Something Of Value I

October 1, 2007

Something Of Value I

by

R.E. Prindle

If a man does away

With his traditional way of living

And throws away his good customs,

He had better first make certain

That he has something of value to replace them.

–Basuto proverb as quoted by Robert Ruark

Dedicated to

Greil Marcus

 

Part One

One Hundred Years In The Sewers Of Paris

With Jean Valjean.

Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sigmund Freud

And The Myth Of The Twentieth Century

1.

The Concepts Of The Unconscious And Emasculation

 

     It has been truly said that man does not live by bread alone.  He also requires a mythic foundation on which to base his actions.  In the neolithic era his mythology was governed by a Matriarchal vision of reality.  In the subsequent Egypto-Greco-Mesopotamian mythology the Matriarchal series went through a revision being replaced by an advanced Patriarchal mythological consciousness.  This system was followed by the Judaeo-Christian mythological system which endured as the basis of mythological belief until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the belief system was subverted by the emergence of the Scientific Consciousness.

     Unlike the mythopoeic consciousness which preceded it the Scientific Consciousness left no place for supernatural explanations; all had to be explained within a rational scientific framework.  This placed a great strain on a significant portion of the population which did not have the intellectual equipment to evolve.  Thus the basis of psychological comfort provided by religion was destroyed.  The code of behavior seemingly sent down from the sky had lost its validity.

     In place of an apparent unified consciousness it now became noticeable that EuroAmerican man had an unconscious or subconscious mind as well as a conscious mind.  Thus another evolutionary degree of differentiation unfolded that separated the advanced Scientific Consciousness  from the anterior Religious Conciousness.  A struggle has ensued in which advanced people are compelled to reintegrate their conscious and subconscious minds while the Religious Consciousness divided into the two camps of the Devout and the Reds resist.

     The discovery of what was known as the Unconscious began with the emergence from the Religious Consciousness during and  after the Enlightenment.  Anton Mesmer with his discovery of Animal Magnetism or hypnotism may have been the first stage.  Goethe and others carried the discussion forward until the Englishman FWH Myers isolated or identified the subconscious by the name of the unconscius in 1886.

     The notion of the unconscious as known during the twentieth century was formulated by Sigmund Freud during the twentieth century’s first decade.  Both Myers and Freud misconceived the nature of the sub or unconscious.  Myers’ conception was more generous than Freud’s and more in accordance with proto-scientific Patriarchal Greek mythological conceptions which were also mistaken but visionary.

     In Myers’ vision of the unconscious it had two aspects: the destructive aspect which he gave the Greek name of Ate and the constructive aspect he termed Menos.  Thus he recognized that the unconcious could be good or bad.

     Myers’ vision may have been based in Greek mythology.  It will be remembered that the creative god, Hephaestus, was married to the emotional goddess, Aphrodite.  Hephaestus and Aphrodite had their digs at the bottom of the sea which is to say the symbol of the unconscious which corresponds to the seeming location of the unconscious at the bottom of the mind or, in other words, the brain stem.

     Thus it is said that Aphrodite, the goddess of love, which is to say irrationality, emerged from the sea on the half shell.

     So, I suppose, love, being never rational is a subconscious decision which is one sided or a half shell.  Love may be either constructive or destructive.

     Thus also good ideas, a la Hephaestus, seem to rise unbidden from the subconscious or the depths.

     Hephaestus and Aphrodite were ancient gods dating back to the Matriarchy.  The incoming Patriarchal god, Zeus, had no part in their creation; they were solely a part of Hera the great goddess of the Matriarchy.  She was much older than Zeus but the youthful Zeus united with her in the form of a cuckoo bird who as she clutched it to her breast slipped down her dress and ravaged her.  So the Patriachy subsumed the Matriarchy.

     When Hephaestus later sided with his mother against Zeus, the great Olympian threw him from heaven laming him.  Then Aphrodite was given to him to wife.  Unbridled lust combined with creative activity, Ate and Menos.

     Aphrodite was not happy with the lamed god.  While Hephaestus was on trips to Olympus she dallied with another Matriarchal god, Ares, the symbol of uncontrollable desire or rage.  Hephaestus having been informed of Aphrodite’s infidelity set a trap for her and Ares.  He constructed a finely meshed net of gold which he suspended over his bed.

     Aphrodite, unbridled lust, and Ares, uncontrollable rage, were literally caught in the act being unable to disengage.  Thus we have two aspects of Ate, lust and rage, caught by the efforts of creativity in the depths of the sea or the unconscious

     Hephaestus called the other gods to witness.  Athene, a new Patriarchal goddess who was the counterpart and antithesis of Ares and Aphrodite turned away in disgust.  Apollo, another new Patriarchal god and the antithesis of Hermes just laughed.  Hermes, the patron god of thieves, a Matriarchal god, said he would change places with Ares in a second.  Thus, lust, rage and dishonesty are combined in one figure of Ate in the subconscious.

     The image of Ate and Menos is what Myers meant by his idea of the unconscious.  Freud, on the other hand, understood the unconscious as pure Ate.

     Both the Greeks and Myers attempted scientific explanations while Freud gave the unconscious a religious and supernatural twist.  He seemed to believe that the unconscious has an independent existence outside the mind of man which is beyond man’s control while being wholly evil.

     Opposed to morality, Freud then wished to unleash this conception of the unconscious on the world.  He was uniquely prepared to do so.  All he had to do was manipulate the symbols of psychoanalysis of which he had full control.  The question then is did Freud have deeper understandings that he concealed in order to bring about his desired ends?

     Such is the case with his conceptions of sexuality.  There is no need for him to have had deeper understanding, after all he was a pioneer opening a new field of inquiry.  On the other hand…

     Defining the unconscious was done by many men preceding Freud so that his is only one of many understandings, not necessarily the best, although today in  common belief he invented the concept of the unconscious.

     Next he chose to define the concepts of sex.  He was equally successful in this field as far as the public was concerned, although I differ in understanding the matter as I do with the unconscious.

     In analyses with patients Freud discovered that there was a fear of castration out of all proportion to actual incidents of sexual mutilation.  It follows then that castration symbolizes something other than the removal of the genitals.  I contend that it was impossible for Freud to have missed the signficance of castration as a symbol.

     Castration as a symbol represents the broader concept of Emasculation, in this case psychological emasculation.  This does occur in everyone’s life in many different manifestations while being something to really fear or avoid.  Unless I am mistaken all neuroses and psychoses depend from it.

     Understanding Emasculation is as much a ‘royal road to the unconscious’ as dreams.

     I do not accept Freud’s map of the mind but we both agree that the Ego or Animus is the key to identity.  Freud fully understood the significance of the Ego.  Thus when the Ego is challenged with an affront or insult to which it is either unable or doesn’t know how to respond to successfully emascualtion to some degree takes place.  There is no unconscious, just as there are no instincts so that a fixation is suppressed in the subconscious as a result of the affront.  These fixations produce effects, which can be grouped in categories such as hysteria, paranoia, obsessive-compulsiveness and the whole panoply of general affects.  The affects then find expression physically and psychologically, or in another word, psychosomatically.  The mind and the body is one unit.  These affects answer to what Freud called neuroses and psychoses.

     When the Ego or Animus is denied its right to assertion the denial is frequently espressed in a hysterically sexual manner corresponding to the the insult.  If the victim feels he has been taken from behind he will undoubtedly resort to anal intercourse as one type of underhanded response in an attempt to get back his own as in the case with homosexuality.  Homosexuality is Emasculation par excellence.

     The human mind is very limited in its inventiveness so all these affects can be catalogued and matched with the insult so that, absent resistance under analysis, they can easily be addressed and exorcised.  The problem is not as complicated as it has been made out.

     Freud understood so much more than he was willing to tell the goys but then he was not a scientist but a Jewish prophet.  In his Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego to which we will return he gave the game away.

     The individual can and does submerge his own ego into a, or at various times, many group egos.  Prominent among these group egos are ethnic, national and religious group egos.

     Just as the individual can be emascualted so can ethnic, national or religious groups be emasculated which the individual will share.  I mention the Jews only as the most obvious case although Negroes, American Indians or any defeated people suffer emasculation to one degree or another.

     Thus I will discuss the unconscious from a general point of view with Freud’s concept prominent while the concept of Emascultion will be discussed by my understanding based on the studies of Freud on the castration complex and group psychology.

     Bear in mind that I think Freud criminally distorted scientific knowledge for ethnic, national and religious ends.

2.

Quo Vadis?

     Born with an integrated mind, circumstances soon disintegrate the personality so that the mind must be reintegrated  to return to a state of psychic wholeness.  A sort of personal mythology is created by one’s early disintegrative experiences which form one’s dreamscape in an attempt to deal with an overwhelming reality.  However, when a person gains some control over external reality when the personality is integrated and the initial  dreamscape based on early memories is eliminated  a sort of distressing vacuum ensues that exists until a new dreamscape is formed which, while sufficient to ease the discomfort lacks the depth and substance of the fully mythologized dreamscape of childhood.  One had reached a scientific consciousness.  It may not be as satisfying but it fills the space while not controlling one’s behavior.

     Western man, Euroamerican man, as the only segment of mankind so differentiated had then to begin to work out a new mythology based on rational scientific ideas.  In other words he had to create a comfortable basis from which to understand and interpret the world.

     Thus after a couple proto-mythographies in the early nineteenth century a cluster of writers or neo-mythographers began to create a mythology for the Scientific Consciousness.

     The destruction of the Religious Consciousness began to become obvious after the eighteenth century Industrial Revolution in  England.  With the advent of steam the problem began to become acute.

     The proto-mythologers may be Walter Scott, Byron, Peacock and the Shelleys.  There is a departure in feel and style with these writers.  Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein posits the scientific problem laying a foundation for the new mythology but does not itself deal with the psychological effects.

     The first mythographer to make an attempt to explain the split consciousness from my own researches was the American, Edgar Allan Poe, 1801-49.

     Poe began his writing career as a psychologically troubled man ending it insane.  Along the way he wrestled with the problem of the void in the subconscious created by the elimination of the supernatural.  His message was received by the later group of mythographers who read him without exception all being influenced by his work.

     Poe caught the great intellectual change as it emerged.  The period from 1830-1880 was the period of the great initial scientific advances that would change the world.  From Poe’s death in 1849 to the emergence of the new breed of mythographers beginning in the 1880s was a period of literary quiescence.

     Poe began his influential masterpiece The Murders In The Rue Morgue with the paragraph:

     Quote:

      As the strong man exhibits his physical ability, delighting in such excercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in the moral activity which disentangles.  He derives pleasure from even the most trivial occupations bringing his intellect into play.  He is fond of enigmas, conundrums, hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension as praeternatural.  His results brought about by the very soul and essence of method, have in truth the whole air of intuition.

     Unquote.

     By analysis Poe didn’t mean the sort of educated guesswork that had passed for analysis in the pre-scientific consciousness.  No, this was scientific analysis that disassembled a problem into the component parts revealing the secret than reassembling the problem to its original state.

     In doing so Poe revealed himself as a master mythographer as well as a scientist.  In C. August Dupin, the initials spell cad, Poe created the archetype of the eccentric madman who would be the here of countless novels.  As a projection of Poe’s own mentality Dupin and his unnamed alter ego live in a dilapidated house.  The house is the psychological symbol for self which Poe used almost to exhaustion.  As the Fall of the House of Usher prefigured Poe’s own descent into insanity as to a number of alter egos representing his sane side figure in the House of Usher, William Wilson, Rue Morgue and most notably in the System of Dr. Tarr And Professor Fether in which his sane alter ego drops his other half off at the door of an insane asylum.

     The two Dupins live in a darkened house during the day, creaking not unlike the House Of Usher, going out only into the depressed asylum of the night.

     Poe thus presents the separation of the conscious and subconscious modern man in the riddle of the murders in the Rue Morgue.  In the Rue Morgue the subconscious is represented by the Orang u tang or animal side of human nature while the conscious is represented by the sailor owner.  From Poe to at least Freud the subconscious was popularly considered a dangerous wild side of man.

     In Dupin and his alter ego versus the sailor and the Orang, Poe may have perceived the emergence of a new species much as H.G. Wells was to do at the end of the century.  Thus both men perceived that the antecedent consciousness and the Scientific Consciousness were not just matters of learning but a genetic difference although they didn’t put it that way that couldn’t be bridged.

     Both aspects were brought out brilliantly by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) in his 1880 novel: The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde.  This book may properly be said to be the first true represention of the scientific myth.

     In this case the good Dr. Jekyll is the disciplined, self-controlled scientist committed to doing good in the world.  Beneath his intelligent exterior he feels the primitive wild man lurking.  The primitive of what is in fact a predecessor Homo Sapiens is very very appealing to him.  Unable to bring this aspect of his psychology to the surface by conventional means he resorts to drugs.

     Having once freed his wild side, who he names Mr. Hyde, he is unable to put Hyde back into the bottle or syringe, whichever the case may be.  Hyde assumes control of the personality which leads both aspects of the personality to destruction.  This is not unlike Freud’s notion of the unconscious.

     Thus Stevenson brilliantly prefigured the twentieth century future in which the scientist is dragged back to the level of the predecessor species through a psychological inability to take the great leap forward and turn his back on his past.

     The same sense of the alienation from a predecessor existence was evidenced in the work of a great transitional figure, H. Rider Haggard (1856-1925).  Let me say that Haggard is a much neglected literary figure.  As his topics concerned Esoterica and Africa, the former which is scorned and the latter ignored, his literary reputation has been allowed to virtually disappear.  Having read a large part of his work in the pursuit of these studies I would rank Haggard very highly, certainly among the top ten authors, possibly as high as number five.  one and two are Walter Scott and Balzac, while Dumas holds down third and possibly Trollope in the fourth spot.  Haggard is a writer of genius.

     He spent his late teens and early twenties in the South African provinces of Natal and Zululand where he acquired a vision of the difference between the first Homo Sapiens, the Negro, and the current scientific man.  As the saying goes, there’s something to be lost and something gained when you move up the ladder.

     Haggard never made it to scientific man himself being stuck in the Religious Consciousness.  He belonged to the Esoteric side rather than the Christian.  In the third novel of his great African trilogy, Allan Quatermain, Haggard examined the difference between the African and European in this manner.

     Quote:

     Ah! this civilization what does it all come to?  Full forty years and more I spent among savages, and studied them and their ways; and now for several years I have lived here in England, and in my own stupid manner have done my best to learn the ways of the children of light; and what do I find?  A great gulf fixed?  No, only a very little one, that a plain man’s thought may spring across.  I say that as the savage is, so is the white man, only the latter is more inventive, and possesses a faculty of combination…but in all essential the savage and child of civilization are identical.

     Unquote.

      In the same book Haggard also put the problem more poetically:

…he dreams of the sight

of Zulu impis

breaking on the foe

like surf upon the rocks

and his heart rises in rebellion

against the strict limits

of the civilized life.

      Here Haggard states the central thesis of Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde.  In the evolution of the species there is always a small gulf between two adjacent species: nature does not take great leaps, it moves in small increments.  Thus it may be a small leap between the two, expecially when the next transition creates not only a new variety but a new species, but the leap is backwards as in Jekyll’s case while it is impossible for Hyde to make the leap forward, nor is he capable of adjusting to the new strict limits.  Wasn’t Stevenson precocious?

     Haggard who was not of the Scientific Consciousness was left behind while his work formed the basis of the greatest of the scientific mythographers.

     Before moving on let us here consider the patron saint of the future Red/Liberal aspect of the Religious Consciousness, the Frenchman, Victor Hugo (1802-85).

Paris Is A Leaky Basket

Paris has another Paris under herself; a Paris of sewers; which has its streets, its crossings, its squares, its blind alleys, its arteries and its circulation, which is slime minus its human form.

~Victor Hugo- Les Miserables

     As Haggard was a transitional figure for the mythographers one might say that Victor Hugo created the literary foundation for the Red/Liberal faction of the Religious Consciousness.  His Les Miserables with its tragi-comic format forms the bedrock of Revolutionary beliefs.  Hugo was himself a Revolutionary.  His novel Les Miserables is the account, so he says, of the apotheosis of Jean Valjean from bestiality to salvation.  Along the way to his apotheosis Valjean makes a detour through the sewers of Paris.

     Hugo was a poet; his account of the sewers of paris is, shall we say, poetic.  In fact a scatalogical masterpiece worthy of our own Lenny Bruce.  If Lenny had studied Vic a little he would have been able to say everything he wanted to say while staying out of jail at the same time.

     One wonders whether Freud read Hugo.  There are certain similarities in style.  Certainly they both seem to have had the same notion of the unconscious.  Valjean’s trip through the sewers of Paris, he with the bleeding Marius on his back must have been intended as a representation of the unconscious.  And a very funny one at that.

     Freud would certainly have agreed with Hugo when the latter wrote:  The history of men is the history of cloacae.  From Hugo’s description of the sewers of Paris it is clear that Paris was not anal retentive.

     Freud was no less scatological in his approach to psychology than this astonishing  section of Hugo’s book.  Who wouldn’t be miserable down in a sewer; miserable enough if only your mind was in the sewer.  In Hugo one gets the same macabre, morbid sense of humor Freud exhibits in his own work.  Oh yes, read properly Freud tells a lot of jokes.  Didn’t he write a book titled: Jokes And Their Relation To The Unconscious?  Sure he did.  Knew what he was talking about too.

     The first chapter of the section of Hugo’s book, The Intestines Of Leviathan is a series of morbid one liners which are as funny as anything Lenny Bruce came up with.  Double entendre?  To say Paris is a leaky basket!  In the underworld homosexual argot of Jean Genet the term basket refers to a man’s crotch and penis.  Undoubtedly the same argot was current in Hugo’s time.  He was a student of criminal argot.  So Paris being a leaky basket is equivalent to saying Paris was incontinent, pissing all over itself.  Don’t you think that’s funny?

     And then: “The sewer is the conscience of the city.” Hm?  ‘This can be said for the garbage dump, that it is no liar.”  I ask you, does Victor Hugo know how to get down and boogie?  Let us follow Jean Valjean into the “Conscience of Paris” “which is no liar” from which Hugo says Villon talks to Rabelais.  Fabulous funny images, morbid but fabulous and funny.

     To be sure, psychology in 1862 when Les Miserables was published, had not been developed, yet notice how closely Hugo’s tongue-in-cheek, laughing in his sleeve, description of Jean Valjean’s journey through the pitch black maze of this subterranean worker’s paradise into which from time to time faint glimmerings of light enter answers to the images of Freudian Depth Psychology.  Depth psychology?  Was that a pun or play on words?

     Just imagine Jean Valjean as he enters the sewer.  Take time to construct concrete images in your mind.  After this, shall we say, harrowing of hell not unlike that of Theseus and Peirithous, from which Perithous never returned, Valjean receives his apotheosis not unlike Hercules.  One might also compare this scene with the temptation of Christ.

     Valjean is carrying the bleeding Marius on his back who might or might not be dead.  Hugo doesn’t let us know.  This might be compared to one’s old self before or during the integration of the personality.  In fact Valjean sheds Marius after emerging from the sewer from which the gatekeeper of Hell, Thenardier, allows him to emerge after being paid his obol.

     The sewer is certainly a symbol of the unconscious for the scatological Freud who seems to revel in such fecal images.  Amidst a chatty history of the sewers of Paris which Hugo keeps up as Valjean plods through the darkness always intuitively heading in the right direction, down.  He evades the thought police who are searching for him or someone just like him in the sewers.  A shot sent blindly down his gallery grazes his cheek.  Jesus!  Isn’t a man safe from harassment in the depths of his own mind?  If you think Paris is dangerous, try the sewers.

     Valjean is exhausted from his long walk carrying Marius on his back, poor suffering humanity, the sign of the cross, nevertheless with the heart of a lion he plods on.  He moves forward through deepening fluids as his bare feet sink into fecal matter “which does not lie” while Hugo carries on a charming separate conversation with we readers about little known facts of the Paris sewers.  No, the fecal matter, as well as Hugo, tells the truth however hard that may be to decipher from the material at hand as well as underfoot.

      As the fluid (also however that may be composed as Hugo is writing scatologically) rises, his feet sink up to his knees into “the conscience of the city.”  Get this!  Valjean is one of the great strongmen, he lifts the dead weight of Marius above his head on his extended arms still sucking his feet from the muck.  Hugo does not reveal whether Valjean lost his shoes during this ordeal or not but surely a while back.  Perhaps of all the details Hugo records this particular item which consumes my interest had none for him.

     Nevertheless, heedless of the the danger to her shoes, Valjean plods on.  Plod, plod.

     Now, here’s a detail of interest Hugo does record.  Feet and legs deep in the conscience of paris, Marius held above his head visualize this, the fecal fluid had risen above Valjean’s mouth and nose so that he has to tip his head back, I’m not sure this would have been effective, until only a mask can be seen rising eerily above the surface, as well as two arms and Marius.  He ain’t heavy, he’s my other self.  Seen in Stygian darkness that is.

     If we’re all in the same sewer here imagine particles of the conscience of Paris, scatologically know as turds, bumping up against the mask probably trailing behind Our Man Of The Sewer in a wake of fetid glory.

     Even in the pitch black Thenardier is watching this spectacle.  Fortunately the psychic crisis is past.  Valjean leaves the conscience of Paris which does not lie, you can say that about it, behind striking solid, er, ground.

     A striking vision of Freud’s and the Revolution’s reality.  Had Valjean been given the name Spartacus the Revolutionary vision would have been complete.  The Red/Liberals had spent a hundred years or more in the sewers of Paris before they turned this primary text of theirs into the Broadway musical of Les Miserables.  Next time you see it put it into this context of the sewers of Paris.  The songs will take on new meaning.

Part II of Something Of Value I follows.

Springtime For Edgar Rice Burroughs

Part VI

Working Around The Blues

by

R.E. Prindle

 

     Nineteen-fourteen dawned with ERB trying to work around his problems.  As unbelievable as it may seem he wrote three stories in the first quarter of that year- The Beasts Of Tarzan, The Lad And The Lion and The Girl From Farris’s.

     Beasts probably relates to his continuing problems with Emma.  Quite probably the wishes expressed in Nu Of The Niocene remained unfulfilled as Tarzan and Jane or ERB and Emma become estranged or separated in Beasts.  The separation is reminiscent of the separation in Tarzan The Untamed, Tarzan The Terrible and Tarzan And The Golden Lion.  Obviously something is going on in the marriage but apart from inferences in the novel we can’t be clear as to what.  Suffice it to say the couple remains together.

     Then in February ERB began what must have been a painful book for him to write.  He began the book on 2/12/14 almost exactly one year after his father died.  George T.  passed away on 2/15/13.  ERB had had a year to mull over his dad’s dieing and Lad is the result.

     George T.  appears to have been a difficult father for his sons, all of them not just ERB.  Except for ERB slipping the noose by becoming a writer none of the Burroughs Boys would have been a success in life by business standards.

     The hangman’s noose is a minor theme in the stories of the teens appearing most significantly in Bridge And The Oskaloosa Kid.  The noose also make an appearance on the 100th anniversary of George T.’s birth in 1933’s Tarzan And The Lion Man.  While the noose was intended for Burroughs alter egos in the teens in Lion Man the situation is reversed when Tarzan/ERB places a noose around the neck of God/George T.  Perhaps the strange piebald appearance of God reflects ERB’s love/hate relationship with his father.

     Little study of George T. Burroughs has been done.  But if we postulate the burning of his distillery as the central fact of his later life from which he never recovered but edged slowly downhill then the burning of God’s castle may possibly represent the burning of the distillery.

     It is possible that the fire changed the personality of George T.  He may have been one man before the fire and another after.  It is significant that God/George T. is associated with cannibalism.  Thus the theme of cannibalism that looms large in the corpus may be associated with ERB’s relationship with his father.  Thus the noose and cannibalism would be symbols of ERB’s treatment by his father.

     In Lad his father surrogate is a deaf mute crazy old coot who torments the Lad and his Anima every day of their lives.  I am not clear on ERB’s relationship with his mother but let us compare a passage from Howard Pyle’s story of King Arther from Volume II The Story Of The Champions Of The Round Table which it is very probable Burroughs read and was influenced by:

     Quote:

     So she (Percival’s mother) kept Percival always with her and in ignorance of all that concerned the world of knighthood.  And though Percival waxed great of body and was beautiful and noble of countenance  yet he dwelt there among those mountains knowing no more of the world that lay beyond that place in which he dwelt and the outer world, then would a little innocent child.  Nor did he ever see anyone from the outside world, saving only an old man who was a deaf mute.

     Unquote.

     Transfer the above setting to the deck of the derelict, make the old deaf mute vicious and mean and possible substitute the lion for the mother and you have transposed Percival to the Lad And The Lion.

     We don’t have enough information to be certain of the characters of George T. and Mary Evaline.  ERB is reticent about his mother.  Either I’m missing the key or she doesn’t appear in the stories.  Not much has been said of her after her husband’s death in 1913 and her own death in April of 1920 while visiting in Tarzana.  Prior to that she had been visiting her sons spending three months at a time with them.  Whether she had just began this rotation is uncertain but this was the first time she had visited ERB and Emma.

      George T. figures more largely in Burroughs’ writing while always in a love/hate relationship.  I never had a father so I have that blind spot in my education meaning that, perhaps, I may not be the best judge of the father-son relationship.  My evaluation of George T. is that he wished to maintain a dominant role over his sons.  Perhaps, like many fathers, he was fearful that as his powers waned theirs would wax and they would become more powerful than he.  Something along the lines of the Greek god Cronus who, having been warned that one of his offspring would replace him swallowed them whole as they were born.  A stone was offered Cronus in place of his youngest son, Zeus, who did grow up to replace him.

     It is interesting that George T.’s youngest son, ERB, was able to escape his meshes just as the father died.

     The letters of the Burroughs Boys – George and Harry- from Yale indicate that while their father supported them he kept them on a short leash.  It is true that they began college after the distillery fire so that he may have been more liberally handed before the fire so as to bind the Boys to him but we won’t know.

     Having finished Yale as graduates of the Sheffield Scientific School they returned home to take up roles in the battery business that succeeded the distillery.  They were only able to escape their father’s domination when Harry became ill from battery fumes requiring his living in the dry climate of the West.  George begged to follow him and was so allowed.

     George T. didn’t own the battery business outright in its first years.  It would be nice to know something about his business associates in that business.

     I have already detailed the difficulties he placed in ERB’s life that were detrimental to the formation of the lad’s character.

     And then we have Herb Weston’s characterization of George T. as a stern man of the old school who he yes, sirred and no, sirred and got along with him famously.

     It is not impossible that John Carter is the idealized character of ERB’s father.  Carter’s own role in the Mars series does not disappear after 1913’s Warlord Of Mars but his role is greatly curtailed.  A possibility.

     I think it is a near certainty that the deaf mute old coot of the derelict is the negative father.  In Lad he doesn’t die naturally but is killed by the Lion who rips his face off.  This must be an affect of his father’s death as after the Lion kills him the Lad and the Lion continue to drift along for several months before the ship gently beaches itself, the tide goes out and the two walk ashore.  Then, just as Percival saw the knights, being drawn into the outside world, the Lad sees the Arab ‘knights’ being also drawn into the outside world.  He experiments with the burnoose just as Percival experimented with the armor.

     Thus a year after his father’s death Burroughs attempts to escape from the ‘crazy old coots’ shadow.

     That done, ERB then turns to a story begun the previous May to finish it.  The long period of incubation indicates the difficulty he had in getting the story out.  The Girl From Farris’s tells of the period from his bashing in 1899 to his return from Idaho in 1904.

     It is a difficult story vis-a-vis Emma.  ERB places his heroine in a brothel in Chicago.  Harris’s, the original location, was actually a famous brothel; Harris himself being a noteworthy figure which is probably why the name was changed to Farris’s.

     The woman escapes from the brothel.  After a series of adventures in Chicago she leaves for Idaho where she meets the hero Ogden Secor again who had aided her back home.

     Secor is in a desperate psychological state and that is probably an accurate description of ERB’s state of mind during those few years.

     The woman is identified and taken back to Chicago where after a bit of legal hoopla she is exonerated, we learn that she was never a prostitute and she and Secor are married.  After this number of terrible years something good happens to Secor and, one assumes Burroughs, the ray of light breaking through the clouds.

     At this point in March, nearly April, of 1914 ERB and the family return to Chicago, after once again auctioning off their belongings as they had done in Salt Lake City before returning to Chicago in 1904.  This has to signify in Burroughs’ mind that he had reversed his shameful performance of ten years earlier.  He undoubtedly expected Emma to also accept 1913-14 as a redemption of 1903-04.  Just as he had gambled and lost in ’03, in 1913-14 he had gambled and won.

     Even though according to him he was living hand to mouth he ordered a new automobile (not a used Velie) for delivery upon his arrival back in Chicago.  If the car was Burroughs’ Hudson then that would indicate that he had visited Baum in Hollywood as Baum drove a Hudson.  ERB would want to emulate his hero.  Then within a month or two the Burroughs left their old address in Chicago to move into the fancier suberb of Oak Park.  Perhaps this move was made possible by the expected book royalties.  Thus Burroughs continued to spend in anticipation of income rather than from money in his pocket.  So Burroughs kept his hopes and dreams alive.

     The springtime of ERB thus ended.  The incredible psychological release of success was now to be tempered by new realities.  The act of writing would now become a full time job.  From 1911 to 1913 he wrote from hopes and dreams.  Now he would have to settle down to turning out two or three books a year for magazine sales plus book royalties and newspaper royalties soon to be joined by movie revenues.  ERB had won the gamble of quitting his day job.  The Roving Gambler could now turn to the pleasures of life on the yacht.

     But first there was the unfinished business of the three stories- The Mad King, The Cave Girl and The Eternal Lover- to be taken care of.

     Properly belonging to 1913 the three sequels would take up a large block of time in 1914 which makes that year a transition year.

     I will review the stories in the sequence in which they were written:  The Cave Man July-August of 1914, The Eternal Lover, August and September and The Mad King, September-October.

Next:

Part VII

The Denouements.

  

Springtime For Edgar Rice Burroughs

Part 5

by

R.E. Prindle

 

     In this year of excitement for Burroughs as his success becomes established and he tries to work out his psycho-sexual conflicts it is interesting to follow the development of both.

     Three of his stories expecially concerned with his sexual conflicts were followed by sequels relating to their development.  The first The Cave Girl finished in March as a sort of sequel was followed by the Mad King of October-November and then in November-December of 1913 by The Eternal Lover.  After a fashion these novels may be considered a trilogy.

     Writing approximately a year later – 16 months for Cave Girl, a year for Mad King and eight months for The Eternal Lover- the three sequels rapidly followed each other.  The Cave Man was writtin in July-August of 1914, Sweetheart Primeval (The Eternal Lover) in August-September and Barney Custer of Beatrice (The Mad King) from September to November.  The diptyches were then published as single volumes.  They have been disconcertedly packaged as single stories when they should be considered as different stories with different approaches to the same problem.  Unless I am mistaken with the sequel to the Mad King Emma is written out of the story.

     Following Cave Girl in early 1913 Burroughs wrote The Monster Men in April-May that probably has little to do with his psycho-sexual problems but relates to his long admiration of Frankenstein and probably the more recent H.G. Wells’ novel The Island Of Dr. Moreau.  There will be a number of related stories along this line if not sequels.

     The Warlord of Mars followed in June and July.  John Carter probably relateing to Burroughs’ emasculation concerns thus having little or nothing to do with Emma.  August to October’s The Mucker is a very important book, the first of what I consider a quartet exploring Burroughs psycho-sexual needs.  In The Mucker a low brow hoodlum from Chicago is thrown together with a New York society girl.  The novel brings together the theme of yachts, shipwrecks, cannibalism and the stranding on a South Seas island.

     In this case the low brow realizes that he won’t make it in a high brow world so he renounces his claim on the society woman.

     The first sequel to the Mucker gestated for three years until 1916’s Out There Somewhere (The Return Of The Mucker).  In this novel Burroughs splits his personality into Bily Byrne- the Mucker- and the gentleman hobo, Bridge.  Thus by 1916 it apears that Burroughs sees himself as more polished than his Mucker creation.  Bridge is a voluntary exile from a wealthy Virginia family so that he unites The Prince And The Pauper in his identity while reversing the order of Little Lord Fauntleroy.  It will be noticed however that Bridge combines all three of Burroughs’ most favorite books.

     In the denouement Burroughs gives the society girl to the Mucker while Bridge goes off in search of the ideal ‘mate’ who is Out There Somewhere.

     The second sequel, Bridge And The Oskaloosa Kid (The Oakdale Affair), of 1917 continues the story of Bridge in, really, a very good story, in which at the end Bridge is revealed as not a bum, assuming his true identity as a Virginia gentleman.  The Pauper become the Prince, Fauntlroy comes into his own.

     The last of the quartet is 1924’s Marcia Of The Doorstep in which in a wholly fictitious way Burroughs’ Anima and Animus are united in the characters of Chase III and Marcia.  This novel appears to conclude this particular exploration that has lasted for eleven years.

     The Mucker was followed by October-November’s The Mad King.  The Mucker was written in both Chicago and San Diego while the Mad King was written wholly in San Diego.

     The Mad King returns to the theme of the Cave Girl of ERB’s relationship to Emma.  He even names the lead female Emma.  It seems possible that the uprooting from Chicago with all their possessions had an unsettling effect on Emma so that ERB’s difficulties with her probably become more pronounced.  Certainly her discomfort is understandable but the Mad King may have determined her fate.

     The title The Mad King is probably significant in this context.  Once again Burroughs creates doppelgangers so that both characters are split from his own personality.  Once again we have The Prince And The Pauper theme of an interchange of roles.  At this stage ERB may have felt like a king but realized he was acting in a mad way.

     The Mad King is followed immediately in November-December actually a matter of only twenty days by The Eternal Lover-  Nu Of The Niocene.  The two stories must be closely related in Burroughs’ mind.  Indeed the sequel to Nu Of The Niocene, Sweetheart Primeval includes several characters from The Mad King.  So one would have to ask how does Barney Custer’s sister Victoria relate to Emma.

     I intend to devote a few pages to the The Eternal Lover which I consider perhaps the most imaginative and interesting of Burroughs’ stories.  The inspiration for the story can be related to two of Burroughs significant influences, Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling.  Among others of Haggard’s work She stands out most prominently while Kpling’s very interesting ‘The Finest Story In The World’ bears directly on the theme of reincarnation and close encounters in time.

     From further reading that I am doing all the time it is also becoming apparent that Burroughs is part of a very large intellectual and literary background activity.  In reading a volume: H.G. Wells’ Literary Criticism I came across this entry:  (p. 62, note 2.)

     Quote:  At the end of (Grant) Allen’s novel, Frida Monteith, now a Liberated Woman, hoping that suicide will enable her to join her lover in the twenty-fifth century, ‘walked on by herself…across the open moor and purple heath, towards black despair and the trout-ponds of Broughton.’

     Unquote.

     I don’t suggest that ERB read Grant Allen’s novel but as ERB himself said ‘plots are in the air.’  So that ERB is working within an intellectual milieu.  His notion of time travel in 1913 is not unreminiscent of Mark Twain’s posthumous 1916 novel Operator 44.  While I would not suggest that Twain received any inspiration from Burroughs certainly conceptions of time and time travel were ‘in the air.’  I merely suggest that there is a milieu from which all are drawing inspiration.   Burroughs also seems to have in mind H.G. Wells’ When The Sleeper Wakes although he claimed virtually to have never heard of ‘Mr. Wells.’  In Wells’ story his hero had fallen asleep awaking several centuries in the future to find his investments had accrued making him the richest man in the world, the object of a religious cult and an impediment to its continuation.

     In The Eternal Lover Nu has been asleep for a hundred thousand years.  Burroughs’ title for Chap. III is ‘Nu The Sleeper Awakes.’  No chance of a coincidence.  Instead of monetary rewards Nu will find that which makes life worthwhile- the perfect mate he had left behind in the Niocene.  Burroughs make an unbelievably subtle comment on Wells.  Wells did read Burroughs but whether he caught this is open to conjecture at this time.

     In fact, Burroughs setting up Nu’s return to consciousness and his relationship to Victoria, Barney’s sister, is extremely well handled by ERB.  I doubt if there is anything in genre literature that surpasses it.

     Victoria and Barney have just passed the rock structure within which Nu lies sleeping.  The Once And Future King motif is also suggested here as well as possibly Vivien’s enchantment of Merlin.

     Speaking of her sensations she says to Barney:  p. 14

     Quote:

     “Barney, there is something about these hills back there that fills me with the strongest sensation of terror imaginable.  Today I passed an outcropping of volcanic rock that gave evidence of a frightful convulsion of nature is some bygone age.  At sight of it I commenced to tremble from head to foot, a cold perspiration breaking out all  over me.  But that part is not so strange- you know I have always been subject to these same silly attacks of unreasoning terror at the sight of any evidence of the mighty forces that have wrought changes in the earth’s crust, or the slightest tremor of an earthquake; but today the feeling of unalterable loss which overwhelmed me was almost unbearable- it is though one whom I loved above all others had been taken from me.’ 

     “And yet,” she continued, “through all my inexplicable sorrow there shone a ray of brilliant hope as remarkable as the deeper and depressing emotion which still stirred me.”

     Unquote.

     That sets the premonition of what is coming as discreetly as anything I’ve read.  The psychology of Victoria’s emotions is as succinctly and accurately expressed as possible.  It is very difficult to imagine the scene bettered by any writer.  Haggard and Kipling who may have recognized their own work as a source of inspiration must have shook their heads in awe.

     Barney is sympathetic:  p. 16

     Quote:

     “Oh, Barney.” she cried, “You are such a dear never to have laughed at my silly dreams.  I’m sure I should go quite mad did I not have you in whom to confide; but lately I have hesitated to speak of it even to you- he has been coming so often!  Every night since we first hunted in the vicinity of the hills I have walked hand in hand with him beneath a great equatorial moon beside a restless sea, and more clearly than ever in the past have I seen his form and features.  He is very handsome, Barney, and very tall and strong, and clean limbed- I wish that I might meet such a man in real life.  I know it is ridiculous, but I can never love any of the pusillanimous weaklings who are forever falling in love with me- not after having walked hand in hand with such as he and read the love in his clear eyes.  And yet, Barney, I am afraid of him.  Is it not odd?”

     Unquote:

     So in a few pages Burroughs has created a mystery of instense interest that will be explained in the next few pages to stunning effect, certainly in 1913 if not today.  Since 1913 the topic has been explared in a number of ways not least of which was the very interesting movie Somewhere In Time.

     Victoria is afraid of earthquakes.  As might be expected a major quake hits.  The rock facing of the cave in which Nu has been sleeping for the last hundred thousand years sheers away releasing the gas and allowing fresh air to awaken the sleeper, much as in H.G. Wells excellent story.

     Burroughs’ treatment of Nu’s experiencing the new world is exceedingly well done.  Through a series of well wrought adventures Nu and Victoria/Nat-Ul are reunited then split asunder again as the Arabs capture Victoria carrying her to the well known fate worse than death in the hands of a Northern Sheik.

     Barney and his crew find Nu taking him back to Tarzan’s house.  Here Burroughs tells a story before Nu leaves to recover Natu-Ul that seems strange.

     The story is told by an unnamed narrator who happens to be a guest of Lord Greystoke at the time.

     As the whole scenario is taking place in the mind of Edgar Rice Burroughs we may be forgiven for assuming that the anonymous I is he.

     ERB has a strange attitude toward his creation Tarzan here, almost demeaning.  When Nu escapes with the wolf hound Greystoke just off handedly asserts that Nu had killed the missing dog.  When this proves wrong ERB allows the others to verbally abuse their host.  Rather strange, I thought.

     It appears that this story that follows Mad King I can be construed as a continuation of that story as when Barney shows up at John Clayton’s ranch, the man formerly known as Tarzan, he is fresh from Lutha and there to forget.  As he lost Emma in Lutha one assumes that she is what he’s trying to forget.

     An American named Curtiss shows up.  Victoria says:

     Quote:

     “Mr. Curtiss!…and Lieutenant Butzow!  Where in the world did you come from?”

     “The world left us,” replied the officer, smiling, “and we have followed her to the wilds of Equatorial Africa.”

     Unquote.

     A charming compliment to Victoria.  Indeed, Curtiss is there to propose to her.  Curtiss begins very charming then slowly turns vicious.  Reminds one of Robert Canler or perhaps Frank Martin in real life.   At one point Victoria was about to consent to marry Curtiss (Frank Martin?)  but then demurred.

     But then she made contact with her dream lover, Nu.  the interchange of time sequences is extrememly well handled as Burroughs manages the hundred thousand year gap betwen Nu and Victoria in inventive and satisfying ways.  Once again he has mingled prehistory and the present in what is definitely his most virtuoso performance.  His depiction of Victoria/Nat-Ul’s blending of dream states and waking states is handled flawlessly and convincingly.

     As Curtiss realizes that Nu is  his competitor for Victoria/Nat-Ul he derides Nu calling him a ‘white nigger.’  I found the use of the term strange within the context.

     When Nu had recovered Victoria from the Arabs Curtiss comes upon the two in the jungle unawares.  He is about to shoot Nu in the back (Martin’s arranged bashing of ERB in Toronto?) when the wolf hound who has been protecting Nu and Natu-Ul leaps on him ripping out his throat and chest.

     Burroughs seems to gloat over this gruesome death so that one must ask who Curtiss could represent in Burroughs’ real life.

     That means, who are Nu and Nat-Ul?

     Once again we have to go back to the period 1896-1900 and the subsequent years.  It seems likely that Curtiss must represent Frank Martin who courted Emma during those crucial four years in ERB’s life.  In ERB/Nu’s absence Curtiss/Martin courted Emma/Victoria/Nat-ul.  We may assume that Emma was about to say yes to Martin/Curtiss’ proposal when Burroughs/Nu returned from the Niocene/Idaho thus foiling Curtiss/Martin’s hopes.

     Now, when Nu rescued Victoria/Nat-Ul from the lion Curtiss shot him in the dark creasing his skull.  This is a theme seldom or never absent from any of Burroughs’ books, therefore  it follows that as Martin was responsible for Burroughs’ bashing in Toronto that Martin/Curtiss are the same.

     Curtiss becomes abusive of Nu after he recovers from the effects of the near miss revealing his ‘true’ or mean side.  So Martin may have, or probably did, become abusive of ERB upon their return from Toronto.  It is not to be believed that he just disappeared from the couple’s life without some demonstration of anger.  As we know that Martin paid close attention to Burroughs and Emma from 1900 to at least the divorce when he sent his friend Butzow/Patchin to LA to talk to Burroughs it is very likely that he interfered in their marriage through the whole Chicago period.  This would explain the gruesomeness of Curtiss/Martins’ killing and ERB’s seeming to revel in it.  So the whole Narrator, Barney Custer, Lord Greystoke and Curtiss story is somehow related.  The missing piece of the puzzle is Burroughs’ seeming hostility to Tarzan/Greystoke.  I haven’t got that yet.

     Having rescued Victoria/Nat-Ul from the Arab abductor in one of the most satisfying fight sequences in the corpus Nu tries to claim Nat-ul as his own.  He is still confused as to how Victoria can be of two minds as both Victoria and Nat-ul.  Before we consider Burroughs’ masterful handling of the fictional situation let us consider the relation of the sequence to Burroughs’ and Emma’s real life situation.  This story was written in San Diego not Chicago.

     The prehisoric aspect of the story may represent the early days of their marriage before ERB lost Emma’s trust in Idaho.  Thus Victoria/Emma remembers the old days but she isn’t necessarily willing as yet to replace her trust in ERB.  Nu/ERB having now the two tusks of Oo the saber toothed tiger on him as proof of his devotion, possibly once again representing  his John Carter and Tarzan successes, insists that Victoria/Emma return to the past with him.  i.e. the early days of the marriage.  In other words Burroughs wants to start all over again.  The name Nu- New- may mean that ERB thinks himself a new man but the same old guy he used to be. 

My hair is still curly,

My eyes are still blue,

Why don’t you love me

Like you used to do.

Hank Williams

As this half of the story ends somewhat in a quandary regarding the relationship, Victoria nevertheless agrees to return to the past with Nu.

     As ERB tells the story in the novel he creates a most extraordinary scene.

     Quote.

     “You do not love me Nat-Ul?”  He asked.  “Have the strangers turned you against me?  What one of them could have fetched you the head of Oo, the man hunter?  See!”  He tapped the two great tusks that hung from his loin cloth.  “Nu slew the mightest of beasts for his Nat-ul- the head is buried in the cave of Oo- yet now I come to take you as my mate I see fear in your eyes and something else which never was there before.  What is it Natu-ul- have the strangers stolen your love from Nu?

     The man spoke in a tongue so ancient that in all the world there lived no man who spoke or knew a word of it, yet to Victoria Custer it was as intelligible as her own English, nor did it seem strange to her that she answered Nu in his own language.

     “My heart tells me that I am yours, Nu,” she said, “but my judgement  and training warn me against the step that my heart prompts.  I love you; but I could not be happy to wander, half naked through the jungle for the balance of my life, and if I go with you now, even for a day, I may never return to my people.  Nor would you be happy in the life that I lead- it would stifle and kill you.  I think I see now something of the miracle that has overwhelmed us.  To you it has been but a few days since you left your Nat-ul to hunt down the ferocious Oo; but in reality countless ages have rolled by.  By some strange freak of fate you have remained unchanged during all these ages until now you step forth from your long sleep an unspoiled cave man of the stone age into the midst of the twentieth century, while I doubtless, have been born and reborn a thousand times, merging form one incarnation to another until in this we are again united.  Had you, too, died and been born again during all  these weary years no gap of ages would intervene between us now and we should meet again upon a common footing as do other souls, and mate and we to be born again to a new mating and new life with its inevitable death- you have refused to die and now that we meet again at least a hundred thousand years lie between us- an unbridgeable gulf across which I may not return and over which you may not come other than by the same route I have followed- through death and new life thereafter.”

     Unquote.

     Wow!  I don’t know that that can be topped in fantasy or other fiction.  And there are people who say that Burroughs has no occult background.  The passage fairly drips of Haggard and Kipling.  Novels and stories that he’d read perhaps twenty years or more before had been working away in his mind to surface in this magnificent speech and wonderful story.

     The unbridgeable gulf clearly refers to Haggard’s Allan Quatermain.  The influence of the story of She is unmistakeable while Kipling’s The Finest Story In The World is clear.  yet Burroughs has built an entirely new edifice that rises magnificently above the old foundations.

     Haggard and Kipling read the story too, I’m sure with their mouths hanging open.  It inspired them four years later to collaborate on Haggard’s own Love Eternal.  While inspired by his masters Burroughs also inspired them.  It’s a pity they didn’t all three sit down to smoke a cigar and have a brandy together.

     That this story has gone unrecognized seems incredible.  With this half of the story ERB capped his incredible year of 1913.

     The tone of the corpus changes after Nu of the Niocene.

—–

      As he worked his stories were being published elsewhere.  It would not be before mid 1914 that Tarzan Of The Apes would see book form but perhaps more importantly his work was recognized and serialized in the newspapers.  We have to thank Bibliophile Robert R. Barrett for collating the newspaper publications that George McWhorter published in the Winter 2005 NS #61 of the BB.  My information is gratis Mr. Barrett’s collation.

     The New York Evening World kicked off Burroughs career when it serialized Tarzan Of The Apes beginning in January of 1913.  The paper also published many subsequent novels.  Following the Evening World Tarzan Of The Apes was published by the Los Angeles Record, Chicago Record, the Bowman ND Citizen.

     The Return Of Tarzan was syndicated by the Scripp’s Howard papers and The Cave Girl by the NY Evening World.  After 1913-14 the number of papers publishing Tarzan Of The Apes increased greatly so by the time the book was published in June of 1914 Tarzan was much more widely disseminated than the mere publication in the All Story Magazine would warrant.

     Burroughs’ book publishing history is difficult to understand.  the reports of untold millions of copies cannot be substantiated.  Indeed it appears that in 1914 fewer than fifteen thousand copies were sold.  There is no record that his publishers, McClurg’s even printed the full fifteen thousand copes of the contract.  When they leased the reprint rights to A.L.Burt in 1915 there had been no record of sales success.  Indeed Burt would only take the title if McClurg’s would indemnify them for the first twenty thousand copies if unsold.

     The cheap edition did well well but Burt reported less than seven hundred thousand copies ehen they turned the rights over to Grossett & Dunlap.  So Burroughs while having a success never realized the substantial royalties on which he had been counting and would have bought him his yacht.

     The springtime of ERB was nearly over.  By the time he wrote the sequels to The Mad King, Cave Girl and The Eternal Lover in 1914 he was already entering Summer.

     Let us now examine the year 1914.

 End Of Part V

  

    

    

Springtime For Edgar Rice Burroughs

by

R.E. Prindle

4c

How Waldo Became A Man

 

     In the complex of meanings of Waldo the question is how much Burroughs bases the character on himself.  In the question of health there is no question that Burroughs had issues after his bashing in Toronto in 1899.

     Judging from the Girl From Farris’s his health was a serious problem for him at least until early 1914 when he finished Farris’s.  During those years he suffered from debilitating excruciatingly painful headaches for at least half the day.  He either awakened with them or they developed mid-day.  There is evidence that he became interested in Bernarr Macfadden’s  body building and health techniques when Macfadden opened his Chicago facilities in 1908.  If he were involved then perhaps the benefits of such a regimen were becoming apparent in1913-14.  In 1916 in the photograph in puttees taken at Coldwater he looks like a healthy specimen and proud of it.

     ERB gives Waldo the wasting disease Tuberculosis putting him on a regimen of exercise in the healthy dry air of his island thus curing him within a few months.  This process is reminiscent of Grey’s hero John Hare of Heritage Of The Desert or the development of the Virginian in Owen Wister’s novel.

     Burroughs claimed that his writing was heavily influenced by his dreamworld.  If so then in this story as well as his others each character must represent a real person who figures in his life; the story must represent a real situation in symbolical form.

     As authors so often claim their characters are composites it is likely that Burroughs also combines memories of other people with his own dreams.  As Burroughs consciously manipulates his dream material he tweaks it into shape to make an entertaining novel then overlaying his conscious desires on his subconscious hopes and fears.

page 1.

     In addition Burroughs retains his literary influences using them to give form to his dreamscapes.  Indeed, his influences fill his mind so full they become part of his dreamscapes.  The island he creates is similar to but not identical with Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island.  This becomes very apparent in the sequel, The Cave Man, when Waldo sets about to improve his little society.  He isn’t as obsessive-compulsive as Verne but along those lines.

     Verne’s island figures prominently in many of Burroughs narratives.  Oddly the book isn’t in his library.

     ERB began telling his life’s story the moment he took up his pen.  While John Carter seems to be dissociated from his own personality Tarzan is a true alter ego, a psychic doppelganger.  Tarzan Of The Apes is a symbolical telling of his life’s story from birth to 1896 while the Return of Tarzan covers the four years from 1896 to 1900 and his marriage.  (See my Four Crucial Years In The Life Of Edgar Rice Burroughs here on ERBzine.)

     The Girl From Farris’s deals with the troubled years from 1899 to, it appears, March of 1914.  Thus Cave Girl addresses his difficulties in making the transition to writer and then full time writer with the attendant marital or sexual problems.  These marital or sexual problems occupy him through many novels in this first burst of creativity from 1913 to 1915.

     Porges in working from Burroughs’ own papers in his biography has very little input from outside sources but some.  The first material we have to work with from an outsider’s point of view is Matt Cohen’s  fine edition of Brother Men, the collection of the Burroughs-Weston correspondence.  Weston being ERB’s friend from MMA days.  At the time of the divorce they had been in touch for forty years.

     However I think that figure may be a little misleading as the two men had very little contact during that period.  ERB met Weston in 1895 at the MMA at the beginning of the school year.  He was one year younger than ERB.  As Burroughs left the MMA in May of ’96 the two must have become fast friends in just eight or nine months.  It isn’t probable that they met again before 1905 when Weston was passing through Chicago with his wife Margaret.  At that time both Westons would have met Emma.  From that time to the end of ERB’s Chicago period except for the occasional brief layover in Chicago the relationship was carried on by correspondence although as Burroughs seems to have some knowledge of Weston’s home town, Beatrice, Nebraska as evidenced in the second half of The Mad King it is possible he and Emma visited Weston but that would have had to have been between March ’14 and August ’14.  Narrow window.

     Thus when Weston talks so knowingly of Burroughs’ character in the letter of 1934 I will refer to I would have to question the depth of his knowledge.  At any rate he claims to have knowledge of the difficulties of the marriage.

     Weston was completely devastated by the announcement of the divorce.  He immediatly sided with Emma breaking off relations with ERB for several years.

     It appears from the letter of 1934 reproduced on page 233 of Brother Men that he contacted Burroughs’ LA friend Charles Rosenberger for information on the divorce.  We have only Weston’s reply but not Rosenberger’s letter.

     In reply to Rosenberger Weston says:

     Quote:

     I have known Ed since the fall of ’95.  He has always been unusual and erratic.  I have told Margaret many times, when Ed has done or said anything which seemed sort of queer that as long as I had known him he had always done or said such things. 

 (One of the most significant odd things would have been Burroughs leaving the MMA in mid-term in May to join the Army.  One imagines that when he didn’t show up for classes next day the faculty asked: Where’s Burroughs.  Perhaps Weston was the only one who knew and had to say:  Uh, he joined the Army.)

      I suppose looking back, that the fact that Ed has always been unusual, erratic and perhaps queer, has been his great charm and attraction for me.

     Unquote.

     I don’t know about you but if my best friend talked about me like that I would be less than flattered.  There is another back handed compliment that Weston made to Burroughs’ father in his defense.

     Burroughs’ father had made the comment to Weston that his son was no damn good.  Good to have your dad on your side too.  Weston defended ERB vigorously saying that he thought there was plenty of good in ERB, he just hadn’t shown it yet.  Thank you, Herb Weston.

     If one judges from the actions of Ogden Secor in Girl From Farris’s after he was hit on the head and if his actions approximated those of Burroughs from 1899 on then there was probably a very good reason for ERB’s unusual, erratic perhaps queer behavior apart from the fact that ERB had developed the typical character of his difficult childhood.

     In reading the correspondence Weston comes across as a very conventional and highly respectable person; in other words, stodgy.  It must have been that settled bourgeois quality in him that ERB appreciated.  Weston did many of the things that Burroughs would have liked to have done.  Weston did go on to Yale from the MMA which is what Burroughs would have liked to have done.  Weston did become an officer in the Army.

     On page 157 of Brother Men is a discussion of the Spanish American War.  If I read it correctly Weston actually served in Cuba with a Tennessee regiment.  So Burroughs had reason to be envious of him as he failed in his own attempts to get into Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders.

      Nevertheless Weston’s evaluation of Burroughs uses some strong language who after all didn’t have that intimate a relationship with him:  unusual, erratic perhaps queer.  Honestly, I don’t think I would have a friend very long who thought of me that way.

     Weston is bitterly disappointed but later in the letter he refers to Burroughs as a crazy old man so, at the least, we can assume that to the average mentality Burroughs appeared eccentric.  As one in the same boat I can’t help but root for the author of Tarzan.  What but an unconventional mind could have conceived such a story.

     Burroughs antecedents had created his persona by 1895 so the crack on the head in Toronto merely added to his unusual persona.

     Apart from any inferences about Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists the sickly character of Waldo may represent Burroughs’ own health problems from 1899 to the time of The Cave Girl.

     I feel certain that Burroughs followed some sort of health or body building regimen from perhaps 1908-09 when the American body building king Bernarr Macfadden opened his Chicago facilities to 1913.  Although Ogden Secor of Girl From Farris’s was still sickly in 1914 perhaps Burroughs health was improving as Waldo evolves from a skinny sickly person to a ‘blond giant’ before our eyes.  ‘Blond Giant’ also brings to mind Nietzsche’s ‘Great Blond Beast.’  I think it would be pushing it to say Burroughs read Nietzsche, nevertheless Burroughs always seems to be well informed when you look closely. He might easily have picked up references to the ‘Blond Beast’ from newspapers, magazines and conversation.

     Weston is especially incensed at Burroughs leaving Emma who both he and his wife Margaret seem to have preferred.  They did travel to California to visit Emma while ignoring ERB.

     Weston quotes Rosenberger to the effect that ERB told Rosenberger that he had always wanted to rid himself of Emma.  To which Weston replies:

     Quote:

     Charming, unusual, erratic personality that Ed is, there is no woman on earth that would have lived with him, and put up with him except Emma, and do not be fooled!  Emma suited Ed plenty, until this insane streak hit him.

     Unquote.

     So we have an outsider’s view of the situation.  He considers Burroughs over the line in his personality to be redeemed by his charm.  Weston had asked Rosenberger his opinion of the situation between ERB and Emma.  ERB had apparently told Rosenberger after the split that he had always wanted to rid himself of Emma.

     As far as Burroughs’ persdonality goes it would be in keeping with a person of his background who had been bounced from school to school.  Waldo may in part be a nasty caricature of the East Coasters Burroughs associated with at the Phillips Academy.  As is well known Easterners at the time and still today disdain those from the West.  One has the feeling that Burroughs valued his Idaho experiences highly thus the transformation from the wimpy Easterner of Waldo to the Blond Giant of the great outdoors may be Burroughs snub of his Eastern classmates.

     At any rate when Weston met Burroughs at the beginning of classes in ’95 ERB’s personality seems set.

     By ‘saying things’ one presumes that Weston means Burroughs had an outsider’s ‘eccentric’ sense of humor.  I have a feeling that a few of we Bibliophiles know where that’s at.  Certainly Burroughs’ stories reflect this trait.  So, between Burroughs and Weston we have a clash of two different backgrounds.

     As to Emma I believe that Burroughs was always dissatisfied with the fact that he had married when he did whoever he might have married.  He has been quoted as saying that Tarzan never should have married so that idea can probably be applied to him.

     If circumstances hadn’t forced his hand he very likely would have remained single.  According to his psychology the right time for him to find a woman and marry would have been after 1913 and his success when he was in effect born again and a new man.

     So when he says he never really wanted Emma as a wife I’m sure that is true.  However he did marry the woman.  So from 1913 to 1920 we have Burroughs struggling with his desire to honor his life long committment to Emma and his contrary desire to find his ideal ‘mate’ a la Dejah Thoris, La, Nadara and a number of others.  Not so easily done in real life and after great success but still possible.

     Added to his problem was his embarrassing behavior in Idaho when he gambled away the couple’s last forty dollars.  Emma reacted badly to the Western interlude in their marriage.  Burroughs’ rather feckless attitude toward earning a living between the return from Idaho and his early success in 1913 undoubtedly caused emotional problems for Emma but as Weston says she stuck by him during those lean years and as he says, there were a lot of them.

     Even in 1913 when the couple earned the first real money they had ever seen Burroughs was recklessly spending it before he got it based only on his confidence that he would always be a successful writer something which by no means necessarily follows.

     Emma was very proud of Burroughs as the photo ERBzine published of the couple in San Diego shows however her pride obviusly conflicted with her fears so that she may have nagged ERB in what he considered an unjustified way.

     On one level Cave Girl can be construed to be a record of their relationship up to the moment with Burroughs trying to reconcile the relationship according to his confident understanding of the situation.

     Writing in February-March in Chicago we have this view.  In September of 1913 the family left for San Diego.  Writing in San Diego during October-November in the Mad King things seem to be deteriorating as Burroughs seems to be pleading with Emma to be reasonable.  Thus the Mad King concerns Prince and Pauper doppelgangers who are appealing to the same woman.

     This situation may have been caused by a situation that would be very reminiscent to Emma of her situation in Idaho of ten years earlier.  On this trip in which ERB and Emma were as alone and isolated as in Idaho ERB was taking another very large gamble with Emma’s and her three little children’s wellbeing at stake.   As ERB proudly tells it the family, no longer just a wife, but a family of five were within an ace of being flat broke if any one of the stories Burroughs wrote in 1913 failed to sell.  Unlike Idaho this was a gamble the Roving Gambler won.  Now, perhaps Burroughs thought this redeemed his earlier faux pas, probably to himself it did.  But what about Emma?  What terrific anxieties  assailed her as she wondered whether they would have a roof over their heads from day to day.

     We need more facts.  Perhaps the move from Coronado to San Diego was forced by necessity to reduce costs.  Perhaps selling the Vellie was necessary to raise cash.  Thus Emma in the midst of this actual plenty of a $10,000 income was a virtual pauper in silks and diamonds.  Would there be any wonder if she were cross and nagging?  As Weston said there were difficulties in living with Burroughs.

     Burroughs then rather than attempting to make reasonable adjustments in his behavior yearned for the perfect mate who would ‘understand’ him.

    Nevertheless he had to bear the burden assigned him.  Let us assume that as Weston said, at one time Emma suited Ed plenty.  That’s an outsider’s opinion but the evidence of this group of novels is that ERB was doing his best to rectify his past for Emma.  If Waldo is portrayed as clownish I’m sure that ERB had played the clown in real life for some time.  As Weston said ERB had always said and done unusual things.  He doesn’t say what they were but in all likelihood the things he said and did were meant to be jokes, to be funny.  After all he describes Tarzan as a jungle joker.  The jokes that Tarzan perpetrated originated in ERB’s mind so he had to think those jokes were funny.  They were usually practical jokes.  No one really like a practical joker.  The psychological needs that go into a practical joke are compensatory.

     Where he failed Emma in the past he seems to be trying to make up for it.  Perhaps his financial gamble in 1913 in some way compensates for his gambling failure in 1903 reversing the outcome of 1903 and making it alright.  His actions in 1913 are so zany one has to ask what he thinks he is doing.

e.

 

     Leaving their little Eden Waldo and Nadara set out for her village where Korth and Flatfoot await him with Nagoola in the background.

     Thus Waldo’s tasks as set for him by Nadara are to kill Korth and Flatfoot.  Waldo quite correctly realizes that these two tasks are beyond his present powers.  So, within sight of the village he makes excuses to Nadara then abandons her running away.  He heads out to the Wasteland.  He appears to be living in a near desert.

     Over the next several months he transforms himself from a tubercular wimp into a ‘Blond Giant.’  Tarzan has black hair so perhaps Waldo has to be blond.

     One can’t be sure but this period may represent the years from John The Bully to ERB’s proposal to Emma.  At any rate Waldo can’t forget Nadara having a longing for her.  During his period in the Wasteland he fashions weapons for himself that make him superior in prowess to the cave men.  He fashions a spear, a shield and what Burroughs jokingly, I hope, refers to as a sword, that is a sharp pointed short stick with a handle.  No bow and arrow.  So rather than a primitive Tarzan we have a primitive Lancelot.  Waldo is actually outfitted as a knight, a la Pyle, while when he acquires the pelt of Nagoola he will be, as it were, encased in armor.  So Pyle, or at least Arthur, is an influence.

     In a comedy of errors Nagoola manages to kill himself by falling on Waldo’s spear.  In one sense this means that Waldo has invested his sexual desires in Nadara while perhaps it is symbolic of Burroughs’ desire to do the same with Emma.  At the same time the panther skin makes Nadara the best dressed girl around.  It is perhaps significant that he kills Nagoola first before Korth and Flatfoot.

     If one looks again at that ERBzine photo of ERB and Emma in San Diego one will notice that Emma is wearing some spiffy new togs.  In her father’s house Emma was a clothes horse.  In another ERBzine photo showing ERB and Emma walking in the wilds of Idaho Emma is still dressed to the nines while ERB shambles along beside her in a cheap baggy suit.

     From that point in 1903 to the efflorescence  of wealth in 1913 Emma had to make do with whatever garb she could afford which must have been depressing for her.  As Weston says that was a sacrifice she was willing to make for her man.

     Not in 1913 in Cave Girl but in 1914 in Cave Man Waldo invests Nadara with Nagoola’s pelt.  Now, Waldo suffered grievously to acquire this skin.  That was a major battle out there in the Wasteland.  Let us assume that the skin represents Waldo’s sexual desires and that in clothing Nadara in the skin he is making her his queen or princess.

     Thus in 1913-14 for the first time in his life ERB is able to reestablish Emma as a clothes horse.  He has finally been able to do his duty as a man and husband.  She can now buy as many clothes of whatever quality she likes and ERB is happy to have her do it.  So, in a symbolic way ERB had a terrific struggle that scarred him psychologically as Waldo was physically scarred by the talons of Nagoola.  Now, Burroughs was proud to be able to dress Emma to her desires.  In the same way that the panther represents Waldo’s investing Nadara with his sexual desires so Emma’s clothes represent the same to ERB.

     It was now up to Emma to forgive ERB for his failings and treat him as her hero.  Perhaps ERB was a little premature.  I think that he would have had to woo her all over again.  While he had conficence he would be able to go on writing indefinitely the surety of such was problematic to others like Emma and actually ERB’s editor at Munsey, Bob Davis.  Davis told him point blank that guys like Burroughs start strong, shoot their wad and fall out after two or three years.  As far as others were concerned Burrroughs future remained to be seen.  The evidence is that Davis and other editors thought that Burroughs had Tarzan and that was it.  Apart from the Mars series how much of this other stuff was pubished to humor Burroughs to cajole more Tarzan novels  is a question.  Still, the fans seemed to receive it well.  Cave Girl was even serialized in the New York papers.

     Nadara has set Waldo three tasks all of them murderous.  He is to kill Nagoola, Korth and Flatfoot.  Having fulfilled the killing of Nagoola Waldo after several months sets out to return to Nadara to fulfill his last two committments. 

     Before he invests Nadara with Nagoola’s pelt he first kills Korth and Flatfoot.  These are monster battles where like the knights of old, Lancelot, Waldo is hurt near to death. 

     Now, what would Emma nag ERB about during those lean years?  The clothes have already been discussed so that leaves the monetary success to acquire them.  So the slaying of the pair of cave men may represent financial success.  Financial success came with the creation of John Carter and Tarzan.  So let’s assume that Korth represents John Carter and Flatfoot Tarzan.  The creation of the two or the slaying of those dragons opens the way for the hero Waldo/ERB to present Nadara/Emma with the first task, clothing.

     Having killed Korth and Flatfoot Waldo still has to make up with Nadara for abandoning her at the threshhold to her village.  Not an easy task.  Waldo pleads that he has done everything she asked but she remains obdurate.  This probably relflects ERB and Emma’s situation.  A situation that apparently was never satisfactorily resolved.

     But then it seems as though there is a change in the characterization and Nadara reverts back to Nadara of the beginning of the book while Waldo, believe it or not, becomes a god, if Nadara had known what gods were.  Waldo scrambles up some fruit trees to toss down some food that seems to bring them together.  In the last pages Burroughs gets schmaltzy writing close to purple passages.

     At this time Nadara spots a yacht out over the waves.  The yacht is a major theme during the teens and especially in this 1913-14 period.  The significance seems to be that Burroughs envisioned his early life as The Little Prince as life on a yacht.  Then the big storm comes changing his life as it sinks.  Then begins the struggle for existence capped by the eventual triumph.

     The yacht first appeared in Return Of Tarzan.  This is its second appearance.  Tarzan wasn’t on the yacht in Return and Waldo doesn’t get on the yacht in Cave Girl although he does in the sequel The Cave Man but that was a year later in 1914.  So things are evolving rapidly in ERB’s psychology.

     In this case he plans to join the yacht that he recognizes as his father’s.  Having abandoned Nadara once she imagines he is about to do so again so she runs off.

     Thoughts run through Waldo’s mind as he envisions a return to civilization with Nadara.

     Quote:

     For a time the man stood staring at the dainty yacht and far beyond it the civilization which it represented, and he saw there suave men and sneering women, and among them was a slender brown beauty who shrank from the cruel glances of the women- and Waldo writhed at this and at the greedy eyes of the suave men as they appraised the girl and he, too, was afraid.

—-

     “Come,” he said, taking Nadara by the hand, “let us hurry back into the hills before they discover us.”

     Unquote.

     And so Waldo decides to remain in the stone age.

     He and Nadara had left the little bag containing the relics of her mother behind.  The crew of the yacht discover the bag just on the inland side of the forest.

     Then we discover that Nadara is in fact the daughter of French nobles.  Burroughs seems to have some love affair going on with the French.  Many of his most attractive characters such as Paul D’Arnot, Nadara here, Miriam of Son of Tarzan are Gallic.  So Burroughs admires most the English, the French and the Virginians it would seem.

     Nadara is the daughter of Eugenie Marie Celeste de la Valois so she is a legitimate princess.

     Thus ends the Cave girl with seeming finality.  The way is open to the sequel but the closing seems final.

     I haven’t read a book that replicates the final scene but I suspect that ERB borrowed it.  I wouldn’t be surprised to learn of an earlier duplicate.

End Of Part 4c.

 

Springtime For Edgar Rice Burroughs

3.

In The Beginning:

The Renascent Burroughs

a.

         The psychological release Burroughs experienced when he began to realize the potential he had always felt must have been especially gratifying.  In all likelihood he believed he was beginning a new life, born again, as it were.  It wouldn’t have been unusual in this circumstance that he wished to dissociate himself from his entire past of failure.

     For this reason it is possible that California loomed as the destination in which his new life would unfold.  Making the change was difficult and would take him six years to consummate.  One asks, why California?  Why not Florida, for instance.  I think the answer may be in his three most favorite novels:  Mark Twain’s Prince And The Pauper, Little Lord Fauntleroy and Owen Wister’s The Virginian.  Wister posits the West as a place of redemption and fulfillment while Burroughs youthful visit to Idaho may have had that effect on him.  Hence Waldo the consumptive lands on an island as primitive as Idaho was to Chicago and becomes a man.  So Burroughs may have viewed his visits in the West.

     In the Prince And The Pauper a Prince becomes a Pauper and a Pauper becomes a Prince.  In Fauntleroy the unknown princeling discovered his true identity thus exchanging the role of Pauper for a Prince while his alter ego the pauper Dick The Shoeshine Boy is transformed as well  and through luck and pluck assumes a role of success in California as a rancher at the end of the story.

     The Burroughs born a princeling then disinherited to a Pauper reassumed his role as a Prince but he had been inefaceably declassed hence though now a Prince as Fauntleroy he retains the psychology of the declasse as in the character of Dick The Shoeshine Boy.  Dick at the end of Fautleroy moves to California where he finds work on a rach eventually becoming a success as a rancher himself.

     It seem obvious that burroughs considered Little Lord Fauntleroy a book of destiny.  Thus California would appear as his destiny.  I believe that the reason for the six year delay in the actual move was necessitated by a need to combine the Fauntleroy and Dick the Shoe Shine Boy or The Prince and the Pauper into one identity.  He had to have enough money to support the appearance of the Prince.  I haven’t figured out why he wanted to raise hogs as yet but when he moved he anticipated only buying 20-40 acres which was well within his means, but when he arrived there Colonel Otis’ magnificent estate presented an opportunity to realize both identities in a property he couldn’t resist although he may have known he was acting in an unwise manner.

     Even then it may have been possible to sustain the property if his economic situation hadn’t come under attack by the Judaeo/Red/Liberal Coalition in the early twenties.

     A second very major p;roblem for him was Emma who now definitely became unwanted baggage.  But, he also had the three children who were also as definitely wanted baggage.  It is possible that for their sake he didn’t abandon Emma until they were grown.

     His Anima ideal was foreshadowed in Dejah Thoris while in Tarzan Of The Apes he creates the stodgy but beautiful Jane Porter as a flesh and blood woman but not an Anima ideal.

     The actual split begins to occur in The Return Of Tarzan when Burroughs bursting with confidence realizes that he is about to realize his visions of self-worth.  At that point the past and all related to it becomes hateful to him.  As might be expected he wanted to put all that behind him.  Thus in creating a land of his fossilized past in Opar he also creates a vision of the ideal woman he would like to have in La of Opar.  In Return the conflict between Jane and La becomes apparent when La is about to sacrifice Jane on the altar of the Flaming God.  That she doesn’t means that Burroughs has elected to stay with Emma undoubtedly for the children’s sake.

     But he begins to toy with ideal images in resolution of his sexual dilemma.  Another woman becomes a possiblity that didn’t exist before.  It would seem apparent that as Burroughs fame grew and he became a desirable sex object to women that opportunities for philandering would present themselves.  At one time I believed for certain that he didn’t.  Now I am less certain but there is nothing to indicate he did.

     Nevertheless he does begin to explore other ideal possibilities.  Nadara of Cave Girl can be seen as one of those explorations.  Having created other possibilities in La of Opar Burroughs begins to develop the idea with the cave girl, Nadara.  She is perhaps the most human of all of Burroughs’ Anima ideals.  She is the daughter of civilized French aristocrats raised by a caveman to be a primitive woman.  Thus she has none of the civilized inhibitions especially toward sex.  Burroughs will now begin a series of novels concerning the sexual relationship well in advance of what he may have heard about Freud.

     Once Nadara has accepted Waldo as her mate she is ready to cohabit.  Burroughs seems to be advocating this as a sociological ideal; a revolt against the strict limits of  civilization.  However in a clash of cultures Waldo who is subject to the strict limits of civilization finds it impossible to establish sexual relations unless they have married according to civilized rites and customs.  As  there is no one in this stone age society to perform these rites Waldo keeps putting consummation off until such an opportunity arises, if it ever shall.

     Bearing the psycho-sexual situation in mind an interpretation of The Cave Girl is possible on a number of levels.  The story is set in motion with a variation of what will become the familiar ship wreck motif.  In this case the Prince, Waldo, is washed off the deck of the ship by a huge wave that deposits him  on the strand of a large stone age island in the South Seas.  Thus Waldo has to begin life without any survival skills, born again as it were as a new born babe.  He has become the Pauper.

     At this point it might be best to introduce the major sources for the story that I have found.  As usual there are several.

     And then I received an email a day or so before this writing from Mr. Caz Cazedessus of Pulpdom Magazine.  Having read the first couple sections he pointed out that Mr. J.G. Huckenpohler had written an article in the first Pulpdom issue relating Cave Girl to Zane Grey’s Heritage Of The Desert.  I haven’t read Huck’s essay but I have read The Heritage Of The Desert which I have just reviewed.  I can see a possible line of argument that shows a number of similarities in the plotting of the two novels.

     Heritage was published at some point in 1910 while Cave Girl was written in February-March of 1913.  That does leave a sufficient window for Burroughs to have read Grey’s book but it seems a little light especially as Grey was a newish author at the time without a definite reputation.  However whether or not he may have read the book earlier it is possible that he read the book shortly before writing Cave Girl having elements of his plot suggested to him.

     Thus both Waldo and John Hale, the hero of Heritage, are consumptives or ‘lungers’ as they say Out West.  Waldo is from Boston, Hare from Connecticut.  Hare goes West to Mormon Country to begin his regeneration while Waldo lands on his island.  In both cases a woman is involved and two enemies are overcome by their respective heroes.  So, as I say, I don’t know Huck’s argument but I’m sure it’s a good one.  There are good reasons to believe that the plot line was an influence, an additional influence, on Cave Girl.  Thus Heritage would be another influence on Cave Girl.  OK, Caz?

     As Burroughs was beginning life over there is also a definite influence from the first eleven chapters of Genesis from the Bible which I will make apparent in my essay.

     Another very major influence seems to be the King Arthur mythology.  I will make this apparent as I go along.  While there is no doubt that Burroughs would have been familiar with Genesis it might do to try the root out his possible Arthurian influences.

     While we have at least a portion of Burroughs’ library listed here on ERBzine we should never gorget that while growing up ERB would have had access to the libraries of his brothers as well as that of his father.  George T.’s library would have gone back to the 1840s and probably earlier not including the then English classics such as Milton’s Paradise Lost, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress et al.

     One imagines that there were Arthurian titles in the collections, at least Mallory’s Arthur.  If the young Burroughs didn’t read the volumes through he would at least have handled them, browsed them and looked at the pictures, if any.  We know his brothers recommended the related Greek mythology to him.

     Certainly the medieval world was more often discussed in papers and magazines then than in our day.  And then Burroughs did like Tennyson having his collected poems in his library.  Thus ERB was likely familiar with the poet’s Idyls Of The King dealing with Arthurian stories.  And those not following Mallory.  Perhaps the most important Arthurian influence was Howard Pyle’s four volume retelling that while similar to Mallory’s differs significantly while Pyle adjusts the story to his own perceptions and moral concepts.

     The reputation of Pyle would have loomed large to ERB.  There is one Pyle title in his library, Stolen Treasure, but Pyle’s reputation as an illustrator would have drawn ERB’s attention to him.  Pyle was the most influential illustrator of his time and perhaps in US history.  His disciples were legion including Burroughs’ own illustrator, St. John.  Pyle founded what is known as the Brandywine school of illustration.

     It should be borne in mind that Burroughs had an aborted career as an illustrator before he began his successful career as writer.  Burroughs was very proud of the time he spent at the Chicago Art Institute.  So it would seem that ERB would have kept up on Pyle, Maxfield Parrish and others.

     Pyle began rewriting the Arthurian story in 1903 completing the last volume in 1910 so Burroughs had plenty of time to ingest and digest the work before he began to egest it.  Nor would Pyle and Tennyson be his only Arthurian influences.

     I didn’t catch this in time to include the idea in my review of The Lad And The Lion but that story seems to be highly influenced by Pyle’s telling of the story of Percival from Pyle’s second volume, The Champions Of The Round Table.  Naturally Burroughs borrows elements rather than the complete story.

     Percival, I follow Pyle, was an orphan living in the forest with his mother far from the haunts of men.  P. 263, prologue to Percival.

     Quote:

     Nor did he ever see anyone from the outside world, saving only an old man who was a deaf mute.

     Unquote.

     So Burroughs took the hint of the deaf mute and elaborated the idea.

     The Lad’s entry into the world follows that of Percival.  So also the Lad’s first sight of the desert horsemen replicates Percival’s first view of the ‘angelic’ knights.

     As I did mention in my review there is a similarity between lad’s being named Aziz, translated as Beloved, by Nakhla and Percival’s thinking his name was ‘Darling Boy’ as his mother referred to him.  If this last connection is valid then Burroughs also read some other Arthurian story as Pyle doesn’t tell his version in that way.

     So, as usual, Burroughs mines the literature of the world to tell his story.  Just as I was not aware of the influence of Grey’s Heritage Of The Desert I’m sure there are more I haven’t noticed.  I may even find more as my essay unfolds.

     Across the strand at no great distance is a forest representing the search for self-discovery and realization.  On the mragin of the forest at dusk a figure appears.  As we will learn this is the beautiful Nadara but Waldo in his hyper-fear and cowardice imagines the form to be some kind of monster of which he is terrified.  The monster stands between him and the food and water he needs.  In a metaphoric way then he is between the devil and the deep blue sea.  He cannot go back and he is afraid to go forward. 

     In Burroughs own situation as he is making the fateful decision to quit his day job to devote his life to full time writing the meaning of the metaphor is quite clear.

     There is also a way of looking at the tale as retelling of the Biblical Genesis.  This opening scene may be represented as the Biblical chaos in which nothing is differentiated  with the upper and lower firmaments resting on each other.  Then a divine wind arose which separated the upper and lower firmaments.

     Waldo is a comic figure while the novel itself is intended to be a comic or satiric novel.  Thus Waldo who can stand the tension between the devil and the deep blue sea no more runs howling and screaming into the forest to do or die against the monster.

     The shrieking may be seen as a humorous representation of the divine wind.  Man having been created first as it seems pursues the phantom who turns out to be a woman.  Thus Waldo and Nadara represent Adam and Eve.

      Waldo’s charge into the wood can also be seen as a representation of Burroughs’ decision to become a full time writer.  This must have been as stressful a decision for him as was Waldo’s charge against the demon.  Once through the wood Waldo is presented with a sheer cliff that appears to be inpenetrable.  So, another barrier presents itself. 

     Having traversed the forest that was after all fairly narrow Waldo had seen a woman scrambling up the barrier.  Rather than pursue her directly Waldo reenters the wood to pick fruit and refresh himself.

     This can be seen as Burroughs’ desperate attempt to become a writer.  Another view of the strand and the demon of the forest- between the devil and the deep blue sea- is that Burroughs had to make the desperate attempt to redeem his life by writing.  Thus that original difficult decision  that might possibly be compared to Waldo’s being washed off deck by the wave while now Burroughs is faced with the even more difficult decision of working at it full time.  Thus the charge through the woods might represent his giving up his day job.

     It would be interesting to know at what point in the story’s composition his father died.  What is even more interesting is that his father’s death did not interrupt his writing schedule.   In fact in a year packed with traumatic occurrences nothing did; Burroughs continued to turn out his stories at two month intervals no matter what.  It is true that he had several incomplete stories in this year which means he hadn’t thought the stories through so that it is possible that while he averted severe writer’s block when he reached the end of his chain of thought he just stopped, resuming the story when he had thought it out.

     A prime example would be The Girl From Farris’s that he began about this time finishing it nearly a year later.  The Cave Girl was completed at this point while The Cave Man its other half and sequel was completed the following July and August of 1914.  It is possible Burroughs was trying to double his monetary return but I think it more probable that he was writing so fast with such a tight schedule that he didn’t have time to worry over completion so he just terminated his story at a convenient point and moved on to the next one that was also only half thought out.

     As all this stuff is based on autobiography I am truly astonished that Burroughs was so undisturbed by the happenings in his life that he had so little reaction.  I have read of authors who found writing personal stuff so difficult that they were driven to bed for a week or two at a stretch.  I have never faced a long stretch like that but I have sought refuge in bed for a day or two a couple times.  So Burroughs writing achievement here over 1913, ’14 and ’15 is fairly remarkable.

     At any rate having made the decision to become a full time writer as symbolized by the charge through the wood.  Burroughs if faced with an unforeseen barrier so he goes back to pick fruit.  This could possibly be seen as having written his intial ideas out, that is John Carter and Tarzan, he had to organize his second crop of stories none of which had the impact of Carter or the Jungle God.  Grey’s Heritage may fit in here as Burroughs searching for ideas and plot lines may have the read Grey’s stories at this time or just previously. 

     Led on by the woman Waldo had mistaken for a demon he now faces the new barrier seeking a way through.  He has difficulty finding the path but once on  it he discovers the opening through the wall.  This is a motif Burroughs will use a number of times most notably in The Land That Time Forgot and Tarzan Triumphant, not to mention the entrance to Opar.

     Now, all these openings resemble the birth canal or being born again.  In the instance of The Cave Girl the result of the rebirth is self-evident as well as perhaps Tarzan Triumphant when he is about to leave Emma for Florence.  The Oparian episodes would have to be examined more closely from that point of view especially as the four episodes occur at critical points in Burroughs’ life while involving sexual conflict between himself and Jane/Emma and another woman represented by his Anima ideal La. Thus, in Golden Lion when Tarzan leaves Opar with La to enter the Valley of Diamonds is it possible that he had a dalliance with another woman?    One wonders.

     At any rate Waldo squeezed through the opening to come out on a wonderland on the other side.  There is never a thought of going back.  In fact a cave man places himself between Waldo and the opening driving him forward.  This could correspond to the flaming sword protecting the entrance to the Garden of Eden which would continue the biblical motif.

     At the same time we have a clear reference to Alice In Wonderland or down the rabbit hole.  We know Burroughs was familiar with the two Lewis Carroll stories.

     Yet another barrier presents itself.  Another cliff is before Waldo this one of cave dwellers another favorite motif of Burroughs especially during this period.   Burroughs would have been familiar with actual cliff houses from his sojourn in Arizona with the Army while he would have been fascinated with the replica built for the Columbian Expo of ’93.  At this point God created Woman as Waldo pairs up with nadara.  Thus Waldo’s fears on the strand when he projected the character of a demon on this beautiful and compliant female were totally unjustified.  But if Nadara represents the success that had eluded him for so long then his fears born of hysteria were warranted by his past.  This is a comic novel at least at the beginning when Waldo begins his transition from the skinny, consumptive academic bookworm  to that of a man of Tarzanic proportions.  Thus at this stage of the book Waldo is a bumbling buffoon.

     Burroughs is obviously ridiculing the Boston Transcendalist school of Ralph Waldo Emerson as Waldo’s name merely leaves off the Ralph and adds the ridiculous hyphenated Smith-Jones.  The latter of course has pretensions to nobility but is compounded of the two most plebeian and common English names.  Waldo’s name is as comic as Burroughs could make it.  Worth a laugh or two on its own. 

     He may also be making a snub at his fellow students of Phillips Academy when he went East.  It is well known that Easterners of the time, if not still, deprecated Westerners.  Burroughs would have had to put up with much jesting and ridicule while there so perhaps he is now ridiculing those who ridiculed him.

Also he may be ridiculing his own former self.

     Burroughs is fairly hostile to New England throughout his writing.  He is positive on the South having more than one hero from Virginia while he is considerate of the middle states.  Thus Waldo beginning as an effete New Englander will turn into something resembling John Carter/Tarzan or the Virginian of Owen Wister’s strange novel.  Thus if one views Waldo in light of Burroughs three most favorite novels, The Prince And The Pauper, Little Lord Fauntleroy and The Virginian the basic tenor of all the stories is made apparent.

     Waldo being pursued toward the cliff dwellings by the cave men with his legs pumping up to his chin and the stick twirling in his hand resembles a scene from a newspaper comic strip.  It would seem that Burroughs was an ardent reader of the newspaper Funnies.  David Innes Earth Borer was undoubtedly taken from a newspaper comic strip also.  This incessant modeling or borrowing may explain a bit of the contempt for his work by contemporaries.  ERB comes real close from time to time.

     Having paired up with Nadara she and Waldo hold off the cave men slipping away in the night to Chapter 3, The Little Eden, which is a key chapter.

4b.

It’s A Lover’s Question

      This chapter is so compacted I find it difficult to find a starting point.  If Burroughs’ marriage with Emma had not run smoothly from 1900 to 1913 their relationship would become even more stressed from 1913 to 1920.  The marriage apparently barely survived a major crisis c. 1918-20 finally being terminated in 1934.

     The relationship of ERB and Emma is very difficult to comprehend.  It seems clear that ERB had no intention of actually marrying her but wished to keep her on a string.  This arrangement was doing well until Frank Martin entered the scene in 1897 or ’98.  Martin forced Burroughs’ hand who was then compelled to marry Emma in 1900.

     Over the years from 1900 on Burroughs developed an intense antipathy to Emma which expressed itself in its most naked form at the time of her death when ERB did everything but desecrate her grave.  There must have been some deep psychological cause for this that isn’t apparent from what we know for sure of the relationship.

     Perhaps the most critical event in their lives occurred on that streetcorner on the way to Brown School in the fifth grade when ERB was emasculated by John the Bully.  Burroughs was then removed to the girl’s school a few months later.  I have no evidence that ERB and Emma were walking to school together on that the fateful day but subsequent literary evidence points in that direction.

     As a result of his emasculation it would appear that ERB was fixated in such a manner that he was unable to form relationships with women after that date and that Emma was the only female with whom he retained one.  But as she reminded him of that fateful day he both rejected her and couldn’t do without her.  Thus he refused to marry her yet didn’t want her to marry anyone else.  When circumstances forced him to marry her this may have begun his irrational resentment toward her.  As there was no other woman possible for him until the beginning of his psychological liberation in 1913 he may have tolerated her, but just.

     Success seemed to liberate repressed areas of his personality and we find him dreaming of an ideal mate quite different from Jane/Emma.  If one assumes that John Carter is an idealized Edgar Rice Burroughs although Burroughs projects the role of uncle on him while maintaining a dissociation from him until the end then Carter’s affiliation with Dejah Thoris on Mars would be ERB’s first Anima projection.  However Dejah Thoris is more closely related to Jane.  In La of Opar and Nadara Burroughs’ Anima ideal shifts more toward a wild or nature woman.  This aspect of the ideal is realized in Balza, The Golden Girl of 1933 who is also represented by Florence.

     So, in Cave Girl an emaciated, consumptive, over intellectualized Waldo Emerson Smith-Jones mates with the primitive Nadara who still retains the imprint of her civilized parents down by the river in the Little Eden.  Thus we have Adam and Eve in the Garden before they leave never to return.

     The problem of male-female relations is a dominant theme in Burroughs’ writing.  Indeed the theme is one that preoccupies all writers of fiction in one degree or another.  In this aspect Freud is merely a prominent writer on the sexual condition of men and women.  He is perhaps more systematic but not necessarily more profound.

     For instance Freud asked in a title to one of his essays What Does Woman Want and gives neither a profound nor very thoughtful answer.  If he had read E.M. Hull’s 1921 novel, The Sheik, he would have have had somthing of an answer written by a woman.  Burroughs did read the Sheik.  He understood what Hull was saying.  His answer was the major burlesque of the Alalus people of the Tarzan And The Ant Men of 1922.  In this charming story of the The Cave Girl he give his 1913 answer to the question of what woman wants in a credible manner.

     The answer in this case is age old.  The answer was clear from ancient times to E.M. Hull’s clear story.  Mostly it would appear what woman wants is a powerful protector willing to perform her will when a problem  exceeds her own powers thus recompensing her for the missing X and more especially the missing y chromosome.  The latter what Freud called Penis Envy.  One can only conclude that woman wants to be whole, to be chomosomally undivided.  Thus as a famed LA procuress once said:  A woman is only as powerful as the man beside her.

     Now, Nadara projects a character on Waldo as her fierce and powerful protector.  As love begins in Waldo’s heart the spectre of sex arises in their little Eden in the form of the Black Panther Nagoola.  Is it a coincidence that the first syllable of both names is the smae while both end in a long A?  Nadara the sexual temptress.

     Prompting Waldo she demands whether he could kill Nagoola.  That may have a couple meanings.  It may mean could he despatch the animal and it may mean can he conquer or control the sexual urge.  In Waldo’s case the anwer will be yes to both questions.

     He does kill Nagoola in a comedy of errors in this comic novel.  In its sequel The Cave Man he will adorn Nadara with the pelt of Nagoola thus making her the physical incarnation of sexual desire.  Who says Burroughs wasn’t subtle.

     Too desirous of impressing Nadara as a man of prowess he allows her to think he has already killed several Nagoolas.

     Very pleased to hear this she says:  ‘Good.  When we get to my village I want you to kill Korth and Flatfoot.’  Well now, there was a committment that Waldo had no intention of honoring, at least in his present condition.

     Thus, we have a demonstration of the thesis that women are responsible for conflict.  Woman proposes, man imposes.

     As they can’t stay in their little Eden forever they make the trek to Nadara’s people.  Waldo is committed to killing the fearsome Korth and Flatfoot.  He is terrified to confront them as well he might be.  As they approach the village Waldo sends Nadara ahead then legs it out of there.

     Thus we have the flight or fight dilemma that is another major theme of Burroughs.  At this point in his career he isn’t ready to articulate his feelings as he will later.  The dilemma relates to his confrontation with John the Bully in the fifth grade.  At that time as Waldo in this story Burroughs elected to run.  Now, you will notice that Waldo is with Nadara which is a pretty sure indication that ERB was with Emma that fateful morning on the way to school.

     In point of fact either Korth or Flatfoot would easily have killed Waldo at this stage in his career as John would have cremated the much younger Burroughs.  When he would later rationalize it there is no dishonor if fleeing overwhelming force which is surely true but has its consequences.

     Thus Waldo like Burroughs was sent into the Wasteland.  His problem now will be to figure out how to return to kill Korth and Flatfoot to reclaim Nadara.

4c.

How Waldo Became A Man

 

 

Prindle Of The Apes

June 7, 2007

Prindle Of The Apes

by

R.E. Prindle

Intro.

This is a snapshot of the world as it appeared to one man c. 1960.  This was all before the technological advances of the late 70s wiped the old world off the map.

If the reader was born after 1955  it may seem that I am describing a foreign country which in many ways I am.

But, as the wise man said, an unexamined life is not worth living.  I hope you like my little memoir such as it is.

Prindle Of The Apes

 

…he dreams of the sight

of Zulu impis

breaking on their foes

like surf upon the rocks

and his heart rises in rebellion

against the strict limits

of the civilized life.

H. Rider Haggard

from  Allan Quatermain

It was the Big Bwana.

Tarzan And The Ant Men

      The layers of Prindle’s education as he began his adult life were many.  As with no other earlier generation his nervous system had to be organized to differentiate many different forms of experience.  Primal of course was the living of his own life:  what may be called objective reality.  Mixing with his real live memories into a subjective reality in a manner in which they had to be compartmentalized were many forms of pseudo-experience.  There was radio which in Prindle’s  early life in the forties and fifties was composed of real life news and current events, fictional radio dramas by night, soap operas by day and the fantasy world of pop music.  After the advent of  Top 40 music radio his listening world converted to the psycho-sexual wailings  of the psychologically wounded who made pop music.

     The fiction of movies, animated films and the real life portrayals of the news reels entered his mind where they had to be stored and differentiated from his real life experiences as well as categorized as truth or fiction or a combination of the two.

     Television added another several dimensions of experience to his young mind.  For the first time he could watch actual events as they happened in far off locations like New York or Washington and after the introduction of the coaxial cable about 1950 he could watch or listen to real time events on the West Coast a full three times zones away.  What was happening in daylight on the West Coast was relayed to the nighttime Eastern Standard Time.

     Thus he could watch an LA Rams game live or view the Kefauver organized crime investigations and the demise of the demigod, Joe McCarthy in the Army hearings.

     He watched the Bill Paley/Edward R. Murrow character assassination of McCarthy from which Big Joe had no defense or recourse.

     And then there was the printed word.  Newspapers and magazines poured out an endless stream of matter of which so much seemed of such timeless quality that he swore he would never forget it.  He read the daily poem of Edgar A. Guest which entranced him by the seeming facility of composition while he was disgusted by the maudlin content.  Yet day after day, month after month, year after year a new poem of creditable quality appeared.

 page 2.

     There were the comic strips of the papers and the comic books of super heroes that stood in large stacks until his mother threw them away.  What did any mother ever know?  He didn’t understand why but then how much ephemera can one boy, let alone a family, accumulate.

     And then there was that great body of literature called Juvenilia.  Some was truly drivel like the beloved Hardy Boys written as mere enterainment for immature minds.  Yet much of it was great literature which had been degraded over the decades to be considered suitable for juveniles.  Not least of these were Dumas’ Three Musketeers and Scott’s Ivanhoe both among the greatest creations of literature.  Not that Prindle understood these complex works except on the action level but he was to return to them more than once in the succeeding years.

     He read the pulps regularly, magazines printed on the cheapest pulp paper.  He read them all:  Westerns, Science Fiction (lots and lots of Science Fiction), Detective and True Romance as well as Argosy and True Magazines.  His mind was well stocked with the incredible and fantastic yet he never confused fiction with reality.  His intellectual life was a feast.  The wonder of it all.

     The greatest of all his early reading was the stuff that was the staple of B movies.  L. Frank Baum, Conan Doyle’s great detective hero Sherlock Holmes who actually exists in most people’s minds on the cusp between fiction and reality.  And of course, the one, the only, the most incredible hero of all times:  Tarzan Of The Apes.

page 3.

     Around the figure of Tarzan formed the immense and important psychological complex of the Dark Continent.  The very heart of darkness, the Africa of both fact and fiction.

     He imbibed the mystery of Africa that was no longer believable after the watershed year of 1960 when what was over ended and what would be began.  A whole aspect of the education of Prindle became obsolete and slid to the ground like one of the towers of the World Trade Center.  There was no better obituary for the European past in Africa than Alan Moorehead’s fine recapitulation issued in that year under the title of ‘The White Nile.’

     One associates the history of White rule in Africa as being several hundreds of years in duration so Prindle was astonished to learn that central Africa only came under European dominion between 1860 and 1900.  The Scramble For Africa.  In fact two life spans of sixty years each bridged the entire era.  The whole period could be encompassed by the memories passed down to no more than three generations.  In 1960 one man could have remembered the whole history of European discovery and annexation from the Scramble till then.

     One of the natives standing in one of those National Geographic photos of 1920 could tell the whole story.  At least from his point of view.  He would be unable to tell of the impact of Africa on the White Man.

page 4.

     The Heart Of Darkness.

     The savage primitiveness of Africa and its art made a deep impression on the European psyche ripping asunder several layers of civilized overburden to reveal the primitive origins of its naked self.  At the time this was called ‘the thin veneer of civilization.’  The primal call of the wild beckoned to White men with irresistibility.

     The bizarre untutored art of African tribes invaded the European subconscious to call forth wondrous responses.  The crude wooden images, the strong primal masks, the scrawled designs all roused the subliminal imagination of Europeans.

     About 1960 a recording of a mass by Blacks titled: The Missa Luba, performed by the Luba people of the Lower Congo took White Bohemia by storm.  The combination of the primitive Luba recitation and the sophistication of the Catholic Mass was a stunning performance that seemed to unite the subconscious mind of Africa with the conscious mind of the White man.  The power of the Missa Luba is undeniable. It is as moving today as it was in 1960.

     Beginning in 1959 the Nigerian Ibo writer, Chinua Achebe, writing from the African point of view describes the designs drawn on the bodies of women as beautiful.  To a Western eye they merely appear as rude but interesting squiggles.  Go through some Geographics of the twenties.

     The great explorers wrote the books describing the discovery or rediscovery of the source of the White Nile from which Moorehead drew his account.  the great books by Burton, Speke and H.M. Stanley had appealed strongly to an earlier generation of writers.  At the fount of imaginative novels of the mysteries of the Dark Continent stood the fantastic H. Rider Haggard.  Himself a onetime resident of Natal, South Africa  for several years, Haggard’s triumverate of African novels, King Solomon’s Mines, She and Allan Quatermain set the trend of an Africa full of undiscovered valleys, deserts and moutain ranges that could only be reached, even if only in your imagination, by the most intrepid or desperate of travelers.  Strange places that time forgot still lived according to the ways of some distant epoch often prehistoric.

page 5.

     Africa was still mysterious and unknown when Haggard began to write in 1885.  Central Africa had not yet been explored.  General Gordon was making his last stand at Khartoum.  Explorers outfitted themselves for treks into Africa at the then legendary Abercrombie and Fitch store in New York City as they sat around explorer’s clubs just before setting out.  After his terms as President ending in 1908 Teddy Roosevelt trekked across Africa shooting at anything that moved, big game or small.

     I don’t know whether his trek fired the imagination of the greatest of the novelists of Africa but in 1912 Edgar Rice Burroughs began the series chronicling the adventures of the Big Bwana himself, Tarzan Of The Apes.

     Tarzan Of The Apes found a place in the imagination of every American male from the series’ inception to the watershed year of 1960 when he was replaced by the Lord Of The Flies.  That was a significant transition from what was to what was to be.

page 6.

     Burroughs himself has never had his place in American literature and psychology recognized.  From 1912 to his death in 1950 thirty-eight years later Burroughs turned out a total of 22 Tarzan books as well as dozens of other titles.

     His creation Tarzan created a life for Burroughs as incredible as the Big Bwana’s.  Tarzan’s success  in books and movies was such a bonanza for Burroughs that he was able to found a city named after his hero in the San Fernando Valley of California named Tarzana.

     In the light of racial events after 1960 the name is ironic, for Tarzan in Burroughs’ invented lingo means White from Tar and skin from from Zan.  Must be a joke in Tar meaning White.  Tarzan is named White Skin while Tarzana would therefore mean White Skin City.  An amusing fact.

     Burroughs was very fortunate to begin writing just as the movies came into prominence.  Tarzan was a natural for the screen.  Many silent movies featuring various Tarzans were made.

     The movies incidentally rescued Rider Haggard who had fallen on hard times of destitution.

     Burroughs had a marvelous facility for incorporating current developments into his novels.  While Rider Haggard relied on time worn themes of Esoterica for his stories Burroughs was very up to date on the latest scientific discoveries.  This was sometimes woven into the story completely unawares to the reader such as his answer to the Freudian interpretation of dreams in 1919’s Jungle Tales Of Tarzan.  Only after finishing the passage does one realize what one has just read.

     This was often done in fantastic juxtapositions.  In Tarzan Lord Of The Jungle of 1928 Jim Blake a contemporary New york executive on a photo shoot safari gets lost somewhere North of Victoria Falls where he enters a hidden valley populated by descendants of the Third Crusade of Richard I who became lost ending up in this hidden valley.  Finding them dressed in Templar chain mail Blake asks them to lead him to their Director.  He has confused an authentic seven hundred year old Knight Templar society with extras from a movie set.

page 7.

     Of course by 1928 Burroughs was very familiar with movie sets of Tarzan.  With the advent of sound in 1927 the Tarzan that Prindle’s generation knew was about to hit the screen.  The great Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller assumed the role as sound came into existence.  This truly Tarzanic figure epitomized the great Tarmangani.  Mangani- ape in Burroughs’ talk, Tar= White, Tarmangani, white ape.  The role was adapted to feature Weissmuller’s swimming acrobatics.  Crocodile fights became much more common.

     Weissmuller perfected the triumphant victory cry of the Great Bull Ape which every boy tried to emulate and perfect. Even today the icon of victory is that the victor puts his right foot on the body of his dead victim, beats his breasts with both fists and yodels out the cry of the great bull ape.  The jungle was relatively quiet until Tarzan arrived.

     Many hours were spent in basements and attics as boys practiced the famous yell.  Many were the discussions and arguments over who had mastered it and who hadn’t.

     Even movie heroes grow old so it became necessary for Weissmuller to retire.  The fierce competition for the job went to a guy named Lex Barker who nobody had ever heard of.  Most of us turned our backs on Barker.  His own successors in the fifties never had a chance.  I didn’t even know there were successors at the time.  The role is still assumed but it is just not the same.

page 8.

     The age of exploration was over; social conditions prevented the notion of the Great White Ape ruling over a Black Africa and living on.  Dracula, Frankenstein, the Phantom Of The Opera and Sherlock Holmes had long successful careers before them but the Great White Ape vanished like the legendary Africa of old. (Revived on Broadway since I wrote this essay.)

     Still, Edgar Rice Burroughs succeeded in creating a mythic character who could take his place alongside the timeless emanations of the subconscious.  Few creations have.  Homer hit the groove sharp as a knife in the Iliad.  The knights of Arthur’s Round Table fill the need.  Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes gratifies the itch in spades.  Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolf Man and The Mummy rank with H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man.  They fill specific but limited areas of the subconscious but Tarzan Of The Apes encapsulates the psychic needs of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth.  A new or improved expositor of the faith is needed now.

     No matter that so much of Tarzan is implausible not counting finding Crusaders in contemporary Africa.  If one looks closely at Tarzan swinging through ‘the middle terraces’ of the trees of the jungle faster than you and I can sprint a hundred one wonders why no branches impede his swings on his trusty grass rope.  While monkeys chatter in the ‘upper terraces’ Tarzan swings through the ‘middle terraces’ to escape an arboreal panther.

page 9.

     But to examine the problem of ‘the middle terraces’ is to miss the point.  It is like searching for the historical Arthur and the locations of his twelve battles or trying to find Sherlock Holmes address at 221B Baker Street.

     Perhaps Arthur and his twelve battles did exist but they have no bearing on the story.  Prindle has  stood across the street from the approximate address of Holmes on Baker Street but the reality bears no relationship to the fiction.  Prindle looked at the windows across the street for Dr. Moriarty and his air gun but could find no evidence the arch villain had ever been there.

     So Prindle disregarded the difficulties of the middle terrace and all other difficulties.  He just allowed Burroughs to amaze him.  Prindle only read seven of the earliest novels.  Over the years the stories and plot lines faded from his mind.  He remembered only a few details of the stories and often those inaccurately.

     What did stick with him was a vision of Africa.  What affected him although the notions had slipped through his conscious mind into the subconscious were the beliefs and ideals of Burroughs as placed in the Tarzan stories.

     Tarzan was a very scrupulous man of high ideals.  While others might stoop to skullduggery to achieve their ends Tarzan never did.  He faced every problem squarely, solved it and acted on the highest principles.

     Prindle ‘remembered’ many maxims which he was able to repeat verbatim although he had no idea not only where he got them but that they weren’t his own original thoughts.  There were half a dozen from Sherlock Holmes that were actual guidelines for his life.  Chief among them was Holmes dictum that whenever you eliminate the impossible whatever remains must be the truth no matter how improbable.  Prindle repeated the dictum constantly as his own not knowing where it came from.  In rereading Holmes in later life he was startled to come across these dicta word for word.

page 10.

     One of the most astonishing remembrances not from Tarzan but from the movie ‘The Incredible Shrinking Man’ which he saw in 1957 almost shattered him.  Prindle had had a dream in which a spectacular image had occurred to him which seemed so original that he was amazed at himself.  In the dream the detail was that he was standing before two men holding up a huge Gordian Knot on a large dowel.  Standing in front of them Prindle’s only way to cut the knot was to manipulate a huge pair of scissors.  The scissors were so large that he could barely raise the handles from the ground let alone open them to cut the knot.

     He asked for help from the two men but all they did was hold the knot higher and shake it.  Dream Prindle put the scissors under his right arm and leaned on them like a crutch.

     This unusual image struck him as something entirely original of which he was very proud.  However on reviewing the Incredible Shrinking Man he came across a scene in which The Shrinking Man is battling a spider.  The Man is of the size where a needle is an appropriately sized means of defense.  On the table beside him is a spool of thread and a pair of small child’s scissors.  He drops the needle off the edge dangling from the string.  He then tries to use these now huge scissors to cut the string which he cannot do.

page 11.

     Thus this image worked away in Trueman’s subconscious to emerge transformed as an impossible solution to his own psychological problem twenty-five years later.  Prindle was forced to ask himself;  Is anything truly of one’s own making?

page 12.

     Tarzan in any size, and in Tarzan And The Ant Men he was shrunk to minature, or situation would have been superior to anyone and ever triumphant.  He was always magnanimous.  Having experienced the entire range of existence from beast to civilized man he never ill treated the African natives or even the prehistoric men and women he met along the way.  The Blacks or Gomangani (Go = Black, Mangani = apes) may have been primitive savages but they were worthy of respect as men in every way.  The same attitude was true of Rider Haggard.  Neither he himself nor his heroes ever referred to Blacks as Niggers.

     Haggard’s hero, Henry Curtis, in King Soloman’s Mines even goes native in battle donning the Black’s headdress and gear to take his place in the Black army’s ranks where of course he proved that with or without the veneer of civilization the Englishman was best of all warriors.

     The Blacks may have been almost another species but they were always thought of and treated as men among men.  This was quite in contrast to Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness in which the Blacks were seen as sub-human.

     In Burroughs’ fantastic Africa the Black natives were only one of many species of hominids.  Burroughs himself was very widely read, educated on the up to the minute scientific theories.  He was well versed in evolution.  He seemed to intuit that there were many vanished varieties of hominids and he peopled his Africa with them back in those hidden valleys.

     In Tarzan The Terrible Burroughs has a cave man riding a Tricertops like Alley Oop of the Funnies plus two varieties of tailed monkey-like hominids that undoubtedly came before the cave man  but were more highly developed.  Of course there is the crown of creation Tarzan himself.  As is habitual with Burroughs he introduces the present into the prehistoric past bringing World War I into it  with a struggle between a German officer and Tarzan for Jane.  Son Jack and his rifle are also on the way.  All this going on in a land that time not only forgot but never imagined.

page 13.

     Prindle recalled none of these details but they prepared his mind to deal with scientific realities when it became necessary for him to resolve the issues in his own mind.

     The balance tipped in the watershed year of 1960.

     Whites and Blacks presented an insoluble problem to any thinking person coming of age in 1960.  That there was and had been racial inequality was an undeniable fact.  Prior to 1960 however the general consensus was and had been that racial equality was based on fact and not prejudice.  Tarzan had, of course, treated all people of good will well regardless of race as deserving of respect.  Underlying his feelings as well as those of American society was the notion that White people were the crown of creation while the yellow and Black peoples, poor fellows, were in fact evolutionarily inferior.  The Whites were Bwanas to the lower races and Tarzan in Burroughs’ words was the Big Bwana.

     Not their fault so no reason to condemn them but rather to pity them.  They were, in fact, ‘the White Man’s burden.’

     Prindle never took anyone’s word for anything so he neither sided with those who said all men were in fact created equal or those who said White men were created superior.  The question was one to be decided at some future time.  The two avenues open to him were personal observation and experience and study.

page 14.

     Of the Negroes with which he came into contact he saw that they were quick at learning manual skills like football and basketball but when it came to perceiving general principles and applying them there seemed to be something lacking in their minds that prevented them from making connections.  Not that Blacks couldn’t take an item and perceive different uses for it than that for which it was intended but they failed to understand the underlying principle.

     This was true in all fields of endeavor, they seemed unable to move from the specific to the general on their own initiative.

     When, looking at Blacks in their home environment of Africa it was obvious that from the moment Homo Sapiens evolved from the Last Hominid Predecessor to the beginning of the nineteenth century when Africa fell under the White Man’s dominion that Blacks had made no advances from the Stone Age.  They had merely matured as Stone Age peoples.

     They had never discovered the wheel, they had no writing, they had no metallurgy, no plow had broken the African plain, they had nothing but the most primitive social organization.  They were in fact untutored savages.

     This fact was somewhat puzzling to Prindle as everwhere else in the world with the exception of the aborigines of Australia and the various tribes in backward areas every people had advanced up the ladder of civilization.  In fact the most advanced was the White civilization of Euroamerica; regretable to many but undeniable to all.

     Whether White guilt prevented acknowledging the fact or not, it was so.  The Peace Corps of 1961 created by Kennedy tacitly observed that truth.  White superiority was so in every field of endeavor from art and literature to science and mathematics.  There was no other people that competed with the White race most especially they of Africa.

     Prindle could offer no explanation in 1960 at the age of twenty-two so we will have to use the year 1960 as a fulcrum balancing the past with the future.

     A Nigerian Ibo writer began his literary career in 1959 when he published a book entitled ‘Things Fall Apart.’  Chinua Achebe began to explain the Black point of view of what happened when Black and White culture collided in his part of Africa.  He directed his polemics at the West as he was from Southern Christian Nigeria and not the Moslem North.

     He is not very explicit as to time, dates and location but it gradually emerges from his corpus that his home was on the coast in Eastern Nigeria.  The times he describes seem to be between 1910 and 1930.  As was Prindle’s experiences with the American Blacks Achebe doesn’t seem to be able to relate the specific to the general; in other words, he has no science.  He has a wealth of carefully selected detail but no penetration.

     Insofar as the details he does use they appear to be the same as those noted by White observers but seen from the other side.  The photos of Africa taken in the 1920s and 1930s which portray a completely primitive people with bizarre body piercing, strange ornaments and squiggly designs on their bodies, strange scars and tattoos  are seen as beautiful and exquisite by Achebe.  Truly, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

page 16.

     While reading Achebe late in life Prindle’s ideas

formed in his early life were merely reinforced.  He could see no reason to change opinions of Africans so eloquently expressed in Mooerhead’s White Nile.  Those opinions were edited out in later editions to conform to subsequent notions.  Nevertheless subsequent events in Zimbabwe, South Africa and elsewhere merely reconfirmed Prindle’s earlier opinions.

     Nor were contacts with Europeans of the nineteenth century the first outside contacts Africans had made.  As Moorehead pointed out a map prepared by the Greek geographer Ptolemy in 150 AD clearly and with very reasonable accuracy depicted sub-Saharan Africa from West Africa to Central and East Africa.  The course of the Niger in West Africa was accurately shown minus the effluent which remained a mystery until the nineteenth century when the Niger was related to the Oil Rivers at the Bight of Benin.  The true course of the White Nile was also depicted although the strong arrogance of academic European scholars forbade their acknowledging the accuracy of any of the ancient writers.

     Ptolemy’s information came from  Greek traders who penetrated Central Africa from the area of future Zanzibar so we may assume that ancient intercourse with Central Africa had been going on for centuries. Yet African developed little or technology.

     The same is true with West Africa for Herodotus records a Libyan expedition which occurred well before his time of c. 450 BC.

     The Romans built roads across the Sahara that were well trafficked.

     After the ancients the Arab slave traders made descents on Africa continually for perhaps two thousand years or more.  Black slaves are common in the Arabian Nights depicting a time of 700-800 AD.  By the time Europeans came into conflict with the Arab slavers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the slavers were all Moslems.

page 18.

     This fact gave Trueman matter to wrestle with as American Blacks decried the slave trade as something peculiarly American.  In fact slavery had been endemic to Africa from time immemorial.  In Chinua Achebe’s story ‘Things Fall Apart’ he makes no mention of Moslem slavers or indigenous slavery dealing only with European slavers.

     Yet from c1500 to 1830 African slave raiders abducted untold numbers of Europeans from Mediterranean shores who disappeared into the Dark Continent never to be seen again.

     The European slave trade was in existence only a couple hundred years after which shame made them abandon the trade.  By the time Europeans came into contact with Moslems in Africa they had abolished the slave trade amongst themselves now taking what must have appeared as a hypocritical stance to Moslems in attempting to force them to desist from slaving.

     As inhumane as the European slave trade may have been it was peanuts compared to the inhuman attitude of the Moslems.  Anyone who has read The Arabian Nights must be struck by the contemptuous attitude of the Moslems toward Blacks.  This was certainly reflected in their methods of capture and transportation.

     Moorehead quotes Stanley’s account of the great slave roundup he witnessed after he met Livingstone.  The Moslem slavers opened fire on the Blacks like Teddy Roosevelt opening fire on the fauna of Africa slaughtering many while dozens of others who took to the river to escape drowned.  Once captured the Blacks were marched yoked together hands tied behind their backs for a thousand miles to the coast.

page 18.

     Once there they were packed into decks only eighteen inches apart for the long torrid voyage to Arabia, Persia and India.  The torture of being unable to roll over or change your position must have been exquisite not to mention the stench and filth.  If it doesn’t kill you as they say it makes you stronger.

     There was nothing in the Koran to forbid such practices although there was in the Christian bible.  However the very humanity of the New Testament may have placed Christianity at a disadvantage compared to Moslemism.

     Moslemism did not call for any changes in social conduct or the organization of society.  The introduction of Moslemism left the African social structure intact calling only for a belief in Allah and his prophet Muhammed.  Slavery was already endemic to African society so that, strangely, while the Arab slavers annually corralled tens of thousands of Black Africans into slavery or death there was an acceptance rather than a rejection of Arab religion.

     Christianity clashed with nearly every tenet of African religion including slavery, polygamy, native medicine men and nearly the whole fabric of African society.  Therefore while Moslemism shared most native beliefs the issue of slavery was a man to man thing and not a moral problem.

     The European invaders placed themselves in opposition to both.  The enslaved Blacks and the enslaving Moslems.  While Europeans were successful in eliminating the Moslem slave trade centered from Zanzibar  they were never successful in eliminating the slave trade above Victoria Falls.  Even today the slavers are active in the Sudan and the Horn of Africa.

page 19.

     At the present time several thousand Somalian female slaves and their masters are transported to Portland, Oregon every year as immigrants to the United States.  It is indeed a strange world.

     Christianity also tended to destroy the social order of African tribes.  The tribes were all small organizations  located in specific geographical locales.  There was no such thing as nations or countries such as Kenya or what was then Tanganyika now Tanzania.  These agglomerations were artificial administrative units set up for the convenience of Europeans.

     Thus the natives no longer were able to look to their old center for the resolution of their problems but to White men located in an administrative center far from their own tribal boundaries.

     As Christianity made no allowance for native customs the established order had no incentive to adopt the religion unlike Moslemism which required no change of conduct.  The appeal of Christianity and the White Man’s Power then was to the disenfranchised and outcast classes.  As Achebe’s Thing Fall Apart clearly shows the ‘untouchables’ were the first to respond.  Christianity in which all men are equal then made the ‘untouchables’ discard the trapping of their class making them visual equals of the ‘big men’ of their tribes.

     As the representatives of the White Christians these native outcasts became the political superiors of the former upper classes.  That was the meaning of Achebe’s title:  Things Fall Apart.

page 20.

     While the Moslem areas of Black Africa were relatively complacent a huge antagonistic split existed in the Christian areas.  The antagonism did not take long to surface.  Within less than sixty years from their actual annexation the Central and West Africans had thrown off their White colonial rulers.

     The French and English had no real liking for West Africa with its oppressive heat and humidity but the English were more desirous of holding on to the more equable Central and Southern Africa.  While it can’t be said that civilian English settlers moved into West Africa they did in Central and Southern Africa.  In these areas the Whites resisted Black independence movements more staunchly.

     The Europeans bequeathed a national state to men like Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta who was himself merely a member of a small tribe.  He now posed as a national ruler over both diverse Black tribesmen and a unified civilized English population.

     The fearsome Mau Mau, a group of natives straight out of Tarzan erupted on the world consciousness in the early fifties as they terrorized and murdered the English settlers in the most primitive manner.

     Alan Moorehead didn’t concentrate on the Mau Mau which he obviously found distasteful but the Mau Mau showed the obvious difference between Europeans and Black Africans.

     Fifty or sixty years is a very short time to convert stone age peoples to a level of civilization that took many thousands of years to achieve even if the two peoples had been of equal mental abilities.

page 21.

     Edgar Rice Burroughs who was a fairly astute student of evolution seems to have captured the general feel of the evolutionary process.  He has his hero Tarzan experience each level of development from animal to Homo Sapiens.  Thus Tarzan on one level is a pure beast raised among the great apes of Africa in the tribe of Kerchak by Kala his ape mother.  Following Freudian theory Tarzan kills his father Kerchak although he mourns his mother’s death rather than following in his father’s wake.

     At the age of twenty he leaves Africa for Europe and America where within the short space of two years he takes on the ‘thin veneer of civilization.’  Well, it was thin, you know.

     Returning to the jungle he becomes the chief of a Black African tribe named the Waziri.  While for Burroughs the Black Africans are by no means despicable they nevertheless appear to be an evolutionary way station between the pure beasts and the civilized Whites.

     Tarzan, of course, inherits the English title Viscount Lord Greystoke so as John Clayton he stands at the apex of civilization as well as evolution as an English gentleman entitled to sit in the House of Lords.

     Although the current genetic information wasn’t available to him Burroughs intuited, or accepted, the obvious evolution of the hominid from beast to Homo Sapiens.

     While it may be controversial to place the White species at the top of the evolutionary scale there is evidence that such may be actually so.  All men may not, in fact, be created equal.  Perhaps an unpleasant fact but then nature is not concerned with pleasantness.

page 22.

     It is generally assumed by scientists that because 97% of Homo Sapiens genes are shared by the Great Mountain Ape while the Chimpanzee shares 98% that those two species of anthropoids are evolutionary predecessors of Homo Sapiens.  In other words that the earliest hominid predecessor of Homo Sapiens mutated from the Chimpanzee.   I don’t know what the actual percentage is but I am sure that fifty percent or more of the genes of the fruit fly are shared by Homo Sapiens.  All species most likely utilize fifty percent or more of the same genes as why not if evolution is indeed a fact.Are all the product of evolution?  You bet.  So what are you going to make of that?

     One may assume that if evolution is progressing from the less intelligent to the more intelligent that the process need not necessarily stop at the apex of Homo Sapiens.  In fact, there are three obvious main species of Homo Sapiens as well as two or more at the upper end of the scale not so obvious and a couple at the lower end of the scale also going unnoticed.

     In coventional parlance if race is admitted as a fact those three divisions are known as races although they may be differentiating species.  Scientists tell us that there is only four tenths of one percent genetic difference between the races as though a mere four tenths disproves something.  Recent genetic discoveries indicate that genetic mutation is still occurring so that differences are accruing rather than remaining static or decreasing.

     If we are going to accept and apply scientific evidence this then raises the issue of which race or sub-species in actuality is the most evolved and bears the evolutionarily active gene line.

     It is assumed that the first hominid came into existence in Africa somewhere about two million years ago because the earliest traces of hominids yet found have been found there.  Many unwarranted assumptions based on this notion have been made for racist reasons.  For instance, because only Blacks were found in modern sub-Saharan Africa it is assumed that this early hominid was also Black or Negro as though there were some distinction in being  possibly the same color as the Last Hominid predecessor.  In fact no one knows what color the Last Hominid Predecessor was nor is there any way of ascertaining the fact.

page 23.

     The distance between this early hominid who must have been much more closely related to the Chimpanzee following the logic is unknown.  Perhaps it was merely half of one percent genetic difference.  Perhaps the visual relationship between this hominid and the Chimp and Ape was approximately that as now exists between the Homo-Sapiens sub-species.  No one knows.

     Homo Sapiens is said to have appeared in sub-Saharan Africa only one hundred fifty thousand years ago.

     So far as I know there are no remains existing of the hominid from which Homo Sapiens evolved.  Nor is there much of a record for extinct hominids between the remains found in Olduvai Gorge and the evolution of Homo Sapiens.  All earlier forms have disappeared.  The various forms of another anthropoid, Homo Erectus, all existed alongside Homo Sapiens.  Whether they preceded him is not clear but that they became extinct possibly with the passing of the last ice age.

     Everyone agrees that the sub-Saharan Homo Sapiens was in fact Black and that the Whites and Mongolids evolved from this Black predecessor.  This may be proven true if it is allowed to examine genetics objectively rather than impose subjective hopes on the facts.

     However objectivity may be denied because reason suggests that the first species evolved from the Last Hominid Predecessor is probably the least evolved Homo Sapiens intellectually.  It is possible that the first evolved Homo Sapiens is physically superior in the animal sense to subsequent mutations.

page 24.

     There may be some physical law that a sub-species once manifested is no longer capable of further evololution.  Thus the Great Mountain Ape probably is little different than its two million year old predecessor.  The same would apply to the Chimp.  Once having attained perfection for its specific limitations a species is as it were fossilized in form.  Thus the Black as the earliest Homo Sapiens sub-species is probably as developed intellectually as it was, is and ever will be.  Further Homo Sapiens evolution will be carried to conclusion by the Whites.  Each step in the evolutionary scale however leaves the others behind as the Chimp left the ape behind and Homo Sapiens left the Chimp behind. Whatever color predecessors may be they must become predecessors and hence less evolved.  This is a fact that if you can’t accept then you merely refuse to accept it for ideological reasons and your reasoning is invalid.

     One must assume that at some point another evolutionary step will occur creating an entire new species leaving Homo Sapiens behind in the same relation to it as the Chimp is to Homo Sapiens.  You must be able to grasp this point.

     Politically and socially this conclusion must be unpopular but one either adheres to scientific truth no matter how unpopular or falsehood is allowed to reign.

     If one goes from mere appearances it would seem that a hierarchy of intellectual ability leads upwards from the Blacks to the Mongolids to the Whites.

     While all scientific achievement may not be attributable to Whites yet all scientific achievment is based on methods introduced by Whites.  In an age where all scientific information is shared almost instantaneously  Black and Mongolid contributions are miniscule compare to that of Whites.  Further no people in the world have made scientific contributions which were not based on White science.  Nothing has come from the Orient, nothing has come from the Semitic lands and nothing has come from Africa.

page 25.

     While today Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness is dismissed for racial and political reasons yet the novel has its basis in fact.  The contrast between the European invaders and native Blacks throughout Africa was too pronounced to dismiss.  Nor was the difference merely quantative but qualitative too. 

     There is an ancientness to the Africans.  There is the sense that they were and are incapable of rising above the stone age mental processes that characterize them.  The Africans seem to have developed stone age thinking to a logical and stultifying conclusion by the time the Whites arrived.

     The Uganda described by the earliest explorers was organized in such a sophisticated stone age way that terrifying customs abandoned by Europeans over two thousand years before had fossilized into a permanent and unchangeable way of looking at things.

     When Moorehead describes the king of Uganda killing thirty people for the entertainment of a visiting dignitary one has to recoil in horror.  Yet in one form or another such was the case throughout Africa.

     The delicacy of Europeans prevents their acknowledging certain facts primarily because if they did they would have to accept the truth.  Cannibalism was a norm nor did the Africans give up such customs.  In addition to the Mau Mau Leopard Men in Kenya in the fifties Moorehead reluctantly concedes that medicine men still donned the skins of the great cats to ritually murder infants at the time of his writing in 1960.  Chinua Achebe admits that humans were still sacrificed in times of great need in Nigeria in his time.

page 26.

     Sekou Toure who was the Prime Minister of Guinea after 1960 famed as a poet in France still kept human flesh in his refrigerator like the American madman Jeffrey Dahmer.  He explained that there were certain things White Men couldn’t understand.  Well, apparently Dahmer could.  With that explanation the ‘poet’ was excused while Jeffrey Dahmer who wrote no poetry was sentenced to life imprisonment.

     In general the Black nations of Africa have rejected an uplifting Christianity which would force them to change their ways for a more tolerant Moslemism which makes no such demands on them.

     Thus the Africa of Tarzan, the National Geographic and the Explorers Clubs passed away by 1960.  Moorehead’s interesting book was the epitaph of the period.

     Not all Blacks remained in Africa.  The forced diaspora of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had spread the species throughout the New World from Brazil through the Caribbean to the United States.

     The predominant slave populations of the Caribbean quickly politically dominated their areas reducing the White population to an ancillary status without any real rights.  Whites lived apologetically on the islands barely tolerated by the Blacks.

page 27.

     There even after extended contact with Whites and White science the Blacks made no advances over their Black brethren in Africa.  They remained on the same intellectual level.  Anyone who would deny that would deny the Holocaust.

     In the United States the story was no different.  It is true that from the seventeenth century to emanicipation in 1863 the Blacks were slaves.  Still, there were ‘house niggers’ and ‘field niggers’.  If the field Black was given no opportunities for education this could not have been true of the household help.  Yet by 1960 as Prindle was entering young manhood there was no indication to him that Blacks had made any intellectual advance.

     The Black situation was not a small problem to him while as the Black rebellion then in progress developed the problem became of the first magnitude.

     The practical effect was a barbarian assault on the institutions of the United States hitorically unparalleled since the incursion of the Roman Empire by the German barbarians which culminated in the fifth century AD.

     The result of the invasions in both cases will be the same although the Germans bearing the higher genetic development were able to develop civilization over time.  The same will not be true of the Blacks who can only bring civilization down to their stone age level.  Sad but true.

     Were the Germans capable of intellectual development while Blacks are not?  This was a burning question of Prindle’s youth.  Were Blacks genetically inferior to Whites or was it merely a question of educational opportunities?

page 28.

     At the time the only means of determining racial intellectual abilities was testing.  This was in the form of the IQ test.  Whites invariably scored higher on the average than Blacks and not just by a point or two either but the gap ws significant enough to raise wonder.

     The Blacks countered that the tests were racially weighted in favor of the Whites.  It was suggested that if tests were written in Black patois Whites wouldn’t do quite so well.

      Perhaps.

      But classes were not taught in either Black or White patois but in a good clean English which was the language of the people, land and literature.  People from educated families probably had a few points advantage over those from families where intellectual prowess was not quite so demanded but such a fact could not be avoided.

     Barring these natural variations in opportunity the playing field was level for all.  The Blacks also advanced the notion that more money was spent per White student than for a Black student.  While well received and even believed against clearly visible evidence to the contrary by Whites this argument too proved fallacious.

     By 1970 every school district in America was fully integrated.  Those in the North and West had been for decades.  In fact the same amount of money was spent on every student White or Black.  While this fact should have been clear yet Whites and Blacks advanced the opposite notion as fact.

page 29.

     It was also true that all White schools had a better record than integrated schools where the levels were brought down by the Blacks.

     Prindle was an independent thinker.  He looked beyond the rhetoric at the true facts of education.  Beyond education he drew from his personal experience.  He noted that no matter how clever or how adaptive a Black might be his intelligence seemed to stop at the training level.  They seemed to lack the ability to associate ideas and take the next step forward.  This fact was noted by even such a sympathetic observor as Rider Haggard.

     There were many, although out of favor and ostracized, who believed that Blacks inherently lacked intellectual ability.  Prindle silently concurred with them yet he thought there was insufficient proof to commit himself one way or the other.

     Edgar Rice Burroughs had come to definite conclusions as early as 1919.  Burroughs was very well read while being absolutely up to date.  Most of what he believed was still being put forth by Time/Life books in their series on prehistory although recent advances have invalidated some of Burroughs’ thought while  he would have been eager in updating himself.

     As Burroughs named it in 1919 the quality to be sought was ‘imagination.’  As he noted the beasts had none at all.  He attributed to Blacks a modicum.  He thought that only Whites were capable of imaginative flights and this as he judged it was only one in a hundred thousand.  That would have been more or less evolutionarily correct.

     Since Burroughs time and especially since 1950 the bounds of human knowledge have been moved forward incredibly in all areas.  Most importantly for my argument in the field of genetics.  With the discovery of DNA in the forties science has progressed to the point where the ‘human’ genome can be read entirely.  All twenty-three chromosomes have been completely mapped or soon will be.

     The mechanism of mutation or evolution can be understood.  And evolution is going on constantly; a mutation that seems to leading to a species of astounding ‘imagination’ or intelligence.

     Genetic findings allowed Prindle to put his mind at rest concerning the relative abilities of the three sub-species.  It was clear to him that as the first species of Homo Sapiens to evolve from the Last Hominid Predecessor, the Black species stagnated while the Mongolids and Whites contintued to mutate adding intellectual capabilities to their Homo Sapiens shells.

     Whatever the genetic difference between Whites and Blacks that difference was expressed in scientific intelligence in Whites while Blacks remained metally lethargic.

      It does no good to say that many Whites are mentally lethargic while some Blacks seem to express scientific aptitude.  Even if true on an individual basis that has no effect on the general proposition.  As of this writing nearly all scientific advancement is coming from Whites.  Contributions by Chinese and Japanese are slight involving mainly improvements to existing models and not leaps forward.

     The Black species is notably absent in the ranks of scientists.

End of Essay

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Springtime For Edgar Rice Burroughs

Part II

by

R.E. Prindle

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Civilization And Its Discontents.

     The period of Burroughs’ life was one of those great pivotal times of civilization.  Civilization was in the midst of one of its great metamorphoses, scientific, political and intellectual.  Changes which had been building up the last few centuries could no longer be absorbed by the existing religious structure.  That structure was no longer viable.  Its bursting mode was not only for the new Scientific Consciousness  but the increasing scientific examination of the past opened the way for the revival of forgotten forms such as the Matriarchy.  Thus along with the inevitable Patriarchal religious  reaction the Matriarchy  as well as suppressed occult religions forced their way through.

The reaction from contacts between civilizations sent various alien religions and ideologies into the Western leaven.

Confused with these intellectual challenges the agricultural basis of civilization evolved into a technological one.  In the mid-teens for the first time in the United States there were more urban residents than there were rural residents.

New demands were placed on consciousness as more precision was required of the human mind.  Man had had little difficulty adapting his methods to cycles of the seasons but the adaptation tothe rigors of the assembly line caused him problems.

That there was a backlash from this tremendous succession of changes should take no one by surprise.  Adjustments were difficult and critical.  In 1930 the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, published what may be his most famous title:  Civilization And Its Discontents in response to this challenge.  His notion of who the discontents were and of what they were discontented about is vague, indeed undecipherable.

In my estimation he doesn’t deal with the malaise at all.

On the other hand Edgar Rice Burroughs not only dealt with the malaise but offered a reasonable, if difficult to apply, solution to the problem.

page 1.

The malaise found many expressions.  On the political front the socialists, Communists and anarchists were the most prominent reactionaries.  Their activities reached a fever pitch in the first two decades of the Twentieth Century resulting in the two phases of the Russian Revolution of 1905 and ’17.  The institutionalized discontents had their homeland after the latter date.

While Freud’s discussion of Discontents sounds generalized by the way he writes he is actually talkiking about himself and the members of his own Jewish culture and their problems with Western Civilization.

Thus Freud’s notion of Discontents falls somewhere between a general malaise and the discontent of the Communists.

The Religious Conciousness of course faced a problem that could only be resolved by surrender or reaction.  There was no middle way.  The evolution into Scientific Consciousness completely invalidated the religious approach.  All religions are based on a false premise and Science exposed that falsity.

The transition to the Scientific Consciousness must be difficult and demanding as so few attain it.  In my opinion this is because of the ongoing evolution of the brain.  The Scientific Consciousness can apparently only be grasped by the further evolved.  This doesn’t mean that those of a Religious Consciousness can’t work with scientific knowledge which requires only basic intelligence and a scientific environment provided by others but they are unable to envision advances.

Thus they find themselves left behind intellectually.  It is the same as the difference between high and low IQ.  Nothing can be done about that.  However the Religious reaction is to attack those of the Scientific Consciousness to lower them to their own level.

page 2.

The problem was especially acute with Freud and his culture as Science per se invalidated all Semitic religious pretensions.  This means all Semites and not just Jews.  Neverthless as Jews were embedded in Western Civilization at that time and other Semites weren’t the Jewish culture was ‘discontented’ and was forced to negate science and the Scientific Consciousness.

Led by the Semitic surge of both Judiaism and Moslemism the very serious attempt to bury the Scientific Consciousness through genocide might just succeed.

As I point out in Part VII of The Deconstruction Of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ America the Jewish campaign to ‘abolish the White ‘race’ should be taken very seriously.  Just because it sounds preposterous doesn’t mean it’s a joke.  A segment of Whites is the bearer of the evolved gene or genes or combination of genes so that if this advance species were destroyed the wild religious reaction would succeed.  Sounds just like some science fiction movie doesn’t it?  Well, it isn’t.

The Scientific Consciousness created its own malaise in the newly evolving species.  As literary and artistic types are always the monitors who pick up these trends first, if they don’t necessarily understand them, we shouldn’t be surprised to find a number of literateurs immersing themselves in the problem.  One of the big texts is H.G. Wells important but neglected novel:  The Food Of The Gods.  In this novel Wells postulates that the emerging scientific Consciousness is a new species of human being.  As with the real religious reaction Wells’ predecessor people wish to kill the new species.  In earlier times when the world was less populated new or different species of human beings could move away from the old species.  Now, the question is what makes Homo Sapiens Homo Sapiens and makes it different from the Last Hominid Predecessor?  It is assumed by our scientific community that the Negro is the first Homo Sapiens species having evolved in Africa.  This means that the Negro evolved from some sub-human Homo Sapiens predecessor.  It’s easy, it has to be.  So far no one has been able to produce an example of the Last Hominid Predecessor.

Now, the Negro was not the only, how shall we say, hominid species in Africa.  The Negro apparently orginated in West Africa.  The rest of Africa was inhabited by other species such as the Bushmen and Hottentots.  These peoples are not Negroes and originated in Africa so the question is are they predecessors of the Negroes who we are told are the first Homo Sapiens or are they Homo Sapiens who precede or follow the Negro in evolution.  Or, are they a separate non-Homo Sapiens species or are they  perhaps the Last Hominid Predecessor.  They are not Negroes so a place has to be found for them.

In any event the Negro and Arab combined to produce a new race or sub-species known as the Bantu peoples.  The Bantus then invaded the territories of the Bushmen and Hottentots who ranged all of Africa South of the bulge, so we are told, driving the Bushmen before them.  As I understand it the Hottentots are now extinct while Bantu pressure on the Bushmen is driving them toward extinction.

At the same time a newer hybrid of Black and Semite is driving the Bantu before it from its base in the Northeast corner of Africa known as the Horn.

So, Wells novelistic problem was that there was no longer a place on Earth for his new species to isolate itself.  He was presented with the choice of his new species either displacing or killing off the anterior species or being eliminated itself much as the Hottentots and Bushman have been eliminated by the Bantu and as the Bantu and Negroes are being displaced and elminated by the new Black and Semitic Hybrid.

page 4.

So this was the problem c. 1900.  This solution was repulsive to the existing Religious Consciousness that was psychologically unequipped to deal with this impasse.

As can be seen the Semitic special consciousness does not fear the problem  In Africa in Darfur and the South of the Sudan they are actively pursuing genocide.  In Euroamerica the Jewish Semitic culture is pursuing or advocating the same resolution of their problem with the White Euroamerican population.  Following Semitic actions in Africa it should be clear to American Blacks what is in store for them.

So, Wells dealt with the problem in its political aspect.  The internal aspect, the split in consciousness between the old and new was ably handled by a number of writers.

For a good introduction to the contrast between the Scientific Consciousness compare Holmes and Watson in Conan Doyle’s stories.  In this essay I will concentrate on three others as well as Freud- H. Rider Haggard, Joseph Conrad and Edgar Rice Burroughs.  Not coincidentally, I think, all three writers place their most important work in Africa.  Haggard as the earlier writer rising to fame in Burroughs’ youth  quite naturally had a great influence on the younger man, although I think Burroughs would have written of Tarzan and Africa with or without Haggard’s influence.  The appeal of Africa is the contrast between the civilized White and the primitive Black.  The two aspects of White consciousness.  I hope to tackle this problem in more detail in my next essay, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sigmund Freud And The Holy Grail.

There was nothing clearer to the English explorers, as well one might note as to the Southern planters of the US, than that there was a gulf between the intellect of the African and that of the White man.

Haggard expressed this difference in his novel Allan Quatermain. I’ve used the quote before but I will include it again here to keep the problem clear before us:

Quote:

All this civilization what does it come to?  Full forty years and more I spent among the savages, and studied them and their ways, and now for several years I have lived here in England, and in my own stupid manner have done my best to learn the ways of the children of light, and what do I find?  A great gulf fixed?  No, only a very little one, that a plain man’s thought may spring across.  I say that as the savage is, so is the white man, only the latter is more inventive and possesses a faculty of combination; save and except also the savage as I have known him, is to a large extent free from the greed of moey, which eats like a cancer in the heart of the white man.  It is a depressing conclusion, but in all essentials the savage and the child of civilization are identical.

          The great Liberal H.G. Wells was also clear on this difference.  The nature of the gulf was the Scientific intellect of the White and the non-Scientific intellect of the Black.  The question is how large did these nineteenth century men perceived the gap to be.  Haggard in his Allan Quaterman, quoted above perceived the gap to be small while if one is to judge by the distance between Tarzan and the Africans Burroughs perceived it be not only large but insurmountable.  Haggard thought the gap easily bridged while judging from Tarzan Burroughs thought it unbridgeable.

page 5.

It should be noted that Haggard was of the Old Religious Consciousness while Burroughs was of the advanced Scientific Consciousness.  Of the two men Haggard writes from the experience of having viewed Africa or at least South Africa first hand.  Everyone talks of Africa as though it were a county in Kansas whereas it is a huge continent of many diverse cultures.  But, perhaps as the cultures seem to share the same level of consciousness perhaps that is the justification for speaking of Africa and Africans as a single unit.

Haggard lived in South Africa for several years as a young man while he was an astute historian and anthropologist.  As a mythologist he was of the most gifted.  His understanding is astonishing.  He was quite familiar with all the Black peoples from the Zulus, Swazis and Basutos tothe Hottentots, Bushemen and Griquas.  His judgements of the various intellects seems quite reliable.  His writing is of most interest for the current rage of Zulu interest.  His actual story telling ability is beyond compare.

Now, this is difficult to speak of because of the ideological stance of the Liberals and their Religious Consciousness that take the procrustean stance of trying to fit facts and reality into ideology whether they can be conveniently forced or not.  They are currently anti-White and pro-African even going so far as to call for the genocide of the White species as I pointed out in the Deconstruction Of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ America.  This is more than evidenced in their support of the genocide being executed in South Africa by the Shona chief robert Mugabe and the Bantu peoples of the Union of South Africa.

page 6.

There’s not much evidence that Haggard was interested or even aware of the theories of evolution which, if I may be so daring, it seems clear that Burroughs either was at the beginning of his career or became so as he aged aware of all the various strands of evolutionary theory.  Thus Haggard comes across as more humane while Burroughs is more accurate.

A third opinion on the nature of the situation was provided by Joseph Conrad in his novelette: The Heart Of Darkness.  One can’t be sure how much contact Conrad had with the situation he describes, but the influence of the primitive African mentality had the effect of dragging down the White intellect.  As the advance in intellect was not so pronounced as Haggard noted the attraction of the primitive was so strong that many Whites retrogressed.  Conrad’s hero Kurtz was an ivory buyer in the heart of the Congo.  Through fraternization with the African he indeed loses his ‘thin veneer of civilization’ going native.  On his death bed in viewing his period in the interior he exclaims ‘The horror, the horror’ and then ‘Exterminate the brutes.’

In point of fact if, as we are told, Homo Sapiens originated in Africa and the Negro is the departure point from the Last Hominid Predecessor which may be the Bushman or Hottentot then if this departure occurred  c. 150,000 years ago, at the time the African came into contact with Whites he had made no move toward becoming civilized.  Nor was he inclined to when given the example.

When H.M. Stanley interviewed the Uganda chief Mtese, that chief was incapable of visualizing anything other than trading.  As he said he noticed that goods traded by the Arabs, who were first in the area, all came from Europe so he assumed that Europeans were more clever than the Arabs however he had no inclination to acquire the knowledge or skills.  Nor have Africans attempted it to this day.

page 7.

As unpleasant as it may be to deal with facts or accept the science of the matter it is nevertheless necessary to consider that in the course of evolution the African brain has evolved to a certain level and stopped much as all the Hominid Predecessors did.  Although Bruce Lahn of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute has been silenced his researches made it clear that the human brain was still evolving but not in all human species, only one.

It should be clear to even the most prejudiced observor that Robert Mugabe the Shona leader of Zimbabwe is in way over his head while as savage in his methods as any character Joseph Conrad could create.  Nor is the reason  unclear to certain Africans.

Writing in the Kampala Monitor of February 7, 2007 in an article entitled  Uganda:  Why Black People Have Remained Backward by Elias Biryabarema the author examines the problem:

     Uganda has been fairly stable long enough.  The conditions for an economic takeoff have been there for 20 years.  Mr. Musevini has enjoyed generous goodwill from nearly all the world’s rich governments.  Their largesse has poured in ceaselessly and in hefty amounts.

Uganda should have taken off.  We haven’t.  We’re stuck.  And so is Tanzania, Sudan, Ethiopia, Mali, Burkina Faso, Kenya, Eretria, Malawi, Congo Republic and pretty much all of Black Africa, excluding the regions sole economic power, South Africa.  This led me to pose a question to myself:  Can Black people build prosperous societies?

Just about every reason- from slavery, colonialism, neo-colonialism to inequitable world trade rules- cited for the backwardness of Black African nations has been so debunked that it has now become necessary to look beyond the realm of such contemporary explanations.’

http://allafrica.com/stories/200702061131.html

Mr. Biryabarema concludes that Africans ‘only rise and touch a low ceiling.’  A disheartening realization but a cruel fact of nature because of the progression of evolution.

page 8.

So Africa came to represent an attractive past to Whites while the psychical split caused by the evolving brain caused them discomfort too.  The brain had not evolved far enough to make a clean break with the animal past.  What was Man, all species to do?  Haggard relapsed into nostalgia.  A longing to go back while nevertheless retaining his cranial development.  His hero, Allan Quatermain while retaining his intellectual superiority to the Africans attempts to establish his kinship with his ‘Black brothers.’  Thus he takes a ‘Liberal’ attitude toward African/White relations that while seemingly humane has resulted in the atrocities against Whites being perpetrated by the likes of Mugabe and the South African leaders.

One shudders at Conrad’s Kurtz’s exclamation to ‘exterminate the brutes’ and yet the choice has turned out to be exterminate or be exterminated,  while Africans have inexplicably opted for the latter.  What can one say?

Burroughs on the other hand working from a philosophical point of view came up with a different solution.  Nor is it entirely impracticable on the intellectual level.  Both he and Freud begin from the same base.  Both are reacting to the inhibitions and repressions placed on Man by civilization.

Burroughs seems willing to accept the ‘thin veneer of civilization’ in certain places and under certain conditions but he demands the right to be able to move freely from the primitive to the civilized state.  Thus when Tarzan takes off his clothes he also removes the ‘thin veneer of civilization.’

page 9.

The basic problem for Haggard, Conrad, Freud and Burroughs is that they wish to retain the advantages of the intellectual aspects of civilization; none of them wish to opt for the ‘low ceiling’ of the primitive.   They all wish to retain their advantages while indulging their primitive ‘natures.’  In some way each has to remain superior to the primitive state.

One can contrast this attitude with Mugabe of Zimbabwe and the ANC of South Africa who seem to be edging in the direction of removing all vestiges of the civilized state.  They seem to be opting for a nostalgic return to the their savage past.  They must have some understanding of the results of their destructive acts against civilization but choose to ignor them.

Conrad says simply- exterminate the brutes.  Haggard adopts an avuncular attitude toward perpetual children.  Burroughs assumes the role of…well…a god.  Freud wishes to assume the role of plantation owner.  The problem is insoluble except by the Shona method of  ‘exterminating the arrogant bastards.’

For Burroughs as well as for Freud sex seems to be the key.  Burroughs position is difficult to fathom.  In all his cultures, societies and civilizations, and he creates a great many, nudity or near nudity is the ideal although as he is writing for popular consumption his characters  remain sexually unexited and incredibly chaste under the most provocative conditions.  Freud of course had everybody going at it like bunnies.

In Cave Girl Burroughs’ hero, Waldo Emerson Smith-Jones is the example of the over intellectualized man of extreme and enervating culture.  Quite the opposite of Burrughs who obviously feels he has reached an ideal balance between the intellectual and the physical.

Waldo is meager then and consumptive when he lands on the island.  He is obligatorily cowardly.  He will find his Anima ideal in Nadara who is the antithesis of the civilized Jane being both nude and perhaps the most obviously sexually unihibited of any of ERB’s female characters.  Burroughs contrasts her natural uninhibited sexuality with the inhibited sexuality of Waldo.  There is a nice comparison with Freud possible here.  Also with the Burroughs corpus there is room for an analysis of Nadara, La, and Balza.

During the course of his stay on the island , the natural primitive life will flesh Waldo out, build him up, give him conficence and make him courageous as well as curing his TB.  Of course he never loses his intellectual attainments while using them to better his opponents and improve his situation.  Thus neither Haggard, Conrad, Freud or Burroughs  is able to resolve the conflicts of the discontents caused by civilization.  As attractive as the primitive is it must remain an intellectual ideal.

Go to Part 3.

In The Beginning.

 

 

 

During the course

Springtime For Edgar Rice Burroughs, Part One

Including A Review Of

The Cave Girl

by

R.E. Prindle

Book I:  The Cave Girl

1.

     In 1912 Edgar Rice Burroughs was looking back on nearly forty years of humiliation and failure.  As 1913 dawned, after that lifetime of suppression and depression it must have seemed as though the Millennium had arrived.  Success on his own terms seemed to be within  his grasp.  The Gambler had finally won the gamble.

     As the year turned he finished his fifth novel since he took up his pen in 1911, The Return Of Tarzan.  As of the beginning of 1913 only two had been published and those only in pulp magazine form.  Perhaps such publication was rewarding in the personal sense but the pulps had a very low literary reputation.  Pulp writers were always second class literary citizens.  Both his first publications created a sensation among the pulp readership while the second ‘Tarzan Of The Apes’ was a stunner. 

     His reputation was augmented when Tarzan Of The Apes began to be serially published in various newspapers.  So while he had not established a reputation from the pulp publications the newspapers had spread his fame.  Book publication was still a full year away.

    Thus by 1913 A Princess Of Mars and Tarzan Of The Apes were before the world.  Gods Of Mars would be published later in the year.  His second novel, Outlaw Of Torn, had been met with outright rejection.

     Based on this promising but hardly conclusive beginning, less than 2500.00 had changed hands in two years, Burroughs decided to throw over his day job to became a full time writer.  As he says everyone thought he was crazy; without the benefit of foresight he most surely was.  Burroughs himself even says he thought so.  The Gambling Man was risking his all on a turn of the cards.  His whole life he had seemed driven to take the riskiest and longest of long shots.  His characters would behave in the same way.  Shall we say on the positive side that it was an act of supreme confidence?

page 1.

     Not only did he give up his day job but he set himself the daunting task of writing a story every two months of which he expected every one to sell.  He ultimately wrote seven in 1913 of which all did sell.  In this year of the most daring audacity he did earn over 10,000 dollars and that beat the cost of living and then some.

     Burroughs won that bet, too.

     The first book of the year, At The Earth’s Core began his Inner World series.  It was also the begining of his exploration of prehistoric and evolutionary themes.  The prehistoric novel was already a genre.  Fictional treatments by Jack London and H.G. Wells were certainly known to him while he may have been familiar with the anthropological studies of J.G. Frazer in one form or another.  Frazer made the phrase ‘the thin veneer of civilization’ a household phrase that Burroughs was so frequently to use and mock throughout his work.  He may possibly have picked the phrase up through newspapers and magazines or possibly as David Adams has suggested through Jack London who used it before him and who we can be reasonably certain Burroughs read.

     Frazer was at the height of his influence at this time having written three different versions of his most famous work, The Golden Bough.  In 1910 he published  a four volume study called Totemism and Exogamy that Sigmund Freud cribbed to write his own semi fictional work, Totem And Taboo.

     Personally I would place Totem And Taboo with the prehistoric work of London, Wells and Burroughs.  Read as a novel Totem And Taboo isn’t all that bad.  Unfortunately Freud took himself seriously thinking he had more than he did.  But as fiction Totem And Taboo is OK.

page 2.

     Interestingly for Freud he formed his very speculative theories in the historical blind spot in the place between his intense Jewish Patriarchalism and the discovery of the Matriarchy that preceded Patriarchy.  So his theories are somewhat skewed.  Matriarchal theories were very stoutly resisted gaining any degree of acceptance only after the 1960s.

     It is to Freud’s credit that he didn’t resist the concept.  Even as early as Totem And Taboo he had heard of the discovery of the Matriarchy through the work of the Swiss mythologist, J.J. Bachofen, although he didn’t know how to incorporate the material.  By 1938 he seemed to be conversant with Matriarchalism but still didn’t know how to fit it into his system.  He was still touting the ridiculous theories of Totem And Taboo.

     For some reasons I haven’t yet identified I find similarities between Freud’s and Burroughs’ writing.  After all Freud did get his Nobel prize for literature not science.

     Freud was in many ways a speculative and wild writer and so in fact was Burroughs.  While the others wrote interesting but conventional prehistoric stories Burroughs discovered ways to link the various evolutionary stages with the present.  While it is overlooked, at the time it was very innovative.  The approach may have been suggested to him by his Prince and Pauper mentality in which he believed a clean break between his past and present had been made when he was sent to the Michigan Military Academy. 

     There is no clearer link for this possibility than the story of Tarzan.  In Tarzan Of The Apes Tarzan was born a ‘Prince’ to an aristocratic British family but became a ‘Pauper’ when his parents died and he was adopted by the great she ape, Kala.  Thus he was raised in a prehistoric environment before the advent of man.  Tarzan then evolves into the fully human right before our eyes eventually becoming the very epitome of civilization.  A thin veneer perhaps but a veneer.

     So ERB devises all sorts of clever ways to somehow get his contemporary characters into prehistoric environments.  In his fifth book, The Return Of Tarzan, he invents the lost land of Opar.  Opar is a fossil city dating back to prehistoric Atlantis.  The Oparians have never advanced beyond the culture of Atlantis and lost most of that.  Behind Opar is an even earlier stage of culture called The Valley Of The Diamonds.  This place is ruled by a highly developed form of gorillas.

page 3.

     In Tarzan The Terrible Tarzan crosses a great swamp to arrive in prehistoric Pal-ul-Don.  In the Inner World series he employs two methods of entering.  In the first David Innes invents an earth borer that drills through the crust to discover a hollow core containing the Inner World.  In Tarzan At The Earth’s Core Burroughs employs the notion of a North Pole entry using the dirigible O-220 to enter in that manner.

     In the most wild of all the stories, The Eternal Lover, his hero Nu is gassed in what Burroughs calls the Neocene to wake up in the twentieth century.  He acquires a lover with whom he successfully travels back to the Neocene.  On the return journey to the present he failed to keep his grip on the strap and didn’t make it.  Wonderful story concept.  Certainly as fine as anything Burroughs ever did.

     Then in the trilogy The Land That Time Forgot the crew of the submarine discover a submarine entrance to the lagoon of a large island that is prehistoric but covers the whole range of evolution from amoeba to full fledged humans.  Quite daring actually and Burroughs is able to make these impossible stories work.  If one compares The Land That Time Forgot with Freud’s Totem And Taboo I think it possible to find many similarities.  Of the two Burroughs was by far the most successful writer in their time although he received no Nobel prize.  Both writers have weathered the vicissitudes of fortune quite well.  One hundred years from those days both men are top sellers although Burroughs has the edge.

page 4.

     The novel under consideration, The Cave Girl has a terrifically interesting scenario.  In this story Burroughs anticipates The Land That Time Forgot by creating a large prehistoric island off the shipping lanes that is ‘seldom visited’ although it seems that no one has trouble finding it.

      In this story Burroughs reverses Tarzan Of The Apes.  Instead of an infant boy being abandoned he has the infant girl, Nadara, survive her parents.  Instead of a female ape rescuing Tarzan he has a cave man rescue and nurture the girl.  The Cave Man retains a little leather bag containing the emblems of Nadara’s origins, while Tarzan has his father’s cabin and books.

     In this instance Nadara having been left on the island, just as Jane and her party are landed on the spot of Tarzan’s father’s cabin so the civilized castaway, Waldo Emerson Smith-Jones is washed from the deck of the steamer by a big wave during a storm landing on the siland where as Tarzan watched Jane’s party arriving Nadara observes the arrival of Waldo Emerson Smith-Jones.

     It isn’t stated how old she was when she and the civilized Waldo got together but I should think twenty on the analogy of Tarzan.

     Burroughs’ two favored terrestrial locations for his stories are Africa and the South Seas.  Both locations occupy legendary possibilities in the imagination of the West.  They were thought to be locations where the White man was freed from the restraints and limitations of civilization.

page 5.

Go to Springtime For Edgar Rice Burroughs Part II

The Deconstruction Of

Edgar Rice Burroughs’

America

by

R.E. Prindle

Part V

 The Byss And The Abyss

You could kiss your lips, and have all the fun

to yourself,

If you only knew the trick.

It would be perfectly easy

If they would only stay there

Until you got around to them.

Why don’t you manage it somehow?

Benjamin Paul Blood:

Quoted by William James

The Varieties Of Religious Experience

     In 1914-15 the great modern Jewish cultural adventure was beginning.  The culture was prepared.  As they say of a good football team, it makes its own breaks.  It was a matter of waiting patiently for opportunity then taking advantage of it.  In 1917 the Big Break came when the German General Ludendorff transported Lenin and his cadre of Jewish Revolutionaries to the Finland Station in St. Petersburg.  In October Trotsky drove the nail home.  The Jews had been prepared.  They had been working out the details for a couple decades or more.  At least since Freud joined with his like minded fellows of B’nai B’rith in 1895.

     Little details pop up in his writing.  In his 1914 On the History Of The Psychoanalytic Movement he lets drop a line that the progress of the French Revolution had been charted and understood.  A few years later the Jewish Revolutionaries in Petersburg would be running around with this little volume of analysis in their back pockets.  Freud refers to the revolution, Thermidors, epigones and reaction.  Psychologically events have to follow in a certain order.  they will follow in that order so if you are aware of things to come in their proper order you will be in a position to anticpate and manipulate.  What the French Revolution had to do with the history of the Psychoanalytic movement isn’t made clear.

     My feeling is that the study of the French Revolution was the role of the men of B’nai B’rith to which Freud was privy.  His role as a psychoanalyst would be to prepare the minds of the revolutionaries for the slaughtering to come while he probably also assisted in the damage control applications for the inevitable reaction when the Europeans had realized what the Jews had done.  Remember in a multicultural environment each culture maintains its identity so that it is necessary to speak of a distinct Jewish and European cultures.  The cultures will of necessity be antagonistic contrary to the ill informed Liberal projection of universal brotherhood.

     Thus in 1917, four years into the Jewish Revolution the culture enjoyed a signal success in Russia; implementing the plan then became the problem.  While the culture might well have expected a rapid worldwide success as all allied governments, including the US, were heavily infiltrated with fellow culturalists.  However the Jews were baffled by the successes of Hitler and Stalin

     While things seemed to be going according to plan in Russia the premature death of Lenin was not accounted for nor the success of Stalin.  You can understand the rage of Trotsky in exile in the swamps of Asia against the triumph of what he considered the epigone, Josef Stalin.  The Man of Steel was a National Socialist who aborted the international revolution pursued by Trotsky and his culture.  This was no small thing for the Jewish Revolution.

Herr Doktor Professor Sigmund Freud

    In the West as Freud had predicted a firestorm of protest against the Jewish culture took place.  Behind the phalanx of Liberals who took their side the culture had two main lines of defense.  One was simply to deny everything much as they accuse the so-called Holocaust deniers of today and the second was to denounce accusers as madmen, conspiracy theorists, cranks and anti-Semites.  As they pretty effectively controlled the media, which they denied, these courses were easy for them.

     As an historian this stuff is my meat.  I like it.  It was at that time that a little book appeared entitled The Protocols Of The Learned Elders Of Zion.  This volume is the center of the firestorm.  Naturally the culture denied any involvement with the book calling it a forgery by which they meant someone other than themselves had written it and palmed it off on them.

     Over the next twenty years or so it was claimed that their authorship was ‘proven’ false.  This is not true.  The authorship is still an open question, nothing has been proven either way.  As the book was reproduced by Henry Ford in his Dearborn Independent articles and we know Burroughs read the articles let us deal with that issue first.

————————————

     While the Protocols are claimed to be a forgery it is also universally assented that they are pased on an 1864 predecessor by the French Jew Maurice Joly entitled Dialogues Between Machiavelli and Montesquiou in Hell.  Clearly so.  Both works are now readily available if you’re interested in this sort of thing.

     It is claimed that Joly was a Jew while being denied, naturally, by the culture.  Joly was at the least of Jewish descent, which is to say the son of Jews,  while I have seen his picture and he looks Jewish to me.  But perhaps he was a secular and not religious Jew whatever than distinction might mean.

     It is said the Dialogues applied to Napoleon III then reigning in France but then it is said the Testament Of Dr. Mabuse parodies the Nazis.  I don’t think either is true.  How many times can you pull the same trick before someone, anyone catches on?

     At any rate it is said that Napoleon III got wind of publication of the book that it so alarmed and inflamed him that he confiscated the entire printing at the printers.  Thus the book must have been legendary and unable to influence anyone.  The stories are too good to pass over thoughs which is why I like this sort of thing.  This stuff would make a good movie.

     Here is one version I just pulled up on the internet that I had not heard before.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/protocols.html

     Quote:

     Joly’s “Dialogues” while intended as a political satire, soon fell into the hands of a German anti-Semite named Herman Goedsche writing under the name of Sir John Retcliffe.  Goedsche was a postal clerk and spy for the Prussian secret police.  He had been forced to leave postal work due to his part in forging evidence in the prosecution against the Democratic leader Benedict Waldeck in 1849.  Goedsche adapted Joly’s ‘Dialogues’ into a mythical tale of a Jewish conspiracy as part of a series of novels entitled “Biarritz” which appeared in 1868.  In a chapter called “The Jewish Cemetery In Prague And The Representatives Of The Twelve Tribes Of Israel,” he spins the fantasy of a secret centennial rabbinical conference which meets at midnight and whose purpose is to review the past hundred years and to make plans for the next century.

     Unquote.

     To delet the paranoia I am familiar with the Goedsche story, this from Jewish sources only, but I have never heard of his using a copy of the Dialogues before.  As a government spy in a government post office I fail to see why the government wouldn’t have covered for him unless something else was involved.  In any event there is no shame on Goedsche involved.

He was simply doing his job for the government rather than the revolution. 

     My studies indicate that the chapter referred to was from a trilogy called ‘To Sedan’ that would indicat a publication date after 1871.  I have read the indicated chapter which is good Gothic stuff.  As a novel I see no reason to take the chaper seriously as history or based on Joly.  It may have happened, it may not have but the atmospheris care terrific and it moves the story along.  A nice bit of writing.  the bit about the representatives of the twelve tribes I took as a literary touch but then I’m not that sensitive on the matter.

     If the Jewish Virtual Library means to imply that the culture was not an organized political entity with specific political goals carried on in a conspiritorial manner than I would have to take issue with the wirter or writers.  As we have Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver’s testimony that sometime after 1666 when the Sabatai Zevi messiahship failed that the, shall we call them the Elders Of Zion, met and formulated the hope of the Jewish Revolution.  Virtually as Goedsche wrote the ‘elders’ of B’nai B’rith were sitting in Vienna in the company of Herr Doctor Professor Sigmund Freud planning to bring about the Revolution imminently.  While I don’t accept the novelist’s meeting of the Elders in the Prague graveyard as a fact I don’t think the idea can even be called a stretcher nor because of the story should Goedsche be defamed as an anti-Semite.  One would expect the culture to deny the story, naturally.

     Back to the Protocols.  It is not improbable that the culture disseminated the Protocols so that its proponensts could be defamed for

Maruice Joly

making a ‘forgery.’ After all mis- and disinformation is a part of the game.  One should always look for it.  In order to discredit the Protocols, and hence any notion of an international Jewish conspiracy, it was suddenly remembered, by whom it is never said, that the Protocols must have been based on the earlier Dialogues.  A great public search was instituted  throughout the great public libraries of Europe although if the edition had been confiscated and destroyed one wonders why.  Aw heck, in fairness, let’s disregard logic.  Needless to say the search was fruitless.  No copy could be found of this legendary book, not even that used by Herman Goedsche who we all know must have had one.  The suspense mounted hauntingly.  Would the Dialogues ever be found?  Not to worry.  An emigre soldier of Wrangel’s passing through Constantinople, now Istanbul,  had a copy missing cover and title page that he sold to a Jewish second hand book dealer.  I mean, this is good stuff; I wish the story wasn’t already taken.  This more than kind hearted book dealer paid good money for this piece of trash unable to even know what he had bought or what the book was about.  Stories of really human kind hearted bood dealers like this warm the heart.

     One doesn’t know in what language the book was printed, possible French, which fortunately this kind hearted Jewish second hand book dealer could read.  This fellow was also an expert on The Protocols Of The Learned Elders Of Zion.  What a concatenation of coincidences, hey?  As he was reading along to see what he might have bought he said to himself:  Wait a minute! I’ve read this before.  A light went on in his head.  By golly or perhaps, oy vey, he said to himself,  What I’ve got here must be the long lost Dialogues Entre Machiavelle Et Monstesquiou Aux Enfers.  Remember this was the first copy of this book anyone had ever seen except, possibly, Herman Goedsche.  Be damned it if wasn’t.  Filled with joy at his lucky buy the used book dealer turned the book over to B’nai B’rith or whoever and saved the day.  It was now ‘proved’ that the Protocols were a forgery based on the Dialogues.  Hey, listen, the Dialogues could have been a forgery themselves.  There’s a good chance even that the Nineteenth Century is a forgery.  The history of the nineteenth century is one of the more implausible stories.  I’ve heard.  What do you think.  At any rate this beat up copy of the Dialogues disappeared never to be found again.  One wonders where the copies now being published came from.

     So, the damage controllers enlisting the support of their Liberal allies shouted down their accusers.  For myself, the culture’s story is so fishy and contrived that I at the very least doubt the defense but I sure as heck like the story.  Could Conan Doyle have done any better?  Pshh…

     Well, so much for the prep work.  As there was no longer room in Russia for the dead Czar’s men a very large number of them fled to, where else, the United States of America.  Hence all those jokes about waiters who used to be Russian dukes.  Some of them were.  Among the emigres was a gentleman named Boris Brasol who just happened to have a copy of the Protocols in his back pocket.

     The plot thickens.  Gets really good.  Now, Henry Ford had been picked out as an anti-Semite back in ’14 when he ‘unilaterally’ doubled the prevailing wage.  This act was considered a blow at the Revolution.  No good deed shall go unpunished.

Hooray for Honkety Hank and his hootenanny automobile.

     Consequently Ford was lured into the Peace Ship deal of ’16 by the Jewish Rosa Schwimmer.  The folly was one from which Ford’s reputation never recovered although the idea of the Peace Ship isn’t as absurd as it sounds.  As a result of the Peace Ship Ford began to have his doubts about the sincerity and motives of the culture which were certainly justified.

      The doubts were sharpened into certainties by the role of Bernard Baruch and his Jews of the WIB and in the government.  It wil be remembered that the Dodge Brothers lost their lives because of a confrontation with Baruch while Ford had his company’s finances attacked as a result of the confrontation in 1919-20.  At that point Brasol showed up with his copy of the Protocols which he provided to Ford for the small sum of 10,000.  Ford then bought the Dearborn Independent which began to publish the articles that became the four volumes of the famed International Jew.

     Today these volumes are classed with the Protocols and are forbidden reading.  On the Coalition Index.  The Liberal Coalition has the bad habit of denying history by preventing its examination.  I haven’t leafed thrugh the Dearborn Independent  but there are a couple sample copies on the internet.  It was a pretty decent newspaper cum magazine of the uplifting sort.

http://www.rationalrevolution.net/special/library/dearborn_independent.html      

     The story of Ford and the Independent articles is an interesting study made more delicious by being forbidden.  One  knows how much better forbidden fruit tastes, doesn’t one?

     It should be remembered that the Jewish culture was especially active after the October Revolution, the fourth year of the Jewish Revolution.  the fourth through eighth years are especially important.  The AJC- American Jewish Committee- wished to ascertain where the centers of American resistance might be the strongest.  At sometime either during or after the War the AJC drew up something called the Jewish Bill Of Rights.  They sent it to prominent men and women to ascertain their stance toward the Jews.  Their responses or non-responses would determine if the recipient was an ‘anti-Semite’ or not.  If not, fine; if so then efforts would be made to marginalize or destroy them.  Edgar Rice Burroughs was sent a copy of this Jewish Bill Of Rights.  He failed the test by questioning one or more clauses while taking an independent attitude.  He was thus marked down for destruction.  It would be interesting to know to whom this questionnaire was sent and how they fared.

Horace And John Dodge

      As I noted the Dodges were assassinated in 1920 while Ford’s business was attacked.  It might also be noted that Ford was run off the road while returning home one night suffering injuries but nothing serious.  His Ford pulled him out of another one. 

     Had the bankers succeeded in filching Ford Motor Co. it would have been quite a coup.  At the time the company was valued by Ford at a billion dollars, a hundred billion in today’s dollars.  In the bankers valuation the company put on the market at that time could be made to produce three to five billion dollars.  As I said the Revolution was an expensive affair.  If the Jewish banking houses had been able to secure Ford they could have recouped a profit of as much as four or five billion in 1920 dollars for their projects.  You will be able to understant the sort of assault that was made on Ford.

     The coalition, which has written all the histories, characterizes Ford’s defensive maneuvers as cranky anti-Semitism which he displayed for no other reason than that he was an insane cranky anti-Semite who attacked Jews qua Jews.

     Nor were Ford’s Independent articles mere ranting without an understanding of the problem as some would have you believe.  The articles were written by William Cameron Ford’s employee.  Ford as usual did things in a thorough way.  Almost overnight he amassed a huge library concerning Judaism.  I mean, this was massive.  The Jews wanted it.  They asked him for it after the apology.  Ford sneered.  While the library is described as anti-Semitic it embraced the whole range of Jewish activities.  Perhaps a unique collection

     Cameron set to work master this huge mass of material.  The result was the four volumes of The International Jew with several uncollected articles left over.  While the volumes have been defamed as anti-Semitic balderdash they are nothing of the kind.  They are well researched accurate accounts of the topics covered.  The first volume dealing with the Protocols merely duplicates what already existed but the remaining three volumes recording the various roles of Jews in American are interesting studies and true, which is to say based on verifiable facts.  However as we have recently learned- the truth is no defense.

     When the articles began appearing they created quite furor.  If you have checked the Dearborn Independent samples on the internet site you will have an idea of what the paper looked like.  Just insert one of the Jewish articles and you have what the readers of the twenties saw.

     Ford’s liquid wealth in today’s terms was in the tens of billions of dollars so he was well able to afford a defense.  Mr. Deep Pockets.  He created something called the Service Department that was a counterspy outfit not unlike that of Daddy Warbucks of Little Orphan Annie fame.  It will be remembered that Little Orphan Annie made its debut at this time.  Ford Employed agents who were supposed to get the lowdown on Jewish activities such as those featured in the Dr. Mabuse series.  Starting from scratch the Service Department was no match for Jewish agences like the AJC, ADL or B’nai B’rith and others that had had decades if not centuries of experience in subversive activities.

     One only has the Coalition accounts of these years of the Jewish Revolution so the reader has undoubtedly been conditioned to view Ford as an insane crank.  To my knowledge no other accounts have appeared.  How contemporaries other than the Liberal side reacted isn’t recorded at present.  However Edgar Rice Burroughs tried in his modest way to assist Ford.’

     Ford and Burroughs were Americans raised on the ideals of that scrap of paper, the Constitution.  They therefore made the mistake of thinking that they could appeal to the reason of ideologues or bigots.  You can’t.  An ideologue has his projection and he knows he got it from from God.  As I have pointed out before a devout member of a religion must, of necessity, be a bigot; there is no room for any opinion that contradicts dogma.  So Ford and Burroughs were wasting their time.

     By 1924 Burroughs must have known he was under attack both demestically and internationally by the Communists.  His 1919 effort, Under The Red Flag, had signaled his antagonism to Communism just as his response to the Jewish Bill Of Rights signaled his refusal to be bulldozed from that quarter.

     Using material gleaned from the Independent concerning the role of Jews in the theatrical business Burroughs wrote a book entitled, Marcia Of The Doorstep in support of Ford and gently rebuking his fellow Americans for their authoritarianism.  The book didn’t see print until 1999.  The novel isn’t bad.  It would have sold reasonably well under the Edgar Rice Burroughs name.  As has been indicated the Liberal Coalition was in control of publishing; nothing was published that didn’t pass their censorship.  Burroughs novel was rejected.  Now, this is interesting.  Burroughs began his own imprint in 1930 eventually publishing all his titles but not, I repeat, not Marcia Of The Doorstep.  One might well ask  stayed his hand on that title.

     At any rate, probably as punishment, there were no Tarzan movies made by Jewish controlled studios from 1922 to 1928.  Ford also was having his problems.  The auto industry was p;rogressing faster than he was.  By 1927 the Model T was approaching obsolescence losing its sales lead to Chevrolet which it never recovered.

     It became necessary to call off his war with the AJC-ADL to concentrate on saving his business.  In 1927 he was forced to sign a bogus apology.  It was a forgery.  Ford had no hand in its writing.  However he promised to abandon the battle.

     With Ford’s collapse anything approaching to resistance to the Jewish Revolution in America collapsed.

     While the Republican interregnum of 1920-32 slowed the Revolution down the Liberal Wilsonian Revolution was resumed in 1933 by Wilson’s disciple Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  With Roosevelt the Jews returned to Washington in force.  Among the first things FDR did was to recognize the Soviet Union just as Jacob Schiff had immediately reversed the Jewish policy toward Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution by granting huge loans to the still nascent and insecure Bolshevik government.  This was OPM- other people’s money.  The money of the citizens of the United States Of America.  Thus the everyday American was forced to underwrite the Bolshevik Revolution whether he knew it or not.

Jacob Schiff- The PM     Schiff who was the Prime Minsister of the International Jewish Culture, was called down to Washington by the President of the United States to justify himself on the charges of Bolshevism.  He was apparently successful as when he left the capitol of the United States to got back to the Capitol of the Jewish Revolution, NYC, it was with a face wreathed in smiles.  Jacob Schiff didn’t smile often.  He quickly resumed his loans to the Bolsheviks.

To return to 1919.

This part if followed by Freud which is Part VI and the Deconstruction Of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ America without a part number which is Part VII.

Thanks for your interest.

The Deconstruction Of

Edgar Rice Burroughs’

America

by R.E. Prindle

Part IV

The Red Triumph

How long, how long,

Has that leetle old evenin’ train

Been gone?

How long, how long,

Oh baby,

How long?

Trad.

     A pall fell over the world when the Communists assumed power.  Joy left the planet in favor of the sour envy of that ilk.  There were no happy Communists.  They knew no contentment.  They were as disaffected, dissatisfied with life, civilization and themselves, especially themselves as psychologically possible.  Misfits, envious with no prospects in life they were.  They were incapable of generating wealth; they could only appropriate and waste what others had created.  The spirit of vengeance which had been their dominant characteristic in the French Revolution would remain their goal throughout their existence.  There has been no Red government from the France of 1793 to the present that hasn’t believed in wholesale massacres of ‘enemies’ at the the least, genocide at the worst.  Quite frankly they can only think in terms of crime no matter how they rationalize it and they can rationalize like nobody’s business.

     Murder is part of their psychotic nature.  I do not exclude Hitler  and the Nazis as Red organizations.  Placed in the context of Redism Hitler and the Nazis are perfectly understandable.  The Nazis were National Socialists.  One can’t be socialist without being Red; one can’t be Red without believing in mass exterminations.  History speaks the for the truth about Reds; I merely repeat history.

     No one Red faction can be held  less accountable than others.  All participated equally and as joyously as their sour temperaments allowed.  Mild mannered college professors and sanctimonious ministers of the social gospel wholeheartedly supported the murders and atrocities of Communist regimes just as today they raise no outcry against the genocide and crimes against Whites taking place in Africa because they think the ‘right side’ has the upper hand.  Reds never did and never will have a disinterested concept of morality.  The Red idea of law and morality is merely a projection of their subconscious desire.

page 1.

     In the giddiness of the Russian success the Revolutionaries believed that the world revolution had arrived so that it was a matter of a few months before they assumed control of the world.

     Post-war success in Hungary encouraged them on.  Revolutionaries flowed back into Germany from Russia intent on bringing to fruition the ‘German’ revolution.  Success in Germany eluded them.  There the world revolution stalled.  It was going to a tougher job than anticipated.  The United States especially was not as ripe for their plans as they had projected.

     Resistance was prompt if somewhat flaccid.  Wilson’s program, while Red was opposed to that of Bolshevism.  Some have said that Wilson was merely envious of Lenin as the leader.  His Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, to whom we all owe a debt of gratitude, cracked down hard on the Red cadres deporting a very few while putting the rest in disarray as a law was passed that outlawed the Communist Party temporarily.

     But all the Parlor Pinks, Fellow Travelers and Liberals interested in their form of ‘social justice’ and the ‘true American Way’ had the ban repealed.  As usual they misrepresented their motives.  The task now became one of subverting the ideals the country held sacred.

2.

Heroes And Villains

     We must now delineate the sides in the American struggle for supremacy as it stood in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution.

     The Liberal Coalition had gained the power of the Presidency in 1913 when Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated.  Although not appreciated as such this was an occurrance for the both the Jewish and World Revolution as significant for America as that of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.  The Wilson administration began the ‘partnership’ between America and the Jews as celebrated by Irving Berlin in his song, God Bless America, while this year of 1913 was the inaugurating year of the Jewish Revolution.  Off on the right foot.  At this point in 1913 for the first time the Jews became influential in the US government.  In 1916 Wilson created the ‘Jewish seat’ on the Supreme Court when he appointed the confirmed Zionist, Louis D. Brandeis, to the bench.

     During the War the Jews played an ambiguous or perhaps duplicitous role.  So long as Czarist Russia was in the War they refused to support the Allies.  This refusal led the British to attempt to buy their cooperation with the Balfour Declaration involving Palestine.  This was unnecessary as  after the Spring Revolution the Mensheviks dethroned the Czar effectually taking Russia out of the War.  At the time of the October Revolution of the Bolsheviks the Jews threw their support to the Allies against Germany.  As they had no troops to offer one wonders what this support was worth.  Perhaps a cessation of sabotage?

     In the US the Socialistic Wilson administration used its window of opportunity to attempt to impose it version of ‘equality’ on the American people.  The key agency was the WIB- War Industries Board- headed by the Jewish financier- the bear of Wall Street- Bernard Baruch.

     I’m not sure that the ultimate or secret plans of Wilson have ever been revealed but Baruch in his autobiography drops a few helpful hints.  The plan depended on the continuance of the War so that when that ended prematurely in 1918 the plan was aborted.

     At that time Wilson, through the WIB had orders ready for execution that would have limited the styles of shoes and clothing to just three or four styles within a definite price so that everyone would be dressed alike without distinction.  Wilson deemed inequality to be based on differences in dress.  Obvious, hey.

     If you think the Liberals discarded the plan just because the war ended all you have to do to look around you today and observe everyone in jeans or sports outfits of one kind or another.  The plan is about seventy per cent or so implemented.  It was done through infiltration of the fashion industry.

     Most troublesome for the leaders of industry was that the WIB required all businesses to submit financial and other data to the WIB for their evaluation.  Most significantly a center of resistance came from the auto industry of Detroit.  Noting all the Jews on the board who essentially had the industrial base of the US in their hands the auto makers demurred.  Of course the Masters of Denial deny that Jews were that involved but if the matter was noted who are you going to believe the Jews or the auto makers?  One of the other must have it wrong.  I’m betting on the auto makers against the Masters of Denial.

     The resistance of Detroit would have consequences.  The Jews never forget.  Significantly Henry Ford was not in thrall to the Eastern bankers thus being independent.  Now, Henry Ford and the Dodge Brothers, accurately noting the number of Jews on the WIB correctly divined their purpose.  Remember, if the War had gone on for another year or two Wilson would have been able to complete the revolution in toto changing the American character in one stroke while Jews would have assumed the role of Commissars or the role they had enjoyed in pre-expulsion Spain, that of middlemen under the crown administering to the general populace.  This is the ultimate cultural dream.

page 2.

     Objecting vociferously to the Wilson plan some intemperate remarks concerning the nature of Jews were made by the Dodge Brothers allowing the administration to play the race card with AS for anti-Semite up there in the corners.  Both the Dodges subsequently died in mysterious circumstance in 1920 while a strenuous effort was made to destroy Ford by bringing his company under the control of the New York bankers, that is to say, the Jews.  Thus there was very little cranky about any of Ford’s supposedly eccentric beliefs.  Such a characterization is mere defamation by his enemies.  Failing to break Ford the anti-Semitic race card was played against him that resulted in his excommunication from society.  They haven’t been able to flush him out of history yet but that may be just a matter of time.  I wouldn’t be suprised to see the marque changed to something other than Ford.

     The Jewish culture shifted the onus from themselves to the ‘anti-Semites’ in a clever damage control move to exonerate themselves.  Internationally the damage controllers also shifted the onus from themselves to ‘anti-Semites.’

     The Liberals, continuing the Reconstruction policy, now set the Jews, Negroes and immigrants over what we may call the Conservatives precisely as they had set the Negroes over the Southern Whites during the Reconstruction after the Civil War.  This was extended to the international field where the Liberals self-righteously adopted an anti-colonial policy.  As European colonialism was equated with Southern slaveholding in Liberal minds they took the side of the colonials, that is to say the colored Third World peoples against the Europeans.  Thus as Charles De Gaulle despairingly noted that America while a White country behaved as though they were a colored or Third World country.  Europeans then were classed with the Southern Whites and Conservatives of the United States.

     The Jewish Culture continued the ultra self-righteousness based on their projection that they were an exceptional people chosen by god to administer the affairs of the people of the world.  Although patently absurd and scientifically impossible the Jews were able to impose this notion on both the Liberal and conservative religious cultures of the US.  Thus although the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith was organized in 1913 as a terrorist organization and the NAACP came into prominence as a terrorist organization as members of the Coalition these patently racist outfits were considered virtuous.

     On the other hand Nativist organizations in reaction such as the APA- American Protective Association- or the the KKK- Ku Klux Klan- were considered kranky or actually terrorist.  In reality there was no difference in intent between any of these organizations.  You may call them protective or terrorist as you wish but they all functioned with the same goal in mind but for different sides.  That intent was to intimidate all others into submission.

     These were cultural wars, in other words, Cold Wars, not shooting wars so the battles were for the control of the dissemination of information, opinion and institutions.  In this the Jews were particularly effective having a clear idea of their objectives effectively seizing control of the key publishing units, the film industry and the emerging radio-television industries.

     Thus the Jews in the US were uniquely positioned to implement Freud’s program of cultural domination.  Now, all of this was done in the light of day so that it was impossible for the program to pass unperceived.  A firestorm of indignation against the Jewish culture ensued after the Russian Revolution.  It might be noted here that culturalism is merely latter day nationalism.  Its defense is patriotism.  So let’s keep the meanings of the terms straight.  The damage controllmen went to work successfully silencing all opposition while censoring the entire media over the next few years except in Germany.

      I will here examine a few literary voices that saw the nature of things but in different ways.  One novel, three movies and one short story that was turned into a TV show.

page 3.

     The short story was by Charles Beaumont published in 1959 then made into a TV script for Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone.  In the TV script the time is set just after the Great War.  A traveler while staying at a monastery unintentionally releases Satan whom some monks were holding captive.  Among various possible interpretations one is that the Bolsheviks represented Satan.  An allegory was necessary as a more direct representation would never have been published as Edgar Rice Burroughs found to his chagrin in 1919.

     The horrors of Communism immediately presented themselves to that writer’s mind who quickly composed an anti-Communist polemic.  Politics was nothing new to Burroughs who sniped at various political affairs from the time he began writing.  About the time he took up his pen in 1912, the Socialist convention of that year took umbrage at the nascent IWW- Industrial Workers Of The World- booting them out of the congress.  The Socialists were led by Jews while the IWW, also known as Wobblies, were Americans of the true working class, the people the Socialists were supposed to represent.  Must have been a culture clash when American workers met European style Jewish intellectuals.

     Now, the Wobblies were the Real Thing compared to the Socialist ‘labor fakers.’  Under the leadership of Big Bill Haywood  the Wobblies took direct action in an attempt to shut down industry and bring the government to heel as the United States was entering the Great War.  These guys meant business.  Their role in this period as well as the whole period has been misrepresented and distorted by Liberal control of the media.

     Burroughs whose anti-Left attitude can be traced back to his boyhood cast the IWW as villains in several of his novels from 1915 to 1924.  Nothing was more natural than Burroughs pillorying the Bolsheviks.  As publishing was controlld by the Reds his effort came to nothing in 1919.  He rewrote the theme in his dystopian novel, The Moon Maid, that was published in 1926.

      The third and most interesting examination of the Red assault on civilization was made by the Jewish-German film maker, Fritz Lang.  While the notion of conspiracy is derided by the conspirators nothing can be more obvious than that events from 1913 through this period were not merely spontaneous.  I doubt if there ever has been a period of history that has not been directed by a cabal or any number of cabals and conspiracies.  Check out your own neighborhood.  You just don’t call them conspiracies, that’s all.  Even the Trojan war was a conspiracy headed by Agamemnon.  You don’t think Ulysses wasn’t coerced by the cabal do you?

     One can call anyone who disagrees with you, bigots or anti-Semites as Liberals do but that doesn’t change the facts.  There is no one group of people more sensitive to subterranean movements than artists.  Paranoia rightly channeled is a gift of the gods not a curse as Freud himself discovered.  He thought he succeeded where paranoiacs failed.  Does that say something?  Lang being himself a Jew from Austria might be expected to be a little more aware of what Freud was up to.  It might be interesting to check to see  if Lang was a member of B’nai B’rith.  Hitler himself was an Austrian who had lived in Vienna at the time Freudianism was being formulated while he was highly critical of  ‘Jewish psychology.’  Hitler was at least as intelligent and aware as either Freud or Lang.

     Lang first tried to land the directorship of the 1919 movie titled The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari.  Although silent this is a great film and great art.  As great art the movie must be allegorical.  As with Lang’s films there is a war being directed against civilization from a mysterious source.  Civilization is represented here as a fair or carnival, a common device of the artist.

     Dr. Caligari is some sort of showman who doubles as an agent of the conspiracy or is the ‘unknown superior.’  He is obviously intended to be Jewish as he has a Golem, a sort of Frankenstein’s monster, to carry out his dirty work.

     When he would be exposed by the injured party it turns out that Dr. Caligari is also the director of an insane asylum, in other words a psychoanalist not unlike Herr Doktor Freud.  In the denouement rather than he being exposed his accuser is committed to the insane asylum.  Obviously an ‘anti-Semite.’  An unexplained crime wave directed at civilization continues.  One believes that Dr. Caligari is responsible.

page 4

    Lang didn’t get to direct this picture but having fought for it he was familiar with the story line which had on influence on him if he, indeed, wasn’t part of this particular cabal.  He converted Dr. Caligari into Dr. Mabuse.  Dr. Mabuse was based on a novel by Norbert Jacques.  I haven’t read the novel so I can’t compare how Lang adapted the character for his uses. 

     While depicting a gambler, which in a way I suppose Freud was, Mabuse is nevertheless a psychologist and master hypnotizer not unlike Freud.  Like Caligari and Freud he is at war with civilization doing everything he can to undermine it.  In this case that favorite dodge of counterfeiting money is used.  He is able under cover of a gambler (one of many guises) to direct several people to destruction by his use of hypnotism.  It will be remembered that Freud was a master hypnotist.  In a stunning scene Mabuse, presenting his act on stage, mass hypnotizes the audience into believing they are seeing a parade not unlike the episode of the Lotharians in Burroughs’ Thuvia, Maid Of Mars.  In the end Mabuse is captured, but his ravings are such that unlike Caligari he himself is committed to an insane asylum.

     He, one imagines, pined there until 1932 when Lang chose to make his masterpiece and the first Mabuse sequel, The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse.  During the intervening several years Mabuse has been catatonic sitting up in his pajamas in bed saying and doing nothing.  And then one day he takes up his imaginary pen simulating writing on an imaginary pad.  The astute head of the asylum, one Dr. Baum, realizes what he is doing giving him a real pen and paper.

     The master criminal Mabuse/Freud then writes out his manifesto or testament for the destruction of civilization non-stop.  As a master hypnotist he is able through his writing to hypnotize and take control of Dr. Baum’s mind who then sets in motion an incredible series of crimes including the counterfeiting of money meant, naturally, to undermine civilization.

     Mabuse having delivered his testament dies.  His ghost then merges with Dr. Baum who becomes in effect Dr. Mabuse executing his Testament.  In the end Baum certifiably insane is incarcerated in Mabuse’s room with all his papers taking his place as head of the conspiracy.  One assumes that another will eventually replace Baum and once set in motion the plot will continue of its own accord, so to speak.

     So, we have a neat allegory of Freud’s goal of destroying civilization.   That Lang chose 1932 to revive the character would correspond neatly with the direction of Freud’s writing at the time which included his attack on Christianity ‘The Future Of An Illusion’ and Civilization And Its Discontents.  While Lang would later say that Mabuse was an attack on the National Socialists when the same character with the same goals was introduced in 1922 there was no National Socialist Movement of consequence to pin the crimes on.

     No.  Both films of Dr. Mabuse were about someone and something else.  The use of psychology points more directly to Freud than it does to Hitler.  How involved Lang was in the conspiracy I leave to your conjecture.  That he made a copy in French and that that French copy was smuggled into the US in 1943 when the Nazi defeat became not only apparent but certain would imply that he too was one so discontented with civilization that he wanted his blueprint for destruction brought to the attention of the American Communist cadres.  By 1943 Lang had been in the United States for about ten years.

     As a footnote Dr. Mabuse became a franchise with many sequels including one by Lang, The 1000 Faces Of Dr. Mabuse.  There is a Mabuse/Tarzan  connection.  The former Tarzan, Lex Barker, who spent the rest of his career making movies in Europe was involved in Mabuse sequels himself.  So, in that way Mabuse and Tarzan are connected.

     Freud’s intent then was divined by many people including Fritz Lang.

     The question then was how to go about undermining European Civilization.  Ostensibly the most ‘pacifistic’ culture in the world while having neither numbers, territory or means for a frontal attack, just in case the disaster of the Great War didn’t present an object lesson, Freud and his culture would have to use surreptitious or clandestine means, in other words, an international conspiracy.

page 5.

     Even on a cultural level Freud was shrewd enough to understand that a mere frontal attack on the cultural traditions would be met with stern resistance so that first the effort must be made to deconstruct the culture according to the desires and needs of the minority culture.  Freud was a master of reduction.

     One doesn’t know whether the signal failure of the Anglians in the South when they merely tried to impose their will on the Southern Whites influenced Freud or his culture but the failure was certainly an object lesson before them of what not to do.

     As I say the Coalition was already in possession of the publishing and news apparatus of the United States.  Through the Jews it controlled the movies and would control Radio.  Thus they controlled access to the media.  Only those writers who met their apporval stood a chance of being published.  As the Red slogan had it:  All things are permissible to Revolutionaries, all others are to be denied.  This while they availed themselves of the freedoms of the Constitution which they claimed to respect.

     While the older authors posed a problem the editorial function can be wielded in such a way that content can be substantially altered while publication of a novel might no longer be able to be taken for granted.

     Overnight, almost miraculously, the nature of the authorial community changed.  While the percentage of Jews and homosexuals was relatively small prewar, after the War non-Jews and heterosexuals seem to have lost the talent to write while Jews and homosexuals miraculously acquired it.  As the editors explained it:  All the best new writers seem to be of the Left.  Thus what people were allowed to read tended to shift their opinions from Right to Left.

     The Social Gospel was preached from the pulpit while college professors subtly rewarded Left thinking students while punishing those of the Right.  Of course it would take time to turn the universities into the Red seminaries they are today but from 1917 to the present is only ninety years.  Once can judge the indredients from the pudding so there is no reason for the Left to deny the results as they did the process for at least seventy of those ninety years.

     Make no mistake the Cold War began with the October Revolution of 1917.   It broke out into a shooting war only because the National Socialists refused to accept the Judaeo-Communist yoke.  It matters not what anyone else says, the reason for WWII was the German volkist refusal to accept Jewish volkism under the religious guise of Communism.  That the leaders of the resistance turned out to be Hitler and the National Socialists may be only coincidental.  They understood the problem and had the will to resist.  It was inevitable that there should be casualties but the extent of destruction was truly phenomenal.

     Only after WWII when the American Right had regrouped under cover of the War essentially exercizing a hegemony over Western Europe did the West acknowledge the Cold War.  The American resistance only solidified after the death of FDR when his less ideological successor Harry Truman took the helm.  What took place before FDR’s death was maneuvering in the Culture Wars.

     The maneuvering took many forms, all of which tended to undermine or destroy the existing culture.  While Jews and Liberals were the key elements in the Coalition each was in competition with the others to impose its culture as supreme.  You can read culture as nationalism by another name.  The contest was both temporal and spiritual.  While I am primarily concerned with the spiritual or culture aspect one may look at the temporal event of the Crash of ’29 and its resultant Depression as the work of the Liberal Coalition.

     While I’m sure there were many reasons for the Crash there were also many ways to make it worse than it need have been.  The restraints that were thrown off the Stock Market are worth investigating.  For instance it was at this time the Jews invented the Holding Company.  Now, I will not tolerate charges of anti-Semitism.  I attempt a scientific analysis of a religious culture, one of only a great many in the US, and refuse to kowtow to any cultural projection.  If Christianity which is a Semitic religion is thought to be ridiculous then how much more ridiculous must the other two Semitic religions, Judaism and Moslemism, be?  One must have at least a modicum of consistency.  So, as I say, the Jews, as an instrument of their particular cultural revolution invented the Holding Company.  A holding company owns a number of producing companies.  Therefore the value of the stock of a holding company is dependent on the dividends it receives from the producing companies.  If there are no dividends  the holding company has no source of income.  then the Jews invented Holding Companies of Holding Companies whose stock was based on value at all.  But these stocks were traded and purchased with bonafide capital.

     Now, when the market crashed if you owned your stock outright you may have taken big paper losses but you weren’t wiped out.  Your stocks still had considerable value.  If you bought on margin that is to say if you put a small amount down when your margin call came you couldn’t meet it and you were wiped out.  The Holding and Holding Holding companies were a total loss as it was all phony money.  And the bankers called Henry Ford a fool!

     I don’t know if a study has ever been done on winners and losers but a survey of those left standing might provide some interesting insights.

     But to return to culture.  The Freudian attack was primarily centered on sex, that is, the destruction of Euroamerican morality.  It is important to bear in mind that Freud was a despicable person, a master hypocrite.  He was a homosexual, Libertine and dope addict.  It should hardly come as a surprise that the ‘morality’ he wished to impose on civilization was precisely the morality of homosexuals, Libertines and drug addicts.

     The key to such morality is sex.  Western morality from the time of Homer was based on the control of sexual apetites or, at the very least, channeling sexual energy into productive habits.  The sexual story of Homer’s Odyssey is Odysseus’ conquest of his sexual nature.  First he resisted the wantonness of Circe, then the allure of the Sirens.  He stayed for some time with Calypso who was the most complaisant of females but who demanded his full attention and finally a vision of the peacful home before his return to Penelope.  Even then he immediately left his wife after taking twenty years to get back to continue his wanderings or his search for salvation, meaning or whatever.  The Roman Catholic Church reinforced these sexual attitudes.

     The ruling attitude then was what Freud wanted to overturn.  In the destruction of the goyim’s culture to be reconstructed on the Semitic cultural model was the most important step.  First the ‘prudish’ ‘Puritan’ attitude toward sex had to be dismantled.  Censorship of explicit sexual material had to be removed.  Hence a campaign ensued to impugn anyone who ‘didn’t appreciate the beauty of the nude human body.’  Sounds reasonable doesn’t it?  But what does it mean?  It means the legitimization of pornography.  ‘There shouldn’t be any shame connected with sex.’  The Freudians said.  Well, that’s an opinion not a fact.

     The first effort was to legitimize literary works of questionable morality or, at least, which contradicted the prevailing morality.  So, books such as Madame Bovary, Lady Chatterly’s Lover and James Joyce’s Ulysses were promoted as the highest form of literary attainment, whatever exactly that might be, rather than as salacious novels.  Literary,  well there’s a thought to be considered.  Eventually they were all legalized.  ‘They started out on Burgundy but soon hit the harder stuff.’  The standards of society had been breached.   Then came the Marquis de Sade whose ‘literary’ value was said to override his sadistic psychosexual content.  Literary, hmm?  From thence we passed through Esquire Magazine to Hugh Heffner’s Playboy.  The latter magazine opened the floodgates of pornography which of course legitimized homosexuality; but, Playboy published stories of the highest literary quality.  Literature, yup, but everyone looked at the dirty pictures.

     So that, as of today we have this peculiar, need I say disgusting, homosexual and Libertine sexual morality.  One judges the tree by its fruits.  What the Satan Freud cut loose which has come to fruition today must have been his intent.

     The driving wheel for this transformation was the film industry of Hollwood.  The very essence of the film is hypnotic suggestion.  While it is true that poetry and novels also serve as suggestion there is a great quantitative and qualitative difference.  One’s intellectual distance and guard are always present while reading while with movies the opposite is always true.  Since one could maintain distance in the silent era being always able to discuss the movies with others while viewing them without disturbing people the suggestive power of any film required the same degree of consent as ‘literature.’

page 7.

     This was not true with sound movies.  Talking was not tolerated as it disturbed concentration.  Thus the mind was left open in a hypnoid state to visual and audio stimulation.  What goes in the mind stays in the mind.  Nothing is forgotten.  During the thirties and forties suggestion was employed but without the effectiveness of the technical changes that began in the fifties.  Huge wrap around screens began to fill the entire visual field enveloping the viewer in the suggestion.  Huge, powerful surround sound speakers filled any void left by the screen.  The volume was overpowering, virtually blocking out critical attention, actually placing the viewer very deep into the hypnoid state, almost the same as the feeling of terror wherein the suggestion becomes implanted in the subconscious somewhat on the order of a fixation.  Then the movie going audience was being hypnotized without being aware of it.

     Realizing that young minds were somewhat more malleable than older ones movies were directed at the ‘critical audience of from twelve to twenty-five.’  this age group also has the most leisure for movies.  Yeah, I know there were good reasons to direct movies at the age group but I’m interested in the real reasons.

     As the Jewish culture had a near hammerlock on the making of movies it could control the content.  Thus while having to ‘pander’ to the dominant culture, especially in the thirties and forties, the Jewish culture could subtly condition the viewers to their own cultural goals.

     Naturally this had to be done openly if not obviously  so that there was always a sizable minority who understood what was being attempted; voices were raised in objection.  Once again the Jews and the Coalition denied this was so deriding any objections as anti-Semitism or in violation of the Constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech and conscience.  The dissidents allowed themselves to be silenced too easily although the charge of anti-Semite was and is indefensible.  Unless you just dismiss it as a joke like I do.

     Thus by the process of gradualism control was established so that no movie not passing a very strict Jewish censorship could be shown.  Christian movies depicting Jesus were absolutely forbidden hence the huge flap over the Mel Gibson movie led by the Jewish culture who, that’s right, denounced Gibson as an anti-Semite.   The key word here is culture, not individual Jews but the entire culture denounced Gibson.  That’s why they call them culture wars.    

     In the thirties and forties the studio heads abjured movies with Jewish themes even in some cases refusing to employ actors because they looked too Jewish.  That’s the legend anyway.  Gentlemen’s Agreement broke that taboo although the lead characters were all goys playing goys but posing as Jews.  Interesting ploy.  Elia Kazan directed.  During the fifties movies that Jews considered purely reflected Jewish culture although the goy audiences were too oblivious of the fact were successful.  Two big films of this genre were A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum and Cabaret.

     Gradually what Jews called ‘Christians’ were made the butt of the jokes while Jewish characters became heroes.  Then as in the Adam Sandler movies he as a Jew although it was never made clear he was acting as a Jew put down ‘Crhistian’ characters, treating them as buffoons and fools while abusing goy women who were portrayed as sex crazed sluts and bimbos.

     Of course criminal behavior and sleazy approaches were used to condition the viewers mind in the direction of Freudian criminal and sex crazed morality.  The ‘Christian’ family was always attacked, fidelity, honor and uprightness demeaned.

     This attack was paralleled by a similar attack made on TV and also significantly in recorded popular entertainment.  First Vinyl records and then more openly on CDs.  Thus the public mind was constantly bombarded by propaganda reflecting the desires and needs of the Jewish culture. 

     So that, if in 1918 you had stood up and said that it was the intent of Freud and the Jewish culture to hypnotize the entire American population they wouldn’t even have had to call you an anti-Semite to discredit you, you would have been laughed to scorn.  Yet here it is.  You are all hypnotized. Except for a small disregarded and vilified minority, a small body not unlike the excommunicated heretics of the Middle Ages, everyone has been conditioned to accept the value system of the Jewish culture.  Of course when you abandon control of your culture to another you can’t expect anything else.

     As a side excursion let us consider the field of pornography.

page 8.

3.

     Let me say that while I deplore the Jewish culture’s methods I vastly admire their chutzpah.  it is the same as the admiration I have for the great Midwestern bandits like Jesse James, the Youngers, the Daltons or Pretty Boy Floyd The Outlaw.  Well, let’s exclude Pretty Boy, he has a special place in my affections.  While their careers were based on a false premise yet there was a dauntless courage and actual justification for the Outlaws’ choice of means to redress their grievances.  While I am aware that it was necessary for society to terminate their careers in one way or another, still I have that secret admiration for their attempt.  So it is with the Jewish culture.  While I can’t endorse their ideals and feel their methods will always doom them to failure, much as those of the Outlaws did,  like the Western train and bank robbers there is something thrilling in the attempt.

     But the return to the question.  Freud in his essay ‘The Aitiology Of Hysteria’ which is certainly approriate here, said:  Collected Papers Vol. I, p. 194:

     Quote:

     (I) am prepared to let my belief outrun the evidential force of my discoveries for the present time.  Besides, I am influenced by another motive, which for the moment is merely subjective value.

     Unquote.

     I am not quite so ready to allow my beliefs to outrun my evidence nor am I willing to abandon objectivity as was the good Herr Doktor Professor Sigmund Freud.  No. No.  We must adhere more closely to our science than that.  While Freud doesn’t tell us what his subjective motives were I think I can guess.

     As a Libertine and homosexual Freud would have been a proponent of the distribution of pornography.  We have seen that Freud made advanced studies into the nature of emasculation.  Well, pornography is what emasculation is all about.  It seems certain that Freud misinterpreted the nature of the Anima following rather the lead of his friend Fliess, of nose fame, that there was an inherent bisexuality.  In other words in keeping with his homosexuality he believed that a man desired sexual relations with either men or women.  Any port in a storm, or even fair weather.

     In fact an affect of emasculation is the estrangement of the Animus from the Anima.  In the process of emasculation the Animus apparently has the understanding that the Anima failed in its duty therefore wishing to punish it.  Indulging his or her hatred then the homosexual is attracted to pornography with is attendant sadomasochism.  Indeed the mainstay of the pornography business is the homosexual by which I include Lesbians.

     In use then terms from individual psychology to group psychology the same Freudian rules apply.  Freud realized his own emasculation, probably that of the Jewish culture, and therefore sought to emasculate the Euroamerican culture in return.  We have seen through the media of movies, TV, radio and recordings how successful he was.    There is a French film entitled Dr. Petiot.  Dr. Petiot was a real person who realized his full potential under the Nazi occupation of France.  A bonafide psychotic as well as a physician Petiot lured those seeking to escape France to his home under the pretense that he would smuggle them out of France.  Instead he murdered them but before he did he mocked and ridiculed them deriving full enjoyment from their humiliation.

     Now, in the Winter 2004 edition of the European magazine The Jewish Quarterly an essay was published by a lecturer of American History at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland by the name of Nathan Abrams.  His bit is entitled Jews In The American Porn Industry.  What this essay shows is the divorcement of the cultural or group Animus from the Anima of the Jews.  This should come as no surprise because Semites in general suppress the role of women, or the Anima in favor of the Male Animus which is an expression of the Culture’s unhealthy Anima-Animus relationship.  Here Mr. Abrams mocks and ridicules Euroamerican civilization.

page 9.

     Mr. Abrams begins his essay thus:

     Quote:

     A story little told is that of Jews in Hollywood’s seedier cousin, the adult film  industry.  Perhaps we’d prefer to pretend that the ‘triple exthnics’ didn’t exist, but there’s no getting away from the fact that secular Jews have played (and still continue to play) a disproportiate role throughout the adult film industry in America.

     Jewish involvement in pornography has a long history in the United States as Jews have helped transform a fringe subculture into what has become a primary constituent of Americana.  These are the ‘true blue Jews.’

     Unquote.

     The most virulent anti-Semite couldn’t have expressed it more succinctly.  At the same time we have a cultural confession of emasculation.  I haven’t been able to discover the exact meaning of ‘triple-exthnic’ but the term is probably just another obfuscation  in terminology.

     While everyone has known of the Jewish role in the ‘sex industry’, where they are as over represented as they are in Hollywood itself, for a hundred years, only Jews have been permitted to write about it.  The goys have been so thoroughly emasculated in their turn that they would rather leave it alone than be denounced as anti-Semites thereby being excommunicated or thrust out of society so Mr. Abrams has the field to himself.  However one is free to criticize the content of the essay.

     When Mr. Abrams identifies pornography as the seedier cousin of the Hollywood film industry he tacitly admits that Hollywood itself is seedy to which conclusion I heartily assent.  All, or nearly all films, are pornographic in intent.  The only area in the world in which the production of pornography is legal is right here in these United States Of America and that place is within a twenty mile radius of Hollywood where you know who is over heavily represented.  Not American but Israeli, Jewish.  Hollywood is an Israeli colony in the United States.

     Mr. Abrams says that Jews have helped transform a ‘fringe subculture’- read criminal- into what has become a primary constituent of Americana.  Further he says that this legitmization of crime has been the work of the Jewish culture.  Mr. Abrams is projecting badly when he believes that pornography has anything to do with Americana, rather by his own admission he should say Judaica.  He further states that these pornographers are ‘true blue Jews.’  In other words, the best that Judaism has to offer.  If so, then the Jewish culture must be analyzed with this notion in mind.

     Pornography is essentially an extension of prostitution.  That is to say, the degradation and exploitation of the Anima, let alone women.  To keep the business running there must therefore be procurers and procuresses.  Men may volunteer but women by and large have to be dragooned.

     As an expression of emasculation one finds a disproportionate number of homosexual also involved which means sadomasochism and drugs.  Sadomasochism is an affect of emasculation.

Thus the seedier cousins of seedy Hollywood itself are governed by a psychotic state of mind.  In fact Hollywood movies are psychotic visions of a psychotic sadomasochistic projection on the world as examples of American culture or as Mr. Abrams would have it, Americana; quite falsely so.

     How far they represent other cultures than the Jewish is open to question.

page 10.

     Pornography was taken mainstream by the goy, Hugh Heffner, who developed this affect of a mental disease in the guise of Hedonism rather than Libertinism which is its true guise.  He was joined by the major ‘players’ Larry Flynt of Hustler Magazine and Bob Guccione of Penthouse Magazine.

     Although Jews had been instrumental in kicking down the doors of sexual censorship, most notably with the legitimization of Joyce’s Ulysses, it was Heffner beginning in 1953 who paved the way for the porn film industry which arose in the sixties.  In competition with Heffner, Flynt and Guccione constantly stretched the limits from Heffner’s Hedonism to outright pornography.  The three magazines above were sold openly across the counter which meant high grosses.  It should be noted that while tremendous effort was made in lifting censorship of obscene material at the same time the same effort was made to censor political and social thought by the same parties.

    The smut industry of peep shows and whatnot Mr. Abrams quite correctly identifies as being primarily Jewish.  Mr. Abrams then gets involved with the motivations of the smut peddlers.  As is consistent throughout Jewish writing he distinguishes between ‘secular’ Jews and ‘religious’ Jews as though they were two separate entities.  The distinction will undoubtedly confuse those who haven’t scientifically studied the culture.  In point of fact crime and prostitution had a significant hand in financing Jewish political activities from the beginning of the Revolution from 1913 and before to the present.

     The Revolution didn’t come free and it didn’t come cheap; there’s a price tag on everything and a very high price tag on this one.  On the financial and banking level it was fairly easy, the bankers just used other people’s money.  Loans are loans and expenditures are expenditures; loans have to be repaid while expenditures are cash out of hand.  So for expenditures the money came largely from vice.  One usually thinks of organized crime as Italian or Sicilian while in actuality the organizers were Jewish.  Enormous sums were raised by crime especially under the kingpins Arnold Rothstein and Lepke Buchalter.  But, lo and behold, when these men died the vast sums that passed through their hands which they could not possibly have spent were nowhere to be found.  To all intents and purposes these men died penniless.

     On the other hand men like Julius Rosenwald who became a principal of Sears, Roebuck contributed millions upon millions of dollars to Jewish ‘charities’, read- political organizations.  While there is no reason Rosenwald couldn’t have become rich from his position at Sears still the amounts of money he contributed seem well in excess of any possible earnings.  While Jewish criminals were donors to Jewish causes, and very welcome ones too, it seems probable that the money pouring into their coffers which, after all was a joint Jewish effort, may well have been funneled thrugh intermediaries like Rosenwald as a money laundering scheme.

     After all men like Rosenwald maintained magnificent establishments while making these contributions.

     The Liberal position from 1815 or so when Liberalism per se came into existence had always been that crime and prostitution were the result of the inequitable distribution of wealth.  Always on the qui vive for another utopia it was assumed that when the working class had its share crime and prostitution would disappear.

     For all practical purposes that particular utopia was realized in the United States.  Lo and behold, instead of crime and prostitution having disappeared they have prospered mightily.  Indeed, rather than being repulsed by this particular form of prostitution women have apparently embraced it.  Yes, as Mr. Abrams so quaintly puts it:  Once (women) had laid down, they could stand on their own two feet, particularly as female performers typically earn twice as much as their male counterparts.  Once they had laid down that is.  Good paying prostitution is still prostitution, but at least the girls were paid better than the boys.  I’d still rather be a boy in those circumstances.

     So, if not driven into prostitution by poverty it seems that women are lured into it by the pursuit of wealth or as Mr. Abrams insultingly puts it, in pursuit of the ‘American Dream.’

      Nor are these entrepreneurs of porn from poverty backgrounds.  Mr. Abrams proudly claims that these porn pros come from ‘upper class’ and prosperous Jewish families.  What motivations does Mr. Abrams attribute  to these Libertine criminals other than the pursuit of the buck.

     Mr. Abrams:  Porn is just one expression of [the] rebellion against standards, against the disciplined life of obedience to the Torah that marks a Jew living in Judaism.

     So, their rebellion is really culturally internal and has nothing to do with the mainstream culture.  They find Judaism too restricting.  Indeed, ‘America provided the freest society Jews had ever known.’ Adds Mr. Abrams.  Including his own Judaic culture one assumes.  One might think the Promised Land had been realized.  But, read the sentence carefully and it is made evident that the Jews still consider themselves strangers in a strange land but now they have the freedom to rage at all, even themselves.

     Quote:

     Extending the subversion thesis, Jewish involvement in the X-rated industry can be seen as a proverbial two fingers to the entire WASP establishment in America.  Some porn stars viewed themselves as front-line fighters in the spiritual battle between Christian America and secular humanism.  (read- the Jews)  According to Ford (Luke Ford) Jewish X-rated actors brag about their ‘joy in being anarchic sexual gadflies to the puritanical beast.’  Jewish involvement in porn by this argument is the result of an atavistic hatred of Christian authority:  They are trying to weaken the dominant culture in America by moral subversion.

     Unquote.

     Quite right.  While the revolution or 1913-28 has been extended that War still rages on.  Furthermore it is being waged on the terms laid down by Freud.  The Jewish culture permits even encourages these pornographers toward that goal.  One doesn’t really believe that a bunch of scum criminal pornographers were able to get a law passed legalizing their criminal behavior does one?  Of course one doesn’t.  Such a law could only be passed by very influential ostensibly respectable people of porn’s less seedy cousin.

     This area of legal pornography is Hollywood.  Whether fronted by goys or not Jewish moguls passed this law.  Are they taking a rake-off as a reward for providing the pornographers a legal sanctuary of are they sleeping partners of the pornographers or has it made it possible to release such racist pornographic filth as Shadow Boxing as legitimate entertainment in mainstream theatres.  Gosh, let me think long and hard on that one.

     So , we have the results so far of Freud’s psychological program for the conquest of Euroamerica.  Of course along the way his program would be reinforced.  Here’s Mr. Abrams again:\

     Quote:

     Those at the forefront of the movement which forced America to adopt a more liberal view of sex were Jewish.  Jews were also at the vanguard of the sexual revolution of the 1960s.  Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, and Paul Goodman replaced Marx, Trotsky and Lenin as required reading.  Reich’s central preoccupations were work, love and sex, while Marcuse prophesied that a socialist utopia would free individuals to achieve sexual satisfaction.  Goodman wrote of the ‘beautiful cultural consequence’ that would follow on legalizing pornography.  It would ‘ennoble all our art’; ‘humanize sexuality.’

     Unquote.

     I’d put those statements in quotation marks too.  These writers might be considered the second wave after Freud to refreshen the program and keep it moving forward.  There is a particular reason why these writers should have been published and lauded over others and it isn’t literary value.  As we will see in the next section, when a book was to be promoted a cadre of boomers ran through the universities and cities touting this stuff.

     Thus this very powerful organization was very effective.  The effectiveness was made total when any who objected could be isolated and harassed by teams of damage controlmen.  Not only could an individual be silenced and marginalized by a whispered imputation of ‘anti-Semitism’ but the entire population could be emasculated by the same charge.

     Freud then had devised the means to emasculate the hundreds of millions of Euroamericans and that purely by their own acquiescence.  Rather than be known as anti-Semites they willingly abandoned their sexuality.  This abandonment was conditioned and reinforced by the entire media of the land.  Most especially Hollywood.

page 12.

     Do not think I condemn the Jewish culture, or nationality in fact, for this fait accompli.  On the contrary I applaud it.  Imagine this atavistic religious consciousness projecting a state of ignorance over the most enlightened population on the planet.  Think about it.  It stuns one to silence.  This achievement is so amazing it leaves one standing with mouth gaping.  If the entire Euroamerican population is willing to voluntarily surrender not only their intelligence but their manly and womanly sexuality to another culture why should the receiving culture be blamed?  No force was used.  Only psychological manipulation that any fool could have seen and easily rejected.

     Further, just like Dr. Petiot with his victims, the Jewish culture humiliates its slaves via the media.  I have pointed out Adam Sandler movies where he plays a vacuous nerd who triumphs over athletic men and humiliates nubile women.  If the past is any guide to the future one can look forward to a gulag system where opponents are mass executed.

     I can say no more on the topic here.  Suffice it to say that on the sexual level Edgar Rice Burroughs’ America hs been deconstructed per Sigmund Freud’s plan and reconstructed to the complete advantage of the Jewish culture and to the complete disadvantage of the Euroamerican culture.  All it took, and this the most astonishing fact of all, was a little chutzpah.

     All credit belongs to the Jewish culture and I say that to the shame of my own.