Grant Wallace: Over the Psychic Radio : In-Person and Online

THE LIFE AND WORK OF GRANT WALLACE

By Lucy Sante

      To understand Grant Wallace (1868–1954), it is necessary to transport oneself back to the nineteenth century and the nearly unlimited opportunities for self-invention and reinvention the United States offered, at least to white men with iron self-confidence and, if possible, nearly suicidal daring. Wallace was born on a farm in Missouri (his father, who became a judge, had been a '49er); acquired several sorts of education; ran a business college; became a newspaper cartoonist, then reporter, then editorial writer, then daredevil war correspondent. After that he vagabonded around the Southwest, wrestling mountain lions and repairing funicular cables. According to his New York Times obituary he then edited a movie magazine, wrote humor pieces for the New York Sun, explored archeological sites in the Southwest for Everybody's Magazine, undertook horticultural projects under Luther Burbank, helped found the writers' colony at Carmel, California, and made animated films in a San Rafael studio. He was nevertheless never truly secure financially, and he took big if often star-crossed chances with investments while he raised his impossibly perfect family in Carmel. Meanwhile he was tuning in to the astral plane, which brought him a bevy of chatty correspondents from the beyond, a number of whose portraits by Wallace and texts ostensibly dictated to him are illustrated herein.

      By the later nineteenth century California, with its sunny skies, diverse topography, and end-of-the-rainbow remoteness, began to appear as the natural home of the spiritual avant-garde. Large properties were plentiful and cheap, and the place kept filling up with trainloads of the spiritually malnourished, escapees from the industrial East and the agrarian Middle and South, who were ready to go all in on any promise of heaven, preferably with an earthly component. The first cult was established by the faith healer William Money, who moved to Los Angeles in 1841, and over the years the roster filled up with the kinds of sects Nathanael West was to mock in The Day of the Locust: New Thought, in Los Angeles from 1904; Aimee Semple McPherson's Four Square Gospel, 1918; Guy and Edna Ballard's I AM, 1932; Arthur Bell's Mankind United, 1934; not to mention such more or less fleeting manifestations as the Great White Brotherhood, the Temple of the Jewelled Cross, and the Ancient Mystical Order of Melchizedek.

      Wallace had an agile pen, which he deployed in his editorial cartoons; "Professional Jealousy," 1925, has vigor, precision, and a dancing line not unlike Robert Crumb's. Naturally, his visualizations of his spirit contacts were bound to be rather more elaborate than the usual run of psychic art, with its predictable altars, temples, and symmetries. He laid out many of his pages like trompe-l'oeil bulletin boards, with statements, maxims, and aperçus from figures living, dead, and extraterrestrial appearing on what look like individual scraps of paper, each in a different style of penmanship. In this they are very reminiscent of the compilations of worthy thoughts of the great that were artfully published at the beginning of the century by the Roycroft Press of East Aurora, New York, Elbert Hubbard's attempt to emulate William Morris's Kelmscott Press.

      But Wallace's otherworldly correspondents also transmitted their images via his psychic radio, giving him rich material for his portraits. The portfolio on display begins with a beautifully lettered title page that suggests Wallace would have been equally at home with fin-de-siècle Symbolists and Decadents and with the San Francisco psychedelic poster artists of the late 1960s. Indeed, there's more than a little psychedelia in these works. The figures have immense Margaret Keane–sized eyes, are crowned with laurels or turbans or towering hair or bejeweled headdresses or helmets or rays of power, surrounded by writings in scripts sometimes so outlandish they might be mistaken for the Mercurian alphabet. He was clearly an admirer of William Blake, whose arched compositions and ways of expressing phosphorescence he liked to adapt. In profile his women, whichever planet they are from, tend to exhibit the ample dimensions and plumply rounded chins associated with bustles and hobble skirts. Across the board, his correspondents are positive and uplifting and quite in favor of universal harmony and world peace—much like the Elbert Hubbard school, which held that art was a sort of spiritual vitamin, needed to arm mankind for its march into the future. This applies equally to Wallace's extraterrestrials, who seem to live in enlightened worlds where the language is dense with Zs: Zarruez, L'Zouree, Zuraleo, Zazuilly, Zozomilea, Zingomar (weirdly like the French cinematic archvillain Zigomar, 1913–1915; zigomar is French slang for "rando").

A HISTORY OF THE COLLECTION

By Matt Berger *

Earth is the Greatest Haunted House. Hourly you walk among crowds of semi-conscious gaseous “ghosts.” To them you are the gaseous folk, while they are the visible and substantial realities. Men’s ignorance of this fact does not change the fact.

      This message is written in thick black pencil on a scrap of paper that I keep in a handmade wooden box near my bedside, along with various keepsakes and good luck charms. It was written by my great-grandfather Grant Wallace (1868–1954), who in every sense of the word was one of history’s most famous ghostwriters.

      Growing up in my conventional family household in the 1980s, my siblings and I lived in blissful innocence when it came to the otherworldly accomplishments of our mom’s dad’s dad. We did not know much about him being a spiritualist philosopher and medium to past lives, alien life forms, and spirit worlds. We mostly knew of him by my mom’s description—a famous newspaper man who collected a famous circle of friends.

      Grant died in his Berkeley home when his grandchildren were young. My mom, Deirdre Wallace, was just seven years old. Her younger brother, Brian, was five. Two decades would pass before I was born, the fourth of the great-grandkids, with the surname Berger.

      What I knew about Grant was mostly lore, told to me by our mom in her giddy nonchalance. In ninth grade, when I checked out Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat from the school library, she explained that the author wrote the novella while flopped out on Grant and Margaret’s living room couch for weeks in their tiny Carmel bungalow . . . she thought. “Or was it The Red Pony?” she wondered.

      When we’d hike the local trails in the nearby Berkeley hills, my mom would remind us that Grant and his writer friend Jack London once invested in a eucalyptus tree importing company, until the hardwood scheme went bust and dried up our family savings account.

      As an aspiring journalist, I pored over old San Francisco morning and evening edition paper newsclips by Grant that were around the house, assigned to Grant by his editors and publishers, including Fremont Older and William Randolph Hearst.

      But my mom didn’t tell us much about Grant’s other journalistic endeavor—his lifelong pursuit to document “the secret structure of reality’s nine dimensions and in general set mankind straight through rational scientific method.” This I would learn from my grandfather Kevin Wallace, who detailed our family story in an unpublished memoir I found in a box in our garage when I was a teenager.

      Kevin recounted Grant’s journey from his childhood home in Missouri—where Grant first reported an ability to communicate with the spirit world, once even ridding his mother of demonic possession by a monk from the time of the Spanish Inquisition—to the epicenter of late nineteenth-century modernism: New York City:

      That last line says a lot about Grant and his position in the family unit. Despite tuning in to the outside world (sometimes more than to his own domestic responsibilities) Grant always managed to keep one foot in this world.

      Many years after his first trip to New York and living an exceptional life—settling in Carmel, California, at the suggestion of his group of friends, including Sinclair Lewis and Mary Austin; marrying a second time and starting his second family (mine)—Grant went back to Manhattan to present his most important body of work, produced under the influence of automatic writing.

      But the Great Depression loomed, and Grant’s collection of bookplates and astral portraits delivered to him through “mental radio” by Pleiadian Light Bringers with names like Zu-la-zu-le, was not what his New York editors were ready to bank on.

      Still, Grant continued to devote much of his life to documenting and promoting their voices. His openness as a medium, his dedication to truth, his editorial wits, and his devout family support system enabled Grant to immerse himself in his pursuit of this higher truth.

      Perhaps that’s where I get it. I’ve been consumed by the resurrection of my family story for more than thirty years now, sometimes at the expense of my domestic responsibilities.

      At times I wonder if it was the groundwork that Grant laid with his spirit friends that has delivered his Big Work back to New York City for this posthumous exhibition 100 years after he first presented it here. After all, it traveled a perilous journey for over a century, across country and back again, through death and inheritance, bad weather and ex-husbands, in many attics and basements. It was nearly lost entirely to a California wildfire that tore through the Sierra Nevada Mountain town where it had been stored for decades but was saved after the fire miraculously changed course.

      Other times, I remember he was also among the greatest of ideas men, visionaries, and marketers of his time. Maybe this was his plot all along.

*Matt Berger is a writer, producer, and third-generation descendant of Grant Wallace based in Santa Cruz, California.