The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (24 page)

Sometimes the veils drop from a man’s eyes, and he sees—and speaks of his vision. Then those who have not seen pass him by with the lifted brows of disbelief, or they mock him, or if his vision has been great enough they fall upon and destroy him.
¹⁸⁰

In the fact-minded Twentieth Century, such a total conviction of mystery has been no common thing. And professional newspapermen have more often been known as mockers and skeptics than as mystics. We may ask then just how it was that A. Merritt came to believe that mystery was not merely a fact, but
the
fundamental fact. How was he so prepared to take advantage of this moment of relative openness and receptivity? What caused the veils to drop from Merritt’s eyes?

As with many among the original Romantics, the answer would seem to lie in a sensitivity to the anomalies of life, exposure to the alternative viewpoint offered by a foreign culture, and experimentation with mind-altering drugs.

In the days when Merritt was a young college dropout haunting the hospitals of Philadelphia looking for newspaper stories, he was taken in hand by two elderly doctors. One, Silas Weir Mitchell, was a specialist in nervous disorders. The other, Charles Eucharist de Medicis Sajous, was a pioneer endocrinologist. Between them, they gave Merritt what he would come to consider the equivalent of a four-year college course—packed into a year and a half—in conventional science and in less orthodox belief and practice.

S. Weir Mitchell, who would die in 1914 at the age of 85, was particularly influential on Merritt. In addition to being a medical researcher of considerable prominence, he was a well-known late-Nineteenth Century novelist and an investigator of strange phenomena.

Dr. Mitchell turned Merritt’s attention toward the existence of mystery. He set him to reading books on medical anomalies, on surviving folk beliefs, on magical practices, and on the paranormal—all that in former times would have been considered “supernatural.” Merritt would later repay Mitchell for his kindness by reporting to him his own personal observations of Pennsylvania Dutch witchcraft and animal sacrifice.

In 1903, Merritt’s eccentric education was abruptly cut short when he became an inconvenient witness to a matter of political delicacy. He was hustled out of Philadelphia for a year, all expenses paid.

Merritt went south looking for exotic adventure, and found it. He hunted for treasure in Central America. He explored the ruins of the Mayan city of Chichen Itza. And he was initiated into the mysteries of an Indian tribe in Miraflores, Mexico.

Merritt says of himself that he “gained a curious knowledge of Indian customs and religious ceremonies that would have stood his Quaker ancestors’ hair on end.”
¹⁸¹
At the impressionable age of 20, for a significant moment, Young Abe Merritt stood outside the bounds of ordinary Western culture.

Merritt would have been content to go on living wild and free forever in Central America, but in time his supply of money came to an end. He was obliged to return to Philadelphia to take up a thereafter uninterrupted career as a newspaper reporter and editor.

After his return from his foreign adventure, Merritt continued to read widely, now centering his interests in archaeology, myth and comparative religion. He began to collect books on the outré. Eventually he would devote the entire third floor of his large home on Long Island to his library of the fantastic.

If his experience in Mexico did not include the use of peyote or psychedelic mushrooms—as is suggested by the vibrant colors that from the first would mark Merritt’s most imaginative fictional passages—he would find some other route to experimentation with hallucinogenic plants. In later years, Merritt not only maintained several experimental farms in Florida, but kept what he would call a “garden of poisonous plants.”
¹⁸²
Here he raised precisely those psychoactive plants, Old World and New, whose use is traditionally associated with witches and shamans—ultimately as many as sixty-seven of them, including mandrake, datura, marijuana and peyote.

Merritt lived two highly separate lives. On the job, he was a shrewd and knowledgeable editor, a pipe-smoking, tobacco-spitting newspaperman, as drunk and skeptical as could be asked for. But in his private life he was quite a different person. Working very slowly, basing what he wrote on his queer reading and his sense of mystery, and aiming only to please himself, Merritt became a scientific fantasist of unique power.

Something of this Merritt and his methods and values can be glimpsed in an account he would give a correspondent of the genesis of one short story. Merritt dreamed most of it in his sleep, but then half-awoke with the story unconcluded. Lying there, Merritt thought of an abrupt and violent ending for the story that would undercut and deny its fantastic element, and then fell back to sleep. But sleeping again, he dreamed a second ending that didn’t undercut the fantasy—and that was the one he used. In his letter, Merritt would ask:

Which was right—the ending of the half-awakening which brought in the conscious mind, and that part of my mind is very cynical, or the other which is in control largely when I write, and which is not? I do not know. It is a curious thing that just above I first wrote “right” for write—and then struck it out when I noticed it. Perhaps that was an answer to my question. I wonder. Certainly I never spelled “write” that way before.

I sincerely hope it was a flash from Truth and that “right” was right.

But—I do not know.
¹⁸³

If we are disposed to view Merritt-the-storyteller as an intuition-led, mystery-sensitive Romantic out of time, however, he was a Romantic writing with every new imaginative resource that had been developed by the Victorians. He was an Edgar Allan Poe able to draw upon the differing formulations and arguments of Jules Verne, H. Rider Haggard, H.G. Wells and Lord Dunsany—and to make them all one through the unifying power of his sense of transcendent mystery.

The merging together of what had formerly been taken as separate is visible from Merritt’s very first story. In “Through the Dragon Glass” (
All-Story,
November 24, 1917), an American venturer is drawn by a beguiling maid into the twilight world that lurks within an artifact which he has looted from the Forbidden City in China during the Boxer Rebellion. He is then wounded and chased from this place by the local demi-god who rules this realm. At the conclusion, having told his story to a friend in the usual way, the adventurer is headed back into the World Beyond the Hill, this time armed with an elephant gun.

This was a relatively minor story, but it yielded a major implication. It suggested that the nonce worlds of Dunsanian fantasy and the strange new realms lately reached by the alien explorers of scientific fiction might not be different and distinct, but the very same places.

There were even more important symbolic mergings in Merritt’s first great popular successes, the 1918
All-Story
novelet and the 1919 serial that together went to make up the novel
The Moon Pool.
In these stories, his characters encounter apparently supernatural beings in an underground realm beneath the Pacific Ocean, first the monstrous Dweller in the Moon Pool and then the godlike
Taithu.

One character—the young Irish airman, Larry O’Keefe—takes the Dweller for a banshee and identifies the
Taithu
with the Tuatha Dé Danann of Irish legend. But, alternatively, Dr. Goodwin, the botanist narrator, theorizes that the Dweller is the product of lost race superscience and that the
Taithu
are a natural result of the processes of evolution:

“ ‘I think,’ I said cautiously, ‘that we face an evolution of highly intelligent beings from ancestral sources radically removed from those through which mankind ascended.’ ”
¹⁸⁴

He then goes on to take his argument for the existence of such evolutionarily superior creatures from H.G. Wells’s
The War of the Worlds
:

“The Englishman, Wells, wrote an imaginative and very entertaining book concerning an invasion of earth by Martians, and he made his Martians enormously specialized cuttlefish. There was nothing inherently improbable in Wells’s choice. Man is the ruling animal of earth today solely by reason of a series of accidents; under another series spiders or ants, or even elephants, could have become the dominant race.”
¹⁸⁵

So which are the
Taithu
really? Are they Irish gods from the Land Under the Wave, or are they some variation of Wells’s evolutionarily advanced Big Brains? We can’t be sure, and since we can’t be sure, we must take them as both, or as either.

The Moon Pool
forces us to ask ourselves whether there is any meaningful difference between the transcendent beings of traditional fantasy and the new transcendent beings imagined in scientific fiction—or whether the two in essence might not be the same.

But Merritt went even further than this in
The Moon Pool
toward reconciling old-fashioned supernatural mystery with science. In his stories, Wells had relied heavily for his effects on metaphor, analogy, and appeals to the limitless extent of the new scientific unknown. Burroughs had tossed in magical rays and new words like “radium” without much concern for their actual scientific meaning. But Merritt did genuine scientific homework. In
The Moon Pool,
he pioneered in the practice of sprinkling his pages with frequent scientific footnotes which speculated on the true nature of the marvels to be found in the underground realm and related them to actual contemporary science.

Most significantly, when Dr. Goodwin is forced by his experiences to admit that the-world-that-really-is is not the same as the world we perceive, he immediately refers the reader to a discourse on Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity that had been delivered by the British physicist A.S. Eddington the previous year. This was a remarkable anticipation by Merritt. At the time that he wrote
The Moon Pool,
the work of Albert Einstein was still generally unknown and its implications unappreciated.

In 1919—after the serial version of the novel had appeared—a British expedition headed by Eddington would travel to the Atlantic to observe stars near the sun during an eclipse, and confirm a prediction by Einstein that light would be bent by the power of the sun’s gravity. And Einstein’s name would become an instant household word as the man who had altered the nature of space.

But this public recognition would only come at the end of the year, at almost the same moment as the book publication of
The Moon Pool.
Merritt’s prescient reference to the new irrational theoretical physics of Einstein was an early recognition that Twentieth Century science might prove to be the source of mysteries fully as deep and strange and unfathomable as any that had ever been born of spirit.

During the little
All-Story
renaissance of the late Teens, A. Merritt went far toward drawing the various pieces of SF literature together. He made fantasy more plausible and the new scientific fiction more fantastic. Merritt’s personal imaginative synthesis was an anticipation of that general consolidation of SF which would be achieved by Hugo Gernsback in
Amazing Stories
in 1926, and may have had a great deal to do with making it conceptually possible.

The farthest reaches of Merritt’s vision of mystery simultaneously scientific and spiritual are to be found in
The Metal Monster.
This story was serialized in
Argosy All-Story Weekly
in 1920 soon after the two formerly separate general fiction pulp magazines were merged.

Like
The Moon Pool,
at its outset
The Metal Monster
has the appearance of a lost race novel. However, it, too, soon develops into a story of the discovery of alien beings—in this case creatures of crystalline metal in various geometric forms, very much like the strange Shapes in J.H. Rosny aîné’s “Les Xipéhuz” (1887).

The prospect of living and thinking metal beings terrifies the explorers and fills them with dread. Dr. Goodwin is forced to arrive at an incredible conclusion—that consciousness, far from being a solely biological phenomenon, must be innate in the very basis of the material universe. He asks himself:

Consciousness itself—after all what is it? A secretion of the brain? The cumulative expression, wholly chemical, of the multitudes of cells that form us? The inexplicable governor of the city of the body of which these myriads of cells are the citizens—and created by them out of themselves to rule?

Is it what many call the soul? Or is it a finer form of matter, a self-realizing force, which uses the body as its vehicle just as other forces use for their vestments other machines? After all, I thought, what is this conscious self of ours, the ego, but a spark of realization running continuously along the path of time within the mechanism we call the brain; making contact along that path as the electric spark at the end of a wire?

Is there a sea of this conscious force which laps the shores of the farthest-flung stars; that finds expression in everything—man and rock, metal and flower, jewel and cloud? Limited in its expression only by the limitations of that which it animates, and in essence the same in all. If so, then this problem of the Metal People ceased to be a problem; was answered!
¹⁸⁶

This is a magnificent vision! It reconciles the new materialistic science with the old spirit-based mystery in terms of consciousness—the universal consciousness of all existence.

The sheer breadth encompassed by Merritt is immense. He was a Romantic, a lover of mystery. He was one of the last writers of SF to treat the metaphor of
the soul
with seriousness. He was the culmination of Nineteenth Century SF. He was a consolidator and integrator of the new scientifiction, one of the first writers to mark his text with scientific footnotes. During the hyper-materialistic era that followed his own, Merritt’s great visions—of omnipresent mystery, of unfathomable transcendence, and of universal consciousness—would serve as a continuing challenge, stimulus and reminder of unfulfilled possibility. Merritt’s work even reaches across the years to writers of the present with their radical crossbreedings of fantasy and science fiction and their explicit concern with states of consciousness.