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| A. Merritt (1877-1943) |
For anyone interested in the life and works of A. Merritt,
the book
A. Merritt: Reflections in the Moon Pool (1985), edited by Sam
Moskowitz, is an extremely frustrating resource.* It is a hodge-podge of stray
writings by Merritt (poems, stories, interviews, fragments) or about Merritt
(poems in praise of Merritt, and fanzine articles on him), with interspersed
and often confusing (if not contradictory) commentary by Moskowitz, all as an
addenda to Moskowitz’s knuckle-dragging essay “The Life, Works and Times of A.
Merritt,” which makes up roughly 160 pages of the nearly 400 page volume. Moskowitz
also notes that he has added explanatory notes and comments, when he felt them
necessary, but in some instances throughout the volume Moskowitz’s alterations
are not clearly designated.
The biggest problem is one common to most of Moskowitz’s
publications. The book is based on what materials Moskowitz could access at the
time. Whatever statements he found by his subject he took at face value, often
without any corroboration or critical distance. To such information Moskowitz
would supply dates, and thereby he would construct a life-story. But as presented
it is often simply wrong. One error, such as an incorrect birth year, and the
whole structure fails.
Much of what is known, biographically, about the writer A.
Merritt, comes from a small number of autobiographical statements and an
interview. Some of what Merritt said about himself is patently false, and some
of it is puffery, and some of it is misleading. Here I attempt to correct the
record, based on genealogical and other historical evidence.
I use as the main blueprint Merritt’s 1943 publicity
statement, as published in the 11 August 1943 issue of the fanzine Fantasy
Fiction Field. A short introduction by Walter Dunkelberger (signed “W.D.”) noted
that “this article was sent to me June 16, 1943 by Abe’s agents Brandt and
Brandt who said that it had been compiled by A. Merritt himself.” Merritt
himself died in Florida on 21 August 1943.
Titled “The Autobiography of Abraham Merritt” the essay
comprises some 41 paragraphs, though some paragraphs are merely a single
sentence in length. I have numbered the paragraphs to distinguish them from my
own comments, given directly below the paragraph being commented upon.
The essay is reprinted, and confusingly augmented, in
Moskowtiz’s A. Merritt: Reflections in the Moon Pool. Where it is
“edited by Walter Wentz.” A brief introductory note (it is unclear whether it
is by Moskowitz or Wentz) states: “I am interspersing throughout this article
portions of a fragmentary, informal autobiography, three pages of which were
found in Merritt’s papers by his widow. To the best of my knowledge, this has
never been published anywhere before.” The original 1943 text was about 2250
words; the 1985 text contains an additional 2000 words found in around nine
additional passages. I have used parts of these additional passages in some of my
notes, and cited the appropriate page number from Moskowitz’s volume. .
For several years I have worked, off and on, on various
essays on Merritt and those associated with him (e.g., Hannes Bok, Paul Dennis
O’Connor, etc.). This is the first to be published, though it has had to be condensed
for reasons of length. My thanks to Kevin Cook for reading and commenting on a draft
of this essay.
The Autobiography of Abraham Merritt 1943
¶1 Abraham Merritt was born January 20, 1884 at Beverly,
N.J. Beverly was then a good old-fashioned wholly American village, on the
Delaware River about 25 miles north of Philadelphia. The population was about a
thousand who maintained themselves by fishing in the river, farming in the rich
country round about, and commerce as then exemplified by two side-wheeler
riverboats that picked up the truck twice a day and by what was known locally
as The Ropewalk. Beverly runs of shad were famous—and the hauls, sold in
Philadelphia, when good meant three or four months’ prosperity for the whole
village.
Merritt first gave out “1884” as his birth year in an “Interview
of A. Merritt” by Julius Schwartz in Science Fiction Digest, January
1933 (reprinted in the 1985 Moskowitz volume). Merritt’s father had died in 1926,
and his mother in 1929, so by the 1930s his parents were not alive to
contradict any misstatement about his birth year. On his 1919 passport
application (dated April 10th), he gave his birth year as 1879. In the 1900
U.S. Census, Merritt is listed as born in January 1878. The New Jersey Birth
Records database for 1870-1980 lists the birth of a unnamed son to William H.
Merritt and Ida Merritt in Beverly in January 1877. Both the 1900 and 1910 U.S.
Censuses asked mothers two questions: how many children did you have, and how
many are living. In both Censuses, Ida Merritt said, one child born, one child
living. So 1877 is clearly the correct year of A. Merritt’s birth.
Oddly, though, on his September 1918 Draft Registration Merritt
gave his birth year as 1876, making him appear a year older than he was—42
instead of 41, both of which seem too old to be called for military service.
The question also arises about whether or not Merritt had a
middle name. No source in Merritt’s lifetime gives him one, from his birth
record to his death record. An odd addition to Merritt’s autobiography in
Moskowitz’s 1985 volume quotes Merritt as writing that he was: “Christened
Abraham Grace Merritt, but dropped the Grace early in life because of damages
incurred by fighting companions who kidded about it” (330). (Grace was the maiden name of his grandfather
Abraham’s wife.) After this statement was published, various reference books
rechristened Merritt as “Abraham Grace Merritt.” Yet it was clearly a form of
his name that he never used, and there is no legal basis for it.
¶2 Mr. Merritt’s grandfather had been a Quaker, but when his
wife, Emily Grace of Maryland, refused to become a Quaker either “by conviction
or adoption,” he was dropped from the Burlington, N.J., Friends Meeting House
rolls. He was an architect and builder and designed and erected most of the new
churches and statelier edifices of Beverly as the village grew in size and
prosperity. He had a careless habit of forgetting bills, however, so that when
he died his estate consisted mostly of uncollectable accounts, and the Merritt
hacienda ultimately became a public park.
¶3 The historic Burlington Friends Meeting House, some twenty
miles north of Beverly, has a lot of Merritts in it, the oldest of their
tombstones dating back to 1621. There are many Abrahams among them, also Jobs,
Hezekiahs, Nehemiahs, Joshuas, and other fine old Biblical names. Mr. Merritt,
the subject of this sketch, was christened Abraham after this grandfather and
has always been thankful that the other names, for example Job, were by-passed
by the naming committee.
A. Merritt’s grandfather Abraham Merritt (1824-1890), like
Merritt’s father a builder and carpenter, was the son of Abraham Merritt, Jr.
(1792-1842), who was in turn the son of Abraham Merritt (1749-1822)
¶4 In Mr. Merritt’s family tree there hang quite a number of
obits of quite distinguished Americans, but he is really proud only of four.
One is General Wesley Merritt, whose father and old Abraham’s father were
brothers. Fenimore Cooper who roosts there by virtue of Mr. Merritt’s maternal
grandmother Hannah Fenimore, a Quakeress also read out of the Meeting House
because of her stubborn husband, and Colonel Grace who licked Tarleton’s men in
the historic battle of Cowpens. And a pre-Revolutionary character who was a
highwayman pursuing his business along the Boston Post Road; a most interesting
scoundrel whose headquarters were at Mamaroneck and whose assassins, instead of being hanged for
the crime, were presented with medals by a grateful countryside.
Major General Wesley A. Merritt (1836-1910) was the son of
John Willis Merritt (1806-1878). If John Willis Merritt was related in any way
to Abraham Merritt, Jr., it was not closely. There were certainly not brothers.
Merritt was indeed related, but distantly, to the famous
writer James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) by his maternal grandmother, Hannah
Ann Fenimore (married name Buck) (1839-1914). She was one of five children of
Alexander Washington Fenimore (1800-1864), who was a son of Joshua Fenimore
(1777-1863), who was a son of Pearson Fenimore (1757-1812), who was a son of
Joshua Fenimore (1722-1771), whose brother was Joseph Fenimore Jr. (1712-1756),
who was the grandfather of James Fenimore Cooper by his daughter Elizabeth
Fenimore Cooper (1752-1817) via her marriage to William Cooper (1754-1809). In
an addition to his autobiography as published in 1985, Merritt called Cooper
his “great-great grand uncle” but Cooper was never an uncle to Merritt, and
only a much more distant relation.
The Battle of Cowpens was fought near Cowpens, South
Carolina, on the 17th of January 1781. Colonel Grace was apparently a minor
participant.
The identity of the pre-Revolutionary War highwayman has not
been determined.
¶5 When Mr. Merritt was about ten years old, his parents
moved to Philadelphia, taking him with them. His father’s name was William
Henry Merritt, and he was also an architect and a builder. His mother’s name
was Ida Priscilla Buck, the daughter of Hannah Fenimore Buck, whose husband had
been Philip Buck, the son of Old Cap’n Buck of Cape May, N.J., one of the first
skippers of the Yankee Clippers plying the China and Far East trade. Philip
died of wounds received during the Civil War. He was on the Union side, as were
a number of the Merritts, and Fenimores, Coopers and Stevensons—also grouped in
the family tree and most of them what were known as Fighting Quakers.
Elsewhere, in his autobiographical notes, Merritt says
“moved to Philadelphia when eight” (332). But if the Merritts moved to
Philadelphia when Abraham was about ten, that would have been in about 1886-87.
The family is still listed in Beverly, New Jersey, in the New Jersey State
Census of 1885. Merritt’s father, William Henry Merritt (1849-1926), was,
according to multiple Censuses, a house carpenter. To call him “an architect
and builder” seems aggrandizing. Merritt’s mother was Ida Priscilla Buck
(1856-1929), whose parents were Philip P. Buck (1830-1866) and Hannah Ann
Fenimore (1839-1914), who were married in Burlington, New Jersey, on 9 March
1853. Ida’s younger sister, Phoebe Shropshire (1866-1946) lived with Merritt’s
parents in the early decades of the twentieth century after her widowhood.
¶6 On the other hand, most of the Graces were killed,
wounded or survived fighting on the Confederate side—which did not make for
family peace in the Beverly households.
¶7 When he was thirteen, Mr. Merritt was graduated into the
Philadelphia High School with high honors. After studying there for a year, he
decided that his future lay in the law and that completing the four years of
high school would be a waste of time. He began “to read,” as it was then
called, in the office of Andrew J. Maloney, one of the outstanding estate
lawyers in Philadelphia, also attending lectures at the University of
Pennsylvania.
The only Philadelphia Central High School yearbook that I
have been able to consult is for 1893. It includes Merritt as a Freshman, aged
16. He should have graduated in the class of 1896.
Andrew Jackson Maloney (1846-1921) was a Philadelphia lawyer.
Merritt’s activities between 1893 and the early 1900s are
not well-documented. In most of Merritt’s Whos’s Who entries, he gives
his educational history as “Philadelphia High School” and nothing else. In the “Interview
of A. Merritt” by Julius Schwartz, published in January 1933, it is claimed
that “he went through Philadelphia High School and matriculated at the
University of Pennsylvania Law School, Just then the family went broke” (356). But
in the entry for Who’s Who in Literature in the mid-1930s, he lists both
“Philadelphia H.S., University of Pennsylvania.” In Jack Champman Miske’s
collaborative article with Merritt, “A. Merritt—His Life and Times,” in the October
and December 1939 issues of Scienti-Snaps (reprinted in the 1985
Moskowitz volume), it states: “Merritt was matriculated from the University of
Pennsylvania law school after his graduation from Philadelphia High. With an
amazing display of timing, his family went broke almost immediately thereafter,
He left college and entered the newspaper game” (344). Perhaps Merritt attended
some lectures at the university informally. In any case, his time associated
with the university was apparently at best very brief.
¶8 The first year of this, he read Blackstone through twice from cover to cover, Simon Greenleaf’s
Treatise on the Law of Evidence, and
a few other legal classics. Also, at the advice of Mr. Maloney, who considered
the Bible as useful in law as Blackstone, he took up the Book—no stranger since
it had been enforced upon him both in Beverly and Philadelphia, and he can even
now quote whole chapters by memory. To the Bible and Blackstone he largely
owes, he thinks, whatever proficiency in English and Latin he may possess.
¶9 About this time, he met two great men who influenced
potently his thinking. One was the famous Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, at that time
carrying on his classic experiments in the medical properties of rattlesnake
venom, the author of The Red City, Hugh Wynn and other books. Dr. Mitchell,
for some reason, took a fancy to Merritt, and turned his mind toward folk-lore
and its modern survivals, and other phenomena then wholly speculative and
unorthodox, but many of which have since become scientific fact. And also
toward some little explored paths of literature.
Silas Weir Mitchell (1829-1914) was a Philadelphia
physician, novelist and poet. His historical novels were popular. Of the two
novels Merritt cites, Hugh Wynn (1897) might have been contemporaneous
with Merritt’s acquaintance with the author; The Red City (1909)
evidently came out later. He was physician to author and feminist Charlotte
Perkins Gilman (1860-1935), and prescribed for her the “rest cure” which causes
insanity in the patient in Gilman’s most famous short story, “The Yellow
Wallpaper” (1892).
¶10 The other was Dr. Charles Eucharist de Medicis Sajous,
whose studies and theories about the ductless glands and their effects upon
personality paved the way to most of the modern discoveries about them—but were
then considered also by the conservative wing of the medical party as somewhat
too unorthodox. He turned Merritt’s mind toward another side of science and
literature. Both men gave it a permanent bent.
Charles Eucharist de Medicis Sajous (1852-1929) was an
endocrinologist who lived in Philadelphia.
¶11 Merritt had the faculty of rapid reading, an unusually
retentive memory, an omnivorous curiosity about everything. So the next year
and a half represented at least a four-year college course, but, of course, a
highly specialized one. Later, he was to repay some of his debt to Dr. S. Weir Mitchell
by certain personal observations of witchcraft practices, survivals of blood
sacrifices, and so on, in the Pennsylvania Dutch region.
¶12 At this time when he was nearly 19, but looking several
years older, he decided that probably his proper field was the newspaper
business. One of his very good friends was a star political reporter. It seemed
a good idea to serve a sort of apprenticeship with this genius before applying for a job on a newspaper. Merritt thought
that maybe if he learned enough in advance he could get on the staff of The Sun in New York—an ambitious project
born of ignorance, of course.
¶13 But in serving this apprenticeship, he unfortunately was
a witness of a singularly unhappy political incident in which he had no part
beyond that of an innocent bystander. Nevertheless, he qualified as an
essential witness. The political opposition was anxious to force him into
this, while the side the political expert was on was just as anxious that he
shouldn’t be an essential witness.
Merritt claimed to have entered the employ of The Philadelphia
Inquirer in 1902 as a reporter. According to the 1900 U.S. Census, he was
already a reporter as of the enumeration date (June 1st), but with which
newspaper is unknown.
¶14 The consequence was a speedy trip to Mexico and other
points south where writs of extradition did not run.
In the additions to his autobiographical remarks published
in 1985, Merritt prefaces further comments with the phrase “when twenty”
(336)—presumably meaning when he was twenty, which relates to his comment in
¶12 above about being “nearly 19.” Yet when Merritt was actually twenty would
have been in early 1897, or was he counting from the later projected birthdate?
Merrit’s story of being sent away to Mexico has many
earmarks of a tall tale. First, it was not told publicly before the 1930s,
after Merritt’s parents had both died. Second, there are no records to support
the account, and third, the information Merritt provided on his later passport
application also does not support the account. From this and other passenger
lists it is documented that Merritt’s travelling outside the United States consisted
of returning from Jamaica in December 1909, and also (with his wife) in
December 1910. In December 1911 he returned from Santa Maria, Columbia. His
April 1919 passport application, complete while intending to go to Cuba for
magazine business, corroborates the destinations if not the dates. Merritt’s
handwritten notes in the application list his residences outside the United
States as The West Indies, from October 1912 tho November 1912 (the final
numeral “2” is overwritten and could read as a “0” or as a “2”).; and as the United
States of Columbia from October 1913 to November 1913. If Merritt wrote these
from memory, that could explain the discrepancy with the passenger lists. I do
not account here for Merritt’s post-1919 travels.
¶15 It was here that he first conceived a strong interest in
matters archaeological, although he admits that he spent most of his time
studying the habits and customs of the natives with special emphasis on fiestas
and bibiendo, or drinking, as they call it in the United States.
¶16 Once, he likes to relate, he won $600 on a Panama
lottery which he had bought from an old Indian woman in Miraflores, spent a
couple of hundred of it, then, filled with gratitude, sought for the old woman
who had sold him the ticket and presented her with most of the balance. This so
overcame the seller, who was quite an important person in her tribe, that a few
days later, Merritt says, he found himself a member of it by full blood rites.
¶17 He was down in that country for more than a year, a good
part of the time in Tehuantepec and Chiapas. He went treasure hunting over in
Yucatan with a rather reckless scout for one of the big Eastern University Museums,
was one of the first white men to enter the ancient Mayan city of Tuluum since
Catherwood nearly a hundred years before. Here he almost lost his life by
falling into an ambush of hostile Indians who were on the warpath.
Frederick Catherwood (1799-1854) was an English artist and
explorer. With John Lloyd Stephens he explored the Mayan ruins in the late
1830s and 1840s. They reached Tulum in March 1841. Merritt, in claiming it was
“nearly a hundred years ago,” seems to suggest that he was counting the years
from the time he was writing his autobiographical notes.
¶18 He turned up later in Chichen Itza and fished for awhile
in the cenote, or “sacred well,” from which was later taken golden objects to
the bullion value of $5,000,000.
¶19 From there he went to Costa Rica where he spent some
time wooing the senoritas up at the San Juan de Potosi. While there the cloud
was lifted from him and he was recalled to Philadelphia. He didn’t want to
leave, but if he stayed he wouldn’t get any more money, so he had to come back.
¶20 Shortly thereafter he got a job as reporter on the old
Philadelphia Inquirer in the days of
the Elversons.
Just when Merritt started work at the Inquirer is
uncertain. His entry in Who’s Who in America for 1936-1937 states: “Began
as reporter Phila. Inquirer, 1902, night city editor.” A similar entry in Who’s
Who in Literature in the mid-1930s notes: “City Ed. Philadelphia Inquirer ’08.”
In the 1900 U.S. Census, Merritt is listed as a reporter, still living with his
parents.
¶21 Merritt’s talent was for what is called “feature
writing.” He rose rapidly on the Inquirer,
covering murders, suicides, hangings, mysteries, romances and political
stories, and one personally conducted lynching party in Delaware that still
keeps him awake some nights.
The bulk of Merritt’s contributions to the Inquirer
are apparently not bylined. A few parodic poems signed “Abraham Merritt”
appeared in July and September 1905.
¶22 In six years he had marched up to the night city
editorship on the Inquirer, becoming
on the way special Philadelphia correspondent for Morrill Goddard, the great
feature editor who left Joseph Pulitzer to take over The American Weekly for William Randolph Hearst. This was then
called simply “the Sunday Supplement” of the Hearst Sunday newspapers. Later it
was forged into The American Weekly
by Mr. Hearst and Mr. Goddard. The magazine has always been one of his publications
closest to Mr. Hearst’s heart.
¶23 Goddard, in 1912, approving of Merritt’s work for him,
offered “to take a chance on him for a year, if Merritt felt like taking the
same chance on him.” Merritt took the chance and became Goddard’s assistant.
Merritt’s beginning at The American Weekly also has
an uncertain date. In his entry in Who’s Who in Literature in the
mid-1930s, he gives his position as “Asst. Ed. American Weekly ’10.” In the
1910 U.S. Census, Merritt is found living with his wife in Brooklyn (540 8th
Street), his employment given as “newspaper clerk.”
¶24 In 1937 Goddard died suddenly, and Merritt moved into
his place as editor of The American
Weekly, a post he has held ever since.
Morrill Goddard (1866-1937) died of heart disease, after an
illness of only two days, on 1 July 1937. In a memoir of Goddard in the Dartmouth
Alumni Magazine for October 1937, it is noted that “Goddard recently wrote
that he [Merritt] was the only man he’d ever found who ‘saw eye to eye with me
in the magazine feature field,’ adding that sometimes when he picked up ‘an
issue that Merritt had gotten out I have had to look it over twice to be sure
it wasn’t my own’.”
¶25 Since that time The
American Weekly has grown from a circulation of around 5,000,000 to
approximately 8,000,000. It is carried now not only by the Hearst Sunday
newspapers, but eight influential non-Hearst papers, perhaps the most important
being the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
¶26 Before Merritt took the post of full editor, he had
written seven novels, several short stories and a number of papers upon
ethnological and archaeological subjects. Most of which were either privately
printed or are held in manuscript form for those interested.
Merritt actually wrote eight novels previous to taking the
post of full editor. No papers on ethnological or archaeological subjects are
know to have been published. His friend and colleague at the American Weekly
John U. Sturdevant (1913-1984) noted: “They no longer exist, if indeed they
ever did. These were a collection of research papers, bulletins, studies and so
forth, the work of scholars, which Merritt probably ordered or purchased as background
for various articles in The American Weekly. I suspect that after they
were used he simply kept them, hoping some day to develop them into longer
pieces for himself” (quoted, p. 339). Sturdevant became heir to the Merritt
literary estate after Merritt’s second wife died in 1977.
¶27 His books are Moon
Pool, The Ship of Ishtar, Seven Footprints to Satan, The Metal Monster, The Face in the Abyss, Burn,
Witch, Burn, and Creep Shadow. A novelette, “The Woman of the Wood,”
has been reprinted many times here and abroad. Two of the books have been made into motion pictures. Burn, Witch, Burn! was printed in
America, in England, Holland, Spain, France and Russia.
The list of Merritt’s book omits one: Dwellers in the
Mirage.
Seven Footprints to Satan was filmed as a silent
picture in 1929. In an interview with Julius Schwartz in Science Fiction
Digest, January 1933, Merritt noted: “I sat through the picture and wept.
The only similarity between the book and the picture was the title. The picture
likewise killed the book sale of Seven Footprints, for people who saw
the picture felt no impulse thereafter to read the book.” Burn, With, Burn
was filmed more successfully in 1936 as The Devil Doll, directed by Tod
Browning and starring Lionel Barrymore.
Burn, Witch, Burn was published in England by Methuen
in 1934. The only known translation prior to this article appearing in 1943 is
one into Spanish, as Arde, bruja, arde! (Barcelona: Molino, 1935),
translated by Alfonso Nadal. In the “Interview of A. Merritt” by Julius
Schwartz, published in January 1933, it is claimed that Merritt’s novel The
Metal Monster (or the version retitled The Metal Emperor) had been
printed in Russia under the title The Lighting Witch, and that The Ship
of Ishtar had also been pirated in Russian, but neither such publication has
been traced.
¶28 In all his stories Merritt weaves much of what he has
seen, heard and read of strange rites, of superstitions, of science, of
religion. They are fantastic, but they are accurate and they are very unusual.
¶29 Last fall, Merritt wrote a book upon the philosophy and
mechanism of feature making, as he sees it. It was not for sale, but was
printed privately by The American Weekly
and sent out as a Christmas present to a great number of prominent gentlemen in
the scientific, advertising and business worlds. The book was called The Story Behind the Story, and showed,
often in lively fashion, how the formulas worked out in actual practice.
The Story Behind the Story (New York: Published
Privately, 1942), as by Abraham Merritt, was published on 18 December 1942. It
contains a one-page foreword signed M.B., and eighteen chapters, comprising
some 188 pages. Merritt’s writing of the chapters was clearly not confined to
“last fall.” A short notice in the January 1943 (volume 36 no. 1, p. 54) issue
of Advertising & Selling, comments: “For several years, Abraham
Merritt, editor of American Weekly, has written monthly letters to
business men and advertising executives explaining why certain articles are
chosen for the Weekly, describing what is involved in preparing them for
publication. Too good to file and forget, last month they were condensed and
revised, published in an 18-chapter volume, ‘The Story Behind the Story,’ sent
to executives of leading advertiser’s advertising agencies.” If Merritt wrote
these articles over an eighteen-month period, the origin would go back to late
1940 or early 1941.
¶30 It was so well received that the edition of 10,000 was
soon almost exhausted. It was very popular with the schools of journalism at
various universities and colleges, which are rapidly absorbing the few copies
that are left.
¶31 Merritt has many interests. Outside of his editorship he
is most interested in horticulture, especially sub-tropical. This is no fad, no
passing hobby. He is definitely and seriously interested and is an expert.
Merritt was profiled in an interesting article “Horror Tale
Writer Tends Long Island Poison Garden” in the 5 September 1935 issue of the New
York World-Telegram. Here are some of the many interesting points.
“I plant and tend vervain and datura because their history
fascinates me. Vervain is an insignificant plant, but it was the first sacred
herb of the human race; its origin is hidden in the midst of antiquity.”
“It was while I was experimenting with and musing on the
mandrake that I conceived Madame Mandelip, the witch of ‘Burn, Witch, Burn.’
The mandrake is the oldest known poison drug. It was used by the Babylonians
3,000 years ago. This is the first year I’ve had any luck with them. Legend
says if you pull a mandrake up by the roots it shrieks and you die. I’ve never
heard a mandrake cry, but I’ve always hoped to hear one. Nor have I suffered
any ill effects from digging them out—so far as I know.”
Mr. Merritt’s interest in poison plants dates from a
youthful expedition to Central America. There he saw the peyote which the Indian
priests use to get in communication with their gods and make prophecies. “I was
young and reckless enough to try some of the concoction made from the peyote
buttons. The influence 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.”
This year Mr. Merritt is raising a rare species of datura
alba, from India. The datura contains stramonium, widely used for asthma. . . .
Other poison plants in the garden are nightbane, white snake root, deadly
nightshade, from which come belladonna, the drug, and atropine, the alkaloid;
laburnum, which contains aconite; tansy and parsley, yielding apiol, which
produces abortions; bride wort, used by the ancients to make birth easier;
primroses, poisonous to the touch, and sometimes from their pollen and
fragrance.
“There’s this interesting thing, however. Poisonous plants
tend to become less poisonous as they are cultivated. There’s a reason for
everything. Some plants are poisonous in order to survive. Care for them, and
their poison lessens. Same with humans. A well-fed, well-cared for man is less
likely to be a menace to society than one who is starving.”
¶32 He has one experimental farm near Clearwater where he
has planted the first olive groves in Florida. On this place he also has some
200 varieties of trees and plants, food bearers, largely from South and Central
America, but others from Africa, Asia and Australia.
¶33 Here also he is experimenting with some 50 Feijoa plants
from Brazil, which bear a delicious fruit and whose flowers are the only edible
flowers known. Here, too, he is growing the Cherimoya, another delicious but
little known fruit.
¶34 In Bradenton, Florida, on Tampa Bay, he has another
experimental farm of some 75 acres where he is specializing in avocados, mangos
and litchi, so popular with the Chinese.
¶35 Merritt is also much interested in the possibilities of
some 750 acres he owns near Santo Domingo, about a hundred miles south of Quito
in Ecuador. This is the richest land
and with J. M. Sheppard, President of the Pan-American Tropical Research
Society, who owns about 2,000 adjacent acres, he is planning another
experimental farm, largely to handle medicinal plants and trees, vanilla beans
and quinine. The hacienda is at present pretty much virgin forest and Colorados
Indios. Merritt is a Director of the Society.
The Pan-American Tropical Research Society published a
journal called Exploration & Scientific Research, which ran from 1938
through 1947, but Merritt does not seem to have contributed to it. The President
of the Society was J[ack]. Mortimer Sheppard (1901-1973), who became a world
traveller and in the 1950s published a historical novel, Harvest of the Wind
(1956) and a autobiographical account of his family’s experiences in northern
Africa, Sahara Adventure (1957). If Sheppard had much of an association
with Merritt, it is undocumented.
¶36 He is also an expert apiarist, or bee man.
Jack Chapman Miske, in his 1939 article in collaboration
with Merritt, notes: “He also keeps
bees. He dislikes violent exercise and always rides if possible, which probably
explains why he is rather plump. He is an atheist (345)”
¶37 He has married twice, first to Eleanor May Radcliffe, by
whom he has one daughter, Eleanore.
 |
| Merritt's daughter in 1940 |
Merritt married Eleanor May Ratcliffe [not Radcliffe, as
Moskowitz also gives it] (born in England in 1879) in Manhattan on 15 August
1904. She died in Queens on 27 October 1933. They adopted a daughter around 1920-21.
The girl was one of two daughters of the eccentric poet and publisher Donald
Evans (1884-1921), who, like Merritt, came to New York from Philadelphia. Evans
had two short-lived marriages, the second to Esther Porter (b. 1898) in January
1918, produced two daughters, Anne, born about March 1919, and a second
daughter, name unknown, who was born in 1920. Later that year, Evans secured
custody of the two children from his philandering wife, from whom he was
separated. Evans died on 21 May 1921; it was commonly believed that he
committed suicide. Moskowitz gives a different story: he claims that in 1918,
Evans and his baby daughter were given refuge by the Merritts, and Evans,
terminally ill with tuberculosis, left the child with the Merritts and died in
hospital (pp 42-43). None of this is substantiated elsewhere, so it is difficult
to reconcile it with known facts. Other accounts suggest that Evans’s mother,
after his death, put the two children up for adoption, and one of them ended up
with Merritt and his wife. They raised their daughter as Ida Eleanore Merritt,
though she went by Eleanore. She went to Stoneleigh College, and she later
worked for
McCall’s Magazine and the
Woman’s Home Companion as a
magazine editor and contributor. She had a brief marriage to Kenneth Edward
Budgen of New York on 10 June 1944, but it was quickly annulled. A second
marriage to Robert A. Wolf [not Daniel Wolf as Moskowitz gives, 151] on 1 March
1948 ended in divorce. A brief obituary in
The Chicago Tribune for 21
September 1963 gives her name as Eleanore Merritt Wolff [sic]. Moskowitz says
that Eleanore never knew she had been adopted (152), but he gives no source for
this claim.
¶38 After his first wife’s death, he married Eleanor
Humphrey Johnson, who shares in most of his tastes, and is an expert in floriculture as he is in horticulture
generally.
 |
| Merritt's widow in 1949 |
Merritt married Eleanor Humphrey [not Humphreys, as
Moskowitz gives it] Johnson (1894-1977), who ran an antique store in Greenwich
Village and who was an occasional writer, in Manhattan on 18 July 1934, about
nine months after the death of Merritt’s first wife. (The yet unmarried couple
took a sailing trip together to Bermuda in May 1934.) According to Moskowitz,
Merritt’s daughter and his second wife did not get along well (125, 151).
Around 1950-51, Merritt’s widow married Harry Schoonmaker (1895-1979), who had
been Merritt’s “full-time chauffeur and handyman” according to Moskowitz (127).
¶39 His only club is the Lotos.
The Lotos Club in New York City was founded in 1870 and
still continues today, making it “one of the oldest literary and arts clubs in
the United States” (as it states at its website).
In Who’s Who in America for 1936-37, Merritt listed
his club as The Players in New York, founded in 1888 with a membership of
theatrical notables. In other sources Merritt lists both clubs.
¶40 Private residence: 87-25 Clover Hill Road, Hollis, L.I.,
and Indian Rocks Key, Pinellas County, Florida.
¶41 Business address: The American Weekly, 235 East 45th
Street, New York.
*Gary K. Wolfe wrote a witheringly accurate review of A.
Merritt: Reflections in the Moon Pool, with an assessment on Moskowitz’s
failings as a scholar, in Science-Fiction Studies, vol. 13 pt. 2 (July
1986): 219-220. Wolfe notes: “Moskowitz’s biographical essay, which ought to be
the most valuable part of the book, is plagued by the maddening obtuseness and
obsessive trivia-hunting that have unfortunately become his trademarks. . . .
he industriously gathers information that no one else has, assembles it without
the slightest sense of priorities, and then babbles to us, often on the verge
of incoherence, about the magnificence of his achievement and the immortality
of his subject. The man is a syntactical terrorist . . . He is relentlessly naïve
. . . He is willing to go to absurd lengths to work himself into the narrative
. . . pointless details abound.”
