[Rarebooks] fa: ERNEST LEISLER MERZ - FROM HIS LETTERS 1894-1909 Privately Printed (re. Grasmere, John Maynard Keynes, Tour of America, &c.)

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, June 12. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la. 

http://tinyurl.com/j6efela

Thanks,
Ardwight Chamberlain
Ann Arbor, MI


Ernest Leisler Merz. Born 24th Nov., 1881. Died 9th July, 1909. From His Letters 1894-1909. Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Privately Printed (by Andrew Reid & Co.), 1910. Small 4to (23 cm) in original[?] polished buckram with gilt-lettered leather spine label, all page edges gilt; 298 pp. Text block showing some mild effects of moisture at the gutter with some cockling and occasional spotting to the leaves, a trace of mustiness, a few penciled (erasable) tick marks in the margins, but generally clean and crisp, firmly bound.

Very scarce privately printed collection of letters and poems by Ernest Merz, a young, romantic Englishman, a would-be poet, who died, apparently a suicide, at the age of 27. Merz was the son of John Theodore (Theo) Merz (1840-1922), a German-British mathematician, industrialist and historian (The History of European Thought) and the younger brother of the eminent electrical engineer Charles Hesterman Merz (1874-1940). His was a prominent northern Quaker family and his sister Teresa (1879-1958) a noted reformer, suffragist and philanthropist. Includes his youth at "The Quarries" and "Heugh Folds" near Grasmere (butterfly collecting, mothing, birding; visits to Dove Cottage, etc.); schooling at York; travels in Germany in and around Worms-am-Rhein; King's College, Cambridge (references to John Maynard Keynes — "breakfasted with Keynes" — and much on the economist Alfred Marshall, who seems to have taken an interest in Merz, inviting him to tea, etc.); tours in the Tyrol and in America, where his brother Charles was inspecting electrical power schemes, with observations on Chicago, San Bernardino, Los Angeles, and lengthy descriptions of the Grand Canyon and San Francisco only three months before the great earthquake of 1906 (Chinatown, the Cliff House, Mount Tamalpais); finally, reluctantly settling down to work in London, first as an articled clerk, then as a solicitor.

The letters provide a touching portrait of a sensitive, romantic, often diffident and occasionally disillusioned young man trying to find his way in the Edwardian era. There is much on his school friends Malcolm Darling, Arthur Cole, Jermyn Moorsom and Robin Quirk, all of whom are  described, along with Merz, by historian Clive Dewey in his Anglo-Indian Attitudes, "Malcolm Darling and the Cult of Friendship," (London: 1993). As Dewey notes of this circle of intimate friends, they "were all artists or connoisseurs…. Too much love, truth and beauty may have handicapped Darling's set in their subsequent careers. Some of them should have got to the top… but none of them was particularly successful… The most romantic, Merz, was a poet. He met a poet's fate — dying young, by his own hand."