H Rider Haggard

Abraham Merritt is one of those writers I’ve long meant to read, and despite owning various paperback editions of his books, and making two attempts to get into The Ship of Ishtar, it’s only now I’ve finally read one—his first—The Moon Pool.

This began life as a short story, published in All-Story Weekly (22 June 1918), where it was popular enough for Merritt to write a longer sequel, “The Conquest of the Moon Pool” (in six instalments from 15 February 1919), and then incorporate the two into a single novel-length work. (Which, for some reason, was published in book form twice in 1919, first by Putnam, then by Liveright—apparently with some revisions to the latter, which included changing the villainous Prussian Von Hetzdorp to a villainous Russian, Marakinoff. Merritt apparently preferred the Putnam text, but I ended up reading the Liveright text.)

The book starts with its narrator, Dr Goodwin (“the foremost of American botanists”), meeting a well-respected colleague, Dr Throckmartin (or “Throck”), who’s evidently in the grip of “some searing shock of mangled rapture and horror”. Throck tells the tale of what happened to him in the ruins of Nan-Matal in the South Pacific: of a certain door that only opens by the light of the full moon, releasing a being of shining light which proceeded to carry off, one by one, everyone else in his expedition, including his young wife. Throck has vowed to return with the necessary resources to rescue them, but having told his tale is himself snatched away by this creature of scintillant moonlight before Goodwin’s very eyes. Goodwin, who has promised to take over the task should Throck be unable to, begins making plans. (This is the point at which the initial short story ended.)

Heading for Nan-Matal armed with, among other things, “a set of Becquerel ray condensers” (an early name for radiation, apparently), Goodwin assembles an odd cast of helpers, including a younger action-hero type in the Irish-American Larry O’Keefe (who’s sceptical of all of the supernatural except, apparently, banshees and leprechauns), the somewhat simple strongman Olaf Huldricksson, and the morally ambiguous (at first, anyway) Russian scientist Marakinoff. All manage to get through the moon-activated door to the chamber of the mysterious and deadly moon pool beyond, but are saved from becoming victims of the “Shining One” by a vision of a beautiful woman and her attendant human-sized frog-creature, who show them how to open a hidden door. Exiting the chamber, the band of adventurers find themselves in Muria (as in Lemuria), a subterranean land presided over by an ancient, advanced civilisation. Muria is ruled by the beautiful Yolara, Priestess of the Shining One, and the stocky-but-strong Lugur, Voice of the Shining One. (In this world, all women are tall and beautiful—though only the blondes seem to attain positions of authority—and all men strong and stocky.)

There’s a healthy dose of Haggard’s She going on here, with O’Keefe as the equivalent of the young heroic Leo, Dr Goodwin as the professorial Holly, and Yolara to some extent as Ayesha. Yolara falls in love with O’Keefe, and while he’s beguiled in turn, he’s really smitten by the visionary woman who guided them by the moon pool, who turns out to be Lakla, Handmaiden of the Silent Ones. This isn’t, though, quite the Ayesha/Ustane set-up from She, as although Yolara has all the fatal allure and power of Ayesha, the morally pure and innocent Lakla is essentially her equal, only serving different—and older—gods. Yolara serves the rapacious Shining One, and when she hears of the upper world from which O’Keefe came, makes plans for her deity’s conquest of it. Lakla’s Silent Ones, on the other hand, are a trio of ancient beings who originally created the Shining One, and though they’ve now lost control of it, and are somewhat fearful of it, nevertheless oppose its hunger for destruction. There are, even, echoes of the scene where Leo steps with Ayesha into a magical flame, only here the flames are “shining coils of moon fire”, and the outcome somewhat different, though just as perilous.

Merritt brings two things to this (by then) standard-feeling adventure formula, to make The Moon Pool distinct from She. One is a much greater degree of fantasy than Haggard employed. Merritt’s subterranean Muria possesses super-weapons including rays that shiver things (and people) to fragments, gravity-destroying bombs, invisibility devices; there’s also frog-people, a landscape of fungi that instantly devour living flesh, and the weird Shining One itself (which I can’t help picturing like the many glittery energy-beings in the original Star Trek series).

The other thing Merritt brings to this essentially Haggardian lost world adventure—and also what damned him for the more serious SF crowd of the 1950s and early 1960s—is his prose. Although James Blish (among others) would go on to dismiss it as “windy and cliché-ridden”, I think Merritt’s writing shows a real poetry when he turns it on at the right moment:

“There was no sky—at least no sky such as we know—all was a sparkling nebulosity rising into infinite distances as the azure above the day-world seems to fill all the heavens—through it ran pulsing waves and flashing javelin rays that were like shining shadows of the aurora, echoes, octaves lower, of those brilliant arpeggios and chords that play about the poles.”

(And if this sounds somewhat psychedelic, it may well be. As Douglas A Anderson shows in his essential article fact-checking Merritt’s autobiography, there’s an interview in which Merritt claims to have taken peyote, saying it “results in a color reaction. I remember sitting on the grass and watching it change into a variety of colors. Out of that came geometric patterns. I had a consciousness throughout of music that blended with the colors.” Just the melange of music and colour to be found in the above-quoted example of his prose, then.)

I have to admit that not all of Merritt’s writing excited me to the same level. His non-American characters tend to suffer from a touch of the Van Helsings, not just talking in garbled cod-English, but doing it at great length, which implies the author was really enjoying it, but to me it was just readerly friction. (And O’Keefe, despite speaking English, descends into long, lyrical passages infused with Irish folklore and mythology, as though to so underline his archetypal Irishness that you can’t help feeling he must be compensating for something.)

Lovecraft was an admirer, writing in a letter to Robert H Barlow that Merritt “has a peculiar power of working up an atmosphere and investing a region with an aura of unholy dread”. And there are a few pre-echoes of Lovecraft’s own stories here. Not only does The Moon Pool, like “The Call of Cthulhu”, centre around a ruin on an island in the South Pacific, but the Norwegian captain of a ship found drifting nearby—Huldricksson—recalls, for me, the Norwegian captain Johansen from Lovecraft’s tale, both of whom have survived an encounter with their story’s monster. (Which, made of moonlight as it seems to be, has a touch of “The Colour Out of Space” about it.) And then there’s the theme of the scientifically-created servitor that turns against its makers—the shoggoths in At the Mountains of Madness, the Shining One here—though of course that could be read as just one more variant on the Frankenstein theme inherent in all science fiction. (Or the Morlock/Eloi relationship from The Time Machine.)

Merritt was a tremendously popular author in his day, even having a periodical (A. Merritt’s Fantasy Magazine) named after him (though only after his death, and only lasting five issues). He was taken up by early SF fans, perhaps to his later detriment as, when SF started getting serious about the science in its fiction, his was found to be lacking, and he had to wait for his re-identification as a fantasy writer for his works to start being republished in paperback. Now he’s settled into place as one of the deep-cut classics of the fantasy field (I read it in an edition with footnotes and an introduction, from the Wesleyan University Press), not quite at the level of Haggard or Edgar Rice Burroughs, but somewhere, perhaps, in the Clark Ashton Smith zone. (CAS on Merritt: “Merritt has an authentic magic, as well as an inexhaustible imagination.”)

Merritt is a clear Romantic—not just in his lush prose, vivid imagination and high adventure, but for his ultimate message that “Love is stronger than all things.” (Even though it doesn’t help Throck, nor Huldricksson.) Although I enjoyed The Moon Pool well enough, the characters and situations were perhaps too archetypal, even clichéd, to really make it work for me. The descriptive prose is definitely good, though, as are the moments of bizarre fantasy. His subsequent output seems to be divided between further lost world adventures and a few occult thrillers. Perhaps if I read some more Merritt, I’ll go for one of the latter.

It’s hard to think of E R Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros as being published in 1922. How can any character — and the most heroic of the novel’s heroes, no less — say, with such regret, so close to the end of the horrors of the First World War, ‘we, that fought but for fighting’s sake, have in the end fought so well we never may fight more’? But, when you consider the elements that make up this mercurial novel, it can, perhaps, be understood as a response to the First World War, though not, for instance, in the same way as T S Eliot’s The Waste Land (also published in 1922). The Waste Land tried to capture a world shattered into meaningless fragments; The Worm can be seen as trying to contain all the things that made the world into a meaningful whole before the war — at least, the things that made it a meaningful whole for Eddison — in an act of what Tolkien thought of as the key function of fantasy: Recovery.

Tolkien called Eddison ‘the greatest and most convincing writer of “invented worlds”’, but criticised him for his ‘slipshod nomenclature’. In contrast, Rider Haggard, writing to Eddison to thank him for a copy of The Worm, said, ‘What a wonderful talent you have for the invention of names.’ And Eddison surely can out-Dunsany Lord Dunsany in the coining of lyrical, evocative, fantastical names: Zajë Zaculo, Jalcanaius Fostus, the Salapanta Hills, Krothering, Fax Fay Faz, Melikaphkaz, Queen Sophonisba, as well as a very homely clutch of English-sounding place-names such as Owlswick, Lychness, Elmerstead, and Throwater, all found in Demonland. And it is, no doubt, that ‘Demonland’ that Tolkien found so grating, along with the other names Eddison chose for his peoples: the Witches, the Imps, the Goblins, the Pixies.

Unlike Tolkien, who grew his secondary world from a single seed (his invented languages), in The Worm Eddison used something closer to C S Lewis’s omnigatherum approach to world-building, where every fragment of myth, folklore, fairy tale and daydream Lewis liked was thrown into the Narnian cauldron without any particular care for consistency, driven by what Laura Miller, in The Magician’s Book, termed so wonderfully ‘readerly desire’. Eddison did the same, mixing the characters that populated his boyhood stories (and illustrations) with an adult enthusiasm for Homer, Norse saga, and Jacobean tragedy.

If The Worm Ouroboros has a flaw, for me, it’s that some of these elements don’t quite mix. The heroes, the lords of Demonland, are action heroes, straight out of boyhood daydreams. They’re defined entirely by what they’re up against: by the fiercely-contested battles they fight, by the impossible mountains they climb, by the terrifying monsters they face, and, most of all, by the dastardliness of their enemies.

But their enemies, the Witches, are of a different order. They aren’t characters from boyhood daydreams, but from Jacobean tragedy. Selfish, cruel, envious, mocking, deceptive, cunning, and destructive they may be, but at least they have the passions, lusts, angers and jealousies that drive them to such nefarious plots, counterplots, and dastardlinesses. The Demons are undeniably the heroes of The Worm Ouroboros, being the most admirable in the actions they perform, but after a while their company can get a bit boring. Not because they lack for wonders to witness or heroic deeds to accomplish, but because that’s all they do — witness wonders and accomplish heroic deeds — things even Lord Dunsany, in a story such as ‘The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth’, can spin out for only so long. The Witches — well, put them alone together in one room, and they’ll soon play out countless dramas, before killing one another in the cruellest ways. The Demons are heroic but one-dimensional; the Witches are unheroic, unadmirable, but at least interesting.

Although the two sides clash many times on the battlefield, the real collision point for this oil-and-water mix is, I think, when the Demons, having broken into the Witchland stronghold of Carcë, find only Queen Prezmyra left alive. The ever-honourable Demons assure her she’ll be treated honourably and restored to queenhood in her native land, but she throws their words back at them. Everyone who ever mattered to her has just been killed. The Demons express regret, but you can’t help feeling they don’t actually know what regret is. There’s a feeling of a boy’s game gone horribly wrong. Then Prezmyra joins her loved ones, and it’s all forgotten.

There is, though, a hint of the The Waste Land in The Worm. When Lord Juss climbs the immense mountain Zora Rach Nam Psarrion (a ‘mountain of affliction and despair’), to the citadel of brass where his brother Goldry Bluzsco is held, he glimpses something of Eliot’s existential — and Lovecraft’s cosmic — dread, feeling ‘a death-like horror as of the houseless loneliness of naked space, which gripped him at the heart.’ When he finds his brother apparently lifeless, the despair deepens:

‘…it was as if the bottom of the world were opened and truth laid bare: the ultimate Nothing… He bowed his head as if to avoid a blow, so plain he seemed to hear somewhat within him crying with a high voice and loud, “Thou art nothing. And all thy desires and memories and loves and dreams, nothing. The little dead earth-louse were of greater avail than thou, were it not nothing as thou art nothing. For all is nothing: earth and sky and sea and they that dwell therein. Nor shall this illusion comfort thee, if it might, that when thou art abolished these things shall endure for a season, stars and months return, and men grow old and die, and new men and women live and love and die and be forgotten. For what is it to thee, that shalt be as a blown-out flame? And all things in earth and heaven, and things past and things for to come, and life and death, and the mere elements of space and time, of being and not being, all shall be nothing unto thee; because thou shalt be nothing, for ever.”

Yet, a moment later the despair begins to lift:

‘In this black mood of horror he abode for awhile, until a sound of weeping and wailing made him raise his head, and he beheld a company of mourners walking one behind another about the brazen floor, all cloaked in funeral black, mourning the death of Lord Goldry Bluszco. And they rehearsed his glorious deeds and praised his beauty and prowess and goodliness and strength: soft women’s voices lamenting, so that the Lord Juss’s soul seemed as he listened to arise again out of annihilation’s Waste, and his heart grew soft again, even unto tears.’

So, it’s a story that brings Juss back from despair, the story of Goldry Bluzsco’s heroic deeds. And perhaps this is what Eddison, too, was doing after the ‘mountain of affliction and despair’ that was the First World War — telling a story of heroic deeds, and using it to luxuriate in a cultured, poetic language, and in oodles of bejewelled detail, as if to remind himself, and the entire waste-landed world, of what life was supposed to be about.

Eddison’s version of what life’s supposed to be about, though, is a somewhat refined taste. His ideal was the heroic aristocrat, one whose great deeds defied death and despair through sheer vivacity, and who lived a life of fine things in luxurious surroundings. In Fantasy: The 100 Best Books, Moorcock & Cawthorn say, of Eddison, ‘Seldom has any author conveyed so convincingly the sheer joy of being consciously a hero’, but also point out that his heroes ‘are a fine, full-blooded crew with a truly aristocratic disregard for the wider social implications of their deeds.’ Hundreds die in massive battles and it doesn’t matter, but when Goldry Bluzsco is taken away, the world itself seems to weep.

Eddison’s Mercury is a fine reminder of what life is supposed to be about, yes, but only if you’re one of the heroes. However, this is a fantasy, so perhaps there’s room enough on Mercury for everyone to be a hero. That is, after all, how fantasy works.