The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence

by Alexei Panshin

  What remained of SF was its most mysterious, transcendent, romantic and imaginative materials—along with its uneasy faith in super-science and the unknown scientific universe. What survived, in sum, was the most questionable, frightening and disreputable portion of SF.

  SF did not have an excess of credit that it could afford to lose. Even in the days when it was widely published, it had always been a minority taste, always a bit suspect.

  For an example of the questionable esteem in which SF was held during the Age of Technology, even in its best days, it is only necessary to look at the career of H.G. Wells. When Wells turned from writing his innovative scientific horror stories of the Nineties to writing more conventional Dickensian social comedies in the Edwardian decade, there was almost a sense of relief. The judgment of contemporary society was that this change demonstrated “a great advance in artistic power”176 on Wells’s part, and both his book sales and his literary repute leaped.

  World War I drove a wedge between SF and all hope of respectability. With the failure of utopianism, SF lost its one strong tie to high culture. At the same time, SF’s central mystery—soulless science—became abhorrent and horrifying to genteel society.

  SF, already wounded, was rejected and shunned by high culture. It was no longer acceptable in polite company. From the Teens on, SF had to make its way chiefly in the pulp magazines as a low form of popular literature that was considered both more than a bit dangerous and more than a bit crazy.

  Both the shock to utopianism and the social fall of SF may have contributed to SF’s great failure in Europe during World War I. Prior to the war, the development of SF had always been an enterprise swapped back and forth by British writers, Americans, and Europeans, in particular the French. There was a flowering of imaginative and explorative French SF as late as the end of the Edwardian decade. During the Great War, however, European SF ceased to be published, as though no one could bear to think about such things. When European SF resumed after the war, it never fully regained its former vitality.

  Neither American self-esteem nor American confidence in science were shaken as they were in Europe by the events of World War I. America only entered the war at the last minute, in 1917. No grinding battles were fought on American soil, and the United States did not suffer the same harrowing casualties as the other participants. It was even possible for Americans to believe that they were responsible for winning the war.

  All during the war years and immediately after, when utopian SF failed and European SF disappeared, a gaudy and romantic line of story much influenced by Burroughs did continue to be published in the American general fiction pulp magazines, particularly All-Story under the editorship of Robert H. Davis, and secondarily its sister magazine, Argosy. With the stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs and the new pulp writers who followed him, the leadership in the development of SF passed into American hands. It was only Americans, among all the people of the West, who retained enough confidence in man and in science to continue with the unsettling and dangerous business of imagining the new SF mythos.

  With utopian plausibility denied to it, this American pulp SF of the Teens became highly imaginative. It was both escapist and exploratory. Sometimes these two aspects were difficult to distinguish.

  During the Teens, there was a last great appearance of lost race stories. These were radically different from the original lost race narratives of the late Nineteenth Century. No longer was it merely remnants of known civilizations like Rome or Phoenicia that were discovered, or simple enclaves of technological utopians. In these Twentieth Century pulp magazine lost race stories, there was a new time scale reaching back into the forgotten past, back to Atlantis and before that to completely unknown civilizations fully as old as the ancient Barsoomian high civilization on Mars. And the populations of these places were now given as masters of ancient mystic wisdom, usually identified with science-beyond-science.

  In Perley Poore Sheehan’s The Abyss of Wonders (Argosy, January 1915), for example, his American venturer travels to a marvelous lost city surviving in the midst of the Gobi Desert, and there falls in love with a mysterious maiden. But the gift of insight that he brings back from his encounter with mystic wisdom is not ancient in form, but rather modern and technological:

  “Hello,” said the foreman. “Did you get as far as Omaha?”

  “I guess so,” Shan answered. Then he continued. “While I was knocking about I thought of that improvement you said was needed in the reversing-plate on the big lathe.”

  He borrowed a stub of a pencil from the foreman and drew a plan on the white-washed wall.

  “You’ve got it,” said the foreman. “Gee, that ought to make your fortune!”177

  Other American pulp SF stories of the Teens did not look for their inspiration to ancient occult wisdom, but instead headed off into the new worlds of space and time or into other dimensions to find their adventures. These stories of alien exploration invariably followed the same plan as their models—Wells’s The Time Machine and Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars and its sequels. Over and over, a contemporary Western person would pass into a strange other realm, be beguiled and threatened, retreat to the Village to tell his tale to some friend or relative, and then disappear into the World Beyond the Hill again.

  Perhaps the most popular of these stories was “The Girl in the Golden Atom” (All-Story, March 15, 1919), by Ray Cummings, a writer and editor in the employ of Thomas Edison. This story was the fulfillment of Fitz-James O’Brien’s “The Diamond Lens” (1858), the tale of a scientific madman’s thwarted passion for Animula, the beautiful girl he sees within the confines of a drop of water. Like O’Brien’s character, the protagonist of Cummings’ story has a super-scientific microscope, peers into the infinitesimal world, and falls in love with a wondrously beautiful maiden he spies there—in this case, within an atom of his mother’s golden wedding ring.

  Fitz-James O’Brien’s story, written before SF explorers had blazed the first trails into the World Beyond the Hill, had ended tragically. To O’Brien, the radically tiny world of Animula had seemed hopelessly inaccessible. And even so recent a writer as H.G. Wells, pioneer explorer of alien realms, had envisioned the microcosm as wonderful, but no place for a being such as himself.

  Ray Cummings, however, was able to imagine bridging the gap between our world and the world of the very small. His character—named “the Chemist” after the example of Wells’s “the Time Traveller”—synthesizes a new drug to reduce himself in size, and penetrates the atomic dimension in pursuit of love.

  It was not particularly important that the adventures discovered in the world of the Golden Atom were ordinary and banal. What was thrilling to the audience of All-Story was that imaginary science had burst through another barrier and brought yet another dimension within its reach.

  Of all the new writers who appeared in the American pulps during the World War I years and immediately after, the most significant and influential was A. Merritt, a newspaperman who took up story-telling in 1917 at the age of 33.178

  Abraham Grace Merritt was born in Beverly, New Jersey, north of Philadelphia on the Delaware River, on January 20, 1884. His father was a lapsed Quaker, an architect and builder. On his mother’s side, Merritt was a great-great-grandnephew of James Fenimore Cooper.

  Merritt’s first aim was to be a lawyer, but when his father died when he was eighteen, lack of money forced Merritt to drop out of college and become a reporter. Writing fiction was never other than a hobby for Merritt, a sideline from his highly paid job as an editor for the Hearst newspapers’ Sunday magazine, The American Weekly, of which he would eventually become editor-in-chief.

  A. Merritt was not as innovative an SF writer as H.G. Wells, nor as inventive as Edgar Rice Burroughs, nor even as eager an explorer of new dimensions as any number of his pulp contemporaries. Neither was he particularly prolific. During an active writing career of seventeen years, Merritt wrote just eight novels and a handful of shorter stories,
by no means all of which were scientific fiction.

  Nonetheless, Merritt played a pivotal role in the development of SF. He unified and consolidated SF through his ability to see that one imaginative formulation might be essentially equivalent to another that was radically dissimilar in appearance.

  Before Merritt wrote, modern imaginative fiction existed, but only as a variety of seemingly separate story types, not as a single coherent literature. Merritt observed none of the conventional boundaries. He switched effortlessly from the alien exploration story to lost race fiction, from otherworld fantasy to the occult horror story, mixing the symbols of one with the symbols of the next as though there was no essential difference between them.

  His special power was his sense of universal mystery. Like some Romantic of a hundred years previous, a Blake or a Poe, Merritt perceived the ordinary appearance of things as a mere facade. It is of the essence of Merritt that Dr. Goodwin, the rational scientist who narrates his first novel, The Moon Pool (1919), is ultimately forced by his strange experiences to conclude, “our world whatever it is, is certainly not the world as we see it!”179

  This was a view to which the mood of the time was unusually receptive. World War I finally ground its way to an exhausted conclusion in November 1918. As everyone took note, with a sigh of wonder and relief, the armistice was signed in the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. And, indeed, it did feel as though the end had come just in time, at the very last possible moment before the midnight hour in which the West would totally destroy itself.

  In the entire course of this harrowing four-year war, no decisive battles were ever fought.

  As much as by anything, the Great War was brought to a halt by the worldwide flu epidemic of 1918—which killed a further twenty million people beyond the casualties of the war.

  In the moment of stunned silence that attended the end of the war, it seemed to many in the West that the world was a place of complete insanity. There was a positive eagerness to believe that somewhere else there might be a truer reality than this one. There was a willingness to consider any possible alternative. Writers of imaginative fiction cultivated hallucinatory and dreamlike prose styles. Interest in drug-taking, occultism and mysticism rose to a peak.

  Among the SF writers of the day, it was Merritt who was most open to alternatives. Other writers might catch a fleeting glimpse of transcendent mystery through the prism of one particular belief or another—science, society, survival, the soul. But Merritt saw mystery as the fundamental fact, and only then tried on various means of expressing this vision.

  Merritt’s most powerful evocation of pure mystery appears in the opening paragraphs of his second and most speculative novel, The Metal Monster (1920). Like The Moon Pool, this novel, too, is narrated by botanist Walter T. Goodwin. But in this story, he is a much-changed man. He is no longer the scientific rationalist he used to be, but is now a scientific mystic, and he begins his new tale with a direct testimonial to the ubiquity of mystery:

  In this great crucible of life we call the world—in the vaster one we call the universe—the mysteries lie close packed, uncountable as grains of sand on ocean’s shores. They thread, gigantic, the star-flung spaces; they creep, atomic, beneath the microscope’s peering eye. They walk beside us, unseen and unheard, calling out to us, asking why we are deaf to their crying, blind to their wonder.

  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 fanta
stic 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.