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SIX KEYS TO A LITERARY GENETIC CODE

In essays on the subject of centricity, I've most often used the image of a geometrical circle, which, as I explained here,  owes someth...

Saturday, June 6, 2020

THE READING RHEUM: THE MOON POOL (1918-1919)





Abraham Merritt’s THE MOON POOL first appeared as an open-ended short story, followed by a novel that concluded the story, both of which were printed in ALL-STORY WEEKLY. This fantasy-drenched "lost race" tale was largely responsible for the author’s meteoric rise to fame for a relatively small number of fantasy-novels. Because the revised novel was a “fix-up” of two related stories, close analysis shows some problems with overall tone, though in the end Merritt manages to bring the sections together in terms of his dominant myth: that of modern man being ravished by elder mysteries.

The short story, the first work to carry the title “The Moon Pool,” is narrated by a botanist, Walter Goodwin, who journeys to Polynesia to gather information for a book in his field. Goodwin meets a colleague, Throckmartin, who within the last year journeyed to the same area for his own research. Twice in the novel Merritt draws attention to Throckmartin having been accompanied by his “youthful” wife and an “equally youthful” junior collaborator, and in so doing, the author manages to suggest some extra-marital impropriety, with the older man made to wear the cuckold horns.

But although Goodwin perceives that Throckmartin has become “one who had borne some searing shock of rapture and horror,” the older man’s catastrophe has nothing to do with sexual betrayal as such. Throckmartin’s research party encountered a transcendent, godlike entity known as “the Dweller,” who manifested in a “moon pool” located within ancient ruins. The Dweller then spirited away everyone but the older man, leaving Throckmartin traumatized by the experience. Goodwin does not know what to make of his colleague’s story, or the fact that Throckmartin has a strange brand on his chest, one which seems hard as stone. As if anxious to prove the truth of Throckmartin’s claim to Goodwin, the Dweller manifests, this time spiriting Throckmartin away as well, leaving Goodwin to ponder his weird encounter with something that seems both of Heaven and of Hell.

In the novel-sequel, originally titled “The Conquest of the Moon Pool,” Goodwin speedily puts together a rescue-party to probe the ruins of Nan-Tauach, which seems to suggest construction by ancient builders with great technological prowess. On his way Goodwin picks up three other investigators. One is a Norwegian sailor, Olaf, whose wife and daughter were also spirited away by the mysterious Dweller. The second is Larry O’Keefe, an Irish-American pilot whose “hydroairplane” was knocked out of the sky by a cyclone, forcing him to drift on the sea-waves until being rescued. The third is Marakinoff, a Russian provocateur conducting his own one-man investigation, who infiltrates Goodwin’s expedition but proves to be a general troublemaker. The four of them investigate a strange “moon door” in the ruins, and pass through it, leaving behind the rest of the rescue party.




The door apparently transports the travelers through time and/or space, for they find themselves in a strange civilization, utterly isolated from the modern world and possessed of a formidable super-science, including disintegrator weapons. This civilization, run by a privileged class called “ladalas,” also worships an energy-entity called “the Shining One,” who happens to be identical with the Dweller witnessed by Goodwin. The women of Nan-Tauach are all beautiful elf-women, but the men tend to be short and almost dwarfish (perhaps owing something to the tropes used in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “Opar” stories). O”Keefe instantly falls in love with the first woman he sees, despite the fact she’s got a humanoid frog in her company, but the woman, name of Lakla, disappears from sight and from several chapters thereafter.

The modern-day quartet then get introduced to the hidden city’s wonders by the high priestess of the Shining One: Yolara, a cruel-looking beauty. This character continues Merritt’s theme of uniting rapture and horror, since Goodwin refers to her as “a queen of hell and a princess of heaven—in one.” However, unlike the virginal Lakla, Yolara’s been around, and has apparently enjoyed as her lover one of the dwarf-men, Lugur (whose name, incidentally, resembles that of the mythic villain Loki, whom the Norwegian Olaf thinks responsible for all of his suffering). Lugur is less than pleased with the outer-world visitors when Yolara begins pursuing O’Keefe, and such is the priestess’s beauty that O’Keefe does come close to forgetting all about the story’s “good girl.” In this development one sees Merritt morphing the suggested theme of the short tale—two men in conflict over a woman—into one involving two women fighting over a man.

The outworlders get to witness a summoning of the Shining One, who pulls sacrificial victims into his own world, where it feeds off their energies. Later Goodwin and company will learn that both Throckmartin’s group and Olaf’s relations exist in a “dead-alive” state from which they never return. Marakinoff makes common cause with Lugur and largely departs the main storyline, implicitly contributing to evil plot-hatching. Yolara drugs O’Keefe in order to make him marry her, but Lakla finally shows up, and reveals to the reader that she’s the priestess of another group of ethereal entities, “the Three Silent Ones,” and she upsets Yolara’s plans. However, the things that Yolara has learned from O’Keefe inspire her to follow the example of Rider Haggard’s famed villainess She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. She plans to unleashing her super-scientific weapons, as well as the Dweller, upon the modern world. Goodwin pictures the entire world being reduced to “a ruined planet” by the seemingly unstoppable power of the Shining One.


Some “lost city” stories place the heroes in the position of bringing down a corrupt hierarchy of “haves” in order to liberate the “have nots.” This theme is minimally suggested in MOON POOL, but Merritt doesn’t pursue it, and indeed, none of the characters in Nan-Tauach are strongly drawn except for Yolara, Lugur, and Rador, a dwarf-man who allies himself to the travelers. The travelers are no better. Goodwin is a colorless scientific theorizer. Marakinoff is a standard Russian schemer, and Olaf is a standard Nordic berserker. As for Larry O’Keefe, he’s positioned as the story’s male romantic lead, but he’s certainly no Leo Vincey. Indeed, O’Keefe may be the crappiest hero ever to bring down a lost city. At heart O’Keefe is a standard Irish stereotype, just as Olaf is a standard Nordic stereotype. But because O’Keefe’s entire being is made up of banshees and blarney stones, he seems like a blathering blockhead rather than an admirable heroic figure. Merritt gives O’Keefe a loopy way of speaking, interspersing his words with exclamations of “Yip” and “Yow,” and he wearies both Goodwin and most readers by stubbornly insisting that the Irish “little people” are real but that scientific speculation is all ‘superstition.”

Thus none of the characters from modern-day Earth are anything but useful props for the author. Lakla the good girl and Lugur the spurned lover are equally flat. Because Merritt expends a lot of effort delineating the charms of Yolara’s cruel beauty, I was tempted to see her as the novel’s “starring villainess,” a deliberate parallel to Haggard’s SHE. But though Yolara dominates the middle third of the book, she fades in importance with respect to the revelations of the novel’s final chapters, detailing what the Shining One is, and how it was brought into being by the endeavors of the Three Silent Ones. By this I make the determination that the Shining One, rather than any of the humans fighting for or against it, is the focal presence of the novel.


Though that history posits that the city of Nan-Tauach pre-existed the coming of the Shining One—implicitly, as a survival of the even more archaic continent Lemuria—in a symbolic sense the sinister beauties of the ancient city is one with the fallen nature of the Shining One. Everything in the city, like the Shining One, is depicted as a series of prismatically-colored, lapidary beauty, but it’s a beauty like that of the Gorgon (to which Yolara is often compared). As author Merritt takes great pleasure in describing the interfusion of loveliness and wickedness, of heaven and hell, and in future novels he develops this trope to greater effect. Here, however, he fudges his own aesthetic somewhat by using dull sticks like Lakla and O’Keeffe as his romantic pair. Some theorists have argued that H.P. Lovecraft’s concepts of his “Great Old Ones” may owe something to the amorphous beauty of the Shining One. But if Lovecraft read THE MOON POOL, I imagine him being dismayed by the novel’s resolution: that of having the monster-god weakened by the love-feeling of hero and heroine, prior to its being destroyed by its creators.

Appropriately, though, Merritt does bring the novel full circle by having Goodwin exiled from the land of wonder as was Throckmartin. Oddly, the vehicle of this exile is Marakinoff, who attacks Goodwin on a bridge to prevent his Western rival for enjoying the fruits of his research. In the fall the Russian dies and Goodwin returns to the mortal world. He’s unable to access the Moon Pool again, but gets another shot at delving into worlds of wonder in a follow-up novel, THE METAL MONSTER.

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