Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.G. Wells
And The
Wold Newton Mythology
by
R.E. Prindle
It Came From Outer Space
For some decades now I have been struggling with the problem of a new mythology for the scientific consciousness. When the old mythopoeic mythology was invalidated by science it left sort of a void in the human psyche. In the Arthurian sense we had entered the Wasteland of disappointed expectations, otherwise known as depression.
Over the last twenty years of unremitting labor I have been either trying to discover or create such an existing scientific mythology. Perhaps my efforts have been rewarded. I modestly offer the following for your approval.
When The Student Is Ready…
Unlike the internet where I get most of what passes for news by current standards, this day I was reading the newspaper. I hadn’t come to that, it was just lying handy and I had the idle moment. owever I read that our giant combined new and used Pulsar Book Store had laid off a couple dozen employees, or workers as they are sometimes amusingly described, because of declining in store sales. I further read that sixty percent of Pulsar’s sales were over the internet.
I’ve been doing all my book buying over the internet and hadn’t been in the Pulsar store for years. Casting about for a reason for a decline in sales, apart from a growing illiteracy in the body politic, it occurred to me that on line electronic transmission of books was cutting into book sales deeply. I mean, Amazon offers oodles of older books free, many of which you will never see in books stores but are offered by Print On Demand publishers over the internet. Ask yourself when you last saw a Charles King? Lots of them for free on Amazon. That has to hurt sales. I then reasoned that Pulsar’s shelves must be groaning. I might be able to find a superb selecion at good prices, and I was right.
I was rewarded with an armful of books at my first stop in the Bs. I picked an armful of hard to find Balzac titles dirt cheap, thousand page nineteenth century omnibus volumes for six dollars and ninety-five cents each, Good God Almighty. As close to heaven as you can get without taking the chance of dieing.
Then I bethought myself to check the H.G. Wells section. I have a complete collection of Wells’ fiction but I’m still missing a few titles of the non-fiction. The Wells shelf was loaded and with cream, titles that I had had trouble finding over the year were now there in profusion. I had to laugh to see nearly a whole shelf loaded down with copies of Wells’ Seven Science Fiction Novels in many editions. I bought my copy of that at sixteen when it became the foundation of my psychic reality. There were a number of editions I had never seen before. In a fit of curiosity and affection I pulled a copy out just to fondle it. As I did a small slim volume concealed between thetwo larger ones tumbled out and fell to the floor.
I picked the paperback up. It was by one Garrett P. Serviss titled Edison’s Conquest Of Mars and sub-titled as the Original 1898 Sequel To The War Of The Worlds. I laughed at what seemed ludicrous and slid it back on the shelf. I must not have been adept because it fell out on the floor again.
I stood looking at it for a few seconds then decided that a mysterious power was bidding me to read it. I know how ridiculous that sounds but it happens to me often and always with an important book for me to read. Call it serendipitous, call it destiny, I follow my star. They wanted nine-ninety nine for a paperback of two hundred pages. I had an armful of thousand page, hundred year old, hard backs on really good paper for six ninety-five each. I wavered. But then I rememberd the mysterious way it had been concealed between two books destiny knew I would look at. I thought of the old esoteric adage, when the student is ready the teacher will appear. This same thing had happened to me many times before. Often when my mind had been prepared a book had suggested itself. Here it was, deja vu all over again. Was I going to let a little literary bigotry stand between me and my obvious destiny? Not I. I begrudged the ten dollars but when I got home and examined the tiny volume I saw that I had discovered the missing link. I can now make a case for a new scientific mythology.
When It All Comes Down, I Hope It Lands On Me
The search for a new mythology goes on apace. Perhaps the catalyst in the organization of the search was a sci-fi writer named Philip Jose Farmer. Back in 1972 he formulated a scheme in his fantasy novel Tarzan Alive called the Wold Newton Universe. He provides a very rigorous framework for the search. Farmer posited that a meteorite fell to Earth near Wold Newton in the North of England in 1795, which is true, a meteorite did come down. He further posits following the lead of H.G. Wells novel In The Days Of The Comet that this 1795 comet produced a change in men’s minds, and in point of fact there was a change of consciousness that occurred at this exact time.
Several years ago, decades now, I bought a collection of the British magazine The Monthly Review, a run from 1781 to 1795. Isn’t this spooky? These volumes reflect a late medieval consciousness. As an example the volumes use f for s internally in a word- paf try for pastry for instance while beginning and ending esses are the convention letter s. After 1800 this form disappears. I wondered at what precise time The Monthly Review changed its orthography. Through the wonders of the internet I was able to determine that precise date. It was at the beginning of 1796, the volume following the last I own. Thus 1795 is, in fact, a very good date for the change to the modern consciousness.
After 1795 then Euroamerica looked at reality with different and fresh eyes. Also a new literary style arose that led into the genre literatures of the present. A magic generation of writers then arose with one foot in the medieval world and the other in its successor, with modern orthography of course. Shelley and Byron, Peacock and the greatest of all, the father of modern fiction, Walter Scott. Scott has lost nearly all his glamor now but he was the presiding genius of nineteenth century fiction. I mention only the great French Bohemians Honore De Balzac and Alexandre Dumas. Toss in Edgar Allan Poe.
Searching For The Thread
Thus in Tarzan Alive Philip Jose Farmer began a classification system for the new approach to mythology. Currently there are two Wold Newton systems- The French Wold Newton Universe and the Anglo-American. Generally speaking a Wold Newton author’s whole work, or the major part of it, is a series of novels, a roman a fleuve, built around a character or a theme, thus Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Baums Oz stories or Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan and John Carter/Mars stories. All the Wold Newton novels develop the new scientific mythology. Some themes are developed by several hands such as the Vampire corpus or that of Frankenstein/artificial life.
A major writer falling somewhere between literary and Wold Newton fiction is H.G. Wells. He neither created a great fictional character nor works that fit easily into nor works that are exactly genre literature. Still, Wells is at the center of the Wold Newton mythology.
There are three novels of Wells that I think can fit into and define the Wold Newton Universe. These are The War Of The Worlds, When The Sleeper Wakes and Tono Bungay. With the exception of the Seven Science Fiction novels, of which only four have made an indelible impact, the rest of Wells’ novelistic corpus is today disregarded having apparently no relevance to the modern world.
Of course I like Wells and I have read the entire fiction corpus. There are a few novels that I think merit attention but in the hundred years since they first began appearing the body of fiction that has been written obscures all but the brightest stars of novels so that vas amounts of meritorious fiction is only read by the specialist or literary enthusiast exploring the past.
War Of The Worlds is what got me started on this investigation, isn’t it? I’ve read War Of The Worlds three or four times now and each time it’s a new book and not the one portrayed on the screen or what I perceived from my childhood reading. I’ve come to the conclusion that the book isn’t really all that good although it has set the world on its ear. It must have played into the fears of a society desperately grappling with a sea change in history. Every conventional way of viewing the world was falling into the dust as the old mythology vaporized as before the Martian tripods and a new mythology was as invisible as Griffin in Wells’ Invisible Man. When you removed the wrappings of Griffin there was nothing there but the invisible power of the past.
Perhaps Wells’ Martians symbolized the all too visible power of the new scientific reality destroying the old magical religious vision of reality. At any rate the book was received with startling avidity at its publication in 1898. An nowhere was this book seized upon with such voracity as in America. The effect has also been enduring including the radio broadcast of Orson Wells in 1938 and a number of movie treatments. We often think Wells created this genre but not so.
In fact the space opera centered on Mars was an exciting new genre that developed rapidly during the nineties and the first decade of the new century. Burroughs with his great Martian Trilogy was merely taking advantage of an established theme which he epitomized so well that his books are a culmination of Martian writing to that point. His were the apex of the nineteenth century Martian theme, a new starting point for the future.
He was apparently well read in the genre although apart from a few obvious titles one can’t be sure how deeply he had read.
Robert Godwin explains in the introduction to Edison’s Conquest Of Mars:
Late in 1897 the great H.G. Wells struck gold when he submitted for publication- in Pearson’s Magazine of London- the future-war story to end all future-war stories, The War Of The Worlds. It was not the first story of aliens coming to Earth, Edgar Allan Poe had done that sixty years earlier. It was not even the first to involve humans fighting Martians, that had been done by Percy Greg in 1880, while German author Kurd Lasswitz had brought Martians to Earth to wage war with the British earlier that year. It was Wells who brought this novel idea home with star realism. The War Of The Worlds has little dialogue and few characters but is literally dripping with paranoia. His invading Martians were completely alien and they had the technology to rampage right across the capitol city of the most powerful nation on Earth. The War Of The Worlds soon appeared in America through the pages of Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Magazine.
Will This Nightmare Never End?
Perhaps the dripping in paranoia was the key to Wells’ American success. America is a very paranoid ountry and the paranoia is shared equally by both the Right and the Left. If War Of The Worlds dripped with paranoia it was as nothing compared to Wells’ next book, When The Sleeper Wakes. Sleeper is all bombs, sirens and searchlights playing across the dark night skies. Sleeper is the masterpiece of paranoia. I just love it. Wells must hav been going through a period of deep anxiety when he wrote it. Sleeper is one great long anxiety attack wich he translated into a fear of being buried alive. The hero, Graham, is actually buried alive although above ground. He’s placed in a glass case where he sleeps for a couple hundred years until one day he awakes to find himself in possession of all the wealth in the world. His money had been in trust gathering interest for all these centuries until his estate equalled the world’s wealth. Of course he is more dangerous awake than asleep so he begins running scared.
But that fear or paranois also characterized The War Of The Worlds which is one long flight from danger. Godwin continues:
Cosmopolitan was not cheap and so it would not be until the following January that the impressionable and imaginative young inventor Robert Goddard would first encounter Wells’ Martian war machines. Copyright laws in America were still somewhat tenuous and newspapers were at liberty to do as they pleased. Obtaining permission was often the last thing a newspaper editor would worry about and this modus operandi was especially prevalent in the smaller newspapers such as the New York Evening Journal, The Milwaukee Sentinel and the Boston Post. Many of these newspapers decided to jump on Wells’ bandwagon.
In the Boston Post, a Sunday, January 9th 1898, an entirely revised version of The War Of The Worlds appeared under the title Fighters From Mars- or, The Terrible War Of The Worlds, as it Was Waged in or Near Boston in the year 1900. What is particularly remarkable about this is that the story is completely transposed from London to Boston. All of the familiar scenes which take place in south London are suddenly taking place in Concord Masschusetts. The Boston Post was fairly well circulated in the New England area and Robert Goddard soon learned of the remarkable serial. The Post certainly did their part to stoke the fires of enthusiasm, they repeated the first chapter the next day in Monday’s newspaper and then not a day went by for the next few weeks without another installment appearing. On the 3rd of February the serialization was complete and Wells’ great story was soon destined to appear in America as a full fledged book.
Then something altogether unexpected happened. The editors of the Boston Post revealed that they had acquired a “sequel” to Wells’ story, the advert in the Post read. “Edison’s Conquest Of Mars- A Sequel To ‘Fighters From Mars’… written in collaboration with Edison by Garrett P. Serviss the well known astronomical author.”
A truly astounding development. Here was immediate impact to be followed forty years later by the even more astonishing reaction to Orson Wells radio script of the novel which was accepted as fact, real by the radio listeners who grabbed their shotguns and ran into the streets to repel the Martian invaders. Obviously the novel answered a deep seated psychological need of Americans which would be reflected in a series of movies such as The Day The Earth Stood Still with Gort an Klaatu as well as such later developments as Roswell, New Mexico and Area 51. Aliens and space were united to the New Mythology. Of course such aliens are only God thinly disguised. After all such characters as Klaatu are always preaching to us to mend our misbegotten ways or else. Religion or no religion.
A Giant Leap For Americans
The remarkable thing is that the Boston Post or one or more of its editors got a British copy in their hands, or the Cosmopolitan reprint, read it had his mind transformed on the spot immediately beginnning the transposition from London to Boston while at the same time beginning he process to create a sequel that was ready to begin publishing as soon as the original finished. Plus Edison had to be immediately amenable to the idea so as to give his permission to use his name.
Now, all this is transpiring during the Spanish-American war and the insurrection in the Philippines. Also as if one phenomenon weren’t enough this was also the moment that Kipling’s poem The White Man’s Burden appeared. Kipling’s poem was, of course, a commentary on the Philippine insurrection.
Serviss then had probably no more than a month to draft his sequel. Serviss himself had a scientific background which he fully employs in his sequel. He was up to date on Martian theory. As incredible as it may seem the book could have been a pilot for Star Trek. He got it all in one book. The Boston Post serialization ran and then the story disappeared. It never made book form at the time. In 1947 it was unearthed and published in a truncated form so unless by a miracle the Post episodes were seen by Edgar Rice Burroughs they had no influence on him although it seems like they could have. However Percival Lowell the astronomer who is often mentioned as an influence on Burroughs was from Boston. By 1899 he had already established his observatory in Flagstaff and written the first of his three Martian books, ‘Mars.’ He might then have had an influence on Serviss. Lowell’s other two Martian books Mars And The Canals and Mars As The Abode Of Life written in 1906 and 1908 respectively might have been influenced by Serviss. As a budding Mars expert it is likely that he might have had his attention called to both Wells’ and Serviss’ efforts. If Burroughs read Lowell he would have been indirectly influenced by Serviss. Anyway Serviss has a full discussion of how the water imagined to be on Mars flowed from the South to the North because the South Pole was thought to be elevated over the North and water, of course, flows down hill. Serviss doesn’t explain how the water gets back to the South Pole.
Serviss and undoubtedly Lowell have the water flowing on the surface so Burroughs has it flowing underground somehow.
At the time Edison’s reputation was at its zenith as a technologist. He was the epitome of the American can do attitude. Serviss was pretty fair at this first attempt at sci-fi. One has to assume that all the scientific ideas were in the air but Serviss skillfully blends them together in that can do attitude within virtually days.
Edison creates a fleet of anti-gravity ships within thirty days. The anti-gravity ship is a plausible way of inter-planetary travel while the ships are designed in the projectile shape of current rockets. The disintegrator guns Edison designs, also within thirty days, eliminate the bonds between atoms also in a plausible manner thus scattering the stricken entity to the winds.
Thus a few years before the Wrights not only does Edison have heavier than air craft but the Martians have huge air fleets along the line of Burroughs. So, as I say, Burroughs was stepping into an established genre not originating anything.
Serviss merely makes the Martians giants so we essentially have a Gullivar and the Lilliputians story reversed. It’s a reasonably good story while being a very proper scientific novel. There is nothing really for future writers to add, just rearrange the details. And that was in 1899.
The Boston response to the invasion from Mars was to ‘organize’ its own invasion of Mars and annihilate them as a psychological projection. Very interesting.
From One Dark Spot To Another
I have found no response from Wells to this rewrite of War Of The Worlds and its sequel. H.G. got busy writing another fantastic futuristic sci fi effort title, When The Sleeper Wakes. This book can actually be bundled with 1909’s Tono Bungay. Both wonderful paranoid books. These two books plus War Of The Worlds form the core of my psyche and if the truth were known probably a large part of the psyche of Edgar Rice Burroughs; most especially he was influenced by Tono Bungay which can be readily traced.
Sleeper is a wonderfully paranoid tone poem. By 1898-99 Wells was realizing his ambition of rising above his origins while his Anima-Animus problem was becoming paramount. Wells was born into the lower social level of society with almost no hope of realizing his considerable potential. He was seemingly condemned to a life as a Draper’s Assistant which was little above servitude or even slavery. On his own efforts he rebelled seeking a way out through education. He achieved this after enduring several years on the razor’s edge uncertain as to what his future would be. Combining his scientific background with his literary skills he began to rise above his origins financially although he was never to escape the psychological stigma of his lower class origins.
Thus through his short stories which were sensational at the time and some still are he got a foothold in the literary scene. Wells wrote at least two or three masterpieces. His The Time Machine put him in the writer’s top notch class. War Of The Worlds and When The Sleeper Wakes, close to a diptich, written out of acute anxiety as to his future put him over the top. He was a force to be reckoned with.
Thus both novels pit his heroes against overwhelming forces that they must defeat. In the War Of The Worlds the enemies fade away through natural causes. In Sleeper, Graham the Sleeper, awakes to find himself the richest man in the world only to discover that all is to be taken away from him. This is normal anxiety for someone on the rise. The new man is always resented and his way made difficult. He is to be prevented if possible. Hence the intense fear and paranoia of Sleeper. In the denouement Graham takes to the air in the last remaining airship to single handedly drive back the Negro police summoned from Africa. Prescient really. The Sleeper’s plane spirals into a crash but then Wells takes the copout that it is only a dream. At any rate in real life he wakes up to find that he is now a guru. His non-fiction Anticipations- a guide to the future- published two years later in 1901 established him irrevocably as a ‘futurist’. All he had do then was write passable books.
Both of his masterpieces Worlds and Sleeper also dealt with Wells’ troubled sexuality. As in the life of all men his Anima became estranged from his Animus which Wells was never able to reconcile as he developed a rather bizarre sex life as he searched for a way to recover his Anima.
In WOW as the populace was fleeing the Martians his hero was driving a cart along with his Anima figure. The two became separated when a crowd came between them and she was lost. In Sleeper Graham finds his Anma but once gain events separate them and he is about to crash his plane alone.
And then ten years later Wells crowned his work with the very wonderful Tono Bungay. Not close to the finest story ever told it is nevertheless one of the world’s great novels. The book had a profound influence on me. I first read it when I was twenty while I have subsequently read the book three times. I cherish my first reading because I projected myself into the story so much that I rewrote the book in my imagination to suit my own needs. Tono Bungay was an entirely new book in my last reading. I hope to show that the book had a profound influence on Edgar Rice Burroughs as his and Wells lives touched as the 1930s arrived. It’s always a strange world.
Wells seems to have been interested in the patent medicine businss in the US during the first decade of the century. Strangely it is not impossible that the story refers to the situation of a Dr. Stace of Chicago. I’m just guessing now. Stace’s partner was a young man named Edgar Rice Burroughs. So it may be coincidence that Edward Ponderevo, the inventor of the tonic Tono Bungay, and George Ponderevo his nephew, may have been based in part on Stace and Burroughs. I mean, the patent medicine stories are identical. Probably a coincidence though but I’m just guessing.
During the first decade of the twentieth century the patent medicine business had developed in the United States to magnificent proportions. As great national magazines arose the potential of the business rose accordingly. The active ingredient in the patents was usually alcohol although drugs, which were unregulated were frequently used. It is well known, for instance, that the Coca in Coca Cola referred to the cocaine with which the drink was laced. Coke was a real pick me up back then. Amphetamines were isolated in 1897 so imagine Methedrine Cola. Quite an idea.
The US government saw the dangers of these patent medicines, not a few of which used the opium based laudanum. I mean, these were loose times, they used to give infants opium based laudamun to keep them quiet. Better than TV. So, during the teens the government was forced to conduct a campaign against patent medicines. First they came for the patent medicines then they came for the alcohol and then they came for the cigarettes. Now they’re working on sugar and salt and caffeine. You’re next, you miserable user you. Wells was watching this fascinating activity from Britain. In one instance Edward Ponderevo remarks that six or seven go-getter Americans would wake England up. Then he invented Tono Bungay, the patent medicine par excellence.
Strangely, leading the anti-patent medicine campaign in the US was Samuel Hopkins Adams who would affect Stace-Burroughs then and sixteen years or so later would upset Burroughs’ life when he published his very successful novel, Flaming Youth. Strangely, strangely how many people who have never met can be so influential on others. Almost paranormal.
So, Burroughs took up with Stace in the sale of patent medicines just as the government was cracking down on them, putting them out of business, filing legal complaints, doing the double nasty. Stace and Burroughs developed a close relationship, almost as close as father and son or, uncle and nephew. Even after the two were put out of business they continued in another line of business before parting. Erwin Porges in his biograpy of ERB doesn’t go into a lot of detail over this relationship, maybe from a mistaken sense of delicacy, but this was a big event in Burroughs’ life perhaps straining his marriage with Emma. I believe it was here that he gained his personal experience of sheriffs and grand juries.
Stace may have been a big enough operator to come to Wells’ attention so that he was captivated by this story of the older man and his younger acolyte.
At any rate Edward Ponderevo goes bust in a provincial town through his aggressive business practices removing to London where he develops the idea of Tono Bungay. Wells then diverges from the patent medicine story as Ponderevo, who was a real go-getter, develops an empire based on legitimate products, like soap, so that Tono Bungay takes a back seat in his success story.
Interestingly Ponderevo buys a huge estate not unlike Tarzana around which he begins to build a ten foot high wall some eleven miles in length. Then, of course, he overextends himself and goes bust.
In reading this story, as I’m sure Burroughs did, he must have really related to the patent medicine story while probably rewriting the story in his mind to suit his circumstances. In this story too, Wells finds his perfect soul mate or Anima who once again he loses.
If by chance Wells was aware of the Stace story and did know he had a junior partner, Burroughs, he undoubtely forgot about him and the patent medicine business in the turmoil of the years to come.
The story of Ponderevo, his large estate and the eleven mile ten foot high wall must have stuck in Burroughs’ mind. The story may have been instrumental in his decision to buy Tarzana while it appears spectacularly in 1933’s Tarzan And The Lion Man.
Let me say that this whole group of writers who would nearly all find a place in the Wold Newton Universe read each other. While Kipling, Haggard, Wells and Doyle were reading Burroughs after he became famous as well. Indeed, Wells in Sleeper mentions three stories that had a profound effect on all these writers: Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King, Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness and Henry James’ The Madonna Of The Future. Writers appearing after ERB’s fame appear to have been universally influenced by his, too. Haggard and Kipling’s Love Eternal was a response to ERB’s The Eternal Lover and unless I’m oversensitive they talked to him in it, too.
In a way then this was a form of telepathy, so controversial a topic at the time- true long distance communication and this would continue through the thirties if you’ve read enough and thought about it.
Anyway Burroughs read extensively incorporating almost everything that impressed him into his stories one way and sometime or other. I’m sure he was unconscious of using most of the sources. Thus the story of Tono Bungay, Ponderevo and the ten foot fence entered his subconscious.
In 1919 he left Chicago for LA for good. His intent was to buy twenty acres or so to raise hogs. This he could easily have afforded avoiding all the subsequent economic pain. However Harrisons Gray Otis, the publisher of the LA Times had died in 1917 and his 540 acre estate, Rancho Del Cabrillo, was on the market. ERB made an abrupt about face and bought it. I’ve often wondered why, what was the impetus? If one reads of Ponderevo’s estate in England one has a pretty good match of Tarzana. Burroughs has been quoted as saying he would have liked to have a large estate that he could build a ten foot high wall around. Of course he had the estate and lost it. But the Ponderevo estate seems to have been on his mind.
This may sound completely conjectural but let’s move ahead to 1933 when ERB penned what I consider his magnum opus, Tarzan And The Lion Man. He includes a novella in the story that might be entitled, Tarzan And The City Of God. This is a pretty good story. By 1933 the talkies had been in existence for five years. Many of the more magnificent early horror stories had already been filmed. I may be a sucker for these early horror films but given the limitations of the industry at the time they have never been equaled. So, in addition to all the books stored in ERB’s mind, fifteen years or so of silent films, he now added a full catalog of talkies. Himself a virtual father of all B movies with his own catalog of novels all these B horror films reinforced his imagination. Even though he had little to do with the filming of his own movie starring Herman Brix as Tarzan, The New Adventures Of Tarzan, the movie was nevertheless perfect of the B genre. Sort of an a correction and example to MGM.
Tarzan And The City Of God is perfect in the Pulp genre which is the literary counterpart of the B movie but now ERB seamlessly joins the Pulp to the B genre.
Tarzan And The Lion Man mocks the making of MGM’s film, Trader Horn. As I have pointed out in other reviews in 1931 ERB signed a contract with MGM that removed the Tarzan character in the movies from his control to MGM. MGM then proceeded to mock the Tarzan character on the screen in an attempt to destroy ERB’s creation. Of course, the mockery failed, Tarzan going on to greater glory and an immortality he might not have attained otherwise.
At the same time ERB was locked in a battle with Joseph Stalin and, at the risk of seeming preposterous, the Soviet Union. This war was brought to the surface n 1930’s Tarzan The Invincible. Now, Stalin and the Communists of all countries were attempting to discredit all pre-Revolutionary writers who rejected the Communist program. ERB was one of these while, oddly, Tarzan was one of Stalin’s favorite characters, especially in the MGM movies.
H.G. Wells who accepted the Revolution in substitution for God in about 1920 was one of Stalin’s literary hatchet men. During this period Stalin assigned State prostitutes to service certain Western literary men to report back to him on their doings. Moura Budberg had been assigned to H.G. Wells. Amazingly Wells fell deeply in love with her although he had to have known that he was her job. One of Wells’ targets was Edgar Rice Burroughs. Thus beginning in the twenties Wells began parodying and vilifying Burroughs in various books to which Burroughs replied in other of his own books. Thus, in a sense, there was telepathic communication.
In 1933 the combined attack of MGM, one imagines Louis B. Mayer, Wells and Stalin had overwhelmed Burroughs.
In 1930’s Tarzan The Invincible Burroughs had been forced to abandon the valley of Opar and La to Wellsian and Soviet interference. The Communists invaded Opar destroying ERB’s imagined paradise. So now, in a masterful creation he attacks Wells, MGM and the Communists in the City of God, London, England transposed to the Mutia Escarpment in Africa The Mutia Escarpment was MGM’s imaginary location for the Tarzan movies named after an African actor who appeared in Trader Horn. We do have telepathic communication here if you’ve got your radio turned on and tuned in. So there is layer after layer of mockeries in what is actually a titanic combat involving film and literature carried on right before the eyes of an unseeing world. Stalin, Burroughs, Wells and L.B. Mayer knew but virtually no one else. I might never have caught on but for the internet and the availability of films on DVD and flat screen TVs programmed through my wireless computer network. I have a complete collection of ERB’s novels, nearly all of Wells, and a nearly complete collection of Tarzan DVD’s. There’s always one or two that elude you. So I can read and watch at will. Rather amazing really. All one’s intellectual influences on one shelf while every library and film archive is only a click away. Isn’t God good to us?
So, Tarzan scales the Mutia Escarpment which at his point of attack is a sheer wall of granite. this probably indicates the difficulties ERB was facing. As usual there is an easier ascent for the ladies but Tarzan knows nothing of it. In real life, the location of Van Dyke’s Trader Horn was Murchison Falls on the Nile and the plateau would have been the land around Lake Victoria.
On the plateau Tarzan approaches the City of God/London which is surrounded by a, guess what, ten foot high wall. The circumference must have been at least eleven miles. Thus we have a replica of Ponderevo’s estate as imagined by H.G. Wells of London, England. Instead of Ponderevo’s modern ‘castle’ we have a replica of what might be Frankenstein’s castle or some othe horror film castle with the requisite village at its base.
Now, ‘God’ who was a ‘formerly handsome Englishman’ had come to this country in 1859. This is now 1933 so 74 years previously. As God will tell Tarzan shortly he was a biological scientist experimenting in evolution and creating artificial life a la Frankenstein, when his studies involving corpses brought the authorities down on him forcing him to flee England but not before he had removed, essentially DNA, which ERB calls ‘germs’, from the corpses of Henry VIII and his court buried in Westminster Abbey. In London, Africa God had forced the evolution of a tribe of gorillas turning them into barbaric replicas of Henry VIII and his court. Still having the appearance of gorillas they have more or less human minds speaking and acting as archaic Englishmen.
Tarzan having scaled the impossible cliffs of the plateau is now faced with a ten foot wall with sharply pointed wooden stakes pointing downward making a leap and hoist impossible. ERB has left out the overarching tree in this instance so Tarzan does his strongman act. The body builders are never far from ERB’s imagination. Tarzan pulls off an impossible stunt. Leaping up he grabs a couple stakes lifting himself over his wrists until he was above the wall then rolled forward. Only time that trick’s ever been performed. Thus ERB enters that ‘sacred city.’ The sort of Troy that refused Achilles.
The scaling of the cliffs, the clearing of the wall might have been suggested to ERB by his struggle to achieve success which he had done for one brief moment. Lifting himself by his bootstraps, as it were, he had gained entry into that sacred city. His success was to be shortlived and almost as tragic as Tarzan’s visit to the City of God or ERB’s Tarzana or Ponderevo’s estate.
While Wells was born to poverty ERB’s course in life had been different; he was a Golden Child with the highest expectations. And then in his teens it was all taken from him as he was plunged into poverty although not as abject as he makes it out to be. Thuse he had a different personal myth than that of Wells. He identified with Mark Twain’s Prince And The Pauper in which the Prince changes places with his impoverished doppelganger, then regains his position. His other favorite book of this type was Little Lord Fauntleroy in which a British heir lives a normal life in America until he inherits his English title. Thus these two books combined with Tono Bungay suggested a course to his life that he actually realized and as the three titles suggest lived his life in a boom and bust fashion. as though compelled to gain and lose, lose and gain his fortunes until he died in bed a comparatively well off man. ERB was a very suggestible guy. At this point in his life he was heading into a major bust part of the cycle and this story tells of it.
Once inside the walls there sits the castle, The City of God, the City on the Hill, the sacred city of Achilles, his goal. Tarzan mounts a very long flight of steep stairs as ‘God high above on the castle ramparts watches with grim satisfaction. the fly has come to the spider. Just like L.B. Mayer and MGM he’s got his man all but trapped.
Having just been trapped by his enemies ERB belatedly has it all figured out. Tarzan enters a oyer faced by three doors. At this point all decisions are Tarzan’s. He can go back or he can go forward. He elects to go on. Two of the doors are locked while one is ajar. This scene of Tarzan and the doors is repeated several times in the corpus. I’ve tried to figure it out. The nearest I can come is a short story of 1898 by Frank Stockton titled The Lady Or The Tiger.
Since this was a very famous story I, for myself, have no doubt that ERB read it and was suitably impressed. This is arbitrary, I know, however there is a great deal of similarity between this story and the story of Queen Nemone and Tarzan in the arena from Tarzan And The City Of Gold. Now, in the Lady Or The Tiger the story hinges on two doors, behind one of which is a tiger and the other a gorgeous lady. This is the trial by ordeal that Stockton’s king has chosen to decide his criminal cases. In his story a young lowly man has dared to love the king’s daughter. She is inn attendance but displeased because the lover will possible marry another. She indicates to him to take the right hand door. The question is left unanswered whether the lady or the tiger was behind the door by Stockton leaving it to the reader whether the one or the other was the man’s fate.
In the city of God, of course, the choice has been made for Tarzan as the middle door is left unlatched. Tarzan enters descends some steps, passes through another door that latches behind him to find himself facing…the lady. Well,I don’tknow, could be unrelated to Stockton’s story, but then, again….
At any rate it relates to ERB’s obsessions with tigers. As we all know the magazine story of Tarzan Of The Apes had both tigers and lions that public opinion forced Tarzan to change as the literalists pointed out that there were no tigers in Africa. ERB changed the tiger to a lioness he called Sabor so that female lions can be thought of as tigers. I think most of the lions Tarzan kills are females. If tigers and ladies are associated in ERB’s mind then in City of God Tarzan got both the symbol and the real thing, who was his preferred Anima figure Rhonda. I’m pretty sure that’s how ERB’s mind worked.
Speaking of tigers, for those lovers of the Pulp and B movie genres, a perfect of its kind, the grande finale of the genre so to speak is Fritz Lang’s Indian diptich The tiger Of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb of 1959. Set in India but pure Burroughs with plenty of tigers, as there are no lions in India as everyone knows. Stunning color and the perfect pulp story of the twenties and thirties. Three or four hours of bliss.
So Tarzan/ERB is in a cage with his other half, his Anima. He’s been in tight spots before but this is it, the real thing, the place that’s a leap too far. Rider Haggard all over again. While the Big Guy and Rhonda are talking things over their captor, ‘God’, makes his appearance. A jolly fellow, a formerly handsome Englishman, now piebald, who might go by the name of H.G. Wells.
As I said Wells is one of my favorites and when I was younger and slightly more obtuse Wells struck me as he probably did ERB as a stunning writer. Later as I learned of Wells’ politics and other failings he lost much of his gitter but the glory pretty much remains although resented. Burroughs had much more reason to consider Wells a ‘formerly handsome Englishman’. Thus he takes a certain malicious pleasure in making his God character half black, half white, half ape and half human. There’s a lot more to analyze in the character of God but I’m working this side of the track right now.
The reason God is half and half is because as he aged he took germ cells from the apes to rejuvenate himself thus slowly adopting ape characteristis, regressing as it were in an evolutionary sense and making a fine joke on the Stokes Trial in Tennessee of a few years earlier. God is delighted to have captured two such fine White DNA specimens as he hopes their germ cells may restore him to his former splendor.
We’ll never know now because while God absents himself, in the best pulp/B movie fashion Tarzan feels a breeze stirring. This leads to what is hopefully an escape oute but merely tuns into an avenue leading to Tarzan’s Gotterdamerung. A fire starts rising up through the flue Tarzan found and ascended so that the whole City of God on the hill perishes in flames.
While Burroughs may have said back in the teens that he had never read Wells, that may be dismissed. Actually when one delves behind the obvious facts one finds a fairly intimate connection with their careers contacting on the psychological level, that is to say ‘telepathically’, several times. Between Wells and Burroughs almost continuously from, say, 1908 to the thirties.
If one assumes that Wells was aware of the Stace-Burroughs situation, which is only a possibility, then Wells formed part of Burroughs subconscious with his Tono Bungay. That influence probably surfaced when Burroughs purchased Tarzana and then became continuous through the twenties and thirties when Wells became Stalin’s literary hatchet man.
Wells eludes the Wold Newton because he never created a mythic character or series of novels although the psychological situations of the seven science fiction novels and Tono Bungay along with many of his short stories give him a significant place in the Wold Newton mythos. The WNU is of course a state of mind giving mythological form to history since 1795 when the meteor landed altering consciousness.
Pt. II: H.G. Wells, Sigmund Freud, Edgar Rice Burroughs And The Development Of Contemporary Sexual Attitudes
August 22, 2010
H.G. Wells, Sigmund Freud, Edgar Rice Burroughs
And The Development Of Contemporary Sexual Attitudes
by
R.E. Prindle
Edgar Rice Burroughs And His Tiger
To put our three protagonists into perspective: Sigmund Freud The eldest of the three was born in 1856, Wells in 1866 and Burroughs, the youngest in 1875. All three were heavily influenced by Charles Darwin and the various theories of Evolution. While today Darwin is touted as the sole source of evolution he was in fact one of many voices as the theory of evolution developed. Thus all three spent their formative years in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Freud was 44 as the century turned in 1900, Wells 34 and Burroughs 25 each neatly spaced 10 years from his predecessor.
Wells was the first to make the leap into prominence followed by Freud and then Burroughs. All three men were desperate to find fame and fortune. Freud even advtertised he’d sell his soul to do it.
Wells came from close to the bottom of the social ladder. His parents eked out a living as shopkeepers without commercial abilities on the edge of London. Wells’ father was an able cricket player who gained his self-esteem from that sport. The parents split up. His mother went into domestic service. She placed young Wells as a Draper’s assistant- a clerk in a dry goods shop. As one might well believe Wells rebelled at this dead end destiny in life. Possessing a good brain Wells began a series of educational maneuvers that led to his being a student of T.H. Huxley, an apostle of Evolution. A science career seemed to be opening for Wells but he was led away by his sexual needs. He married a cousin with whom he was a boarder in her mother’s house only to discover her Victorian notions of male-female sexual relations differed widely from his. He divorced her taking up with a fellow student. She was an able financial manager so he put her in charge and began chasing skirts. It didn’t seem to bother his wife Catharine who he renamed Jane. After a series of hairy but educational employments Wells began to find success in journalism and writing. With his story The Time Machine he broke into the bigtime giving Jane some real work to do. Quickly following The Time Machine up with his succession of sci-fi novels by 1900 he was assured of a lifetime income.
Bertie Wells
It was well because his work after 1906 while prolific was unlucrative except for 1922’s Outline Of History. There was a winner. The Outline was his second great break setting him up for the rest of his life along with the science fiction. Ah, those Seven Science Fiction Novels. And, of course, his close to amazing collection of short stories. There was another gold mine. Jane raked in the cash and Bertie, for that was how he wished to be called, spent it.
He associated himself with the socialist Fabian Society of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century with their ‘advanced’ sexual notions. Why the old Hetaerist notion of promiscuity is considered ‘advanced’ is beyond me. At the same time Bertie claimed to be a Feminist. The women’s Matriarchal movement was very active from mid-century on. His Feminism, however, was concerned only with eliminating chastity thereby allowing any man access to any woman at any time, anywhere. Purely Hetaeric, although Wells wouldn’t have understood his ancient roots in that manner.
It was when Wells turned to his sex novels that he put his reputation in jeopardy. After his intial spate of sci-fi his reputation slid, the only bright spot being The Outline Of History. While his later novels, tend toward the tedious and require a certain determination to read through they are almost always redeemed by the social context. I like Wells and don’t mind the stuff too much but I can’t recommend it very strongly. It’s a matter of taste, either you like Wells or you don’t.
Wells major themes are outlined in the last of the Seven Sci-Fi Novels- In The Days Of The Comet- when he shades into the sex novel. In my estimation this is a very fine book as utopian novels go. After Tono-Bungay and When the Sleeper Wakes it may be my favorite. The turn of the century was a hey day of the utopian novel with the dystopian novel being introduced. If you like the genre many fine ones were written: News From Nowhere by William Morris. I came to Morris late in life but if you like the mystical utopian or quasi-utopian novel Morris has a lot to recommend himself including several utopian forays. I’m sure he influenced both Wells and Burroughs; Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward is another fine example of the period. They’re all bushwa but fun to read. Utopian novels are usually a projection of the author’s own needs and desires into which all humanity is to conform. Usually by some miracle all humanity becomes reconciled to living in universal harmony with no unseemly disturbances of the temper. Museums and lecture halls flourish while dance halls and crime atrophy. Culture is much more elevated. To the most casual observor such an utopia is impossible without an alteration of the human brain. Only one utopianist I have read has addressed that problem and that one is H.G., our Bertie.
In The Days Of The Comet was published in 1906 at the time that Halley’s Comet was due to make its scheduled seventy-five year fly-by in 1910. It was projected to pass very close to the earth which it did unlike its 1985 appearance when you had to know where to look for it. Indeed, the comet came with trails of glory so bright you could read newsprint by it at night.
Thus Wells uses the comet as his agent to change the physical structure of the human brain. Wells fails to mention any change to the brains of the lesser animals and insects. Perhaps the lion really did lie down with the lamb. Before the comet, or the Big Change as the passing was referred to, people’s brains were as ours are now; after the Change they all resembled that of H.G. I am in sympathy with Wells; I fancy that one morning I will sally forth, flick my finger tips a couple times, say abracadabra and the people of the world will be tranformed into clones of myself. What’s holding me back is that I don’t know which will be the Big Morning and I don’t wish to be seen as an eccentric or worse who failed to take his medicine by repeatedly trying and failing. You know, out there flicking my finger tips into the empty air.
But, Wells had it worked out. The comet came trailing this tail of green gas. As the comet passed the gas enveloped the earth much like a magnetar, I suppose, knocking people out for several hours while the gas did its work. When England came to the world was changed and everyone thought like Wells. Sort of the same thing that was thought would happen when Obama was elected. The Magic Negro would save us all.
Actually the Comet reflected a change in Wells own circumstances. In 1898 when Wells published The War Of The Worlds he was balanced between hope and despair. He was close to financial independence but not quite there. Thus in WOW the tone is between hope and despair. The world is invaded by Martians who destroy everything in their path, themselves being destroyed by a virus taken in through their beastly habit of drinking human blood. One neglected detail is that the projectiles they arrived in trailed some green clouds. The last projectile had a larger one so that perhaps Wells was going to develop the notion but then couldn’t work it in. He did have the Martians project a black gas that killed people though.
By 1906 his success was assured, he was shooting his pistol off around London having several sexual affairs so his outlook was brighter and, hence, that of the planet, so the novel describes the transition from the evil old world to the brave new one In other words, Wells had passed from poverty to affluence.
Sex is the issue here.
Before the Comet Willie, the hero, was courting his childhood sweetheart Nettie from whom he expected to be her sole sexual companion. In the weird old world sex was exclusive. They had committed themselves to each other as children which remained a claim in Willie’s mind.
However Willie is a poor boy with no prospects. Nettie is courted by the rich guy’s son, Verrall with whom she runs off. Willie treks 16 miles to see her only to find she has abandoned her parents’ home in company with Verrall. Well, Willie’s not going to endure such treatment from Nettie or take that from Verrall so he steals some money, buys a revolver and a train ticket to track them down and shoot them dead. You see, in the days before The Big Change that was the way things were done.
In the meantime the Comet is getting closer, C-hour is near, and war breaks out between England and Germany, this is eight years before 1914 so Bertie exhibits his prescience. The details are well handled so we have the increasing color of the green cloud and the flash and boom of the big navel guns as the climax takes place by the seashore. This was really nicely handled.
Willie tracks the couple down to a Bohemian enclave on the East Anglian coast. Nettie and Verrall had gotten married so it seems rather odd that they searched out a Bohemian enclave. So, as the battle rages and the green cloud descends on the earth Willie is chasing the couple down the beach firing his pistol wildly. This is the moment of the Big Change. Everybody gets gassed for a few hours then arise, born again, in a new heaven and a new earth. Utopia!
The same device is used a few decades later in the great movie The Village Of The Damned. A good device. It won’t go stale.
In the new world, new rules and reasonings apply. Nettie no longer has to choose between Willie and Verrall. She can have both…and more.
As Willie comes to he hears groaning. The groaning is coming from a prominent politician who was out bicycling at two in the morning when the green fog descended and fell off his bike as he conked breaking his ankle. Thus Willie makes a connection changing the direction of his life allowing him to become prominent in the establishment of this brave new world. Thus he later meets Nettie and Verrall on equal terms.
Nettie informs Verrall that she wants a menage a trois with Willie to which, in this best of all impossible worlds, Verrall compliantly agrees. Later Willie marries making the arrangment a menage a quatre. Neato! Was this all? No…
In the frame for the story it turns out that the story teller is Willie. In the Frame Wells comes upon this white haired old dude, Willie, writing this memoir. He has pages clipped in fascicles of fifty that Willie allows the editor, H.G., to read.
Finishing the last fascicle the author asks if Nettie had sexual relations with others. The white haired dude replies somethng like this: ‘Oh, heavens, yes. Hundreds. You don’t think a beautiful girl like Nettie wouldn’t attract numerous suitors do you?’
So there you have it. In the brave new world the woman of Wells’ dreams is a mere sex object who spends her life being pawed by, shall we say, all comers. A Hetaerist’s dream. This is Wells’ sexual program. At this point he began to lose readers. Too avant garde; you don’t want to get too far out in front of the pack. In addition to the sexual proselytizing of his novels he carried his didacticism to extremes advancing educational theories for instance. For over a hundred years we’ve been told our educational system is faulty. New systems have succeeded new systems. After over a century of tinkering are people better schooled? No. They’re worse. There’s only one way to learn and that’s the drudgery of study. Not every mind is prepared to do that, somebody’s going to be left behind. Wells’ notions as everyone else’s is what they think they would have liked. No study. Lots of play.
At any rate carrying all these utopian notions Wells passed through the horrific war years to have all his expectations disappointed. Not surprisingly his mind broke and he went into a deep depression. First he tried the God trip and when that failed he embraced the Communist Revolution in Russia. He essentially became an agent of Moscow. As a very prominent writer he was a desirable acquistion for the Revolution. As a major theorist and propagandist he had an entree first to Lenin and then after 1924 when Lenin died, Stalin.
In 1921 he interviewed Lenin and received his instructions. the Soviets had a system of State prostitution. These women were assigned as agents to service writers while spying on them for Moscow. In 1921 he met Moura Budberg for whom he fell. At that time she had been assigned to manage a consular agent, Bruce Lockhart, who along with the agency was in process of being expelled. Wells became intensely jealous of Lockhart because of this connection badmouthing him from then on. In any case Moura Budberg was assigned to Maxim Gorky then living in exile in Italy with whom she stayed until Gorky was enticed back to the USSR at which time she was reassigned to shepherd Wells.
Now Wells became a Soviet literary hatchet man. It was his job to interfere and discredit writers who refused to propagate the Party line. Among these was Edgar Rice Burroughs who had proclaimed his anti-Communism with a tract or study titled Under The Red Flag of 1919. Publishers refused the piece. Wells anti-Burroughs campaign was so discreet that my discovery of it three or four years ago was the first mention of it. I repeat the story here for those who have not read my earlier essays.
In the first place all these writers read each other. Kipling and Haggard for instance read each other as well as writers like Wells and Burroughs and vice versa. They could pass disguised messages in their novels. As Burroughs was the last of these writers to begin writing and that in US pulp magazines in 1912 that may never have reached Europe while his book titles only reached print in 1914 after the Great War began and were only the Tarzan titles until the end of the decade Wells may not have read Burroughs until 1918 or slightly after. Nevertheless Burroughs influence shows in Wells’ 1923 effort Men Like Gods. This book also ridicules Burroughs.
Men Like Gods takes place in a parallel universe. There is some resemblance to the Eloi of The Time Machine. For the first time Wells’ characters are nearly nude. This was the only time he ever did this so he was probably under the influence of Burroughs whose characters never wore clothes or only minimally.
Burroughs apparently picked up the references or had them pointed out to him. In any event in 1926 he wrote The Moon Maid in answer to Wells, The First Men In The Moon. Wells’ book was pretty clumsycompared to that of Burroughs who demonstrated his imaginative superiority by running circles around Wells. The second part of the story was a rewrite of Under The Red Flag that was a direct challenge to the Soviets. By 1926 of course Stalin was directing the USSR.
Wells then countered with an undisguised attack that portrayed Burroughs as insane. This was Mr. Blettsworthy On Rampole Island. Here Wells parodied a pulp magazine story not yet in book form, The Lad And The Lion, and the last third of The Land That Time Forgot. Burroughs returned the fire with Tarzan At The Earth’s Core and Tarzan The Invincible that featured Stalin himself as a character.
Moura Budberg Young
At about this time Moura Budberg was assigned to Wells as a concubine as Gorky had returned to the USSR. This was to cause a falling out between Wells and Stalin while perhaps leading to Stalin’s assassination in 1953.
Burroughs’ entire series of novels from Tarzan At The Earth’s Core to Tarzan And The Lion Man deals with Wells and the Reds. The Communists attacked unrelentingly on several fronts probably robbing Burroughs blind in royalties while trying to squeeze off his sales. His British publishers did just that. Although it appears that they refused or were reluctant to keep his titles in print Alan Hodge and Robert Graves in their history of the twenties and thirties, The Long Weekend, twice refer to Burroughs’ great popularity, once in the twenties and once in the thirties.
In Germany the Communists attacked ERB for his anti-German comments in books written during the war
Moura Budberg Old
years thereby destroying that lucrative market. The Soviets never paid royalties anyway so there was no monetary effect from that market. In the US Burroughs had troubles with his publishers McClurg’s and Grossett & Dunlap who seem quite hostile to in the correspondence in the archives at ULouisville. ERB left McClurg in the late twenties going through two more publishers before winning the battle by publishing under his own imprint. Thus by 1930’s Tarzan The Invincible, note the title, he seemed to have won the battle if not the war.
However sound had come to the movies in 1927-28 which rearranged the playing field. Rather than just being ‘flickers’ they were now more on a par with literature while being even more influential. With sound the movie version of a story took pecedence over the book, heck, it took precedence over history. Thus the movie version took precedence as the canon over the book, the latter became an adjunct that few read in comparison to those who saw and heard the movie. As the movies paid in one lump sum what it might take years to dribble in as royalties authors were willing to give the devil a cut to have their novels produced. Books could be issued in their thousands of titles a year but there were only a couple hundred movies released in a year. The number of producers had been consolidated from many to a few after the shakeout of the twenties, hence combines like Metro, Goldwyn and Mayer, Radio-Keith-Orpheum- RKO- and the combine of Twentieth Century Pictures and William Fox.
MGM was of course top dog by far. There was no vacuum there but the Commies moved in anyway soon taking over de facto control. When Burroughs published his own books, quite profitably, he had slipped the noose but only temporarily. As a strategist he did poorly. In 1931, because Burroughs didn’t ever bother to dread his contracts, MGM finessed his meal ticket, Tarzan, from him thereby making him financially dependent on them. Even though they might have exploited the Tarzan character by making two or three movies a year and zillions of dollars they chose to make only six movies between 1931 and 1940 thereby keeping Burroughs on a short financial lease while depriving him of hundreds of thousands of dollars in income. Remember that at the same time Roosevelt after 1933 drove the income tax rate as high as 90% so there was some difficulty forcing a grin in those trying times.
This is a good story and I covered it in some detail in my ten part review of Tarzan And The Lion Man, expecially parts 6-10 to which I refer you if you’re interested. Wells and Burroughs bickered back and forth although it appears that Burroughs lost heart after Tarzan And The Lion Man. By that time he knew he had been had. He did concede defeat in the issuance of a book version of The Lad And The Lion in 1935; a notice to both Wells and Stalin. The story was a short one so while leaving the old story as a notice to Wells who had mocked him and the story in his Blettsworthy novel, Burroughs interpolated chapters with a story mocking the Communist Revolution in Russia. Then he retired from the field.
However he gives Wells a grand slam in the story of ‘God’ in the middle of Lion Man. That is a great story within the story however I wasn’t clear on its relation to Wells at the time so I will give a modified version here.
Now, Burroughs had a remarkable mind. He was able to carry the story lines of hundreds of books he had read in his head retrieving details whenever they suited his needs. He was always conscious of what he was doing but he wrote pastiches anyway.
The story of Tarzan and God mocks Wells’ The Island Of Dr. Moreau. Burroughs had already used Moreau in his 1913 novel The Monster Men plus he wrote around the theme repeatedly. Moreau itself plays around with the Frankenstein theme which also figures prominently in Burroughs’ literary antecedents.
Remember that Burroughs is able to combine numerous details of other books into one composite figure so that Wells is only one source for the character of ‘God’ in Lion Man. For our purposes one may assume that when Tarzan talks to God (smirk) it is equivalent to Burroughs talking to Wells. Gone is the transcendant confidence of Tarzan The Invincible and Tarzan Triumphant. However the coup of the capture of Tarzan in 1931 when Burroughs signed away his rights to the movie representation of Tarzan to MGM had stripped Burroughs of all defences and he himself was now trapped in a cage at the mercy of MGM, Wells and Stalin. During Tarzan’s movie history dating back to the late teens Burroughs had always complained, making a nuisance of himself because the studios weren’t following his stories closely. Now, he had given MGM the right to create their own stories. ERB was dissatisfied with the representation of Tarzan but the character was so good that even though MGM tried they couldn’t destroy it.
Nevertheless they were in a position to substitute the movie Tarzan for the literary Tarzan in the public mind and they did. For me and many others the discovery that there was a literary Tarzan came long after we had been viewing Tarzan movies. We invariably found the literary Tarzan superior. For now Tarzan/ERB was imprisoned in a cell. The best ERB can do is to come up with a better Moreau story than Wells.
So, ERB creates a mock London, England in the wilds of Africa with a replica of the court of Henry VIII peopled by mutated gorillas. By 1930 when this story was written ERB was probably as well informed about evolution as anyone. He had kept up his reading becoming as knowledgeable concerning genetics as any but researchers. Thus while thirty years earlier Moreau had been clumsily experimenting with vivisection ‘God’ had used the lastest genetic techniques that ERB can devize to convert gorillas into a cross between apes and human beings. The apes of God are human in all but appearance. There are many jokes concealed in this episode, apes of God perhaps being one. Wyndham Lewis used the term apes of God as a synonym for writers so he may be calling Wells as God and writer an ape. ‘God’ himself who has exchanged ape genes with himself is now half ape. See, a joke. Whether Wells recognized his portrait isn’t known.
Tarzan sets about to escape but as there is no escape from his real life situation ERB merely burns God’s castle down disrupting one supposes the USSR. Perhaps gratifying to the imagination but futile for changing his situation. No longer in control of his creation Burroughs creative powers begin to atrophy.
Uncle Joe As FDR Would Say
Thus Stalin triumphed over his literary adversary. Perhaps Stalin despised writers for he set out to humiliate Wells after the defeat of Burroughs. As noted the State prostitute Moura Budberg had formerly serviced Maxim Gorky while after his return Budberg was assigned to Wells. H.G. had fallen hard for Budberg apparently seriously in love with her. Stalin called Wells to Moscow in 1936 when Gorky was on his last legs, about to die. Budberg was also in Moscow but when Wells asked to see her she told him she was called out of town. In a rather malicious ploy Stalin arranged for Wells to see Gorky and Budberg together as, of course, she wasn’t out of town.
Wells was completely destroyed unable to penetrate Stalin’s duplicity, or at least believe it, at the time. However when it finally sank in he had no more means to retaliate than Burroughs so he wrote a book too- The Holy Terror. In that book, the ruffian leader of the revolution, or Stalin in real life, has lost the ability to lead the revolution and has to be discreetly removed. A conspiracy is set afoot. A doctor’s plot in which the leader is artfully removed by medical means. I am unaware of how much influence Wells may have had to incite others to achieve his result. At any rate the War intervened making it inexpedient to dispatch Stalin while Wells died in 1946 before he could reactivate the plan.
It may be coincidence but Stalin discovered a doctor’s plot in the early fifties that he was able to foil. However Khruschev and Beria and others poisoned Stalin at a dinner in 1953 thus removing this singularly successful but troublesome dictator.
The turmoil of the thirties may have derailed Wells sexual program somewhat but sexual matters were still moving in his desired direction. Sexual matters had been loosened a great deal but there were still miles to go.
Sex And The Psyche
In Part III I will deal with the key mover in sexual matters, Sigmund Freud who was the second of the three to reach prominence. Thus Burroughs the third to arrive on the scene and the last to leave will be saved for the last part.
A Review
Themes And Variations
The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs
#14 Tarzan The Invincible
Part V of X
by
R.E. Prindle
First Published On The Ezine, ERBzine
The Man
Six White Men In Search Of An African Empire
If one believes that Burroughs is merely on a rant against Communism in Tarzan The Invincible and Tarzan Triumphant then there is nothing more to say. Still, it is remarkable that ERB specifically names Stalin as a persecutor of Tarzan in both books. As Burroughs says he doesn’t mind fictionizing political and religious realities the question is , is he fictionizing a real life situation where Stalin, or the Communists are giving him a hard time?
Seems really improbable doesn’t it? People are used to thinking of Burroughs as a barely literate fantasy writer better ignored by the literati. But more insignificant men than ERB have been the victims of hate campaigns.
Dr. Harvey Springer- The Cowboy Evangelist
Who now, for instance, remembers Harvey Springer? Harvey Springer? Never heard of him? I don’t wonder. Oddly enough when I was in San Diego in 1957-58 Harvey Springer, who was some kind of evangelicalist, was going to appear at some church out where no sailor ever went. He was kind of a cowboy evangelical from Denver. His most dramatic stunt was placing one of size fourteens, he was a tall rangy man, on one chair and the other on another to harangue the crowd.
I hadn’t heard of him, you know, nor had anyone I knew, but Harvey Springer was reputed to be an arch anti-Semite. Could have been for all I knew, but I’m not going to take anyone’s word for it. The point is the Jews sent all kinds of people into the streets to tell people not to go see Harvey. I don’t how many times they must have heard- Who’s Harvey Springer?- in reply. Rather than say he’s an anti-Semite, of which I had even less knowledge at the time never having heard the term, all that was necessary was to say the two words, church and evangelical to cool my ardor, if I had any, to find where he was speaking and go see him.
In addition the AJC and ADL published books in which they denounced Harvey Springer as a very dangerous anti-Semite. Now, if certain people would go to such extremes to persuade someone not to do something he had no intention of doing what would they do to defame someone with an international reputation? The only one who didn’t realize the extent of ERB’s fame seems to have been ERB himself. He was no self promoter, he thought it best to keep his head down.
In that sense, judging from the unpublished Under The Red Flag and the published Moon Maid, Invincible and Triumphant Burroughs was actually a leading anti-Communist voice. I mean, people read this stuff. They read it in America , they read it in England, they read it in numerous translations and they read it in the Soviet Union. Here’s the kicker, Stalin read it. Not only that, Stalin was a movie buff. And he requested Tarzan films (reported in a recent UK Telegraph story and the book of Simon Sebag Montefiori: Stalin: The Court Of The Red Tsar.)
History is not a mystery, it’s just schoolyard bullies bigger than life.
We also know that Stalin ordered his scientists in the 1920s to attempt to cross an ape and a human to create a super warrior. It’s clear to me that Stalin had read Beasts Of Tarzan. The Man of Steel may have had a difficult time distinguishing between fact and fiction as many another. Besides, remember eugenics was a hot topic of conversation in Red circles then as it is today. Not knowing what we know now about genetics crossing an ape and human may not have seemed that far fetched. It doesn’t to a lot of people now. Heck, the Old Testament enjoins one to destroy the results of an animal-human union so the ancient Hebrews thought it was not only possible but a regular occurrence.
There is very clear evidence that the Reds were conducting a campaign of vilification against Burroughs. I’ve mentioned it before but the clearst evidence is H.G. Wells’ novel Mr. Blettsworthy On Rampole Island.
Bertie Wells
May we take a moment to look more closely at Wells? Don’t think I’m antagonistic toward Wells. I dearly love Wells just as I do Burroughs. I have a complete collection of Burroughs while I’m looking for the odd volume of the more obscure Wells. I’m not boasting, I’m just saying this in the way of credentials. I’ve read all of Burroughs more than once and I’ve read all the Wells’ titles I have, many of them more than once. In point of fact I love all the literature from say, Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines to 1930 and perhaps an odd year or so beyond. I love. I mean, I love it. I love Edgar Wallace who, if you can believe it, is claimed to have sold one out of four books sold in England during this period. If you don’t know him he was one of the co-writers of the movie King Kong and then he died. All this stuff of this period is wonderful. Robert Hitchens, P.C. Wren.
So, you know, it’s like this: H.G. Wells was a Soviet literary hatchet man.
The man had a wonderful career. You know his most famous novels, The War Of The Worlds, First Men In The Moon, The Island Of Dr. Moreau, In The Days Of The Comet. If you like Wells, and I do, those are the tip of the iceberg. A few of his short stories and he wrote many are as good as short stories get.
He was always a socialist and perhaps a terrorist conspiritor, but he was a child of the nineteenth century until his mind broke at the end of the Great War. At that time he lost faith, in god, transferring his faith to the Revolution, becoming a Soviet dupe. His literary career may be divided into two halves, pre-God- The Invisible King and post-God. That was one of his books.
He was not taken seriously as a fiction writer after the war. During the twenties and thirties he turned out an unending stream of novels that were ignored. It’s not difficult to see why, but I find them a little more tolerable. I like Wells. His reputation and career were saved by his 1922 effort An Outline Of History. It was a massive volume and it sold massively for twenty years or more while being hugely influential in literature. Put him on easy street for the rest of his long life. As much as any artist who is skilled at spending money can be on Easy Street.
As a novelist however, he was pretty much a has been. While none of his post-1920 novels take off he hits the spot with me.
From 1920 on his soul belonged to the Revolution, which is to say the Socialist homeland, which is to say the Union Of Soviet Socialist Republics. That means he was more loyal to Russia than he was to England. In short, a traitor in intent if not in deed. While no Liberal ever deals in realities hence are in constant denial, The Man of Steel, Josef Stalin, was his boss. Wells naturally would have denied this.
The Soviets had a pretty comprehensive system which once again is denied. There were a number of State prostitutes who were assigned to the various important Red writers to service them as mistresses, while reporting back to the Kremlin. This is, of course, denied by the Liberals. I don’t understand living a life that has to be denied, where everything you do has to be represented as something else, but such duplicity is apparently congenial to the Liberal mind. They must seek it.
Moura Budberg
Wells was assigned a woman named Moura Budberg. She must have known how to turn on the charm as she was able to make a number of men she was assigned to sincerely love her, including the British diplomat Bruce Lockhart, the Russian writer Maxim Gorky and H.G. Wells. She wasn’t that good looking either. All of these people led double, triple or quadruple lives. They must have been really able to compartmentalize their minds. Freud didn’t touch that type.
After Wells’ visit to Lenin in 1921 he was signed on. He began his career as literary hatchet man. In his writing he portrayed recognizable people, sometimes under their real names, in negative or positive lights. As a skilled writer, whether you like his later stuff or not, he was more than competent to do this. It appears that he first targeted Burroughs in his 1923 novel Men Like Gods. Among his science fiction novels this one should rank more highly than it does. Burroughs’ 1926 Moon Maid reads like a reply to Wells. Especially the first part of the trilogy where Burroughs dances imaginative rings around the First Men In The Moon. From there Wells took up the challenge with Mr. Blettsworthy On Rampole Island of 1928 which unmistakably is a parody of Burroughs in which he portrays Burroughs as insane, but not a bad analysis.
Burroughs responded possibly with At The Earth’s Core but definitely with Tarzan The Invincible. At the same time one interprets Stalin’s interest in crossing apes with humans as being derived from Beasts Of Tarzan and other Tarzan novels there may have been more direct Soviet interest in ERB. One notes that Tarzan The Invincible was the first title published under the Burroughs imprint. I think it highly probable that his publishing was being interfered with by the Reds in addition to whatever other grievances against his publishers Burroughs may have had.
One may say that Burroughs was too insignificant for Stalin to bother with, yet according to Simon Sebag Montefiori Stalin put out a contract on John Wayne because he was such an ardent anti-Communist. Khruschev is said to have told Wayne that he concelled the contract after Stalin’s death. Edgar Rice Burroughs was at least as significant in 1930 as Wayne in the 1940s and 50s.
At any rate in 1930 Burroughs has Stalin and the Reds invading his dream world of Opar to steal his gold, i.e. put him out of the publishing business. Invincible and Triumphant, notice the titles, both deal with Stalin and the Soviets then the topic disappears from the oeuvre. Was Burroughs given incentive to counter-attack the Reds? I think there is enough evidence to warrant the opinion while time will tell even more. Research is just beginning.
It is signficant that Burroughs introduces the story in his own voice, not a framing device. He may be simply talking to the reader or he may be addressing Wells and, dare I say say it, The Man Of Steel himself. Perhaps a subtitle could be ‘The Big Bwana Meets The Man Of Steel.’ Now, it should also be remembered that this is the fourteenth novel of the series. the first title had been written eighteen years earlier. At that time the surprise of the character had knocked the socks off the reading public. In 1930 Tarzan was in danger of becoming old hat. Burroughs had to think up new and interesting devices to keep his readers coming back. As with most series of this type the readership was limited. Maximum sales could be predicted so that success meant not falling below a certain level of interest or letting interest diminish below unsupportable levels. As his own publisher Burroughs was now taking all the risks financial as well as literary. He had to turn out a successful book.
I think he did a superb job. Since the series continued to flourish his readers must have thought so too. I do wish ERB, Inc. would release some sales figures though.
For the premiss of his story Burroughs postulates that Stalin and the Soviets wish to instigate a new world war which will allow them to pick up the pieces establishing a complete European dictatorship. Not at all farfetched. Burroughs postulates that Mussolini and his Fascists are aiming at a European hegemony. This is 1930 so Hitler and the Nazis are not on anyone’s radar as a threat to world peace except for a few fringe elements. At the time Hitler and the NSDAP were in hand to hand combat with the Communists for control of Germany. They would not assume power until three years hence.
The Reds then wish to create an incident that would cause the Italians to attack France. The indirect approach is usually more effective than the direct approach so they wish to create an incident in Africa where French colonial troops appear to invade Italian Somaliland.
At that instant expendable confederates in Italy would reveal a bogus French plan to Mussolini. It is assumed that Italy would then declare war on France and the holocaust would begin. As we all know Italy did not declare war on France in 1930 so the plan must have misfired somewhere along the way. Tarzan was the reason. Burroughs gives these little known details that would have been lost to…well… if not history, remembrance. So, uh, really ERB is providing a valuable service here.
There may be two sides to every story, but usually one is on one side or the other. We don’t have to be reminded ERB is not on the side of the Reds. In fact, ERB is exposing their plans and weaknesses. He displays a fairly profound understanding of the goals and workings of the Communists. He is read up on the subject, He has studied. He is not shooting from the hip. He knows whereof he speaks. If not an authority on the subject he is pretty darn close.
ERB has his eyes on how ‘American’ manufacturers are relating to Moscow. He has Zora Drinov analyze the situation this way, p. 12
“But what do the puny resources of this single American (Wayne Colt) mean to us?” demanded Zora. “A mere nothing compared to what America is already pouring into Soviet Russia. What is his treason compared with the treason of those others who are already doing more to hasten the day of world communism than the Third Internationale itself- it is nothing, not a drop in the bucket.’
“What do you mean Zora?” asked Miguel.
“I mean the bankers, and manufacturers, and engineers of America, who are selling their own country and the world to us in the hope of adding more gold to their already bursting coffers. One of their most pious and lauded citizens is building great factories for us in Russia, where we may turn out tractors and tanks; their manufacturers are vying with each other to furnish us with engines for countless thousands of airplanes; their engineers are selling us their brains and their skill to build a grreat modern manufacturing city, in which ammunitions and engines of war may be produced. These are the traitors, these are the men who are hastening the day when Moscow shall dictate the policies of our world.”
“…their government is a capitalistic government that is so opposed to our beliefs that it has never recognized our government; yet in their greed, these swine are selling out their own kind and their own country for a few more rotten dollars.”
Sound anything like the US and China today? That was a mouthful. The first thing FDR did upon taking the reins of government was to recognize Soviet Russia. Tell you anything about FDR? That was a mouthful that should have eraned ERB the hatred of the Liberal Coalition.
You can see why they wanted to stop his mouth. Passages such as this are probably the reason Richard Slotkin and his crowd, John Taliaferro, group ERB with Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard. A charge of racism is usually a cover for a multitude of offences that have nothing to do with race. One is merely opposing the Liberal program. If they were to say- the fellow opposes the Liberal program they would get no rise- they might even have to explain the Liberal program- so the charge of racism is used as a red herring. One should always suspect such an accusation and disregard it.
Liberals however, never answer such charges. They merely deny them. In 1953-54 they were even denying themselves as Communists or taking the Fifth, which is the euivalent of saying, yes I am, but I’m not going to admit it.
The Revolution was only twelve years old in 1930. The CPUSA had been briefly outlawed in the early twenties but ‘disinterested parties’ believing in the time honored notion of ‘free speech’ had the ban lifted. Over in Russia their free speech loving comrades were filling cattle cars with dissenters destined for the Gulag or else they were murdered outright. Today, of course, these freedom loving people are throwing dissenters in prison on the basis of trumped up laws. The Program is moving right along isn’t it?
Even William Z. Foster denied he was a Communist as he was running for President on the Communist ticket. Today a tenured Law 
Professor at Harvard actually denies that AIPAC, which is a registered lobby group, exists. They ought to throw such people into cells next to David Irving. Denial of themselves is what Liberalism is all about. You couldn’t find anyone to admit to being a Communist. They all denied it. The hypocrisy of Liberals throwing men as decent or moreso than themselves into jail for denying the holocaust is mind boggling. Well, it would be, if you didn’t already know what’s going on.
So ERB would have been roundly denounced as a paranoid delusive for the above passage.
Henry Ford- Philanthropist
Men like Armand Hammer, Bernard Baruch, essentially the whole Jewish government in exile here in the US were working furiously to make the Revolution a global reality. They really had no idea of Hitler’s intentions at the time, yet they attempted assassination while through the German Communist Party they were waging street warfare against the National Socialists. The word National is what they objected to not so much the man Hitler. Burroughs mentions the Third International. The Comintern- short for Communist International as it was known- was essentially a beta model for what is now multi-culturalism. It was the Jewish cultural vision of the world. Thus industrialists like Armand Hammer and Bernard Baruch using their Jewish identity as a shield from criticism, any criticism would be characterized as anti-Semitism, were directing huge sums of money into the development of Soviet Russia.
In addition a well-meaning industrialist, Henry Ford, who would later be denounced as a Nazi, was doing the
Armand Hammer
same thing. The mention of tractor factories refers to Henry Ford- the Jewish bete noir- who was trying to relieve the Communist induced famine by selling or even giving tractors to the Russians to increase food production. He was also building the factories for them. I mean, you know, gratis; altruism run rampant. The great industrial city probably refers to Stalingrad.
Even Burroughs biographers Porges and Taliaferro disparage Burroughs for his rational stance against Communism. Burroughs doesn’t stop his analysis with the multi-cultural contradiction within American society, p. 35:
“The general plan, of course, is no secret to any of us here,” said Zora, “and I shall betray no confidence in explaining it to you. It is part of a larger plan to embroil the capitalistic powers in wars and revolutions to such an extent that they will be helpless to unite against us.”
“Our emissaries have been laboring a long time toward the culmination of the revolution in India that will distract the attention and armed forces of Great Britain. We are not succeeding so well in Mexico as we had planned, but there is still hope, while our prospects in the Philippines are very bright. The conditions in China you well know. She is absolutely helpless, and we have hope that with our assistance she will eventually constitute a real menace to Japan. Italy is a very dangerous enemy, and it is largely for the purpose of embroiling her in war with France that we are here.”
Once again you will note that there is no reference to a threat from Germany. No one could have seen it but the Communists who were opposed not merely to Hitler but any Volkish attempt to govern. The Volkish movement was inherently anti-Communist. To be anti-Communist was equivalent to being anti-Semitic, so that Hitler was automatically an enemy to be destroyed. When he and the Nazis assumed power in 1933 an automatic boycott of Germany and things German was instituted by the Jews. One might say that WWII began in January of 1933 at the instance of the Jews. The obvious conclusion is that if Hitler’s actions against the Jews were not self-defense, they were acts of war in which the first offensives had been begun by the Jews. Needless to say any such opinion is and will be denied. Any such discussion of such matters will be ridiculed and suppressed. But there you have it. At any rate ERB was not one of those far-sighted individuals who foresaw the rise of Hitler. Italy turned out to be a not so dangerous enemy.
In his story Italy was merely to be a dupe of the Soviets.
In order to present his analysis ERB had to be especially well informed. What he read or where isn’t clear as there is nothing in the existing library that even deals with the Communists per se. ERB does have a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf but that could only have been obtained after 1940 when the war was in progress.
As the story opens then, the Reds are assembling their forces for the march on Italian Somaliland.
Things aren’t to be quite so simple as the leader of the expedition, Peter Sveri, develops delusions of grandeur hoping to establish his own Empire in Africa with himself as Emperor. On the one hand Communism breaks down on the rocks of the interests of the various cultures, while in seeking to establish himself in Africa Zveri is infringing on the domain of its current Emperor, Tarzan.
Tarzan handily frustrates Zveri’s designs, while at the same time beating Stalin and the Reds, hence the title Tarzan The Invincible. One imagines though that there may be something more behind it. Originally titled Tarzan, Guardian Of Africa the change of title indicates something deeper.
In order to finance his operations Zveri intends to loot the fabled treasure vaults of Opar of which, one assumes, he has read about in The Return Of Tarzan, Jewels Of Opar and Tarzan And The Golden Lion. This makes him somewhat a fan of the amanuensis of the Big Bwana.
This is the fourth and last of Burroughs’ Opar stories. In section six let’s review Opar and its significance to this story.
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 