From forthcoming collection of stories, as yet untitled
Gerard Hanson was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, on the first of March, in the year 1871. Very little is known of Hanson’s early life. His parents were grocers, and he endeavored to run the family business, but it proved incompatible with his skills and personality, and by 1890 he had traveled to Chicago, where he worked in a series of restaurants. There is a record of him in a contemporary article about Rector’s, the famed oyster house, that suggests that he served as an assistant of sorts to the establishment’s chef, Charles Ranshoffer. (“Mr. Ranshoffer turned and shouted a string of words to his boy, Jerry Hanson, who seemed to grasp all that the older man meant and hopped at once atop his bicycle to pedal away.”) By 1900 he had become disillusioned with the world of food service and devoted himself to literature. He then published an English translation of Novalis’s Hymnen an die Nacht, which brought him great notoriety, written as it was in the modern language of the day, and many of the day’s prominent literary figures seem to have counted themselves among his acquaintances (Sandburg, Dreiser, Hamlin Garland). Acquaintances, not friends, and this distinction is important, as Hanson was known to be solitary in the most extreme way. When he was elected a member of the city’s Literary Society, he refused to attend either his own induction ceremony or any meetings at all, though he avoided expulsion by sending in notes that demonstrated that he was very much aware of the objectives of the organization. Hanson had one close relationship, with Sarah Kobach, the daughter of a wealthy local butcher, and most of what we know about him has been gleaned from her diaries. “GH over today,” reads one representative entry of March 11, 1904. “Held forth at great length of the origin of the world—or rather on the origin of the world of ideas. Paused eventually for water, and had a spot of gin at my urging.” A week later, Hanson visited Kobach again. “Even before I opened the door, he wanted to know what I thought about the sentiments of the philosophers when it came to the nature of the soul,” she wrote. “I was giving my dog a bath but I tried my best. Listening to GH can be a chore.” In 1917, a volume appeared in bookstores entitled “Knowledge In Its Many Forms, From Divine To Documentary.” It sold modestly at first but acquired momentum over the months until it had fully captured the attention of the city’s intelligentsia. For many years this book was attributed to Hanson, but now it appears doubtful whether he ever wrote a single word of it. Arthur Linton has argued quite compellingly for Donald Perrante as the author. In the memoirs of R. Henry Thompson, the noted attorney, the same hypothesis is set forth with force. Alice Fraser seems to place great faith in the Thompson memoirs, especially, using it to fix the authorship of the work: “If Robert Thompson says that it was Perrante, only a fool would doubt him. There has never been a more dependable intelligence among all the men I have ever known.” This thick volume, bound in green in its first edition, is a book of which Linton says, “This is the work of its time, which is our time, and if there is a gradual improvement in the perspicacity of men, as it suggests, it will be that much more the work of times to come.” It had detractors, but only a few, and even their objections contained a grudging acknowledgement of the precision of its thought. “Eloquence is hardly lacking here,” wrote Rantolo, somewhat reluctantly it seems, “and even the passages that are more difficult to slog through than wet mud reward the effort once the shoes of the mind are cleaned.” The book addresses plainly the work of all thinkers to that time, particularly those with a stated interest in examining the nature of knowledge, both categorizing them and assessing the fitness of their thought. Some sections possess a greater spirit than others, a fact that has led critics to suppose that those were written by the novelist Jane Bedminster, who was married to a prominent local politician but is suspected to have been Perrante’s lover for more than a decade. “Knowledge In Its Many Forms” was not published during the lifetime of Hanson, who perished in a boating accident on Lake Michigan in 1915, and thus it is impossible to collect evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, regarding Hanson’s reaction to its appearance or reception. Contemporary with him were Francis, Jersey, Tabbit, Ruggiero, Monsantus, Clarke, Plick, Hammy, Garoukas, Toland, Asterbride, Hilldale, Zell, Manguso, Calperson, Fitz, Fitzgerald, and Fitzroy, forming a slate of thinkers whose renown will be passed down through the generations as an antidote to the gray mental slumber in which men so often find themselves. And if, as appears likely, Hanson’s name was associated with this group only as a result of Perrante’s insistence that Hanson be credited as the author of “Knowledge In Its Many Forms”—an insistence that seems almost certainly motivated by Perrante’s desire to camouflage his relationship with Bedminster, motivated in turn by the known penchant for violence on the part of Mr. Bedminster, a former boxer well-known to enjoy nothing more than beating his wife’s many lovers to within an inch of their lives (“a half-inch,” he was rumored to have said, “if they are the smart type”)—the arc of Hanson’s life, and the high caliber of his contemporaries, ensures that he will be remembered as an important voice in the chorus of man’s attempt to understand his place in the universe of thought and knowledge.
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