Vol. I, Clip 3: The Vampyres Of New York
December 28, 2015
Book I, Clip 3
The Vampyres Of New York
A Novel
by
R.E. Prindle
If you haven’t experienced that kind of mental agony you don’t know. I tossed and turned all afternoon and into the night. My brain was racked but not with pain. It was like all the connections had come loose and I had no control of my mental processes. There was no way to concentrate, to organize my thoughts to possibly think or be rational. It was like three fevers without temperature racking around in my brain.
I was exhausted and then possibly at one in the morning I heard a knocking. I sat up in bed wondering who in the world it could be. Then I heard Gaines again: Hello, I’m back. Let’s talk.
Well, Gaines! Of course I knew what was happening then. I was at that level of experience and conditioning between the birth process and more conscious experience. I had already cleared out the most compelling of my childhood fixations at forty-two when I integrated my personality. That freed me from compulsions and inhibitions but I gradually learned that there was another layer of control or influence yet beyond my reach. Gaines had now shown up so it was possible to free myself from that psychological layer. Small comfort at eighty but then few if any become so clear. Freud and Jung certainly never attained it. I flattered myself that I could be unique. The first of the New Men. Don’t smile, it was a pleasant thought.
This wasn’t the first incident of interior dialogue my mind had spoken to itself. I heard what they call voices back in my early teens. Of course like St. Augustine I had been convinced that one could talk to God. Unlike Augustine I wasn’t crazy enough to persist when God couldn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know when I asked.
And then back then I heard voices telling me to do inappropriate things like Kill your mother and Chuckles but I shut them up; I wasn’t to going to jail for any reason. And now, here was Gaines a more or less rational entity who would try to convince me to do evil I was certain. As in primeval days I was attached to the God Principle while Gaines was representing the Satanic Principle.
He seemed to be lodged in the right hemisphere just behind and above that ear. This puzzled me somewhat as I would have thought he would have been part of my Animus or Ego that being the male side of the brain; instead he was on my female side.
Then I realized that when Gaines had taken up a primal position in my consciousness I was sitting on the back steps of the Orphanage. When my mother had put me in the Orphanage and had walked away she had created this space in my mind, this psychological layer. Gaines and his evil comic books was therefore associated with my mother. Oh yes, my mother. Sometimes I wish I had heeded those early voices and offed both her and Chuckles. Chuckles, that mean assed bastard, was her second husband. They married when I was ten and I then came out of the Orphanage.
Well, you know, as I always told myself, you have to play the hand you’re dealt. I think I can say without comment that I played that lousy hand well. Here I was in New York City, the capital of the world, in a thirty million dollar apartment. Gaines wasn’t going to be a problem, after all, he was me and I was him. I had the upper hand with the God Principle on my side while Gaines might as well have been Abe Goldbladder of the Satanic Principle. I will discuss that more in my presentation to the New Serapion Brethren.
I was inside my skull with Gaines but my mind had cleared up, I might as well get started.
‘So, Gaines, what brings you here?’ A silly question because I already knew the answer. Still, in order to extinguish him I had to play along. However I did think it necessary to call in my old psycho-analyst Dr. Anton Polarion as an assist.
Who is Dr. Anton? I’m embarrassed to say this because then you might think I really am crazy. But that’s alright, I may be.
Dr. Anton Polarion came around several years ago when I was deep in my psychological studies. I was working a number of fields of study and I needed someone to handle the psychology for me when I was working another field. It was then I thought up Dr. Anton giving him the responsibility for memorizing and developing psychology.
I know it sounds kind of crazy but it’s not. Dr. Anton was and is a memory aide. If you read up on the art of memory you will learn that in Greek and Roman times people constructed memory palaces of many rooms extensively furnished and then assigned memories to various rooms and objects in order to more conveniently record them, prodigious feats of memory are recorded. Oh alright, but I wasn’t going to wander around a Memory Palace trying to find various rooms and objects with their assigned memories so I just handed the job to an imagined Dr. Anton rather than a Memory Palace. You can understand that can’t you? Seems reasonable enough to me but you never know what other people will think. Anyway Dr. Anton knows whereof he speaks. So when it comes to hearing voices it was now two to one against Gaines and I had another Ace or two up my sleeve.
I was loaded for bear and I was sure I could kick Gaines’ ass. Still, I had to hear Gaines out.
‘So Gaines, as I said, what brings you here?’
‘I’ve got some good advice for you,’ said Gaines.
‘Knowing who you are Gaines I doubt it could be good.’
‘Oh ho, you think you know who I am do you? Who am I?’
‘This will take some time Gaines but you’ve got as much as I do. I’ve been waiting for you for a long time. Your showing up here, now, puts things in place. I’m going to call in Dr. Anton for support. You know who he is don’t you Gaines?’
‘Of course, of course. I know as well as you know me. Hello Anton, welcome to the conversation.’
Anton: Hello Gaines. Well, let’s get started.
Partly: The key here is the Orphanage and me sitting on the back step reading Tales From The Crypt. That was one sado-masochistic piece Gaines with a certain portrayal of women. Strangely that portrayal was reminiscent of my mother. It is between you and my mother that this psychology revolves around.
Anton: Yes, your mother transferred her hatred of your father to you after she had put him away and tried to destroy any happiness for you. It is no coincidence that after she had your father committed to the asylum she committed you to the Orphanage. Of course, she had ‘good reasons’ for doing so but they weren’t the real reasons. When you turned eighteen she thought she had you again, enlisting you in the Navy and having you shipped off somewhere where she would never have to see you to remind her of her crime against your father. Thus the association of your mother, sado-masochism and Gaines.
Gaines also provides your connection to the Jews although that application came later in life. The content of Gaines’ comics, the sado-masochism, is part of the Jewish Weltanschauung that Freud expressed so well and it is that that Judaicized you, making the Jewish culture part of your own. It is that part, this Satanic consciousness that drags your spirit down causing your chronic low depression. We’ll try to shake it here but it may now be integral to your mentality.
Leaving Gaines for a moment the pre-Gaines component was your mother’s extreme selfishness. Of course your mother was three months gone when she married your father. This didn’t create so much guilt as anger. She held your father responsible preventing her from doing whatever she thought she would be doing later. You were born in 1938 in the depths of the Great Depression.
Jobs were not easy to come by and although your father was a good provider, that is you had a roof over your head and a shack to live in, even so your father ran out of jobs so he joined the Civilian Conservation Corps and went to work planting forests. He was a good man; he sent most of his money to your mother. She unfortunately as you would learn was not a good woman.
It is difficult at this point to retrieve her motivation but she got laid in the back of a Chevrolet in the parking lot of a grocery store as you know well, Perry. She became pregnant with the little bastard palmed off to you as your brother. A child of sin he has always remained so. A point came where the pregnancy could no longer be concealed.
Needless to say the realization made your father angry. In an attempt to learn the culprit he began to punch her out. In the way of women she was stout refusing to give up his name. Your father said things like ‘I am out working CCC to provide for you and you’re out, words that were unintelligible to you. Do you remember that Partly?
Partly: Yes I do.
Anton: Less than two and half and you remember! What a memory Perry. The bastard was born, your father left and you saw him only once more several months later. Do you know what happened to him?
Me: No. Never saw him again after that last time.
Dr. Anton: Your mother had him committed to the insane asylum and he lived there all his life and died there.
Gaines: Wait a minute, wait a minute. You can’t know anything he doesn’t Anton. Where’s this coming from?
Dr. Anton: Just as you have been suppressed until now Gaines so has the knowledge I’m now revealing. It came in bits and pieces and I have put it all together. Partly is just now realizing it.
Where was I? Yes, committing him was a sadistic act on the part of a guilty woman. But it didn’t stop there Partly. To assuage her guilt while indulging her sadism she had removed her husband but you, a reminder of her crime, remained. She transferred her affection to her bastard and set out to torture and frustrate you. You remember the nightmares you had in high school where your mother was constantly betraying you? That was a subconscious recognition of what you wouldn’t allow yourself to acknowledge but still you knew.
The Orphanage was just four blocks from your grandparents house where you were living. She had to know the effect it would have on your mentality, you certainly did, but just as she had put her husband away in an asylum she put his memory away in another institution, the Orphanage.
Do you remember this Partly?
Me: Sure Anton, I remember but not as clearly and well organized as you do.
Dr. Anton: You’d be a better man for learning it although at eighty who gives a shit. You’ll take it to your grave soon enough.
Me: That’s alright Anton, I’ll die, as you say, a better man.
Anton: So your mother dropped you off and you were led away just like in prison or the asylum but with slightly better conditions. And thus you began to become who you used to be before your personality integration that introduced this current phase of your life at forty-two.
You became quite independent in that harrowing situation of the Orphanage. Fate left that copy of Tales From The Crypt lying on that little porch and a pain equal to your being abandoned seared your soul again striking through your subconscious to the structural level here. You were no longer a free man but controlled from, for lack of a better term, your subconscious. I don’t know how you made it through but here you are.
Your mother’s remarriage to the maniac Chuckles who was a match for your mother’s sadism nearly destroyed you during those eight long years until graduation. Enough of that for now. Let’s deal with Gaines here.
Me: Can we get rid of him?
Gaines: Hell no!
Dr. Anton: He is unfortunately part of the warp and woof of your personality but I’m pretty certain we can modify it and reduce his Satanic level considerably.
Gaines: Over my dead body.
Dr. Anton: Preferably Gaines, that is what we’re shooting for.
With that I collapsed back into my pillow exhausted but calmer with less of a feverish feeling. I was breathing somewhat heavily. I knew that this was a significant psychological event that had not yet achieved resolution and I was afraid to lose the thread. After about an hour Dr. Polarion returned. Anton was not an alter ego as Gaines but functioned more as a guardian angel, a good spirit so I welcomed him.
‘We’ve got to handle Gaines Partly.’
‘Yes. What is your suggestion Anton?’
‘This. It seems that Gaines is functioning as a node for a constellation of similar events. The two obvious strands of the constellation are he, that is your Jewish experience, and your mother. The first step must be to disentangle your mother and put her into her own constellation to be dealt with later. You already have a decent handle on her.
That leaves Gaines and your Jewish experience which is a distinct constellation which when knowledgeable about it you’ve done a lot a preparatory groundwork but certain resolutions are still necessary. That constellation has to be distended into its planetary elements so that each can be identified and dispensed with.
In addition there may be other elements concealed within or behind the constellation of which we have yet no knowledge. Time will tell.
And then there is what Gaines wants you to do which is why he’s made his appearance now. We’ll have to listen and go from there. You and I do understand that what he wants is going to be ridiculous and dangerous.
Me: OK Anton, your analysis is good and I do have a good idea what Gaines wants; I’ve also got my arguments ready and can direct him. But, God, this is painful.
Anton: Yes Partly, self-realization can be trying and I’m sure you’re in agony. You remember Hubert Selby the fellow who wrote his novel Last Exit To Brooklyn?
Me: Oh sure, Anton. Very interesting story. He was probing his mind to write his story. That once when he came up against a particularly painful remembrance it shattered him so that he had to take to his bed for a week writhing in agony. I can’t afford the time for that now. I have things to do and fields to plow.
Anton: You may have more than you think Partly. Get some rest and I’ll get Gaines back here in an hour or so. Control your feelings.
With images of Jekyll and Hyde in my fitful dreams was the titanic struggle of the Shadow with evil and the images of Superman and Clark Kent. Good must triumph over evil although it might not be as clear cut a victory as one might hope.
Just before dawn Dr. Polarion returned and shortly thereafter I heard Gaines’ Hello, I’m here.
Me: Alright Gaines. I’m ready.
Anton had already disentangled my mother from the constellational complex so he and I were dealing with just the Gaines/Jewish constellation. In that obscured constellation other traumas wouldn’t be clear at this time.
‘What’s up Gaines?’ Anton asked quietly with an implied menace that he wasn’t going to listen to nonsense.
Gaines: Why so hostile Doctor Polarion.
Anton: We know what you’re up to Gaines. I have to tell you that we know who you are and where you’ve come from so your Satanic power is negated.
Gaines: Oh, aren’t we clever. What is my pedigree Dr. Polarion?
Anton: Simply this: You infected Partly’s mind on that stoop of the Orphanage with your sado-masochistic claptrap. Partly only semi-consciously took in the sado-masochistic sexuality without knowledge of sex, he had to repress your Satanic influence and with some few exceptions he did. As he knew nothing of Jews and your own Jewishness that puzzling aspect of your Satanity was filed away for future reference. In the meantime following Jewish propaganda he was conditioned to revere Jews and did so.
Then in winter of nineteen fifty-eight in a fit of sado-masochistic lunacy the Jews pre-empted all TV channels at the same time on Saturday prime time and broadcast the most incredible pornographic sado-masochistic program imaginable. An hour of graphic snuff films depicting naked dead bodies being pushed about by bulldozers. The sexual implications were horrendous. While secretly fascinated Partly was resentful of the Jews for pushing this atrocity on him. Without articulating it to himself he was fatally disgusted. Also without noticing it he associated the ‘entertainment’ with you Gaines.
Gaines: I’m disgusting?
Anton: Eminently. Now, there comes an incident that was let slip by almost without recognition. Partly’s wife, now deceased, came from a Jewish background on her mother’s side; the father was nominally Catholic. The mother wanted a Jewish wedding while fearing that Partly would object. The venue was unimportant to Partly, in fact, with his Jewish conditioning he got a little thrill from it.
However to the Jews the notion that a Jewish girl would marry a, what they considered Christian boy, was anathema to them. Her parents approached all the synagogues in the East Bay but there was only one Rabbi in the East Bay that would consent to marry the couple. This was brought about by the intervention of his wife’s mother’s sister whose family was a prominent supporter of the synagogue. Even so the rabbi insisted on an interview with Partly.
As I say, Gaines, Partly had no religious scruples to marrying into a religious family, not quite true, he would never have married Catholic, and thought to be amiable with the rabbi. Both Partly and his wife were above religion despising them as relics from a primitive age. While Partly tried to be amiable the rabbi didn’t. Partly talked to the rabbi man to man while the rabbi as all rabbis do exalted his position believing as a Talmudic scholar that that worthless information placed him not only above Partly or his fellow Jews but all humanity and most of the angels. Resenting Partly’s familiarity he insulted Partly grievously as not worthy of a Jewish girl while being a Christian dog or words to that effect. At that point his respect for the Jews, intense conditioning or no, vanished.
This event was constellated with you Gaines and the TV atrocity to negate any positive feeling he had for the Jews. A couple decades of propaganda was wiped out in an instant. Partly’s future unpleasant relations with Jews will appear subsequently.
So that’s who you are Gaines. Satan on a stick.
Gaines: Yeah, well Dr. Polarion I know where Partly lives. I know he has suffered insults, injuries and indignities from many quarters including the ones you mentioned and I know this: He wants revenge. Who do you go to when you want revenge? Satan, baby, Satan. And here I am.
Anton: True, Partly?
Me: No. It’s true I have a lot of resentments but they’re from assholes and assholes can’t help being assholes; if they could they wouldn’t be assholes so one has to ignore them. It’s their cross to bear and I enjoy watching them be assholes. If Gaines thinks he’s going to lure me into criminal activity he’s not here.
Gaines: Kiss my ass Partly. Social unrest is developing rapidly, exponentially day to day. There are hundreds of racial and religious, what the authorities are pleased to call murders rather than the acts of war they are happening every week.
I know Partly that you were trained by your experiences to be a serial killer. You know it. I don’t know how you’ve resisted up to this time but now is the time to indulge those resentments. Not only are the cops overburdened trying to deal with all the killing and raping going on but they’re afraid to leave the station. Whole cities are no go zones for them. They’ll never identify you, never track you down. Come on buddy, let your inner Mr. Hyde see some light. Now’s the time for your revenge.
Me: I think you’re right about the time being the right time Gaines but remember that Vengeance is mine saith the Lord. I’ve learned that it is true.
Gaines: Vengeance is mine saith the Lord? Listen to this guy. Are you putting me on Partly?
Me: Certainly not Gaines, certainly not. Remember you were kicked out of heaven for the religious offence of chutzpah. God stuck his boot up your ass and down you came. You always tempt men to their destruction by exploiting their own weaknesses. If I were to act in revenge I would surely be caught. Even at eighty I don’t want to be thought of as a criminal.
Gaines: No, you don’t want to be thought of as a criminal. Here’s a tip for you Partly…
Anton: I…
Gaines: You stay out of this Anton, this is between Partly and me.
As above, so below, right Partly? God’s will is supposed to prevail on earth as in heaven, right?
Me: I’m not religious but the Bible does say so. What’s your point?
Gaines: As a lawbreaker I was kicked out of heaven, right. If so, then it is God’s will that I be persecuted on earth also, isn’t it?
Me: Well, you have to believe the Bible.
Gaines: No, you don’t. Freud replaced the Bible but as a Jew he follows the Bible’s rhetoric. Freud and I are one and not only am I part of your mind but Freud is too. That’s one of my attributes that Anton the so-called psychologist forgot to mention. So, if it is God’s will that it is to be on earth as it is in heaven then it is permissible to punish Satanic practices as he punished me isn’t it? As a God fearing person it is imperative that you do so.
Well, there was a thought. The Jews consider themselves God’s viceroys on Earth and that they are doing God’s will by forcing his, or theirs really on the rest of mankind, punishing those who resist, that is anti-Semites. It was a tough argument to counter while Gaines had cleverly appealed to my suppressed desires. Anton was no help at this point.
Me: To punish is vengeance Gaines and as I say Vengeance is the Lord’s. Therefore I cannot punish Gaines, however there is the question of justice, lawbreakers should not be allowed the fruit of their crimes with impunity.
As we know God has no temporal means to effect his will on earth so he must use intermediaries as his chosen vessels hence the Jews claim to be that vessel. However if God spoke to the Jews then he can speak to me. Thus if like Saint Augustine I were to hear his voice enjoining me to administer His justice on earth as he does in heaven, that is kicking Satan off the earth then I could obey his will and be judge, jury and executioner here on earth as the Jews consider themselves. Well, Gaines, that is a thought I will have to give consideration.
Gaines: Yes it is. Further…
Anton: Hold, hold it, stop Gaines. Be gone. Hold up Partly, we have to think about this. Later Gaines, later. Go.
And with a sly wink at me Gaines wandered away. He would be back, of course. But he had given me something to think about. I knew I was going to think about it too and as Gaines knew I would rationalize his suggestion into reality but only in a ‘legal’ manner.
Anton just looked at me and shook his head. He knew what was coming. So did I but neither of us could as yet admit it.
-IV-
Once again I lay back exhausted. Still I had to get to work. In an agitated state of mind I reviewed the correcting of my piece for the New Serapion Brethren that I was titling The Vampyres Of New York. I had put some preliminary thoughts up on the internet so I was searching Vampyres Of New York when I was startled to find that there was an actual group called The Vampyres Of New York that claimed to be a worldwide organization. Its spokesman was some guy calling himself Father Sebastian. He was a young guy who would have been further ahead claiming to be Brother Sebastian; in another thirty years he might pass for a father.
Anything associating itself with vampirism had to be Satanic while the guy was absolutely touting himself as a religion. The crude Satanism of the nineteen sixties was obviously morphing into an attempt at a universal religion. This was a far cry from the historian Arnold Toynbee’s cry for a new universal religion to replace Christianity. Gaines was obviously right about the Satanism in Freud being a part of me but apparently the drive was to make Freudianism the basis of a new religion. Thus as Christianity as a Jewish based religion had represented the Godly Principle so Freud as a Jewish based religion would represent the Satanic Principle.
This was a revelation to me that while new I would have to try to work into my essay. I had to think about it a little so while I was thinking I tinkered around working out disguises. Having seen street activity for a couple weeks now I was uneasy walking around in my own skin; I didn’t want to become that well known.
So, as I thought I tried out mustaches, wigs, glasses, different outfits, so I could walk the streets so as not to become obvious. But, time was passing and I was driven back to my writing desk. I wanted to avoid Gaines as long as possible so I put in some long sessions hoping I would be so tired when I went to sleep that that bastard Gaines wouldn’t be called up. I was successful for the week left before going to Farquhar’s.
I was a day ahead of the deadline so I went out to get a couple two or three bottles of wine to take along. Wanted to show I was a regular guy. I am a regular guy but usually not that regular. Boy, NYC is an alkie’s paradise. What a fabulous selection of spirits. I don’t drink much but in my earlier days I could do a limited justice to the bottle. In those days I favored brandy. Really good stuff if you’re going to drink. Oh lord, if I had known then what New York showed my now I might have been the man who never returned.
I wasn’t after liquor though I wanted wine so I asked for and got bottles of Ramey’s Claret. Ramey is a good Napa Valley vintner while his claret is moderately priced and more than good enough, excellent in fact. The vintage was 2014 that particularly dry year and of small berries. Excellent, I thought it should go over. I’d had it before and it really is a great vintage.
For dress I wore a 1960 vintage sport coat I bought at a second hand store. Nothing was ready at James Carter and I had tried Lord and Taylor and other stores but none was showing other than those idiotic short jackets cut small and I thought I looked a heck of a lot better. Charles Tyrwhitt shirt, one of their higher priced dark blue and white mini stripes, black in a low light. So what’s a boy to do? Ralph Lauren had turned ludicrous after he left.
Ragnar drove me and my bottles of wine up to fifty-second street off Madison to Farquhar’s condo, very good, twelfth floor. As I entered the building an explosion went off maybe three blocks away in some direction I couldn’t determine. Somebody was acting up, hard to tell who. It was beginning to happen fairly regularly. Cops weren’t catching anybody. So many people and organizations were claiming credit for these things it must have been a nightmare investigating these things using only electronics.
As these things were getting more frequent they didn’t even make the headlines in New York while except for certain sites on the internet the rest of the country was totally ignorant of them. The permanent Obama administration was still trying to explain them away as the work of domestic terrorists, actually by now the terrorists were domestic although not so-called White Supremacists. If by Global terrorists it was only just that we should be bombed as was said and that brought the thought of Gaines back as Lessing was rattling the locks on the other side of the door.
Once that ritual was completed I was admitted into a small foyer with a second door and a number of locks which were only locked at night or when Lessing was away. The door was now open for which I was grateful.
Through the second door one entered directly into a large living room, perhaps eight hundred square feet cutting straight through the apartment to the floor to ceiling windows that looked into the windows across the street unfortunately.
The room was comfortably decorated with expensive furniture but not the costliest. The usual New York abstracts, tasteful, were on the wall facing lovely floor to ceiling bookshelves admirably stocked. Books do furnish a room, don’t they?
I was the last to arrive. Seated, looking at me with expectant bemused expressions were Max Savings, Mark Giusty and Baron Cammell the other members of the New Serapion Brethren. Lessing was apparently a bachelor or, as I was to find, a widower.
As I could see I was the oldest of the four. Lessing was seventy-two but still in his prime. How well I remember being fourteen and finding the age of seventy incomprehensible as young people still do. While even people in their thirties and forties expect people of seventy or eighty to be decrepit. Most of us aren’t. Certainly Lessing and I were in full vigor. Diet helps, three or four years earlier I had been compelled to give up my sugar diet, and I mean I love sugar, and that and an improved diet recharged me considerably.
Lessing was more robust than I being taller, probably six-two and bigger boned. He was filled out but not fat or even heavy looking, his face like mine was unlined while he had a full head of white hair as did I although mine was removable and his wasn’t. He showed a little surprise as I was nearly bald at our two previous encounters.
Lessing introduced me to Max Savings who was small, perhaps five-six, and slight. Max was the youngest at sixty-two. He was dressed like an undertaker, had a slightly weasely face with a pointed nose. He had a sharp intelligence.
Marc Giusty was Italian standing a half inch or so below me, seventy years old, still athletic looking, spent a couple hours a day in the gym as I was to learn, lean and long headed in the Italian manner, thin mustache and good features.
Last to be introduced was Baron Cammell. Baron was his first name and not a title. He would prove to be the most difficult member of the group for me.
By the time I was finished with the introductions Max had a bottle of claret open and the glasses filled. Well, you know, two fingers. One sips, this was a cultured group no full water glasses at one gulp. We accepted our glasses and looking at each other took a sip.
Lessing: Oh, very nice.
Marc: Yes. Haven’t seen the label before.
Baron: (Sniffing slightly.) Yes, quite distinctive.
Max: (Smiling.) Enough said.
Me: Yes, well, Ramey apprenticed for many years in France before setting up in Napa. I like Bordeaux style blend and claret hits the spot for me after reading all those old English novels where claret and wine were synonymous. I like this one. So, we’re all ETA Hoffmann admirers, um?
Lessing: Yes, we are that. By way of curiosity Perry, how did you come to Hoffmann.
Me: Oh, you want my origin story as the comic books say? OK Lessing, I’ve got one. I’ll do this in the best comic book style. It was a dark and stormy day back in the middle of the last century when a thirty-six year man shoulders hunched against the cold and rain looked into a shop window. Perceiving it was a book store he being a bibliophile pushed the door open. A blast of warm air hit him as heads turned to look at the stranger. The man glanced casually about at the few inside, mostly help, with no particular object in mind. His attention was caught by a slip cased set of two. Always a sucker for so-called special editions he picked it up to examine it. ‘Hmm…’ he mused to himself, ‘Selected Writings Of Hoffmann? Hoffmann who?’ Extracted, Vol. I read from the title page, E.T.A. Hoffmann The Tales. The man had heard of ETA Hoffmann spoken of most highly and of course he knew of Offenbach’s opera Tales Of Hoffmann. Twelve dollars and fifty cents. OK.
Tucking the parcel under his arm under his coat and lowering his head against the blast he proceeded down the street. I was that man.
Me: There you go Lessing and an identical copy can be found on your bookshelf right over there.
Ha, ha, ha came as a chorus from the four men: Nicely done, Perry, nicely done.
‘The lad shows promise, doesn’t he?’ said Lessing.
Max Savings: This could prove interesting.
Me: And since then then I’ve added a dozen volumes filling out, I think, what’s available in English except for that magnificent nineteenth century volume you have on your shelf.’
Lessing: That one. I’m quite proud of that find. I tramped London looking for that one. But you have never reviewed Hoffmann on your site Perry, how come?
Me. I don’t feel adequately prepared Lessing. I have added a number of Romantic writers to my library in the last four years, Kleist, Tieck and like that but nothing in the way of critical reviews so I don’t think I’m prepared to speak authoritatively. And I still have to read Goethe, the key Romantic. If you’ve read my stuff you probably are aware that I speak without concern of contradiction. I can’t do that with Hoffmann yet. So, if I may ask, give me a thumbnail of yourselves.
Lessing: I’m host so I might as well go first. The salient point is that I spent my career practicing law, mainly real estate and financial issues. That is an area where much of the money sticks to the lawyer and I am in a comfortable situation as you can see having made my share or more of the money stick to me. Although remunerative I found the law and its cases fairly loathsome so as soon as I felt financially independent I left all that behind and turned my attention to what I loved much as you have Perry. Much more rewarding.
Max Savings: I’m not quite so financially independent as Lessing and still at my desk at Chase. I certainly am not so accomplished literarily as you and Lessing but I squeeze in time in an effort to keep up.
Marc Giusty: I was a university prof all my working life, loved it at Columbia uptown here. History was my subject. Unfortunately I was just a yeoman and not a star. I wrote a few papers for academic publications and a couple slim volumes that disappeared down the memory hole but allowed me to keep my position. By the way, this is a nice wine.
Me: Glad I chose to your taste. And you Baron.
Baron: I’m somewhat of a polymath, expert in several fields. I’m working on a unified field theory to arrange the liberal arts in a chronology with commentary. That’s all you need know of me.
Me: Quite so, quite so. Now that we’ve been introduced and had a little wine what say I begin my presentation? I’m anxious for your opinion and hope to please.
Lessing: That sounds right. What is the title of your presentation Perry?
Me: I call it The Vampyres Of New York.
I noticed a little uneasiness in the Brethren at the title. Lessing spoke:
Is this a vampire story, Perry? I thought the understanding was that we present historical essays.
Me: Exactly Lessing. But lesser known aspects, other sides so to speak and that is what mine is. Don’t let the title throw you. By the way as you’re not looking at the paper I spell vampire v-a-m-p-y-r-e. I chose the spelling to indicate a difference from a Dracula type blood vampire. My essay will concern what is known as psychic vampires. When I was searching Vampyres Of New York on the internet to see if my first couple of posts had registered yet I was surprised to find that there is actually an organization called The Vampyres Of New York, spelled with a Y.
I was further astonished that it claims to be worldwide although the claim seems a little dubious. At any rate the possible leader is a guy calling himself Father Sebastian who divides his time between New York and Paris.
As you know since the first Disney version of Star Wars a recent religion has sprung up based on the concept of the Force and whatever. It seems probable that the Vampyre organization is a type of Satanic religion too. This brings to mind that after the challenge to the Jewish religion in the West after the Scientific Revolution following the Enlightenment the Western Jewish religion under the Scientific challenge dissolved into a number of splinter religions seeking a center. The center of course came from the East and was called Zionism so that Judaism with some atavism and Zion are one.
Christianity has taken longer to find a new center but under the influence of nineteenth and twentieth century Satanism we may be seeing a jelling into some form of a universal Satanic religion. It is something to bear in mind. So my historical investigation is concerned with the Jewish and Christian religious disintegration of the previous two centuries under some sort of vampiric influence. Is that alright? It won’t offend any sensibilities?
Lessing: If it is historical we have no objections.
Me: Alright. I’m pretty sure this will be a different approach to what you’re used to so I have a prologue explaining the difference between a Dracula type Vampirism and psychic Vampyrism which will concern us. This is longish but not hugely long so fill your glasses and sit back. It is written out so feel free to interrupt at any time for explanations or comments, discussions or whatever.
OK? I begin: The Vampyres Of New York.
Clip 4 following contains the text of Vampyres Of New York.
The Ancient Evil: Diana And The Goddess Tradition
October 13, 2012
The Ancient Evil:
Diana And The Goddess Tradition
by
R.E. Prindle
A problem that has been perplexing me for some time is the role of the Goddess Diana as the female archetype for the last half of the Age of Pisces. The adoption of the goddess Diana or Artemis as she was known in Greece signifies a resurgence of the Matriarchy. This is a rather remarkable comeback as the Matriarchy was virtually unknown in the nineteenth century, all but forgotten.
I’m sure the interpretation of Diana’s history and her relationship to Astrology will be met with some dismay as these subjects are not properly understood. Essentially the problem is one of memory; in this case historical and racial memory. Memory on one level is a desire to retain and understand the past whether on a personal or historical level. From the past the future may be predicted. What has gone before will likely happen again. It was this knowledge that made the calendar a necessity. If one has a starting point, such as the shortest day of the year the return of flora and fauna may be roughly known. To make the year more manageable it was divided into seasons and months to mark more easily the passage of the days of the year. This knowledge led to a whole cycle of gods, goddesses and myths. Thus a terrestrial zodiac was derived denoted by symbols appropriate to the seasons. As it was assumed that what happened on earth was a reflection of what happened in the skies the terrestrial zodiac was translated to the stars and thus we have the Astrological Zodiac in which the twelve signs reflect the weather pattern on earth.
Just as there are twelve months in the year so the skies were divided into twelve portions called Ages. The length of the Ages was determined by the Great Year that was of some twenty-five thousand years plus duration. The Great year was determined by the rotation of the earth on its axis as evidenced by the stars of the North Pole.
The Great Year
Each Age has it male and female archetypes. In Greece the Arien Age was presided over by Zeus and Hera. Thus each set of archetypes has a lifetime of two thousand plus years and then they make the long slide to Far Tartary and back again.
The Piscean Age which has become universal began with the male archetype of Jesus of Nazareth while in mid-Age the archetypes where transferred to the female side- Diana in the North of Europe and Mary, the mother of Jesus, in the South of Europe.
While the mechanism used to achieve this is fairly clear the exact process can only be surmised.
While it may be difficult to believe the Astrological Zodiac must have begun development about a hundred thousand years ago being in the fourth cycle at the time of the dawn of the Age of Pisces. Thus as a method of timekeeping the Zodiac has a long history.
One may question the hundred thousand years and yet the Mesopotamian myths mention a past of at least that long. One usually doesn’t credit the ancients with actual knowledge but I think it is time to take them more seriously.
For much of that hundred thousand years during the long Ice Age the level of the Mediterranean was much lower probably being a long valley with a succession of large lakes fed by the Nile and the Propontis while the outflow was at the Pillars of Hercules. As the Med Valley was habitable it must have been inhabited. Undoubtedly a civilization developed that was fairly sophisticated. One needn’t look for extraterrestrials for human development.
Thus when the Ice Age ended returning the accumulated waters to the oceans the waters rose forcing the Valley’s inhabitants to seek higher ground until the sea level became static. While denizens fled to all sides of the Med the civilization bearers occupied Lower Egypt, the emerging Nile Delta. A second area in which civilization in some form must have survived was the island of Crete.
Nile Delta. 10,000 years ago the Delta would have been smaller as the silting would not have progressed so far.
It was on this island that the religious formula that became a basis of Europe was formed. The basis was provided by the Hellenic Greek tribes that began their invasion of the Greek peninsula c. -1700.
The Greek penisula was occupied by an ancient people called Pelasgians. They like the Cretans were descendants of the Med Valley peoples as were the Cretans and Lower Egypt. The Pelasgian religion closely resembled that of the Cretans. The conquering Hellenes imposed their Greek language on them while setting about solving the religious differences into one unifed religion. This was done following a usual pattern.
Crete, The Aegean Islands and the Greek Mainland, The Core Of The Thalassocracy
The Hellenes followed an Aryan Patriarchal model while the Pelasgians and Cretans followed a Matriarchal type.
How much religious development took place between 8000 BC when the waters rose and 2000 BC when things had settled must have been very large. An important thing to remember is that the human mind is continually handling information. Problems of memory have been continually remedied with new storage technologies. They have been continually developed to today’s immense ability to be able to very nearly store entire reality. Every phone call in the world 24/7 can be stored and retrieved at will so that totally inconsequential information is on record but will never be read.
The time lapse between improvements in storage and retrieval were immense in the early days increasing rapidly to the present. The earliest known city, the remains of which date not coincidentally to c. 8000 BC is located at Catal Huyuk in Anatolia which would have been a rural backwater to the Med civilization, but a high degree of communal organization is evident. One imagines the Cretan civilization was similar but more highly developed. There is every evidence that the Great Mother religion was fairly highly developed at the time the waters rose.
The Cretans certainly brought the religion to a degree of perfection. Obviously there is no agreement as to the degree while the substance of religion can be only guessed at.
The Goddess Angry
Presently the Goddess advocates picture the Matriarchy as some kind of golden age of
The Loving Goddess
peace love and happiness. This is not the case. The Matriarchates lived in a period of very primitive mentality. Nor is the female of the species any less bloody minded than the male. The memory of the matriarchate was still strong enough for later males to dismiss the matriarchate as a period that was not too kind to men. Indeed, if one bears in mind that the sacrificial bulls were substitutes for men and that bulls were often sacrificed in holocausts which means a hundred bulls or more then it follows that at one time a hundred men or more were sacrificed to the Great Mother. Obviously this would leave rueful memories in the minds of men.
This memory may have been played out in the tale of Iphigenia At Aulis.
Shall we examine the participants in this drama, Agamemnon, Clytmnestra, Iphigenia and Diana?
Zeus in the apparition of a swan had intercourse with Leda who then lay two eggs. Both bore twins. From one egg Castor and Pollux emerged. These two represent the soltices, Castor, winter and Pollux summer. From the other egg Helen and Clytemnestra emerged. These two represent the equinoxes, Helen the Spring, Clytemnestra the Fall. One might compare Helen to the Cretan Loving Goddess with the erect snakes held hip high and Clytemnestra to the Angry Goddess brandishing the two writhing snakes. Thus the two goddesses are representatives of Diana.
Zeus Impregnating Leda
Now Agamemnon was punished by Diana for killing a deer and then boasting that he was a better hunter than she. Agamemnon and the Greeks were assembled at Aulis but unable to sail for lack of wind. A sacrifice was deemed necessary to allay the winds. Ordinarily a male would have been the sacrifice to Diana. Instead Agamemnon sacrificed his and Clytemnestra’s daughter probably in vengeance for his punishment by Diana and the slaughter of all those males during the Matriarchy.
Clytemnestra herself was a representative of the Matriarchy so the story is involved.
While my interpretation might be controversial I think it clear that the Cretan goddess became Artemis/Diana. At any rate it was the Argive (from Argos) mainland goddess Hera who would be chosen as the wife of Zeus. Therefore the Cretan goddess would have lost her consort and been a loose cannon.
Zeus himself was of Cretan origin probably intended to be the annual consort of the Goddess. As religion evolved the characters of the Gods and Goddesses changed so that while there is continuity the attributes and characters change enough so that the religious figures have to be located in time and place.
When the Hellenes, or Greeks, began to arrive the Cretans had already created a political organization known as a thalossocracy, a sea based empire. The islands and at least the coasts from Aegean to Italy were under Cretan rule. The Greeks then challenged the power of the Cretans as well as seeking to impose the Patriarchal religion on the Matriarchy.
This method of taking control was the same as that of all religions replacing another. As in such situations the overcome religion submits to greater power but continues a more or less clandestine existence. Thus the Aryan Greeks converted religious sites such as Delphi to Patriarchal shrines. Where the necessisity existed in Matriarchal strongholds, they apparently attempted to exterminate the Matriarchates. Persecute them out of existence, perhaps, as happened to the Lollards of England.
In this case, Perseus’ assault on the Gorgon Medusa could have signified an all out assault on the Matriarchal stronghold as was the story of the Iliad in which the Patriarchal Greeks waged a ten year war to exterminate Matriarchal Troy. Whether factual or not it is true that when the post-Troy dark age ended the Greeks were in possession of the Anatolian littoral.
Of course the preferred method was by stealth and intermarriage. Intermarriage may have required the extermination of the males to acquire the women which was commonly done. Thus, Zeus’ frequent rapes of women may commemorate such takeovers.
As the assimilated gods appear to have been indigenous the Greeks must have taken over the pre-existing gods while changing them to Patriarchal from Matriarchal. Thus, while Zeus is clearly a Cretan god, probable annual consort of the Great Mother, he was transported to mainland Argos where as a woodpecker he raped the Argive goddess Hera becoming her lord and master, or her husband.
The consort of Hera was Heracles, a sun god. When Zeus took Hera from him as his wife this left Heracles at loose ends without a purpose. The Greeks gave him a new lineage and the role of the champion of the Patriarchy and punisher of the Matriarchy.
In this case Zeus seduces Alcmene in the disguise of her husband Amphitryon impregnating her with Hercules. Just as Heracles was a loose cannon after the marriage of Zeus and Hera the Cretan Great Goddess was without a consort when Zeus left Crete. The problem is what identity was she assigned? When Heracles was born two snakes were sent by the Matriarchy to kill him. The baby Heracles strangled both, one in each hand. Symbolically then the Cretan religion was imagined to be destroyed and possibly its Great Mother murdered.
A great problem however that remains hidden from me is the origin of the Peloponnesian Lady Of The Lake. As the Cretan Great Mother was also a Mistress Of The Animals it is quite possible that she was taken to the mainland from Crete where she became an Artemis and possibly the Lady Of The Lake.
At some later time the Cretan priesthood would be carried from Crete and installed as the priesthood of Apollo at the premier Greek shrine of Delphi. So, how much of the Greek religion was of Aryan origin and how much of the ancient Med Valley religion through its Cretan development isn’t clear but the two must have been extensively intermingled making the Cretan Great Mother a probable Artemis/Diana and the Lady Of The Lake.
I have found no references in Greek mythology to the Lady Of The Lake but the Lady as Vivian turns up in the Arthurian epics of +1000-1300 when they were formulated. In those she is referred back to ancient Peloponnesian times. I haven’t found the sources of the medieval writers but they must have been in possession of some mythological sources that no longer exist.
I would now like to examine the transition from the male archetype of Jesus in mid-Piscean Age to Diana in Northern Europe and Mary, the Mother of God in the South.
Before leaving the Ancients however let me say that having organized a pantheon the Greeks then removed the various gods from their home locales and established their residence on Mt. Olympus deep in the more densely Aryan populations of the North of Greece.
II.
The religion of no one Age is secure because the transition to the next Age is always looming. Just as Zeus had replaced Cronus of the Taurean Age so the Greek male archetype of the Piscean Age, Dionysus, was maturing as Zeus’ replacement.
However, in the long war between Europe and Asia the balance of power was to shift toward the Asians. Dionysus was discarded to be replaced by the Semitic Jew, Jesus of Nazareth. The Jews had quietly been infiltrating Western society while actually contending for pre-eminence in the East and Egypt. This would erupt into the Roman-Jewish wars of the first two centuries AD.
As the early Christians were a purely Jewish sect it is no wonder that when Paul of Tarsus turned the Jewish cult into a universal religion that that religion reflected Judaism to a large extent. Judaism being an intolerant religion that intolerance was replicated in both the Roman Catholic and the Greek Orthodox Churches. The result was that any competing religious views were viciously suppressed. After the fourth century the old Creco-Cretan religion was anathematized on the pain of death.
As would happen in the fifteenth century when the Ottoman Moslems conquered Constantinople and the Greek scholars fled East to India and West to the Roman successor States numbers of the Olympian priesthood undoubtedly fled into the German lands to the North. Just as the Arian priests fled North to escape Catholic oppression where they converted the German tribes so the Olympian priests sowed their beliefs among the Germans. That’s one reason so many Olympian beliefs are found in German folk tales as collected by the Grimms.
As the Lady Of The Lake is a Matriarchal myth it follows that the Cretan priesthood of Delphi sowed Matriarchal ideas among the Germans. It can be little wonder that Vivian, The Lady Of The Lake, appeared in the French chivalric myths created from the eleventh though fourteenth centuries.
Not only that but Vivian represents the Matriarchal resurgence against Catholic Patriarchalism. Vivian of course was none other than Artemis/Diana. It was thus that Diana became the female archetype of Northern Europe in the second half of the Piscean Age.
It would be a mistake to suppose that the Olympian gods died quiet deaths or deaths at all. It is one thing to outlaw a belief system and another to erase it from the memories of those who had used that belief system for two thousand years. The Christians were at best a conquering horde no different from the Patriarchal Greeks who attempted to destroy the Cretan religion. The Catholic Church was no more able to contain the Olympians than the Greeks were able to contain Cretan religion. Just as the Greeks had had to accommodate the Cretans by installing them at Delphi so the Catholic Church had to accommodate Olympians while the struggle never ceased.
Just as the Iliad was part of an immense mythological cycle detailing the struggle between the Matriarchy and the Patriarchy so the Arthurian epics detailing the Matriarchal, Patriarchal and Church as Aryans sects was even more immense and sprawling. The huge corpus of the Vulgate-Lancelot may just be the largest literary work in the world while being only part of the story.
So Arthur being installed at Camelot as the wise and benevolent Patriarchal monarch, Vivian had her home beneath a northern French lake. The problem for her was how to subvert Camelot and restore the Matriarchy. After all the court of Arthur was guided by and protected by the magic of the great magician Merlin. So long as Merlin was on the job Arthur was invulnerable. Vivian’s first task was to eliminate Merlin.
Bear in mind that an ages old system that these participants can have had no knowledge of is being satisfactorily worked out according to the principles of that system. One can understand how active minds could penetrate this arcane system but the miracle is that naïve minds could understand what was intended and how to further it. But then I am participating here in furthering events into the Aquarian Age and am no member of any priesthood; I was just a guy standing on the corner watching the girls go by while reading the odd volume. Do I know what I say I know? I can’t even guess but at the same time I can’t keep from writing as though I do. Blame it on the muse.
Vivian was a cute girl; Merlin was a half daft old man susceptible to a young beauty’s charms even though he knew better. Vivian smiled at him and the wisest dope in the world fell for it. But, isn’t that the way the sisterhood always works. If you’ve got a job to do, keep it zipped up.
Enamored of Vivian Merlin took her into his confidence. He was reluctant to share his magic with her but she coaxed and he caved. Once the wiliest of womanhood had obtained the old wizard’s knowledge she turned on him entombing him in the matriarchal symbol, Mother Earth, where he remains today muttering useless spells in an effort to remove the stone.
Vivian Enchants Merlin
Part one of her effort was now achieved. Arthur was unprotected and vulnerable. It was only necessary to find the means and the agent. Vivian already knew the means. Arthur would marry the beautiful but flighty Guenivere. Arthur was old sobersides as he had a kingdom to rule so Guenivere was on the lookout for the dark romantic lead. It just so happened that Vivian had a boy in training who was now about to emerge into lusty young manhood. He was the most perfect knight in the world save one, who was yet unborn and to be his son.
When this lad was a young boy Vivian had lured him down to the lake from whose shores she abducted him taking him to her submarine palace for training. Lancelot became a fairy prince. Now, this is important: Vivian although a virgin was an alpha mother . All those bundles of genes out there who yell and stomp thinking that makes them alpha males aren’t. It’s not in the genes its in the mothering. Look for the alpha female. So, Lancelot was the alphaest of all living males.
As an emblem of her authority Vivian dressed Lancelot as well as the horse he rode out on in shining white velvet. Guenivere’s prince had come.
This Dandy, Lancelot, then went to Camelot and was deputized by Arthur to fetch his bride from her father and thus began a liaison with the Queen that would disrupt the famous Round Table resulting in a war between Patriarchal Arthur and Matriarchal Lancelot that brought the kingdom to its knees.
Arthur’s original sword drawn from the stone had been stolen and replaced by Excalibur a sword given to him by Vivian. Thus Arthur originally armed by the Patriarchy was now defended by the power of the Matriarchy or Diana. When Arthur died the sword was returned to the Lady Of The Lake and Arthur was taken to her bourne, Avalon to be tended by the fairie maidens. Symbolically England had passed from the Patriarchy to the Matriarchy; what began two thousand years earlier between the Cretans and the Greeks was now resolved in England in favor of the Matriarchy.
In the South of Europe the female archetype of the Piscean Age was Mary who delivered Jesus to the world in Virgin birth somewhat like Vivian giving virgin birth to Lancelot. At the same time that Diana assumed authority in the North Mary began to be worshipped in a form known as Mariolatry in the South and assumed pre-eminence over Jesus, the male. The contest then shifted to one between the Dianites of the North and the Marionites of the South.
If one assumes that the sexual battle was over by 1300, then the battle of the female archetypes began. That began to resolve itself when Henry VIII separated England from the Papacy rejecting Mary, the Mother of God. Luther did the same for the Germans. This conflict resulted in the horrific Thirty Years War that nearly destroyed the German people. At war’s end Protestants, that is the Dianites, were in control of the North while the Marionites held the South.
Dissension in the North and South was still rife until the Enlightenment broke the power of the Church releasing all kinds of repressed religious views of which the religion of Diana was merely one. One wonders how much of the women’s movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was influenced by the concept of Diana The movement today is heavily influenced by a goddess cult, not Mary, but Diana and probably the Egyptian Isis. One imagines that there must be some continuity.
The interest in both Greek mythology and the Arthurian epics did not wane during the nineteenth century, if anything increasing. Tennyson’s Idylls of the King was a major retelling of the story while the quest for the Holy Grail is an ongoing theme.
The Matriarchy was all but forgotten in the conscious memory of Europe that had become patriarchal on the surface. In mid-century against stiff resistance the Swiss mythologist, J. J. Bachofen uncovered the Matriarchy reintroducing it into intellectual history. The concept was stoutly resisted but a reevaluation of the evidence over the succeeding hundred years has reestablished the knowledge of its existence.
On the popular level the great English novelist H. Rider Haggard toyed with the idea in several significant, even great, novels that have been slighted through a lack of understanding. The most significant of that set of novels, the She saga, has become one of the world’s great classics.
She, or Ayesha, her actual name, means Life was definitely not a mother goddess, as far as we know she had been chaste for two thousand years. Life might be interpreted in the sense of Mistress Of The Animals, so it wouldn’t be unfair to associate Ayesha with Diana. Haggard was no mean mythologist.
He associated with the well known mythologist Andrew Lang with whom he also collaborated on The World’s Desire. He was very well read in mythology, Greek, Egyptian and Israelite. The year after Haggard wrote She in 1888 he followed up with Cleopatra, a very good Egyptian novel. He followed that with the astonishing interpretation of the Helen myth in The World’s Desire of 1890. Within the compass of these three novels he unraveled the meaning of the Hermes/Mercury staff- the Caduceus.
The Caduceus Of Mercury/Hermes
In She Ayesha wore a golden belt composed of two snakes whose heads opposed each other at her waist. They represented the combat between good and evil in Ayesha’s mind. Both natures of the Cretan goddess were united in Ayesha.
By the time Haggard wrote The World’s Desire two years later he had separated the two impulses into two persons. The evil aspect of the goddess was the ruling aspect of the Egyptian princess Meriamun while the pure loving aspect of the goddess belonged to the spirit of Helen whose character was the world’s desire.
Thus the rod of Mercury’s staff represents the spine while the two snakes entwining the rod represent the good and evil impulses who facing each other are at war with each other. In modern psychological terms it could be said the snakes represent the Anima and Animus- the left and right halves of the brain or, in other words, the ovate strand of DNA and the spermatic strand. The wings mean that the whole apparatus is sheltered under the wings of the goddess. It is also quite probable that the points of the chakras are intended by the twining. See my full explication here: https://idynamo.wordpress.com/2009/12/04/a-review-part-iv-she-by-h-rider-haggard/
Hermes/Mercury was one of the old Matriarchal gods who was reborn as a Patriarchal god so that the Patriarchal Mercury bears the Matriarchal emblem of the Caduceus before him thus representing both religious outlooks.
Haggard was the rock on which his near disciple, Edgar Rice Burroughs, built his church. Without saying that Burroughs was an expert Greco-Roman mythologist he began reading mythology at a very early age while his Junior High years were spent at the Harvard Latin school of Chicago where he was placed under a heavy classical regimen. He also continued to read Greek mythology throughout his life while also being interested in anthropology. Thus, while he might not have had the scholarly background of Haggard he must have known enough to follow Haggard’s argument, if not consciously at least in his subconscious memory.
When Burroughs created his fantasy lost city of Opar its goddess, or high priestess, was even named La which is French for She. Whether he was aware he was working with a vision of Diana isn’t relevant as the notion of She/Diana was engraved in what Jung would call the collective unconscious and hence his own.
Ever the Patriarch, Burroughs turned the tables on the Diana/Vivian Merlin story and made La submissive to Tarzan while Tarzan was unmoved by either her beauty or her love.
A sort of version was also told by the very good but now nearly forgotten novelist Robert Hichens in his novel of 1905, The Garden Of Allah. This story in turn influenced Burroughs as well as the much more conscious mythologist Edith Maude Hull who wrote The Sheik in 1921. Today Mrs. Hull’s reputation, such as it is, rests on The Sheik and The Sheik’s reputation on the movie represention of Rudolph Valentino. In point of fact Mrs. Hull’s novel was a study of Diana, the name of her heroine, that follows to some extent the version of Burroughs. (See my full review of The Sheik here https://idynamo.wordpress.com/2007/10/12/a-review-1921s-the-sheik-by-em-hull/)
1920s English Devotee Of Diana
That Mrs. Hull was a part od some sort of Diana cultish interest is evidenced by this 1920s photo of woman posing as Diana. The collective memory and/or unconscious has kept the vision of Diana/Great Mother alive for a minimum of three thousand years. The Ancient Evil had been transmuted into Freudian psychology.
Today the worship of the Goddess has been revived in the Feminist Movement and is thriving. Indeed, a Matriarchal Revolution has been in progress since perhaps the 1850s and now seems to be rapidly approaching fruition, at least among the Aryans of Europe and America.
Time will tell whither the Ancient Evil will triumph.
Part II: Only The Strong Survive
April 3, 2012
Only The Strong Survive
Part II
An Examination Of Bridge And The Oskaloosa Kid
As Created By Edgar Rice Burroughs
(Alternate Title: The Oakdale Affair)
by
R.E. Prindle
Part II
Into The Mysteries
(Some capitalization appears in the text that has no significance. For some reason it just showed up. I didn’t do it)
Young Burroughs With His Camera Eye
Burroughs does a good job in the Holmesian sense in this book enclosing mysteries within mysteries. The central mystery is who is committing the crime wave in Oakdale. Having learned from his mentor, Conan Doyle, Burroughs skillfully withholds details to enhance the suspense then disclosing them to reveal the mysteries. The organization of the scheme of crimes gradually unfolds to show that the real Oskaloosa Kid is one of the perpetrators. So we have a clever doubling of a sweet girl posing as the vicious criminal The Oskaloosa Kid. This is obviously a transfer of his Anima identity from the male De Vac/Oskaloosa Kid to the resumption of a female identity for his Anima through the fake Oskaloosa Kid/Gail Prim.
The girl who was seen with the criminals could have been Gail since she had disappeared without a trace never having arrived at her destination. Gail was not the girl seen with Reginald Paynter, who was robbed and murdered, and the crooks. That person was Hettie Penning who was ejected from the car speeding past the abandoned Squibbs place by the real Oskaloosa Kid. Thus symbolically De Vac/Oskaloosa Kid returns his Anima to Bridge/Burroughs.
As indicated Hettie Pening represents the dead early Anima of Burroughs who has here been resurrected. As in all cases of Burroughs representation of his failed Anima she appears to be a ‘bad’ girl but in reality is merely misunderstood. He compensates for himself.
Bridge himself is a mystery man and double. He is a hobo but with great manners and an excellent education. He is definitely a member of the Might Have Seen Better Days Club. The real club was organized by Burroughs when he served as an enlisted man in the Army in 1896.
In this case Bridge is in actuality the son of a wealthy Virginia aristocrat who has left home because he prefers a life on the road. In the framing story of a Princess of Mars Burroughs portrays himself in his own name as a Virginian. In reality Burroughs was declassed at eight or nine by John the Bully and by his father’s subsequent shuffling of him from school to school finally sending him to a bad boy school that Burroughs describes as little more than a reformatory for rich kids.
If one looks at his career he was on the move quite a bit. During his marriage he seldom lived in one house for more than a year or two then moved on.
Just as Bridge will assume his proper identity at the end of the novel so through his writing Burroughs has abandoned the shame of his hard scrabble years from 1905-13. In a sense he is assuming his proper identity with this novel.
Bridge and the Kid joining together at the fork in the road, one is reminded of Yogi Berra’s quip: When you come to a fork in the road, take it, in this case the less traveled dirt road.
I read word for word frequently dwelling on the scenes created. Burroughs is a very visual writer. Standing at the fork in a driving Midwest summer lightning, thunder and deluge storm they can hear the pursuing hoboes shouting down the road. Ahead of them is a dark unknown and a house haunted by the victims of a sextuple murder.
Indeed, Burroughs describes almost a descent into hell, or at least, the hell of the subconscious.
Over a low hill they followed the muddy road and down into a dark and gloom ravine. In a little open space to the right of the road a flash of lightning, followed one imagines by either the crash of deep loud rumbling of the thunder of perhaps if over head the sonic boom of the air splitting and closing, revealed the outline of a building a hundred yards (that’s three hundred feet, a very large front yard) from the rickety and decaying fence which bordered the Squibb farm and separated it from the road.
There are those who say Burroughs doesn’t write well but in a short paragraph he has economically drawn a verbal picture which is quite astonishing in its detail. The house is a hundred yards from the road. In the rain and muck that might be a walk or two or three minutes or more.
A clump of trees surrounded the house, their shade adding to the utter blackness of the night.
That’s what one calls inspissating gloom. One might well ask how any shade can add to utter blackness but one gets the idea. There is some intense writing thoroughly reminiscent of Poe but nothing like him.
The two had reached the verandah when Bridge, turning, saw a brilliant light glaring through the night above the crest of the hill they had just topped in their descent into the ravine, or, to be more explicit, the small valley, where stood the crumbling house of the Squibbs. The purr of a rapidly moving motor car rose above the rain, the light rose, fell, swerved to the right and left.
“Someone must be in a hurry.” commented Bridge.
There isn’t any better writing than that. Another writer can say it differently but he can’t say it better. Just imagine the movie Frankenstein or Wolf Man when you’re reading it. Burroughs did as well in less than the time it takes to show it.
A body is thrown from the speeding car a shot following after it. Bridge goes to pick up the body.
Thus the mystery and horror and terror of the dark and stormy night has been building. Bridge carrying the body which may or may not be alive asks the Kid to open the door.
Behind him came Bridge as the youth entered the dark interior. A half dozen steps he took when his foot struck against a soft yielding mass. Stumbling he tried to regain his equilibrium only to drop fully upon the thing beneath him. One open palm extended to ease his fall, it fell upon the uplifted features of a cold and clammy face.
Yipes! What more do you need? Cold and dripping, half crazed from fear, overwhelmed by the thought he might be a murderer the Kid’s hand falls on cold and clammy dead flesh. Bridge is standing there with maybe another dead person in his arms. The Kid is also aware that the murderous hoboes are hot on his trail.
If that doesn’t get you then somehow I think you can’t be got.
Not yet finished Burroughs builds up the tension. Striking a match from the specially lined water proof pocket of Bridge’s coat they find a dead man wearing golden earrings. Obviously a gypsy but while staring in unsimulated horror they hear from the base of the stairs of a dark dank cellar the clank of a slowly drawn chain as a heavy weight makes the stairs creak.
This is too much for the nerves of the Kid. Burroughs brilliantly contrasts the terror of the unknown in the basement with the fear of the dark at the top of the stairs. You know where that’s at, I’m sure, I sure do. In a flash the Kid chooses the unknown at the top of the stairs to the horror in the cellar.
What do you want?
The hoboes are still slipping and sliding down the descent into the ravine of the subconscious. Horror in front, terror behind. There is absolutely no place to hide. Nightmare City, don’t you think? How could anyone do it better? What do you mean he can’t write? Put the scenes in a movie and everyone in the theatre would be covering their eyes. Itd\ would be that Beast With Five Fingers all over again. Maybe worse. Never saw that one? Check it out. Peter Lorre. Terrifying. Of course I was a kid.
The clanking of the chain recreates an incident in Burroughs’ own life when he had a job collecting for an ice company. He called on a house and while he was waiting he heard the clanking of a chain coming slowly up the driveway. Waiting with a fair amount of trepidation he saw a huge dog dragging the chain appear. ERB backing slowly away forgot about the delinquent bill.
In this case the chain is attached to Beppo the dancing bear but Bridge and the Kid won’t know that until the next day.
They retreat into an upstairs bedroom. Here what Burroughs describes in capital letters as THE THING and IT pursues them. I remember two movies one called The Thing and the other It.
Just when the thing retreats the murderous gang of hoboes enters the house. Wow! Out of the frying pan and into the fire in this night of terrors as the lightning continues to flash and the thunder crash.
Discovering the dead man and as the bear begins moving again four of the hoboes flee while two who were on the staircase being trapped in the house flee into the same bedroom as Bridge, the Kid and the girl, Hettie. Shortly thereafter a woman’s scream pierces the lightning and the thunder then silences as the storm settles into a steady drizzle.
The rest of the night is one tense affair between the murderous hoboes and the Bridge and the girls. Not a moment to catch your breath.
In the morning when they go downstairs the mystery increases when they find the dead man gone and nothing in the cellar. If they’d had Tarzan along he would have not only been able to smell the bear but to tell whether if was black or brown.
After a brief confrontation Dopey Charlie and the General are driven off. Bridge’s relationship with the Kid is then deepened. Even though all the Kid’s reactions are repulsive to the manhood of Bridge he feels his attraction to the seeming boy growing stronger.
Not since he had followed the open road with Byrne, had Bridge met one with whom he might care to “pal” before.
This brings up an interesting hint of latent homosexuality. My fellow writer, David Adams has objected that in my analysis of Emasculation as applied to ERB is that he should have been a homosexual but wasn’t.
There are degrees of emasculation and there are various degrees of psychotic reaction to it. I don’t say and I don’t believe that ERB was a homosexual but there was a degree of ambiguity introduced into his personality by his emasculation. I have touched on this in my ‘Emasculation, Hermaphroditism and Excretion.’
Here we have another example of it as Bridge is experiencing some homoerotic emotion which is very confusing to him as he has never wanted a ‘pal’ before. In hobo lingo I believe a ‘pal’ has a homosexual connotation.
If Burroughs took his ‘inside’ information on hoboes from Jack London’s The Road then Bridge is the sort of hobo London describes as the ‘profesh’, the hobo highest in the hierarchy of hobodom. London always thought of himself as a quick learner, so one doesn’t have to award his statement too much credibility but Burroughs apparently took him at face value.
As London describes the ‘profesh’ he has been on the road so long he knows all the ropes. Unlike the unkempt bums he realizes the importance of a good front and always dresses neatly. But he is hardened and capable of committing any crime.
While Bridge is obviously intended to be a ‘profesh’ he is neither criminal nor does he dress to put up a good front.
Another category of hobo London lists is the ‘road kid.’ These are young people just starting on the life of the road. The ‘profesh’ would often take one of more of these road kids under his wing as his fag, as the British would say, or in Americanese, a ‘pal.’ In other words a homosexual relationship. Thus this displays ERB’s sexual ambiguity which David couldn’t locate in my psychological analysis of ERB’s emasculation. In this case the ambiguity will be resolved and explained when we learn that the Kid is the beautiful young woman, Abigail Prim, and both Bridge and Burroughs heave a sigh of relief.
Nevertheless ERB is discussing homosexuality in an open and natural way that couldn’t be missed by the knowing and which may be unique for its time. But then, remember that one of ERB’s hats in this story is that of the Alienist, so that in these pages we are deep into the psychological abstractions and Doyle’s mystery stories as influences.
Now comes the time for breakfast. Someone has to ‘rustle’ grub. We have already learned in ‘Out There Somewhere’ that Bridge doesn’t rustle food, he rustles rhyme. Nothing has changed. The Kid goes out to get breakfast and when she comes back with the goods, true to form Bridge bursts forth with several snatches from H.H. Knibbs which surprisingly the demure Miss Prim recognizes. What has she been reading?
How might this apply to Burroughs’ own life. Let’s look at it. Burroughs was enamored of How to books but in his heart he must have considered them a fraud. Willie Case will soon pick up his copy of How To Be A Detective which he finds completely inapplicable to his circumstances. He also has the good sense to throw the book away reverting to his native intelligence which may be a subtle comment on How To books by Burroughs.
ERB always considered himself of the executive class. After his humiliating experience trying to sell door to door he never attempted it again. Instead as a master salesman he preferred to write how to sales manuals for others to use as they went door to door selling his line of pencil sharpeners or whatever while he sat in the office waiting for orders. Hence in his own life he was the ‘rustler of poetry’ or manuals while others rustled grub in the door to door humiliation of the actual selling. Here the Kid will do the door to door gig. ERB always makes me smile.
In this case in what may be a joke the Kid just buys the goods from the homeowner reversing the roles.
There are those who insist Burroughs can’t write but I find his stuff wonderfully condensed getting more mileage out of each word than anyone else I’ve ever read. Just see how he describes breakfast.
Shortly after, the water coming to a boil, Bridge lowered three eggs into it, glanced at his watch (an affluent hobo) greased one of the new cleaned stove lids with a piece of bacon rind and laid out as many strips of bacon as the lid would accommodate. Instantly the room was filled with the delicious odor of frying bacon.
“M-m-m-m!” gloated the Oskaloosa Kid. “I wish I had bo- asked for more. My! But I never smelled anything so good in all my life. Are you going to boil only three eggs? I could eat a dozen”
“The can’ll only hold three at a time,” explained Bridge. “we’ll have some boiling while we are eating these.” He borrowed the knife from the girl, who was slicing and buttering bread with it, and turned the bacon swiftly and deftly with the point, then he glanced at his watch. “Three minutes are up.” He announced and, with a couple small flat sticks saved for the purpose from the kindling wood, withdrew the eggs one at a time from the can.
“But we have no cups!” exclaimed the Oskaloosa Kid, in sudden despair.
Bridge laughed. “Knock an end off your egg and the shell will answer in place of a cup. Got a knife?”
The Kid didn’t. Bridge eyed him quizzically. “You must have done most of your burgling near home,” he commented.
The description of the breakfast between the time Bridge looked at his watch and when the three minutes were up was delightfully done. I could smell the bacon myself while I especially like the detail of swiftly and deftly turning the bacon with the knife point. The knife seemed to have disappeared between the bacon and knocking the end off the egg.
Nice details aren’t they? You’d almost think Burroughs had actually done things like this for years. There’s enough blank spots in his life that he may have had more experiences of this sort than we know about. Take for instance the three days in Michigan between the writing of Out There Somewhere and Bridge And The Oskaloosa Kid. He says it took him twelve hours by train on four different lines to return to Coldwater from Alma. It is not impossible that he was hoboing back for the experience. He knew that he was going to write Bridge And The Kid next; might he not have been picking up local color?
Likewise in Bridge And The Kid he mentions the road from Berdoo to Barstow with seeming familiarity. Had he met Knibbs and the two embarked on a few days road trip as the expert Knibbs showed him some of the ropes?
I don’t know but there is something happening in his life which has not been explained.
Perhaps also the hoboism which appears in 1915-17 in his work when by all rights his success should have permitted him entry into more exalted social circles symbolized a rejection by so-called polite society. If so, why? Certainly the serialization of Tarzan Of The Apes in the Chicago paper must have raised eyebrows when people said something like: Is that the same Edgar Rice Burroughs who’s been tramping around town for the last several years?
After all people live in a town where a reputation is attached to them whether earned or not. In reviewing the jobs Burroughs had after he left Sears, Roebuck there is a certain unsavory character to them. Indeed, one employer, a patent medicine purveyor was shut down by the authorities while ERB then formed a partnership with this disgraced person. Where was Burroughs when the authorities showed up to shut the business down? I make no moral judgments. I’m of the Pretty Boy Floyd school of morality: Some will rob you with a six gun, some use a fountain pen. Emasculation is the name of the game.
It is certainly true that many, perhaps most, of the patent medicines of the time were based on alcohol and drugs therefore either addictive or harmful to the health. Samuel Hopkins Adams was commissioned by Norman Hapgood of Collier’s magazine to write a series of articles exposing the patent medicine business in 1906.
http://www.mtn.org/quack/ephemera/oct7.htm . A consequence of the articles may very well have been the shutting down of Dr. Stace. I think it remarkable that Burroughs didn’t distance himself from Stace at that time.
Even as Adams was presenting his research on patent medicines Upton Sinclair was exposing the hazards of the Chicago meat packing industry whose products were no less hazardous to the public health than patent medicines. Sinclair’s book, The Jungle, as well as perhaps Adams’ articles resulted in the Pure Food And Drug Act of 1906.
The products of meatpackers were so bad the British wouldn’t even feed them to their Tommies. That’s pretty bad.
So, if the Staces of the world were criminal and ought to be put out of business then by logic so should have the Armours and Swifts but what in our day would be multi-billion dollar industries don’t get shut down for the minor offence of damaging the health of millions.
One can’t be sure of Burroughs’ reasoning but his writing indicates that he was keenly aware of the hypocrisy of legalities. Perhaps for that reason he stuck by Dr. Stace.
However Stace was put out of business and the Armours and Swifts weren’t. While I applaud ERB’s steadfastness I deplore his lack of judgment for surely his reputation was tarred with the same brush as Dr. Stace.
When society figures may have asked who this Edgar Rice Burroughs was they were given, perhaps, a rundown on Dr. Stace and patent medicines as well as other employments that seem a little murky to us at present. I’m sure the ERB was seen as socially unacceptable. Thus Bridge who has lived among the hoboes has never partaken of their crimes so there is no reason for society to reject him especially as he is the son of a millionaire.
In any event ERB left Chicago for the Coast returning in 1917 then leaving for good at the beginning of 1919. Life ain’t easy. Ask me.
As Bridge, the Kid and the putative Abigail Prim were finishing breakfast the great detective Burton pulls up in front of the Squibbs place. Burton is obviously a combination of Sherlock Holmes and Allan Pinkerton. We have been advised of the Holmes connection in the opening paragraphs of this book. ERB describes Burton thusly:
Quote:
Burton made no reply. He was not a man to jump to conclusions. His success was largely due to the fact that he assumed nothing; but merely ran down each clew quickly yet painstakingly until he had a foundation of fact upon which to operate. His theory was that the simplest way is always the best way. And so he never befogged the main issue with any elaborate system of deductive reasoning based on guesswork. Burton never guessed. He assumed that it was his business to know; nor was he on any case long before he did know. He was employed now to find Abigail Prim. Each of the several crimes committed the previous night might or might not prove a clew to her whereabouts; but each must be run down in the process of elimination before Burton could feel safe in abandoning it.
That’s a pretty good understanding of Doyle’s presentation of Holmes. ERB did learn Holmes’ dictum that it was necessary to read all the literature on the subject to understand the mentality of one’s subjects. Burton did demonstrate some acumen in his arrest of Dopey Charlie and the General. He deployed an agent fifty yards below and fifty yards above to converge on the two criminals while he approached from the front. Either Burroughs had been doing some reading of his own or he picked up some experience or information from elsewhere.
Another keen point was when Burton went back to where the hoboes had been hiding to dig up the evidence they had concealed that would lead to their conviction for the Baggs murder.
It’s little details like these that always make me wonder where Burroughs picked up this stuff. He does it all so naturally but one can’t write what one doesn’t know. He must have been a curious man, good memory.
So Burroughs has a a pretty good understanding of the methods of Sherlock Holmes. It must be remembered that ERB was reading these stories as they first appeared not as we do as part of literature. Holmes, O.Henry, Jack London, E.W. Hornung, these were all fresh new and extremely stimulating with a great many references and inferences which are undoubtedly lost on us. Even in Bridge And The Kid ERB’s reference to the Kid’s bringing home the bacon is a direct reference to a quip the mother of the ex-heavyweight champion of the world Jack Johnson made just after he won the championship from Jim Jeffries: He said he’d bring home the bacon and he’s done it. I don’t doubt if many caught it then but I’m sure the phrase has become such a commonplace today that only a very few catch the reference and share the laugh.
Doyle’s stories such as A Study In Scarlet dealing with the Mormons and The Valley Of Fear dealing with the Molly Maguires would have had much more thrilling immediacy for ERB than they do for us. Also Burroughs has caught the essence of Holmes which was not so much the stories as the method of Holmes.
I have read the canon four times and while I could not reconstruct any of the stories without difficulty, if at all, maxims like- When you eliminate the impossible whatever remains no matter how improbable must be the truth. – have lodged in my mind since I was fourteen guiding my intellect to much advantage. So also the dictum to read all the literature. Not easy or even possible, but the more one has read the or read again the more things just fall in place without any real effort. You have to be able to remember, remembrance being the basis of all mind, of course. Holmes has been like a god to me.
If you wish to learn a source of Burroughs’ stories then all you have to do is apply the above methods; it will all become clear.
Burton moves the story forward as his appearance causes Bridge who isn’t sure what the status of the Kid and the putative Gail Prim is, elects to avoid the great detective even though they are friends.
The trio slip out the back into the woods following a track leading to ‘Anywhere’. Burroughs in a masterful telling catches the feel of a Spring day on a recently wetted trail littered with the leaves of yesteryear. Ou sont les neiges d’antan?
They come upon a clearing where a gypsy woman is burying a body. By this time Bridge has solved the mysteries of the previous evening.
The girls make noises upon hearing the clank of a chain in a hovel causing the gypsy woman to look around. Rather than spotting the trio she spots Willie Case hiding in the bushes who she drags out.
The gypsy woman, Giova, is as good a character as Bridge, the Kid, Burton and the hoboes, but my favorite of the story is Willie Case, the fourteen year old detective. While to my mind ERB presents Willie as a thoroughly admirable character, he nevertheless vents a suppressed mean streak not only on Willie but on the whole Case family.
ERB doesn’t let his mean streak show very often, it lurks in the background, but he lets it loose in this book. He must have been under personal stress.
He describes Willie as having no forehead and no chin, imbecilic traits, literally beginning with the eyebrows and ending with the lips. A freak of nature, a real grotesque. That means that Willie was a real ‘low brow’ as Emma accused ERB of being, even a no brow. Is it a coincidence that Emma called ERB a low brow or that the literati thought ERB wrote ‘low brow’ literature?
In point of fact Willie strikes me as an intelligent boy. He analyzes the situation always being in the right place at the right moment. Burton himself pays him a high but sneering compliment then cheats him out of the promised reward of a hundred dollars but in the manner McClurg’s published his books Burroughs was cheated out of a large part of his reward.
I don’t say that’s the case but if so it fits the facts.
In any event ERB treats the Case family meanly; they might almost be prototypes of Ma and Pa Kettle of the Egg and I or the meanly portrayed characters of Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road. Jeb Case behaves very reprehensively at the lynching although once again he merely reported the facts that the Kid gave Willie. The Kid did tell Willie that he had burgled a house and killed a man. So, perhaps ERB created some characters that he could kick around as he felt himself being kicked.
And then we have the gypsy woman, Giova. She and her father are not only pariahs in general society as gypsies but because of her father they even have been cast out by the gypsies. Her father was a thief from both general and gypsy society. The former may have been laudable in gypsy terms but the latter wasn’t. They make, or made their living by thieving and cadging coins with Beppo, their dancing bear. Beppo of the evil eye.
Burroughs presents Giova as being sexually attractive with lips that were made for kissing, in echo of the refrain from Out There Somewhere. Here we may have a first inference that Emma was in trouble; the kind of trouble that would have ERB leaving her for another woman a decade or so hence. There are numerous rumblings indicating the trend not least of which was ERB’s fascination with Samuel Hopkin Adams’ novel, Flaming Youth of a few years hence and the subsequent movie starring Colleen Moore.
Bridge is now on the run with three women and a bear and he hasn’t done anything wrong to get into such hot water. One woman his emergent Anima, one, his rejected Anima, and the last a longing for a woman whose lips were made for kissing. Wow! This is all taking place in a ravine that opens into a small valley too.
All this has been accomplished in a compact one hundred pages. One third of the book is left for the denouement that Burroughs scamps as he usually does.
Giova decks them all out as gypsies which must have been an amusing sight to the Paysonites as this troop of madcaps complete with dancing bear in tow troop inconspicuously through town. Surprised they didn’t call out the national guard just for that.
As the story draws to a close ERB contributes a wonderful vignette of low brow Willie dining out at a ‘high brow’ restaurant called the Elite in Payson. The idea of Willie being conspicuous in a burg like Payson which we big city people would refer to as a hick town good only for laughs is amusing in itself. You know, it all depends on one’s perspective:
Willie Case had been taken to Payson to testify before the coroner’s jury investigating the death of Giova’s father, and with the dollar which the Osklaloosa Kid had given him in the morning burning in his pocket had proceeded to indulge in an orgy of dissipation the moment that he had been freed from the inquest. Ice cream, red pop, peanuts, candy, and soda water may have diminished his appetite but not his pride, and self-satisfaction as he sat down and by night for the first time in a public eatery place Willie was now a man of the world, a bon vivant, as he ordered ham and eggs from the pretty waitress of The Elite Restaurant on Broadway; but at heart he was not happy for never before had he realized what a great proportion of his anatomy was made up of hands and feet. As he glanced fearfully at the former, silhouetted against the white of the table cloth, he flushed scarlet, assured as he was that the waitress who had just turned away toward the kitchen with his order was convulsed with laughter and that every other eye in the establishment was glued upon him. To assume an air of nonchalance and thereby impress and disarm his critics Willie reached for a toothpick in the little glass holder near the center of the table and upset the sugar bowl. Immediately Willie snatched back the offending hand and glared ferociously at the ceiling. He could feel the roots of his hair being consumed in the heat of his skin. A quick side glance that required all his will power to consummate showed him that no one appeared to have noticed his faux pas and Willie was again slowly returning to normal when the proprietor of the restaurant came up from behind and asked him to remove his hat.
Never had Willie Case spent so frightful a half hour as that within the brilliant interior of the Elite Restaurant. Twenty-three minutes of this eternity was consumed in waiting for his order to be served and seven minutes in disposing of the meal and paying his check. Willie’s method of eating was in itself a sermon on efficiency- there was no waste motion- no waste of time. He placed his mouth within two inches of his plate after cutting his ham and eggs into pieces of a size that would permit each mouthful to enter without wedging; then he mixed his mashed potatoes in with the result and working his knife and fork alternatively with bewildering rapidity shot a continuous stream of food into his gaping maw.
In addition to the meat and potatoes there was one vegetable side dish on the empty plate, seized a spoon in lieu or a knife and fork and – presto! The side dish was empty. Where upon the prune dish was set in the empty side-dish- four deft motions and there were no prunes in the dish. The entire feat had been accomplished in 6:34 ½ , setting a new world’s record for red headed farm boys with one splay foot.
In the remaining twenty-five and one half seconds Willie walked what seemed to him a mile from his seat to the cashier’s desk and at the last instant bumped into a waitress with a trayful of dishes. Clutched tightly in Willie’s hand was thirty-five cents and his check with a like amount written upon it. Amid the crash of crockery which followed the collision Willie slammed check and money upon the cashier’s desk and fled. Nor did he pause until in the reassuring seclusion of a dark side street. There Willie sank upon the curb alternately cold with fear and hot with shame, weak and panting, and into his heart entered the iron of class hatred, searing it to the core.
The above passage has many charms. First, it is an excellent piece of nostalgia now, although at the time it represented the actuality, thus, as a period piece it is an accurate picture of the times. And then it is excellent comedy as well as a a parody as I will attempt to show.
One has to wonder if ERB really thought the Elite was a pretty fine restaurant. If so, one wonders where he took Emma and kids for a night out. Not too many gourmet Chicago restaurants served breakfast for dinner. Ham and eggs with mashed potatoes? Reminds me of the Galt House Hotel in Louisville where a ‘starch’ is served as a side dish. What exactly was this side-dish Willie wolfed- stewed tomatoes? The dessert prunes- dessert prunes?- was a nice touch too. Dessert for breakfast? Another nice quality touch at the Elite was the cup of toothpicks. Of course, those were the days cuspidors were de riguer so what do I know, maybe the Palmer House had a cup of toothpicks on the table too. I know they had cuspidors.
It does seem clear that little Willie was far down the social scale of little rural Payson. They had electric street lights, though. I’m not even from New York City but I would find the Elite, how shall I say, quaint and charming? Of course, New York City is not what it used to be either. Can’t fool me in either case; I’ve dined out in Hannibal. Good prices. Bountiful. Plenty of side dishes something that I’d never seen before.
I’m sure I’ve been in Willie’s shoes, or would have been if he’d chosen to wear them, too, so I have a great deal of sympathy for the lad. A man with a dollar has the right to spend where and as he chooses. Damn social hypocrisy!
In addition to the charm and light comedy ERB interjects a little parody of Taylorism and mass production into the mix.
For those not familiar with Frederick W. Taylor and his methods I quote from
http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/dead453-653/ideabook1/thompson-jones/Taylorism.htm :
Taylor wrote “The Principles of Scientific Management in 1911. These principles became known as Taylorism. Some of the principles of Taylorism include (Management for Productivity, John R. Schermerhorn, Jr. (1991)):
Develop a ‘science’ for every job, including rules of motion, standardized work implements, and proper working conditions.
Carefully select workers with the right abilities for the job.
Carefully train these workers to do the job, and give them proper incentives to cooperate with the job science.
Support these workers by planning their work and by smoothing the way as they go about their jobs.
Taylorism which led to maximum efficiency also give the lie to the unconscious of Sigmund Freud, or at least puts it into perspective. If the twentieth century has been the history of the devil of Freud’s unconscious it has also been the century of the triumph of the god of conscious intelligence. The question only remains which will triumph.
One of the recurring themes in ERB’s writing of the period is efficiency. Indeed, a couple years hence he will write a book entitled The Efficiency Expert.
It was the age of efficient mass production which required standardized motions and produced terrific results where applied as at Henry Ford’s marvelously efficient factories. Ford brought the task to the worker in well lighted clean factory spaces at a level which required no time consuming, fatiguing and unnecessary lifting or bending. Plus Henry Ford blew the industrial world away by doubling the going wage for unskilled labor. He changed the course of economic history singlehanded. He achieved more than the Communists or IWW could have accomplished in a million years earning their undying enmity. He may in one fell swoop have defeated the Reds. They sure thought so.
But, go back and review how Willie organizes his repast for consumption. Taylor-like he eliminated all non-essential motions then with maximum assembly line speed-up he gets production into one continuous stream.
A comic effect to be sure but there is even more comedy in the parody of the assembly line and Taylorism. I’m sure ERB intended it just that way.
Willie may be a joke but there is a certain flavor to be obtained by filling a continuum of food, mouth and time. Such an opportunity for enjoyment may present itself once in ten years or so. Willie saw his opportunity and seized it which he does throughout the story. Willie is OK with me.
I have eaten that way but I now reserve the method for ice cream and highly recommend it. My last opportunity, they present themselves but rarely and can’t be forced, was several years ago when I was insultingly offered a half melted Cherries Jubilee. The dish was of a perfect consistency for assembly line consumption. I saw my chance and like Willie, I took it. I kind of distributed cherries and ice cream chunks in the creamy stew, got mouth in the right position and cleaned the bowl in sixty seconds flat, reared back gripping the bridge of my nose, honked a couple times as the freeze seized my brain and then took a few minutes for consciousness to return. One of the great natural highs in this drug infested time. I tell ya‘, fellas, they was all lookin’ at me but I am much beyond the iron of class hatred. If they can’t take a joke…well, you know the finish. So I think Willie Case did the right thing.
Clumsy waitress to get in his way anyway. Fourteen hours on the job was no excuse.
Willie didn’t feel guilt for too long though, for what ERB calls a faux pas, it put him in the right place at the right time to see Giova and her dancing bear fresh from Beppo’s own slops. How could ERB be so cruel to a dumb animal- the bear, not Willie-, one that was going to save the heroine’s life- both the bear and Willie.
After having had dinner and refreshments Willie still had 20 cents left from a dollar of which he spent 10 cents for a detective movie and had ten cents left over for a long distance phone call to Burton in Oakdale after he spotted Giova and her dancing bear when he came out of the movie theatre.
He followed Giova to Bridge and the girls, fixed their location then called Burton. Not only did Willie spot the fugitives but so did the four leftover bums. Dopey Charlie and the General were impounded for the Baggs murder while we will learn that the real Oskaloosa Kid and the putative Gail Prim remain as well perhaps as the true identity of L. Bridge.
Burroughs is full of interesting details. The hoboes are gathered in an abandoned electrical generating plant which had formerly served Payson but had been discontinued for a larger plant servicing Payson from a hundred miles away. We don’t know when that might have happened but electrical generation and distribution was relatively new. The consolidation into larger generating units was even newer. Samuel Insull, whose electrical empire collapsed about1938 had begun organizing distribution in 1912 when he formed the Mid-West Utilities in Chicago absorbing all the smaller companies such as this one in Payson obviously.
I find details like this the exiting part of reading Burroughs.
The murderous hoboes set out to rob and kill Bridge and the Kid while Sky Pilot and Dirty Eddie elect themselves to return the putative Gail Prim who we will learn is actually Hettie Penning, thus doubling ERB’s Anima figure and connecting the latter to the former.
One is put in mind of the Hettie of H.G. Wells’ novel In The Days Of The Comet. Both Hetties exhibit the same traits. While it may seem a slender connection, still, ERB has so many references to other authors and their works that the connection is not improbable. For obvious reasons ERB always insisted he had never read H.G. Wells. Wells? Wells, who?, but how could he not have?
Bridge and the girls would have met their end except that Willie Case’s call brought Burton on the run who arrives in time to save their lives. Unfortunately Beppo of the evil eye meets his end after having done Burton’s job for him much as Willie always did.
In between the girls, the ‘boes, Bridge and the coppers Burton has a full load so he drops Bridge and Kid at the Payson jail. Willie Case had not only solved the case for the ingrate Burton but saved the life of Gail Prim posing as the Oskaloosa Kid. In a heart wrenching scene little Willie seeking his just reward is cruelly rejected and cheated by the Great Detective. I don’t know, maybe I read too closely and get too involved. Or, just maybe, ERB is a great writer.
It’s all over but the shouting and along comes the mob howling from Oakdale for the blood of Bridge and the Kid. I tell ya, boys, it wuz close. Burton arrived in time but not before Bridge with a well aimed blow broke Jeb Case’s jaw. What did those Cases ever do to ERB I wonder?
In the end Hettie Penning is identified, clearing up that mystery. Burton is able to tell Bridge’s dad who has spent $20,000 looking for him that he is found. It may even have cost less for Stanley to find Livingston. Of course there was a lousy rail system in the Congo in Livingston’s time. Bridge is united with Gail obviously prepared to renounce the roving life. Thus the promise of Out There Somewhere is redeemed. Bridge has found his woman.
Thus on paper, at least, Burroughs is reunited with his Animus in gorgeous female attire. No more men in women’s clothes or women in men’s clothes.
2.
Bridge And The Kid is a very short book, only 152 pages in my Charter paperback edition of 1979 (Septimius Favonius BB #24. Charter didn’t see fit to include a date.) Although first issued in book form so late as 1937, it was reprinted in 1938 and 1940 so there must have been some early readers however when reprinted in 1974 there could have been few who remembered it.
My fellow writer, David Adams wrote a short review in the same issue #24 of the Burroughs Bulletin, October 1995, in which he also recognized the importance of this book to the corpus:
It may come as a surprise that anyone could possibly think of calling the novelette, THE OAKDALE AFFAIR, a major work of such a prolific writer as Edgar Rice Burroughs, but I found it to be such an animal…
I am unaware that any other than Mr. Adams and myself have reviewed the book. To sum up:
There seems to be an obvious connection to Jack London in the Bridge Trilogy (I prefer Bridge to Mucker because the latter draws reproving stares and no one today knows what a mucker is. It sounds slightly obscene.)
Mr. Adams, who is more of an authority on Jack London than myself, I’ve only begun to read London as a result of Bill Hillman’s series of articles in ERBzine, which posits a strong connection between Burroughs and London, and not the other way around, feels the novels have a great deal to do with London. The connection seems to be there but I have only begun to read London’s relevant or major works.
What ERB’s attitude towards London may have been which seems ambiguous isn’t clear. Burroughs never wrote about London and never mentions him explicitly. There are many points of disagreement between the two politically and socially. Burroughs does seem to have liked London and his work although what he read or when he read it isn’t clear. There are no London titles in his library.
The second major influence in the novel is the problem of hoboism connected with the IWW and labor unrest.
In the background Burroughs is working out his Anima/Animus problem.
The whole is framed in the form of a rather magnificent detective story patterned after Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories with a dash, perhaps a soupcon, of E.W. Hornung thrown in.
Attention should be paid to the psychological aspects.
Many of ERB’s favorite themes such as the efficiency expert are also thrown in. Nifty historical details like Samuel Insull’s electrical empire are added to the mix as well as Taylorism.
If anything ERB was too efficient, too economical in his use of words. The Book could easily have been fleshed out another sixty or hundred pages with no loss in the marvelous immediacy of the telling. If anything the story is too condensed. I found myself pausing over each description to recreate a mental image of the depiction. I was willing to do so and the personal reward was great. How much ERB was the creator of my vision of the story and how much my own as collaborator isn’t clear to me. Perhaps ERB just outlined the story ‘suggesting’ the scenario, expecting the reader to ‘customize’ the story as he reads along. This may be the first ‘inter-active’ novel. If so, Burroughs may be an even more innovative and greater writer than he is commonly thought to be.
I, Dynamo 