Edgar Rice Burroughs Vs. The Comic Book Superheroes
September 20, 2011
EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS VS. THE COMIC BOOK HEROES
by
R.E. Prindle
Adventures In The Unconscious
In the attempt to put together a historical puzzle the missing piece or pieces, the clarifying pieces, appear from time to time. Thus with the release of the movie, Captain America this year a significant piece of the puzzle falls into place that clarifies the role of Edgar Rice Burroughs and his literary creations in the panorama of the twentieth century- the fabulous twentieth century.
It is difficult today to conceive of how the early twentieth century was perceived as a complete break with the Victorian nineteenth. One only has to compare the streamlined Santa Fe Chief in this picture alongside a nineteenth century locomotive to see how the Twentieth Century was perceived as the century of absolute exciting progress. The time certainly justified General Electric’s motto: Progress is our most important product.
Twentieth Century Unlimitied. Santa Fe Super Chief Alongside Nineteenth Century Locomotive- San Diego Calif. Back when the future was something to look forward to.
Burroughs role in this fabulous century is essentially the story of how Edgar Rice Burroughs created the concept of the super hero on the cusp of the emergent movie and comic book industries. It is in the latter two industries that the super hero found his definition.
Photographing The Past- Edgar Rice Burroughs
Just as in the days of yore mankind projected its needs in the psychological projection of Gods so the twentieth century saw the beginning of the demise of the old gods and the birth of the new. While the creators of the Old Gods have disappeared into the mists of time, and there must have been human creators of the Gods, the creators of the new gods can be easily traced.
The predecessors of the Superheroes can be found in the rise of the mega intellects of the nineteenth century detectives such as Monsieur LeCoq, Sherlock Holmes and arch fiends such as Dr. Moriarty and the French Fantomas. Influenced by such as these Edgar Rice Burroughs created the actual prototypes of the mid-century superheroes in the characters of John Carter of Mars and Tarzan The Ape Man. While John Carter is less well known than Tarzan, who became a household word within a half dozen years of his creation, Carter truly had super human powers having been transported from the higher gravity of Earth to the lower gravitational field of Mars, or Barsoom, as Burroughs renamed the planet.
While not able to leap over tall buildings his saltational powers functioned at a level of efficiency unattained by any other Barsoomian. For a decade or so Burroughs had the superhero field to himself while his lessons sunk in to the minds of those following him.
The Shadow Knows
The two most significant men of extraordinary if not super human powers to follow Tarzan and John Carter were Maxwell Grant’s superb character, The Shadow and Lester Dent’s Doc Savage. Preceding the comic book character Superman by a few years Doc Savage was actually advertised as a superman, undoubtedly in reference to Nietzsche.
Then in the early thirties in addition to movies, in which Tarzan was a stellar attraction, the modern comic book or magazine came into existence. Of course newspaper comic strips had been developing from the turn of the century but the actual comic book was a development of the thirties.
As fate would have it the comic book industry like the movie industry became a province of the Jews.
Doc Savage- The Man Of Bronze And Crew
Thus two streams of influence formed comic book heroes. On the one hand the Jewish writers and cartoonists were influenced by John Carter, Tarzan, The Shadow, and Doc Savage and on the other by a fifteenth century Jewish super creature known as the Golem. This was a creature fashioned from clay, as per Adam of the Old Testament, by a Prague Rabbi named Loewe who breathed life into his creation as God had breathed life into Adam. The Golem was created to wreak vengeance on Jewish victims as a sort of avenger as would be the status and role of the latter day Jewish superheroes of the comic books.
First out of the box in 1938 was the prototype of the rest of the comic book heroes, Superman. Like Burroughs with his creations the two Jewish creators built Superman’s origins from the Biblical story of the Exodus. Tarzan of course was born to noble English parents in Darkest Africa who then died or were killed by the Great Apes while the she ape, Kala, snatched him from the cradle and raised him as an ape.
Superman was born of noble parents on the planet Krypton which was about to be destroyed, and sent on a rocket ship to Earth while his parents died. On Earth he was raised by kindly goy Earth people. Thus we have two different versions of Moses in the bullrushes. Superman, then, combined John Carter and Tarzan.
Superman was a good thing in commercial terms being the equivalent of a literary best seller. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery so that while Superman imitated Burroughs’ great characters a host of comic book superheroes soon trod in Superman’s footsteps. Next in 1939 there was Batman, probably the most successful of the Jewish superheroes, and then in 1940 the temporarily successful Captain America, really the product of WWII, losing his popularity with the end of the war. The most successful of all the superheroes was the strange goyish creation, Capt. Marvel but he doesn’t concern us here.
2.
From Out Of The Unconscious Depths
The above is very interesting I’m sure but what significance does it have; what is its meaning; what is going on? Well, the back story is very interesting indeed. One must remember that our lives are not lived in a social vacuum of unrelated incidents. All is part of a continuum that does not just happen but is created by the participants. All is a drive to attain a desire. The question is who are the participants? As has already been indicated, the Jews and the Gentiles or goyim. From what do those desires arise? Suggestion. Suggestions having been received, when a body of suggestions have been ingested, our minds begin to digest those suggestions. One then interprets the suggested reality according to one’s temperament which itself has been built on a body of suggestions.
All society is education, indoctrination and conditioning, in other words hypnotic suggestion. Burroughs was born in 1875 as the scientific revolution was in an advanced stage of development; by 1893 when Burroughs was seventeen the whole of human knowledge and scientific advances was put on exhibition at the Chicago Columbian Exposition. The Expo was probably the high water mark in Western Civilization or, at least, its confidence in itself. The Expo was an unparalleled achievement of human endeavor far surpassing all expos of the nineteenth century with the possible exception of the 1851 London Exposition. Interestingly both were burned to the ground by anti-civilization elements. The Columbian Expo of 1893 was the most powerful element of Burroughs’ education.
Shortly before the boy’s birth in 1875 the character of immigration changed. In 1871 Jews from the eastern European Pale of Settlement began to flood the country until in 1914 possibly half of European Jewry had been transferred to the United States. The great immigration myth is that the immigrants were assimilated into the ‘Melting Pot’ of the United States; nothing could be further from the truth. The immigrants merely transferred their national cultures to the United States where because they were compelled to speak English it appeared that they had been assimilated. In reality the immigrants came to the sparsely populated United States where they established an outremer population on the New Island as the Irish had it, a new Sicily, a new Zion etc. They came in such numbers that they actually were colonists. The old cultures were merely adapted to the new realities and developed along side the Native peoples.
These alien or invading cultures then shaped the development of the United States in their image as much as possible. Thus they were able to blame their cultural shortcomings on ‘America’ while emphasizing their virtues as their own. Hence ‘America’ developed into a sort of dirty word, a catchall for the crimes of the immigrant cultures. This state of affairs was masked until the Great War when the social conflicts came into the open and were immediately subsumed into the Communist ideology after 1917.
Young Burroughs observed this immigration phenomenon or suggestion with misgivings associating himself with Nativist views although he remained independent to our knowledge of association with Nativist organizations. Thus while interpretations of these social suggestions are found through out his early writings the conflict didn’t come to a head until after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in what became the USSR as Russia disappeared from the map. With all the national dissidents operating under the rubric of Communism the world was divided into us and them- ostensibly Communism and Capitalism. The dichotomy was created by the Communists. However each national culture could function with representatives in each camp while furthering their parochial objectives.
It was a new world the morning after the Bolshevik Revolution. Burroughs immediately came into collision with the new realities. As this new world was us and them it was possible to hate Communism while retaining virtue in the Capitalist camp. However one couldn’t detest national, religious or racial components even though they may have been Communists. As Communists always denied being Communists one was always dealing with cultural groups that dissembled their Communism.
When Burroughs began his career in literature even as he wrote the movies began to assume a transcendent place in US and world culture. By the end of the second decade it was evident that movies were where the big money was. That’s when Burroughs’ troubles began.
He quickly ran afoul of the Communists who controlled publishing and the Jews who controlled the movies. The Communists wished to suppress all non-Communist writers who refused to put out the Communist message. The Jews wished to discourage all criticism of their activities. Burroughs was marked out as one to be destroyed.
Rabbi Silver- A History Of Messianic Speculation In Israel, 1927
Behind the Communist outrage and obscured by it was the Jewish attempt to realize the Messianic age which assault was begun in Europe and the United States in 1913 and was to continue to 1928 according to Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver. While the assault was violent in Europe emanating from the transformation of Russia to the USSR, in the United States it was more peaceable after the violent year of 1919 while being conducted on a propagandistic and social level buttressed by the doctrines of Sigmund Freud as executed by his nephew and disciple Edward L. Bernays and others. You should become acquainted with Edward Bernays if you aren’t already.
Among the first of these propagandistic efforts was the promulgation of a ‘Jewish Bill Of Rights.’ This document along with a questionnaire was sent to the prominent men and women of America to discover their ‘anti-Semitic’ propensities. Burroughs failed this test so that he was black balled in Hollywood after 1922. The blacklist was broken by Joseph Kennedy and his FBO Studios in 1928. MGM then stepped in with a different approach from blacklisting. They bought the movie rights to Tarzan from Burroughs for much less than a song. Burroughs then was essentially neutralized in 1931 while MGM acquired the supreme super hero Tarzan to shape or mishape as they pleased. Within a few years there were not many who remembered that there was a literary Tarzan. My amazement when I learned there were Tarzan books when I was twelve in 1950 was a revelation of the first order.
The movies were able, of course, to shape all the goy literary heroes from Frankenstein to Sherlock Holmes into their own intellectual mold from then into the present while comic books added Jewish superheroes to displace them.
3.
Tired Old Man- Easy To Manipulate
The planned Jewish revolution hadn’t succeeded by 1928 but the groundwork had been laid leaving the future promising and open. While in the US the Jews were able to sweep all opposition aside even to the extent of putting their creature, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, into the White House for an unprecedented four terms, in Europe unexpected opposition occurred when Wolf Hitler was elected chancellor of German in 1933. While having their creatures Joseph Stalin as Premier of the USSR and FDR in the USA with Popular Front governments if office throughout Europe with the exception of Germany, Italy and Spain, the Jews seemed to be in a position to realize their millennium.
Indoctrination and conditioning was still important in the US thus when sound movies were introduced at the very end of the twenties and the comic book in the early thirties the Jews had two of the most powerful propaganda tools available under their ownership and control.
Their need in the thirties was to isolate and marginalize the Nativist opposition. This would be achieved in the forties wartime conditions when FDR had the prominent Nativists arrested and charged with sedition. At that point the Jews had succeeded in capturing the government and mind of the country although a long mopping up process would be necessary into the fifties and sixties. Thus while Wolf Hitler rounded up Jews in Europe, Jews were rounding up Nativists Americans in the US while advising any dissidents to keep their heads low.
The movies and comic books would play a big role in indoctrinating Americans to believe that the Nativists were Fascists and/or Nazis and not true Americans. It was at this time that Edward L. Bernays succeeded in changing the definition of Democracy from that of individual opportunity to recognition of groups having rights to a share of government based on group identity rather than individual identity. This would be a key concept as the century developed.
4.
After the Bolshevik Revolution the American reaction to Communism was strongly against it. The Communist Party was even outlawed for a time until the Fellow Travelers and Parlor Pinks had the ban lifted. The silent movies of the twenties then were not heavily influenced by the Reds although as indicated the Tarzan movies of Edgar Rice Burroughs were blacklisted. By the thirties the Reds were better organized while with the arrival of sound playwrights capable of producing dialog were needed. The Red exodus to Hollywood began.
The US Communist Party as with all national Communist Parties, was a majority or plurality Jewish affair to the point where an attack on one was an attack on the other. Thus as the thirties advanced the drum roll for US involvement in a war against the Nazis began. This would involve the formation in the US of an opposition led by the America First Committee which was opposed to any involvement in foreign wars as a reaction. As this was opposed to Jewish wishes the America First Committee was designated as Fascist while its putative leader, Charles Lindbergh was designated Hitler’s stooge.
Samuel Dickstein- Congressman From Hell
In order to discredit the opposition, no sooner was FDR sworn in than Samuel Dickstein, a Jewish representative from New York, began to agitate for a House Un-American Activities Committee to stamp out Nativist opposition. As Dickstein was a Soviet agent this meant that the Nativist opposition was un-American while the Jewish Roosevelt government were the true Americans. So, the Jews were well on the way to usurping the American identity which the comic book superheroes represented. Dickstein was successful in establishing his HUAC committee in 1938 but the chair eluded him and went to a real American, Martin Dies of Texas, who then used the committee to harass Communists as well as ‘Fascists’ much to the dismay of Dickstein and FDR.
Hollywood in support of Dickstein began turning out anti-German movies and by implication anti-Nativist well in advance of American involvement in 1942. Involvement in the European conflict was of course brought about by forcing Japan to declare war on the US in late ‘41.
The comic book industry forming about 1932 was becoming real by 1938 when the two Jews from Cleveland devised their Golem character Superman followed by Batman and Captain America. The comic book heroes fell in with the anti-German propaganda. If the Jews, British and FDR were not yet openly promoting the war against Germany the tendency was well formed in that direction.
All those comics were openly anti- German with Capt. America socking Hitler on the cover of the first issue. Capt. America was a creation of two Jews from Brooklyn, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. To quote the Rabbi Simcha Weinstein from his book Up, Up, And Oy Vey!: How Jewish Culture And Values Shaped The Comic Book Superhero:
Rabbi Simcha Weinstein
Kirby and his partner, Joe Simon, worked at Martin Goodman’s Timely Comics, where the mostly Jewish staff openly despised Hitler. When Goodman saw the preliminary sketches for Captain America, he immediately gave Kirby and Simon their own comic book. The character was an instant hit, selling almost one million copies an issue. “The U.S. hadn’t yet entered the war when Jack and I did Captain America, so maybe he was our way of lashing out at the Nazi menace. Evidently, Captain America symbolized the American people’s sentiments. When we were producing Captain America we were outselling Batman, Superman and all the others.” Simon later commented.
Well, not quite all the others, as Whiz Comics Captain Marvel was the best selling comic of both the war years and later forties. Certainly my favorite. As in the years before the war the America First Committee enjoyed overwhelming popularity amongst ‘Americans’ I would question Simon’s notion that Captain America overwhelmingly represented American opinion. As there were six million Jewish ‘Americans’ in the country I might suggest that the response from that culture of ‘Americans’ was more overwhelming than elsewhere. Jews might easily have accounted for sixty to eighty percent of sales.
It is also probable that no real American would ever have invented a corny jingoistic persona like Captain America, in fact, none did. The image was certainly repulsive to me as a child. My prime comic reading years were from 1947 to 1950 and I and my entire generation rejected Captain America while embracing Captain Marvel. Even then Superman was a distant competitor to Captain Marvel which is why DC comics sued Whiz for copyright violation.
Rabbi Simcha Weinstein- The Story Of Jewish Comic Books.
All the Jewish comics were openly anti-German, thus the FDR administration, the movies and comic books were fighting for the Jewish ‘good war.’ When Charles Lindbergh pointed this out he was immediately portrayed as an agent of the Nazis whereas he was merely telling the truth while being an ideal American. Philip Roth in his 2004 novel, The Plot Against America, recounts the Jewish atmosphere of the time while he postulates that Lindbergh was elected president in 1940 as a satrap of Hitler. Thus the Jews became the real Americans and the real Americans were totalitarians out to destroy the Democracy the Jews had created.
In his essay in the New York Times of 9/19/04 titled: The Story Behind The Plot Against America Roth says that he is recreating America as it really was in 1940 but that is not so. As Roth lived in a New Jersey Jewish colony he and his family was out of touch with the real America as his fictional brother who had gone to Kentucky tries to tell him.
In fact in the America of the time in which Samuel Dickstein was an evil presence the American Jewish Committee and The Anti Defamation League were paramilitary organizations conducting spying operations against the non-Jewish public. Numerous agents unaffiliated with any government agency crisscrossed society looking for any activity that might be considered against Jewish interests. These forays were gathered together in 1943 under the assumed name of John Roy Carlson and published as an indictment against Jewish ‘enemies.’ Many of them were arrested and tried as ‘un-Americans in 1944. So, Roth’s paranoia is at best unbalanced.
Roth says the idea of Lindbergh’s having been elected occured to him while reading Arthur Schlesinger’s autobiography:
I came upon a sentence in which Schlesinger notes that there were some Republican isolationists who wanted to run Lindbergh for president in 1940. That’s all there was, that one sentence with its reference to Lindbergh and to a fact about him I’d not known. It made me think, “What if they had?” and I wrote the question in the margin.
While this may be how Roth came upon the notion his was not the first such idea. As Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner in their Radical Hollywood of 2002 point out, Donald Ogden Stewart in his script for 1943’s Keeper Of The Flame, Charles Lindbergh is posited as a plotter of a coup to replace FDR in alliance with Hitler. This would have been propaganda to indict Lindbergh for the upcoming trial of the Nativists. I don’t know whether Roth saw the movie as a boy but if he did perhaps the idea festered in his brain for several decades until he was reminded by Schlesinger’s book while his mind was half prepared.
So the actual plot of the Jews to take over the American government was displaced to Lindbergh and the Nativists. The Jewish coup was represented in the comic book character of Captain America. This situation is made clear in the current (2011) movie Capt. America: The First Avenger. Thus Philip Roth and Stan Lee of the comics recapitulate and clarify Jewish activities in the 1933-43 era. Captain America is actually Jewish assuming an ultimate American identity.
The origins of Captain America then emanated from the Jewish dream subconscious of Jack Kirby which was quite different form real Americans. He therefore, as all writers must, made Capt. America in his comic book existence from his own dream fantasies. Thus giving his creation the goy name of Steve Rogers he nevertheless gave him a Brooklyn Jewish origin. As Rabbi Weinstein also a Brooklyn Jew explains, Jews have a sort of dual identity as powerless Jews posing as goys in a powerful goy world. Thus the sickly ineffective Rogers undergoes a scientific experiment that turns him essentially from a 98 lb. weakling into an all powerful goy Charles Atlas without the hard work of body building. I’m sure Kirby saw those ads growing up.
Rogers having now been turned into a Superman had to have a name. Superman being taken Super Jew was out for obvious reasons, or even Super Hebrew, there was no Israel at the time, so Kirby settled on Captain America. Rabbi Weinstein again:
Of course a more literal reading of the costume is that it is the American flag brought to life. Captain America’s star is, after all, five pointed, not six pointed like the Star of David. The flag-as-costume [this is what used to make we boys puke] notion reinforces the ideal of assimilation [Jews ‘becoming’ Americans.] By literally cloaking their character in patriotism, Kirby and Simon became true Americans.
In 1940 there was a desperate struggle going on between the Jews and America First who the Jews styled as American Fascists, I.e. actual Hitlerites. By that line of reasoning the Jews became the true Americans, creators and protectors of genuine American Democracy while Anglo-Americans or Native Americans or America Firsters were out to destroy the great American Dream the Jews had created. This is the theme of Philip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America backdated to this period. The current movie Captain America could easily be subtitled The Plot Against America Foiled.
Rabbi Weinstein again:
Despite the patriotic appearance, Captain America’s costume also denotes deeply rooted [Jewish] tradition. Along with other Jewish-penned superheroes, Captain America was in part an allusion to the golem, the legendary creature said to have been constructed by the sixteenth century mystic Rabbi Judah Loew to defend the Jews of medieval Prague. “The golem was pretty much the precursor of the Superhero in that in every society there is a need for mythological characters, wish fulfillment. And the wish fulfillment in the Jewish case of the hero would be someone who could protect us. This kind of storytelling seems to dominate in Jewish culture,” commented Will Eisner.
According to tradition a golem is sustained by inscribing the Hebrew word emet (truth) upon its forehead. When the first letter is removed, leaving the word met (death) the golem will be destroyed. Emet is spelled with the letters aleph, rem and tav. The first letter, aleph, is also the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, the equivalent of the letter A. Captain America wears a mask with a white A on his forehead- the very letter needed to empower the golem.
I hope this makes clear that Superman, Batman and Captain America are Jewish in identity and what their purpose is in American society.
5.
Having created a competing line of Jewish superheroes the problem then became how to discredit and supplant the goy super heroes. As should be clear by now what we have going on is a religious war but fought by propagandistic means. In other words the battle field was literature, comic books and the movies. As in all religious conflicts the goal is to displace the religious icons of the other; thus, in early Christian times churches were built on the sites of pagan temples while sacred groves were cut down. Nothing has changed; nothing can change. The Jewish goal was the elimination of ‘Christian’ or goy symbols.
Capt. Marvel was gotten rid of in 1953 when the Jews sued him out of his cape. As I’ve pointed out in my review of Tarzan And The Lion Man, parts 8,9.10, a key text in this colossal battle, MGM attempted to destroy the character as well as Burroughs when they bought movie rights to Tarzan in 1931. They got his birthright for a mess of pottage. It may be coincidental but in 1942 after the success of the Jewish comic book super heroes MGM discarded their lucrative rights to Tarzan to movie maker Sol Lesser presumably as worthless or, at least, of no more interest to them. Of course Lesser continued the franchise with phenomenal success. This necessitated a continued campaign to debase the character continuing today. At the same time that Tarzan is debased the Jewish characters, Capt. America is now one of a group of four ‘Avengers’, hence the double entendre of ‘The First Avenger’, who are increasingly Judaisized, while presented in a positive way in the attempt to marginalize Tarzan.
Now, some seventy years after the demise of the man, the continued demonization of Wolf Hitler is becoming less relevant, even annoying if you’re not Jewish, so in Capt. America Wolf Hitler is demoted to an incompetent dead threat while the scepter is passed to the mega Nazi/anti-Semite recreated in the mental projection of Red Skull or the Hydra. The mythical symbol of the Hydra is well chosen to represent anti-Semitism as no matter how many heads you cut off another one, two or three grow back. The threat never ends and the paranoia is justified.
Thus in the Freudian sense Jews have a dual personality: on the one hand you have the ineffective completely innocent assumed goy persona of Steve Rogers, who is the equivalent of Abel, the Chosen one and the crazed madman Hydra who is a projection of the negative aspects of the Jewish character imposed on the other as the anti-Semite. Thus the Jewish character is always at war with itself in the Freudian sense and hence never successful in its aims.
Captain Marvel And Billy Batson
A Review: Part III Tarzan And The Madman by Edgar Rice Burroughs
October 13, 2010
The Aquarian Archetype
The Renowned Arab Traveler- Mohammed Ibn Batuta
Writing in the fourteenth century Ibn Batuta had visited the East African coast trodding the soil of Kilwa Island on the southern border of Tanganyika, now Tanzania. Zanzibar replaced Kilwa as the Moslem trading entropot on the East Coast. Haggard apparently had done the same as he mentions ruins that dated back to before the tenth century. So, we have established commercial activity in Southern Africa before the arrival of the Shona people in Zimbabwe.
Ruiz stood behind a low, stone altar which appeared to have been painted a rusty brown red.For a long time Ruiz the high priest held the center of the stage. The rites where evidently of a religious nature that went on interminably. Three times Ruiz burned powder upon the altar. From the awful stench Sandra judged the powder must have consisted mostly of hair. The assemblage intoned a chant to the weird accompaniment of heathenish tom toms. The high priest occasionally made the sign of the cross, but it seemed obvious to Sandra that she had become the goddess of a bastard religion which bore no relationship to Christianity beyond the symbolism of the cross, which was evidently quite meaningless to the high priest and his followers.She heard mentioned several times Kibuka, the war god; and Walumbe the god of death, was often supplicated, while Mizimo departed spirits, held a prominent place in the chant and the progress. It was evidently a very primitive form of heathenish worship from which voodooism is derived.
Looking up, she saw a dozen naked dancing girls enter the apartment, and behind them two soldiers dragging a screaming Negro girl of about thirteen. Now the audience was alert, necks craned and every eye centered upon the child. The tom-toms beat out a wild cadence. The dancers, leaping, bending, whirling, approached the altar; and while they danced the soldiers lifted the still screaming girl and held her face up, upon its stained brown surface.The high priest made passes with his hands above the victim, the while he intoned some senseless gibberish. The child’s screams had been reduced to moaning sobs, as Ruiz drew a knife from beneath his robe. Sandra leaned forward in her throne-chair, clutching the arms, her wide eyes straining at the horrid sight below her.A deathly stillness fell upon the room broken only by the choking sobs of the girl. Ruiz’s knife flashed for an instant above his victim; and then the point was punged into her heart. Quickly he cut the throat and dabbing his hands in the spurting blood sprinkled it upon the audience, which surged forward to receive it…
“Well, what of it?’ demanded da Gama. “I am king. Do I not sit on a level with God and his goddess? I am as holy as they. I am a god as well as a king; and the gods can do no wrong.”“Rubbish!” exclaime the high priest. “You know a well as I do that the man is not a god, and the woman no goddess. Fate sent the man down from the skies- I don’t know how; but I’m sure he’s as mortal as you or I; then you get the idea that by controlling him you could control the country. You were jealous of me that’s all; then you get the idea that by controlling him you could control the church, for you know that who controls the church controls the country. You were jealous of me that’s all; then you conceived the idea of having a goddess, too, which you thought might double your power. Well, you have them; but they’re going to be just as useful to me as they are to you. Already, the people believe in them, and if I should go to them and say that you had harmed the god, they would tear you to pieces…”
“…you don’t stand any too well with the people, Chris, anyway; and there are plenty of them who think da Serra would make a better king.”“Sh-h-h,” cautioned da Gama. “Don’t talk so loud. Somebody may overhear you. But let’s not quarrel, Pedro. Our interests are identical. If Osorio da Serra becomes king of Alemtejo, Pedro Ruiz will die mysteriously; and Quesada the priest will become high priest. He might become high priest while I am king.”
“You should know,” he said. “You are a woman.”“I am not a mortal woman. I am a goddess.” She grasped at a straw.Rateng laughed at her. “There is no god but Allah.”“If you harm me you will die.” she threatened.“You are an infidel,” said Rateng, “and for every infidel I kill, I shall have greater honor in heaven.”
Edgar Rice Burroughs On Mars
November 16, 2008
Edgar Rice Burroughs On Mars
by
R.E. Prindle
ERB scholars have long noted that the entire corpus of novels reads almost as one long book. I believe this is because ERB records his life in his novels. If one reads the novels in the sequence in which they were written and if one understands the symbolism used by Burroughs against a background of what’s happening in his life ERB actually records his mental state of the moment.
In this essay I am going to concentrate on a role of John Carter in the Mars series and that of Ulysses Paxton in the Mastermind Of Mars.
In real life before ERB began writing he was powerless on earth. I would call him an abject failure but even though he appeared one he was only on the verge of being one and if his attempt at a writing career in 1911 had failed he would have been plunged into the abyss.
As he was a failure or at least an unfulfilled seeker in 1911 he makes John Carter into a mold he admired, that of a Virginian and a soldier who was seeking his post-Civil War fortune in the deserts of the Southwest. Carter, whose initials are JC, actually finds his gold mine but attacked by Indians he escapes death by transporting himself to Mars.
Mars has a lesser gravity than Earth so on Mars he has superhuman powers. Thus unable to realize any of his ambitions on Earth ERB transports himself in his imagination to Mars as the Superman, John Carter.
Amazingly the idea struck a responsive chord in his soon to be Editor at Munsey’s, Metcalf, who bought the story. It doesn’t matter for how much, the point is it validated ERB’s lofty opinion of his destiny. Fortified by this response he brought himself down to Earth in the fantastic form of Tarzan Of The Apes in an imaginary Africa. Here was the gold mine he as John Carter was seeking. There was no one, no Indians, to drive him off so he was off to the races.
The first rush carried him through the line into 1920 when he left Chicago behind and fled to Los Angeles.
In LA his careless financial habits soon led him into hot water virtually bankrupting him but definitely stripping him of his assets. By 1926 when he wrote The Mastermind Of Mars he was virtually financially prostrate.
The hero of Mastermind is Ulysses Paxton. Ulysses can stand for the Greek wanderer and seeker Odysseus or for the great warrior, Ulysses S. Grant. So what we have is a duplicate of John Carter.
ERB is on record as saying that he thought that every man was two persons not unlike Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, some more divided , some less. Under stress the two personas like Jekyll and Hyde became distinct.
Now, in 1911 ERB was an unrealized genius but in 1926 he was a failed genius. In other words he had had his legs cut from beneath him. He might as well have been dead. Therefore Ulysses Paxton while serving in the Great War has a shell explode beside him. When he comes to he realizes his legs have been blown away. While he lies dying he looks up to Mars as John Carter had fifteen years before. When he next comes to his legs are restored and he is standing in a garden on Mars.
Thus in real life ERB imagines himself figuratively in Paxton’s situation returning in his imagination to the Red Planet in the hope of making lightning strike twice.
He hadn’t written a Tarzan novel since Ant Men four years previously. He was black listed by the movie colony that refused to make any Tarzan movies even though they would have been lucrative. He was under attack nationally and internationally by the Reds who were doing everything possible to destroy his sales and reputation. ERB truly had his back to the wall or figuritively had had his legs cut off.
Fortune would once again favor him when FBO Studios broke the blacklist against him. After a couple fumbling attempts at Tarzan novels he would hit a magnificent stride through the Tarzan novels from 1929 to 1936.
The Mastermind Of Mars was his attempt to recover his career. His style while revered by his fans was old hat by 1926 so he could no longer take the world by storm as he had in 1911.
Mastermind is a complex novel of which I haven’t completely broken the code but let us concentrate on two aspects. The first is ERB’s troubled state of mind over his marriage. Thus he invents the story of Xaxa and Valla Dia as he fights to deal with his sexual problem. The second is the religious problem caused by his confrontation with the Jews beginning in 1919 and continuing not only through 1924’s Marcia Of The Doorstep, and 1926 but to the end of his career.
In 1926 ERB had not yet met Florence Dearholt although he was probably already familiar with her husband Ashton and through that acquaintance he may already have seen her, and perhaps, also on the screen as she was an actress. He did meet her in March of ’27 when Dearholt approached him on a movie deal and was either immediately smitten or had the opinion of her he already had confirmed.
In Mastermind ERB expresses the thought that he has a wife to whom he owes everything but who he hates. This strong emotion would be realized at his own Emma’s death.
In this novel Emma is represented by the brain of the horrid Xaxa. Ras Thavas, the demon mastermind of Mars and physician nonpareil, has transplanted the brain of Xaxa into the beautiful body of Valla Dia and vice versa. Dia is Latin for goddess. I don’t know what Valla means.
The body of Xaxa containing the brain of Valla Dia is held in suspended animation by Ras Thavas. Bringing the body to life Paxton is smitten by the beauty of Valla Dia’s brain. Knowing that her body is of incomparable beauty he conceives the notion of restoring her brain to her body and taking her to wife. Valla Dia may also be seen a version of Helen of Troy.
I interpret this to mean that ERB’s Anima ideal was the beautiful Valla Dia, perhaps as he had once viewed Emma. But to his mind Emma had developed an ugly mind that animated the body of his Anima ideal. the beautiful mind he sought was thus in an ugly body while an ugly mind was in a beautiful body. ERB’s dilemma was to shuck Emma and find a beautiful mind in a beautiful body. When he met Florence in 1927 he thought he had found his Anima ideal of a beautiful mind in a beautiful body. His problem then was how to rid himself of Emma.
On that level then ERB is struggling with his sexual problem. In this book his struggle would take the form of an astonishing number of dual and split personalities. This is quite a study in that sense and an indication of ERB’s extreme stress. Perhaps Mastermind is a worthy successor to Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde.
The second and less resolvable problem is the religious issue. At this moment in time the Jews of Hollywood have got ERB boxed. Indeed, they have cut off his legs. The logjam was about to be broken by FBO Studios which would free ERB up until the late thirties when he was forced into exile in Hawaii. For now though he has to deal with this very difficult problem. He has by now learned that freedom of speech ends where Judaism begins. If I am right he was denied publication of Marcia Of The Doorstep because of the manner in which he discussed his dilemma.
In Mastermind while the religious issue assumes primary importance ERB puts it into an ecumenical form denouncing all religion. Does he refer to his Jewish situation in any cloudy form? I think he does.
The god in this story is a huge several story high idol named Tur to which all must bow down. The name Tur is an odd name for a god, at least in my mind. I have said before you cannot talk about that which isn’t in your mind. If you haven’t studied religions there is nothing you can say about them. As ERB has a great deal to say it is obvious that he knows something about religion and religions. Theology isn’t the issue here, that is a separate matter.
Given ERBs method, when he learned he had a problem with Judaism I’m sure he went out and learned something about it. It isn’t necessary that he had a profound knowledge; it is only necessary that he learned some things. We can’t be sure what. The word Tur is signficant in Jewish historiography. His use of Tur may be a coincidence but there you have it- Tur is Tur any way you turn it, frontwards or backwards, Tur is Tur.
The word Tur appears in Judaic lore in this manner:
…Rabbi Jacob (Yaakov) ben Asher (1270-1343) the “Baal ha-Turim” compiled the Arba Turim, first printed in 1458. “Tur” is used as shorthand for both the title of the whole work and for Rabbi Asher himself since it is customary in Judaism to call a compiler by the name of his compilation. The Tur is the predecessor of Rabbi Joseph Karo’s Schulchan Aruch. The four part structure of the Tur and its division into chapters (simanim) were adopted by Karo in the later code, Shulchan Aruch. Each of the four divisions of the work is a Tur, so a particular passage is cited a Tur…
p. 127 Hoffman, Michael, Judaism Discovered, 2008
While one can’t be certain ERB learned the above fact it isn’t particularly recondite and might have been easily learned. At the least the use of Tur for the god is a remarkable coincidence.
Making Tur an idol to which all must bow would have been an egregious offence to the Jews and one which any knowledgeable Jew, who might have read the book, always a precondition, would have picked up on it whether Burroughs intended it or not. Paranoia strikes deep.
The idol itself could possibly be modeled on the Alexandrine Egypto-Greek god, Sarapis. Burroughs would have known of this from the Bible if not from his readings in the classics. We know he reread Plutarch’s Lives at least twice with one of those times just previous to writing Mastermind. If he read the Lives twice he undoubtedly read other classics so there is no reason to believe that he didn’t have knowledge in these matters.
The manner of Paxton’s posing as Tur and bamboozling the bamboozlers is a mockery of religion in general although given the context of the word Tur the application of the mockery might have been taken more personally.
Forced to use the most discreet measures to avoid accusations of anti-Semitism ERB may have thought he was undetectably clever while he is certainly having a good laugh. Paxton congratulates himself and gives himself a couple pats on the back at the success of his ruse.
The end result, of course, is that he frees the people from the bondage to the false religion of Tur.
I’m not quite clear on the nature of Ras Thavas who is named after the Ethiopian Prince Ras Tafari who became the Emperor Haile Selassie and the namesake of the Jamaican Rastafarians.
The book is a worthy of the attempted second birth of ERB’s faltering career. The characters are magnificent and finely drawn. Ras Thavas is surely one of the great characters of pulp fiction. Mastermind paired with The Synthetic Men Of Mars makes for one of the greatest diptyches of science fiction.
The Deconstruction Of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ America
April 14, 2007
A Review
The Lad And The Lion
by
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Review by R.E. Prindle
30 pages,
Now were moving into the twenties. The trans-Atlantic cable was laid in 1859 so telegraphic communications have bridged the Atlantic. Wireless is becoming a reality about to create the great radio networks. Primitive commercial air routes were still a decade or so in the future while the great passenger ships could cross the Atlantic safely in a week.
The Atlantic would be flown within a few years but as of the early twenties the speed and ease of our travel had not yet commenced. Still, it was now possible to closely coordinate activities as was done by the American Communists and their handlers from the Soviet Union.
By 1923 Freudian sex notions, Marxist political fantasies and the pseudo-science of Einstein’s relativity were melded into one intellectual approach by what is known as the Frankfurt school, also known as critical theory.
[ http://.marxists.org/subject/frankfurt-school/index.htm ]
The Institut For Sozialforschung…was the creation of Felix Weil, who was able to use money from his father’s grain busines to finance the Institut. Weil was a young Marxist who had written his Phd on the practical problems of implementing socialism.
—–
Weil negotiated with the Ministry of Education [German] that the Director of the Institut would be a professor from the state system, so that the Institut would have the status of a University.
The school staffed entirely by Jews was also known as the Institute for Social Research. As you can see the sectarian nature of the school was concealed behind fine sounding screen names like Social and Research after the Freudian manner when it was a plan to implement the Jewish Revolution itself disguised as Communism.
In a system of freedom of expression and conscience the School was no problem. But the Jewish Culture at the same time that it claimed the rights and benefits of freedom of expression and conscience for itself denied them to the very creators of the concepts and this denial was made in terms of Orwellian doublespeak.
Thus the so-called ‘Critical Theory’ was used to cast a pall of disrepute over the Other or the non-Jews while sanctifying the mores of the in group. Decontruction went on in both Europe and America.
During the Nazi era the school would be relocated first to Switzerland in 1932 from which it could operate in Germany, then in 1935 the entire school was transferred to NYC. In 1941 the school was moved to Hollywood.
For decades with their control of expression it was virtually impossible to examine problems from any other point of view than the Critical Theory. I was just at Reed College. Going through the book store it was clear that the curriculum was based on the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory.
With the coming of the internet it became possible for opinions that had been savagely repressed to find expression. The current bugaboo of the Semites is a professor from Long Beach State by the name of Kevin MacDonald. He began a research into the methods by which the Jewish Culture established itself in the twentieth century as the dominant culture. That work was titled The Culture Of Critique which has since become the bible of the Right.
A full scale attempt to marginalize MacDonald is now in progress. Needless to say the attack as always is ad hominem with the attempt to defame Mr. MacDonald’s scientific researches as ‘anti-Semitic.’ Nevertheless the door is open a crack, at least temporarily.
The Jewish Culture through Freud established the concept of Multi-culturalism which states that each culture is distanct in identity with a set of objectives that it wishes to implement for itself. We didn’t need the concept of Multi-culturalism to be aware of that but there you have it.
MacDonald’s title the Culture of Critique defines the Jewish cultural technique through the ages as well as that of the Frankfurt School in the twentieth century. The Culture enters another culture immediately beginning to find fault with what up to then had been a successful effort at dealing with problems of civilization. Whatever the response and no matter how successful the Jewish Culture criticized it, tore it down and insisted that the Jewish way replace it.
All of the ancient cultures were grappling with nature through a system of polytheism. Polytheism was the forerunner of science in that it identified and separated the processes of nature attempting to understand each in isolation. As with the rise of Science in the nineteenth century there was no way for the Jewish Culture to establish supremacy. Any argument they had to offer was just another opinion.
So the Culture countered with monotheism which was supposed to be superior to polytheism in some way they couldn’t explain. They just asserted it. Once I slipped from under the conditioning of my religious upbringing that enforced monotheism without an adequate justification I came to the realization that there was nothing superior in monotheism in fact the approach negates scientific inquiry in favor of an inviolable dispensation from ‘G-d’ or, in other words, a projection of the Jewish Weltanschauung.
Having subdued polytheism with monotheism when science broke its bonds from the seventeenth to the nineteenth the Jewish Culture had to come up with an approach to contain and negate science. Hence a number of pseudo-sciences were created to confuse and obfuscate so that these scientific sounding ‘sciences’ that nevertheless served to impose Jewish Culture could be established.
Foremost among these attempts incorporating Marx, Freud and Einstein as aforementioned was the Institute for Social Research. I was aware of most of the leading figures of the school such as Wilhelm Reich, Marcuse, Adorno and Fromm from my college days but I wasn’t aware of their association in the Frankfurt School although I was aware of that name.
Following Freud’s lead, such as in Lang’s Testament Of Dr. Mabuse the members continued the attacks Freud had launched. Central to their issues was sexual theory.
In order to reconstruct society along Jewish Cultural lines they had to deconstruct the existing society. That is to say by the use of Critical Theory they had to subvert existing customs and mores. A first step was to belittle existing beliefs attempting the substitution of ‘superior’ Jewish beliefs. Thus beginning in the twenties a systematic debunking of American heroes and customs began.
The world was turned upside down. Everything that previously had been thought good was now bad which means that everything bad was good. It was all relative; nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so. But the maxim only cut one way in the hands of critical theory. What you believed was bad; what they believed was good. No one ever thought to ask: Compared to what? And they got away with this too. Still don’t know how it worked that way but it did.
And then they went back and changed the past. A sort of inverted nostalgia. The way they wanted it to have been when managed by the other. John Dos Passos began to turn out his USA trilogy that many people think is one of the top ten books of the twentieth century. It’s flashy. Even flashier if you don’t know the historical background. The first time I read it, much younger then of course, I was bowled over. Of course my state of mind was perhaps a little more depressed than Dos Passos’ story which is pretty depressed. Second time I read it I began to waver. Seemed awfully one sided. Then I integrated my personality and like the character in Gradiva my projection began to dissolve. My windshield got clearer and I could see more clearly. The third time I read the trilogy I was repulsed by the complete and total negativity, the general nastiness of Dos Passos’ mind. Well, nothing’s good or bad but thinking makes it so. I thought the trilogy was good when I first read it, neutral the second time and terrible the last. It’s all relative, of course, but now my opinion is that the trilogy is absolutely bad and as thinking makes it so it must be bad. Fifty years later or so Greil Marcus’ reinforcing the USA tilogy came out with a book he titled Bad Old America. That could have been the title of Dos Passos’ USA trilogy. So who you going to believe novelists and memoirists who speak of the good old America or those like Dos Passos and Marcus who believed it was a bad old America. Compared to what? It’s all relative. Well nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so so people like Dos Passos and Marcus can get behind their push carts and trundle off into oblivion.
Well, that was flip and satisfying but ignores the tragedy of the people who lived through that era yet were mystified by what they saw going on around them because they were living by rules formulated thirty or forty years in the past but which didn’t work very well anymore because another culture, actually a couple cultures were changing the game before their eyes by disregarding those very rules. There you have a multi-cultural society: if you’re not busy setting the rules you’re busy following those who are. Quite frankly any culture that doesn’t want to set the rules is a culture of saps. Unfortunately I belong to that sappy culture but I’m doing my best to set them on their feet and point them in the right direction.
It was too late for Edgar Rice Burroughs back then but he was a game old bird. This essay started in 1912 with Burroughs scribbling away at a strange story entitled Tarzan Of The Apes. Well, from a jack to a king. From a financial and emotional bankrupt Burroughs’ story of Tarzan improbably caught the imagination of not only the United States but pretty much the whole darn world.
Apart from being an amusing but fantastic story that given your frame of mind is a very difficult tale to take, one is astounded at the influence of Tarzan on the world stage. The literate were absolutely repulsed by the story and I’m not so starry eyed I can’t see why. A certain type of mind can only see the ridiculous aspect of Tarzan. I don’t have any good arguments to convince those who believe so, I see the reason for their revulsion but I don’t share it.
page 5.
My first introduction to Tarzan was of course the movies. I was entranced by Johnny Weissmuller, although watching the movies now I’m not sure why. From there I bought what was available from Grosset and Dunlap. I found the books better than the movies. There was that about Burroughs, the man himself, telling his stories of Tarzan that made the stories seem very significant so that not only me but thousands of others accept Tarzan as, what shall I say, their savior, their role model, their leader, their intellectual ideal?
Whatever it is it is the very antithesis of the Judaeo-Communist-Liberal school. Tarzan is self-sufficient; he is his own man. He is the very antithesis of the Liberal ideal which is, in the words of Vance Packard, an organization man, a member of the collective, subordinated completely to the ideology. Buzzing around in the hive.
There are many, even among his fans, who think of Burroughs as a simple minded boob who had the skill for escapist literature. I can see how they form their attitude too but, once again, I don’t share it.
I think it just as obvious that Burroughs was deeply interested in the social, psychological, political, religious and scientific concerns of his time. Wisely, he decided to employ such details in a casual way without emphasizing his opinions because to call attention to them would have been beyond the scope of entertainment. He believed the sole purpose of fiction was entertainment however he construed the word. Still the serious reflections come through to the perceptive reader. For instance the Oakdale Affair is a wonderful little study packed full of perceptive and fairly profound observations.
page 6.
Burroughs had a large public who were devoted to Tarzan. the impact of the character seems to go far beyond the book sales. Of course book sales were amplified by the movies that became the established form of fictional entertainment as Tarzan’s popularity grew from 1912 to 1920 or so. In the late teens several very popular movies of Tarzan were made.
Regardless of what the critics thought of Tarzan the Liberal/Communist faction perceived a threat to their collective mindset. The ideals Burroughs infused into Tarzan that educated his public were in opposition to the Liberal collectivity. One good Tarzan novel combined with a movie could more than offset the influence of the whole Frankfurt School plus.
Before the October Revolution there was no political opposition to Burroughs but as the war ended and the twenties began attention was directed toward Tarzan and Burroughs. It seems quite obvious that the Jews recognized the importance of the movies for influencing culture from the beginning. One may argue that they took control of the movies because it was a new industry and it was open to them. It’s a good argument but not necessarily the real one. As the technological age dawned all industries were new and open to anybody. The argument might equally apply to the auto industry in 1908 yet Jews shunned the formative years of the industry.
The newspaper and publishing industries were dominated by goys yet Jews gained access to the industries and shouldered them aside. The same may be said of department stores. Yet Jews seized on movies and as radio became a business that industry and then television. So there seems to be another reason for Jews seeking control of such culture forming areas as stage, screen, radio and publishing. One hates to state the obvious.
After the October Revolution Jews worldwide were in a position to control culture. Thus, as in the US, they could issue volume after volume debunking older cultural heroes and national customs. The Liberal/Judaeo/Communist coalition could control the images of current cultural figures like Edgar Rice Burroughs also. While Burroughs always had publishing difficulties for other reasons, after 1920 it got worse until in 1930 he was forced into self-publishing.
page 7.
It may be a coincidence that after 1922 no more Tarzan movies were made until 1928 or not. But it was about this same time that Burroughs began having troubles everywhere. His English publishers began to neglect him. His Tarzan novels which were very popular in Germany came under attack because Burroughs’ novels written during he war were considered Germanophobic. As the campaign was successful it had to be led by Communists.
And in Russia Burroughs aroused the ire of the Communist government because the proletariat preferred Tarzan novels to Communist doctrine. So, in the period 1920 to 1924 a concerted worldwide attack was carried on against this poor fantasy writer.
The Soviet government enlisted the services of a writer of great fame to denigrate Burroughs discreetly in print. That writer was no less than H.G. Wells. His opening shot across the bow was Men Like Gods which was so discreet I may be the only person who ever saw it other than Burroughs. However Men Like Gods was followed in 1928 by a work clearly referring to Burroughs entitled Mr. Blettsworthy On Rampole Island. As his point of departure Wells chose a 1914 novelette entitled The Lad And The Lion. In Blettsworthy he postulated that Burroughs was insane. That is a pretty heavy defamation of a living author if anyone read Wells’ book. Not many did. After 1920 Wells had a very limited appeal as a novelist. His attack had an influence on the publishing history of the The Lad And The Lion that will require some detailed attention.
page 8.
The original of Lad was written in February-March of 1914 immediately followed by Beasts Of Tarzan while The Girl From Farris’s begun in 1913 was finished at the same time. The three novels then were written at the height of Burroughs recovery from the despair of his earlier failure. They represent a response to his success as he tried to find a new footing.
Burroughs’ father had died on February 13th, 1913. In September, at the time of his birthday, ERB left for an extended stay in California. All three novels were written or finished in California in the final three months of the stay. That Lad and Girl were both completed in March indicates their close connection in his mind. Lad being concerned with his Animus and Girl undoubtedly with his Anima.
Wells’ analysis of Lad convinced him that Burroughs was insane as he said in his ad hominem attack in Blettsworthy. Even if Burroughs were ‘insane’ at the time he wrote Lad that would have no effect on the influence of Tarzan.
While Burroughs suffered from mental distress from the time the events of Lad took place, which I put as his entry into the Michigan Military Academy, to what I would call his emergence and recovery here in 1914, that is far from insanity and I might add no worse than the symptoms of distress Wells showed in his In The Days Of The Comet. Even Men Like Gods in 1923 is a lttle bonkers. Nevertheless his analysis of the state of mind Burroughs displays in Lad seems to me to be fairly accurate. That Burroughs passed through such a stage of suffering is normal, which Wells if he weren’t in a partisan attack would or should have recognized.
page 9.
At any rate the story Wells read has to be separated from the book edition that was rewritten and published twenty-four years later. Every other chapter has to be removed, those concerning the events in Moscow- or at least an imaginary Eastern European city.
That leaves you with the story of Michael adrift off the Atlantic coast of Africa and his subsequent landing. The manner in which the story relates to Burroughs’ life and state of mind is fairly transparent if one knows his life and psychology.
George T., Burroughs father, had transferred him from one school to another jerking him out at the critical moment. Anyone who has experienced this knows how difficult it is. It makes you a little bit buggy. The final straw came when George T. sent him away to the MMA. Burroughs tried to escape but his father sent him back. We don’t know what he said to the boy but it must have had a terrific effect on him.
It was the feeling of rejection from this inident that lay behind the story of the Lad And The Lion. The MMA completely declassed Burroughs so that he was able to fit in nowhere. He characterized this feeling as one of shipwreck. The shipwreck figures into several of his novels not least of which are Tarzan Of The Apes and Son Of Tarzan.
So, in the story of Lad. As usual Burroughs weaves in several literary influences. Underlying the story is that of Mark Twain’s Prince And The Pauper that so influenced Burroughs. In a 1923 newspaper article the writer declared that he had read Prince approximately six times. One doesn’t read such a light weight fantasy six times unless it closely relates to one’s own experience. Thus until the MMA one can conclude that Burroughs thought of himself as a little Prince. In the same article he said he also had read Little Lord Fauntleroy six times. After the MMA he lost the feeling of being a Prince and Lord to become a pauper. In Lad then, the hero (a version of himself) is a prince who after the shipwreck becomes a pauper.
page 10.
The shipwreck itself was influenced by the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. Several tales of the Titanic are retold. The young Prince Michael who because of his age was entitled to a place in a lifeboat generously and manly gives up his place to a woman.
When the great ship rolled over we are led to believe that Michael was catapulted some distance away. His guardian had thoughtfully put a life jacket on him so he doesn’t drown. But just as the shipwreck repesented the second of Burroughs’ great fixations as he is in the water a life raft descending a wave crashes down on his head ‘in a glancing blow’ knocking him unconscious causing a total loss of memory that lasts for over five years.
When he comes to an empty lifeboat is floating by him. Not recognizing it as a boat as he has total- and Burroughs means total- memory loss yet Michael reasons that it will be more comfortable than the water. Clever kid.
The shipwreck and lifeboat are prominent themes taking several different forms in Burroughs’ work. Tarzan’s parents are marooned in the opening novel of the series put ashore in a lifeboat while the ship they were sailing on was subsequently wrecked and sunk. There were several such incidents in the sequel, The Return Of Tarzan, all of them occurring within a few miles of each other and close to where Tarzan’s parents were marooned, which is to say Burroughs himself. These are one or two too many coincidences for most readers. If this were a traditional adventure series perhaps that would be true, but in the psychological sense in which Burroughs is writing there is a logical imperative controlled by Burroughs’ fixations.
Waldo Emerson Smith-Jones is a castaway in 1913’s Cave Girl while the first large scale run through of the theme is in the later novel of 1913 The Mucker. These two novels were conceived before the father, George T. died.
His death shifted Burroughs mind back a decade or two so that the shipwreck of Lad is psychologically the first in the sequence.
page 11.
Discarding Freud’s interpretation of the unconscious let us view Burroughs’ shipwreck through the version of the subconscious I have outlined which is truer than that of Freud. Now, the events of Burroughs life were filtered through his three great fixations. Certainly up to 1914 he had been unable to relax their hold at all. He was subject to terrifying nightmares because of the fixations and why not. The daily happenings thus would be constellated around these fixations and distorted to meet the experience of their horrific traumas.
Over the years as his circumstances changed even though he was apparently unable to exorcise these fixations his new circumstances were powerful enough to alter the consequences of the experiential fixations. Since he dwelt on these central symbols in which his traumas cast his dreams he uses the same situation over and over which causes some readers to accuse him of repitition. While the situations do repeat the same symbolism they do not do so in a deadening manner but are variations on the theme that evolve with Burroughs’ evolving consciousness.
Thus in Lad he is in the lifeboat alone, no Anima figure. In the Mucker all the survivors of the shipwreck end up in one boat with the Anima figure Barbara Harding. It must be true as this is dream material that the figures in the boat represent real people that were associated with Burroughs in these traumas. Later in 1924 when Burroughs has edged back to a prince from a pauper there are two lifeboats, one for the gentlefolks and one for the criminal class. Chase III, the Burroughs Animus figure was supposed to have been with the gentlefolk but in the confusion he is thrown in with the criminal class. This undoubtedly represents the MMA. Marcia, the Anima figure is also taken in that boat by mistake. Thus we have another variation on the MMA fixation.
page 12.
It must be true that these differences were reflected in Burroughs’ dreams as his fixations and his reality drew apart and conflicted. Apparently troubled all his life by this conflict Burroughs even bought a book on scientific dream interpretation in 1932.
Drifting along in his life boat, breathing being the only thing he can remember, he is spotted from a drifting derelict by its sole human inhabitant, a crazy epileptic deaf mute. Add to his infirmities the fact that Michael has no memory and one has quite a combination. The old loony draws him from the lifeboat to a four or five year life on this drifting derelict. Michael drifts thus until the old loon is killed upon which being released from his control or enchantment Michael lands on the coast of North Africa having no memory of land whatsoever.
The dream ship was adequately provided with all the necessities for this interminable drifting about as a dream ship would.
As they drift up and down the coast of Africa one is compelled to ask why. Very likely Africa had taken on a mythic quality for Burroughs from the works of Stanley, Livingstone, Du Chaillu, Buel and others. Africa was a world where the White man was supreme and unfettered much as was Tarzan. Thus the Africa of the Tarzan novels should be considered a dream or fantasy Africa that bears little resemblance to the real geographical Africa. Burroughs’ Africa was a place inhabited by lions and tigers and deer. More’s the pity for the psychological reality of the continent that his fans wouldn’t allow him to populate the place with tigers and deer. Psychologically these things were essential to the story he was telling.
As in all dreams the most improbable coincidences have to be accepted. Thus as unbelievable as it may be to a rational mind, this old epileptic deaf mute insano had a very young lion cub in a cage on deck. It is impossible for him to be there rationally but there you have it. Psychologically he belongs there. It is noteworthy that over five years the ship encountered no storms so the lion didn’t wash overboard as he must otherwise have.
page 13.
The old guy is cruel and sadistic. He beats the Lad, who no longer has any other identity which must be why he’s called the Lad, on a daily basis as well as torturing the lion. As a lion is Burroughs’ Anima figure he naturally forms a close friendship with the cub. Both Lad and cub grow huge with the result that the Lad challenges the old coot who never has a name. The old coot knocks the Lad senseless with an iron bar. That’s two blows to the head within twenty pages. Seeing his friend threatened the lion bursts from his cage grown rickety over the years despatching the coot in one chomp as he tears the old bastard’s face away. Thus Lad and Lion are delivered from the mastery or enchantment of the old crazy.
Now, who in Burroughs aching life could this old monster be? Well, his father died about a year earlier. His father did rush him from school to school finally placing him with what Burroughs considered the juvenile delinquents of MMA. Burroughs always professed the greatest love for his father, celebrated his birthday annually; yet on his dad’s hundreth anniversary he created the zany loony mad Doctor, ‘God’ who bears some similarity to this crazy old coot of Lad. I don’t think there’s any doubt that Burroughs had ambiguous feelings about George T. It is even quite probable that he didn’t recognize the crazy old coot as his father so he would suffer no guilt from ripping the old loony’s face off. Indeed, removing his face was removing his identity.
The Lad and Lion did not land immediately but continued to drift for a period of several months. From that one might reason that Burroughs and his Anima figure while released from subjugation by George T.’s death took several months to move from beneath the father’s shadow. Indeed this novel was written approximately nine months after his father’s death.
If one construes the period from 1891 the year Burroughs entered the MMA to his father’s death as symbolic of the years of drifting under the domination of the old weirdo one might interpret Burroughs situation in this way.
page 14.
His father had humiliated and shamed him so thoroughly that the boy was psychologically barred from following in his father’s footsteps as a businessman. Hence from 1891 to 1911 or 12 Burroughs drifted from job to fairly disreputable job a complete failure. Realizing he could never be a success as his father had Burroughs in desperation was forced to take another tack outside the business world. Thus he took up pen and began to write. Here he was successful. It is significant that he used materials, old letterheads and pencils, from his own failed enterprises. His father died just as Burroughs was receiving the first fruits of his new career which was probably just as well. But now he had to get away from the proximity of the man so he packed wife, kids, car and all his belongings fleeing to the West Coast. At the end of this voluntary exile and just before returning he completed The Lad And The Lion. Having made the attempt to exorcise the demon he could return to Chicago which he did.
I haven’t read the magazine version which may differ a little or quite a bit but the above story is the crux of The Lad And The Lion. The above must have been what convinced H.G. Wells that Burroughs was insane.
Dream symbolism is not however an indication of insanity but the problem of the interactions of the conscious and subconscious trying to make sense of experience it finds difficult to understand. Contrary to Freud’s belief that dreams are a product solely of the unconscious it is impossible for consciousness to abandon itself completely to the subconscious.
Burroughs relation of his dream is no more a sign of insanity than Freud’s dream of Irma’s Injection. In fact Burroughs, as one aspect of his story may very well have been dealing with his own interpretation of dreams. As this story was modified in 1938 long after psychoanalysis had entered the popular domain the story that Wells read c. 1920 may be significantly different than the altered 1938 version. Burroughs may very well have developed his psychological theories significantly since 1914. This version would also have been written after he had had time to digest the scientific dream book he bought in 1932.
page 15.
As Burroughs acquired his initial interest in psychology from Lew Sweetser in 1891 which is evidenced from his earliest works there is no reason not to believe that by 1938 he had definite ideas of dream psychology.
Wells himself was read in Freudian psychology as his analysis of Burroughs in Blettsworthy indicates. The depth of his undertanding appears to be somewhat superficial but, still, informed. His attack on Burroughs is ad hominem in the Liberal tradition. As a writer Wells should have known better than to take Lad at face value, especially as several of his own stories vary into paranoia and other mental disorders or, rather, states of mind. One might even say that the interest of the stories rise from these projected states of mind. Two of Wells finest novels reflect disordered states of mind. The magnificently portrayed paranoia of ‘When The Sleeper Wakes’ is unparalled unless it be by his own ‘In The Days Of The Comet.’ Both can compete with ‘Lad’ in terms of insanity.
Very likely ‘Blettsworthy’ was a calculated attack motivated by orders from Moscow. Those orders were probably received about 1921 when Wells visited Lenin and the Soviet Union. By this time Wells was religiously committed to the Revolution. Thus, as indicated, during this period the attack on Burroughs was commenced on the international level. His English publishers inexplicably lost interest in a key commerical product like Tarzan. The same may be said of his American publishers and movie makers. His German sales were destroyed on political charges and finally the Soviets ordered Wells to attack him personally to destroy his credibility. These actions should throw some light on Burroughs’ financial difficulties of this critical period when he lost control of the Tarzana estate.
The period from this attack to 1928 and 1930 when Burroughs elected to self-publish has not been examined from this point of view. Suffice it to say that Burroughs first self-published title, Tarzan The Invincible concerns an actual war between Tarzan and no less than the Soviet dictator, Josef Stalin. This was continued in the sequel, Tarzan Triumphant, while being continued through 1934 and the release of Tarzan And The Lion Man.
page 16.
The rewriting of The Lad And The Lion in 1938 may be taken as a heavy salvo in this war. By 1938 the history of the two Russian Revolutions, 1905 and 1917 would have been known in their broad outlines. The minor details have been guessed from the very beginning having been recently confirmed by research. So, his ‘head bloody but unbowed’ Burroughs returned to the battle.
Aware of Wells’ interpretation of the 1914 magazine version of Lad Burroughs may have altered the details to correspond with his state of mind in 1938 blending the earlier story into the later additions dealing specifically with Wells and his Soviet handlers.
By 1938 Wells had been abandoned by his Soviet mistress Moura Budberg. He had met her during his 1921 visit to Russia. She had then been assigned to him by Stalin from c. 1928 to 1935, the height of the war on Burroughs. She had abandoned him probably because his usefullness was considered minimal because of his independence and criticism of Stalin. In 1939’s Holy Terror Wells would actually call for the assassination of Stalin in much the same way he had declared Burroughs insane. The amazing thing is the casual way in which Wells advocates assassination as a political means. Wells was an outstanding Liberal who here displays the absolute bigotry of Liberalism. They denounce capital punishment unless it serves their own purposes. Once again it is impossible to be religiously devout without being a bigot. It make no difference whether it is character assassination, or individual murder, or the genocide of a billion all is justified by religious bigotry, in this case Liberalism.
Did I see eyebrows raised at the mention of genocide of a billion? Please to follow the line of argument.
page 17.
Liberalism began with the French Revolution. The Liberals began by murdering aristocrats individually or as a group, genocide. When the aristocrats resisted, revolting in La Vendee, genocidal massacres began. Barges loaded with the royalist party were towed into the middle of rivers and sunk drowning all aboard.
These proceedings were justified about seventy years later by the Liberal pundit Victor Hugo in his novel 1793. He doesn’t mention atrocities like the above but he justified the holocaust in this way:
These people stand in the way of the New Order. So long as they live they are a threat to the New Order, therefore it behooves us to kill them all to give birth to the New Utopia.
This notion has been the guiding principle of Liberals ever since. At every opportunity they massacre those standing in the way of the New Order. In the horrific aftermath of the October Revolution Jews massacred millions. Picking up the baton Stalin engineered a famine in a genocidal attempt to murder independent farmers called Kulaks. A few years later the Leftist Adolf Hitler attempted to exterminate a number of enemies of his New Order. Mao added his tens of millions. But, that’s not a billion you say? Well, that is a possible if seemingly not probable next step. It is already in the works.
I don’t know how many of you have heard of Noel Ignatiev. He is a Jewish Harvard graduate who has formed an organization called Race Traitor. In a Winter 1991 article in his magazine called RaceTraitor [ http://racetraitor.org/abolish.html ] the lead article was entitled: Abolish The White Race– By Any Means Necessary. Perhaps wisely, the article is unsigned. The article is sheer rhetoric with so many logical flaws I can’t begin to go into them here. The article intends to be divisive. The intent is to persuade as many White people as possible to renounce their ‘White Skin Privilege’, whatever that might mean. This will be a step in abolishing the White ‘race’ which Ignatiev perceives as a monolith, perhaps along the lines of his own Jewish culture. The above notion provides Ignatiev and his Culture an escape clause because, although nominally White, they, we are led to believe, have renounced their White Skin Privilege.
page 18
As a New Aboloitionist as Ignatiev refers to his organization the Jewish Culture is safely on the side of the colored ‘races’ of the world. The destruction of a billion Whites still seems improbable but Ignatiev and his fellows have already induced guilt into a very large number of Whites neutralizing them while cadres of White ‘youths’ have been enlisted in the cause. They are supposed to renounce their Whiteness by breeding with colored people thus losing Whiteness in color.
At the same time those who seem more aggressively White, refusing to be intimidated have been defamed and castigated as ‘White Supremacists’ being reviled and hated by not only the New Abolitionists and colored peoples but also by all White People who have not been so designated. So, if you allow for 10% of the Whites to be unrepentant that amounts to about 100 million people spread over hundreds of locations. As this sub group has now been demonized as sub-human while standing in the way of Ignatiev’s New Order of a world without White people it is historically perfectly permissible to kill them all.
Now, concentration camps have been set up in the US, you can find pictures of them on the internet, huge tent cities that have ostensibly been set up to house illegal immigrants. Why anyone would want to house illegal immigrants who no one is interested in arresting anyway remains a mystery. Then who are these camps on which a vast sum has already been expended for? I suggest you examine certain legislation before Congress concerning ‘Hate Laws’ and draw your own conclusions.
So, with the obstructionists of the New Order safely out of the way the next batch of the less than enthusiastic Whites can be safely dealt with by the New Abolitionists. Diminished, disarmed and defenseless it will be a small matter to finish off a mere half billion or so, if they haven’t already had the sense to blend in with the coloreds. As I have pointed out before the rule is to keep the women and kill the men so in reality it would only be necessary for a holocaust of a quarter billion. Get’s easier, doesn’t it?
page 20.
As a historical process this would complete the Semito-European war that began approximately 6000 years ago with a total victory for the Semites.
Let us go back to the mano a mano duel between Wells and Burroughs as centered around The Lad And The Lion. We still have two stories to deal with, one is the desert story when The Lad now known as Aziz is made a member of Arab society and the Moscow story. Having never read the original magazine story it still seems reasonable that Burroughs adapted the 1914 story to his 1938 needs.
When the ship was grounded a new life began for Aziz and the Lion. The change was complete. The ship drifted ashore at high tide, the tide went out so far that the ship left high and dry rolled over on its side allowing the pair to walk ashore over dry land.
This is a dream representation of Burroughs own transition from being adrift to realizing success as a writer. As the old tyrant had died just previously one may believe that the death of his father coinciding with his success released Burroughs from thrall.
The situation now is more perfect than Tarzan, indeed this story may be a bridge between the Russian Quartet and the rest of the series. It falls between Beasts Of Tarzan and Son Of Tarzan prefiguring the latter in many ways, while the lion may be considered the predecessor of the Golden Lion linking the rest of the series.
page 20.
Naked came Aziz. Not only naked but illiterate and speechless. The epileptic deaf mute was unable to teach him anything. The blow to his head from the raft had obliterated his memory that obviously included the memory of language. He has learned lion talk however, he has a pretty impressive roar. Aziz does have remarkable native intelligence however so he learns with an alacrity that is astonishing.
Actually both he and the lion have no survival skills whatever not even knowing how to hunt. Contrary to most feral children Aziz is able to evaluate a situation and come up with an appropriate solution. Thus when he and the lion fail at chasing the prey down Aziz does a quick analysis then places himself above the prey and lion driving the beasts into the jaws of the lion. Not bad for a complete novice.
In a scene reminiscent of the Percival story of King Arthur Aziz when he sees his first Arab horsemen is as entranced as Percival was when he first saw the knights. By 1914 I doubt if Burroughs had read much of the lore of King Arthur but by 1938 he may have, must have. One odd item that may be coincidence of course is that when Percival is asked his name by the knights in Chretien de Troyes’ Grail he replies that it is ‘darling boy’ which is how his mother referred to him. When Nakhla names the Lad she calls his Aziz which in Arabic means ‘beloved.’ The French officer’s daughter when she learns his name remarks that he must have been named by his mother or a sweetheart as she explains the meaning of Aziz to him. Aziz has obviously mastered French within a couple weeks having kicked off his linguistic skills with lion and Arabic.
Aziz’ romance with Nakhla had been abandoned when he was told she had married. Thus when with the French woman and a group of French soldiers they visit Nakhla’s Arab camp the young woman is devastated to see Aziz in the company of another woman, dressed as a European soldier. Burroughs likes the comedy of errors approach.
page 21
The situation changes rapidly when Aziz overhears the Captain describe himself in an uncomplimentary fashion as unfit for his daughter. Stripping down to loin cloth Aziz heads back into the desert as the wid beast he is, although by this time he knows lion, Arab and French which places him two languages ahead of most civilized people. On the way back his two lion friends pounce on him which must have hurt not a little. Kind of like being embraced by a speeding freight train.
Burroughs begins to describe Aziz as a lion man. I think this would be the first reference to a lion man in the corpus unless the reference was only included in the rewrite of ’38. Tarzan is described as a lion man while at the same time he has parallel indenties as a Monkey Man and an Elephant Man. In this case Aziz is solely a lion man. He left the ship with the male lion who has no name and acquired a female lion who was attracted by the male at about the same time Aziz became aware of Nakhla. As with De Vac of the Outlaw Of Torn the lion seems to be associated with Aziz’ Anima. With the arrival of the female the Anima shifts to the female with the male moving to the Animus while Aziz makes a ‘real life’ connection to a living female forming the appropriate quaternity.
Having left the French where he also learned that Nakhla wasn’t married he visits the Sheik’s encampment to make up. Here the Sheik is indignant at Aziz presumption called him worse names than the Captain did. Aziz is so crushed that one wonders if Burroughs himself wasn’t grossly insulted by old Mr. Hulbert, Emma’s father. While he is debating with himself Nakhla is captured by his rival Ben Saada.
At this point it would be good to have read the magazine version for comparison. As this story is running parallel with the Moscow story Burroughs may have coordinated the two, changing the orginal version considerably. If that were the case then the desert story is almost certainly influenced by E.M. Hull’s 1921 novel, The Sheik and the movie of the same year starring Rudolph Valentino.
page 22.
In any event in the denouement Burroughs does his usual action razzle dazzle but Aziz still has no memory of his origins. In a battle with the outlaws he gets clubbed with a rifle on the forehead. He is out of it for a couple days. There is concern whether he will survive. His skull is torn open the familiar way. This is the third major blow Aziz has received in this story and it’s a short one. When he comes to his head is being bathed on the lap of Nakhla and wonder of wonders his full memory has returned. He knows who he is: he is no longer a pauper but a Prince. Little Lord Fauntleroy has come into his own.
We will leave Aziz at this point and turn to the parallel story of Prince Ferdinand, Hilda de Groot and the Revolution.
Prince Ferdinand and Hilda is a retelling of George W.M. Reynold’s second series subtitled, Venetia Trelawney. Hilda is Venetia while Ferdinand represents George IV. Hilda’s brother Hans probably represents Venetia’s husband, Horace Sackville. If I am correct in supposing that Burroughs read The Mysteries Of The Court Of London c. 1898 then the memory of the story surfaces here forty years later in 1938. Not bad.
Burroughs telling of the story here may be a parody on H.G. Wells. Like George IV who had rather womanize than pay attention to affairs of State Ferdinand does also. Unlike George who maintained the throne Ferdinand is caught in the Revolution being murdered, perhaps a reference to Nicholas II.
I am sure the story is replete with references and insults I am not getting or they are tenuous enough to prevent certainty. The first revolutionary chieftain for instance is named Meyer which is not too far from Mayer perhaps referring to Louis B. Mayer of MGM.
page 23.
Burroughs is writing this in 1938 after he has been under attack for twenty years. This book is addressed to Wells who began his literary attack in 1923. There is no reason to doubt the major battles took place from 1930 to 1934. In 1931 MGM whose President was the highest paid executive in the US, Louis B. Mayer, filched control of Tarzan’s image from Burroughs. By 1934 when the second MGM Tarzan was released Burroughs was thoroughly beaten.
You know, a man has to think about things. You have to be pretty slow or psychologically sanguine to think that things just happen. As we can see from Lad Burroughs was well aware of Wells’ involvement. The studio heads did not stand in the way of the Red infiltration of Hollywood. They welcomed the Red movie makers who fled Hitler into the studio system. They had no trouble blending in the Frankfurt School when it arrived in Hollywood in 1941. If as John Howard Lawson said that the studio heads approved of every single scene and line in every single movie then while they may have rejected some overt Red inferences it may not have been because they were Red but because they believed the country wasn’t ready for them.
Even though everyone talks about the Hollywood Black List of HUAC there was always a Hollywood Black List. After the so-called post-1950 Black List most people who weren’t objected to for other reasons eventually found their way back into movie work. It didn’t take that long. This could not have been done if these ultra-authoritarian studio heads hadn’t permitted it. So while I have never heard that Louis B. Mayer was following a Red agenda yet talking movies have always had a Red tinge becoming more open as the decades wore on.
Mayer was subservient to the ‘money’ men in New York City. The actual control of the movies came from that quarter so Mayer in no way was an independent operator. One would have to examine Loew’s in New York City for Communist influence before one cleared Louis B. Mayer. I have the feeling that Burroughs may have been telling us something.
page 24.
In the intervening twenty-four years from the first version of Lad Burroughs was not idle. Even though not considered a serious writer yet he allows serious topics to creep in that indicate wide reading if not study. There were two items I found interesting. The first is a psychological reference. Even though I was laughed at for suggesting Burroughs had psychological interests consider this: Lad, p. 56:
“Meyer was too rabid and too radical,” said Carlyn. “He wanted to accomplish everything at a single stroke. I can see now that he was wrong.”
“Meyer wanted to be dictator,” said Andresy. “He was mad for power, and too anxious to obtain it quickly. That came first with Meyer, the welfare of the people second. It is strange what small, remote things may affect the destiny of a nation.”
“What do you mean?” asked Carlyn.
“Because Meyer, as a child, was suppressed and beaten by his father; because on that account, he had a feeling of inferiority, he craved autocratic power that would permit him to strike back in revenge. Meyer did not realize it himself; but when he struck at government, he was striking at his father. When he ordered the assassination of the king he was condemning his father to death in revenge for the humiliation and brutalities the father had inflicted on him. Now the king is dead and Michael and Meyer and Bulvik and hundreds of men and women who believed in Meyer; but Meyer’s father is still alive, basking in the reflected glory of his martyred son. Life is a strange thing, Carlyn. Civilization is strange and complex. The older I grow the more I realize how little any of us know what it is all about. Why do we strive? Everything we attain always turns out to be something we do not want, and then we try to change it for something else that will be equally bad. Oh well, but I suppose that we must keep on. How do you plan to kill the king?”
page 25.
Carlyn strarted, as though caught red-handed in a crime.
“God!” he exclaimed. “Don’t spring it on me like that.”
Andresy laughed. “You have nerves, don’t you?…I shall put it in an emasculated style.”
In the first place we have a full blown psychoanalysis of Meyer’s motives that demonstrates study and thought. What is of more interest to me is Carlyn’s reaction to Andresy and the latters unusual joking of let me emasculate my comment for you. That is a very unusual way of expressing the point. That would indicate to me that Burroughs has been studying and thinking about emasculation possibly from reading Freud himself or magazine articles discussing Freud’s concept of emasculation. In any event Burroughs is much deeper into psychology at this point than readers have been willing to acknowledge. As a response to Wells’ ‘Blettsworthy’ this is turning into a psychology duel to which Burroughs gives the coup de grace in the very short and pointed last chapter. That chapter would lead me to believe that Burroughs had rewritten the whole of Lad from stem to stern to deal with the Wellsian attack.
One can imagine Burroughs with Blettsworthy in one hand and the first Lad in the other musing on what course to take.
Apropos of assassination in general the story of Wesl is a general blueprint. This gets into a little speculation but in 1937 a year before book publication of Lad Burroughs lived in an apartment building also lived in by the Chicago Outfit mobster Johnny Roselli. Roselli would later figure in Burroughs’ war novel, Tarzan And The Foreign Legion as Johnny Rosetti. It would seem more than probable that Roselli would make it a point to get to know the world famous author of Tarzan. Roselli would wish to impress Burroughs with inside criminal information. From my study of Burroughs I have come to the conclusion that he borrowed a significant amount of detailing from elsewhere. I have already mentioned the Venetia Trelawney aspects of th Ferdinand/Hilda story. If one reads the Wesl story one will notice a general resemblance to Lee Harvey Oswald’s supposed assassination of John F. Kennedy. There are those who maintain the assassination was a mob hit. As the assassination fits so well with the Wesl story one is led to believe that the Outfit had a general assassination plan that Roselli related to Burroughs. I have no proof of this other than the fact that Roselli knew Burroughs and that the latter would probably have borrowed the plan rather than have invented it.
page 26.
In the story Wesl (pronounce it, Weasel) is told by the revolutionaries to enter the palace grounds at a certain hour and stand in a certain place. He is told to wear gloves and be unarmed. He is the Fall Guy.
The crime involved here is the assassination of King Otto. Carlyn enters the kings room which was just above Wesl’s post and shoots the King. Tossing the gun out the window it lands at Wesl’s feet. While Wesl dithered Carlyn using another gun, different caliber, shot at him. Wesl began to run. As he reached the gate Carlyn dropped him. Thus all the testimony of ‘eye witnesses’ and the circumstantial evidence pointed to Wesl. Case closed.
If the outfit were involved in the Kennedy Assassination, which is more than probable, then following the Roselli scenario it is more than probable that Oswald was the Fall Guy as he himself said on television. He would have realized this as he watched the action in Dealy Plaza from his prime vantage point. He immediately realized he was the expendable fall guy, threw down his rifle and raced to his apartment to get his hand gun. Officer Tibbets was on the way to assassinate him but Oswald got the drop on Tibbets first then entered a public place where the hit on him would be obvious. It therefore follows that like Wesl he had to be eliminated. It was therefore made easy for Jack Ruby to make the hit on Oswald. That Ruby was connected to the Outfit makes his ‘patriotic’ story wash ‘thin as piss on a rock’ to use President Nixon’s expression.
page 27.
While the above proves nothing about the Kennedy Assassination it should give food for thought. Johnny Roselli claimed to have risen out of the sewer to deliver the actual shot that did Kennedy in. I just love this stuff.
At any rate it is almost certain Burroughs got the assassination plan from somewhere else. If not from Roselli than from some forgotten short story or elsewhere. I’m betting on Johnny Roselli.
So, there we have the Ferdinand/Hilda story adapted from G.W.M. Reynolds and the revolutionary story from events in Russia from 1905 to 1917 and beyond. A third influence seems to be the Ruritania/Graustark stories of Burroughs first novels which would be constellated around the magazine version of Lad. The combination with later events gives a nice illusion of continuity.
The account is very generalized so that there is no obvious reason to retaliate on Burroughs. There can be no mistaking that Meyer was meant to be a Jew as Meyer is a Jewish name. That would have been daring enough for Louis B. Mayer to know who Burroughs was referring to.
The evidence is that this was Burroughs last intended shot in the war as at the very end in reference to Wells he throws in the towel. It might be well to quote the entire chapter 25 with some commentary.
Quote:
Chapter Twenty-five.
Magazines from civilization seep into many far corners of the world. One such, an illustrated weekly of international renown found its way into the douar of an Arab sheik. The son-in-law of Ali-Es-Hadji was reading therein an account of happenings in a far-off kingdom. He read of the assassination of King Ferdinand and Hilda de Groot, and he examined with interest their pictures and pictures of the palace and palace gardens. There was a full page picture of General Count Sarnya, the new Dictator. There was also a picture of an elderly, scholarly looking man, named Andresy who had been shot with many others by order of Sarnya because they had attempted to launch a counter-revolution.
One day General Count Sarnya received a cablegram. It was from from Sidi Bel Abbes. All it said was, “Congratulations! You have my sympathy.” and it was signed, “Michael.
That’s a well packed paragraph that might have been expanded to three pages or so. It weems too compact to me yet I suppose it contains all the information to make its point even if it lacks color and shading.
The opening sentence is a direct reference to E. M. Hull’s The Sheik. In that novel the heroine, Diana, is presented in nearly the exact scene. She was the captive wife of the Sheik; Michael is the husband of the Sheik’s daughter. So we have a reversal of roles. I believe Burroughs is an adept at this.
The question is to whom is the paragraph addressed. It is obviously meant to be read by someone: is it Stalin? is it Wells? or is it intended for both? You may be certain that both men read it. Let us take Wells first.
By 1938 Wells had had a definite falling out with Stalin. As I pointed out, in next year’s Holy Terror He would call for the assassination of Stalin. Wells had reason to be bitter. He was definitely in love, even dependent on the Soviet state prostitute, Moura Budberg. Stalin had sadistically let him see Budberg and Maxim Gorky together when Budberg told him she was somewhere else. Then Stalin ordered Budberg to break off with Wells. One can’t be certain but I most certainly believe Burroughs was keeping up on these details of Wells’ life which, while not perhaps common knowledge, were no secret while probably being an item of gossip among the cognoscenti.
page 29.
Now, Burroughs had recently taken a new young wife so that he was able to flaunt her to a broken hearted Wells. In Blettsworthy that hero who had been living a fantasy life along the lines of Burroughs’ stories has been under the care of a psychiatrist. When he regains his sanity he learns he hasn’t been living on Rampole Island but in his imagination in New York City. New York City?
As the Lad is an answer to Blettsworthy, consider: Michael as a child has a raft fall on his head giving him total amnesia. Unlike Blettsworthy he is actually living the fantasy at sea and in the African desert. Than, a la Tarzan, not to mention Burroughs self, he gets his forehead bashed and torn open suffering excruciating head aches, as did Burroughs in real life. Then Aziz’ collapse. When he recovers, voila! his memory is completely restored but rather than being in New York City he is still in his exotic location in the desert his head in the lap of his beauteous new wife, Nakhla. So we have a probable sneer at Wells who will read the novel.
To Stalin: As remote a possibility as it may seem there is every evidence of some kind of duel between Stalin and Burroughs. There is no other reason for him to introduce Stalin into Invincible and Triumphant by name. The alternate Russian story of Lad is a fictional account of the two Russian Revolutions. Count Sarnya is obviously meant to be Stalin. The execution of Andesy and the counter-revolutionists must refer to the show trials of 1936.
So here we definitely have a sneer at Stalin. Burroughs waves both men off as though he’s finished with them. Burroughs had had enough, he will be content to tend his own garden.
page 30.
By 1938 Burroughs had been pretty thoroughly plundered in a fight that was not of his own makiing. MGM had Tarzan, his writing career was effectively over. If the pulps were inflitrated by Reds giving him trouble the talkies had him on the ropes. When Burroughs said he no longer read fiction he was still watching many volumes of fiction on the screen. The fiction laden pulps couldn’t compete with the movies. That market if not closed was no longer lucrative. He was out of radio. The only steady income he had came from the comic strips. Within a couple years he would be run out of Hollywood.
All the bright new young writers were Communists, no one else could get their foot in the door. As one of the old dinosaurs Burroughs had pretty effectively been cut from the tree.
The America he had known in the nineteenth century was gone. The last buffalo robe had been sold in the twenties. Even the America of the first and second decades were gone. Heck, the twenties were only a fond memory. The grim Communist politics of FDR had arrived with the Dust Bowl. Hitler had flushed out all the Freudian Jewish psychoanalysts of Europe into New York and Hollywood. The Frankfurt School that had fled to Switzerland in 1932 gave up Europe in 1935 fleeing to New York City. In 1941, probably to escape any danger from a Nazi invasion of New York they fled further West to Hollywood to find Santa Barbara shelled by the Japanese in 1942.
The extermination camps of Hitler accellerated the success of the Jewish Revolution by more than somewhat. In 1946 a direct frontal attack on America began with the release of the movie, Gentlemen’s Agreement.
That tall thin guy watching The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse in 1943 and The Iceman Cometh in 1946 staged his The Death Of A Salesman in 1949. the play had a curious affect on the nation seeming to undermine its confidence although it is difficult to understand why. That is the reason Arthur Miller is lauded as a genius not from any ablility as either a thinker, or a playwright.
From then on the deconstruction of America was a piece of cake. The reconstruction along Jewish Cultural lines began in earnest in the sixties being nearly complete today except for some counte-revolutionaries in the odd nook and cranny, here and there.
I, Dynamo 