as he felt at any time inhabiting this strange planet.

Notes

(1) Quoted in Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural by Jim Steinmeyer (2008), with Mr. Steinmeyer's brackets and ellipses, p. 11.

(2) Quoted in Steinmeyer, p. 11.

(3) Quoted in Steinmeyer, p. 12.

(4) Quoted in Charles Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained by Damon Knight (1970), p. 70.

(5) From "Farnsworth Wright" by E. Hoffman Price in The Weird Tales Story by Robert Weinberg (1977), p. 11.

(6) See Knight, p. 171 and notes 161 and 162 on p. 216.

(7) Quoted on Wikipedia.
(8) Ellipses and italics are in the original.

The Book of the Damned by Charles Fort in a British (?) paperback edition.

Lo! in the original hardbound edition illustrated by artist and raconteur Alexander King (1899-1965).

Charles Fort's ideas have permeated our culture, even showing up in cartoons by Charles Addams. From Creature Comforts (1981).

Text and captions copyright 2014, 2023 Terence E. Hanley