Chaps. 9, 10, 11, 12: Edie Sedgwick, Maid Of Constant Sorrow

November 30, 2010

Edie Sedgwick
Maid Of Constant Sorrow
Chapters 9,10, 11, 12
by
R.E. Prindle
Chapter 9
Leavin’ On A Jet Plane
by
R.E. Prindle
 
 

The 707

 

DC 6B

 

There are arguments about the psychological duration of the sixties mentality.  The limits run from 1956  at the beginning to 1974 at the end.  There are reasonable arguments for those parameters.  I would argue that the sixties began on August  26, 1959 when Pan American World Airways inaugurated non-stop jet service from New York to London, and ending with Altamont in 1969.  Before was merely prologue and post-Altamont merely aftermath.
The sixties are unthinkable without the arrival of trans-Atlantic jet service.  With the jets, the Jet Set came into existence.  The Jet Set was the envy of the entire generation.  There’s little we wouldn’t have done to have been part of it.  Thus when Pan-Am put the first 707-320 into the air the conditions for the sixties were in place.
Boeing won the race to commercial jets and what a plane the 707 was.  In late 1956 I was sent from Philly to San Francisco via a DC6B.  The DC7 was the reigning prop plane at the time but the 6B was just behind.  The 707 not only added jets but dimension.  The DC 6B was just a flying cigar with about a 50 passenger capacity.  Very narrow, claustrophobic and I don’t suffer from claustrophobia.  At somewhat less than 300 miles an hour the 2600 miles from Philly to the West Coast took a major part of the day.  We left Philly at about 6:00 PM and arrried the next day just after sun-up.  The pressurization was terrible; I arrived with my ear drums bursting while the pain lasted well into the week.  I thought I was permanently damaged.  It wasn’t a great experience.
By contrast the 707 was twice as fast with a feeling of roominess and excellent pressurization.  Pan Am’s 707-120 flight that refueled in Newfoundland carried 111 passengers the most ever on a commercial flight.  So the modern era of flight was innaugurated.  A, if not The, future had arrived and it actually did work.  Not only worked but exploded.
The Jet Set could now commute between New York and London over the weekend, or even one could fly to New York, have lunch and be back in London to sleep in your own bed that night.  For people with money the expense was negligible.  All of a sudden travel posters appeared in everyone’s appartment.  London, Paris, Rome, Swiss skiing.  It was a sign of our desires, a longing to travel that was soon fulfilled whether you could afford it or not.  Along with the jet need came other needs that had to be fulfilled, a new outlook, new clothes, new hairstyles.  Whole new economic vistas opened up for the uninfranchised who had the vision: Mary Quant, Vidal Sassoon and a host of others.  Did we need advertising to create those needs?  Not by a long shot.
It took ages for the established firms to catch on.  Meanwhile the portals of opportunity were blown wide open.  Perhaps the phenomenal  response to the Beatles was merely a symptom of those new ideas.  The Beatles clothes, the haircuts, their naive insouciance.  They just epitomized the new attitude as the Rolling Stones nor any other group ever could.  It didn’t have anything to do with the music itself.
Thus by the time Andy set up his headquarters at the Silver Factory things were shifting into high gear of which he was a beneficiary, but then he had the style too.  The defining Pop moment for Warhol was the incredible visit of Pope John VI made possible by the big 707 jets.  But let Andy give his breathless account from Popism, pp. 134-135:
A week or so after Philadelphia I got a real lesson in show business and Pop style.  Just when you think you’re getting famous, somebody comes along and makes you look like a warm up act for amateur night.  Pope Paul VI, talk about advance PR- I mean, for centuries.
Definitely the most Pop public appearance tour of the sixties was that visit of the Pope to New York City.  He did it all in one day- October, 15, 1965.  It was the most well-planned media covered personal appearance in religious (and probably show business) history.  “Never Before in This Country!  One Day Only!  The Pope in New York City!”
The funny thing for us, of course, was that Ondine was known in our crowd as “the Pope,” and one of his most famous routines was “giving the papal bull.”
The (real) Pope and his entourage of aides, press and photographers left Rome early that morning on an Alitalia DC-8.  Eight hours and twenty minutes later, they got off the plane at Kennedy with the Pope’s shiny robes blowing in the wind.  They drove in a motorcade through Queens- the streets were lined with people- through Harlem crowds, and then down to the jammed- for blocks St. Patrick’s Cathedral area in the Fifties- where the Pope seemed to want to go out in “the audience” but you could see his aides talking him out of it.  After all the stuff in the cathedral he ran down the street to the Waldorf-Astoria where President Johnson was waiting.  They exchanged gifts and talked for a little under an hour about world troubles.  Then it was over to address the UN General Assembly (essentially he said, “Peace, disarmament and no birth control”) out to Yankee Stadium to say Mass in front of ninety thousand people, over to the closing World’s Fair to see Michelangelo’s Pieta in its Pop context before it went back to the Vatican, and back out to Kennedy and onto a TWA plane, saying, when the reporters asked him what he liked best about New York, “Tutti Buoni” (Everything is good”) which was the Pop philosophy exactly.  He was back in Rome that same night.  To do that much in that short a time with that kind of style- I can’t imagine anything more Pop than that.
Yes, left Andy breathless and why not?  I wasn’t there but as the motorcade passed by the Factory and Andy looked down on the scene perhaps it was the or a defining moment of the sixties.  Certainly it was a masterpiece of planning and execution for what would have been a small army.
Andy himself had joined the Jet Set back in May when he was summoned to Paris for an art exhibition.  Originally sent a ticket for an ocean voyage Andy asked his sponsors for a change to four air tickets taking a small entourage with him including Edie.  One can only imagine his elation as the big jet liner lifted off the tarmac.  Certainly a defining moment of the sixties for Andy.  By the seventies and eighties Andy and his entourage were part of the Jet Set flying back and forth repeatedly.
Chapter 10.
The System Of Dr. Tarr And Professor Fether

The Heyday Of Andy And Edie

For those of us out in the provinces Warhol and his Factory were an ongoing phenomenon.  It all seemed sort of crazy or insane but inescapable.  His movies while perhaps being experimental were too bizarre to contemplate.  The ‘superstars’ with names like Ultra Violent and International Velvet who were merely girls and not stars of anything were viewed with amazement.  Quite frankly, we didn’t know what to think but had the cool to act like we were with it.  If there was something happening here we thought we knew what it was.
Obviously New Yorkers themselves had different understandings of the phenomenon.  Unaware of the meaning of the rise of Warhol some were condescending to this outre individual and his entourages but curious.  Andy’s strengths were of course in the art world and the homosexual  community more than in the straight world.  Thus at the beginning of 1966 the New York Society For Clinical Psychiatry extended an invitation to Andy to speak at their annual banquet.
This was a dangerous invitation for them to make to a group of quasi-maniacs on dope, for Andy wouldn’t come alone while I suspect the invitation was made in bad faith.  I think the psychiatrists thought they would amuse themselves at Andy’s expense.  It’s not improbable that Andy suspected this intent.  As the program chairman, Dr. Robert Campbell, said post-banquet in a NYTimes interview:  Creativity and the artist have always held a fascination for the serious student of human behavior.  And we’re fascinated by the mass communications activities of Warhol and his group.  In that statement I think the tone of the question and answer segment would have been set.
It is not like certain people in the Warhol entourage hadn’t experience with the psychiatric establishment of New York.  Several of them may very likely have been in the hands of psychiatrists there they recognized.  While the psychiatrists considered their methods quite reasonable those who had suffered at their hands had somewhat different sentiments.  One of the more bizarre of their methods and one that Dr. Mengele would have envied was electro-shock therapy.

Edie And Andy- Sitting On Top Of The World

To a layman like myself the rationale of electro-shock seems quite absurd.  How sending electricity coursing through someone’s brain is supposed to change that someone’s psychology in the direction desired by the doctors is beyond my understanding.  In point of fact it didn’t change anyone’s psychology, not that of Edie Sedgwick nor that of Lou Reed, two of Andy’s entourage, anyway.  While Edie was more passive about it, Reed was enraged.  Andy sympathized with Reed which didn’t bode well for the psychiatrists.
Nineteen sixty-six was a swing year for the sixties.  At that time right at the peak things began to go sour leading up to the twin disasters of Stonewall and Altamont.  Drugs were at the heart of the problem.  As the year began the amphetamine users had been on the stuff for six years or more.  And they we’re taking massive doses.  Edie was already over the edge while Andy’s A-men like Ondine and Rotten Rita were at the point of unraveling.
This use of speed had been mixed with alcohol and marijuana.  In addition the psychedelics that had been gaining in prominence since the fifties were becoming ubiquitous and multiplying.  Aldous Huxley’s psychedelic bible, The Doors Of Perception, celebrating the virtues of mescaline had appeared in 1954 when it was well received by dopers.  Psilocybin and peyote were available for the more adventurous and knowledgeable while the greatest hit of all, LSD, had been increasing in popularity.  Already well established on the West Coast and in Hollywood well before Dr. Timothy Leary became its proselytizer after 1960, the psychedelic was becoming endemic.
Heck, in the fifties the CIA was using hookers in San Francisco to dose Johns with the stuff unbeknownst to the Johns.  Agents behind two way mirrors were doubling over in laughter watching the action.  And of course the chemists were busy rearranging molecules to create new sensations.  Look out below!
Along with the use of drugs came the inevitable separation from both reality and morality.  As Warhol said:  If you don’t like what’s happening to you pretend it’s a movie.  And people did.  All of a sudden people were walking around in buckskins like they were actors in a Western movie.  Don’t Bogart that joint was a tribute to Humphrey Bogart’s smoking style.  Bette Davis eyes….  I knew one guy who thought prison movies were a joke.  He got himself arrested on drug charges thinking it was a lark, just another scene in his movie.  Two or three years later he came back and found the joke was on him.  His former cronies who all seemed to have been in on the joke at the time now wouldn’t have anything to do with an ex-con.  The guy’s movie turned from a comedy into a tragedy.  It was painful to watch.
As people drugged out, subconscious desires rose to the surface, they attempted to become what they couldn’t be thus islolating themselves and destroying their lives.  As Andy also said:  During the sixties people forgot what emotions were supposed to be and he  didn’t think they ever remembered.  At the same time morality became confused with what the individual wanted at the moment.
The psychiatrists were no more immune to drugs than the street people.  Lou Reed wanted some kind of revenge for the suffering he had endured at the hands of the psychiatrists.  Of course when Dr. Campbell extended the invitation to Andy he had no idea what that would include.  Dr. Tarr was to meet Professor Fether.
One can’t be certain what the psychiatrists were thinking when they invited Andy to speak; it’s not exactly clear what they thought he would talk about although the banquet was billed as  ‘The Chic Mystique Of Andy Warhol.’  Andy on his part saw the invitation as an opportunity to ‘epater les pyschiatristes’, and he did.

Velvet Underground And Nico

The two chief accounts of the banquet are Andy’s own as recorded in POPism and a review published in the NYTimes ( http://www.warholstars.org/warhol/warhol/andy/loureed.html )
The event took place on either 1/10 or 1/13 while the Times account was published on 1/14.  The writer, Grace Glueck, does not appear to have been present but relies on reports from other persons.  She quotes Dr. Robert Campbell, the organizer, as saying he ‘was fascinated by the mass communications activities of Warhol and his group.’
Miss Glueck goes on to record the reactions of some of the psychiatrists in attendance:  ‘I suppose you could call this gathering a spontaneous eruption of the id.
‘…a repetition of the concrete quite akin to the L.S.D. experience.’
‘Why are they exposing us to these nuts?’
And finally:  ‘Put it down to decadent Dada.  It was ridiculous, outrageous, painful.  It seemed like a whole (psycho) ward has escaped.’

Edgar Deep In Thought

Yes, the inmates had taken charge of the asylum.  The scene was quite reminiscent of the dinner in Edgar Allan Poe’s famous story:  The System Of Doctor Tarr And Professor Fether.  One might describe it as Lou Reed intended it, as shock treatment for the psychiatrists as well as the repetition of the concrete electro-shock therapy.  As John Cale, the violinist of the group, was to admit a few decades later:  That was revenge- Lou’s revenge…and I was all for it.  So evidently was Andy Warhol.
At the time Andy seemed to be enamored of his crowd but in his subconscious other feelings were stirring.  On page 370 of his diary referring to the Factory years Andy says:
I’d dreamt about Billy Name, that he was living under the stairs of my house and doing sommersaults and everything was very colorful.  It was so weird, because his friends sort of invaded my house and were acting crazy in colorful costumes and jumping up and down having so much fun and they took over, they took over my life.  It was so weird.  It was like clowns.
Everybody was a clown in a funny way, and they were just living there without letting me know, they’d come out in the morning when I wasn’t there and they’d have a lot of fun and then they’d go back and live in the closet.

Malanga and Dylan

It almost sounds like Andy confounded the banquet with Name and his friends actually living in the Factory inhabiting his life, or house psychologically.  So Andy was uncomfortable with his situation but as he equates terrorism of the sort inflicted on the psychiatrists as ‘having fun’ he was amused.  Nevertheless when the Factory moved in 1968 he cut these people off from him.
Andy’s account of the banquet was recorded in his memoir POPism pp.  146-147:
I was invited to speak at the annual banquet of the New York Society For Clinical Psychiatry by the doctor who was chairman of the event.  I told him I’d be glad to ‘speak’ if I could do it though movies, that I’d show Harlot and Henry Geldzahler and he said fine.  Then when I met the Velvets I decided that I wanted to speak with them instead, and he said fine to that too.
So one evening in the middle of January everybody in the Factory went over to the Delmonico Hotel where the banquet was taking place.  We got there just as it just was starting.  There were about three hundred pychiatrists and their mates and dates- and all they’d been told was that they were going to see movies after dinner.  The second the main course was served, the Velvets started to blast and Nico started to wail.  Gerard and Edie jumped up on the stage and started dancing, and the doors flew open and Jonas Mekas and Barbara Rudin with her crew of people with cameras and bright lights came storming into the room and rushing over to the psychiatrists asking them questions like:
‘What does her vagina feel like?’
‘Is his penis big enough?’
‘Do you eat her out?  Why are you getting embarrassed?  You’re a psychiatrist; you’re not supposed to get embarrassed!
Edie had come with Bobby Neuwirth.  While the crews filmed and Nico sang her Dylan song, (I’ll Keep It With Mine) Gerard noticed (and he told me this later) that Edie was trying to sing, too, but even in that incredible din, it was obvious she didn’t have a voice.  He always looked back to that night as the last she ever went out with us in public, except for a party here and there.  He thought she’d felt upstaged that night, that she’d realized that Nico was the new girl in town.
Edie and Nico were so different, there was no good reason to compare them, really.  Nico was so cool, and Edie was so bubbly.  But the sad thing was, Edie was taking a lot of heavy drugs, and she was getting vaguer and vaguer.  Her society lady attitude toward pills had changed to an addict attitude.  Some of her good friends tried to help her, but she couldn’t listen to them.  She said she wanted a “career” and that she’d get one since Grossman was managing her.  But how can you have a career when you don’t have the discipline to work at anything?
Gerard had noticed how lost Edie looked at that psychiatrists’ banquet, but I can’t say I noticed; I was too busy watching the psychiatrists.  They were really upset and some of them started to leave, the ladies in their long dresses and the men in their black ties.  As if the music- the feedback actually- that the Velvets were playing wasn’t enough to drive them out, the movie lights were blinding them and the questions were making them turn red and stutter because the kids wouldn’t let up, they just kept asking for more.  And Gerard did his notorious whip dance.  I loved it all.
And there we have Andy’s version recalled fifteen years later.     His account can be divided into two parts.  On the one hand the banquet and on the other Andy’s blighted relationship, call it an affair of the heart, with Edie.  Andy devotes 22 lines to the banquet and 15 to Edie.
Regardless of what Bob Dylan might now say there was intense competition between he and Andy for the possession of Edie.  That competition complicated by Warhol’s homosexuality and Dylan’s committment in marriage to so Sara Lowndes.  It is doubtful that Warhol could have maintained a relationship without paying physical attention to Edie although it is not impossible that some modus vivendi could have been worked out.  Certainly in the case of P.G. Wodehouse and his wife such an arrangement was worked out.
Dylan’s intentions were entirely dishonorable.  He was too self-centered to maintain a relationship with any woman except wholly on his terms.  Not only would he consider marriage only with a Jewish woman

Dylan

and that solely to fulfull a religious obligation to be fruitful and multiply, but he divided women into two classes, Madonnas and sluts.  Sara was his Madonna and all other women were sluts to be used solely for his pleasure.  Thus he could not have respected Edie.
He also had a serious mother problem.  Sometime around puberty his mother told him that he had blighted her plans for living life as she wanted by being born.  In other words he was an encumbrance to her life as a free spirit.  Thus his attitude toward himself and life took a dark turn about the age of twelve.  For some reason, perhaps ‘her fogs, her amphetamines and her pearls’ Edie reminded Dylan of his mother’s wish for the high life.  Now, it is absolutely taboo for a man to punish his mother so men take out their animosity to their mothers  on other women, hence all these serial killers of women, mother surrogates.  So, Dylan was essentially punishing his mother through Edie.

Neuwirth

Edie had walked out on Andy in December of ’65 when she jumped to the Dylan camp in the expectation that Dylan and Grossman were going to do something for her in the way of a ‘career’, especially something that involved a large paycheck.  As I have pointed out elsewhere there were many things that could have been done to capitalize on Edie’s extraordinary unearned fame.  There was money to be made there but either Grossman and Dylan lacked the imagination or they merely wanted to remove the girl from Warhol’s sphere and then to hell with her.
The latter is what was done.  Dylan had passed her to his sidekick Bobby Neuwirth and thus it was Neuwirth who escorted Edie to the banquet.  Warhol notes this then ruefully mentions that Nico, who was now in his camp, was singing the song Dylan wrote and gave to her.
Dylan had met Nico in Greece a couple years earlier when she was really depressed.  He wrote I’ll Keep It With Mine and gave it to her as her song.  In the video clip linked above the Velvet Underground are playing Venus In Furs.  The cacophany would have driven the psychiatrists out so I doubt they would have listened to more than one song.  Andy is misremembering and projecting.  Dylan had been a thorn in his side and would continue to be.  Indeed, after Neuwirth and Edie reported the spectacular doings at the banquet Dylan showed up at the Factory a couple of days later to get a fuller report.
Edie, on the the video clip, does look a little lost on stage but as it was crowded so does Malanga.  If Nico was trying to sing there was no chance she could have been heard.  Andy is clearly still suffering from Edie’s abandonment.  In his diary for 1977 he mentions meeting Neuwirth at a party where they discuss a couple of Neuwirth’s old girl firends, one of which was Edie.  As Edie was as close to love as Andy could get he had to resent Dylan for taking her away.
The situation with the psychiatrists was evidently secondary in his mind to Edie, but the event had been carefully planned, nothing that happened there was accidental.  This event would set the tone for the next few decades; a new direction in impolite social discourse had been established.  Nor was this an isolated event without consequences, the psychiatrists must have gone away steaming with vengeance on their minds.
Chapter 11
From Out Of The Looney Bin

The Man Of A Thousand Faces

In a different context Sam Cooke was singing A Change Is Gonna Come while Bob Dylan was singing The Times They Are A Changin’ and it may have been the Byrds who were chanting Change Is Now, all normal conditions.  Currently there’s a song which has a video that simulates an insane asylum in which the inmate screams:  ‘There’s nothing wrong with me, there’s nothing wrong with me, there’s nothing wrong with me and then the lead singer comes in screaming four times ‘Something’s gotta give, somthing’s gotta give, somethings’s gotta give, somethings gotta give.’  The banquet was where these two worlds collided…Worlds In Collision.  The irresistible force met the immovable object.
There was a premonition of this evolution  a year or so earlier when Dylan got up to receive the Tom Paine award from the pre-Khruschev Communists and roundly insulted them as old fogies.  Well, you know, the times they were a changin’.

Sigmund Alone Is His Study

Let’s take a look at the psychiatrists.  First it may be necessary to explain the difference between Depth or Freudian psychology and psychiatry.  You don’t need a medical degree to practice psychology, you do to practice psychiatry.  Freudians essentially believe that there is a gap between perception and reality in the mind caused by cognitive dissonance while psychiatrists believe the gap is caused by a physical malfunction somewhere in the brain that can be solved by surgical means, drugs or some external stimulation like electro-shock therapy, to what is an internal perceptual problem.
Hence Edie who really had nothing wrong with her except inexperience with the world was subjected to electro-shock therapy; Lou Reed whose homosexuality was beyond medical treatment was also subjected to electro-shock.  The psychiatrists at one time thought that teeth caused mental problems proposing to alleviate the symptoms by pulling all a poor wretches teeth.  In addition some perverted genius came up with the idea of pre-frontal lobotomies, and he wasn’t a Nazi doctor either, while one had a choice between electro-shock and the equally if not more bizarre insulin shock therapy.
In addition the drugs psychiatrists give to their patients have side effects more serious than the original ailment.  One has to remember that the Dr. Feelgoods such as Max Jacobson and Dr. Roberts, MDs while not psychiatrists, were giving super massive doses of amphetamines to everyone from the President of the United States on down.  Edie received massive doses from Dr. Roberts who was himself

Her Fogs Her Amphetamines And Her Pearls

befuddled by drugs.
Dr. Max Jacobson is a horror story.
Is it any wonder that the Factory hands were rebelling against the pyschiatrists?  Who were these psychiatrists?  As this was 1966 it must be true that over half were Jews, the so-called smartest people in the world, while of those Jews, I’m only guessing, fully half must have been Central and East European Jews who had emigrated during the Hitler years, many probably with very doubtful credentials.  The difference between Dr. Mengele and the Nazi doctors with these psychiatrists is minimal in my mind.
What sort of madmen would subject victims to massive electrical charges and expect beneficial results?  Besides these guys were probably all on drugs anyway.  And these psychiatrists had absolute authority, no different than the Nazi doctors, over those committed to their care.  I mean, there was no way for a patient to question or appeal his treatment.
Now, who were the Factory people.  What exactly are we dealing with here?  A bunch of loonies with Andy Warhol presiding as the Magister Ludi.  Andy, a pervert of the first magnitude.
When Warhol came to New York in 1950 from Pittsburgh he was no longer willing to conceal his homosexuality as he had had to do back home.  He arrived in New York an open homo.  Nor was he ever willing to compromise on what he was.  The avant garde of NYC was homo almost to a man.  The painters Warhol most wanted to impress were also homos but they abjured the lisp and mince not feeling the need to display their sexuality on their sleeves.  They rejected Andy because he did.
One, there’s nothing wrong with me.
Two, there’s nothing wrong with me.
Three, there’s nothing wrong with me.
Four, there’s nothing wrong with me.
Andy bore the insults but he patiently worked to impose his values as well as his art on society.
One, something’s got to give.
Two, something’s got to give.
Three, something’s got to give.
Four, something’s got to give.
In line with that approach he organized the Factory which was a homosexual clubhouse and promotional tool.  Essentially that is what the psychiatrists wanted to question.  While the posters, or paintings if you prefer, were more sexually neutral as soon as Andy had the necessary celebrity he began to make prodigiously boring movies that weren’t that good but avant gardists felt obliged to respect.  I mean, there are boring movies and then there are politically correct boring movies.  The audacity of his film Blow Job, the title was enough to undermine then morality, forced his notions on at least the college generation.  Whether the blower was seen, was male or female, was irrelevant;  Andy was promoting oral sex.  In his later years his pictures would become even more openly homosexually erotic.
The impact of that movie, whether you’d seen it or not, was enormous, liberating many repressed eyes.  So Warhol and his fellow fags, viz.  Rotten Rita, at the Factory were revolutionists leading up to the sharp, short battle of the Stonewall Tavern on Christopher Street, the ultimate fag street in the world, in 1969 that overthrew the entire restrictive attitude toward homosexuals in one fell swoop across the entire United States.  It was one of the worst things that ever happened.
The homo revolution didn’t stop there.  Pyschiatrists and psychologists still recognized homosexuality for what it is, a mental psychosis.
One, there’s nothing wrong with me.
Two, something’s got to give.
Three, let the bodies hit the floor.
The idea that they were ‘sick’ oppressed the homosexual psyche so they mau-mau’d psychiatrists in much the same manner Warhol had except that they were much more violent.  Just as the lesbians took over the feminist movement by showing up with baseball bats and threatening to beat the shit out of anyone who disgreed with them, so the homos treated the pyschologists compelling the wimps to drop the psychosis business.
Let the bodies hit the floor.
Let the bodies hit the floor.
Let the bodies hit the floor.
Let the bodies hit the floor.
So, as the psychiatrists let Warhol in the door he decided to take full advantage of them giving them a dose of their own medicine, so to speak.  At first he apparently intended to bore them to death with his stupid movies, but then, as he said, when he associated himself with the Velvet Underground a new plan took shape in his mind.  A new form of electro-shock therapy at 180 decibels.
The Velvets were a product of the avant garde.  John Cale the violinist was a protogee of the terminally boring ‘One Note’ La Monte Young.  Young was a devotee of the dynamo hum.  As a child he used to stand around the old transmission stations and listen to the transformers hum.   In those days the transformers used to spark and keep up a stead unvarying hum.  It was really something to hear.  The sparking and hum would probably have reminded Lou Reed of the juice flowing through him.  It was a great sound, very mesmerizing, but I never became as obsessed with it as La Monte Young.  Anyway Young’s avant gardism was based on the dynamo hum and the Velvets one chord music was based on La Monte Young.  I’m sure there’s a joke in there somewhere but I haven’t found it yet.  It is laughable though.
The good news is, through the wonders of the internet time machine you can listen to the Velvet’s

Lou Running A Temperature

performance (here).  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNwp4nNTeJg
While warhol informed Dr. Campbell of the movies and the Velvets he didn’t say anything to them about Jonas Mekas and Barbara Rubin or the mocking Factory hands.
Jonas Mekas is an interesting character.  He came to the United States after WWII.  He had moved through various Displaced Persons camps in West Germany in the vile post-war years before emigrating.  I’m not clear on his ethnicity but he’s probably Jewish.  Once in NY, arriving at nearly the same time as Andy, he associated himself with the avant garde eventually emulating the Cinematheque Francaise when the experimental film makers of NY began creating a body of work.
A cinematheque is a library of films.  The French version was begun in the 1930s by Henri Langlois.  After a period of vicisssitudes caused by the war the archives of the Cinematheque Francaise has become a major archive of tens of thousands of films.  Mekas began collecting avant garde NY films on a much smaller scale of course but Warhol’s films were so marginal that many thought Mekas should exclude them  Mekas stood up for Andy exhibiting his films without which help Warhol films would have been consigned then and there to the dustbin of history.   Even more so than they have been.
Mekas at this time was employing a Jewish woman named Barbara Rubin as his assistant.  Rubin was marginally sane exhibiting all the sexual obsessions of the unbalanced.  The previous year she had made a film entitled Christmas On Earth.  Her Christmas on earth was envisioned as a huge sexual orgy, not with a cast of thousands, but a lot.  A few stills are available on the internet but I haven’t found any video clips.   Interestingly Andy’s assistant and collaborator, Gerard Malanga, had a prominent role.
Mekas did film this psychiatric spectacle but the film is locked away from human eyes.  God only knows why.

John Cale as Old Hipster Contemplating The Dynamo Hum

It might be appropriate to say something here about Gerard Malanga.  I might have to repeat myself at some later date but, you know, I’m 73 and there might not be a later date so I’ll say it now and perhaps later if I’m still around to tell the tale.  Malanga at this time at the beginning of 1966 was being placed in a difficult situation.  Within New York circles he was considered a poet of some distinction, he wasn’t just Andy’s helper.  He added luster to the Factory being much more than one of Andy’s vagrant perverts.  He was instrumental in the success of Warhol’s silk screen period.  As I’ve mentioned before Andy’s silk screens are little more than posters.  Andy was very lucky in finding associates who could advance his projects.  I mean Malanga, Mekas, Edie, Bob Colacello, Fred Hughes, Paul Morrissey, how lucky can you get?
When modern (60s) posters began they were travel posters fostered by jet setting.  During the early sixties they were de riguer, everyone had a couple.  Then the big personality posters came in with the Ben Day dots.  These were really impressive and something more, 36×24, and only cost a dollar.  Of course, a dollar back then was really something too, but what a bargain.  Then the Fillmore and Family Dog posters began appearing coupled with the fabulous East Totem West.  These were all printed.  Now, when I emphasize these posters don’t think they were universally accepted, they pervaded only the hip or Bohemian culture.  The were looked on aghast by the straight world.  Strangely, as though from another planet.
By 1966-67 black light designs were becoming prominent, those were mostly silk screened in flourescent colors and then they added flocking a little later.  Under a black light you were talking mind blowing.  With fluorescent colors and silk screen paints some fabulous designs were produced, usually priced at 3.00 but big.  These things really flipped the straights.
So when Andy began silk screening about 1963 he knew next to nothing of the process, however Gerard

Gerard

Malanga, who he now hired as his assistant, did.  There were mechanically operated screening machines capable of turning out unlimited quantities of copies but Warhol and Malanga used a manual method allowing for more variations in results.  At this stage then, Malanga became a collaborator making material suggestions as well as supplying knowledgeable labor.
Gerard also took Andy around to cultural events, poetry readings, and such thus broadening Andy’s rather limited cultural background.  Andy hired Gerard at the minimum wage and never over the years did he raise wages over the minimum wage level.
Gerard profited by his association with Andy becoming something of a figure in the avant garde scene without ever becoming the celebrity that Edie became.  He was in several of Andy’s movies as well as the Rubin sexcapade.  However as his fame and presence in the New York scene grew he faced the same problem Edie had.  He didn’t have the money to enjoy his celebrity.  Sixty dollars a week or so wasn’t going to take him very far.  So, what to do?
Andy ran off large numbers of impressions of his posters, none of these were originals.  For an exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in LA ( there’s a movie available on the Ferus and the LA avant garde)  he sent off a two hundred foot roll of Presleys advising them to cut it up as they saw fit.  He had a stack of Marilyns leaning against the wall that a women came in and put a bullet through Marilyns forehead through the whole stack.  Andy occasionally gave pictures away.  He either gave or let Bob Dylan appropriate one for his screen test.
There was value in these copies laying around so Gerard felt himself entitled to take some to supplement his income.  When he was stranded in Europe he even created an original, the Che Guevara Warhol and sold them.
How is one to view this?  In my estimation one has two types of Warhols.  One has on the one side Warhol-Malangas and on the other Malanga-Warhols.  In one case the screens are collaborative efforts, on the other Malanga originals.  While the Guevaras are considered fakes or counterfeits I think they have every claim to authenticity as Warhols even though they were conceived and executed in whole by Malanga.  Gerard also later either took or produced other posters which he sold.  These are now considered fakes by the Warhol Trust under Fred Hughes.  Maybe.  But Gerard was entitled to better compensation than Andy was giving him while the screens or posters were as much Gerard’s labor and input as Andy’s.
So, whatever, but beginning in 1966 and the move into the performance art of Andy’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable and trips to LA Gerard was woefully underpaid.  He was virtually a Warhol partner in my estimation.
At the banquet he performed his whip dance while Edie bopped around.
Thus, just as the waiters brought around the roast beef, string beans and new potatoes, and they called that a banquet, the inmates of the asylum burst through the doors, this is the entire Factory crowd of reprobates, to harass the unsuspecting psychiatrists.  They threw down their knives and forks streaming for the doors.
Miss Glueck in the NYTimes began spreading what was an amazing story via her commentary in the paper.  This was sensational.
Chapter 12
A Scandal In Bohemia

Andy And Gerard

I’m sure Andy’s audacious incivility was the talk of the town for a few days.  While not exactly getting away with a crime the whole fabric of civil discourse was shredded.  The word of what Andy had gotten away with quickly spread across the country in homosexual and/or revolutionary circles.  It was learned that you could disrupt anything without consequences and in the long run it would prove that these disrupters and obstructionists would profit mightily.  Certainly by the turn of the century there were few of them  who weren’t in enviable positions.  With the election of Obama the  Weather terror underground was in control of the country.  They had gotten away with it and pulled it off under the very eyes of the authorities.  Andy himself died in 1987 a very wealthy man.  Today his estate under the management of Fred Hughes is worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
A plethora of people and organizations emerged who were quite willing to disregard everyone else’s rights and desires to impose their own on all.  This may have begun with the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, which had nothing to do with free speech, in which a small group of dissidents upset the University of California bringing education to a halt.  They were accommodated.  In the end the dissidents were in control, not the regents, temporarily at least.  Today, of course, the student body of UC is nearly entirely Asian and the whole brouhaha has absolutely no relevance.  It’s their university, now.  That magnficent library of the European heritage has absolutely no relevance to them.  The Asian library is terrific too.

Bomber Billy Ayers

The Free Speech Movement was expanded out into the terrorist organization Students For A Democratic Society, which had nothing to do with democracy, but the imposition of a narrow view of bigots,  and an assault was made on the entire university system of the country.  This attempt failed, most notably at the Chicago Democratic Convention of ’68 where they made fools of themselves, but from which came the criminal and evil Bomber Billy Ayers and his Weather Underground which today has captured the Presidency of the United States.  The dissidents are now distributing the largess in an authoritarian manner.
While symptomatic of the larger picture and part of that picture on the local level in New York, Andy was even more influential.  New York Bohemianism itself has managed to impose its ideals on the entire culture and that largely through Warhol’s efforts.  It is interesting however to note that George Du Maurier, the late nineteenth century author, thought that such an event would be beneficial.  Boy, did George get that wrong.
I haven’t read an account of Bohemia that wasn’t written by a Bohemian or someone sympathetic to Bohemia.  Thus the romance of Bohemia supplants the reality.  This is not recent either, the roots are deep into the nineteenth century.  Henri Murger’s The Bohemians Of The Latin Quarter celebrates Bohemianism in early nineteenth century Paris.  Puccini based his opera, La Vie Boheme on Murger’s book.  Dumas and Balzac both have a Bohemian outlook.  Perhaps the most famous celebrator and believer in Bohemianism was the late nineteenth century author George Du Maurier.  His three novels- Peter Ibbetson, Trilby and The Martian are a perfect example of sentimental Bohemianism and well worth reading.
Du Maurier’s Bohemia and Bohemianism was before drugs became ubiquitous or Freudian sexual attitudes became predominate although something like them existed at the time, but there was a civility of sorts that prevailed but has since disappeared.   As Warhol put it, in the sixties people forgot what emotions were and haven’t recovered them since.
With the sixties civility came to an end.  The criminal element and mentality prevailed in the Bohemia of Warhol’s time while Andy himself had a sadistic attitude.  His term for disruptive or anti-social behavior was ‘having fun.’
Perhaps Edie is symptomatic of the descent into madness, a modern day La Dame Aux Camellias.  the scene in the Village was an embarrassment for ‘respectable’ New Yorkers.  Underneath the antics of the Bohos real crime seethed, child brothels flourished, the drug scene was no laughing matter as movies like the French Connection attest.  The scene was mild compared to what it would become after Stonewall and the invasion of what New Yorkers called Eurotrash into the seventies and eighties.  The degenerate behavior was called ‘partying.’   As the saying goes:  they really did kick out the jams.
Still the early sixties was bad enough that the city authorized the police to clean up the Village for the ’64 World’s Fair so as not to offend the tourists.  So things weren’t just a little offbeat.  As I said, by ’66 the more destructive aspects of drug use was beginning to tell.  It’s not that people were beginning to lose self-control, Andy’s emotions, they had forgotten what controls were.  A process of devolution was in effect that would be recognized by the 70’s rock band, Devo.  They asked the musical question, echoing the refrain of the vivisected beasts on H.G. Wells’ Island Of Dr. Moreau, Are We Not Men?  the band Devo’s answer was no, we are not evolving we are devolving.  But, the country had a seemingly infinite capacity to assimilate any kind of outrageous behavior without making any move to correct it.  A moral paralysis had set in.  Everyone joined it, the money men would loot the entire Savings and Loan industry of every last dollar and nobody even seemed interested in who got that trillion dollars.  So what, hey?
Thus, when Andy mau-mau’d the psychiatrists in what was an unheard of way at the time without so much as a reproof the word rippled down the line and the rowdies, posing as revolutionists or whatever, sat up and took notice.  Their day had come.   The day of the locust.

Andy And Fred Hughes

In some ways the Stonewall Riot of ’69 in which the homos faced down the NYPD was an extension of Warhol’s mau-mauing the psychiatrists and from then on society had no method devised to counter it.  In reaction to this deviant and puerile behavior for which there was apparently no legal remedy a spirit of vigilantism invaded society compounding the chaos.  Dirty Harry, the lone avenger, made his appearance on the screen; Charles Bronson’s Death Wish movies captured the imagination of put upon society turning a legion of nut cakes loose.  Bomber Billy Ayers and his Weather Underground vented his and their personal frustrations on society.  But, then, society had already been corrupted.
I watched the corruption develop with Du Maurier’s sentimental Bohemianism in mind as partially seen through Maynard Krebs of the Dobie Gillis TV series and I recognized that the problems were emanating from New York but I wasn’t quick enough to see the difference between sentimental and practical Bohemianism.  Perhaps if I had read William S. Burroughs at the time I would have seen the danger more clearly.  As Dylan sang:  There’s something happening here but you don’t know what it is, do you.  He didn’t either although he may have thought he did.  Let the bodies the hit the floor.
For Warhol there must have been consequences to his insulting the psychiatrists.  When the inmates seize control there must be a reaction.  The Factory’s reputation was becoming more tarnished with every passing day.  Even Warhol tried to escape by leaving for LA  with the Velvets and then Arizona to make one of his porn movies.  Nineteen sixty-five had been the Factory’s apogee.  But as that party ended a new party was beginning but I suspect the offended psychiatrists used what influence they had to gain revenge.  When Warhol’s lease came up for renewel in 1968 the City condemned the building forcing Warhol out.  Fortunately for Andy New York was in decline with landlords walking away from unleaseable buildings.  These empty buildings created ‘squats’ which the indigents possessed as public property on ‘squatters rights.’  These empty buildings figure prominently in the movie Midnight Cowboy.
Warhol had no trouble finding other quarters.  Although an inconvenience, the forced move worked to Andy’s advantage.  Andy had already determined it was time to move on and leave the fantasy of the Silver Factory behind.  A new approach was evolving in his mind.  Fred Hughes knew there was money to be made from Andy’s reputation and he was going after it.  He should have been there when Edie was worth money.
Unfortunately at this time in mid-sixty-eight Andy’s dangerous sadistic game playing of the past rose up to haunt him in the form of Valerie Solanis.  She showed up at the new ‘White’ factory and put a bullet or two into Andy’s body.  The body hit the floor.  It was a terrible shooting.  A bullet managed to pass through nearly every organ  except the heart.  The shots from her gun actually did kill Andy.  He was legally dead for a minute and a half before the doctors got his electricity flowing again.
Nineteen sixty-eight was the year of the big revolution.  The only problem with that was that it only happened in the minds of the the so-called revolutionaries; still a change of direction did take place.  Andy departed one world and awoke in another.  He was born again.
For Edie 1966 ended her brief but glorious reign as The Girl Of The Year and began her terrifically horrorous spiral into oblivion.  Her fame would destroy her.

All The Fame Anybody Needs

Tell ’em Andy

Posted in Aldous Huxley, Bob Dylan, Folk Music, Jews, Psychology, R.E. Prindle, Rock And Roll, Uncategorized, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

A Review, Pt. 10: Tarzan The Invincible by Edgar Rice Burroughs

November 21, 2010

A Review

Themes And Variations

The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs

#14  Tarzan The Invincible

by

R.E. Prindle

Part 10

The Prohpet- Edgar Rice Burroughs

Religion: Standing On The Promises

Even though at the beginning of the novel Burroughs says he does not consider Politics and Religion suitable topics for fiction- unless highly fictionalized- the two topics seem to constitute a major portion of his work.

The Great One does not feel called upon to exhibit a foolish consistency.   In Invincible the first sentence is:  I am no historian.  In Tarzan Triumphant he says: ‘Being merely a simple historian and no prophet…’   So in the few months between Invincible and Triumphant he has gone from no historian to a mere simple one while hinting that while he is no prophet he may become one.  We can’t be certain what the future holds in store for him.  I’ve already sensed that he is a prophet.  Tarzan is the god and Edgar Rice Burroughs is his prophet.  So much for Mohammed being the end of the prophetic line.

Under cover of fiction Triumphant will deal extensively with the Jewish and Christian religions so this might be an appropriate place to review some aspects of the history and nature of religion.

Evolution occurs on many levels other than the biological.  The biological naturally controls all other forms of evolution.  The species has developed from a time of pre-hominid ancestors that must at some time have diverged from that of the other anthropoids as unpleasant as that may be for a certain type of mind although, for the life of me, I can’t imagine why.  One of the more significant areas of evolution has been that of the brain.  Nothing should be clearer than that the brain of HSIII is superior to the brain of the first Homo Sapiens and species which evolved from the Last Hominid Predecessor.  I mean gorillas must have a relatively primitive brain.

There is no reason for this not to be so.  The brain of the infant Homo Sapiens continues to develop outside the womb until at least the early twenties.  At each stage the ability of the brain to function increases.  As above, so below; as in the macro so in the micro.

Thus as in each stage of evolution from the first Homo Sapiens to the present most highly evolved specimen Homo Sapiens III, abilities to think and function have increased.  Thus HS’s understanding of the world and universe are immeasurably different from the first Homo Sapiens model.  I can’t imagine anyone who would dissent from that conclusion.

Now, except for the intermingling of human species certain human species would still be unacquainted with the approximately true nature of the world and universe that we have attained.  I don’t see how this can be disputed.  Without European influence the rest of the world would still think the earth was flat.  These are facts whether one likes them or not.  Indeed, even among the most advanced human species there are very large numbers who resist the scientific explanation of nature. These people still prefer the atavistic, antiquated religious Semitic explanation of natural phenomena.  These people can barely accept the notion of a heliocentric solar system, many don’t.  Why should anyone pay attention to them?

If one accepts that Homo Sapiens is 150K to 200K years old then it seems to me impossible that all human  intellectual development has occurred in the last ten thousand years.  Weapons of some sort have been in existence for many tens of thousands of years if not from the beginning of Homo Sapiens having been evolved from the Last Hominid Predecessor.  It seems evident to me that a highly developed civilization existed in the Med Basin beginning c. 100K years ago.  That doesn’t mean they had advanced Science it merely means that they had an organized society with relatively sophisticated thought processes and tools.  Religion is basically an attempt to understand and make order of the world.  All interpretations of the natural order must be based on that order.

Hence the North Polar stars which never set are the basis of religion.  The Polar stars rotate about the Pole over a period of some 25K odd years forming what is called a Great Year.  The Great year was made to conform to the terrestrial year of twelve months therefore being divided into twelve periods called Ages.

The Great Year with it twelve Ages formed the basis of religion.  We will call that religion the Astrological Religion.  Thus the religion goes back for tens of thousands of years as Sumerian records indicate.  These Ancients did not make up their lives or talk through the backs of their necks.

Each Age of the Astrological Religion had its male and female religious archetypes.  These are, perhaps most easily traced as far back as four ages, possibly five, in the Greco-Cretan mythology.  The historical ages are the Taurian, Arien, Piscean and the next, the Aquarian.  I am not a New Ager although I see no reason to disparage them and I am in sympathy with the outlook.  One may say that I am of the Astrological religious tradition as we will see, I think, was Edgar Rice Burroughs.

In ancient days the Hom Sapiens species were separated each having distinct territories so that in the Darwinian sense they were not yet in conflict.  When the last Ice Age came to an end flooding the Med Basin- this is not speculation, but fact- the civilization of the Basin was forced to higher ground bringing them into contact with the highland savages from West to East.  Thus civilization as we now know it began.

The first settlers of Mesopotamia brought the Astrological Religion with them or, according to Mesopotamian mythology a man-god named Oannes- the name Oannes evolved into Johannes or John- appeared from the sea to teach them the rudiments of civilization and the Astrological Religion.  Immense amounts of lore must have been lost, that is forgotten,  so perhaps that is where the legend of the Lost Word comes in.

Now, off to the East on the Arabian Peninsula a different species lived.  These were called the Semites or would be after the later Hebrews so named them after their mythical ancestor, Shem.  Mere desert dwellers the Semites were attracted to the glitter of the Astrological Religion.  There is no evidence that the Semites had a civilization or anything that could be called an actual culture of their own.  They merely mimicked the existing culture infiltrating it much as Europe and America are being infiltrated today by their descendants.  Eventually they will succeed the European civilization just as their ancestors did the Sumerian.

The evidence is that they had no religious forms of their own so that they attempted to take over both the physical and cultural edifices of their predecessor civilization, the Sumerian.

The Semites did not have the same mental organization or capabilities as their predecessors so they could maintain neither the civilization nor the religion.  The major conflict came at the transition from the Age of Taurus to the Age of Aries.  Here is where the real conflict between the Semites and Indo-Europeans or  the Semites and HSII & III begins to take its historical form.

When the Astrological Age changes the religious archetypes change.  For instance Cronus had been succeeded by Zeus at the transition from Taurus to Aries.  Zeus himself was succeeded by Jesus the Christ at the transition from Aries to Pisces.  Zeus would have been succeeded by Dionysus but the Semites either had to be accommodated or they forced Jesus of Nazareth on the Age which was later combined with the Kyrios Christos to form the composite deity the Semitic Jesus and Hellenic Christ.  The role of Paul was very important in forcing Jesus of Nazareth on the goyim as Burroughs attests in Triumphant.

As we are now about to transit from Pisces to Aquarius a new set of archetypes will emerge representing the current intellectual and psychological development of Homo Sapiens.

This raises the question of whether Burroughs was merely a simple historian or was he also a prophet.  Is Tarzan his offering for the role of the male archetype for the Aquarian Age?  I think he is.  For those who scoff at such an idea it would be wise to examine Burroughs relation to Mormonism during his stay in Salt Lake City.  If it was possible for Joseph Smith to befuddle the minds of intelligent Westerners with his nonsense in the middle of the nineteenth century, or Mohammed to impose his twaddle even in the seventh, then I see no reson to be amazed that Burroughs would attempt the same thing in the twentieth century.  I mean, look at this stuff for what it is.

Also, believe it or not, I read recently where someone thinks Oprah Winfrey could be the female archetype for the Aquarian Age.  Get out of here.  I don’t whether to laugh or barf.  So, the notion of religious archetypes for the new age is a fairly active one.  Any such discussions are in conflict with Semitism.  So, we’re back to that problem.

Semitism took identifiable form at the transit from Taurus to Aries.

The record of such happenings is, of course, much more recent than the transition from Taurus to Aries.  It could have been made up during the Babylonian captivity.  The Old Testament record was only recorded, perhaps even formulated, after the Captivity which began in 586 BC lasting for only fifty years although rather than return to the pleasure of the temple most Jews remained behind by the waters of Babylon just as their ancestors yearned for the fleshpots of Egypt.

To clarify the nature of human species according to Jewish sources:  The Jews argue that all mankind is derived from Jewish or Hebrew stock.  The only survivors of the great flood were Jews- Noah and his family.  The ancient Hebrews while knowing many cultures knew of only three species or stocks.  They acccordingly named them Hamites, Shemites and Japhetites after sons of Noah.  In their conversations with De Great Lawd which were frequently carried on in public He apparently dispensed information on a need to know basis so he withheld the info on the Mongolids and West African Negroes as no account of them is taken in the descendants of Noah.  A little gap in the perfect knowledge of the Old Testament.

Thus the Old Testament acknowledges the differences between the Semites, the Europeans or Japhetites and the Hamites are more than merely racial, which is to say Cosmetic.  Such an idea is of course in line with genetic learning.

The Med People or HSII devised a fluid religious system that allowed for the development or evolution of the human mind.  In other words they not only accepted but embraced change.  This is a quality of mind not shared by HSI, the Semites or the Mongolids.

Depending on what time period the Semites began the infiltration of Mesopotamia which may have overlapped the Geminian and Taurian Ages or perhaps fell completely within the Taurian Age there would have been no conflict with the Semitic need for stasis and the Astrological allowance for development, evolution or growth.  However, by the time of the transit from Taurus to Aries the Semites had gained political control of Mesopotamia while the religious control was still in the hands of the Aryan priesthood.

Following Astrological precedents the ancient Aryan priesthood wanted to change to the Arien archetypes.  In European Greece where the Semitic influence was lower the transit from Cronus to Zeus was made with only the usual warfare hence the legends of the Cronian Titans and the Olympians.

In Mesopotamia where the Semites were in the ascendant, according to Jewish myhthology, the Terahites, under the tutelage of Abram, disputed the succession with the ancient priesthood.  According to Jewish mythology Abram and the Terahites argued that the religious archetypes were eternal and there was no Astrological tradition.  Thus in the ancient world the Jews were believed to worship Saturn.  If Saturn were the Taurian archetype then this was very likely true as Saturn would then be the basis for the Eternal which the Jews do acknowledge worshipping.

In the Semitic manner, then, the Semitic mind being incapable of  accepting change, having been fully developed before they emerged from the desert, went into opposition to the Astrological Religion.   Thus the conflict changed from a termporal one to a ‘spiritual’ one.  At that point then diaspora was possible without the laws of national identity.  As a spiritual entity, Judaism was born.  The notion of Semitism developed along with  its opposite anti-Semitism.  Christ = Anti-Christ.  Thus the explanation of the origin of this so-called anti-Semitism is simply explained.  In reality Semitism was in conflict with the Astrological Religion and hence was anti-Astrological.  Any other religion must perforce be anti-Semitism.  The struggle then became a struggle for the souls of men as well as their bodies.

Once again in direct conflict Europe and Asia began a long theological dispute.  As the Piscean transition progressed the Semites began their attempt to convert the Astrological religion to Semitism.  They were effective in shutting down intellectual inquiry which is the motive force for change.  We will see this again in the nineteenth century efforts of Marx, Freud and Einstein.

As the ancient world ended, its religious legatees were the Catholic Church and Judaism.  All other ancient religions disappeared from the face of the earth except in ineffective remnants or underground movements.

It is interesting that fourteen hundred years after being forbidden the Arien Age worship of Zeus has been made lawful again in Greece.  There’s really no place in the Aquarian Age for the Olympian pantheon but it is an interesting atavistic attempt reviving as it were the struggle between the Arien Age religions of Olympia and Israel.

Gradually the Egyptian and Anatolian elements of the Christian manifestation of the Piscean archetypes have been displaced in favor of the Semitic models.  The Catholic Church was able to contain the Semitic influence in Europe from the end of the Western Roman Empire to the Age of the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  The Enlightenment let Simitism loose on the world again.

While the Roman Empire militarily defeated the political entity of Jerusalem from 66 AD to 135 AD the battle weakened the Empire allowing in Asiatic influences like the Emperor Heliogabalus.  Then in the seventh century AD the present form of the struggle between Europe and Asia took form when the prophet Mohammed formed the Moslem Religion based largely on its predecessor religion, Judaism.

The Moslems stormed across North Africa into Spain and France where they were stopped at Tours by Charles The Hammer.  It took nearly one thousand years to drive the Moslems from France and Spain which result was finally obtained in 1492.

As the Moors were driven from Europe by Ferdinand and Isabella they also expelled the Semitic Jews.  In the evolutionary sense this was the other correct response to an invasion of a competing species.  The other, of course, would have been extermination.  Thus at this stage of European history they were responding in an evolutionarily correct manner.  England had expelled the Jews in 1190 and France in 1307.  The various small German States fluctuated in their attitude sometimes expelling sometimes readmitting.  There were always German States that allowed Semites.  Otherwise the great mass of European Semites lived in the no-mans land between Russia and Germany that would after Russian annexation be called the Pale of the Settlement meaning this area was roped off for Jewish residence.

While these actions may have been evolutionarily correct and probably even politically correct the defensive party seldom thinks in such grand terms as evolutionary inevitability.  So, really, in evolutionary terms the only correct response is extermination.  The Shona of Zimbabwe fully understand this principle.  I say this to show I am not springing anything new or unusual on you.  These natural responses are going on today in Zimbabawe, South Africa, South and West Sudan, Indonesia, in former Yugoslavia where Moslems are exterminating non-Moslems.  If you don’t believe these things, open your eyes, open your eyes.

Now, wars do not end after seeming victory.  The expelled Moslems of Spain continued the war establishing the Barbary Pirates who then preyed on Europe for the next three hundred years plundering and enslaving Europeans.  The actual invasion of North Africa first by Spain and then by France was an attempt to end this savage warfare.

Burroughs would have been brought up on the legend of millions for defense but not one cent for tribute as was my generation.  Until recently I believed that Americans had ended Barbary piracy.  This was just something we were told in the fourth grade.  Actually the Barbary pirates were put down only in 1830 when France conquered and annexed Algeria.

France at that time ought to have either exterminated or driven out the Moslems.  Having once expelled them, if they had had the power, they should have swept across North Africa, as the Moslems had done, driving the Moslems before them until they had reached Suez.

Thus Africa would have been reclaimed for Europe.  First it was held by the HSII survivors of the Med Basin flooding, then the Semitic-Carthaginians, then HSII Romans and back again to the Semitic Arabs.  So such a preemption was certainly historically justified.  The Moslems make a great noise about the Crusades but the modern problem was their offense of the Eruption From The Desert.  Get straight.

At the same time the Jewish and Arab Semitic struggles were going on  the yeast of the suppressed religions of the Middle East and philosophies of Greece were converting the Europeans from Semitic stasis to Aryan intellectual activity.  The Eastern Roman Empire fell at the time of the expulsion of the Jews and Moslems from Spain.  Scholars flooded out of the East.  These Egyptian, Greek and Syrian influences burst forth in the seventeenth and eighteenth century as the Enlightenment.  Previously the discussion had been between the Semitic reigions of Judaism, Moslemism and Christianity.  The level of human consciousness between the three was nearly equal although still retaining some measure of the Astrological Religion.  This is a very serious subject for study.  Christianity, such as it was, was intellectually superior.  Remember, however, that Catholicism was so imbued with the limited Semitic intellect that the Pope made Galileo deny the notion of a heliocentric system.

The release of the Scientific Consciousness after the long suppression of several hundreds of years put the inferior religious consciousnesses on the defensive.  The Semitic counterattack going on today is the culmination of the Jewish response to the Enlightenment.  It is imperative that a Scientific offensive be made against this anterior and surpassed form of the evolution of human consciousness.  As in the past a victory cannot be achieved without a perhaps bloody and costly struggle.  Such as is going on now.

We, you readers, Burroughs and I, are concerned with the middle of the Englightenment period here, say from 1890 to 1935.  I think we will see that Edgar Rice Burroughs is deeply and constructively involved in this struggle between the Religious and Scientific Consciousnesses.

As I’ve noted before, the Christian response to the scientific challenge was to declare either the Pope or the Bible infallible. Protestants didn’t have a Pope so they declared the Bible infallible.  Same thing.  American Liberals who evolved from the Puritan/Abolitionist nexus essentially became secular religionists.  It is to be remembered that the Puritans the Liberals evolved from considered themselves neo-Hebrews hence the new Chosen People.  According to John Adams as Neo-Hebrews they even rejected the celebration of Christmas.  Thus Liberals tend to give science  a religious spin rejecting Christianity.

The Jews on the other hand confronted by a hard edged Science that could not be bent to Semitic ideas decided to co-opt Science perverting it so that it resembles their religion.  All these responses have been taking place since the French Revolution of 1789 which emancipated the Jews removing them from Roman Catholic control.

As I pointed out in an earlier essay there was a brilliant episode on the TV show Twilight Zone in which monks had captured and imprisoned Satan.  They made the mistake of allowing a lost traveler to stay the night in the monestery.  The monks warned the visitor to pay no attention to the entreaties of the prisoner to release him.  The traveler did not heed the warning and prisoner who was Satan was released again in the world.  A little allegory.

Thus the Revolution and Napoleon emancipated the Jews who immediately began the conquest of Europe.  France was the first to fall.  Karl Marx then hi-jacked Socialism in the name of Communism.  Communism negates change in favor of stasis.  Its story is all regulation and control, no different than Judaism.  An elite administers to the ‘masses’ as the Chosen People administers to the goys.

Just as the Moslems are called to prayer five times a day and the Jews are expected to apply their 613 commands to every action before they take it, so Communism coopts the individual into the collectivity and regulates his every action.

Using Socialism as its cutting edge the way was paved for Communism in Europe.

Burroughs first encountered Socialism on the streets of Chicago as Socialists marched along under their waving red banners.  The scene made an indelible impression on the young boy resulting after the Russian Revolution in his book, Under The Red Flag.  Thus the Semites coopted the political ideology of the next one hundred years.

Science unfolded very quickly in the years following Darwin’s Origin Of Species.  Particularly great progress was made in the scientific understanding of the mind.  Psychology then was coopted by the Jew, Sigmund Freud.  It is rather difficult to understand why all research seems to have been channeled through Freudianism.  A rather fecund area of research seems to have been enveloped into one train of thought.

Freud quickly established his version of the static ‘unconscious’ as the sole vision of the mind.  He demoted the conscious mnd to a position of irrelvance.  His intention is quite clear.  The conscious mind is the engine of change.  By emphasizing the static unconscious combined with is vision of sex, which is to say only sexual intercourse, he was attempting to disarm the conscious mind and hence stop change or in other words establish stasis.  Success in such a course is not instantaneous so naturally science continues to progress as the pall of the unconscious spreads.  It doesn’t take a genius to understand why scientists are male and white.  Once you have established the fact that scientists will be male and white it becomes necessary to stultify and emasculate white males, thereby establishing stasis.    One would have to be blind not to see that that is exactly what is happening.

In point of fact the unconscious does not have an objective existence.  Its apparent existence is merely a mind in an arrested state of development.  The stasis is caused by fixations from challenges too stressful for the conscious mind to handle.  Once the fixations are dealt with and disappear, which is included in Freud’s understanding of the mind, the mind or personality is allowed to integrate, the Freudian unconscious disappearing.

Freud never integrated his personality remaining under the influence of his ‘unconscious’ so it is possible he didn’t understand the integration of the personality although his disciple, Jung, did.

However in Freud’s hands the unconscious became a weapon in the Semitic attempt to subjugate mankind.  This subjugation is not religious or moral but a matter of one species seeking dominance over the others.  Thus as Marx perverted the science of politics so Freud perverted the science of the mind.  The third perversion of Science was the conquest of physics by Einstein.  As Marx and Freud had interjected Semitic religious concepts into Politics and Psychology so Einstein did the same in Physics.  It matters little that there is some scientific content in the the theories of these men.  Their intent is to subordinate science to religion just as they had done vis-a-vis the Astrological Religion to the Semitic Religion when the Religious Consciousness was supreme.

That Einsten has been able to befog the minds of very intelligent men with his nonsense about the ‘fabric’ of space and time is nothing short of incredible.  Yet, by the second decade of the twentieth century the perverted notions of these three men were directing the course of research in these three essential disciplines.

Thus cored from within the Aryans were made susceptible to the rising time of Wahabi Moslemism that Lothrop Stoddard noted and warned against but which warning was defused due to the machinations of Jewish Semites within Western Civilization.

Running concurrently in the background contra to the Semitic stream was the evolving Astrological Religion.  Just as the evolution of the Dionysiac Archetype of the Age of Pisces developed for hundreds of years within the Arien dispensation of Zeus so the formation of the Aquarian has been taking place in the Age of Pisces.

The Enlightenment with its advance in the development of scientific consciousness was undoubtedly the opening salvo.  Unlike Semitic development the Astrological evolution was not institutionalized.  It is an idea that once set in motion is maintained by volunteers who get the idea and keep it perpetuating.

The principle is known.  For instance the notion that America is a land of immigrants has been allowed to develop to the point of self-destruction.  Of course that notion is constantly forwarded by the Liberal Coalition.  Even though it is obvious to the feeblest intelligence that the land is capable of supporting only a finite number of humans the madness has now reached the point where it is beleived that the whole world can be imported ‘to share what we have.’  One of the most, if not the most, bizarre notions in all history.  Such insanity is difficult to understand.

If one assumes, as one must, that human consciousness has been developing over the 150K years since humans evolved from the Last Hominid Predecessor then this transition to the Aquarian Age is the most dramatic development of history.  All previous stages of evolution have involved the progression from one stage of supernatural religion to another.  In this transition, for the first time, it has been proclaimed that ‘God is dead.’  That is to say a supernatural being who guide’s our destiny.

With the age of Science mankind realizes the true nature of appearances or Nature itself.  The concept of Evolution destroyed the basis of the Semitic religion.  There is no God, no Yahweh, no Allah, no stasis.  Oh, Lord, crikey Massa, don’t put me jail for saying that!  People who still believe in such non-existent deities have not been relegated to the dustbin of history.

Burroughs, and I consider this fairly remarkable, seems to have accepted the New Order of Science upon his first contact with Darwin and Evolution.  To say that ‘God is dead’ creates a vacuum in human consciousness such as the integration of the personality changes one’s mental structure leaving an aching vacancy between the vacation of the old personality and its replacement by the new.  Thus for the last hundred years or so mankind has been seaching for a metaphysical sucessor to the supernatural concept of God.

Just as the Enlightenment may have opened the way to the transition to the new consciousness so men have appeared to direct consciousness into constructive channels.  One of these writing as Burroughs writhed through the years between his marriage and the epiphany that produced his writing career and Tarzan was a man called Levi Dowling writing under the name of Levi.  His effort, I’m certain what he considered his gift to the world, was a work called The Aquarian Gospel Of Jesus The Christ.

I doubt Burroughs read this book although one never knows.  Chicago in the period before Los Angeles was the American hotbed of religious speculation.  One should never overlook that.  Burroughs lived in a welter of religious speculation.  Added to that Burroughs was heavily influenced by Lew Sweetser who was particularly interested and well informed on such topics.  Plus Burroughs lived in Mormonland for a decent period of time making a special visit ot the Mormon capital in 1898, while living in Salt Lake City for several months in 1903-04.  It would be hard to believe that he wasn’t learning of the Mormon doctrines especially how a noodle brain like Joseph Smith was able in the nineteenth century to impose his religious will on thousands of people.

Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, came from an area highly influenced by the fantastic religious notions of the Rhineland Pietistic Germans who became known as the Pennsylvania Dutch in America.  Magazines would have been full of this stuff while the Chicago papers must have covered these religious speculations in detail.  There is no reason to believe that Burroughs’ mind wasn’t filled with these speculations.  Such ideas spill out all over the pages of his books.

Many writers have noted that the initials of John Carter and John Clayton are JC the same as Jesus the Christ.  No Freudian believes in coincidence so there must be an intellectual connection.  Burroughs repeatedly says that the next deity must be a man-god and that is explicitly what Tarzan is.

There is nothing supernatural about Tarzan.  He is completely a man of science.  The most highly involved specimen of humanity ever.  If like Jesus the Christ he doesn’t have a magical birth he certainly has a miraculous upbringing from the age of one.  Unlike Sargon and Moses who were fished from rivers in baskets thus breaking continuity with human predecessors Tarzan was taken from the cradle by an ape thus breaking continuity with human predecessors while establishing a new human paradigm.  He in fact unites nature with civilization or, at least, a thin veneer of it.  Now, this is completely in keeping with the Dionysiac paradigm.

Dionysus has two sides.  The soft feminine side which has characterized the Piscean Age and the wild natural side which is meant to characterize the Aquarian Age.  The undisciplined natural side of human consciousness that the Patriarachy tried to suppress in favor of the strictly rational as characterized by Apollo wouldn’t be suppressed.  As mythology relates it, women could not be rational thus they embraced the Dionysiac religion imposing its ecstasies on society.  The Dionysiac ethos was so strong that it forced itself on the Delphic Oracle in partnership with Apollo.  Thus Delphi came to represent both the rational and irrational sides of consciousness.  The conscious and unconscious if you will.

Thus as the Piscean Age dawned and the religious archetypes changed from Zeus and Hera to Dionysus and Isis the struggle was to keep consciousness or the rational uppermost.  Of course, Dionysus and Isis were supplanted by the Semitic ideals Jesus and his mother, Mary who later became the Mother of God.  Later the Dionysiac Kyrios Christos was grafted onto Jesus of Nazareth and he became Jesus the Christ as Levi Dowling correctly notes.

One can’t be certain how learned Burroughs was in this lore.  He most probably was somewhat read in it while brilliantly intuiting the direction the evolution of consciousness must take.  One can never be sure although there is little in the surviving library to indicate he read deeply in such lore.  But then, so much of his knowledge he does evidence can’t be found in the library either.  Suffice it to say that such knowledge seems to be apparent in his stories.

Needless to say the idea of Tarzan expanded and developed over his career.  The Tarzan of the teens is quite different from the Tarzan of the thirties.  There are a couple of passages in Tarzan Triumphant that make you do a double take.  To wit:  p. 12

…Tarzan with knitted brows, looked down upon the black kneeling at his feet.

“Rise!” he commanded, and then; “Who are you and why have you sought Tarzan Of The Apes?”

“I am Kabarega, O Great Bwana,” replied the black.  “I am chief of the Bangalo people of Bungalo.  I come to the Great Bwana because my people suffer much sorrow and great fear and our neighbors, who are related to the Gallas, have told us that you are the friend of those who suffer wrongs at the hands of bad men.”

So here Tarzan as become a Sultan, a King, an Emperor, a great judge and dispenser of justice; shall we say a god?  Certainly the Lord Of The Jungle.  He also seems to have lost perspective but then, perhaps a god must keep up appearances.  We do have a new imperious Tarzan here who was not in any books before Invincible.

And then in Chapter 13, p. 98 in the Bowlderized Ballantine edition:

The “Gunner” was waiting for him upon the summit of the cliff directly behind the village, and for the second time these strangely dissimilar men met- dissimilar and yet, in some respects alike.  Each was ordinarily quiet to taciturnity, each was self-reliant, each was a law unto himself in his own environment; but there their similarity ceased for the extremes of environment had produced psychological extremes (opposites) as remotely separated as the poles.

The ape-man had been reared amidst scenes of eternal beauty and grandeur, his associates the beast of the jungle, savage perhaps, but devoid of avarice, petty jealousy, treachery, meanness, and intentional cruelty; while the “Gunner” had known naught but the squalid aspects of scenery defiled by man, of horizons grotesque with screaming atrocities of architecture, of an earth hidden by concrete and asphaltum and littered with tin cans and garbage, his associates, in all walks of life activated by grand and petty meannesses unknown to any but mankind.

“A machine gun has its possibilities,” said the ape-man, with the flicker of a smile.

The last near hundred years has been characterized by the attempt to overturn the Scientific  Consciousness in the name of two Arien Age Semitic religions, Judaism and Moslemism.  Indeed the ‘hand of God’ moves in mysterious ways.  Let’s look at one called ‘The Iron Law Of Wages.’  When you read in the Old Testament that ‘the poor shall be always with us’ you probably didn’t notice the arrogance of the remark nor that it is an actual ‘eternal’ tenet of Semitic religious belief.  The remark put into academic terms might be that the price of labor is the lowest price that a man can be gotten to do a job and that they may be worked to death like slaves thereby insuring that the poor shall always be with us.

The religious theory was formulated in scientific terms by David Ricardo in 1817.  Described as a British economist Ricardo was actually a Sephardic Jew.  That is to say his people fled Spain c.1492 in this case first to Holland and then to England which was undoubtedly done illegally after a period of Dutch acculturation.  It will be easily seen that Ricardo is adapting the ancient Semitic belief that the poor will always be with us to British conditions.  Indeed, as his formulation became the bedrock of employment practices it may be said he created poverty as the industrial age took shape until Henry Ford disproved this ancient historical bunk in 1914.  At that time he ‘unilaterally’ doubled the wages of unskilled labor to begin to create the prosperity that characterized American society until the reemergence of Semitic beliefs in the twenty-first century.

I personally deplore unionism but I also see its necessity.  Ford’s action raised the price of labor across the board.  Unionism was successfully fought by managers until unionism gained the backing of the government under FDR.  Backed by the government support unions made excessive and ridiculous demands until their momentum was stopped when Ronald Reagan sent the Air Controllers back to work which put unionism on the defensive.

Ricardo’s Iron Law Of Wages was not re-instituted at that time.  Fordism still prevailed.  Then jobs were exported wholesale to ‘multi-cultural’ areas of  low wages.  This was a crucial mistake for the world.  Even this did not break the back of labor.

The next strategic move was simply to open the borders allowing millions of immigrants who would work for lower wages under distressing conditions.  While immigration makes no sense on any other level it does put the Biblical managers in control of labor once again.  President Bush himself was a primitive religionist unacquainted even with the twentieth century who had surrounded himself with even more primitive Jewish religionists.  The war of religion against Science goes on.

Thus the Semitic counterattack against Science goes on.  Both major races of Semites, the Jews and Arabs, are waging war on the most primitive basis.  The issue is not the issue.  Immigration, the ostensible issue, is simply a Red Herring to disguise the true issue which is to defeat Fordism and re-institute Ricardo’s Iron Law Of Wages to ensure that the poor will always be with us.  The streets are now filled with the homeless.

This is the real reason Ford is called an anti-Semite and on that basis he certainly was.  God bless his memory.

So, the unsuspecting young Burroughs thrust himself into this melee.  Just as Ford was in actuality a religious prophet with a new industrial dispensation so Burroughs, judging from results set himself the task of creating an archetype for the Aquarian Age.  Something of value for one to aspire to.  One can trace the development of Tarzan from the miraculous babe to the finished archetype as the man-god.

As H.G. Wells noted in his First And Last Things there is a necessity for metaphysics.  Man does not live by bread alone.  While Science reduced everything to its material basis it destroyed the means of  ‘spiritual’ or psychological comfort.  With God dead mankind lost its identity and sense of direction.  As the old psychological projection of its identity had failed a new one was required that would be based on scientific material realities.

Levi Dowling’s vision of an Aquarian Jesus is unsatisfactory.  Burroughs vision of the competent Tarzan satisfies on several different levels.  Burroughs seems to have caught the essence of the Astrological Religion although there is difficulty in understanding how he came by his knowledge.  The rudiments can be clearly seen so the answer must be in his personal digestion of the ideas.  Lew Sweetser is obvious while perhaps Burroughs loyalty to a medical charlatan like Dr. Stace may possibly be explained by the man’s esoteric knowledge.  Such knowledge frequently goes hand in hand with special diets and medical nostrums.  There is no reason to believe that Stace didn’t sincerly believe in his nostums just because science couldn’t find a reason for them to be effective.  Men have misled themselves to a much greater degree than that.  Nevertheless I am convinced that Burroughs acquired his New Age beliefs as evidenced by Tarzan more from his associates’ conversation than reading.

The idea of Tarzan as the man-god culminates in Tarzan The Invincible and Tarzan Triumphant.  With these two novels he is a fully functioning psychological projection of the Aquarian Age.  The ‘spritual’ basis for Western man to regain its psychological balance destroyed by the ‘death’ of God.

He is what stands between the immolation of Euroamerican men on the altars of Semitism and the triumph of the scientific Aquarian Age.

Mankind, or at least Euroamerican mankind, must make the great leap for mankind into the Scientific Consciousness, into evolution to the next level.  The old Religious Consciousness must be rejected.  One cannot tolerate primitive belief systems any more than there can be no tolerance of the intolerant whatever that may mean.

Burroughs has given us an avatar of the future.  It is up to us only to accept him and make use of the gifts he brought us.

Posted in Biology, Christ, Christians, Civilization, Consciousness, Edgar Rice Burroughs, ERBzine, Freud, Henry Ford, Jesus, Jews, Messiah, Moslems, Muslims, Mythology, Psychology, R.E. Prindle, Religion, Religious Consciousness, Reviews, Science, Scientific Consciousness, Semites, Sigmund Freud, Subconscious, Tarzan, Uncategorized, Unconsciousness, Writing | Leave a Comment »

Chaps. 6,7,8: Edie Sedgwick, Maid Of Constant Sorrow

November 20, 2010

Edie Sedgwick:  Maid Of Constant Sorrow

Chs. 6,7,8

Chapter 6

The Pillow That We Dreamed On

 

Revolt Of The Undermen

 While this is a history it is also a history I lived through.  Thus, while history from a distance in time loses much detail it gains in perspective.  While these events were transpiring in New York an interpretation of them was being dispersed throughout the country by magazines.  While I have no first hand knowledge of the scene in New York my reality at the time was formed by magazine reports.  I considered myself pretty well informed from those magazines and in an intra-social sense I guess I was although that only made me less superficial than some others.

The sixties was a fabulous time for magazines.  Endless specialized titles came and went after only a few issues, or even a single issue.  One of my favorites was the long lasting Horizon, a hard cover quarterly boasting a whole hundred thousand subscribers.  Obviously it was for the fortunate few.  Of the big bombers chief of all was Time-Life.  The two magazines were probably the backbone of American culture during the fifties and sixties.  Time lost its credibility during the sixties.

Time was founded by Henry and Clair Booth Luce in 1923.  By the fifties it was not only a money machine but gave the Luces a position from which they could actually direct the course of American culture.  A heady responsibility.  The Luce’s always claimed to be Conservatives but their publications always seemed to have a decidedly leftward bend.

For me the 60s was a most exciting intellectual period.  Things were moving fast and generally opening up the American mind.  Time-Life publications, all those mail order books.  I love mail order.  I especially love getting books through the mail.  The sixties was my time.   Horizon had annual volumes I cherish.  Time-Life published a series of paperbacks, actually linoleum like covers, called the  Time-Life Library, sent out four titles a quarter, complete set of 108.  I completed it.  They did delete one title replacing it with another that I don’t have.

However the titles seemed to further a Left agenda.  Biographies of Marx  and others with the explanation that it was important to know how the enemy thought.  True enough, I’m sure, and I bought it at the time but they issued precious little concerning other political angles.  I soured on Time-Life as it went.

I also discontinued subscribing to Time sometime in the mid-sixties although it was impossible to stop reading the magazine as there was always a copy lying around somewhere.  I became revolted when I read a marvelous piece describing Howard Hughes exit from Las Vegas.  It was an astonishing eye witness piece.  Then we learned that the whole account was fiction; it never happened.  Not only inaccurate but it never happened.  They just made it up.  That ended my fascination with Time.  Still it was where I continued to get most of my information while it had formed my mind for over a decade.

The magazines- Time, Life- were where I got my information on the NYC art scene.  Time was especially attentive to it.  Pop Art was covered pretty extensively by both magazines.  A complete collection of both Time and Life is available on line for reference.

On the West Coast where I was,  then, my personal knowledge of Warhol and the art scene pretty much came from Time-Life as did that of most others.  Probably not that many were actually interested.  Time was a big weekly magazine, how much of it could you actually read.  One looked at the magnitude of the weekend NYTimes, sniffed, and just walked away.  Who could even begin to read it.

When Edie hooked up with Warhol she gained a national recognition second to none for a nonentity, quite astounding in retrospect.

In August of ‘65 she and Warhol received a good write up in the Arts section of Time while as late as November she received a very nice photo essay in Life.  She hadn’t even done anything but hang out with Warhol.  Judging from what I read on the internet these articles impressed a number of people giving Edie a national reputation, at least in some circles.  This is quite startling because she was only a cute girl, nothing more.  She could never have achieved this without her association with Warhol.  And she was in a position to turn her allure and fame to account.

Warhol was not going to pay her for the movies.  His position was that he had given her this fame so that it was her responsibility to do something with it.  There were things she could have done to retrieve her fortunes.  Supposedly Chuck Wein was on the lookout  to make her into something.  He was useless.  He should have given his brain an enema and looked at things more clearly.  There were things that could have been attempted.  It wouldn’t have been impossible for her to set up an advice column such as Edie Says, or What Would Edie Do.  My god, she was in NYC.  The idea could have been sold to the NYTimes and from there perhaps syndicated.  She wouldn’t even have had to do anything but collect the money.  Others could have handled everything.

Edie had already modeled so she was in Fashion.  So…a line called Edie Sedgwick Party Clothes, Casual Fashion, you name it.  Heck, Warhol should have been on the ball and taken his cut, led the way, instead of stupidly taking Ondine’s chat for a novel called ‘a’.  Who bought it?

Having raised Edie then to near iconic status within just a few months Warhol, Wein and Edie let the opportunity of a life time slip through their hands.  Perhaps it was the drugs.

Chapter 7

Hatred In His Heart

 

But She Breaks Just Like A Little Girl

At the beginning of May Dylan left for a tour of England.  At the same time Warhol took Edie along with Gerard Malanga and Chuck Wein for a gallery show in Paris.   Warhol, Edie and Dylan were in Europe at the same time.  Whether this influenced Dylan’s rage or not isn’t known but in June shortly after his return he began to vent his rage as he began the composition of Like A Rolling Stone.

Now, Edie’s brother Jonathon told a story he says he got from Edie that she was impregnated by Dylan and carried his baby.  There is no time frame for this story.  According to Jonathon Edie was determined to have Dylan’s child.  As she told it it took four men to hold her down for the abortion to be performed.  If true, this is an interesting situation.  For one thing abortions were illegal at the time, so a rogue doctor was required.  Edie says that she was adamant about having the baby so that she would have had to have been either lured to the doctor or essentially kidnapped.  If she resisted and four men, who happened to be in attendance, were required to subdue her then we have a crime of some magnitude.

Bear in mind that all the alleged participants are whacked out of their minds on amphetamines so no one is thinking clearly.  At any event Dylan was committed to marry Sara if this is before the wedding or married to her if after.  Edie is a celebrity of some distinction who in all likelihood would tell everyone it was Dylan’s love child.  What effect this might have on Sara can’t be known but it might possibly have disturbed Dylan’s plans.  If he’s like the rest of us he would have held Edie responsible for getting pregnant.

The gist of it is Jonathon Sedgwick says Edie told him the story.  It is a possibility, after all if you’re having sex with somebody as she undoubtedly was with Dylan, the possibility of pregnancy is there.  But that’s in the background.

During the summer while Dylan stewed Edie and Andy’s star was rising.  New York dailies ran stories on the pair that told of Edie drawing Andy into uptown society; and then in late November Life ran its photo essay on Edie.  Let’s let Andy recap the period as he told it in his autobiography Popism, recalled in 1980, p. 107:

(At the party) There were a few guys in the latest velvets and silk shirts, but not too many- the boys were still mostly in blue jeans and button-down shirts.  Edie brought Bob Dylan to the party and they huddled by themselves over in a corner.  Dylan was spending a  lot of time then up at his manager Al Grossman’s place near Woodstock, and Edie was somehow involved with Grossman too- she said he was going to manage her career.

I’d met Dylan through the MacDougal Street/Kettle Of Fish/Café Rienzi/Hip Bagel/ Café Figaro scene, which Danny Fields claims got started when he and Donald Lyons saw Eric Andersen, they went up and asked if he wanted to be in an Andy Warhol movie.  “How many times did we all use that one?”  Danny laughed.  And after that Eric got interested in Edie and suddenly we were all around the Village together.  But I think Edie actually knew Dylan because of Bobby Neuwirth.  Bobby was a painter who originally started singing and guitar playing up in Cambridge just to make money to paint with, he told me once.  Then he hooked up with Dylan and became part of that group- he was something like Dylan’s road manager-confidant.  And Bobby was a friend of Edie’s.

At Sam’s party Dylan was in blue jeans and high-heeled boots and a sports jacket, and his hair was sort of long.  He had deep circles under his eyes, and even when he was standing he was all hunched in.  He was around twenty-four then and the kids were all just starting to talk and act and dress and swagger like he did.  But not many people except Dylan could ever pull that anti-act off- and if he wasn’t in the right mood, he couldn’t either. He was already slightly flashy when I met him, definitely not folksy anymore- I mean, he was wearing satin polka-dot shirts.  He’d released Bringing It All Back Home, so he’d already started his rock sound at this point, but he hadn’t played the Newport Folk Festival yet, or Forest Hills, the places where the old-style folk people booed him for going electric, but where the kids started getting really crazy for him.  This was just before “Like A Rolling Stone” came out.  I liked Dylan, the way he’d created a brilliant new style.  He didn’t spend his career doing homage to the past, he had to do things his own way, and that was just what I respected.  I even gave him one of my silver Elvis paintings in the days when he was first around.  Later on, though, I got paranoid when I heard rumors that he had used the Elvis as a dart board up in the country.  When I’d ask, “Why would he do that.”  I’d invariably get hearsay answers like “I hear he feels you destroyed Edie,” or “Listen to ‘Like A Rolling Stone’- I think you’re the ‘diplomat on the chrome horse’, man.”  I didn’t know exactly what they meant by that- I never listened much to the words of songs- but I got the tenor of what people were saying- that Dylan didn’t like me, that he blamed me for Edie’s drugs.

So it is quite clear from Andy’s recollection that he had known Dylan from the early Spring of ‘65 and that Edie was quite clearly dating him.  Whether the pregnancy story comes from this time would be an interesting question.  After the release of Highway 61 Revisited Dylan conceived a plan to take Edie away from Andy.  It would seem quite clear from the bags under Dylan’s eyes that he was no stranger to drugs.

Perhaps the August Time article on Andy and Edie was the high point of their relationship although the October art exhibit at UPennsylvania was still to come.  That show was astonishing in that Warhol was treated like a rock star with apparently the same crowd attending.  Of course, Andy’s pal Sam Green had masterfully whipped up enthusiasm with his promotion of the show preceding it by several weeks.  The show was probably the first time an artist received such adulation.

Though Andy was enough of a rage that a big crowd would come out for him.  I was in attendance at the UOregon lecture in Fall ’67 when Allen Midgette impersonated him and a crowd of about 1500 paid to see him.  It isn’t true that Midgette’s impersonation was that good.

I was standing at the end of the line waiting to enter when Midgette and Morrissey were brought in to the elevator just behind me.  The guy in front of me asked if that was him.

I was watching Midgette who was a midget, little skinny short guy.  There was a superficial resemblance but he seemed too short and he wasn’t wearing a wig.  I said, ‘It looks like him but I don’t think it is.’  Midgette raised his eyebrows while Morrissey looked like the jig was up but the admins ignored me.

During the so-called lecture there were several groups of us dispersed throughout the audience loudly debating the issue.  They got away with it but later the school learned they had been pranked and demanded their money back.  I always thought that was rude.  What did they expect of Warhol.  He had a reputation.  Didn’t the administration read Time?

In September of ‘65 Dylan began to court Edie with promises, one believes, of a good income from movies, recording or such.  One is amazed that geniuses like Dylan, Grossman and Neuwirth couldn’t come up with something more inventive to promote Edie.

Edie was torn between two lovers, Andy and Bob.  It must have been quite head turning to be the object of contention between the number one celebrity artist of the time and one of the most famous recording and performing acts at the same time as receiving national exposure in Time and Life.

Warhol, even though a homosexual, said that he was as close to in love with Edie as he had been with any other person in his life, he even took her home to meet his mother.  Mrs. Warhola who had been urging her son to marry would certainly have taken Edie’s appearance as an indication that Andy was serious about her.

Having committed himself even that far would mean that her receptiveness to Dylan was a crushing rejection of himself as, say, a male object, while her abscontsion to Dylan’s camp would be a traitorous act.  Unforgivable in his eyes.

Thus as Edie wavered between Dylan and Andy her life at the Factory became untenable.  Andy quietly brought in other superstars including Dylan’s old flame, Nico.  Whether conscious of it or not Andy was displacing Edie.  She was mocked and reviled.  While this was happening at the Factory Edie was evidently taken to Woodstock where Albert Grossman was talking contract to her as her manager.  Dylan had had his May gig in England filmed although it would be a while before it was released.  There was talk of another film of which Edie would have the starring role.  That film apparently wasn’t made for several decades until Dylan finally got it together to make Masked And Anonymous.  Perhaps the blond female lead was meant to remind the viewer of Edie.

So, rejected by her family who disapproved of her modeling as well as scorning her association with Warhol, desperately in need of money Edie was in an agonizing mental dilemma.  Remember that by this time she was a national figure having appeared in Time and even as her position disintegrated featured in Life, yet she had no money to back her celebrity status.    She couldn’t participate in the social life.

We don’t know what Dylan was promising her personally whether he hinted at marriage or stated it but it seems clear from the evidence of One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later) and Most Likely You Go Your Way And I’ll Go Mine that Edie believed Dylan was serious about her.

Dylan married Sara in November of ‘65 secretly but how to keep a secret.  Warhol learned of the marriage tauntingly informing Edie of it in December.  Edie was incredulous.  It follows, and can’t be otherwise, that she confronted Dylan with the alleged fact.  This was undoubtedly a moment of triumph for Dylan as he could now reject Edie as he believed she had rejected him in March.

One can imagine Edie demanding of Dylan whether he was with her or Sara.  The intense mocking derision of Sooner Or Later when Dylan sings:  I couldn’t believe what I did hear- was I leaving with you or her?

At that time Edie’s game was up.  Warhol had destroyed her reputation; she could no longer get modeling jobs; she was broke with no hope of a good encore.  With a loud sneer Dylan passed her to his sidekick, Bobby Neuwirth then a song to commemorate it:  She’s Your Lover Now.

Chapter 8

Down The Trail Of Broken Hearts

 

Dylan Lifting Off

The motivations of the actors are difficult to determine.  However that insofar as any actions relate to the others than the actions of any of the others are interrelated.  Thus Andy had Edie and wished to keep her as she was as close to love as he ever came.  Perhaps he realized that he would need money to do so while perhaps his various activities from the Factory to filmmaking were keeping him financially strapped so that even if he wished to he couldn’t pay Edie.  He had expenses.

Of course today an authenticated Warhol may go for millions up to the one hundred millions paid for the Eight Elvises picture but at the time you could have scooped up several paintings for under ten thousand dollars that might have been worth tens of millions twenty to thirty years on.

Dylan is ridiculed for trading his Presley taken from Warhol for a sofa but at the time that wasn’t necessarily a bad deal depending on the sofa.  Warhol would give his actors the choice between a painting and a hundred dollars cash.  The Factoryites elected the cash over the picture.  So, it’s not like Warhol could just sell a painting anytime he needed to  raise the ready.  His question was how to raise some cash, he had overhead.

His adversaries were Dylan and Albert Grossman, one a recording artist the other a manager both swimming in cash.  There seemed like a pot of gold at the end of that particular rainbow.  Andy thought about it and came up with what he thought was a winning formula, and it actually was but he let it slip away.

Taking his cue from Bobby and Albert then Andy decided to manage a band.  He also conceived at the same time an artistic light show to create an even more unique and exciting ambience, The Exploding Plastic Inevitable.  When the student is ready the teacher will appear.  And so it was.  Andy’s scouts went looking for a band and came back with a group called the Warlocks who were renamed The Velvet Underground.  An SM band extraordinaire whose chief songs were Heroin and Waiting For My Man.  Only Andy could have shouted Eureka! at such a find.

The band came straight out of the avant garde.  The chief instrumentalist, John Cale, had belonged to the John Cage/La Monte Young musical circle.  The ostensible leader, Lou Reed, another survivor of electro-shock therapy, not much of a musician, was the group’s songwriter and lead singer.  Between Warhol, the Factory hands and the Velvets they were a Happening of the first order.

Andy now had his band and his concept but no venue.  No way to present the package for popular consumption.  But, that too appeared when someone suggested a hall called the Dom.  Andy rented the hall but, here’s the catch, he didn’t lease it.  He cautiously wanted to try it out first.  The trial was a major success, wowing hip New York while also bringing in an astonishing amount of cash for a three or four week run.  Should have been a hint.

Now, Andy negotiated a recording contract for the Velvet Underground and the band actually recorded its SM anthems Heroin and Waiting For My Man.  Remember the Velvets had no history and horrible songs but Andy’s influence was so great this unknown band was given a recording contract.  Not so bad.  Of course the record wasn’t released until 1967 but it fell flat as one would have expected with an eighteen minute song called Heroin.  Also the record was released as Andy Warhol Presents The Velvet Underground.  Andy’s credibility wasn’t too great outside NYC and I, for one, looked at the record as a probable joke, especially as the cover was a peel away banana.  After listening to the record I knew it was a joke.

A couple years earlier Dylan had been in Greece where he met a German woman going by the name of Nico.  They apparently had a short fling and he wrote the song I’ll Keep It With Mine for her.  Time passes and paths meander.  Having passed through London Nico showed up in New York City at this time where, as chance would have it, she hooked up with Warhol and became a Factory girl.  Andy in his usual way foisted her on the Velvets as a chanteuse, Nico And The Velvet Underground, did I mention that before?  So, not only did one ask what the hell was a velvet underground but who the hell was Nico?  We knew who Andy Warhol was.  And how.

Dylan undoubtedly thought of Nico as his, thus he showed up in Warhol’s scene to push songs on Nico with the intent no doubt to woo her away as he had done Edie.  The contest between Andy, Bobby and Albert was heating up.

I think it probably came to a head over the Dom.  Andy and the Velvets left for a gig in LA and when they returned they attempted to resume their shows at the Dom.  Lo and behold they found that Albert Grossman had leased the venue from under them.  They had the winning formula but once again no venue.  Albert called his place something stupid like The Balloon Farm but under different management it became The Electric Circus.  Andy was offered the light show but didn’t take it, but by then light show paraphenalia was being manufactured as a commercial product.

From my point of view the most astonishing and impressive thing Andy ever did was the Exploding Plastic Inevitable.  It had a long lasting effect.  Of course by this time the whole light show paraphernalia had turned into an industry and anyone could do it.

Toward the end of ‘65 Edie had become peripheral to both Andy and Dylan.

Chapters 9,10,11 and 12 are now up on one post.

Posted in Bob Dylan, Folk Music, R.E. Prindle, Rock And Roll, Uncategorized, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Tarzan The Invincible Pt. 9: by Edgar Rice Burroughs

November 1, 2010

A Review

Themes And Variations

The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs

#14, Tarzan The Invincible

by

R.E. Prindle

Part 9: Politics

The Entertainer

 

The Big Bwana

 

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

–L.P. Hartley- The Go Between

I would like to take a moment to organize the content and direction of the Tarzan oeuvre within the context of Tarzan The Invincible and Tarzan Triumphant.

It is close onto a century now since Edgar Rice Burroughs burst onto the international literary scene.  He was not literarily well regarded by the intelligentsia.  In the language of the time he wrote adventure novels.  They were thought of as sub-literary.  In our times after literature has evolved from Burroughs’ time into its various genres that didn’t exist as such back then he would more properly be designated as a fantasy or sci-fi writer.

Even though very great minds wrote ‘adventure’ stories their efforts  are usually classified as sub-literary, relegated to the teen section.  There has certainly never been a more profound writer than H. Rider Haggard nor is his literary style inferior in any way to the pretensions of literary fiction.  Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs all had a great deal to offer.  If it is necessary to say so their work has remained popular while most literary heavyweights of the past are unknown and unread in non-specialist circles today.

Edgar Rice Burroughs is not usually accorded the dignity of being ranked with even the above adventure writers.  It pains me to say it but I think the literary consensus is that Burroughs is a semi-literate lightweight trash writer with no other value than ‘entertainment’ or a diversion for men and women who haven’t quite grown up yet.   I receive sniggers and raised eyebrows whenever I am forced to admit I write what I hope are scholarly essays on Edgar Rice Burroughs.  I have to scramble to find any scrap that will give me a little dignity.  But that’s not the way I see it myself.  The way I see it is that there are two groups of people who do take Burroughs seriously.  The small group of which I am a member that sees something of value lying like a huge diamond in the tall grass and a much larger group of Left-Liberals who quite correctly see Burroughs as a threat to everything they wish to believe.

Burroughs’ publishing career has not been well researched or examined.  The research I have done leads me to believe that ERB was exploited while his career was sabotaged by McClurg’s from the start.  Although MClurg’s seem to have had no intent to promote his work from the beginning they nevertheless tied him up with a contract that went on forever.  Compare it with MGM’s contract twenty years later.

Ten years after ERB’s death with the firm of McClurg’s on the edge of bankruptcy ERB, Inc. had to buy out the contract.  This is all so contradictory it boggles the mind.   Rather than attempting to maximize sales and therefore profits McClurg’s took the opposite approach of minimizing sales while reducing profits both for themselves and ERB to the lowest possible level.  If it hadn’t been for the movies Burroughs’ benefits from his efforts would have been minimal, a fraction of what they should have been.

From 1914 to 1919 politics do not seem to have been involved; there is some other reason for McClurg’s behavior.  Then from 1919 to 1924 ERB’s relationship to the Liberal Coalition took form.  His Under The Red Flag of 1919 let the Reds know where he stood politically.  Also in 1919 he was felt out by the American Jewish Committee for his stance on Semitism.  He failed this test by taking an insubordinate stance.  So from 1919 to 1924 he seems to have been under attack from the Left.  He remained defiant through his Marcia Of The Doorstep with its very reasonable criticism of Semitism but then he seems to have been ovewhelmed by economic pressures that were exacerbated by his own poor decisions.

While McClurg’s should have been supportive of their, or what should have been their walking gold mine, they strangely continued to get in his way.

Burroughs wanted his reissues to be sold at a dollar but G&D and McClurg’s adamantly insisted on 50 cents which gave ERB a very small return.  Why McClurg’s should have resisted higher prices that would have doubled their own income must remain a mystery.  A dollar doesn’t seem unreasonable to me but there seems to have been the intent to restrict Burroughs’ income as far as possible.

By the late twenties the Liberal Coalition was also actively interfering in Burroughs’ career.  There seems to have been a blacklist against making Tarzan movies from 1922 to 1928.  As Hollywood was controlled by the Coalition it was possible to restrict Burroughs’ income from movies to zero.

The blacklist was broken in 1927 when Joseph Kennedy’s FBO Studios made a Tarzan film.  ERB also began searching for another publishing arrangement.  Not finding anything satisfactory he took the last ditch recourse of self-publishing.  He established the Burroughs imprint.  As this act was taken just as the stock market crash took place the move was fraught with dangers.

Now freed from publishing restraints does it seem like a coincidence that the first title under the Burroughs imprint was Tarzan The Invincible?  Or, with its success it was followed by Tarzan Triumphant?  Perhaps taking vengeance for 1919’s snub of Under The Red Flag, Tarzan The Invincible is a full scale attack on the Communism in general and Uncle Joe Stalin in particular.

Perhaps also responding to 1924’s rejection of Marcia Of The Doorstep the succeeding novel, Tarzan Triumphant parodies the Jewish religion while making some not so subtle comments about big noses and receding chins.  Either book would be difficult for the Liberal Coalition to misunderstand.

While Burroughs would publicly proclaim that he undertook self-publication because he was too greedy for high royalties, certainly tongue in cheek,  privately he complained that McClurg’s refused to promote his books, turning them over immediately to reissue houses depriving him of his just royalties.  I’m sure the industry understood the irony of his first reason while the second is true.

Tarzan The Invincible is both a defense and a counterattack.  Burroughs himself said that defensive wars could never be won.  One must take the offensive.   With Invincible he was doing just that in what was in fact a literary and cultural war.

The power arrayed against him was terrifying.  The Reds could prevent the publication of his books through regular channels.  I believe they did.  ERB publicly said he took up self-publication in the relentless pursuit of the dollar.  What else could he say?  One doesn’t go around saying people are out to get you.  That’s giving your enemies ammunition.

Ask, is it a coincidence that the first novel under the Burroughs imprint is a direct attack on Liberal Communism?  A work that almost certainly would not have been published by any mainstream publisher, including McClurg’s.    There isn’t a Freudian in the world who believes in coincidence.  I sure don’t.  Burroughs launched his publishing effort in 1930 the year after the depression began in 1929.  The guy was either crazy or knew something other publishers didn’t wish to acknowledge.

When he met his former publisher, Joe Bray, of McClurg’s afer the crash he sneeringly told Bray who was complaining about business that he was doing very well with the Burroughs imprint and he was.  In the height of the depression Burroughs’ books turned a profit.  That was a profit no publisher seemed to want.  McClurg’s certainly never exploited this literary gold mine.

Was it political?  Well, Burroughs’ first publishing venture certainly was.  And remember that Tarzan The Invicincible must have caused a reaction.  The Reds had to say among themselves omething like ‘Don’t worry we’ll get that bastard yet.’  It had to be, nor did his even more sneering Tarzan Triumphant smooth anything over.  Think about this for a moment; let it sink in, this is open warfare.  There must have been a retaliation.  What was it?  The Reds did not cease their campaign of vilification during his lifetime nor have they ceased to this very day nor will they cease until either the Reds or Tarzan is triumphant.

I have discussed Richard Slotkin’s  Gunfighter Nation several times previously.  Slotkin in his book tries to pin responsibility for the My Lai massacre in Viet Nam on Burroughs.  He uses nearly seven hundred pages of fine print to try to prove that My Lai was the inevitable result of Burroughs’ writing.  The guy’s got a job at a prestigious university too.

While one can discount the hysteria of Liberal academics heavily no one necessarily attacks someone they do not consider a threat.  So what Bibliophiles have to ask themselves is whether there is a basis for the Liberal reaction or not?

I think my analyses of Tarzan books so far shows that Burroughs had a much more serious political intent than is commonly thought.  Underneath the buck and wing, the old soft shoe of the entertainer is some very serious thought and reflection.  Also his means of expression itself is the very antithesis of Liberalism.

 

Joseph P. Kennedy

Burroughs’ writing does reflect the sea change in world history noted by such academic analysts as Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard.  Whether ERB ever read these thinkers or not there is no conflict between their conclusions and his own.  ERB is of the same mindset so on that basis Slotkin is correct.  None of the three writers is eiher wrong or evil it’s just that Liberals think any opinion but their own is inherently evil in intent and ought to be censored.  I say censor the censors.

Liberalism is a religious reaction to the Scientific Consciousness.  Their core constituent, Judaism’s sole purpose is to defeat Science and reimpose the religious yoke of absolute conformity to its religious ideal.  As I’ve noted, American Liberalism which evolved from the quasi-Hebrew sect of Puritanism is in complete accord.  Combined of fundamentalist Christians, who pursue an Old Testament program not much different from the Liberal agenda and the insurgent Moslem fundamentalists, the challenge to Science and all that Burroughs represented is formidable.

The determined effort to plow the concept of Evolution under is a supreme threat to the whole Scientific Consciousness.  Of course, the Liberals talk peace, while as the Old Testament proclaims, peace, peace, everyone talks peace but there is no peace.  There is no peace anywhere on earth and there never will be.

Burroughs realized that war was inevitable.  He decried the disarmement movement and applauded preparedness.  In Triumphant he makes the wry comment that the Chicago underworld gunner, Danny Patrick, and his fellow criminals believed in pareparedness, always having a gun with them.

Burroughs was brought into a world of conflict, nor so far has the world disappointed his expectations.  As he says the only good defense is a terrific offense.  Defensive wars cannot be won.  I believe he has been proven right there too.  Whether you’re looking at John Carter, Tarzan or any of his protagonists you will see that they never barricade themselves.  They are always on the offensive, nor do they hesitate to kill as part of that offense.  My god, Tarzan ripped a man’s head off in Ant Men.  His Beyond The Farthest Star posits a world of never-ending war.  Prefigures the Cold War in its way.  Any concept of ‘peace’ is merely a temporary cessation of hostilities; war by other means.  The Liberal, Slotkin, may lament such a reality but being a man of ‘peace’ making endless  appeasements and concessions to belligerents can end only in disaster to oneself.  There aren’t any Americas left to bail civilization out; that possiblility ended with WWII.

I think it fair to say that in today’s war situation versus the Moslem and Mexican invasions ERB would take the aggressive position of throwing them out.  As the Shona state explicitly, and believe me the Mexicans and Moslems are no different from them, if you need to hear it from an African there are those who dominate and those who are dominated, which is another way of saying perpetual conflict.  Either Americans will dominate Mexicans and Moslems or they will be subservient to them.  Need anyone go further than to look at the condition of both Matabele and European in Shonaland?  It is a given that Burroughs would rather dominate as Tarzan does at the end of Invincible.  If you’ve got to fight you might as well win.

Let us never forget that Burroughs participated in the opening of the frontier and he saw its closing.  He lived through the two most devastating wars in history.  One must fight or die was the lesson he learned.   Tarzan still lives.

And then we must deal with the persistent charge of racism brought against ERB.  One finds it difficult to understand what Liberals mean by the term ‘racism.’  There is nothing more inherent in human nature than pride in one’s own kind.  In that sense all peoples are racist.  What then?  Racism is the natural state of affairs.  Certainly Liberal heroes like Robert Mugabe and the Shona are as racist as could possibly be, yet, he and they are Liberal heroes.  There must be something else going on.

Liberals themselves are responsible for passing racial laws that would have staggered the imagination of Adolf Hitler.  Someone who they say they despise.  Whereas Hitler called his laws what they were, Liberals are more adept at disguising their intent, still they appropriately call their laws ‘hate’ laws which is exactly what they are.  The unspoken assumption behind them is that ‘White’ males ‘hate’ everyone who is neither White nor male, excluding homosexuals, and that they therefore have to be socially isolated and denied.

The apparent belief is that only White males are capable of ‘hating’ while the rest of the world is a loving brother and sisterhood.  Of course such a notion leaves the Moslem attack on the Twin Towers unexplainable as well as the Shona extermination of Black brothers like the Matabele.

Hey fellas, it’s the exception, even multiple exception that proves the rule, isn’t it?

I have no doubt that ERB would have been opposed to such ridiculous racial laws no matter what language was used to disguise them.  He does seem to have been aware of the dangers of the evolutionary collision of the human species.  ERB was an evolutionist.  His novels explore evolutionary possiblities in enormous variety and detail.  While much of his speculations and jokes seem ridiculous in the light of current knowledge, at the time of composition most if not all of the speculations would have appeared to be not that far fetched, even possible.

At the least Burroughs was on the side of Science at that time when the controversy really raged, while even today over fifty percent of Americans reject evolution in favor of religious explanations, that’s one hundred fifty years after Darwin, while the Moslem invasion of the world is rapidly spreading the slime of superstition over scientific knowledge.  As I understand it, it has progressed so far that I could be put in jail in France, Germany or Austria for blaspheming the prophet and Allah by referring to their atavistic religion as ‘the slime of superstition.’

Within just a very few years since 9/11 an intolerant superstition like Moslemsism has overturned the scientific attitude of the Enlightenment.  May Georges Chirac burn in hell forever and a day.  If President Obama doesn’t  back off, him too.  Don’t any of these guys listen to what people are saying about them?

As I have noted, by the second decade of the twentieth century more sensitive minds perceived the sea change in the relationship of the various human species.  Among these, in fiction, were Sax Rohmer with his Fu Manchu stories and Edgar Rice Burroughs.  Prominent in non-fiction were Madison Grant with his Passing Of The Great Race and Lothrop Stoddard ‘s Rising Tide Of Color.

At the risk of repeating myself, I flatter myself that at least some Bibliophiles have been reading my stuff for the last few years, let me place a quote  from Darwin here that clearly explains what happens when similar species compete for the same territory on the same economic basis.  Darwin:  On The Origin Of Species, Chap. III, Para. Struggle For Existence- Struggle for life most severe between individuals and varieties of the same species:

As species of the same genus have usually, but by no means invariably, some similarity in habits and constitution and always in structure, the struggle will generally be more severe between species of the same genus, when they come into competition  with each other, than between species of distinct genera.  We see this in the recent extension over parts of the United States of one species of swallow having caused the decrease of another species.  The recent increase of the missal thrush in parts of Scotland has caused the decrease of the song-thrush.  How frequently we hear of one species of rat taking the place of another species under the most different climates!  In Russia the small Asiatic cockroach has everywhere driven before it itx great congenor.  One species of Charlock will supplant another, and so in other cases.  We can dimly see why the competition should be most severe between allied forms, which fill nearly the same place in the economy of nature; but probably in no one case could we precisely say why one species has been victorious over another in the great battle of life.

As we are certain that Burroughs read the Origin Of Species we can be sure that he read the above passage.  If it struck him as forcibly as it strikes me then we share the same basic outlook on life and the passage shaped his way of looking at the intra-genus conflict between Homo Sapiens species.

As most agree that Homo Sapiens has an African history of 150K to 200K years, most assume, and this is only an assumption, that the First Born of Homo Sapiens were black because the indigenes of Africa today are black.  This may or may not be true, we have no way of knowing, but let us assume it is.  There are no people in Africa today who can absolutely trace their descent unbroken from the Last Hominid Predecessor or the first specimen of Homo Sapiens.  No one knows what the individual looked like or what his mental constitution was compared to the various African races of today.

It therefore follows that over that course of a very long history peoples have been exterminated to make way for others innumerable times.  One wave of rats, one wave of cockroaches after another have succeeded for a moment only to be replaced by another in due time.  This is how evolution and nature work.  Homo Sapiens is not outside either history or nature and it is foolish to act as though it were.  One must understand the natural process and adjust one’s actions to it.

To use the Shona example.  The Shona are not indigenous to the soil.  At one time they must have exterminated and displaced a predecessor people in what they now consider ‘their’ territory.  Beginning about 1830 the Ndebele Zulu as an incoming wave of new people began to exterminate and displace them.  There is no difference between this Ndebele invasion of Shonaland and the Moslem and Mexican invasion of the United States.  Nature is red in tooth and claw.  What can one say?

Had the Matabele, to use the Ndebele’s other name, not been interrupted by another wave of incoming people, the Europeans, (color and race have no real bearing on this issue of Nature and evolution) the Zulus, (the Matabele were Zulus) would have completed the process and today the Shona would be at best a memory.  But the succeeding wave of Europeans did come crowding after the Matabele.  So far Darwin’s thesis is correct.  One species of rat drives out another.  Had the Europeans behaved normally they would have exterminated their predecessors and driven them before them.

But then evolution throws in a clinker.  The Europeans were evolutionarily more advanced than the Blacks.  While the fact that the evolution of the human species is continuing is clear from the visual physical evidence,  scientific research has proven it beyond any quibble.  So, even though those at the turn of the century lacked the evidence to prove their case they were right.  The most obvious evolution is taking place in the brain and it is not taking place in all human species.  Only one species is evolving while the others are now sterile.  Hard thing to accept but it’s true.  Thus Europeans had developed consciences that prevented them from doing what Nature commanded them to do.  Instead they set themselves up as a parasite class believing they could control the Blacks without special intermixture forever.

As Burroughs would have noted this put them on the defensive and no defense outlasts a good offense as the Shona have proven.  Thus the Shona having been given a breathing space reorganized, regained the initiative and won the dominant position.  They are now doing the natural thing exterminating or driving out both the Ndebele Zulu and the Europeans.  If you won’t fight or can’t, you lose everything.

So, you have the Darwinian struggle for existence presented to you in plain terms in a human context that cannot be misunderstood.  No rats or cockroaches as necessary examples.  One must be intolerant of other species.  One must be a ‘bigot’ as the Shona are or go under.

Now, not having the will and perhaps no longer having the power to do as Nature commands Europeans attempted to retreat, to withdraw within their own territories.  As anyone knows they all come out at the first sign of weakness.  One would have to be stupid or utopian not to realize that.  As a sonsequence Europe and America are being invaded by the other human species in the Darwinian sense.  I mean, folks, they call evolution science.  Science means knowing.  Anyone who does not act on certain knowledge is foolish or, perhaps, too religious.

However in the first two decades of the twentieth century the Liberal ideology was formed by the weakest and lamest members of Western civilization.  Not understanding actual differences between the human species, even denying them on religious grounds, they used conscience as a weapon to first emasculate themselves, and I mean this in the literal sense, and then they shamed those who knew better into silence.

Among those silenced were Grant, Stoddard and Burroughs.  Although all these men were initially very influential telling Americans the nature of evolution and its consequences their reputations were dismantled.  By the beginning of WWII Grant and Stoddard were regarded as mere ‘racist’ cranks.

It is time to debunk the debunkers.  The wheel has turned.  Bunk is bunk and shouldn’t be tolerated by anyone.

Burroughs who hadn’t left himself quite so open was provoked into acts of defiance so that sanctions could be applied against him as much as had been done to Henry Ford.  Ford is another whose reputation should be rehabilitated much as Khruschev rehabilitated the reputations of various Communists after the death of Stalin.  The tool preferred by the Liberal Coalition to discredit someone was the charge of  ‘anti-Semitism’, a religious charge be it noted.

The most potent weapon in the Liberal religious armament is the term ‘anti-Semite.’  It is used liberally usually combined with Fascist to defame and control an opponent.  Oddly enough they couldn ‘t make it stick on Burroughs.  Even Slotkin in Gunfighter Nation only hints that ERB might have anti-Semitic tendencies.

I know it is unpleasant to discuss the Semitic issue but I think the time has come to discuss the issue head on especially as Burroughs was and is involved to a much more serious degree than might be apparent at first blush.  The problem of Asia, from whence the Semites come, and Europe has roots in prehistory.  Indeed it is a tale of two species.  This is one of those eternal conflicts that will not be settled until one side annihilates the other much as the Shona are doing in Zimbabwe to their competitors.

In ancient days both the European Greeks and the Mediterranean Egyptians were in a constant conflict with what the Egyptians referred to as ‘vile Asiatics’, the Greeks as ‘barbarians.’  The Asiatics were vile not on the basis of race but because of the differing view of life of the two species.  As regards the Egyptians and the Semites one or the other had to be exterminated.  If you know anything of Egyptian history you will know that few true Egyptians still survive.  The Semites have exterminated the true Egyptians.

Thus the related species of HSII, the Egyptians and HSIII, the Europeans found the Semitic species unassimilable.  We are back to Darwin’s competing species of rats and cockroaches.  In the religious terms in which the problem is usually stated one says the animosity is racial or in other words, moral;  in scientific terms one says that it is genetic or special.  In other words, the problem is much deeper than mere surface appearances.  It extends to the genetic development of the brain.  The Semite cannot understand as any other human species understands and vice versa.

Thus the current problem in the Sudan between Negroes and Semites which is genetic or biological can only be resolved by the extermination or expulsion of the other.  The whole course of this new African conflict can be projected historically and scientifically.  It may be delayed but it cannot be stopped.  Compare it with the Shona in Zimbabwe.  There is no question as to what course the conflict will take.

Why Liberals choose to make an issue of Darfur while they ignore the South Sudan and Zimbabwe and South Africa where genocide is also going on is known only to themselves.  It is absolutely necessary to analyze the matter in scientific rather than emotional or religious terms.  These are not matters of race but species.  The mental capabilities of the Negro, the Semite and the European are different and irreconcilable.  An unpleasant fact, perhaps, but true.

The conflict between Europe and Asia or the Semites and Indo-Europeans began according to legend with the Semitic abduction of the European woman Io from Argos.  The history of the Mediterranean in ancient times was the perpetual warfare between Europeans and Asiatics or Semites.  At one time the Semites seemed to be besting Europeans and then turn about.  For the long Hellenic and Roman period the Europeans seemed to have won.  But, and this is a big but, they failed to exterminate or drive the Semites out.  A very bad mistake.

Two things happened.  The Jewish Semites began a peaceful infiltration into Europe which came to a head in the long Jewish Wars that lasted from 66 AD to 135 AD.  The Jewish Semites were militarily defeated in their homeland but came to spiritually dominate Europeans through the Judaeo-Catholic religion.

None of this struggle went unobserved by the Semitic peoples of the Arabian penenisula.  In the seventh century the Arab or Ishamelite, to use the Jewish term,  branch of the Semitic peoples led by Moslem ideology which had its base in Jewish ideology overran North Africa, large parts of the Eastern Mediterranean into the steppes of Asia and over the Hindu Kush into India.  More or less following the path of Alexander.  The Indo-European Persians, now known as Iranians, were Islamized or Semitized which they remain today.  They were stultified hence their ridiculous position today.

The southerly Egyptians, the native Copts, are on the verge of extinction or what the modern world fondly describes as genocide.  There are few surviving true Egyptians today.

Thus the Hellenic-Roman hegemony was reversed.

The Semitic Arab incursion into Europe which was a continuation of the multi-thousand year conflict between Europeans and Semites was defeated by Charles the Hammer at Tours in the heart of Europe.   Over the next nearly thousand years the Moslems were expelled from Western Europe but they advanced in Eastern Europe.

From the expulsion of the Moors from Spain in 1492 the southern Med if not the Med itself was controlled by the Barbary pirates.  During that period Europeans supinely submitted to a slave trade that greatly resembled that of sub-Saharan Africa.  Even as Negroes were being transported to the Americas countless Europeans were captured on European soil, transported to Africa and enslaved.  So, the Africans have no cause to complain of Europeans.  Some people whine some people don’t.

No one European State was strong enough or determined enough to clear the seas of the Moslems while they were unable to concert a united attack.  The piracy and enslavement continued until France annexed Algeria in 1830.  Rightfully so.

In Darwinian terms it is quite clear that the struggle was one of the replacement of one population by another.  Thus when France conquered Algeria it behove them to either exterminate or drive out the existing population replacing it with Europeans.  They ought to have relentlessly warred on every North African people until North Africa was once again European.

The attempt to coexist was a defensive war that could only end in defeat.  The defeat was adjudicated by General De Gaulle in the nineteen sixties.  The French stupidly and erroneously thought the war was over, but in reality the momentum shifted once again to the Semites.

As noted by Lothrop Stoddard the Wahabi Moslems went onto the offensive.  No longer able to comptete militarily with Europeans they resorted to guerilla warfare, something the West now chooses to call terrorism, combined with an infiltration of Europe using their reproductive capabilities as a weapon.  The situation now is a replica of the 3000 BC infiltration of Sumer.  Hence the balance of power of the age old war between the Semites of Asia and Europeans has once again shifted toward the Asiatics.

As the Libyan, Moamar Qadaffi gloated in May 2006 there are fifty million Moslems in Europe.  Europeans have the option of fighting or submitting.  He knows whereof he speaks.  As the war will now be conducted on European soil with the certain loss of the entire cultural superstructure of the last two thousand years there seems little chance of any European resistance.  Notre Dame will be renamed and become a mosque.

If there is resistance then Burroughs’ prophecy of a flattened Europe turned Black over the centuries is a distinct, nay, certain probability.  In addition to their submission to the Wahabi Arabs, Europeans seem incapable of resisting the Black Moselm invasion from sub-Saharan Africa.  Thus once Blacks and Moslems have the strength they will undoubtedly follow the ancient plan of killing the men and keeping the women.  Need I point to Haiti after the slave rebellion as an example?  Within three or four generations both Arabs and Europeans will be absorbed into Black Africa.

Any discussion of the problem is now impossible in Europe as the blackest censorship has been imposed on dissent.  Astonishing that the enlightenment could disappear just like that, isn’t it?  Anyone who dissents from the Semitic program is liable to imporisonment, heavy fines or both.  The term Semite includes both the Jewish and Arab branches.

Once the Moslem are powerful enough to direct the European military it will mean the end of Israel as that State will be completely encircled by Moslem powers with irresistable might and control of all land, sea, air and satellite communications.

With European technological war materiel at their disposal the Moslems will be able to isolate the United States by depriving it of oil or with the huge and growing population in the US sabotage any war effort if threatened.  Let’s have a round of applause for the brilliant leadership of Chirac, Blair, Bush and Obama not to mention the morons of the US Senate.

Burroughs foresaw the results of the West’s waffling before the Communists, the Moslems and perhaps the Africans but he was prevented from examining the problems too openly for fear of bringing the Liberal Coalition with its charges of anti-Semitism down on his head.  Both he and Henry Ford were having a tough fight for survival.  W.R. Hearst.

Burroughs had already called attention to himself by questioning a survey sent him by the American Jewish Committee in 1919.  It seems apparent the survey drew his attention to Jewish matters which he had ignored up till that time.  This resulted in the character of Bluber in Tarzan And The Golden Lion as well as several characters in 1924’s Marcia Of The Doorstep.  As the AJC would have considered these characterizations ‘anti-Semitic’ the publication of the book was prohibited.  Censored as it were.

Probably as a result of questioning the AJC survey he was put under surveillance.  While a number of movies had been made from his books, in 1921 movie making from his novels ceased reducing his income potential drastically at a very critical time in his finances.  For whatever reason there was a hiatus in the production of Tarzan films that lasted until 1928.  It is only fair to assume that Tarzan had not lost his box office appeal which is the usual Hollywood cover for blacklisting.  One also imagines that Burroughs would have leapt at any movie money.  Indeed, in 1922 the Stern Bros. and Louis Jacobs, a trio of Jewish movie makers, tied up the rights to Jungle Tales Of Tarzan and Jewels of Opar for $40,000.  This was a very decent sum to spend yet the movie makers made no effort make the movies, they were content to tie up the titles.  Whether Burroughs was being disciplined for being ‘anti-Semitic’ or not can’t be determined for certain at this time.

 

Richard Slotkin

Hollywood was notorious for being a Jewish industry.  W.R. Hearst was one of the few goys making movies.  D.W. Griffith was being increasingly marginalized.  In the interim then, the noted ‘anti-Semite’ Joseph P. Kennedy, the father of the future president John F. Kennedy, formed or bought FBO Studios.  The story of this multi-cultural struggle for dominance has never been adequately researched for obvious reasons, but what with the Ford conflict with the Semitic Jewish culture flaring in the foreground it is not unlikely that there was a great deal of maneuvering in the background.  It will be noted that when RKO was formed which incorporated FBO Studios the R for Radio came from RCA and KO for Keith Orpheum were retained while FBO was deleted.  The R and KO were Jewish concerns while FBO had been a great goyish disrupter.

Nevertheless, as Burroughs was blacklisted by Hollywood which the Hollywood historian Neal Gabler describes as a Jewish empire, it is noteworthy that an ‘anti-Semite’ broke the blacklist making Tarzan movies again.  It would have been the equivalent of Dalton Trumbo being allowed to script movies under his own name again in the 1960s.

The blacklist broken, the Stern Bros. and Jacobs then decided in 1928 to exercise their rights to the two Tarzan novels to release Tarzan The Tiger and Tarzan The Mighty.  Calling Tarzan a tiger may have been a slam at Burroughs who erroneously introduced tigers into Africa in the magazine version of Tarzan Of The Apes.

The silent era of movies over, MGM produced the first talkie of Tarzan in 1932.  Watch the dates.

Now, in both Tarzan The Invincible and Tarzan Triumphant Burroughs takes undisguised hits at Communism, pointing fingers and naming names; in Triumphant he continues his open attack on Communism and covertly ridicules the Jews in his portrayal of Midians with their enormous noses and receding chins.  Both attributes are well known caricatures of Jews.  Was this a gratuitous insult or was he responding to insults to himself?

If he had been given courage by the presence of Joseph Kennedy and FBO Studios then he might have relaxed his vigilance a little.  However his open and blatant attack would not have been unresented by Judaeo-Communists.  While Hollywood had always been run by Jews, by 1930 Communists had also made much more serious inroads than is usually admitted.  In other words, ERB’s well being in this multi-cultural war zone depended on his sworn enemies.  As both a goy and counter-revolutionary ERB was an odd man out.  It could not possibly be any other way.

There can be no question that he would have to be gotten for what could only be seen as egregious insults to both Communists and Jews. In fact, the two were nearly one.  The question then was how best to get Burroughs short of outright assassination.  The blacklist had already been broken by Kennedy but possible a movie could be made to make ERB’s great creation ridiculous.  Destroy him in that way, you see.

Thanks to technological marvels like DVDs it is now possible to study old movies at will.  I have a sets of most of the films.  I have viewed Tarzan Of The Apes a number of times.

Bearing in mind that Burroughs was in a struggle with both Communists and Semites as exemplified in 1930’s Tarzan The Invincible and 1931’s Tarzan Triumphant while being surreptitiously listed as an anti-Semite by the American Jewish Committee, I think it worthwhile to speculate on the intent of Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg’s productions.

Having watched the movie a number of times while bearing  books Invincible and Triumphant in mind I have come to the conclusion that the movie’s ulterior motive was an attempt to ridicule the Big Bwana into oblivion.  We all know that ridicule is a most effective weapon, especially when it can’t be answered.  It was undoubtedly thought Tarzan could be destroyed in this manner.

MGM did not negotiate to obtain rights to any particular story but, and this is important, they bought the right to use the characters as they thought fit.  Thus as the movie poster picture in Bibliophile David Fury’s book Kings Of The Jungle on p.63 published by McFarland, it is stated that the movie is ‘based on the characters created by Edgar Rice Burroughs.’  In other words, this is not the Tarzan of Invincible and Triumphant.  Oh no, no.  This is Tarzan The Defeated, Tarzan The Buffoon.

The vision is no longer Tarzan Of The Apes but Tarzan, The Ape Man.  A subtle but important shift in emphasis.  Tarzan is no longer a man raised among apes he is a man who is an ape.  The fabulous brain of Tarzan which allowed him to master reading and writing with the aid of only a picture book, that allowed him to learn new languages instantly has now been replaced by an inarticulate moron who does five minutes of  ‘me Tarzan, you Jane.’

This was free love in the jungle between a hunk and a babe.  Apparently it slipped by unnoticed at the time until it was picked up thirty years later by an astute librarian.  Tarzan and Jane are no longer married in the movies, Jane just began cohabiting with Tarzan because he was such a handsome hunk.  Fortunately she, he, or both were infertile.  Thus Tarzan was subtly defamed, his universality removed.  His audience constricted by that much.

Having slipped this bit past the censors, as incredible as it may seem, in the next movie, Tarzan And His Mate, not wife but mate, you know, a live in,  MGM included the famous nude swimming scene that did not get past the censors.

Both these items would have had the effect of defaming Tarzan and constricting his audience.  A certain type of viewer would be offended by these items and refuse to see the movies while another type would gratified by such items and drawn to the movies but lower the quality of the audience moving Tarzan toward porn.  Thus by degrees Tarzan movies would gain the reputation as porn flicks.  Porn is porn even if it is Tarzan so you aren’t going to let your kids eat popcorn in front of dirty movies nor are legitimate first run theatres going to show them.  At least, not then.

Thus MGM was well on their way to making Tarzan porn before the censors forced a change in plan.  There was nothing Burroughs could have done about this as he, or rather his office manager signed away all his rights to his character.

The MGM poster then portrays Tarzan as a criminal freak:

Mothered by an ape- He knew only the law of the jungle- to seize what he wanted.

The ‘to seize’ is in attention grabbing italics.

Mothered by an ape is ambiguous and meant to be repulsive.  It could mean that Tarzan was fathered by a human on an ape or it could be so obscure as to be meaningless.  If you were familiar with the books you could probably guess what was intended but if you weren’t who knows what it could mean to you.    Remember the first volume, Tarzan Of The Apes, was no longer in print even in 1930 so the original story couldn’t even be bought.  The later volumes don’t recapitulate his birth and raising so there may have been actually few who knew the whole story.  We are led to believe that the MGM Tarzan is completely lacking in morality.  If he wants something he just steals it.  Not the Tarzan I would want to emulate.

The director was W.S. Van Dyke who had just had a major success with his Trader Horn, another African picture.  That one had been phenomenally successful and Tarzan is billed as “Another Miracle Picture directed by W.S. Van Dyke, Creator Of “Trader Horn.”  Van Dyke was certainly not the creator of Trader Horn as the movie was adapted from the book by Trader horn, there was such a man, thus in a way Tarzan, The Ape Man is subordinated to W.S. Van Dyke and Trader Horn.

What is called ‘the adaptation’ is done by someone called Cyril Hume.  As the dialogue was written by Ivor Novello I presume that both the storyline and the alterations to Tarzan’s character can possibly be attributed to Hume.

There is little on Hume on the internet but a New York Times review that was cribbed from All Movie Guide.  It says ‘…During the 1920s, Hume proved a worthy rival of Fitzgerald with such lost generation novels as Wife Of The Centaur and Cruel Fellowship.’  An interesting couple of titles in relation to this Tarzan movie.  The review then goes on to say ‘…During the 1930s , he was the principal writer of MGM’s “Tarzan ” films, bringing prestige to these escapist exercises by treating them with dignity and respect…’  That’s one man’s opinion anyway.

As we all know the attributed movie writer frequently has very little to do with the finished script so we will assume that Hume’s script went through many revisions by many minds with perhaps different agendas than his.  One wonders why Ivor Novello, who was a well known playwright of the time was broght in to do dialogue.  Apart from the Tarzan yell, with which Novello is given no connection, that seems to be the major portion of the dialogue along with the famous ‘Tarzan-Jane’ sequence,  there seems to be little dialog that an amateur couldn’t have written.

The net result is a movie that seriously demeans Tarzan as conceived and portrayed over fifteen novels.  In order for their ridicule to be successful MGM did have to produce a movie that someone would go see.  They were apparently successful beyond their wildest hopes or fears as the movie was described as a ‘surprise’ hit and an enormous grosser.   Now MGM was stuck with the character.

If it was a surprise hit then one can discount the publicity that the movie cost a million dollars to produce.  There are no well-known stars in the movie, while much of it is footage left over from Trader Horn which had already been amortized with the rest being shot on lot.  If the movie cost MGM a quarter  million I would still be astonished.

In their attempt to ridicule Tarzan they were too clever by half.  The character of Tarzan may not have that of the books but audiences still found it satisfying, especially the yell.

Those of us who have read the books have always been uneasy with those MGM movies although Johnny Weismuller was perfectly cast in the role of the Ape Man.

So, while the NYT reviewer may believe Cyril Hume brought ‘prestige to these escapist exercises by treating them with dignity and respect’ there are dissenting opinions other than mine.

Another interpretation was that of the first movie Tarzan, Elmo Lincoln, who commented to ERB “the house seemed to think it was a comedy.  Why do they portray Tarzan without dignity?…with the right treatment and portrayal, Tarzan could a romantic, thrilling character, and still have the sympathy of his audience…I don’t like to see him treated as a clown…”

Elmo Lincoln and I both see the MGM version in the same light, while I have to question the interpretation of the NYTimes writer.  I think Lincoln was right, the movie was a comedic effort meant to defame the persona of ERB’s great creation and thus destroy Edgar Rice Burroughs.  After all ERB, Inc.’s  publishing arm was dependent on sales of Tarzan’s.

By 1932 the troublesome ERB had learned which side his bread was buttered on so he publicly endorsed the MGM movies, after all this was big money, bigger than any other souces of income combined.  It may be said then that just as Henry Ford recanted and apologized for offending the Jewish Cultural entity in the ongoing culture wars so Burroughs bent the knee to Liberal suzerainty.

As ERBzine reports, privately Burroughs had other thoughts:

Daughter Joan Burroughs revealed:  “Dad found it hard to reconcile himself to the movie versions of the Tarzan stories and never did understand the movie Tarzan.  He wanted Tarzan to speak like an educated Englishman instead of grunting.  One time we saw a movie together and after it was over, although the audience seemed enthusiastic, my father remained in his seat and kept shaking his head sadly.”

So Burroughs and Lincoln both resented the screen adaptation based on the Tarzan ERB had created.

There was nothing Burroughs could do about it.  His rights had been signed away by his agent Ralph Rothmund.  Rothmund must have been aware of the tension between Burroughs, Communists and Jews, yet he essentially gave the courthouse away.  He placed Burroughs in the hands of his enemies.  He gave Tarzan to MGM stripping Burroughs of his only weapon and asset.  Why?  Did he contact MGM or did MGM contact him?  Why did he negotiate behind Burroughs’ back presenting him with a fait accompli? Why not tell his employer,  ‘I’ve got this deal worked out with MGM.  Do you want to take it?’

Presented instead with a check, Our Man seduced by vain desires went out and bought five Packard automobiles.  Ah, ERB…

Did he repent of this deal?  I believe so.  Trapped by the contract his only way of retaliation was a futile one through his novels.

Louis B. Mayer

Can it be a coincidence that Tarzan And The Lion Man written over February to May of 1933, published by ERB, Inc. in book form on September 1, 1934 (Septimus Favonius BB#55 p. 34) ridiculed MGM, Irving Thalberg and Trader Horn.  The second MGM movie Tarzan And His Mate was released on April 16, 1934.  Bear these two dates in mind, the movie was released five months before the book leaving time for a revision of the book text.

Certainly severely wounded by the MGM adaptation of Tarzan Burroughs had been beaten.  He had lost the culture war between himself, the Communists and the Jews.  Having lost control of his character in the vital field of movies his only recourse was to lampoon MGM in a book which he did in Tarzan And The Lion Man.  Strangely his illustrator St. John chose this book to experiment with an unrepresentative cover that was believed to have killed sales.  Thus this magnficent achievement was undersold.

Lion Man recounts W.S. Van Dyke’s movie making in Africa, telling it in a ridiculing manner.  MGM’s version of Tarzan is portrayed by a character named Stanley Obroski, perhaps a takeoff on Johnny Weismuller, who is a pale imitation of the real Tarzan.  Burroughs makes a careful comparison showing what a joke the MGM Tarzan was.  In a fit of pique he kills the fake Lion Man off.

One of the more interesting characters is Balza- The Golden Girl.  After escaping from the Valley of Diamonds she joins the movie company where she cavorts about in the nude.  This scene has baffled me but if one remembers that in Tarzan And His Mate Maureen O’ Sullivan is stripped by Tarzan followed by the nude swimming scene, the novel makes sense.  ERB had seen the movie in April of 1934 possibly an earlier studio screening and incorporated the changes in his text for the 9/1/34 release date.

So his retort against MGM while ineffective made for what must rank as one of his very best efforts.

Just as an aside note that while this struggle was going on in Hollywood Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January of 1933; Franklin Delano Roosevelt became President of the United States in March of ’33.

One of FDR’s first deeds was to recogtnize the USSR regime of Joseph Stalin.  In late 1933 a chubby little ex-draper’s assistant acted as a go-between for Stalin and Roosevelt.  Having first visited Stalin,  H.G. Wells carried his messages to Roosevelt.  Thus under the very eyes of the world some very important communications were passed back and forth.  Nineteen thirty-three was also the year the former draper’s assistant wrote his Shape Of Things To Come.

These things can’t be stated with absolute certainty but the character of God– the formerly handsome Englishman in Lion Man, is certainly based on the pompous little H.G. Wells.

Thus while I at first objected to Slotkin’s accusations against ERB, barring the My Lai stuff, I think I am beginning to see ERB’s relation to the cultural wars between Communists, Jews, Liberals and Conservatives.  there is more going on here than meets the eye.

But let us look at some of the religous aspects of this interesting situation.  The religious war between Semitism and the Astrological Religion as represented by Tarzan Of The Apes.

 

Weissmuller As Tarzan

 

 

 

Posted in 1919, Adolf Hitler, Bolsheviks, Communism, Communists, Edgar Rice Burroughs, ERBzine, FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, H. Rider Haggard, H.G. Wells, Henry Ford, Jews, Josef Stalin, Liberal Coalition, Liberalism, Liberals, Louis B. Mayer, MGM, R.E. Prindle, Religion, Religious Consciousness, Reviews, Semites, Tarzan, Uncategorized, Writing | Leave a Comment »